THE UNREADABLE BOOK CLUB Don Quixote 1
Dulcinea at the End part 1
(Miguel de Cervantes completed the First Part of Don Quixote in 1605. Fifteen years later, he published the Second Part, mostly because there were apocryphal sequels written by other authors being circulated. Cervantes wrote Part Two as if it were by another author, the Moor, Cide Hamidi Benengali and translated from the Arabic. In Part Two, all the characters are aware of Part One as well as the other, falsified, sequels. Cervantes even tells us which parts of the ‘translation’ are left out. Characters talk about how the ‘real’ Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are so much more honorable, clever and wise than those in the unauthorized sequel. Don Quixote is therefore, famous and a great fuss is made of fooling him into enacting his dream of knight errantry. To their surprise his honor and moral philosophy overshadow his madness. Sancho Panza gets his governorship, which he wisely abdicates, and many other adventures ensue before Don Quixote is tricked into giving up his dream for a year at a jousting match. Sancho continues to speak in proverbs, wordplay and fractured and misspelled idioms, features which we humbly attempt to reproduce. For Cervantes, the story ends with our hero dying in his own bed having regained his sanity, all characters except Dulcinea being present. I hope to correct this error below.)
Close family and friends gathered around Don Quixote, who on his death bed had done them the disservice of becoming sane, renouncing his honor and oath as a knight errant and proposing to give up the ghost as he began his life; as Alonzo Quixano. Before this fever took hold of him however, he had just arrived home from the events related at the end of Cide Hamidi Benengeli’s sequel to the tale of his original exploits. That tale, the First Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, was the most well known in the popular imagination; wherein he is described tilting at windmills astride the old nag Rocinante, a barber’s shaving pan for a helmet and faithful Sancho Panza at his side riding his beloved grey donkey, Dapple.
These, the lesser known events of the Second Part, as translated from the Arabic, have the Knight of the Sorrowful Face tricked into a joust by the bachelor Sansón Carrasco disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors. By losing the joust, Don Quixote was bound by oath to remain in his village for one year and go on no further quests or errantry during that time.
While still mad, it then came into his verdant imagination to live out the plots of pastoral novels for a year instead of chivalric novels. He would dress as a shepherd, buy some sheep and goats and wander the countryside composing poetry and songs in honor of some hard hearted and duplicitous love who had rejected him, probably because of his lowly station and romanticism. In the novels, these pinings often led to a romantic suicide.
Just as mad as knight errantry, you might say, but Carrasco, the village priest and Sancho Panza had taken to the idea, both as a method of turning their friend away from more violent fantasies and because of their own affection for the pastoral. The reader might well wonder which madness was worse when the madman is spurred on by the trickery of the sane.
When Don Quixote came out of his fever in his own bed however, he proclaimed that he no longer believed in enchanters, the saving of ladies in distress, defending the weak and relieving the misery of the poor, at least not as a knight errant. But, having achieved the result they had wanted for years, the group now was sorry to see the source of so much entertainment and true wisdom renouncing the very font of their treasure.
Sancho Panza whispered to the priest. “There is one thing I do know, which is absence makes the heart grow out of sight and out of mind, but contempt broods familiarity, so I believe if I bring the one person who is absent but is of paramour and paramount importance, my Master will at least look before he leaps into hesitation and is lost.”
The priest said, “As usual friend Panza, your proverbs are useless but if you mean to bring Dulcinea to his bedside, it may at least bring him comfort. I must tell you as well, that the peasant girl of Toboso, who stood in for the enchanted Dulcinea, has been made well aware of her part by the novel of your master’s exploits, much to her initial dismay and more recent entertainment. She has, in truth, come to enjoy her notoriety, since it has brought even her a surfeit of suitors.”
Sancho said, “To make a fine point, your fine diction is fine with me, I understand your plan and I wasn’t just born out behind the turnip cart either. See to my master in his sanity or delirium and I will find Dulcinea.”
And so, the barber and the physician gave the old man draughts of herbal tinctures to calm and sedate him, and he did not protest, looking forward as he was now to the highest and deepest rest.
Go to Part 2