The Final Swindle of Quevedo's Buscon

(An old paper from my Utah days, posted in hopes of rectifying the incorrigible moralistic reading of a novel that is obviously anything but.)
           Francisco de Quevedo’s 1626 picaresque novel El Buscon (The Swindler) famously ends with the line,

I thought things would go better in the New World and another country. But they went worse, as they always will for anybody who thinks he only has to move his dwelling without changing his life or ways, as Your Honor will see in the Second Part. (Quevedo 197)

The protagonist Pablos, after a narrative full of swindles and crimes, finishes with this out-of-nowhere decicion to acknowledge the error of his ways and hold his life up as a moral model for readers to avoid. It’s a sudden tonal shift incongruent with the rest of the novel, and one that is never followed through with the promise Second Part. As Dale B.J. Randall comments, “The tale closes with a moral tag which, though more or less obligatory for the picaresque genre, is none the less out of place” (Randall 101-2).  For nothing precedes this moral tag; the line feels appended as an afterthought.  But more than just an odd appendage, that final line also reframes the entire preceding novel: the slap-stick, amoral tenor of the rest of the story is undermined by this sudden didactic ending.  But that's only if you actually believe our little swindler at this last moment: I propose the oft-controversial last line is actually a continuation of the swindles that Pablos has performed throughout the novel, including, even especially, on the reader. The last line becomes, then, the final swindle of Quevedo’s Buscon.

             This final swindle does not exist in isolation; it is foreshadowed at the beginning of the final chapter, wherein Pablos teaches his readers how to avoid card tricks:

Don’t think, my friends, that you’ll be safe if you use your own pack of cards, because they’ll swap it as quickly as you can blink. Watch out for cards which feel rough or scratched, because that’s how they feel the suits. If you’re a kitchen-hand, friend, you’d better know that in the stables and kitchens they use a pin to prick cards, or bend them so that they can recognize the suits. If you like playing with better-off people, watch out for cards which were actually conceived in sin at the printer’s and have watermarks in them for their owner’s own benefit. Don’t trust a clean card because even the best washed one is dirty for a player who’s got good eyes and a good memory. (Quevedo 193)

This passage is significant in that Pablos has for once broken from the main narrative, no longer reminiscing but speaking to the reader in the present tense, long after the events of the narration have concluded. In fact, the only other time when Pablos breaks the retrospective narration to directly address the reader is the final line, and the two passages’ tones couldn’t be more different. The above passage isn’t the words of a moralizer, but rather the words of a card shark explaining how to play with other card sharks. He is not teaching how to avoid the swindler’s life but how to participate in it. Given then that, chronologically speaking, the speaker of this passage is contemporaneous with the speaker of the final line (even bookending the same chapter), the finishing speaker must have either completely repented within the space of one chapter, or remains this unrepentant card shark. The textual evidence weighs in favor of the latter given that the above passage finishes with a warning to “not trust a clean card;” thus, one must therefore assume that the “clean card” that finishes the novel is the final swindle warned about. The reader who therefore mistakes the final “clean card” for anything but another swindle has neither “good eyes” nor a “good memory” for the beginning of the chapter. “The best washed card becomes dirty,” just as the final moral tag becomes dirty in the buscon’s hands. One who takes the closing line at face value becomes the very victim that Pablos warns against being.

           The reader who interprets Pablos’ lines literally is like the Galician servant girl who, hearing Pablos the playwright compose the lines “Watch out for the bear, the bear” (Quevedo 188), promptly panics, tips the pot, breaks all the plates, and tells everyone a bear is tearing someone apart upstairs. Soon the entire neighborhood is in his room, and Pablos reflects with some chagrin, “Even when I explained how stupid the girl had been and what had actually happened, they still refused to believe me. I didn’t eat at all that day” (Quevedo 188). The naïve reader who takes words, like cards, at face value is not only as stupid as the Galician girl, but as foolish as the entire neighborhood that believes her. Also significant is that Pablos is here misunderstood specifically while composing lines of fiction, a fiction he is once again composing at the end of the novel. A dramatist’s bear should not be confused for a real bear, nor should a swindler’s moralistic ending be confused for a real one. 

