The Colors of Curiosity: Ekphrasis from Marguerite de Navarre to María de Zayas’ Tarde llega el desengaño

Abstract

María de Zayas’ Tarde llega el desengaño, the fourth tale in her Desengaños amorosos (1641), is one of the most studied novellas in the collection. The reader’s curiosity may stem in part from the main model for the tale, the Apuleian story of Cupid and Psyche, which has curiositas as its central motivation. Nevertheless, this essay argues that one of the reasons that the tale has attracted so much attention has to do with the vividness of its scenes, the chromatic design that Zayas uses to write for the eyes and the relationship of these topics to curiosity. The text induces characters and readers to marvel not only at a colorful scene but also to seek to understand the choice of colors in eight impacting ekphrasis in the novella. These colors color emotions and arouse our curiosity regarding scene, symbol, shade, and character. In addition, Zayas alludes to a painting included in one of Marguerite de Navarre’s novellas to further arouse curiosity and visual memory.

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–1661) is one of the three most important women writers of the early modern Hispanic world. She shares this distinction with Ana Caro and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Still, little is known about her life. She was born in Madrid, the daughter of an infantry captain. We do not know if she was single or married, if she also lived in Valladolid, and if she traveled to Naples. She and Ana Caro were close friends, a fact that spills over into their writings. Both of them dealt with the marginalization of women, the importance of friendship among women, and the importance of valor. They promoted the notion that women should study to improve their social status (Maroto Camino 2007). Indeed, it is very likely that the two worked together in Madrid between 1636 and 1638 (De Armas 2021). We have an early play written by her, La traición en la Amistad (Treachery in Friendship) (1628/1632). In addition, we preserve two collections of novellas, Novelas ejemplares y amorosas (Amorous and Exemplary Novels), published in 1637, and Desengaños amorosos (Disenchantments of Love), published in 1647. Her two collections consist of a number of tales tied together by a frame story in the manner of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

María de Zayas’ Tarde llega el desengaño, the fourth tale in her Desengaños amorosos (1641), is one of the most studied novellas in the collection. It is one of the more complex, since it presents a story within a story. Filis narrates the story to the guests gathered in Lisis’ home. The story begins with the tale of Don Martín who is shipwrecked in the Canary Islands. There he witnesses the main story, that of the cruelty of Don Jaime, who mistreats his wife and has replaced her with the daughter of slaves. Conscious of Don Martin’s shock, Don Jaime tells the story of how he was treated cruelly in his youth, thus adding another level to the narrative. When this black woman falls fatally ill, she reveals that she lied about Don Jaime’s wife’s infidelity so that she could take over. However, it is now too late since she also expires at this time. This essay seeks to highlight the uses of ekphrasis in the tale, the chromatic design that Zayas uses to write for the eyes and the relationship of these topics to curiosity. While a few essays have pointed to specific instances of ekphrasis (De Armas 1998; Catelli 2011; Pérez Villanueva 2021), no study has read the novel as a whole in these terms. We will highlight eight instances of ekphrasis and their importance. Although Edwin B. Place noted in 1923 that Zayas’ novella made use of one of Marguerite de Navarre’s tales, this piece analyzes in detail, for the first time, how Zayas uses the painting mentioned by this author.

The reader’s curiosity may stem in part from the main model for Zayas’ tale, the Apuleian story of Cupid and Psyche, which has curiositas as its main motive. In the novel, both Lucius, the protagonist, and Psyche the main character in an interpolated tale are consumed by curiositas. Joseph G. De Filippo reminds us that “Curiositas… itself is found in a literary text only once in extant Latin prior to Apuleius, whereas it occurs twelve times in the Golden Ass alone, not to mention twelve occurrences of the adjective curiosus” (De Filippo 1990, p. 471). Curiosity is also key in Zayas where characters in both the main story (don Martín) and in the interpolation (Don Jaime) are negatively affected by their curiosity (or lack of it). Already, in Apuleius, the term curiosity has a meddlesome character. In his important seventeenth century Spanish dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias sees a curious person as often intrusive, asking why this and why that (Covarrubias y Orozco 1611, p. 260). Covarrubias thus leaves out the dangerous and often-punishable aspects of excessive curiosity as found in Apuleius (witchcraft) and Zayas. He also fails to include the dangers of a lack of curiosity. Although these are key aspects of Zayas’ work, this essay argues, nevertheless, that one of the reasons that the tale has attracted so much attention has to do with the vividness of its scenes, the enargeia with which it presents a series of tableaux before our eyes.1 Although the notion of vivid description seems to have originated with the rhetoricians, it was later to become firmly entrenched in poetic theory, too. One reason for the popularity of descriptive passages in poetry, no doubt, was the Latin notion of ut pictura poesis. Horace had said that poetry is like painting, and most Renaissance literary critics repeated the claim that poetry is like a picture” (Bormann 1977, p. 156). This created competition between art and literature, between the visual and the verbal.

