1.
Other people can boast all they like about having read Don Quixote. I can say I studied with him.
Antonio Macías, which was our Quixote’s name, enrolled at the Central University Arts Department in October 1999. This I remember clearly because I myself had started there the previous year and because, though quite by chance, I had something to do with his decision to become a student.
Matilde’s call came in December 1998, days after Hugo Chávez became president.
“It’s me, from the Cordon, do you remember? Isabel’s friend.”
“Of course, Matilde.”
I had met her at the Cordon Bleu a couple of Fridays before. I was eighteen and she was twenty-three. She was about to graduate with a degree in communication science, but her real passion was photography. She’d managed to convince her professors to let her do a thesis that would consist, as she put it, of “a photographic interpretation of the theme of friendship in literature.”
“So far, I’ve got Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, of course . . . and that’s about all!” She had burst out laughing.
I had started giving her a rundown of books and writers that might work.
“Ah, amazing,” she had said. “Let me take your number so I can get you to tell me this all again, because I haven’t got anywhere to write it down now.”
When we met again, she asked if I was interested in helping her.
“That would make you my literary and photographic assistant.”
“Sure, Matilde.”
“Great. I picked some of the books from the list you gave me. I’ve already got people to play Horacio, Talita and Traveler, Dorian Gray and Lord Henry, Achilles and Patroclus, and Bouvard and Pécuchet. And I’ve got Sancho Panza too—I’m using Mr. Segovia, my dad’s driver. He’s seriously fat. But I still haven’t got anyone for Don Quixote.”
She called me again a month or so later. In a good mood—she’d found her man.
“He’s perfect. You’ve got to see him. The shoot’s this Saturday. Can you make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s going to be at a friend’s hacienda. It’ll be fun. Go on.”
That Saturday, in her car, Matilde told me she’d already done the photos for Hopscotch, the Iliad, and Bouvard and Pécuchet.
“I thought I was going to be helping you,” I said.
“I didn’t want to take advantage,” she said, reaching up and stroking my cheek. “Are you annoyed?”
We soon stopped outside a parking lot on Plaza La Castellana.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Looking for Don Quixote.”
A man came out of the parking lot; he was about fifty, tall and thin, and had blue eyes. His hair was fair, a gingery blonde with some streaks of white. He had a gaunt but noble-looking face. When he took a seat in the back, I got a clearer view of his moustache and goatee. It was like he had Gustave Doré for a barber.
“He’s perfect,” I said.
“I told you,” said Matilde.
Quixote looked pleased.
“How’s it going?” he smiled. “Antonio Macías.”
“Felipe,” I murmured.
“And where’s my Sancho Panza?” he asked.
“He’s coming in my dad’s station wagon. We’re meeting there.”
The shoot went well. Antonio and Mr. Segovia got into character.
“Where did you get him?” I asked Matilde, during a coffee break.
“You saw where I got him.”
“Where?”
“The parking lot. Antonio works there as a valet.”
“And has he read Don Quixote?”
“As if. But everyone knows Don Quixote. I offered him the job the day I saw him, and he said yes. I only told him how he needed to do his facial hair.”
It was then that I remembered I hadn’t read Cervantes either.
“Mr. Segovia, I need you to look lovingly at Don Quixote now,” ordered Matilde when we went back to work.
And Mr. Segovia gave a look of such tenderness that you’d have understood if the gentleman with a mixing bowl on his head had felt invincible. For my part, I looked lovingly too, at Matilde, and all I felt was miserable.
It was a while before I saw her again, when her thesis defense came around. Her parents organized a party at their house, and Isabel asked me to go with her.
Matilde greeted me warmly, like the other times. I was short with her, as though I expected some special treatment.
After a few moments, another guy showed up, and their greeting involved a kiss on the lips.
“That’s her boyfriend,” said Isabel. “He’s a writer. Do you know him?”
“Yeah. I read something of his once,” I lied. “Very second-rate.”
