Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  In Piura I also lived or experienced in some way the events that, turned into memories, became the raw material for most of the stories in my first book, The Cubs: the attempt at a school strike, the fist-fights in the dry river bed, the abuses of the estate owners on their lands, where they still ruled as tyrants. The world of nostalgia and youthful memories that my grandparents and Mamaé retreated into as their long lives neared the century gave me the theme and characters of The Young Lady from Tacna. I found the story of Pichulita Cuéllar, by contrast, in a newspaper I was reading in Lima, on the bus from Miraflores to the city centre. The hired scribe I invented in Kathie and the Hippopotamus, who exaggerates and sugar-coats the travel journal through ‘the yellow Orient and black Africa’ written by a woman from Lima who had discovered her literary vocation somewhat late in life, was based on my life, in the first instance, when I was doing piecework in a Paris garret for a woman with an inventive imagination and deficient syntax.

  But just as much as my lived experience, what I have read – which is another, sometimes more noble and sumptuous, way of living – has also had a decisive influence on the gestation of all my stories, although, in this case, I hesitate when it comes to giving specific authors and titles. I am sure that Sartre’s ideas on committed writing, which in the fifties and early sixties I believed in blindly, had a great deal of influence on the critical intentions and ethical preoccupations of my first novels, and that the epic style and romantic mythology of André Malraux, whom I read with great passion during my university years, left its traces in my first stories along with my idols of those years, the US novelists Hemingway, Dos Passos, Caldwell, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald and younger writers like Truman Capote and Paul Bowles. But the greatest influence was, had to be, that of the supreme teacher of so many novelists of my generation (and also of the generations that immediately preceded and followed mine) throughout the world: William Faulkner. Without the wonderment that I felt when I discovered the richness of shades, allusions, perspectives, harmonies and ambiguities of his prose, and the absolutely original way in which he organised his stories, I would never have dared to rearrange ‘real’ narrative chronology in my own work, or to present an episode from different points of view and levels of reality, as I did in Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and in the rest of my novels, nor would I have written a book like The Green House, in which the words are as visible, and sometimes more visible, a presence as the characters themselves – a landscape for the story – and in which the construction – the perspectives, the flow of time and the changing narrators – is all of labyrinthine complexity. For it was thanks to the Yoknapatawpha saga that I discovered the prime importance of form in fiction and the infinite possibilities offered by point of view and the construction of time in a story.

  ‘Influence’ is a dangerous word, and, when applied to the writing of literature, it is also a contradictory term. There are influences that stifle originality and others that allow writers to discover their own voices. In any event, it is very likely that the most fertile literary influences are those that are not very evident to us, that we are not very conscious of. For that reason, although I know which authors captivated me and opened up to me the world of dreams, and which writers taught me about writing and the structure of fiction, I would not venture to say that these are the writers – and I would add to that list, of course, Flaubert, Melville, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, Thomas Mann and many others – to whom I owe the greatest debt, let alone specifying exactly what this debt might be.

  The only thing that I am absolutely certain about is that it was in these early childhood years, spent in that large house on Ladislao Cabrera Street in Cochabamba, in the heart of my extensive, almost biblical, family presided over by my grandparents, when I started reading my first stories, in books and children’s magazines that Baby Jesus brought me for Christmas or which I bought with my pocket money, that I first became interested in writing fiction, something that has shaped my life from then on. And in some discreet and distant way, these early stories still kindle my dreams.

  London, 24 June 1997

  A Twenty-First-Century Novel

  In the first place, Don Quixote de la Mancha, the immortal novel by Cervantes, offers us an image: the image of an hidalgo in his fifties, crammed into anachronistic armour, as scrawny as his horse, accompanied by a coarse, podgy, peasant riding on a donkey, who acts as his squire, travelling the plains of La Mancha, frozen in winter and baking hot in summer, in search of adventures. He is spurred on by a mad plan: to revive the time long since past (and which, furthermore, never existed) of the knights errant, who travelled the world helping the weak, righting wrongs, and offering justice to ordinary men and women that they would not otherwise receive. He draws inspiration for all this from his readings of romances of chivalry, which he takes as true stories, as truthful as the most meticulous history book. This ideal is impossible to achieve because everything in the reality that Don Quixote lives in gives the lie to it: there are no longer knights errant, and no one professes the ideas or respects the values that they adhered to. Similarly, war is no longer a matter of individual challenges, in which two knights resolve disputes in a precise ritual. Now, as Don Quixote himself sadly laments in his speech on arms and letters, war is not decided by swords and lances, that is by the courage and skills of an individual, but by the thunder of cannons and gunpowder, an artillery that, through its noisy slaughter, has blown apart the codes of individual honour and the deeds of heroes like the mythic figures of Amadis of Gaul, Tirant Lo Blanc and Tristan de Leonis.