This vivid description, creating, in many cases, ekphrasis that describe a special moment or picture, is accompanied by a chromatic impetus that further enhances it. The text induces characters and readers not only to marvel at a colorful scene but also to seek to understand the choice of colors. After all, color symbolism was essential to medieval and early modern literature, from priestly vestments at liturgical feasts to the hue of different planets and from the dyes used in clothing to the pigments used to fashion a painting. Indeed, color and design are the very basis for Renaissance artistic theory. In María de Zayas, these colors color emotions and arouse our curiosity regarding scene, symbol, shade and character. Indeed, Eavan O’Brien has pointed to the ornate clothing, their color and symbolic meaning in Zayas’ first collection, the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. She explains how characters wear “their social statuses and relationships” (2012, p. 127). She also evinces how chromatic elements can provide “visual evidence of the innermost emotions” (2012, p. 127).2 The colors assigned to each character symbolize their passions and emotions, utilizing a chromatic dictionary that Lope de Vega had clearly followed in his plays, and that derived from at least the previous century (Fichter 1927, pp. 220–31). At times, the color need not even be stated as when the narrative points to Lisis dressed in the “color de sus celos” that is, blue (Zayas y Sotomayor 2000, p. 170). While revealing desires and emotions, the tableaux also paint with many colors the moment of the beginning of the feast organized for Lisis to make her forget her illness. It thus allows readers to view the scene as a dramatic ekphrasis that regales the eyes and other senses.3

The tale that concerns us emphasizes men’s cruelty to women.4 Ekphrasis appears here in its original sense, as a vivid description that seems to present itself before our very eyes, what the Greeks called enargeia and the Romans, evidentia.5 Its more specific sense, the description of a work of art, will also be encountered here. The diverse ekphrasis found in this collection can paint with words astounding landscapes or tableaux of human suffering; from scenes suffused by chiaroscuro to moments typical of a vanitas painting.6 In our story there are eight main ekphrastic images: (1) storm and shipwreck; (2) the calm seas whose waves have returned to its blue abode (cerúleo albergue); (3) the description of the castle with its many tapestries and ruled by a man with wavy dark hair; (4) the dinner: a black lady, dressed in “cruel” red and lighted by candles; (5) the dinner: a white woman kept in the darkness of her cell and in the shadow of the floor under the dining table; (6) Elena as martyr, recalls the ecstasies of Mary Magdalen; (7) Marguerite de Navarre’s tale; (8) a cruel man and his Lucretia (Borgia).

