A Reading Diary (15 page)

This morning, reacting to yet another Le Pen assembly in France, my French publisher, Hubert Nyssen (who fought in the Resistance), says, “We’ll have to pull out the old rifles once again.”

Misery in our time: according to
Le Monde
, 53 percent of the children of London live below the poverty line. What action, then? The common argument: helping one beggar won’t alter the situation, won’t eradicate the cause, won’t change anything. But for Don Quixote
there is no doubt that direct action
is
the answer. On his very first excursion as a knight, he hears cries of distress and sees a boy, naked from the waist up, tied to a tree and being flogged by his master. Don Quixote orders the man to stop: “Uncivil sir, it is unseemly that you should attack one who cannot defend himself; mount your steed, couch your lance, and I will make you see the cowardice of what you are now doing.” The boy’s master attempts to explain that he is punishing him for his carelessness, and not (as the boy claims) for demanding his wages. Undeceived, Don Quixote orders the man to untie the boy and pay him what he owes him; the man answers that for him to do so, the boy must accompany him home, since he does not have the money on him. The boy, foreseeing that he will once again be beaten when left alone with his master, begs the knight not to believe him. “He will not disobey me,” Don Quixote answers. “It is enough for me to give my orders and he will surely respect them.” Because justice, chivalrous justice, is for Don Quixote an immutable universal law, and he believes that breaking it will entail unthinkable universal catastrophes. But, as the reader suspects, as soon as Don Quixote turns and leaves, the master ties the boy to the tree again and beats him within an inch of his life.

Twenty-seven chapters later, when Don Quixote meets the boy again and wishes to prove to his companions the importance of knights errant by telling them the story of the rescue, the boy answers that the outcome of the adventure was exactly contrary to the knight’s intentions, and begs Don Quixote, if he ever finds him in trouble again, to leave him as he is and not attempt to save him. Sancho, giving the boy a piece of bread and cheese for the road, comments, “Take this, brother, for we are all affected in some part by your misfortune.” Reasonably, the boy asks in what part it has affected Sancho. “In this part of cheese and bread I give you” is the answer, but that is only one version of the truth. The boy’s misfortune, as Sancho intuits, affects us all, not in the physical pain, of course, not in the empty stomach and the flogged skin, but in the realization that injustice thrives and that we are (apparently) condemned to the impossibility of overcoming it.

André Gide on Gandhi’s assassination: “It is as if God had been defeated.”

The chapter ends with the boy cursing his rescuer and all knights errant, with Don Quixote sad and ashamed and his companions holding back their laughter at the scene they have witnessed.

I can no longer watch scenes of violence on television or in films, but I can read their fictional descriptions.
Don Quixote
is one of the most violent books I know.

Don Quixote
presents itself as a bewildering set of Chinese boxes. After only three chapters, Cervantes tells us that he has got this far and now realizes that he no longer knows how the adventures of his knight continue. By chance, he is offered for sale a bundle of old papers; being a compulsive reader who reads “even torn scraps in the street,” he leafs through them and sees that they are written in Arabic. Curious as to what these pages may contain, he seeks out a translator (Hebrew and Arab translators are easy to find less than twenty years after their expulsion from Spain, Cervantes tells us), and discovers that the manuscript is nothing less than the chronicle of the adventures of Don Quixote, written by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benegeli—who, it turns out, includes Cervantes among the authors in our knight’s library. From then on, the spiral of authorship becomes vertiginous: The novel we read purports to be a translation from the Arabic, and Cervantes becomes not its “father” but merely its “godfather.” Later, in Part II of
Don Quixote
, the characters have read Part I and correct and revise its factual errors, even though, Cervantes tells us, its Moorish author swears that all the
events are true, “even as a Catholic Christian might swear” (which, the translator explains to Cervantes, means that he swears nothing but the truth). At this point, the reader wonders: who is inventing whom?

Most writers possess a historical presence; not so Cervantes, who, in my memory, is less a real man than a character in
Don Quixote
. Goethe, Melville, Jane Austen, Dickens, Nabokov are more or less recognizable writers of flesh and blood; Cervantes seems to me invented by his book.

In May of last year, with Javier Cercas, I visited Cervantes’ house in Valladolid. The house is impressive. Here Cervantes lived when Part I of
Don Quixote
appeared in Madrid in 1605. The garden, the study, the bedroom, the room in which the many women of the family gathered around a Moorish coal-burner, the kitchen which he no doubt seldom visited—all these (we agreed) held more of the world of Don Quixote than of his creator. In spite of museums like this one, in spite of the reputation, of the monuments, of the literature courses, of the institutes named after him, of the enthusiasm of posterity and the generosity of curators, Cervantes remains unreal.

