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astonished that this young playwright should remember a humble soldier’s page who, two years before, had helped him save a library from the flames in a Flemish town hall. Calderón sat down with us, and for a while there was much pleasant conversation and more wine, which the new arrival accompanied with no more than a bowl of olives, for he did not, he said, have much appetite. Finally, we all got up and took a turn about the mentidero . An acquaintance, who had been reading something out loud to a group of guffawing idlers, came over to us with a few of his fellows in tow. He was holding a piece of manuscript paper.
    “They say this was penned by you, Señor de Quevedo.”
    Quevedo cast a disdainful eye over the writing, enjoying the expectant hush. Then he smoothed his mustache and read out loud:
    “The man in this dark tomb,
Who lies here dead and doomed,
Sold body and soul for a wager
And even dead he’s still a gamester . . .
    “ No,” he said, apparently grave-faced, but with tongue firmly in cheek. “That last line could do with a bit of work—if, of course, I had written it. But tell me, gentlemen, is Góngora such a broken man that people are already writing epitaphs for him?”
    There were gales of flattering laughter, the same laughter that would have greeted a barb aimed by Góngora at Quevedo. The truth is that, although don Francisco preferred not to say so in public, he had, indeed, written those lines, just as he had many of the other anonymous verses that ran like hounds about the mentidero ; although sometimes, other people’s poems, however uninventive, were also attributed to him. As regards Góngora, that quip about his epitaph was not far off the mark. Quevedo had bought a house in Calle del Niño purely in order to evict Góngora; and that leader of the ranks of culturanistas , ruined by the vice of gaming and his desire to cut a fine figure, and so short of funds that he could only just afford a miserable carriage and a couple of maidservants, was forced to submit and retire to his native Córdoba, where he died, ill and embittered, the following year, when the disease afflicting him—apoplexy, some said—finally attacked his mind. Arrogant and aristocratic in manner, that Córdoban prebendary was as unlucky at cards as he was in his choice of friends and enemies; he clashed with Lope de Vega and with Quevedo, and placed his affections as mistakenly as he placed his bets, linking himself to the fallen Duke of Lerma, the executed don Rodrigo Calderón, and the murdered Count of Villamediana. And any hopes he had of receiving favors from the court and from the count-duke—whom he asked on numerous occasions for positions for his nephews and other members of his family—had died when Olivares famously announced: “The devil take those people from Córdoba.” He had no better luck with his work. Out of pride, he had always refused to publish anything, preferring to distribute his poems amongst his friends for them to read and publicize; then, when necessity did finally force him to publish, he died before he saw his books leave the press, and the Inquisition immediately ordered them to be confiscated as suspicious and immoral. And yet, although I never warmed to the man and disliked his particular brand of Latinate gibberish—all triclinia and grottoes—I still say that don Luis de Góngora was an extraordinary poet who, paradoxically, along with his mortal enemy Quevedo, did much to enrich this beautiful language of ours. These two cultivated and spirited men, each writing in very different styles, but with equal skill, breathed new life into Castilian Spanish, one with his linguistic richness and the other with his intellectual swagger. It could be said that this fruitful, pitiless battle between two literary giants changed the Spanish language forever.
     
     
     
     
    We left don Pedro Calderón with some relatives and friends of his and continued down Calle Francos to Lope’s