I finished my drink and decided to get out of there. Isabel took me by the hand and asked me not to go.
I called a taxi and went out to the front porch to wait. After a few minutes, I heard the front door open, and Matilde came out.
“Felipe? What are you doing out here? Leaving already?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, but I have to go.”
The taxi pulled up just then, honking a couple of times.
“So, see you later. Congrats.”
I went to leave, but Matilde pulled me back. She looked me in the eye, and then she understood. Or perhaps she always had. She kept my face in her hands, brought her lips to mine, and gave me a brief, moist kiss.
“Thank you,” she said.
I got in the taxi feeling like a beaten dog.
2.
In 1999, Chávez started talking about “revolution.” And it was enough for that little word to start circulating among people, on radio, television and in the written press, for time itself to start spinning at a faster pace.
October of that year marked the start of my third semester. I was a member of student government and was given the job of coordinating the poetry recital that took place every year as part of the freshmen class welcome.
I had so much on my mind that day that I didn’t even notice Antonio Macías until I saw his willowy frame spring up from among those seated on the ground, before going forward and sitting at the desk on the stage to read.
He read a magnificent poem. It was about friendship and the night. Friendship as a fire or a shield or refuge in the dead of night; I can’t remember exactly, but the thundering cadence of his voice has very much stayed with me.
He didn’t seem happy to see me. In fact, he gave the impression, initially at least, that he didn’t even remember me. That night, after the recital, we all went for drinks at Ling-Nam. I noticed he wasn’t really in the conversation and tried to include him by telling the anecdote of the photo shoot. What a cool story, my friends said. Antonio made a face and got up from the table. I waited a couple of minutes and then went to look for him. I found him out on the street, smoking a cigarette.
“Hey. Have I annoyed you?”
“For more than three centuries, Don Quixote was a masterpiece. Now it’s nothing more than an opportunity for jingoistic toasts, hubristic spoutings, and obscene coffee table editions. And photographic adaptations.”
“So why did you agree to get involved?”
“Same reason as you. And the fat guy that day, and the girl.”
“Matilde.”
“Exactly. Matilde. As I say, the same reason as the rest of you. I hadn’t read Don Quixote either.”
“Matilde had. That much I’m sure of.”
“She read it with one eye closed.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“There’s a kind of glory in not knowing—the worst kind, possibly.”
He dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out under his shoe, and walked away.
I kept tabs on Antonio Macías’ progress through the university. That was how I found out that he’d read Don Quixote at age fifty and been left traumatized. He’d never read a book in his life before, and then had the good luck, or utter misfortune, to start with the greatest of all time. After that, he resolved not to waste another minute. He somehow managed to get a place at university, I don’t know by what route. Then, in seminar rooms and lecture theaters, he took it upon himself to point out the faults in everybody’s arguments, teachers and students alike, earning a reputation as a crackpot and a pedant. The whole point of the “immortal work of the one-handed veteran of Lepanto” was to “set the one-eyed straight.” And the one-eyed, for Antonio, were those who didn’t know how to read, or those who were bad readers. That was the real importance of Don Quixote.
I, in the two or three years following that poetry recital, was busy with my own life. Not long after the party at Matilde’s, I’d started dating Isabel, and we were together, on and off, for the rest of my time at university. Every few months we’d split up and get back together, until April 2002 came around and everything really and truly started coming apart at the seams.
The Puente Llaguno massacre and Pedro Carmona’s coup meant no more sitting on the fence. Isabel declared herself for the revolutionaries. I, for the opposition.
And yet, we stayed together a little while longer.
In December of that year the general strike was declared. Around that time, I took part in a student march. We wanted to demonstrate in Plaza Venezuela. The Círculos Bolivarianos were waiting for us when we got there, and the welcome included tear gas, gunshots, and hurled rocks. I saw Isabel, Mauricio, and Daniel among the students standing with the Círculos. Mauricio and Daniel were holding rocks. Isabel had her hood up. I saw her, she saw me. And so, with no need for any more words, the relationship was over.