1. Storm and Shipwreck

Our story begins with nature’s cruelty, the description of a storm at sea that imperils a ship. An ancient topic, dating back at least to Homeric descriptions, the tempest at sea became a most recurrent and meaningful image during the early modern period. After all, it was a period of discovery—when the Europeans encountered other lands—lands often separated by dangerous seas. At a time of conquest and discovery, the sea space became “the most profoundly alien and hostile element, with the result that shipwreck is the worst imaginable scenario, evocative of the most extreme fear, horror and abjection” (Thompson 2014, p. 6). Placed at the beginning of the novella, this terrible tempest that seems to dash Don Jaime’s hopes to return home to receive great honors and to marry his beloved creates suspense and curiosity. It also shows the dexterity of the author in presenting such a narrative ekphrasis. It matters not if elements of the description come from ancient epic, contemporary tales of shipwreck or the many paintings of losses at sea.7 It is too brief to discern the different strands. What matters is hyperbole, if such a term can be used to describe such a storm. It does serve to write for the eyes, to present to the curious reader a moment of great peril and a scene of terror: “habiendo cerrado la noche obscura, tenebrosa y revuelta de espantosos truenos y temerosos relámpagos con furiosa lluvia, trocándose el viento apacible en rigurosa tormenta, los marineros, temerosos de perderse…” (Zayas y Sotomayor 1983, p. 107).8 From moments in extremis, we move to acceptance as sailors, after doing all they could, and seeing themselves at the mercy of the storm “puestos de rodilla, llamando a Dios que tuviese misericordia de las almas, ya que los cuerpos se perdiesen” (1983, p. 233). This pious reaction is typical of numerous religious texts in which the heavens save the ship and those who are about to drown.9 But, in Zayas, the storm continues, allowing for the narrative to give us a glimpse of its protagonist. His bravery, we are told, keeps the mariners from succumbing to despair and to the sea. After three days and nights, the tempest leads to the moment of shipwreck. Carrie L. Ruiz points to three moments of shipwreck in this novella: the first in the frame tale; the second, Don Jaime’s shipwreck; and the third is found in an interpolated tale, the story of Don Manuel. For Ruiz, shipwreck “functions as a metaphor for female/male relationships” (2022, p. 13) and indicates “that a social breakdown is inevitable” (2022, p. 23). My reading, instead, will deal with the curiosity aroused by ekphrasis; and, echoing Ruiz’s somber analysis, the absence of miracles in the world of the novella. Neither the sailors are saved nor, in the end, will the main female character achieve happiness in life. The somber attitude towards social life and gender relations, however, will be questioned in a final but quite hidden ekphrasis of a French painting subtly inserted, one deriving from a novella by Marguerite de Navarre.

2. Calm Seas

The ship, four days into the storm, is tossed towards a strange land with high mountains. Surprisingly, here, we find a moment of solace as Don Martín and a fellow traveler manage to reach shore and take shelter in a “hueco o quiebra que en la peña había, donde, por estar bien cóncavo y cavado, no llegaba el agua” (1983, p. 233). The curious use of the term concave recalls the importance of the “manipulation of concave and convex lenses beginning in 1590s Italy (García Santo-Tomás 2017, p. 30). This would lead to the creation of the telescope, and its eventual use by Galileo to gaze at the heavens and publish Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger) in 1610, destabilizing the traditional view of the planets and the heavens. Mariners would thus start using the telescope as an aid to navigation. In Zayas’ story, it is as if the text invites us to look through such lenses at the natural beauty that follows the storm and even follow the waters to its point of origin: “salió el sol y dio lugar a que, las olas retiradas a su cerúleo albergue, descubrió una arenosa playa” (1983, p. 233). The text contrasts the dark/gray atmosphere of the storm with the luminosity of a new day and the brightness of the sands. The survivors can also glimpse how the stormy sea has retreated to its calm blue home. We view it further away, as through a telescope. The term cerúleo, used by Zayas is a Latinism typical of the imitators of Góngora, although it was used by poets long before him. Annotating the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, Dámaso Alonso explains “Cerúleas sienes: Cultismo: Cerúleo (en latín aeruleleus) vale ‘azul oscuro’. A los dioses marinos se les atribuía miembros de color azulado. Vilanova ha comprobado que se usaba abundantemente en poesía española desde fines del s. xvi” (Alonso 1974, vol. 1. p. 109).10 Zayas, writing for the eyes, has created two scenes of great visual impact. First, the dark and tenebrous storm with its many waves and the dangers of shipwreck; and second, the scene following, a bright beach, illumined by the sun, and behind, as if seen through the lenses of a telescope, the sea of deep blue, reposing in its own home.

3. The Man with Wavy Black Hair and His Tapestries

The opposition between the violence of the storm and the docility of a calm sea, the contrast between horror and beauty, anticipate future events and prepare Don Martín to observe the shocking events at a castle in the island. As an idealized hero, who led others through the storm, he is the most authorized person to observe what will soon transpire. Nevertheless, his great prowess in battle does not prepare him to deal with horrific domestic violence. As he arrives at the castle he observes the rich owner of this site, dressed in ornate and expensive clothing and with “el bigote y cabello negro y algo encrespado” (1983, p. 235). His appearance invites us to link the sea with his hair. After all, the term encrespado comes to mean curly hair as well as choppy seas. The metaphor of ocean waves with the curls of hair in a beautiful lady is a common one in the poetry of the period. It points to the beauty of the lady but also to her haughty disposition. We need only recall Quevedo’s “En crespa tempestad del oro undoso,” (Roig Miranda 1998, vol. 3, p. 174). Zayas inverts the genre, foregrounding the dark masculine hair as the locus for passion. The curls of Don Jaime de Aragón reveal that we are about to turn from ocean fury to a terrestrial tempest impelled by this figure.11 Thus, woman does not hide passion in the curls of her hair; nevertheless, man unleashes his passionate and tormented inner self.