  Does this mean that Don Quixote de la Mancha is an old-fashioned book, and that Alonso Quijano’s madness stems from a desperate nostalgia for a world now lost, from a visceral rejection of modernity and progress? This would be the case if the world that Don Quixote longs for and tries to revive had ever been part of history. For in truth, this world only ever existed in the imagination, in the legends and utopias fashioned by human beings in order to escape, to some extent, from the insecurity and brutality of their lives, and to find refuge in a society of order, honour and principles, of men who would seek justice and redemption for them, and offer redress for the violence and sufferings that made up the true lives of men and women in the Middle Ages.

  The chivalric literature that makes Don Quixote lose his mind – this is an expression that must be taken metaphorically rather than literally – is not ‘realist’, because the delirious exploits of its champions do not reflect a lived reality. But it is a genuine, imaginative response to this reality, full of hopes and desires, which above all else rejects a very real world which was totally opposite to this ceremonious and elegant order of things, to this representation in which justice always triumphed and crime and wickedness was punished. It was in the real world, full of anxieties and despair, that people avidly read the romances of chivalry (or listened to them being read aloud in taverns and town squares).

  So the dream that turns Alonso Quijano into Don Quixote de La Mancha is not an attempt to revive a past, but something much more ambitious: it is an attempt to make the myth a reality, to transform fiction into living history. In the course of the novel this endeavour, that seems purely and simply absurd to everyone around Alonso Quijano, especially to his friends and acquaintances in his unnamed village – Nicolás the barber, the housekeeper and his niece, Bachelor Sansón Carrasco – gradually begins to infiltrate reality, one might say because of the fanatical conviction with which the Knight of the Sorry Face imposes it on his surroundings, without being in the slightest bit daunted by the kicks and blows and misfortunes that rain on him from all sides because of it. In his splendid analysis of the novel, Martín de Riquer insists that from the beginning to the end of his long journey, Don Quixote does not change – he repeats himself time and again, without ever wavering in his certainty that it is the sorcerers who change reality so that he seems to be mistaken when he attacks windmills, skins of red wi
ne, goats or pilgrims, thinking them to be giants or enemies.13 That analysis is doubtless correct. But although Don Quixote does not change, bound up as he is in his rigid, chivalric view of the world, what does change are his surroundings, the people around him, and reality itself which, as if contaminated by his powerful logic, becomes gradually less and less realistic until – as in a Borges story – it becomes a fiction. This is one of the subtlest, and also one of the most modern, aspects of Cervantes’s great novel.

  Fiction and Life

  The major theme of Don Quixote de La Mancha is fiction, its raison d’être, and the ways in which, as it seeps into life, it shapes and transforms this life. Thus what seems to many modern readers to be the quintessential ‘Borgesian’ theme – one that we find in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ – is, in fact, a Cervantes theme that, several centuries later, Borges would take up, giving it his own personal seal.

  Fiction is a central issue in the novel because the hidalgo from La Mancha who is the main protagonist has been ‘driven crazy’ – and we must also see his madness as an allegory or a symbol rather than as a clinical diagnosis – by the fantasies in the romances of chivalry. And, since he believes that the world is as it is described in the romances of Amadis and Palmerin, he goes out into the world in search of adventures, which become parodies, suffering and causing minor catastrophes along the way. He does not learn any lessons in reality from these bad experiences. With the unshakeable faith of the fanatic, he blames evil sorcerers for the fact that his deeds always unravel and become farcical. In the end, he gets his way. Fiction contaminates life and reality gradually bends to the eccentricities and fantasies of Don Quixote. Even Sancho Panza, who in the opening chapters is presented as a supremely earthy, materialistic and pragmatic being, has in the second part also succumbed to the enchantments of fantasy and, when he is made governor of the island of Barataria, he cheerfully adapts to a world of deceit and illusion. His language, which is direct and popular at the beginning of the story, becomes refined in the second part, and there are passages where he sounds as mannered in speech as his own master.

  Is it not through fiction that poor Basilio attempts to win back the beautiful Quiteria, preventing her marriage to rich Camacho, and having her marry him instead (I, 19–21)? Basilio ‘commits suicide’ as the wedding is about to take place, driving a sword into his body and bathing himself in blood. And, in his death throes, he asks Quiteria whether, before he dies, she will give him her hand because, if not, he will die without making his confession. As soon as she does so, Basilio revives, revealing that his suicide was a piece of theatre and that the blood spilled had been hidden in a hollow tube. The fiction is effective, however, and, with the help of Don Quixote, it becomes a reality, because Basilio and Quiteria marry.

  Don Quixote’s friends in the village, who are so hostile to literary romances that they make an Inquisition bonfire of his library, resort to fiction with the pretext of curing Don Quixote of his madness: they devise and enact scenes to return the Knight of the Sorry Face to sanity and the real world. But, in fact, they achieve the opposite: the fiction begins to devour reality. Bachelor Sansón Carrasco disguises himself twice as a knight errant, the first time with the pseudonym of the Knight of the Mirrors, the second, three months later in Barcelona, when he appears as the Knight of the White Moon. On the first occasion, the deception is counterproductive because it is Don Quixote who gets his way; the second time, however, he achieves his goal, defeats Don Quixote and makes him promise to give up arms for a year and return to his village. With this, the story moves towards its end.