Proust felt he was condemned to be the fictional “I” he had created. In
Don Quixote
it is as if the fictional “I” is condemned to be Cervantes.

Sancho and Don Quixote compared to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Nicholas Rankin, in his admirable travel book
Dead Man’s Chest
, observes that “perhaps it is no accident that the letter of the alphabet between H for Hyde and J for Jekyll is I.”

I found an engraving professing to be the portrait of Cide Hamete Benegeli. I’ve had it framed and have hung it on the wall next to my desk.

Subjects dealt with weakly by Cervantes in many of his other works mysteriously come to life in
Don Quixote
. Compare the tedious enumeration of good and bad poets in his
Voyage to Parnassus
(a kind of pedestrian
commedia
in which the author’s purpose seems to be merely to receive the approval of Apollo for his own poetic manifesto) to the book-burners’ census in
Don Quixote
.

Books within the book: When the Curate and the Barber ransack Don Quixote’s collection in order to purge it of “evil” books, they come across
La Galatea
by a certain
Miguel de Cervantes. “This Cervantes has been a great friend of mine for many years,” says the Curate, “and I know he is more experienced in misfortune than in verses. His book has some good invention; it proposes something, and concludes nothing.” Regarding
La Galatea
, “concludes nothing” simply means that Cervantes never wrote the second part. But the same could be said of
Don Quixote
, and for a stronger reason:
Don Quixote
“concludes nothing” because the physical death of the hero is not the conclusion of the ethical argument.

Flaubert: “Yes, stupidity consists in the desire to conclude.”

Note: Flaubert could not have liked
Don Quixote
, written, as it is, without any visible effort to rein in the story or to master the prose. In a letter to a friend, Flaubert insists, “The weak passages in a book should be better written than the others.”

Don Quixote tells Cardenio that he has “more than three hundred books” back home. Cervantes’ books (and books on Cervantes) occupy three shelves in my own library. I notice that I still have the book on Cervantes that Javier Cercas insisted on lending me. I must send it back. I feel uncomfortable having other people’s books at home. I want either to steal them or to return them
immediately. There is something of the visitor who outstays his welcome in borrowed books. Reading them and knowing that they don’t belong to me gives me the feeling of something unfinished, half enjoyed. This is also true of library books.

What would happen if the Curate and the Barber purged my library of memoirs and diaries the way they purged Don Quixote’s of novels of chivalry?

Auden, quoting an Icelandic proverb: “Every man enjoys the smell of his own farts.”

Idiocy in academia seems to have no limits. Amherst College in Massachusetts has decided to offer a course in Espanglish—that is to say, in the mixture spoken by Latin American immigrants who have not yet learned English. Among the assignments, the translation of
Don Quixote
. These are the first two sentences: “In a placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un greyhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omlet pa los sábados, lentil pa los viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa los domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income.”

Yesterday, in Nigeria, Islamic protesters rioted after hearing that the Miss World contest would take place in their country. They set fire to churches and shops belonging to Catholics and wounded or killed more than five hundred people, stabbing them with knives or placing burning tires around their necks. They ran down the streets of Kaduna shouting, “God is great!” and “Down with beauty!”

If I had to choose a favourite passage in the novel, I think it would be the episode of Clavileño, when Don Quixote and Sancho are tricked into mounting, with their eyes covered, a wooden horse that supposedly will take them through the air to visit the wizard Malambruno. If they are indeed flying, Sancho asks, how is it that they can still clearly hear the voices of those on earth? Don Quixote dismisses the question as simply another peculiarity of their magical business. Sancho then suggests that they at least peek from under their blindfolds to see where they are. And it is then that Don Quixote shows how ambiguous his supposed delusion is: he forbids Sancho to remove his blindfold.

Faith must not be subject to the proofs of reason. Faith does not battle reason; it simply asserts itself by creating a place of emptiness for itself. It is into this emptiness, mystics believe, that God can enter.

Leave for Canada to give a lecture at the University of Newfoundland.

My first visit to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Immediately, the sense of being in an alien place, an island world with its own rules, its own language, its own imagination. I add St. John’s to the places where I think I could live happily.

This evening, a blizzard broke out over the city. From my hotel room, which has two huge corner windows, I see the snow clouds blow in and shatter endlessly against the glass, as if the whole building were swimming into waves of white.

Four of the most memorable weather experiences in my life have happened in Canada: this blizzard; the northern lights in Manitoba; a tornado in Saskatchewan; a storm coming up from the Pacific, seen from the librarian’s house perched on a cliff above Campbell River, British Columbia.