The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  I know what our writers do nowadays. How does this pretty-good CIA story end?

  This not-bad CIA story ends with the key case officer’s rationalizing his exposure of the coup, all of whose participants are tortured and shot, by saying to Franklin Key Talbott Okay, so we gave the bloody bastard this one. But we can do him in anytime we want to. To which Franklin Key Talbott replies You’re never going to want to.

  Will you come home to me now, honey?

  That isn’t where you are. Please come hither.

  No. What did Chip think of that pretty-good CIA story?

  I suspect it gave him a little handle on the Problem of Evil. This morning he’s helping Frank Talbott install a beeper on the delivery gate of Natural Recycling Research.

  Dear God.

  Perfectly safe and ninety-eight percent moral. Frank’s out to improve the quality of his information on the minidump industry. What are you doing this morning?

  I’m having babies without my husband’s assistance and support. You?

  I told you. I’m making up

  PART ONE OF A POSSIBLE THREE-PART DON QUIXOTE STORY.

  It’s called quote Rocinante Two unquote.

  The whole three-part story is called that?

  No. If you need me, I’ll be aboard Story.

  That’s right.

  Huckleberry Findley on the Honga River; Odysseus Dmitrikakis on the Little Choptank; Captain Donald Quicksoat outside Fawcett’s Marine Supply store in Annapolis Harbor—musing upon their splendid originals, Peter Sagamore remarks to Story’s log (not for the first time) that whereas the first of them lights out for the territory and the second escapes from time, noble Don Quixote, armored in his delusions, tilts with the real world around him. Though he most often ends up on his back, that armor remains unshaken even when the man himself is knocked breathless, and in time (i.e., in Part Two) it is reality that yields; that cooperates in the sustaining of his fiction. His own quixotic aspiration, P.S. notes not for the first time, has been to leave behind him some image as transcendent as his favorite four: Odysseus striving homeward, Scheherazade ayarning, D.Q. astride Rocinante and discoursing with Sancho Panza, Huck Finn rafting down the Big Muddy. His fortieth year near run, his narrative career half done, P. Sagamore finds himself neither famous nor unknown, unsure of his accomplishment but absolutely certain that nothing of his invention approaches that ideal. Dwarfed septuply into silence (he writes), I am a Quixote windmilled flat. Unhorsed early and sent home. Coomb’d. Crumpt.

  Let Don Quixote rest in peace, Cervantes warns in his last chapter: Do not presume to resurrect or disinter him. But it is fact, not fiction, that Story overtook a few days back off the Thomas Point Light: Rocinante IV, her curious skipper and winking bow-eyes and provocative hailport, all as real as that Phaeacian 35 in Madison Bay. By what chart, P asks his logbook, does one sail from the Cave of Montesinos in central Spain to Carla’s Cavern in Fells Point?

  For there, surely, is where Capn Don’s voyage begins: in that cave wherefrom the aging knight so laments his having been withdrawn; which in another sense he never leaves. “God forgive you, friends,” he cries to Sancho and Sancho’s cousin when he awakes; “you have snatched me from the most delightful vision that any human being has ever beheld!” Had they not hauled him up and waked him, Peter notes, he might have completed his adventures underground: some consummation, surely, involving capricious Dulcinea, to whom he has loaned the last of his money. His retrieval leaves that debt outstanding; it also leaves his enchanted self, the one in the vision he now recounts, back down there in the crystal palace of Montesinos.

  Yes. The Don Quixote who ascends from the cavern after “three days” by his own reckoning (half an hour by Sancho’s) and goes on to complete Cervantes’s story, including the story of his interrupted sojourn in the cave—that Quixote is not the same who went down on a hundred-fathom line to that ledge, opening onto that golden meadow and transparent palace. While the real Don Quixote dreams on, bound by enchantment like Dulcinea and all that subterranean company, his reemergent self is “wakened,” does this and that, suffers final disenchantment, dies a proper Spanish death at the novel’s end—and therewith sets free his still-enchanted self to commence its voyage.

  Voyage?

  From a restless sleep like Durandarte’s, the knight awakes and stirs. His half-century-old joints complain. God be praised! white-headed Montesinos cries: One encantado in the palace is enough.

  How long has he slumbered? There is neither clock nor calendar where he is, yet time does not stand still. His nails and beard are longer; Montesinos reckons that the four reales his visitor bestowed upon Dulcinea through her serving-maid, if loaned out at five-percent simple interest per annum, would by now have earned half again the principal amount. But he has seen no sign of those frisky ladies since the loan was made; nor does he expect to, until they need to borrow more.

  There is no more, says Don Quixote, carefully stretching his arms and legs. If there were, you may be certain I’d never lend it to Dulcinea del Toboso.