In order to augment the ekphrastic power of this third visual and chromatic scene, the narrative alerts us to the “ricas colgaduras y excelentes pinturas” (1983, p. 236) that cover the walls of Don Jaime’s castle.

4. The Black Lady at Dinner

With this in mind, and satiated by the visual narrative, we turn to the evening meal. This dinner, given in honor of Don Jaime’s guests, presents the fourth and fifth ekphrastic scenes, filled with theatrical elements and utilizing a chiaroscuro that includes elements of race. Martín and his traveling companion experienced the following: “Se les ofreció a la vista dos cosas de que quedaron bien admirados” (1983, p. 236). Two very different doors open up. According to Victor Stoichita, “Hornacinas, ventanas y puertas son fragmentos de realidad que se distinguen por su capacidad de delimitar un campo visual” (2000, p. 59). Thus, each door serves as frame for a “painting”. Through one of them appears the lady of the castle, paradoxically, a black woman that resembled the devil: “una negra… que si no era el demonio, que debía de ser retrato suyo” (1983, p. 237). Slaves headed for the Americas often passed through the Canary Islands. Notice how ekphrasis is underlined once again through the use of the term retrato or portrait: the black lady seems to be a “picture” of the very devil. She is further described using comparisons with animals thus making her appear less than human. Don Jaime de Aragón’s castle has, surprisingly, white slaves and a lady of African origin. The black lady and mistress of the fortress was born in the castle and is the daughter to two black slaves. In recent times, she has become a consort to Don Jaime. The narrative does not include any kind of criticism of slavery nor does it speak of a racialized society.12 This black lady is adorned with a profusion of rich vestments and jewels that seem ridiculous in their excess. The chromatic spectrum is displayed in this ekphrasis, from the black of her skin, to the white of her pearls, and including the rich golden red fabric of her dress. Numerous stones and flowers of many colors further animate this quasi-grotesque portrait. The word “retrato” then calls for other paintings of this type. If readers are astonished by Zayas’ art and cannot recall a specific work, they can at least recognize that it is in the style of Caravaggio. After all, the Italian artist heavily influenced Jusepe Ribera and Diego Velázquez (Brown 1986, p. 12). The lady’s way is lighted by two young women carrying candles in a silver candleholder. Let us recall, among others, paintings by the Flemish artist Adam de Coster (1586–1643), called pictor noctium for his many scenes lighted by a candle;13 or even the works of Francisco de Zurbarán, called the Spanish Caravaggio, who in the decade of the 1630s painted a series of women saints dressed with great elegance. The golds and reds of St. Dorothea, for example, along with her flowers, could serve as contrastive image of Don Jaime’s companion. I would argue that we cannot then discard this ekphrasis as an ironic allusion to Zurbarán, Philip IV’s painter. In fact, Zurbarán painted more than one image of Mary Magdalene, which Zayas may have known, as explained in Section 6. Indeed, while the martyred Dorothea shows her compassion to one who mocks her, sending him fruits and flowers, the black lady’s portrait suggests cruelty. According to William Fichter, who has analyzed the theater of Lope de Vega, the different shades of red mean different things. The color “encarnado” (1927, p. 221), as used by Lope, points to the person’s cruelty. Zayas may have been quite aware of this connotation in dressing her figure (1983, p. 237).

5. The White Lady’s Dinner

The other door, a much smaller one, depicts another portrait, this time of a woman that contrasts with the black lady and calls for the compassion of a St. Dorothea:

La mujer que por la pequeña puerta salió parecía tener hasta veinte y seis años, tan hermosísima, con tan grande estremo, que juzgó Don Martín, con haberlas visto muy lindas en Flandes y España, que ésta las excedía a todas; mas tan flaca y sin color, que parecía más muerta que viva, o que daba muestras de su cercana muerte. No traía sobre sus blanquísimas y delicadas carnes más que un saco… Traía en sus hermosas manos, que parecían copos de blanca nieve, una calavera (1983, p. 237).

