Las paredes oyen by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

Don Juan de Mendoza is a nobleman, but sees himself as “a man so poor and ugly, and so ill-shaped”. For two years he has loved Doña Ana de Contreras, a rich and beautiful widow who barely looks at him. When he finally dares to declare himself, she dismisses him with a question: “Pues si vos lo decís todo, ¿qué queréis que os diga yo?” (“Well, if you say it all, what would you have me say?”). Doña Ana loves Don Mendo de Guzmán, a rich and admired gallant, and means to marry him as soon as she completes the novenas she vowed to Saint Diego in Alcalá.

Don Mendo has one vice: he cannot speak without running someone down, and he also keeps Doña Lucrecia, Doña Ana’s cousin, deceived. On Midsummer Night, the feast of Saint John, walking with Don Juan and a young duke newly arrived at court, Don Mendo says the worst of Doña Ana while Don Juan defends her. What none of them knows is that she has secretly come back from Alcalá for the night and is hearing everything from her window.

From then on the comedy is a tangle of letters, jealousy and disguises. The Duke wants to meet the widow, and Don Juan devises a plan for him to see her up close without her knowing, secretly hoping that a rivalry between two powerful men will leave an opening for him.

It is a Golden Age comedy of intrigue, in verse and in three acts, set in Madrid and Alcalá de Henares. Alarcón published it in 1628, in the first volume of his plays, and its lesson lies in the title, a proverb; Doña Ana sums it up: “y a toda ley hablar bien, porque las paredes oyen” (“and speak well at all costs, because the walls have ears”). The vice punished here is malicious gossip.

It is still read because what matters in it is manners and words more than a handsome face, and the lady defends her freedom to choose (“el sí o el no todo es mío”, “the yes or the no is wholly mine”, says Doña Ana). For Mexican readers it has a special interest: the poor, plain hero bears the author’s mother’s surname, Mendoza, and critics have seen in him a reflection of Alarcón himself, whom his rivals mocked for his hunchback and his American birth.

Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza was born around 1581 in New Spain, most likely in Taxco, now called Taxco de Alarcón in his honour (he himself said Mexico City), and died in Madrid on 4 August 1639. He studied law in Mexico and Salamanca.

He wrote some twenty-five plays, among them La verdad sospechosa (The Suspect Truth), and published twenty of them in two volumes, in 1628 and 1634. From 1625–26 he served on the Council of the Indies. He is one of the very few great Golden Age playwrights born in the Americas.