Feliciana's Little Voice

I

At the mid point of the journey from Iceland to Rome, the pilgrim band at the heart of Cervantes' last novel, Persiles y Sigismunda, might reasonably have expected a change of fortune. Having survived 44 chapters of vicissitudes in the frozen north, Periandro, Auristela and their companions finally make landfall at Lisbon, vowing never again to set foot on board a ship. But after only a few days on dry land and five leagues out of Badajoz on the road to Guadalupe, Auristela is forced to conclude that 'los trabajos y los peligros no solamente tienen jurisdición en el mar, sino en toda la tierra' (Cervantes Saavedra 2004: 457). What drives her to this conclusion are the extraordinary events that make up the story of Feliciana de la Voz, the first of a sequence of episodes that will provide the pilgrims with edifying amusement for the remainder of their journey.

The story of Feliciana de la Voz has every appearance of a formulaic plot from the contemporary comedia or novela tradition: a young girl is under pressure to agree to an arranged marriage; instead, she chooses her own man and has his child; she runs away from home, pursued by her father and brother who are intent on avenging their dishonour; she accompanies the pilgrims to Guadalupe, where she sings a hymn to the Virgin; her father and brother recognize her fine voice and the two families are reconciled. But, as with the rest of Cervantes' work, the significance of the story lies less in the plot than in the many subtle variations of narrative detail and point of view that distinguish each reworking from all the others (Rey Hazas 1999; Teijeiro Fuentes 2001). And there is much in the story of Feliciana that is odd – not just routinely odd, in the way that Cervantes often stretches the reader's credulity to show his narrative mastery; but seriously odd, in a way that invites a radical rethink of what it is we are being asked to believe.

On first reading, Auristela's concern that the Mediterranean world will offer 'more of the same' seems borne out by some of the obvious structural and thematic parallels between the main narrative and the episodes (Forcione 1972). Feliciana and her illegitimate husband are both fugitives for love, as are Periandro and Auristela. The birth of Feliciana's child also reinforces a pattern. In the first chapter of Book I, the narrative opening in medias res is overlaid with imagery that makes Periandro's transfer from the dungeon to the isla bárbara a symbolic birth into the fictional world (El Saffar 1984: 131; Baena 1996: 45–64). In the second chapter of Book II, the pilgrims are, again, symbolically reborn when they are rescued by caesarian section from the upturned hull of their ship, an escape that initiates a significant comment about the distinction between a miracle and a mystery (285). And in the third chapter of Book III, we have a literal birth, the offspring of a family conflict that will eventually be resolved by events that bear all the hallmarks of a secular miracle (Forcione 1982: 328–35). Feliciana is also symbolically reborn from a holm oak tree ('preñada estaba la encina'; 451), in the hollow trunk of which she is hidden by the shepherds from her pursuers.

Structurally, too, the story of Feliciana relives in miniature many of the novel's principal features. Beginning in medias res is an extremely effective way of delegating the narrative voice to the characters, and protagonists as well as readers have an important part to play in working out who is who and what is going on. When an unknown rider thrusts a newborn child into Ricla's arms and asks the pilgrims to take it to Trujillo, it is left to her to deduce that the tearful young woman who turns up soon after is the mother ('habiendo conjeturado que aquélla, sin duda, debía de ser la madre de la criatura'; 450); while the narrator, far from making it clear, often seems keen to cast doubt on the...