To avoid arguments with her, I decided to quit my role in student government, but I carried on as the College Council liaison. The Council’s fights and debates at the time don’t interest me here. I’d rather wind the tape forward to Wednesday, November 19, 2003, when the undergraduate Antonio Macías came and requested the floor in a Council meeting.
I know the date because I still have the minutes from that meeting, as well as the letter Antonio gave to all members present that day.
He had disappeared for a while before that. When he showed up at the university again he had a fairly eye-catching prosthesis where one of his hands had been; I never found out what happened. He seemed even thinner than before, and slightly unwashed. After a few weeks people started seeing him going round with a street dog that followed him everywhere. A bitch. Sooty, she was called. She became quite the celebrity in the Arts Department. Some of the faculty even let Antonio bring her into seminars, since not only was Sooty impeccably behaved, but she gave her full attention to whoever was teaching, as attested to by various witnesses.
A friend of mine told me that Antonio had saved Sooty from the clutches of the head of campus security, who had started leaving poison out for the street dogs.
And, as if the mutilated hand and the “greyhound for racing” weren’t enough—there was no skinny nag, after all—Antonio also finally found his Sancho Panza. His name was Vitelio García. He was studying philosophy. Short, chubby, and with his face scarred by an awful case of acne he must have suffered as a teenager.
Like a lot of the other crazies you’d find milling around campus, Vitelio aspired, above all else in life, to a degree from CU. He was known for the scenes he’d cause in the halls of the Art and Philosophy Departments. People even said he was a government spook. That he was an undercover Círculo Bolivariano agent. Antonio was warned by more than one of his acquaintances, when they started seeing the two of them together, to be careful.
“All Vitelio wants is to learn,” he said, “and it’s my responsibility to educate him.”
Antonio recommended writers to him, lent him books, and in him found an audience for the lengthy public lectures he gave on the benches outside the department entrance.
And that was how things stood when Antonio went back to Cumaná, his native city, for an operation on his hand. He wasn’t gone long, but returned only to learn that Vitelio had plagiarized some of his writings, submitting them, with barely any alterations, for a number of philosophy electives he was taking. Antonio was so deeply wounded, he felt so betrayed, that he went straight to the dean’s office to lodge a complaint.
And then something unusual happened that was, at the same time, par for the course in the Venezuela of that time: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza declared themselves mortal enemies.
Vitelio responded to Antonio’s accusations by waging a campaign, the cruelest ever seen in the lecture theaters and halls of CU, to discredit him. It was a blow from which Antonio never recovered. His request to speak in the Council meeting, and the letter he gave us, were his final attempts to respond to the affront.
That letter, almost in its entirety, is below. I am not including the appendices.
Honorable professors,
I am addressing you today in order to express the deep shock that has been caused me by the immoral aspersions that have been cast upon my whole life, as a consequence of a series of obscene accusations against my person by Vitelio García, also an undergraduate at this institution, whose express aim—as our university community is aware—has been to subject me to an onslaught of public ridicule (see Appendix i.).
Utterly unspeakable accusations of indescribable depravities. All the putrefaction that a rancid sewer can contain has been poured upon the walls, the washrooms, and the uprights of the sports fields of this house of learning (see Appendix ii.).
This reprobate begins by fabricating a supposed account of my unemployment and indigence that is quite untrue, going on to assert a supposed emolument, which I also refute, given that it was by mutual agreement that I sought to expand his understanding of Latin expressions and of ballads, and that he was to repay my invaluable contribution to the enlargement of his spirit by way of a modest stipend. By undertaking this job, and others, I have avoided both hunger and the pox in my time as a student, which is the most anyone can ask for; were illness and hunger not so much part of the life of study, there would be no other pleasure nor pastime to compare; for it is the marriage of virtuousness and enjoyment. The aforementioned García has made it his quest to exile me from this glory, this tranquility. He is a person who is said to boast of having been taught at the Patrice Lumumba University in the former USSR, and everybody knows that is a place where the students are given training in complots, sabotage, and criminality (see Appendix iii.).