  Montesinos once again praises God and declares this to be the first evidence he has seen that the enchanted can actually learn from experience, instead of merely aging. But Don Quixote goes on to make clear that his lady can no more borrow his money than she can borrow his heart: Both are hers outright, in fee simple.

  At the word “heart,” the knight Durandarte rolls over and groans. In the house of the hanged man, Montesinos warns Don Quixote, don’t mention rope. The battlefield at Roncesvalles, where my cousin fell, was a noisy and fearful place, and I was a young soldier in those days, not a sage. How was I to know, when he bid me fetch his dying heart to the Lady Belerma, that he was speaking in figures?

  This talk of hearts (and ropes) reminds Don Quixote not only that the Cave of Montesinos is in the heart of La Mancha, but that he himself is in the heart of Part Two of his own history, as he knows from having read Part One several chapters back; also that Sancho and his cousin and faithful Rocinante must be waiting for him at the mouth of the cave; at the bitter end of that coil of rope. He therefore bids good-bye to Montesinos and his odd household, leaves the crystal palace, and sets forth across the golden meadow, looking for the place where he first woke upon being lowered to the cave ledge. He wishes too late that he had marked the spot, taken bearings on the palace, or at least looked back from time to time as he first crossed the meadow. Nothing he sees now looks familiar: The erstwhile-golden meadow is an ordinary field of gorse; the palace is already more translucent than transparent; presently it is opaque.

  Where by his best guess ought to be a hundred-fathom line hanging from the sky, he finds instead a small winding creek, which he does not recall having seen before: the headwaters, he supposes, of the Guadiana River. He follows its meanders downstream for a kilometer; it widens from the size of a drainage ditch to that of a modest canal. No sign of the rope. Is he lost, he wonders? Or have Sancho and company long since hauled up their empty line like luckless fishermen, presumed him dead, and gone their ways? He is tempted to despair—but then, under a black willow tree around the next bend of the creek, he sees a battered, flat-bottomed skiff with its stern in the water and its stem nosed into a mud flat. It was once gaily painted in the style of Portuguese fishing boats, but the paint is chipped and flaked and faded except for the great eyes staring from the bow. Even before he makes out the name Rocinante II behind those eyes, he assumes the vessel to be there for his use. The absence of anchor, oars, mast, or sail confirms his assumption.

  Picking up a dry stick from the creek bank to steady himself on the slippery flat, he unhesitatingly steps aboard and is astonished to find, on the stern-seat, two one-real coins: the only sign of human presence besides the aged skiff itself, whose frayed painter is coiled idly in the bow. For a moment he wonders whether they are, after all, enchanted interest on what he never meant to be a loan, or Dulcinea’s shy repayment of half the principal. Then Montesino’s word
s come back to him—that not even the enchanted are free from want—and he joyfully pockets the coins. He has not a centavo on his person; surely the two reales, like the skiff, are a sign and token from the Enchanter himself: not wicked Merlin, but (as he has already remarked aboveground to Sancho Panza) the all-seeing Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, author of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. The Moor has published Part One; Quixote himself, like all of Europe, has read it. He will now be in midst of setting down Part Two, whereof the knight’s every present action is, as it were, a sentence.

  Don Quixote strokes his beard. Don Quixote steadies himself with his stick. Don Quixote seats himself in the skiff’s stern and waits to see what Don Quixote will do next. His aftward movement lifts the bow from the mud flat, and off he drifts in Rocinante II: now stern-first, now bow-first, now beamwise, but always downstream. So be it, he says contentedly to himself: Whither the current of the story fetches me, thither shall I go in this enchanted boat, with these enchanted two reales. A further happy thought occurs to him: He gave Dulcinea’s serving-maid four reales because, though she had asked for six, four was all he possessed. Now he has the other two.

  Author of my adventures! he cries: ¡Muchas gracias! not only for providing me with this splendid vessel and these twin coins, but for plotting my course through this episode! He stands unsteadily, the better to con the creekside for Dulcinea, and is pitched to his knees in the bilges when the skiff bumps a rock in the shallow stream. There he prudently remains, though his hose and doublet are soaked through, for the skiff is far from watertight. Your knight-errant, however powerful and benevolent his Enchanter, is more at ease on horseback than afloat. Even in the Cave of Montesinos, gravity is gravity; best to keep the center of it low.

  But his stomach soon grows uneasy from the skiffs random spinning. Much as he trusts his author to navigate Rocinante II expeditiously to his next encounter, he discovers that the course thereto can be more comfortably negotiated with some assistance from himself. First he experiments with using the frayed painter as a halter, and learns that what steered the first Rocinante well enough is of no use whatever on the second. Further trial and error reveal, however, that dragging his walking-stick astern tends to keep the skiffs bow aimed downcurrent and to prevent its spinning in the eddies. He even contrives narrowly to avoid the next rock in his path by poking to starboard a bit with that same stick; the rock after that he dodges rather more adroitly.

