A Problem

Let us imagine that a parchment written in Arabic is discovered in Toledo and that the experts on ancient script declare the hand to be that of a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli, the man on whom Cervantes based Don Quixote. In the text, we read that the hero - who, as everyone knows, travelled the length and breadth of Spain armed with sword and lance, challenging anyone on any grounds whatsoever - finds, after one of his many battles, that he has killed someone. The fragment ends here; the problem is to guess, or conjecture, how Don Quixote reacts.

As I see it, there are three possible answers. The first is somewhat negative; nothing special takes place, since in Don Quixote's deluded world death is as common as magic, and to have killed a man should not disturb someone who battles, or believes he battles, with monsters and wizards. The second is touching. Don Quixote never forgot that he was a figment of the imagination of Alonso Quijano, a reader of fabulous tales; to see death, to understand that a dream has brought him Cain's guilt, wakens him perhaps for ever from his willing madness. The third answer is perhaps the most likely. With a man dead, Don Quixote cannot bring himself to admit that his appalling deed is an act of madness; the reality of the effect makes him ascribe an equal reality to the cause, and Don Quixote will never emerge from his madness.

There is yet another conjecture, one alien to Spain and even to the Western world, which requires a more ancient, complex, and languorous setting. Don Quixote - who is no longer Don Quixote but a king out of one of India's Sanskrit epics - facing his enemy's corpse, intuits that to kill and to procreate are divine or magical acts that clearly transcend the human condition. He knows that the dead man is an illusion, as are the bloodstained sword he hefts and he himself and his whole past life and the prodigious gods and the universe.

[1957]