Naïve readers populate the pages of El Buscon, and if there’s any set of lives set up as warnings (moral or otherwise) to the reader, it’s these characters. For example, a lunatic fencing instructor that Pablos meets early on, in defense of his laughable fencing skills he learned in a book, maintains that “It’s in the book, it has the King’s permission to be printed and I’ll maintain it’s true” (Quevedo 107). Our equivalent sentiment “they couldn’t print it if it wasn’t true” is as laughable today as it was in Quevedo’s time, and the implication is that anyone who accepts as truth whatever is written, is as crazy as this lunatic fencing with soup ladles. Whichever book the lunatic cited was no truer for having the King’s permission to be printed than is the fictional narrative of El Buscon, which would have also required, in 1626, to have the King’s official permission to be printed. Pablos here is hinting that to believe every written word is just as naive--and dangerou--as challenging a large, scarred mulatto to a fencing match, as the lunatic ladle-fencer does.

The folly of naïve reading is a lesson that Pablos himself learned the hard way, when the priests who swindle Pablos and Don Diego out of food and money ask Pablos if he is servant to a gentleman. Pablos reports, “I thought they meant everything they said so I said that I was, and so was the other lad” (Quevedo 82). Needless to say, soon after he and Diego are swindled, Pablos learns not to believe everything someone says. If there’s any actual moral offered by Pablos’ life, it’s that one should never believe that anyone means everything one says, least of all from him, and especially not when he suddenly acts “clean” in his moralizing final line. For if supposedly “clean” Priests cannot be trusted, a buscon like Pablos certainly cannot.

But this final swindle is foreshadowed even earlier: in Book 2 Chapter 5, Pablos is climbing across a rooftop in the night to sneak into the room of a woman he’s tricked into thinking he is a nobleman, to get her money. Unfortunately he slips and falls through the roof of a lawyer, “and, as lawyers are always on the lookout for thieves, they thought I was one” (Quevedo 163). The lawyer and his household tie him up right before the eyes of his lover as he protests, but she, far from helping him, “thought I’d fallen on purpose as a sort of performance for her benefit” (Quevedo 163). The irony, of course, is this fall is the one time he is not performing for her, and is the one time he is not acting as a thief. But as comical as her misinterpretation is, we as readers are in the same position; we think Pablos is performing when he’s not, and more importantly, we think he’s sincere when he’s pulling a swindle on all of us, such as with the last line. The novel’s final line, in this context, is no more sincere than Pablos’s protestations of love; naïve readers may have been the bane of Pablos’ existence earlier, but as he improves at his swindling skills, he is able to turn their naivete to his advantage.

But besides the warning about naïve readership, there is something else to be gleaned from Pablos’ debacle on the lawyer’s roof, namely, the fact that Pablos is continually punished for the wrong crime, never for what he deserves to be punished for, thus subverting the role of Providential retribution that would have allowed the moralizing ending to function. For example, in Book 2 Chapter 8, he is counting out the money he owes his landlady, a notorious prostitute, when, “as I was giving it to her, it was just my bad luck, as always, that they came to arrest her for offences against public morals” (Quevedo 180). The police who arrest her assume that Pablos is her “fancy-man,” or pimp, and proceed to give him a beating. Pablos was certainly guilty of near countless swindles up to this point, but being a mistress’s “fancy-man”, at least, was not one of them. The most egregious example, however, occurs immediately before, when Don Diego tricks Pablos into wearing his cloak to alert Diego’s own thugs to beat him. But, reports Pablos,

no sooner had I left him, wearing his cloak, than it was just my bad luck that a couple of fellows who wanted to beat [Don Diego] up over a woman, ran up and rained blows on me with clubs. (Quevedo 177)

Before Don Diego could punish Pablos for being a liar, Pablos was beaten for something that Don Diego did, not him. Nevertheless, Pablos does not rail against the injustice of his beating, but instead tries to figure out which deserved beating he is finally receiving:

I didn’t know who had attacked me, though from what I reckoned it might be the landlord I hadn’t paid…or the jailer I tricked, or my companions who had disappeared. In fact I expected to be knifed by so many people that I didn’t know who to blame it on. (Quevedo 177)

