Periquillo
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by Philip Gambone

"He doesn't like to work, he enjoys freedom, friends, and luxury all too much, and he is very flighty in his way of thinking." The rascal in question is the protagonist of El Periquillo Sarniento (The Mangy Parrot), generally considered to be Mexico's first novel. It was written by a liberal-leaning journalist and pamphleteer named José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, who published the first three of the novel's four volumes in 1816. El Periquillo, which appeared during the Mexican independence movement, is a grand social and political satire in the picaresque tradition. (Think: Tom Jones or Don Quixote.) Lizardi aimed his barbed pen at just about everything, but most vehemently at the deplorable state of life in Mexico under Spanish rule and the Church.

Katherine Anne Porter, who wrote an introduction to the first English translation, thought El Periquillo Sarniento was "without dispute The Novel of the past century, not only for Mexico but for all Spanish-speaking countries." Alas, that translation, which was done by her husband at the time, was severely abridged, cutting out most of Lizardi's trenchant commentaries and asides. It wasn't until 2004 that David Frye, who teaches Latin American culture and society at the University of Michigan, brought out a complete, and very readable, translation.

Lizardi was born on November 15, 1776, into a creole family of limited means—"rich in pride, but poor in purse"—writes Jefferson Rea Spell in his meticulously researched biography. Lizardi's father was a physician at the Real Colegio in Tepotzotlán, and it was there that the future author received his elementary education. He seems to have been quite a delinquent boy, exasperating his father who once even denounced him to the Inquisition for possessing a deck of cards with suggestive, off-color meanings.

The young man eventually went to Mexico City to pursue higher education; but when his father became gravely ill, Lizardi had to withdraw from the university. He "reached manhood unfitted for any specific trade or calling," Spell says. Lizardi married sometime around 1805. By 1811, when he was 34, he was actively engaged in writing and publishing, turning out satiric poems on contemporary social conditions, which he sold in pamphlet format on the streets on Mexico City.

In 1812, Lizardi took to writing prose pamphlets about the need for political reform. "His purpose was apparently conciliation," Spell says, "for he suggested that the mother country, by a more liberal policy, could win the love and friendship of the colonists instead of their hate." When the Council of Cádiz, hoping to satisfy Mexican critics of Madrid's harsh colonial policies, reinstated freedom of the press, Lizardi seized the opportunity and published the first issue of his reform-minded periodical, El Pensador Mexicano, on October 9, 1812. His editorial stance became so bold that two months later he was arrested and imprisoned by the ultra-royalist government. He was not released until the following March.

While in prison, Lizardi continued to put out issues of El Pensador Mexicano, and wrote a pamphlet in which he denounced the ongoing violence of the revolution, exhorting both sides to follow Christ's words to love one another. Despite such noble sentiments, the vehemence of his criticisms and his general liberal bent earned him the acrimony of royalists and clergy alike. The eye of the Inquisition began to fall on him.

In response, Lizardi turned from essays to novel writing, intent on presenting his reformist ideas in a less obviously polemic framework. The result was El Periquillo Sarniento. The novel is full of characters from every stratum of society who behave in dreadful and dishonorable ways. Lizardi spares no one, but it's clear his most caustic judgment is reserved for those members of society who are in positions of authority and power. In her excellent book, Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America, Nancy Vogeley notes that Lizardi thought that "the humor that usefully keeps a reader reading results from ridiculing high-born people, rather than low-born ones." Lizardi himself once wrote, "Perhaps we excuse the vices of plebian persons, considering their lack of any rules of action and coarse breeding. In distinguished persons we don't find this excuse and it follows that their defects are more shocking to us."

Title page, 1842 edition
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After El Periquillo, Lizardi went on to write three more novels. In the last seven years of his life, corresponding to the first years of the new Mexican Republic, he became an ever-more important social critic and forward-looking thinker, espousing a progressive stance that kept him in hot water with the Church and the government. Indeed, the fourth and final volume of El Periquillo Sarniento was suppressed by the colonial viceroy because of Lizardi's criticisms of slavery. For almost two years (1822-1823), he was excommunicated for supporting Freemasonry. Because of this kind of persecution, he considered moving to the United States. Lizardi died on June 27, 1827, emaciated and in poverty. The cemetery where he was buried later became a pigsty.

The protagonist of El Periquillo Sarniento is Pedro Sarmiento, who, flat on his back and "struggling against both illness and doctors," writes down his life story for the benefit of his children. Having led a "rakish and wicked" life, he hopes that, by reading his story, they will learn "to avoid many of the mistakes you will find admitted here by myself and others, and, forewarned by my example, that you will escape the suffering I have endured through my own fault."

Birth of Periquillo
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And so, his story unfolds. Pedro says that he was born in rich and prosperous Mexico City—"the capital of North America," he calls it—between 1771 and 1773. As the son of respectable criollo parents—"neither wealthy nor mired in poverty," —he is given a privileged, if rather useless, education. Lizardi's description of that education affords him the first of many opportunities to satirize bourgeois life and culture in colonial Mexico. Periquillo's teachers are indolent and pedantic. His studies focus on Church doctrine and a few bits from the Aeneid and Cicero. "I got my head filled with little Latin rules, riddles, phrases, and plays on words; but in this matter of intelligence in the purity and propriety of the language, not a word."

