Level B1 · Chapter 50
The Captive of Algiers
A soldier who has spent twenty-two years away from Spain arrives at the inn. He tells how his father divided his money among three sons, and how he ended up a captive in Algiers.
What you will learn
- Tell what had already happened before the moment you are talking about.
- Build the pluperfect with había plus the participle.
- Lay out a whole life on two planes of past time.
Before you read
The captive is telling tonight about things that happened twenty years before. To do that he needs a tense that says already, before then, earlier than the earlier: había elegido, he had chosen. It is two words, había plus a participle, and once you see the first one the rest of the sentence is easy. Count how many times it appears.The story in easy Spanish
A la venta llegó aquella noche un hombre vestido a la morisca, con una mujer muy callada.
That night a man dressed in Moorish fashion arrived at the inn, with a very silent young woman.
Se llamaba Ruy Pérez de Viedma y había pasado veintidós años lejos de su tierra.
His name was Ruy Pérez de Viedma, and he had spent twenty-two years far from his own country.
La mujer no hablaba español, y nadie supo al principio quién era ni de dónde venía.
The woman spoke no Spanish, and at first nobody knew who she was or where she came from.
Cuando terminaron de cenar, le pidieron que contara su historia, y él empezó por el principio.
When they had finished supper they asked him to tell his story, and he began at the beginning.
Nadie en la venta lo interrumpió.
Nobody at the inn interrupted him.
Su padre había sido un hombre generoso hasta la ruina.
His father had been a generous man to the point of ruin.
Un día había reunido a sus 3 hijos y había repartido su dinero en 4 partes.
One day he had gathered his three sons together and had divided his money into four parts.
Les había dicho que eligieran camino, porque en su casa ya no quedaba nada.
He had told them to choose a path, because there was nothing left at home.
Uno de los hermanos había elegido las letras y se había marchado a Salamanca.
One of the brothers had chosen letters and had gone off to Salamanca.
Otro había elegido América, donde muchos habían hecho fortuna en pocos años.
Another had chosen America, where many had made a fortune in a few years.
Él había elegido las armas, que era el camino más corto y el más peligroso.
He had chosen arms, which was the shortest road and the most dangerous.
Sirvió en Italia y después en la gran batalla naval de Lepanto, contra los turcos.
He served in Italy and then in the great sea battle of Lepanto, against the Turks.
Aquel día, entre el humo de la pólvora, ganaron todos menos él.
That day, in the smoke of the gunpowder, everyone won except him.
Cuando terminó el combate, se encontró prisionero a bordo de una galera enemiga.
When the fighting ended, he found himself a prisoner aboard an enemy galley.
No lo había herido ninguna bala, pero había perdido la libertad para muchos años.
No bullet had wounded him, but he had lost his freedom for many years.
Lo llevaron a Constantinopla y más tarde a Argel, el gran mercado de cautivos.
They took him to Constantinople and later to Algiers, the great market for captives.
Allí lo encerraron en un patio grande, con otros cristianos que también habían sido soldados.
There they shut him in a large yard, with other Christians who had also been soldiers.
A los cautivos ricos los trataban bien, porque su familia había prometido pagar un rescate.
Wealthy captives were treated well, because their families had promised to pay a ransom.
A los pobres los tenían encadenados y les daban de comer una vez al día.
The poor ones were kept in chains and were fed once a day.
Él no era ni una cosa ni la otra, y esperaba sin saber qué esperaba.
He was neither one thing nor the other, and he waited without knowing what he was waiting for.
Habían pasado ya muchos años cuando ocurrió algo que él no había esperado nunca.
Many years had already passed when something happened that he had never expected.
Una mañana, por una ventana muy alta de la casa vecina, bajó una caña.
One morning, from a very high window of the house next door, a cane came down.
De la caña colgaba un pañuelo blanco atado, y dentro del pañuelo había algo.
From the cane hung a white cloth, tied, and inside the cloth there was something.
Los cautivos del patio levantaron la cabeza y ninguno se atrevió a moverse.
The captives in the yard raised their heads and not one of them dared to move.
Sancho lo escuchaba todo con la boca abierta.
Sancho was listening to all of it with his mouth open.
Vocabulary
War at sea
- la galera
- the galley
- el combate
- the fighting
- la bala
- the cannonball
- la pólvora
- gunpowder
- el soldado
- the soldier
- la valentía
- courage
- manco
- one-handed
- el enemigo
- the enemy
Captivity
- el cautivo
- the captive
- el rescate
- the ransom
- encadenado
- in chains
- el patio
- the yard
- la libertad
- freedom
- el prisionero
- the prisoner
- cobarde
- cowardly
- esperar
- to wait, to hope
The house and the inheritance
- repartir
- to share out
- la ruina
- ruin
- elegir
- to choose
- la fortuna
- a fortune
- generoso
- generous
- el hermano
- the brother
- la tierra
- the homeland
- el camino
- the path
The pluperfect: what had already happened
Su padre había sido un hombre generoso hasta la ruina.