Pablos’ beating is undeserved, but it might as well have been deserved. In fact, in a perverse sort of way, the proper role of fate, or karma, or divine providence, what have you, has been supplanted by sheer dumb luck, and has performed its office just as effectively. Taken together, these events add up to a collective swindle on the reader’s expectations, wherein the role of divine retribution is substituted for a string of random events that fail to mete out a satisfying poetic justice, even when the protagonist is still over all punished. Quevedo undermines at every possible opportunity the possibility for a moralizing example by substituting divine justice for mere chance, making the final line all the more out of place.

       This discrepancy between the imagination’s expectations and actual cause and effect is discussed by Northrop Frye, who writes in The Secular Scripture,

The long-standing association between the worlds of imagination and fancy may suggest that the imaginative, by itself, tends to be fantastic or fanciful. But actually, what the imagination, left to itself, produces is the rigidly conventionalized. (Frye 36)

According to Frye, what the imagination expects is not the fanciful, but rather a unified structure; for Frye, one of the imagination’s “functions…is to present an illusion of logic and causality” (Frye 48). Pablos himself spends much of the initial narrative believing in the illusion of reality’s logic and causality, as he attempts to become a gentleman first by accompanying Don Diego to school, and then by trying to scam his way into the aristocracy, imagining at every stage that if he follows certain prescribed steps, then he will attain respectability. But, as T.E. May said about El Buscon, “here is uncovered the fundamental problem, which has little to do with mere scruples. What must come in some way into question…is the imagination itself” (May 320). The imagination itself is the problem; Pablos keeps expecting reality to conform to the rigid logic of his own imagination, but his imagined expectations are thwarted by the messiness and random happenstance of dumb chance; in other words, Pablos’ imagination has been swindled by reality. He has been a naïve reader of reality, but Pablos, once again, turns this naivety to his advantage. Thus, he likewise swindles the imagination of his readers; he abandons the rigid conventionality of both imagination and society, and instead embraces “the conception of human life itself as much more a series of ‘and thens’ than a continuous narrative” (Frye 52).  Thus, at every stage of his narrative Pablos excises any possibility of the poetic justice inherent in Romance, swindling the imagination’s expectations at every opportunity. Having thus violated his audience’s imagination’s expectations, the only swindle left for Pablos to pull is to suddenly shoe-horn in a moralizing final line that conforms to the rigid convention that he has spent so much of the novel dispelling. The reader who still believes this conventionalized ending after such a thoroughly anti-conventional text is as swindled in one’s expectations as Pablos often was in his own.

But Pablos doesn’t just violate Romance’s rigid conventionality, but also Romance’s representational tendencies. Frye also states that “the romantic tendency is antirepresentational” (Frye 38), which is a relevant statement considering that if there’s one thing that Pablos does consistently, it’s represent himself as something he is not. To represent, by definition, means to substitute a true thing for something else, which is not only what Pablos spends most the text doing, but is also a fair description for how Pablos, in his narrative, has substituted divine providence for dumb luck. Pablos even explicitly declares his allegiance to the substitute for Providence when he declares, “I became a follower of AntiChrist, which is the same as saying I began to chat up nuns” (Quevedo 189). In this particular context, he has substituted nuns with vows of chastity for nuns who only appear to be chaste; more generally, he substitutes the sacred for a profane which only appears sacred. Pablos’ swindles parody Christianity itself.

Not only does Pablos parody Christianity, but in fact he himself becomes the parody himself; he becomes the substitution. As Dunn observes quoting T.E. May,

The student’s derisive ‘This Lazarus is ready for resurrection, to judge by the stink’…when he appears among them; Pablos’ inexplicable falling asleep in the middle of the day and his being awakened by Don Diego’s voice saying ‘This is another life’…These details form part of a whole sequence of unmotivated suffering and humiliation. Putting all this together, May sees a deliberate travesty of the mockery and crucifixion of Christ not, of course, so as to ridicule the Christian story, but in order to measure the inadequacy of Pablos. (Dunn 72)

