| s-104
| To prove that he was not a self-obsessed ingrate, he began to question Auster about his writing. |
| s-105
| Auster was somewhat reticent about it, but at last he conceded that he was working on a book of essays. The current piece was about Don Quixote. |
| s-106
| One of my favourite books, said Quinn. |
| s-107
| Yes, mine too. |
| s-108
| There's nothing like it. |
| s-109
| Quinn asked him about the essay. |
| s-110
| I suppose you can call it speculative, since I'm not really out to prove anything. |
| s-111
| In fact, it's all done tounge-in-cheek. |
| s-112
| An imaginative reading, I guess you could say. |
| s-113
| What's the gist? |
| s-114
| It mostly has to do with the authorship of the book. Who wrote it, and how it was written. |
| s-115
| Is there any question? |
| s-116
| Of course not. But I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing. |
| s-117
| Ah. |
| s-118
| It's quite simple. |
| s-119
| Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. |
| s-120
| The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengali. |
| s-121
| Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. |
| s-122
| He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, |
| s-123
| and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. |
| s-124
| In fact, he can not even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself. |
| s-125
| And yet he goes on to say, Quinn added, that Cid Hamete Benengali's is the only true version of Don Quixote's story. |
| s-126
| All the other versions are frauds, written by impostors. |
| s-127
| He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world. |
| s-128
| Exactly. |
| s-129
| Because the book after all is an attack on the dangers of the make-believe. |
| s-130
| He couldn't very well offer a work of the imagination to do that, could he? |
| s-131
| He had to claim that it was real. |
| s-132
| Still, I've always suspected that Cervantes devoured those old romances. |
| s-133
| You can't hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. |
| s-134
| In some sense, Don Quixote was just a stand-in for himself. |
| s-135
| I agree with you. |
| s-136
| What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books? |
| s-137
| Precisely. |
| s-138
| In any case, since the book is supposed to be real, it follows that the story has to be written by an eyewitness to the events that take place in it. |
| s-139
| But Cid Hamete, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. |
| s-140
| Not once does he claim to be present at what happens. |
| s-141
| So, my question is this: who is Cid Hamete Benengali? |
| s-142
| Yes, I see what you're getting at. |
| s-143
| The theory I present in the essay is that he is actually a combination of four different people. |
| s-144
| Sancho Panza is of course the witness. |
| s-145
| There's no other candidate – since he is the only one who accompanies Don Quixote on all his adventures. |
| s-146
| But Sancho can neither read nor write. |
| s-147
| Therefore, he can not be the author. |
| s-148
| On the other hand, we know that Sancho has a great gift for language. |
| s-149
| In spite of his inane malapropisms, he can talk circles around everyone else in the book. |
| s-150
| It seems perfectly possible to me that he dictated the story to someone else – namely, to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote's good friends. |
| s-151
| They put the story into proper literary form – in Spanish – and then turned the manuscript over to Samson Carrasco, the bachelor from Salamanca, who proceeded to translate it into Arabic. |
| s-152
| Cervantes found the translation, had it rendered back into Spanish, and then published the book The Adventures of Don Quixote. |
| s-153
| But why would Sancho and the others go to all that trouble? |
| s-154
| To cure Don Quixote of his madness. |
| s-155
| They want to save their friend. |
| s-156
| Remember, at the beginning they burn his books of chivalry, but that has no effect. |
| s-157
| The Knight of the Sad Countenance does not give up his obsessions. |
| s-158
| Then, at one time or another, they all go out looking for him in various disguises – as a woman in distress, as the Knight of the Mirrors, as the Knight of the White Moon – in order to lure Don Quixote back home. |