As for his principal accusation, García tars with depravity the purest of human sentiments, the one represented most eminently by the humble figure of the dog: friendship. Literature, religion, and the office of those of us in the Arts Department, have provided numerous examples of the noble bond that often exists between a man and his dog.
Argos is without a doubt the first honorable ancestor of these animals; without him, Odysseus’ return would have been for nothing. Can you, honorable members, imagine what would have become of that great Greek hero if, instead of Argos, a cat had been there to receive him? A cat which, there can be little doubt, would not have awaited its master’s return, but would have been away in the banqueting hall filling its belly on scraps at the feet of Penelope’s suitors.
Nor should the poet Cruz María Salmerón Acosta go unmentioned; one of his most beautiful poems was written for the dog who cared for him during the scorching siege of leprosy. The same goes for Quincas Borba, the Machado de Assis character, who took the form of a dog in order to faithfully watch over Rubião in the nouveau-riche madness he inherited. Nor can we forget the sleepless nights shared by Flush, a lovely cocker spaniel, and Elisabeth Barrett, depicted with such veraciousness by Virginia Woolf. Or the unforgettable, hard-put-upon Karenin in Kundera’s great novel. And so, I ask both myself and this honorable Council, among these illustrious anthropo-canine references—whose abundance I have but scratched the surface of—can there be any inference or suspicion of zoophilia? No, there cannot! And a thousand times, no!
If the literary arts, my own and those of the immortal genii of literature, are insufficient as argument, let us turn to the irrevocable verdict of biology. Because, although my soul shrinks in disgust at the horrendous vulgarity which could only find home in the rancid dungeon of that contemptible person’s head, I must point out that the small creature that has been the object of his attacks was sterilized as a pup, making doubly impossible the act imputed to me.
The letter concluded with mention of the legal actions our Quixote was going to take against his Sancho Panza and the appendices backing up everything he’d said while also demonstrating Vitelio García’s lies.
3.
I completed my undergraduate degree in January 2004, and a few months later I embarked on an MA in Comparative Literature. It was the closest match CU offered to my interest in classical Western literature. I met Daniela. When we completed our respective MA’s three years later, we got married and moved to Spain.
In Madrid, she did an MA in Publishing, and managed to get a job as an editor at a cultural magazine. I did an MA and two further diplomas in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age. All with the same emotion and secret pangs suffered by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me if You Can: despite my years of study, I still hadn’t read Don Quixote.
My marriage to Daniela lasted six years. As is so often the way, the desire for children was the clincher. She stayed on in Madrid and I went back to Caracas.
I returned midway through 2012, with the intrigue over the state of Chávez’s health at its most febrile.
It was a comforting humiliation to be living under my parents’ roof again. I decided to accept the offer of an adjunct professorship in the CU Arts Department. When they told me what I was going to be teaching—Introduction to Spanish Literature of the Golden Age—I saw that I couldn’t avoid it any longer. It was then, at the age of thirty-two, that I took on Don Quixote.
It’s pointless trying to get across how stunning I found it. Let’s just say that I was strongly reminded of Antonio Macías and that I then understood the way he’d reacted to the photoshoot, along with everything that, in his view, people such as Matilde and I represented. Being reminded of Matilde made the realization even greater: underlying all my relationships and heartbreaks to date, in between the lines of my dreams and my desires, between all that I had read and my attempts to write something that merited the effort, was Matilde. And she always had been.
That kiss, fifteen years on, still laid moist on my lips.
My reaction was Cervantine. If the Ingenious Gentleman’s exploits were all on account of Dulcinea del Toboso, and he’d never laid eyes on her, what would I not do for Matilde, given that I had seen her, had dealings with her, shared a kiss with her?