In other words, Pablos becomes himself the profane substitute for Christ himself. In fact, Pablos himself explicitly measures his own inadequacy against Christ when he pleads, to his beaters, “Please don’t, I’m not the Ecco Homo [Christ on the cross], you know” (Quevedo 88). Pablos is fully cognizant of his status as a substitute for Christ, and a poor one at that. Any moralizing he performs, therefore, is but a poor substitute for the actual moralizing of the Christian religion. The final moralizing line of the novel, then, is fully self-conscious of its inadequacy and parody of an authentic moral tag, and the most delicious last swindle he can therefore pull is to make the reader think this poor substitute of a moral tag is authentic, that is, to substitute the sacred for the profane the way a card shark substitutes a clean card for a dirty one.

           Parodying and appropriating sincere language is something that Pablos already has experience with, from his time as a hack playwright. Playwrights in general write lines for actors to pretend to recite sincerely (as Pablos himself often does in non-dramatic situations). But Pablos not only writes inherently false lines to be recited sincerely, he specifically writes plays by stealing others’ plays, “adding some nonsense and removing the good lines” (186). He is an insincere plagiarist of insincere recitations. Any play Pablos writes is inherently a parody of whatever the original writing was. In fact, Randall believes the final line itself was ripped off. He writes,

Reared on the classics as many early readers were, some may well have heard in Quevedo’s final sentence an echo of the eleventh poem in Book One of the epistles of Horace. Toward the end of this poem, which he addresses to his wandering friend Bullatius, Horace writes…caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt [“skies, not minds, change, that cross sea currants”]. Bullatius is one who would go sailing to distant lands rather than rest at home because he is heedless that content, at least for the man of reason and prudence, lies within. Between Bullatius and Quevedo’s Pablos an instructive parallel may be drawn. (Randall 103)

Randall sees an instructive parallel in that Pablos, like Bullatius, continually thinks that if he can merely change his social circumstance that his lot will finally improve, moralizing about how change comes only from within. The implication is that if Pablos would just mend his wicked ways, he would finally improve his situation. Such a comparison ignores the text, which finds Pablos turning into a swindler only after his attempts to improve himself are rebuffed by a hypocritical society; remember that Pablos begins the novel disavowing his wicked family and following Don Diego to school to receive a better education. He even goes in the capacity of a servant, thus conforming to the dominant power structure, a conformity he assumes will get him accepted by same power structure. He is by all accounts honestly trying to better himself, and only turns buscon when acting good fails to make him good. This Bullatius/Pablos comparison assumes the fallacy of a reality governed by logic and causality, wherein if one becomes good, then by logical causation, his lot will improve; this is a reality both Pablos and the text reject as inaccurate.

Rather than see the final line as an instructive parallel to a classical text, I see the final line as yet another example of Pablos the hack-playwright’s wholesale theft of others’ writings. If Randall is right, and Quevedo’s readers recognized the final line as an allusion to Horace, then Pablos here is merely demonstrating his skills once more as a literary thief. Also significant is the fact that he only quits writing and calls being a playwright “that wicked profession” (Quevedo 188) after he’s made his money and someone else is arrested. In other words, he only calls his writing wicked once he’s gotten away with the money scot free. It is the same with the final line; Pablos, far from lamenting his wicked life with that final line, is actually diverting attention from himself while he gets away scot free with the money. That final line is his last sleight of hand and misdirection, his final swindle, not just for the fun of getting one over the audience, but as a way to get away with the money without suspicion.

I am aware that my positing that the sleight of hand by which Pablos gets away successfully runs counter to the traditional critical reading of Quevedo’s El Buscon as “the satiric means by which the self-consciously aristocratic author continues to persecute an upstart who had ideas of rising above his station” (Dunn 72). Quevedo does indeed subject his protagonist to almost sadistic levels of punishment; and Quevedo was in fact a thorough conservative proud of his “pure” northern Christian racial heritage, intolerant and disdainful of young upstart “New Christians,” converts, rich merchants, and especially Jews, all of which he blamed for subverting the fortunes of the old aristocracy to which he belonged. Certainly Quevedo’s racism and anti-Semitism are all on full display in El Buscon, as shown in such spiteful, off-hand comments as “The owner and landlord was one of those who believe in God, out of good manners and not sincerely…Of course I’m not hinting at any impure blood among the aristocracy, oh no!” (Quevedo 86) (as though impure blood should have any bearing on one’s faith), and “our cards, like the Jewish Messiah, never came” (Quevedo 119). Such lines betray the Quevedo behind the Pablos. As many critics have noted, just such an upstart as Pablos is precisely the sort of character Quevedo would have demonized and punished as a buscon.

