Life Is A Dream

Introduction

My name is Pedro Calderon de la Barca. I am the greatest playwright of the 17th century. And I am dead. This is true. But I have come from the grave to introduce this most fantastic—and fantastical—novel by a great young writer. His name you know. If you don’t, look on the cover.

But more about me! Calderon! Who am I? I wrote over three hundred plays! Impossible, you say. Nothing was impossible back then. I wrote constantly, even through the night, when I wasn’t making love to beautiful women. And sometimes I wrote even during lovemaking! You ask about those I loved who were not beautiful? All the women I touched were beautiful. There were no hags. Well, except for one. But I was sober, so I wasn’t myself.

I wrote like a demon. True, sometimes I shuffled bits from one play to another. There was the time a certain duke discovered that the script he’d commissioned contained fifty pages or so from a script commissioned by another duke—who also happened to be his arch nemesis. I spent a week in a dungeon, until the king learned of my incarceration and ordered my release. Woe to the imprisoning duke, who soon found himself in my own shoes. Well, manacles actually.

Ah, the king! How he adored me! The weekends I spent at his villas. Did I seduce his wife, the queen? Of course! It was to be expected. In those days a man was dishonored if he did not seduce. Ah, the queen! How clearly I remember the little mole on her… Well, I leave the details to God. But as I was saying. The weekends were a game of cat and mouse. The king dropped me into his maze, and it was my duty to amorously conquer his lady, his wife, without getting caught. It was expected. That’s how it was in those days. If I didn’t get caught, I lived to write another play. Had I been caught, I would have been jailed for life… or worse. But Her Lady and I were not caught. Indeed, with each successful weekend, we grew bolder, making more and more love, like young, horny peasants. One particular day we made love ten times, practically on the hour! And to think I was fifty-three at the time. I amaze even myself!

And when the queen was exhausted, I would move on to her chamber maids. And just when I thought I could do no more, a young servant might appear, with a hint of bosom and the scent of roses, and my recently-sated appetite would rise up yet again—yet again!—and I would have to have her. I took immense pleasure in such encounters, but the young women gained more. For not only did they receive the vast delight that only a man as experienced as myself could provide, but something even more supreme: the honor of being seduced by the greatest playwright of his time.

But I digress. A cuckolded husband is a dangerous beast, and there were those scenarios when one of my conquistas would reveal to her husband that yours truly had prevailed. Though I was normally protected by the king, I might on occasion find myself in a delicate situation. Once, a jealous husband tried to castrate me in my sleep. Fortunately, I slumber with a gold and silver plate over my groin, for just such circumstances. Imagine the man’s surprise! “My family jewels are like the forward cannon on a Spanish galleon,” I cried, as I grabbed my sword from under my pillow and cut off his arm. “My man-part is hard as steel,” I declared, “able to shoot far and wide, and ever victorious!”

Our sailors joke that if only they had me aboard their gallant ships, their battles would be shorter. It has been said that I make love in the name of the king. I fly the king’s flag, and the women I conquer are the property of Spain! As I once whispered in his majesty’s ear during a fox hunt, “The fields are yours, my lord. I merely plough them.”

On occasion I have been unlucky at the hands of Senor Cuckold, and found myself in his dungeons. I won’t bore you with my numerous escapes, each more clever and dangerous than the previous. What I will tell you is that these incarcerations gave me time to think. My best plays were born in such jails. Indeed, my greatest, La vida es sueno—Life is a Dream—came to me during just such a predicament.

I had been captured by a Don Madagona. It was a foolish capture, rather embarrassing. He caught me with my pants down, quite literally. I was not with his wife at that moment. Actually, I’d never been with his wife. But such is my reputation, and Don Madagona jumped to conclusions. He was prepared to kill me, but I begged him not to do so in front of the lady with whom I was awkwardly coupled. Senor Madagona was honorable. He permitted me to dress, and ushered me outside for my execution. This gave me critical time to argue my defense, that not only had I never met his wife, but I’d never so much as seen her from afar. I wouldn’t recognize the woman. He shoved a locket in my face. “You have never seen this woman before?” he scowled. I had not. And was glad, for the visage engraved therein would have been suited for the part of “the hag” that so often shows up in that other playwright’s works. (He shall remain nameless.)

Of course I couldn’t tell Don Madagona that his wife reminded me of certain farm animals, for which I have no appetite. I could only repeat the truth, which was that I had never seduced his wife. Apparently I successfully planted doubt in his mind, for rather than dispatch me to the next world, he took me to his castle and locked me in his dungeon. Where I had ample time to think. And thought I should write a story, a play, about a man falsely accused. It was to be a comedy; a cuckold imprisons the wrong man, a fable of mistaken identity, that sort of thing. The plot, however, began to shift directions in my mind—as tales are wont to do—when I was secretly visited by a young servant, Rosabella, who, at risk to her life, brought me chocolates, pastries and a detailed map of the castle and its surroundings.

Though Rosabella was lovely and my desire for her stupendous, our relations in that dungeon were strictly chaste. I could not bring myself to “make a move,” as you modern readers are wont to say. For there was something sad about Rosabella. I would learn that she had been raped by her master, Don Madagona. By custom, a servant cannot be “dishonored” by a master. Whatever he might do to her, custom would not consider said action a true “dishonoring.” Peers may dishonor peers, servants may dishonor masters, but a master cannot dishonor a servant. What happens, happens, and is to be absorbed as simply the way of the world. Ours was a brutal era. On that point I cannot disagree.

Though legally Rosabella had suffered no “dishonor”—mind you, a technical word—at the hands of Don Madagona, in her own heart she felt herself to have been disgraced, and dishonored. She helped me, hoping that I would take vengeance upon my jailer. I told her: though I might kill Don Madagona for imprisoning me, none of his blood spilt by my hands would undo her situation. She might regain what she had lost, at least in her own heart, only by killing him herself.

This was not news she wished to hear, and for many weeks I saw no sign of her. Don Madagona proved a worthy jailer, for I could conceive no means of escape (without Rosabella’s aid), and languished in that rat pit for several weeks. This period seemed an eternity, and I imagined a man sent to jail for his entire life. I felt myself to have been in that cell forever, and imagined I’d been there even as a small child. A play began to form in the theater of my mind. Details were sketchy, but I saw clearly a young man sent to prison as an infant, and a young woman who seeks the restoration of her honor and inadvertently discovers the young man in his jail…