  This ending is a rather depressing and forced anticlimax, and perhaps for that reason Cervantes finished it off so quickly, in a few pages. For there is something untoward, even unreal, in the fact that Don Alonso Quijano relinquishes his ‘madness’ and returns to reality when that reality around him has been so largely transformed into fiction. The grieving Sancho Panza (the reality man) reveals as much when he pleads with his master, on his deathbed, not to die, exhorting him to get up so that they can go into the countryside dressed as shepherds and act out, in real life, the pastoral fiction that is Don Quixote’s final fantasy (II, 74).

  This process of fictionalisation of reality reaches its climax with the appearance of the mysterious, unnamed Duke and Duchess who, from chapter 31 of the second part, accelerate and multiply the transformation of daily life into theatrical and fictional fantasies. Like so many other characters, the Duke and Duchess have read the first part of the novel, and when they come across Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are as bewitched by the novel as Don Quixote is by romances of chivalry. And then they arrange things in such a way that in their castle life becomes fiction, and everything in it reproduces the unreality that Don Quixote is living in. For many chapters, fiction takes over from life, turning it into fantasy, a dream become reality, literature lived as life itself. The Duke and Duchess do this for their own egotistical, even despotic reasons, so that they can amuse themselves at the expense of the madman and his squire; at least, that is what they think. What happens is that the game begins to take them over and absorb them to such an extent that, later on, when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza leave for Zaragoza, they do not accept this and send out their servants and soldiers to scour the vicinity until they find them and bring them back to the castle where they have staged the fabulous funeral ceremony and purported resurrection of Altisidora. In the world of the Duke and Duchess, Don Quixote is no longer an eccentric: he is quite at home because everything around him is a fiction, from the island of Barataria where Sancho Panza finally lives out his dream of becoming a governor, to the airborne flight on the back on the artificial horse, Clavileño, the air from large bellows creating the winds through which the great man of La Mancha gallops amid clouds of illusion.

  Like the Duke and Duchess, another powerful figure in the novel, Don Antonio Moreno, who offers Don Quixote lodging in Barcelona and entertains him, also puts on shows that make reality unreal. For example, he has in his house an enchanted bronze head that replies to questions, since it knows people’s pasts and their futures. The narrator explains that this is an ‘artifice’ because the so-called fortune teller is a hollow machine with enough room inside to fit a student, who answers the questions. Is this not living a fiction, turning life into a theatrical performance, just as Don Quixote does, although here done with malice, and not with his naïveté?

  During his stay in Barcelona, when his host Don Antonio Moreno is taking Don Quixote around the city (with his name in large letters on a sign stuck to his back), a Castilian comes up to the Ingenious Hidalgo and says: ‘You’re a madman…but you have the ability to turn everyone who has anything to do with you mad and stupid just like you’ (II, 62).14 Don Quixote’s madness – his hunger for unreality – is contagious, and he has given those around him his appetite for fiction.

  This explains the blossoming tales, the dense thicket of stories and novels that comprise Don Quixote de La Mancha. It is not just the evasive Cide Hamete Benengeli, the other narrator of the novel, who boasts that he is the mere transcriber and translator of the novel (although he is also, in fact, the editor, and takes notes and offers commentary), who reveals this passion for the fantasy life of literature, incorporating into the main story of Don Quixote and Sancho adventitious stories such as ‘The man who was recklessly curious’ and the tale of Cardenio and Dorotea. The characters also share this narrative propensity or vice which leads them, like the beautiful Morisca, or the Knight of the Green Coat, or Princess Micomicona, to tell true or invented stories, which create, through the course of the novel, a landscape of words and imagination that becomes superimposed over, and at time blots out completely, the other world, that natural landscape that seems so unreal, so bound up in commonplace forms and conventional rhetoric. Don Quixote de La Mancha is a novel about fiction in which the life of the imagination is everywhere, in the character’s actions, in the words they utter and in the very air that t
hey breathe.

  A Novel of Free Men

  Just as it is a novel about fiction, so Don Quixote is a song of freedom. We should pause a minute to reflect on that very famous statement that Don Quixote makes to Sancho Panza: ‘Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no treasures that the earth contains and the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, men can and should risk their lives and, in contrast, captivity is the worst evil that can befall them’ (II, 58).

  Behind this sentence, and the fictional character that utters it, we find the shadow of Miguel de Cervantes himself, who knew very well what he was talking about. The five years that he spent in captivity by the Moors in Algeria and the three times that he was imprisoned in Spain for debts and for being found guilty of discrepancies in tax accounts when he was a tax inspector in Andalucía for the Navy, must have intensified his desire for freedom and his horror at any restrictions on freedom. This background lends authenticity and power to Don Quixote’s statement and gives a particular libertarian bias to the story of the Ingenious Hidalgo.