Rome as Andalusia: Bodies and Borders in Francisco Delicado’s Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza

Francisco Delicado’s attention to thresholds and crossings, both geographic and (para)textual, combined with the prevalence of speech in the novel, imbue his writing with a heightened sense of circumstance that has led critics time and again to hunt for intermedial metaphors to register the work’s immediacy: “It is almost as if Delicado had equipped himself with a tape recorder and plunged into the streets and houses of Pozzo Bianco, catching all the nuances of the various languages and dialects to be heard in this district of Rome” (MacKay 179). The author certainly encourages us to regard his representational prowess as uniquely honed by experience and rendered in the language of Andalusian women:

Y si quisieren reprehender que por qué no van munchas palabras en perfecta lengua castellana, digo que, siendo andaluz y no letrado, y escribiendo para darme solacio y pasar mi fortuna, que en este tiempo el Señor me había dado, conformaba mi hablar al sonido de mis orejas, que es la lengua materna y su común hablar entre mujeres.¹

A deeply personal work, we are meant to see it as emanating from the writer’s own “physical torments” while convalescing from the French Pox, “siendo atormentado de una grande y prolija enfermedad, parecía que me espaciaba con estas vanidades” (329). The malady’s “prolix” quality reverberates in a critical reception that attends to Delicado’s bid for intimacy as a multi-media event. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s comparison to silent film pornography is one such early and astonishing example. The traditionalist historian not only identified with those that “quisieren reprehender,” but effectively banished Lozana from his archive of Spanish imperial letters (Cortez 288). While he urged scholars to pay it no mind—“no es tarea para ningún crítico decente”—he went on to describe it as “más bien un cinematógrafo de figurillas obscenas que pasan haciendo muecas y cabriolas, en diálogos incoherentes” (Menéndez Pelayo 54). His prim censure helps us to locate the defining features of Delicado’s redrawn frontier worldliness, in which eventfulness and affect combine at a key historical juncture, just prior to the Sack of Rome, 1527.

The author’s dedication asserts the work’s circumstantial quality by conjuring a well-appointed retreat in which reading is synonymous with the charms of “la señora Lozana” herself: “encomendando a los discretos letores el placer y gasajo que de leer a la señora Lozana les podrá suceder” (6). From plush domesticity we proceed to an erotics of space associated with Iberian expats in Rome.² These seductive bids for entry into a precarious community of translated Spaniards assert Lozana’s worldliness. For Edward Said, the articulated nexus between the novel and the world is one of Cervantes’s abiding legacies: “the western novelistic tradition is full of examples of texts insisting not only upon their circumstantial reality but also upon their status as already fulfilling a function, a reference, or a meaning in the world. Cervantes and Cide Hamete come immediately to mind” (Said 44). In Lozana, which is often cited as a precursor in the use of fictional or narrated authorial figures, the worldliness of its condition extends to gendered and regional speech, as well as the architecture of the printed book and the culture of the early modern print shop. The authorial persona acquires cross-class dimensions as a writer who also speaks as a more humble corrector, but one very much in his element in the book at hand. Having survived the occupation of Rome by the riotous imperial armies of Charles V, he relocated to Venice where he published Lozana and was also employed as corrector and editor. In the latter role he dubbed himself el Delicado in his new prologue to Primaleón (1534), thus transforming his name into an epithet.³ Anthony Grafton captures the interstitial nature of correctors, characterizing them as “hermaphroditic figures who both set type and read proofs” (75). They were “Bartleby-like” by virtue of a cultural...