Cartas marruecas by José Cadalso: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

In the introduction, an editor explains that the manuscript came to him on the death of a friend. Gazel has managed to stay in Spain after the Moroccan ambassador left: he dresses like the Christians, speaks their language and has become close friends with Nuño Núñez, a former infantry captain who lives withdrawn from the world, “encarcelado dentro de sí mismo” (“imprisoned within himself”), and who explains what Gazel sees so frankly that he sometimes says: “de eso no entiendo” (“I know nothing about that”).

The letters go back and forth among the three. Gazel travels through the capital and the provinces, from Barcelona to Bilbao, and writes to his teacher about what surprises him: hereditary nobility, salon gatherings, young gentlemen who never study, the bullfight, the fashion for sprinkling Spanish with French words. Ben-Beley answers from Africa with an old man’s prudence, and Nuño corrects his friend when he generalises, or reads him from his curious dictionary of the “abusive” meanings of words.

There is less a plot than a growing conversation. Some letters are almost short novels, such as the young Andalusian gentleman raised among cowhands and gypsies, the gentleman living happily on his country estate, or the young woman who at twenty-four has already buried six husbands; others are short essays on Spanish history, education, posthumous fame, patriotism and the “hombre de bien” (the decent, honest man), the ideal that unites the three correspondents.

Cadalso followed the model of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), which had made fashionable the critique of a country through the eyes of a foreign traveller, and his readers could recall a real Moroccan ambassador, Sidi Hamet al Ghazzali, known as “el Gazel”, who spent several months in Spain in 1766. It is a work of the Enlightenment, trusting in reason and education and avoiding two extremes: despising everything about one’s own country, or praising everything.

Out of prudence it avoids religion and government, but its portrait of vanity, ignorance and misguided patriotism still rings true. The editor sums it up: “Yo no soy más que un hombre de bien, que he dado a luz un papel que me ha parecido muy imparcial, sobre el asunto más delicado que hay en el mundo, cual es la crítica de una nación” (“I am nothing but a decent man who has published a paper that seemed to me very impartial, on the most delicate subject in the world: the critique of a nation”). It came out in instalments in the Correo de Madrid in 1789 and as a book in 1793; this edition follows that of 1796.

José Cadalso was born in Cádiz on 8 October 1741 and died on 26 February 1782 at the siege of Gibraltar, struck in the temple by a fragment of shrapnel or a grenade. He was educated in Paris, travelled in England, Italy and Germany, and made a career in the army, rising to colonel.

He used the pen name Dalmiro and wrote the satire Los eruditos a la violeta (1772), against those who aim to know much while studying little, and the Noches lúgubres (Lugubrious Nights), born of the death of the actress María Ignacia Ibáñez, whom he loved. He is one of the leading authors of the Spanish Enlightenment.