Celestina

“And how may one who is out-of-tune tune? How may he who is himself so discordant know harmony, he whose will does not obey reason, who holds within his heart barbs, peace, war, truce, love, enmity, injuries, sins, suspicions, all from one cause? But take it up and sing the saddest song you know.”

Calisto, lovesick after he first meets Melibea, demands that Sempronio bring him his lute. The instrument is out of tune, but Calisto demands that Sempronio play it anyway, demonstrating the humorously dramatic spectacle of Calisto’s anguish. 

“Greater is the flame that lasts eighty years than the one that passes in a day, and greater the one that kills a soul than one that burns a hundred thousand bodies. As different as appearance from reality, as the real from the painted, as the shadow from the physical, that great the difference between the fire you speak of and the one that is burning me.”

In response to Calisto’s order to Sempronio to sing the “saddest song [he] know[s]” (9), Sempronio sings about the emperor Nero burning Rome. This nod to Neoplatonism and the classical allusions that occur throughout the text is a ludicrous choice in response to Calisto’s personal heartbreak. It becomes even more ridiculous when Calisto insists that his pain is more tragic than a devastating fire that destroyed an entire city. 

“I wish for riches, but he who is dishonest in his climb is likely to fall farther than he climbed. I would not want wealth gained through deceit.”

When Celestina wants Pármeno to help her extort money from Calisto, his response illustrates his initially upright and rigid moral character. His statement foreshadows what will eventually occur: He will become corrupt and then “fall farther than he climbed” (34). The falling imagery hints at not only his and Sempronio’s fall from the window, but also Calisto’s fall from the ladder and Melibea’s leap from the roof.