Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

1. The Barbary Corsairs

15 1 The Barbary Corsairs Cuando llegué cautivo, y vi esta tierra tan nombrada en el mundo, que en su seno tantos piratas cubre, acoge y cierra no pude al llanto detener el freno. —Saavedra, El trato de Argel1 MANY CRITICS HAVE ALLUDED to the marks left on Cervantes’s thoughts and works by his North African captivity. “Fue el más trascendental hecho en su carrera espiritual” [it was the most transcendental event in his spiritual career], says Américo Castro, referring to this catastrophic experience, while Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce argues that the capture by Barbary pirates in 1575 “es el gozne sobre el que se articula fuertemente toda la vida de Cervantes ” [is the hinge which forcefully organizes the entire life of Cervantes ].2 Certainly, Cervantes’s Algerian enslavement is the phantasmatic center to which his writing incessantly returns. In the words of Juan Goytisolo, Cervantes’s captivity is “ese vacío—hueco, vórtice, remolino—en el núcleo central de la gran invención literaria” [that void—hole, vortex, whirlwind— in the central nucleus of the great literary invention].3 This whirling void speaks to the presence of trauma. As Hartman reminds us, trauma, on the one hand, is registered rather than experienced, bypassing, as it were, perception and consciousness; on the other, it reappears as a kind of memory of the event, “in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche” (537).4 In Cervantes, the ungraspable experience of captivity returns relentlessly , as an incessant ritual of concealment and invention that agitates his fiction in uncanny ways. Such insistent thematic repetitions—the Christian captives and Algerian corsairs that endlessly reappear in his texts—suggest that trauma is localizable not in that violent occurrence situated in the subject’s past but rather in the way it comes back, unassimilated, to haunt its victim. As it turns out, the recurrence and reenactment of the traumatic event in his works may even function as a source of creation for the writer. As early as 1915, Armando Cotarelo Valledor claimed that the theme of 16 CERVANTES IN ALGIERS: A CAPTIVE’S TALE captivity was a fountain of inspiration for Cervantes: “Fue el primero en traer a la dramática española los asuntos de cautivos; [. . .] aportó antes que nadie una fuente copiosísima de inspiración artística [. . .]: la realidad” [He was the first to bring the subject of captivity into Spanish drama (. . .). Before anyone else, he contributed a rich fountain of artistic inspiration (. . .): his own experience] (Teatro, 30–31). More recently, George Camamis has cogently argued that La historia del cautivo is the first modern novel on the subject of captivity, one that inaugurates the new genre of the contemporary historical novel. Camamis stresses the perplexing connections between captivity and literary invention in Cervantes: “el cautiverio en Cervantes viene a ser un mundo complejo de creación artística” [captivity in Cervantes turns out to be a complex world of artistic creation].5 This seems to be a Cervantine paradigm—a pattern studied in depth by this book. Not only does Cervantes probe the theme of captivity in almost all his writings but the related issue of freedom is a constant in his work, inspiring Luis Rosales to remark that “la libertad [. . .] ocupa el centro del pensamiento antropológico cervantino” [liberty (. . .) occupies the core of Cervantine anthropological thought].6 BASIC TO THE DISCUSSION of Cervantes’s captivity in Algiers is the history of the Barbary Coast, from the Spanish conquests of the North African shores following the fall of Granada in 1492 to the arrival of the legendary Barbarossa brothers, founders of the modern State of Algiers, and the consolidation of the famous city in the 1570s—at the time of Cervantes’s imprisonment—as the capital of corsair activity par excellence in the early modern Mediterranean. This includes the conflictual events that led to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, as well as Cervantes’s participation and heroism in this campaign, where he lost the use of his left arm. The subsequent capture of Cervantes by Algerian corsairs in 1575, his experience as a slave in the baños of Algiers, and his four consecutive escape attempts, in which he barely escaped death, are carefully examined here side by side with archival documents and contemporary accounts of captivity in Barbary. In addition, this chapter focuses on the cruel fate of Christian slaves in Algiers and the punishments perpetrated...