Periquillo at school
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His classmates jokingly turn his surname, Sarmiento, into Sarniento ("itchy," "mangy") and give him the nickname "Periquillo Sarniento" (mangy parrot). He soon turns to associating with "naughty and mischievous" boys, rising to become "the best prankster" in the school. He loathes studying and enjoys the idea of making money while lying around lazily scratching his belly. For a while, Pedro actually considers a life in the Church because of the cushy life it would afford: "I'll get myself a rich little parish, and then I can rely on my own curates, flop down on my back, and live high on the hog." But he soon abandons theological studies and, with "rogue's luck," moves on to "the most disorderly period of my life."

In chapter after chapter, Pedro details how he willingly took up with every kind of rogue, swindler, and thief—a parade of lowlifes such as we see in Hogarth's The Rake's Progress. These chapters provide Lizardi with opportunities to condemn the vices of his day: the pomp and vanity of funerals, the frivolity and dissipation of bourgeois life, the prejudice against manual labor, the ineptitude of the medical profession, and the ubiquity of thievery, among the high as well as the low. As one of his comrades observes, "What is so much better about robbing with fountain pens, with yardsticks, with measuring scales, with prescriptions, with oils, with papers, and so on, and so forth, than robbing with picklocks, ropes, and master keys? Stealing is stealing."

A duel with the black man
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Despite the efforts of a few good people to turn him around, Pedro plunges into ever more scurrilous adventures. He becomes an apprentice apothecary, a quack doctor, a sexton, a member of the "honorable guild of master beggars," and a freeloader. He learns all the tricks of an idler and a leech. At one point, he joins up with a government subdelegado, who takes bribes in order to help merchants and rich farmers get away with all manner of illegal practices. "If any poor Indian asked one of them for his daily wage, or haggled with them, or tried to work for a master who was less cruel, they would beat and mistreat him more freely than if he were their slave."

Eventually, Periquillo is thrown out of Mexico to be punished for his misdeeds. Exiled in Manila for eight years, he conducts himself more honorably: "I did not have any perilous adventures worth mentioning." He begins to understand that there is a better side to humanity than what he has learned in colonial Mexico. A black man teaches him that "disdaining blacks for their color and for the difference in their religions and customs is an error; that mistreating them for these reasons is a cruelty; and that being convinced that they are not capable of having great souls that cultivate the moral virtues is an extremely crass prejudice." These are the chapters that got the fourth volume banned.

Periquillo sails for Manila
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On his return to Mexico, our mangy parrot is shipwrecked and cast ashore on a Pacific Island. Here, like Gulliver, he comes across a community of foreigners—in this case, Chinese—with customs and beliefs he finds utterly strange. Pedro's ideas about what constitutes proper civilization are challenged. Could it be that there are other, perhaps even more enlightened, ways of organizing society? But once again, under bad influences, he reverts to being a scoundrel, a vagrant, and a bum.

As bad as Pedro is, Lizardi is quick to point out that the young man has "a sensitive heart," one that tweaks the picaro's conscience and reminds him that there is a better path to follow. At the conclusion of the novel, under the rubric that all's well that ends well, Pedro finally reforms himself. The catalog of virtues he admonishes his children to follow—"that you should be humble, thoughtful, friendly, kind, courteous, honorable, truthful, simple, sensible and upright" —sounds like the Boy Scout oath. But it's a code of conduct that Lizardi sincerely embraced.

Periquillo gambling
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As Pedro observes, "Knowing how to conquer oneself and tame one's passions is the most difficult conquest of all, and is therefore the most praiseworthy victory." He tells his children: "You should not read my story as a mere pastime; rather, in between my erring ways … you should be sure to take advantage of the maxims of solid morality that I have sown, imitating virtue wherever you see it, fleeing from vice, and always learning your lessons from the wrongs for which others are punished."

To lovers of eighteenth-century English picaresque novels, Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento provides many of the same pleasures: a cavalcade of madcap misadventures that throw a bright satirical spotlight on the vices and evils of the day. We are treated again and again to vignettes of lowlife Mexico City—the down-and-out flop houses, gaming saloons, taverns, and pool halls (arrastradertios). At the same time, Lizardi takes pains to show that the venues of the upper classes—schools, churches, hospitals, government offices—are equally places where deceit, stupidity, and wrongdoing reign.

Another pleasure of the novel is the number of witty aphorisms and bits of folk wisdom that Lizardi sprinkles throughout his tale: "There is no such thing as bad bread to a good hunger." "If you're full of life, water is as good as medicine." "The habit doesn't make the monk." "A dog has to walk if it's going to find a bone." "One more garbanzo won't burst the pot." "The friend that won't give, and the knife that won't cut: if you lose them both, it won't matter much."

Periquillo dancing
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Lizardi was a pioneer, concludes Spell. "He blazed a trail in order that others might follow. With all the powers at his command, he devoted himself to attempting to arouse his countrymen from their lethargy; in return, he earned for himself only the hatred of the privileged class and the contempt of the ignorant. In order that his compatriots might see themselves as others saw them, he pictured them as they were—ignorant and indifferent, intolerant and unjust, blind to their own interest and to that of others; in him they saw only a quarrelsome mentor, dissatisfied with everything about him."

Today, we need another Lizardi, a writer with the courage, the intelligence, the insight, and the wit to critique and burlesque the rampant scurrility of our own shameful times.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, is just out from Rattling Good Yarn Press and is available on Amazon.

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