Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“That we shouldn’t go on dumb dating shows?” proposed Sancho, unhelpfully.

“Incorrect,” Quichotte admonished him, not unkindly, for Sancho was only recently arrived in the world, and so it was understandable that he would get things wrong when he sought to judge its ways. “Listen and learn, my boy. Prolonged viewing of this seminal program, which originally ran on daytime television in black-and-white but soon burst into full color on prime time, drives home some hard truths to the attentive viewer. Firstly, that when a woman possessed of a high degree of desirability is the goal, you will have competitors. The field will not be open to you; you will have to chop down your adversaries ruthlessly in order to achieve your end.”

“That sounds good,” Sancho said. “Chopping people down. Who are our targets, and how and when do we waste them?”

“Secondly,” continued Quichotte, ignoring his miracle child’s pseudo-adolescent arousal by the suggestion of violence, “she will question you, and you had better have the noblest answers to her questions, for she will question others as well. Love is an audition, Sancho. He who knows best how to present himself to the beloved gets the part.”

“How do you think you’re going to do that,” the youth disrespectfully rejoined, “a broken-down old nag like you?”

“Be a little less obnoxious to your only parent,” Quichotte reproved him. “I brought you into existence by the power of my wishing and the kindness of the stars, and if I grow weary of you, I can make you vanish as well.”

“Too late for that,” said Sancho. “Once you’re born, you’re born, that’s all there is to it; by whatever means you arrive, you’ve arrived. After that you’re the boss of yourself, and responsible only to yourself. Responsibility for your own actions: that’s the basis of all morality, isn’t it? The do-gooder gets the credit for the good deed? The murderer is guilty of the crime?”

“We aren’t discussing morality,” said Quichotte. “We are discussing love.”

Sancho, who had been slumped down in the passenger seat of the car, filled with the indifference of his apparent years, abruptly sat up and clapped his hands. “Okay then,” he cried, “let’s play. I’ll be the girl hidden on one side of the wall, and you’ll be the contestant on the other side, Contestant One. Let’s see how you do with my questions.”

“What about the other contestants?” Quichotte asked.

“Don’t worry,” Sancho replied. “I’ll be them as well.”

LET US IMAGINE THEM leaving the Canyon of the Ancients, after Quichotte has satisfactorily invoked his mighty questing forerunners and also, to Sancho’s intense embarrassment, demonstrated his personal version of the Sun Dance, a slow-motion, lurching, gimpy, unstable thing, with arms outstretched and awkwardly tapping feet, oddly innocent and childlike, as if Laurel without Hardy had gone way out west. This terpsichorean act, Quichotte explains, was also a kind of questing, in this case for spiritual power. “Did you get it, then? The power?” Sancho asked when the dance was over, leaving Quichotte panting and wheezing with sweat staining his shirt, and refusing to reply.

And now they are in the vehicle, heading east from Cortez (pop. 8,482) on 160, aiming at Chimney Rock. If we want we could imagine a Penske truck heading the other way, the driver looking down at the Chevy Cruze, seeing the gent in there, formally dressed, suit and tie and hat, what’s an old coot like that doing out here looking that way, talking to himself. Maybe he’s lost and on speakerphone trying to find his way. Probably the Penske driver doesn’t even think about it that much, just passes by and whoosh, he’s gone. But on the other hand maybe he thinks, For a minute there I thought I saw someone else in the car, but then no, there was only the dressed-up gent driving alone. Must’ve been some kind of reflection. A trick of the light. Forget it.

“QUESTION ONE,” SANCHO SAID. “And I’m the lady, remember. I can’t see you, you can’t see me. There’s a wall.”

“Pyramus and Thisbe,” Quichotte said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Please don’t interrupt anymore,” Sancho said with a shrug, and then raised his voice to sound feminine. “Here’s question one. I’m a woman who likes my men tall, dark, and handsome, with strong jaws and a dominant attitude. How do I know you’re my kind of guy? Contestant Three?”

Now he deepened his voice and answered himself, “Just wait until I get you in my arms, baby. You won’t be disappointed.”

And then again as the lady: “How about you, Contestant One?”

“By the height of my emotion toward you will you know me,” Quichotte cried out in high rhetorical fashion, “and by the darkness in which I dream of you, and by the handsomeness of the deeds by which I will prove myself, for handsome is as handsome does. And by the determined set of my jaw as I bend the arc of my life toward you, and by the dominant idea which possesses me, which is, that you must be mine.”

Sancho let out a low whistle. “Wow, Dad,” he said. “I guess I underestimated you.” It was the first time he had used the word “dad” and meant it.

Quichotte nodded gravely. “A good knowledge of the classics,” he advised his son, “is the sign of an educated man.”

THEY LIVE ECONOMICALLY. Quichotte’s small pension pays for gas and food and cheap accommodation but not much else. It is, of course, inexpensive to feed and house Sancho, as he is, at least at this point, still non-corporeal, monochrome, and visible only to Quichotte. Let us imagine them in Colorado, sitting together outside a tent at the Lake Capote Recreation Area, near Chimney Rock. (There has always been a tent in the trunk of Quichotte’s car. Maybe we should have mentioned that. It has been there all the time. Sorry.) Here’s what’s happening: Sancho, not a patient lad, is fraying a little at the edges.

“WE’RE OUT HERE IN the middle of nowhere,” Sancho said. “There’s nothing to do and no reason to be doing it. This woman you never stop talking about, she’s over a thousand miles away and we’re out here looking at a rock. There isn’t even a TV to watch her show. What exactly are we here for, ‘Dad’?” Dad again. This time he definitely didn’t mean it.

“We’re waiting for a sign,” Quichotte replied.

“There’s signs all over.” Sancho was not a stranger to sarcasm. “That one says Showers and that one says Slow. And there’s one back there saying Bait Shop. Also Self-Permitting Station, that’s a good one. It’s right over there. You can just permit yourself to do whatever you want. Problem solved. Can we go now?”

“I danced the Sun Dance,” Quichotte said. “So the sign will surely come.”

PAUSE.

“AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette. Twenty-five contestants! Twenty-six in season twelve! Thirty in season five, thirty-one in season thirteen! The searcher for love must understand immediately, at the outset of his search, that the quantity of love available is far too small to satisfy the number of searchers. We may further intuit, following on from this first proposition, a second; namely, a quantity theory of love. If the amount of love in the universe is finite and unchanging, then it follows that as one searcher finds the love he seeks, another must lose his love; and that when one love dies here— and only when a love dies!—it becomes possible for another love to be born there . We may regard this as a variant form of the butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and we feel the breeze on our cheek here at Lake Capote.”