This clearly ekphrastic passage, as well as the one already described, immediately arouses the curiosity of the two travelers and of readers that peruse this novella. Such a prominent black lady would arouse curiosity in an age that shunned interracial marriages. Readers soon become aware of the terrible cruelty enacted by Don Jaime, who has locked up Elena, the white lady and his actual wife, in a small room so low that she can only come out of it on her knees. Crawling on the floor, she is allowed to collect crumbs and scraps that fall from the dining table. She is only allowed to drink out of the skull of her dead cousin, her supposed secret lover. This shocking punishment derives from ill-founded jealousy, having been the now black lady who had denounced Don Jaime’s true wife, Elena, for infidelity. It is remarkable that the novella is constantly arousing the readers’ curiosity, but within the tale, Don Jaime is never curious to discover sufficient proof of his wife’s infidelity. If he had been curious, the events in the tale, which arouses our curiosity, would never have transpired. Instead, Don Jaime lets himself be moved by the tempestuous blue of jealousy and the black of his passionate hair, never realizing that the black lady’s red dress is the color of cruelty. The scene or portrait, done with great detail, fully contrasts with the other one. Here, chiaroscuro is evoked through the white beauty of the woman who lives cloistered in a minuscule and dark space, and who eats under the shadow of the dining table. The great lights of the dining room only emphasize the feeble whiteness of a body that seems to be disappearing into nothingness. Laura Catelli leads us to admire the “juego de marcos visuales: los de las excelentes pinturas que cuelgan alrededor de los caballeros y los de las dos puertas de las que salen las dos mujeres (2011, p. 418). This double contrast reiterates the double frame of the story where a dark and violent storm contrasts with the natural beauty of a calm sea at home in its “cerúlea” or blue natural beauty.

6. Mary Magdalene

The motif of a woman drinking from a skull is often related to Mary Magdalene. She traveled with Jesus and helped support his ministry, thus being named in the Gospels She also witnessed his crucifixion and resurrection. Earlier, Jesus had exorcized the seven demons that accosted her. While not in the canonical Gospels, she was considered a repentant prostitute. By the time of the Counterreformation, the Catholic Church came to emphasize her penance for her sins. She was one of the most popular saints during the early modern period. There are hundreds of works of art that portray her, and thus the image of Elena and the skull in Zayas’ novella becomes an allusive ekphrasis pointing to Mary Magdalene, where a series of paintings may be evoked.14 Beginning with 1998, three essays have imagined Zayas’ Elena as a Mary Magdalen, pointing to paintings by Titian, El Greco and José de Ribera. To these, we can add the possibility that Zayas may have known Zurbarán’s depictions of Mary Magdalene. The first of these three essays underlines that hagiography and its pictorial contexts provide new depth to the characters. Elena is one of many examples in Zayas where women “are often crossed by men and must bear the cross of living in a patriarchal society” (De Armas 1998, p. 11). In the second article, Laura Catelli takes up this concept and reiterates that, in Tarde llega el desengaño, we have an allusive ekphrasis which points to pictoric representations of Mary Magdalene.15 She concludes that “Los intertextos de los Desengaños, particularmente los ekfrásticos, parecen subrayar una y otra vez la idea ortodoxa del martirio del cuerpo y la pureza del espíritu. El objetivo aquí no sería expresar el mensaje ortodoxo, sino enmarcar para resaltar y comentar la violencia que se ejercía sobre el cuerpo femenino y el sistema de valores misóginos que justificaba esa violencia” (2011, pp. 430–31). More recently, Sonia Pérez Villanueva foregrounds The Penitent Magdalen (1635–1640) by José de Ribera, a painting that includes a skull, and represents just as in Zayas “la fugacidad de la vida terrenal” (2021, p. 204). She adds “La belleza de Elena refleja la sensualidad de Magdalena en su agonía y la eleva a un estado de santidad” (Pérez Villanueva 2021, p. 204). The martyrdom of Elena/Mary Magdalene is thus the most impacting moment in the novella. These three essays show different ways in which hagiography and art metamorphose a character, in this case Elena, layering her with elements that transform her into a figure akin to a saint and martyr. This martyrdom is brought about by negative/cruel masculine power.