But then, Quevedo was a critic of the marginalized, but also of what he saw as the decadence of Spain in general. Clergy and nobility are treated with no greater respect in the world of El Buscon than are the crooks and swindlers. Perhaps, if Quevedo’s biography is to be considered relevant at all, what the author railed against was how the whole of Spain is an enabler of such wicked behavior, and that famous final line doubles as a criticism of a Spain that is so naïve that, if they really believe Pablos did not get away with the money, then perhaps Spain deserves to be swindled.

               I also base my claim that the final line actually indicates Pablos gets away rich in part by tracing Pablos’ trajectory as a career criminal. Throughout most of the novel, Pablos is constantly beaten, knifed, robbed, ripped off, arrested, humiliated, tricked, and imprisoned; he’s falling through roofs, being exposed by former friends, and generally failing at whatever venture he puts his mind to, whether honest or dishonest. But he does improve at swindling, eventually. By the last couple chapters, Pablos is successfully play-writing, acting as a beggar, kidnapping children, sleeping with nuns, and card-sharking, all while evading detection and turning a handsome profit. And right at the end of Book 2 Chapter 10, just before his famous last line, Pablos is even killing the cops and getting away with it. The text reports:

When we came to, I realized with astonishment that two men and the sergeant had been killed or had run away from our wretched little mob. We had a good time in the Cathedral because, at the smell of criminals on the run, came plenty of whores, who stripped to cover our nakedness. (Quevedo 196)

Whereas earlier in the novel Pablos was being summarily rounded up and arrested by cops “where our status as gentlemen was not respected” (Quevedo 152), and then having to bribe his way out of the jail cell with the latrine, here Pablos is brazen enough to murder the police who threaten him. Not only does this action not take him to the gallows (which, given his disavowed uncle’s status as a hangman, would have possessed a certain poetic symmetry), but he escapes to the cathedral and is visited by whores aplenty, and then again escapes to the West Indies. Getting away with murder and prostitution are hardly the laments of a repentant, failed criminal.

                    All of which brings us back to the end. The contrast between these clean get-aways and the final line make the moral tag all the more out of place, and we should justly be suspicious of it, given the swindler who recites it. In contrast to Peter Dunn, who writes that Pablos’s account “represented his inability to escape, and the futility of his life” (Dunn 69), it is Pablos who indeed has the last laugh. He has escaped to the New World with his stolen goods and rap sheet a mile long, and the reader is left on the shore, waiting in vain for the promised comeuppance in Part Two, neither of which ever come. I of course cannot read Quevedo’s mind, but I can’t help but conjecture that he never even intended to write a Second Part, that he intended Pablos’ final swindle to be on the very reader’s expectations, one last sleight of hand and misdirection, to cause the reader moral introspection so that, as you look within yourself, you don’t see Pablos sneaking away with your wallet. The perfect swindle is the swindle the victim doesn’t even realize, and in that sense, the last line is not only Pablos’ final swindle but also his most successful, the perfect apex to his career arc as a criminal.

Works Cited

Dunn, Peter N. “Quevedo’s Pablos, El Buscon” The Spanish Picaresque Novel.

Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. 
Frye, Northrop. “The Context of Romance.” The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. 
May, T.E. “Good and Evil in the ‘Buscon’: A Survey” The Modern Language Review 45.3 (1950): 319-335.

Quevedo, Francisco de. “The Swindler.” Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler: Two

Spanish Picaresque Novels. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. 
Randall, Dale B.J. “The Classical Ending of Quevedo’s Buscon” Hispanic Review. 32.2 (1964): 101-108.