DON QUIXOTE OF THE PARADOXES

By Eduardo Galeano Reprint | | Print |

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MONTEVIDEO, Feb 1 2005 (IPS) - It was in prison that this adventure in freedom was born. In the jail of Seville, \’\’where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound its home\’\’, Don Quixote of La Mancha was engendered, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, and author of \”The Open Veins of Latin America\” and \”Memories of Fire\”. In this article, Galeano writes that every person contains other possible people, and each world contains its anti-world. This hidden promise, the world that we need, is no less real than the world we know and suffer. This truth is well-known, and fully lived, by the beaten down who still practice the madness of returning to the path, time and time again, because they continue to believe that the path is a challenge that awaits them, and because they continue to believe that righting wrongs is a worthy folly. The impossible helps the possible come to pass. To put it in terms of Don Quixote\’s pharmacy: the magic of this balm of Fierabras is so powerful that at times it saves us from the curse of fatalism and the plague of despair. Isn\’t this, in the end, the great paradox of the human voyage on this earth, that the navigator steers by the stars though he knows he will never reach them?

It was in prison that this adventure in freedom was born. In the jail of Seville, ”where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound its home”, Don Quixote of La Mancha was engendered. His ‘father’ had been arrested for debt.

Exactly three centuries before, Marco Polo had dictated his book of travels in the prison of Genoa, as his fellow prisoners listened and so travelled with him.

*** Cervantes set out to write a parody of the chivalric novel. No one, or almost no one, read them any more. They had fallen out of fashion. His spoof was an effort deserving of a greater cause. Nevertheless this useless literary adventure far exceeded its original project, it travelled far higher and far further to become the most popular of all time and of all languages.

This Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance deserves our eternal gratitude. The tales of chivalry had scorched the brain of Don Quixote, but he, who lost himself reading, saves those who read him. He saves us from solemnity and boredom.

*** Famous stereotypes: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the knight and his squire, madness and sanity, the dreamer with his head in the clouds and the rustic labourer with his feet on the ground. It’s true that Don Quixote goes completely insane whenever he mounts Rocinante, but when he dismounts he speaks with the purest common sense, and at times it seems he plays the madman only because that is what the reader or author expects of him. And Sancho Panza, the ignorant, the rough, is able to exercise with exemplary skill his governorship of the island of Barataria.

*** He was so fragile that he seemed, and was, more lasting. Each day he rides with greater hunger and not only for the plains of La Mancha. Tempted by the ways of the world, the character escapes from the author and is transfigured in his readers. And so he does what he didn’t do, and says what he never said.

Don Quixote never spoke the most famous of his lines: ”They’re barking, Sancho, a sign that we are riding.” Which anonymous author was the author?

*** Wearing his tin armour, mounted on his starving nag, Don Quixote seems destined to ridicule and failure.

This madman makes himself into a character from the chivalric novels which he believe are books of history. Yet he does not always tumble from his mount in his impossible charges, and at times even administers an honest beating to the enemies he faces and invents. It is ridiculous, and one must doubt, but it is an endearing form of ridiculous. A child believes a broom is a horse while his game lasts, and so the reader accompanies and shares the outlandish antics of Don Quixote for as long as he reads. We laugh at him, yes, but we laugh with him far more.

*** ”Don’t take anything seriously that doesn’t make you laugh,” a Brazilian friend advised me a while ago. Pop language takes seriously the ravings of Don Quixote and expresses the heroic dimension that people have granted this anti-hero. Even the Dictionary of the Real Spanish Academy recognises this quality: a quijotada is ”the action of a quixote” and a quixote is one who ”places his ideals above convenience and works disinterestedly and committedly in the defence of causes he considers just, but without success.”

Twice Cervantes sought work in the Americas and twice he was rejected. Certain sources state that the purity of his blood was in doubt. Statutes prohibited travel to the American colonies by anyone who had Jewish, Muslim, or “heretic” blood in his veins, which one had to be free of for seven generations.

Cervantes couldn’t travel to the Americas, but his son Don Quixote could. And there he did very well.

*** In 1965 Che Guevara wrote his final letter to his parents. To say goodbye, he did not quote Marx. He wrote: ”Once again I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rocinante. I return to the road with my shield on my arm.”

*** In his misfortunes, Don Quixote evoked the golden age, when everything was held in common and there was neither yours or mine. Afterwards, he said, the abuses began, and it became necessary for errant knights to take to the road to defend maidens, shelter widows, and rescue orphans and the needy.

The poet Leon Felipe believed that the eyes and conscience of Don Quixote ”see and organise the world not as it is but as it should be. When Don Quixote takes the innkeeper thief for a courteous hospitaller knight, the insolent prostitutes for lovely maidens, the inn for an elegant hotel, black bread for white bread, and the whistle of a gelder for welcoming music, he is saying that the world should have neither thieves nor mercenary love nor scarcities of food nor run-down inns nor horrible music.”

*** A few years before Cervantes invented his feverish paladin of justice, Thomas More came up with utopia. In his book, the word was derived from u-topia, literally meaning ”no place”. But perhaps this kingdom of fantasy becomes real in the eyes that foretell it, and is incarnated in them. George Bernard Shaw was right in saying there are those who see reality as it is and ask why, and there are those who imagine reality as it had never been and ask why not.

It is clear, and the blind can see, that every person contains other possible people, and that each world contains its anti-world. This hidden promise, the world that we need, is no less real than the world we know and suffer.

This truth is well-known, and fully lived, by the beaten down who still practice the madness of returning to the path, time and time again, because they continue to believe that the path is a challenge that awaits them, and because they continue to believe that righting wrongs is a worthy folly.

*** The impossible helps the possible come to pass. To put it in terms of Don Quixote’s pharmacy: the magic of this balm of Fierabras is so powerful that at times it saves us from the curse of fatalism and the plague of despair.

Isn’t this, in the end, the great paradox of the human voyage on this earth, that the navigator steers by the stars though he knows he will never reach them? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)