7. Marguerite de Navarre

As if all these ekphrastic elements were not enough, we need to turn the screw one more time in order to discover an even more complex pictorial scheme. María de Zayas, as Edwin B. Place mentions in a now almost forgotten study from 1923, takes the motif on the skull and much of the main plot of Tarde llega el desengaño, from a French novelist, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549). The sister of Francis I of France (whom Emperor Charles V incarcerated), Marguerite was a well-known figure at this time and her works could well have impacted Spanish writers of the Renaissance and early modern periods.16 Published posthumously, nine years after the death of the queen, it was reprinted the following year, in 1559, by Claude Gruget as the Heptaméron, the title that we associate with her collection of tales.17

Very much like María de Zayas, Marguerite de Navarre assures the reader of her Heptaméron that her novellas derive from historical events.18 In tale 32, a gentleman named Bernage travels to Germany, sent by Charles VIII in a diplomatic mission. There, he discovers that his host has punished his wife, who had been unfaithful to him, forcing her to stare every day, while locked in her room, at the skeleton of her lover. When she is allowed out of her room in order to dine with her husband, she must drink out of the skull of her lover. While Zayas did not use the hanging skeleton, Marguerite did not include the woman who ate scraps under the table. While Elena still preserves her golden hair, albeit mangled, the woman in Marguerite’s tale must shave her hair and appear bald. Furthermore, while the woman in Zayas must come out from a small door, the one in Marguerite comes from behind a tapestry, thus underlining the ekphrastic elements of the tale.19 When Bernage returns to France from his diplomatic mission, the King, upon hearing of the great beauty of the suffering lady, sends a painter to Germany, Jean Perréal, also called Jean de Paris, so that he capture on canvas this sad beauty. Marguerite de Navarre uses a historical figure here, and many critics have affirmed that the painting was transformed into a saintly one: Jean reproduces this sad beauty as Mary Magdalene, a lost work of art (Rigolot 1994, p. 60). The tale also mentions that before departing Germany, Bernage had asked the husband to show compassion to his wife, and this does happen. We learn that years later, the couple lives happily and have “beaucoup de beaux enfans” (1967, p. 245).

Given the many parallels between the two tales, it is quite likely that Zayas was pointing to a hidden model, Marguerite de Navarre’s novella. If such is the case, we must foreground two key elements. First, Zayas rewrites the French novella to underline man’s cruelty to women. Just as the devastating storm destroys the ship, here Don Jaime’s extreme choleric response leads to Elena’s death. Her innocence is discovered too late since she has just perished from grief, mistreatment, and malnutrition. Marguerite’s tale inserts an ekphrasis of a future painting, a work by Jean Perréal, a work that impels an ekphrastic game with Zayas’s work. The original painting leads the Spanish writer to imagine an Elena as seen by Perréal, but now with a tragic ending. Zayas also rejects the verbal ending of Marguerite’s novella, where woman can end up smiling and surrounded by her family and children. Instead, like Perréal, she paints a martyr. In Zayas, Elena dies incarcerated, suffering and innocent. She does so not only to show man’s cruelty, but that fulfillment can only be attained beyond this world: “el premio de su martirio, que ya Dios se le ha dado en el cielo” (1983, p. 253).