I launched myself against the world. Which, in the twenty-first century, meant setting up a Facebook account. She didn’t have any restrictions on her profile, meaning I was able to find out all about her life. Her status and her photos provided less protection than a shambolic squire, presenting the undeniable truth: Matilde had married the writer, they’d had three children together, she had made it as a photographer, and they were living a very happy life in Sorrento, on Italy’s Mediterranean coast.
The debacle of Chávez’s final chapter, after the great leader’s death, prevented me from dwelling on my situation. I was still living in my parents’ house and there was little prospect of me standing on my own two feet any time soon. I wasn’t too worried, given the urgent needs of the tribe at large. My sister, who, along with her husband, also lived at home, had just had her first child and we were all busy standing in the never-ending lines at the superstores for diapers. And after that, the line for the toilet paper, shampoo, or deodorant. And then the one for the chicken, mincemeat, or flour.
I know it’s wrong of me to say so (we’ve only just arrived in Barcelona, Consuelo begged me not to tell her parents), but I felt happy standing in those lines. I’d take my Aguilar edition of Cervantes’s Complete Works and spend those hours making my way through Don Quixote, La Galatea, and “The Dialogue of the Dogs.”
Horrors occasionally interrupted this routine. Hearing about students found tortured and shot in the back of the head was more upsetting than having to wait in line for foodstuffs and read books. Sometimes it was a specific manifestation of life’s abhorrent side that prompted me to think I’d been the stupid one in our group, and not Isabel, Daniel, or Mauricio. For example, the time I helped my fellow professor María del Pilar Puig on an annotated edition of Don Quixote for one of the government’s publishing houses. It was she who showed me the contract, signed by the recently appointed director of that publishing house: Vitelio García.
The book had the support of the Spanish embassy in Venezuela. I met Consuelo at one of the meetings. When I saw her, I felt something I hadn’t felt for years and years. A few weeks later, I was surprised to get a call from her. Consuelo wanted me to be one of the contributors to a book she was putting together.
“It’s the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the second part of Don Quixote next year. We’re looking for texts that recount people’s experiences of reading the novel. We don’t want anything academic. We’re interested in something more anecdotal and personal.”
I drafted something and sent it to her. She came back with an unforgettable rejection:
“It’s too anecdotal and personal,” she said.
I was about to come out with some retort, but instead I said:
“Does that mean you’ll go for a drink with me?”
We met up at El León, opposite Plaza La Castellana. I left the car in a parking lot nearby.
Nothing happened that night. Consuelo insisted on going home on her own, by foot; she lived at one end of Palos Grandes. We said goodbye and I made my way to the parking lot.
I hadn’t been to Plaza La Castellana for a long time. It had been a dangerous, untended sort of place for a number of years, the public gardens bare, the trash cans overflowing, and street kids prowling around in the darkness like huge, overgrown rats, or cats.
On a bench, faintly illuminated by one of the few lampposts that still worked, I saw him. In spite of the ginger-white beard, and the newspapers he’d half covered himself in, I recognized him. I also recognized the parking lot where I’d left my car.
I went over to him. Antonio was lying down on the bench, trying to balance a backpack on himself for a duvet. Hearing me approach, he stopped and looked at me, clasping his elbows, like someone in a hospital bed at the arrival of an unexpected visitor.
He didn’t recognize me. I tried to say who it was, but a growl cut me off. A large black dog appeared from underneath the bench. At least, it looked large and black in the darkness. I turned and carried on walking, but I did hear the thunderous voice behind me.
“Enough, Sooty, enough. Come on, silly pup, let’s get some sleep.”
Then I saw him pick the dog up and clasp her to him on the bench.
Consuelo and I met up again the next day. We went back to hers, bared our wounds, licked one another’s wounds. She saw me to the door in the morning and kissed me goodbye.
“Your lips,” Consuelo said. “They’re the most delicious in the world.”
And I felt that old drop of moisture evaporate, to be replaced by something new, something different.