The Mercedarian's Shoes (Perambulations on the fourth tratado of Lazarillo de Tormes)

In Lazarillo de Tormes, the fourth tratado is barely there. Much of what might be explicit is missing, and the little that is left is told with a reserve the narrator calls intentional. Amid two rather long tratados (one with the escudero, another with the buldero), the fourth is so miniscule it seems a mere precis, as if something got the tongue of the narrator, or some qualm left nothing to the narration, or even that the vast and busy (and sometimes conniving) memory started to lose momentum and fade. It can be read nearly in a single breath, though we cannot be sure where the innuendos (of contempt? of carousing humor?) should fall. We spot irony and censure in the air among the lapses or elipses; there is a slur of some scandal-anticlerical but not specific-with a handful of possible clues to the precise infractions. Here is the full text or what the author chooses to leave intact of it

Art · Literature · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Philosophy

• Complicitous Laughter

  E Michael Gerli•Hispanic Review•1995

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