8. A Cruel Man and His Lucretia (Borgia)

Before concluding, we need to seek some kind of an explanation for Don Jaime’s cruelty—some feeble rationale that can never excuse him. As stated, he never seems curious to find out if his wife was truly unfaithful; and readers are curious to discover his motivation. Don Jaime explains that, in his youth, an invisible mistress (a woman who would not allow herself to be seen by her gallants) ordered him never to reveal their trysts. This tale then is presenting the reverse of the Cupid and Psyche myth, since, here, the male is the curious one, as he tries to figure out who the woman is. In the darkness of her home, Don Jaime states that “sin luz empecé a procurar por el tiento a conocer lo que la vista no podía, brujuleando partes tan realzadas que la juzgué en mi imaginación por alguna deidad” (1983, p. 241). Even in the dark, the imagination creates images, portraits, making Lucrecia a perfect being, an angel or goddess. When Don Jaime reveals their secret meetings against her commands, the cruel lady attempts to assassinate him.20 Lucrecia turns out to be a great princess, that of Erne. Her social position does not permit a scandal, and thus she seeks to hide all traces of intimacy by seeking to murder her talkative lover. This interpolated story, just like the Don Jaime plot, has a literary model. It is based on the famous plot of the invisible mistress, well known in the theater and in early modern prose through works by Castillo Solórzano, Céspedes y Meneses, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, and Ana Caro (De Armas 1976). Be it a fictional tale or a true one (as Zayas asserts), Don Jaime seeks to ameliorate his portrayal as a cruel man by underlining the murderous attempts of this princess. Zayas’s narrative, although feigning to create a balance between men and women, clearly tips the balance in favor of women and against men’s cruelty. Don Jaime’s actions are of un-imaginable cruelty.21 At the same time, the tale of the cruel princess, as an interpolation, becomes a frame tale and thus an ekphrastic passage. As Laura Catelli (2011, pp. 418–19) point out, the name of the princess recalls Lucretia Borgia, who was said to have ordered the murder of her former lovers. What is really curious is that Don Jaime marries Elena because she looks like Lucrecia. So much so that she appears to be her “retrato” (1983, p. 247). We thus come to discover that Don Jaime may have punished his wife because of the murderous impulses of his still-beloved princess Lucrecia.

Indeed, when Don Jaime enters the palace of his princess, his emotions are so exalted that he exclaims that he has ascended to heaven: “En la gloria que siento en el alma, y en el olor y dulzura deste albergue” (1983, p. 241). As we have noted above, the novella plays with the term “albergue” to underline contrasts. The day following the storm, Don Martín and his companion can move from their “peligroso albergue” (1983, p. 234) and admire the beauty of the day and of the calm sea with waves that have returned to its “cerúleo albergue” (1983, p. 233). While enjoying the sumptuous dinner offered by Don Jaime, our shipwreck survivor observes admiringly the beautiful woman, Elena/Magdalene that takes only crumbs from the floor, soon to return to her cramped quarters: “volviéndose a su estrecho albergue, cerró el criado la puerta con llave y se la dio a su señor” (1983, p. 238). Using a key, a servant locks her in. “Albergue” takes on a series of meanings, from the home of a princess and the blue spaces where the ocean resides to a dangerous cave and the closed-in and dark spaces where Elena is incarcerated.

These unlikely places and spaces arouse the readers’ curiosity as they navigate through a series of impacting and chromatically dense ekphrases that further augment admiration and curiosity. Indeed, this is a curiosity shared by characters in the work. While Don Martín is intensely curious as to the strange goings on at the castle in the Canary Islands where he is lodged, Don Jaime is curious as to the identity of his invisible princess hiding in the darkness of her palace. Giving in to his curiosity, Don Jaime is punished and almost murdered. Reacting to this adventure in early life, he refuses to investigate if his wife Elena has indeed committed adultery. This lack of curiosity again places him at fault, only discovering her innocence after she dies, martyred by his many cruelties. From the storms at sea to the storms of passion, Zayas’ Tarde llega el desengaño, creates unforgettable images of violence and emotion, filled with an impacting palette and dramatic chiaroscuro. Each of the eight main ekphrasis in the tale is a visually stunning work of art, rendered through words.22 From the peaceful blue of a calm sea, we move to the red cruelty of a false witness; and from the vivid candlelight that reveals the darkness of a body and soul, we move to the darkness in which a shining and tormented soul, with golden hair is martyred. Elena’s hair contrasts with the waves of her husband’s dark and curly hair, a sign of tormented passions. To these many pictures filled with enargeia, Zayas adds references to a tale by Marguerite de Navarre, one that ends with a happy picture of marital love. That such an image existed in reality and was painted (in a tragic manner) by Jean Perréal, adds further depth to the ekphrastic impetus of the tale, and shows that, even in the times of Marguerite, men were not as cruel to women. In this novella, then, Zayas paints with strong and damning colors the brutalities of men without failing to assign the red of cruelty to a demon-lady and the darkness of secrecy to a willful princess.