“Vizcaínos en un berenjenal”

Abstract

This essay tries to explain the coincidence that the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli should take over as Don Quixote’s “witness-chronicler” precisely during the fight between the latter and the Biscayan Sancho de Azpeitia. This coincidence is explained by virtue of a Basque-Iberist theory accepted at that time, that related the Basques to Moors “a las tácitas” (tacitly). The hypothesis strengthens the structural unity of chapters 8 and 9 of Part I of Don Quixote, since, in both chapters, Cervantes would be presenting a challenge –let us say even an defiance– to the 17th century Basque “estamental society” –from the common people or the incipient bureaucratic bourgeoisie to the clergy and the high nobility–, exposing the imposture common to their status as privileged subjects of the Empire. In addition to satirizing the supposed nobility of the diabolical –thanks to his fiendish expression– Biscayan, the author would have derided the false brief chronicles –the structural technique revealed in this adventure–, by hiding –as we venture to say– the identity of the “Benitos” –Frs. Haedo, Biscayan Benedictine, the supposed author and editor respectively of the story of the captivity in Algiers–, as well as the identity of one of the “historians of La Mancha” –Garibay, the Guipuzcoan chronicler based in Toledo–, not to mention the resentment against the high nobility who had the privilege of the “pase a Indias” (pass to the Indies). And all this, in an episode of conflicts between three languages and cultures whose complementary nature and perspectivism are a cover up for the impossible truth of the modern Man of the author’s time.