Trust Me On This : Return to La Mancha

As nearly as I can remember, the last time I picked up Don Quixote, Richard Nixon was President and we thought he’d never leave. There was a war going on in Southeast Asia; I’d been married for three years and was lying low on a farm in West Virginia. In those heady days I never dreamed of reaching 40, let alone the pit beyond.

Then, a couple months ago I was looking for a way to tell a story that would allow me simultaneously to move forward and to digress, one that I could use as a model for a piece I was trying to write, so I turned again to Quixote. Immediately I was struck by two things I’d missed the first time through. The first was that Cervantes’ great character wasn’t all that old; he was in his mid-50s, just about my age. The second (well, really the second and third) was how rapidly the story gets underway and then, once it does, what a large number of people are truly hurt--I mean broken bones, and blood and near-death and financial loss--by all that idealism.

The other thing I’d more or less forgotten (yet another!) was that his adventures actually take up not one, but two full volumes. The first, which contains the most famous episodes (the windmills, the sheep, Mambrino’s Helmet and the troubles at the inn), explores the multiple possibilities of interpreting the work. Is the son plain wrong, or is he right that the tricks played on him are the product of enchanters? Or, another possibility, have the enchanters covered not his eyes but the eyes of the rest of the world? Everything in that first volume exits in multiples--the numerous pairs of lovers (what’s true love and what’s false?), the Don and Sancho, even the question of who the narrator is--Cervantes or his reputed source, the Moor, Cid Hamete Benengeli. No wonder Borges, master of mazes and of mirrors loved this book, and no wonder, with Cervantes’ stories within stories, so large a tip of the hat is given to the Thousand and One Nights.

And if that first book is all about the Don being mocked for his original vision (itself a copy of the romances of old), then, in the second, he is ridiculed for believing the visions others have copied from his won. Instead of disbelieving his as in part one, in the second, worse, he is humored.

If this is starting to sound a lot like life, well maybe it is. In my own case by now I have ventured out twice from the relative comfort of marriage (ah, true love and false!) in search of a different way to be in the world. Both times I found it, and both times the pain I lay about others was very, very great, in fact unspeakable. Was it worth it? Did I accomplish more as a result? My answer is only to echo Quixote, and the ancient Greeks as well, that it’s the adventure, not the result that is our measure.

Quixote did both good and harm, as much by chance as anything, and maybe that’s been true of my life also. Still, it’s interesting that of all his adventures, the one that troubled the Don the most was the Cave of Montsantos, where, instead of descending to the depths of an abyss, he instead settles in along a ledge a few feet from the top and falls asleep. There he has a dream, or vision, and forever after the question keeps bothering him: Was it a true vision or a false one? In time, the best answer comes from a charlatan: Some of it was true and some was not.

Another surprise this time around is that while in my youth I was in a hurry to reach the end, I would have been happy, this second reading, to have it last forever. Quixote (in the Modern Library, Putnam translation) comes to nearly 1,000 pages, and it took more than two months to complete. Now I can’t think of searching for a new place to live, choosing a house, packing and unpacking, and putting things in place, in a way that’s separate from the adventure of the mill, or the flying wooden horse. How many experiences are there, for that matter, that are that luxurious, outside life itself? A compact disc will last an hour, a movie possibly two, most novels (when I’m not caught up in moving) two or three days. To allow a book to be absorbed so completely into one’s life makes it seem as if we are living not one, but two separate and very different existences.

Related to the book’s length, curiously, is the breath-taking brevity of the don’s death. It takes four pages in all, so rapidly that it seems not even to have happened, to be the greatest illusion of all. But isn’t this also like life? Of all the deaths of others I’ve experienced, the most unbelievable were not those close at hand, or sudden, or even of the very young. The deaths hardest to accept were of those characters so eccentric, so unusual, the until the actual moment of their passing they seemed to operate on a set of physical laws so different than our own. They couldn’t die, and then they did.

Finally, speaking of the unexpected, there is a stunning scene in the second book of his adventures where the Don actually takes into his hand, not the first volume, which we know he is aware of, but the very book we are holding, so that later, meeting a minor character in a country inn, he comments to Sancho that surely this man must be who he claims to be because earlier, when he was looking over the second part, he saw his name (which, of course, is this very scene we are reading. Speak of mirrors inside mirrors!).

For Cervantes then, the measure of fiction and the measure of life, too, is the story. And just as there are romances, and thrillers, and success stories and stories of disasters, as well as modern epics of bleak and hopeless drudgery, each attracts us in a different way. So lives vary too, and other than the pleasure of living them, who can say if one is better than another. Is a long life more valuable than a short, or an exciting one of more significance than one that’s quiet? Ultimately, what makes a book valuable isn’t style, or plot, or character, or tone, but simply its ability to tell us something that we hadn’t known, that we’d forgotten--our own strange and illusory existence.

So is Quixote about illusion or about life? Read on: No sooner had I finished the last words of the novel (“ . . . doomed to fall. Vale.”), than I turned to find the source of the clanking sound coming from the next room. It turned out to be my dog scratching his ear, and the sound was of his metal collar tags hitting one another. The ear looked to be infected, so I went to the dresser to find a few cotton swabs to clean it, and when I pulled on the drawer, the front came off in my hands. I was headed toward the garage when I heard a cheery “Hello.” I looked up and saw two guys in dark suits; each was carrying a briefcase.

“Have you noticed that there seems to be a plan behind all things?” the taller one ventured by way of starting a conversation.

“Hmmm,” I replied, and sensing the lie of the land, he handed me what he called, “some of our literature,” which I took, but didn’t pay attention to until after I’d re-glued the drawer and cleaned the offending ear. Then I looked. My farewell gift was a small pamphlet titled, “Who Really Rules the World?” and its message was that deceptions are everywhere. Things aren’t what they seem, the pamphlet said. Don’t be gullible. Don’t always believe your friends, or what you read in the papers, or see on television, or in films. Watch out, it said. Beware.