Uno de los hermanos había elegido las letras.
Ocurrió algo que él no había esperado nunca.
You have four past tenses already. This is the fifth, and it is the easiest of them all, because it is built once and never changes shape.
1. How it is made
Imperfect of haber, then the participle. That is the whole rule.
| person | form | English |
|---|---|---|
| yo | había elegido | I had chosen |
| tú | habías elegido | you had chosen |
| él, ella, usted | había elegido | he, she, you had chosen |
| nosotros | habíamos elegido | we had chosen |
| vosotros | habíais elegido | you had chosen |
| ellos, ustedes | habían elegido | they, you had chosen |
The participle is the same one you learned for the perfect back in lesson 18: -ar gives -ado, -er and -ir give -ido. The irregulars are the same short list too, and this story uses four of them.
| infinitive | participle | in this story |
|---|---|---|
| decir | dicho | les había dicho que eligieran |
| hacer | hecho | muchos habían hecho fortuna |
| ser | sido | su padre había sido generoso |
| ver | visto | no había visto nunca aquella ventana |
2. What it is for
Spanish narration has a now. In this lesson the now is the night at the inn, and everything the captive describes sits at some distance behind it. The pluperfect is how you say behind.
| what happened first | and then |
|---|---|
| Su padre había repartido el dinero | les dijo que eligieran camino |
| Habían pasado muchos años | cuando bajó la caña |
| No lo había herido ninguna bala | pero se encontró prisionero |
Notice the shape of that middle row, because it is very common and very useful: habían pasado muchos años cuando… Spanish uses the pluperfect to measure a stretch of time that was already over when the next thing occurred.
3. Never split the two words
In English you can slide an adverb between had and the participle: he had never expected it. In Spanish nothing goes in between. Haber and the participle are welded together, and the adverb goes before or after the pair.
| wrong | right |
|---|---|
| ✗ había nunca esperado | ✓ nunca había esperado |
| ✗ había nunca esperado | ✓ no había esperado nunca |
| ✗ había lo elegido | ✓ lo había elegido |
The same rule catches the pronouns. Lo, le, se and the rest go in front of había, never inside the pair: no lo había herido ninguna bala.
Algiers, the city of captives
In the sixteenth century Algiers ran, to a large extent, on the business of captured Christians. Contemporary estimates put the number of captives held there at over twenty thousand at any one time, and the city was organised around them: the yards where they were kept, the market where they were sold, the intermediaries who carried letters, the religious orders that arrived by ship with money raised in Spanish parishes to buy the poorest of them back. A captive was not primarily a slave. He was an investment, and how you were treated depended almost entirely on how much your family could be persuaded to pay.
Cervantes knew all of this because he lived it. In 1575 he was sailing home from Italy, where he had been a soldier, when his ship was taken by corsairs. He was carried to Algiers and held there for five years. He was carrying letters of recommendation from Don Juan of Austria, the commander at Lepanto, and those letters did him the worst possible favour: his captors read them, concluded that he was a person of consequence, and set his ransom impossibly high. His family sold what they had. It was not enough. He was finally freed in September 1580, days before he was to be shipped to Constantinople, from which nobody came back.
This is why the captive’s tale reads differently from everything around it. There are no windmills in it and nothing is mistaken for anything else. The yard is a real yard, the ransom is a real sum of money, and the waiting is the waiting Cervantes did. Readers have noticed for four centuries that the story sits inside Don Quixote like a piece of a different book, and that is exactly what it is. Cervantes had been trying to get this material into print for years.
One detail is worth keeping as you read on. Ruy Pérez says he is neither rich nor poor and simply waits. That middle position, too valuable to be worked to death and not valuable enough to be ransomed, was the worst place to be, and it was Cervantes’ own.
Cervantes in the original
En un lugar de las Montañas de León tuvo principio mi linaje
In a place in the mountains of León my family had its beginning.
Read the first five words again and then read the first five words of the novel: En un lugar de la Mancha. The captive opens his life with the same formula that opened the book, and no reader of 1605 could have missed it. Cervantes is quietly telling you that this man is starting a story of the same weight as Don Quixote’s, and the joke is that he is right. The tale of the captive is the one piece of the novel that is nearly autobiography: five years in Algiers, a ransom his family could not raise, and a return to a Spain that had moved on without him. Notice the verb too. Tuvo principio, had its beginning, is a formal turn, the way a written chronicle starts rather than the way a man at an inn speaks. He is a soldier telling his own life in the register of history, which is exactly what someone does when he has been rehearsing the story in his head for twenty-two years and has never once been asked for it.