  After a few kilometers, he has the hang of it. Between maneuvers he bails the bilgewater with his barber-basin helmet. In the more placid stretches, he is able to enjoy the passing scenery and the bright sunshine—if that is the word for a clean light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, like the glow of lucid prose. Though his kneecaps in the leaky bilge complain, so exhilarating does he find adventuring by sea that he is not at all disappointed when by “sunset” he has seen neither Dulcinea nor any other human being, only the odd egret stalking minnows and the splash of startled fish. The creek has widened into a proper río, presumably the Guadiana. Ahead, the scrubby plain through which he has been winding gives way to low hills pleasingly greened by stands of almond, olive, oak. Without doubt he could put his life in his author’s hands and float securely through the night. All the same, he dexterously steers Rocinante II ashore, makes fast her “halter” to the nearest tree-root sticking from the nearest bank, and beds down high and dry near that same tree, a wild olive. How can there be stars, he wonders, in a cave? Yet the sky is spangled from horizon to horizon, as if instead of mid-Spain he were in midocean. The gentle motion of the skiff, which he can still feel in all his body, reinforces that illusion: an enchantment within an enchantment. Somewhere in Part One of Don Quixote, he remarked to Sancho Panza that the road is better than the inn. Can it be, he wonders now, that the river is better than the road? He falls asleep in pleased anticipation, not of overtaking Dulcinea del Toboso, but of voyaging all day tomorrow down the Guadiana.

  Guilty Peter leaves off making narrative sentences. He has broken his pledge to us both, and in imaging Don Quixote he has forgotten Katherine Sherritt and Either/Or; also Chip, the Talbotts, minidumps, the Doomsday Factor. Stirred by the wake of a passing powerboat, Story tugs lightly at its lines; the Wye chortles along its hull. Quixote’s dream, were our man to continue writing, would be of adventuring on in Rocinante II, no longer alone but with Sancho Panza, discoursing toward Portugal. He would awake next morning, startled to realize that it is not Dulcinea at all whom he needs to find, but indispensable Sancho. If he “owes” Dulcinea two more reales, what does he owe his faithful squire? The fact is, he does not know quite what he would do with Dulcinea should he find her, beyond pressing upon her those coins; he cannot imagine truly conversing with her, whereas he has a thousand things to say to Sancho. Dulcinea is for invoking and saluting; she is the inn at the end of the road. But for going down that road, or this or any river . . . give him Sancho Panza!

  To find Sancho, however, he must find the rope that lowered him into this story, and to find that rope he must go back to the palace of Montesinos. Though Peter Sagamore makes no more sentences, he cannot resist sketching the rest of “Rocinante II.” When Quixote goes to the skiff this morning, as if to confirm his new understanding he discovers not only two more reales on the stern-seat (discharging Dulcinea’s debt to him, he is now pleased to believe, and his to her—as well as enabling him to repay what he borrowed from Sancho), but also a sturdy pair of oars, unnecessary for going on downstream, but essential for going up. So be it: All that day he alternately rows and tows Rocinante II upstream. Once he gets the knack of keeping his oars in their thole-posts, he becomes as adept at rowing—and at judging the stretches which must be waded through, his stick in one hand and the skiff’s halter in the other—as yesterday he became at downstream steering.

  But the river he retraces is not the river he came down. Its course is straighter and more swift, through wooded hills, under a cooler sky. As he ascends, the rapids become more numerous. The skiff is not only of no use against them; it is an ever-greater impediment to his progress. He stumbles, almost falls half a dozen times. In one rare rowable stretch, despite his new dexterity, an oar slips from its tholes; he pitches backward (that is to say, bowward) into the bilge, wrenching his spine and losing the oar. The other by itself is useless for upstream work; now it is pull, pull, pull, like Sancho his sometimes recalcitrant Dapple. Toward evening, all his muscles sore, he rounds one more slight and unfamiliar bend and is gratified to see ahead, not the crystal palace, but a small walled town on a low stony island in the river, which forks to encircle it: a miniature, low-profile Toledo, sidelit in the last of the sun. He decides to rest there for the night and tomorrow make inquiries after his squire, of whom the inhabitants may have heard if Hamete Benengeli’s book is circulated here underground as it is throughout the rest of Europe. At very least he will learn where in Spain he himself is, what river he has ascended, and whether it leads out of the Cave of Montesinos. Surveying the moated town before him, he thinks wryly of Sancho’s ambition one day to govern an island. He presses on, encouraged, reheartened, into the last obstacle between himself and the end of his day’s work: a short stretch of rapids so swift and steep as to amount almost to a waterfall. As he picks his way through an agitated pass between two cottage-size boulders, Rocinante’s frayed halter parts. Quixote springs too late to catch hold of the stem; the skiff swirls away downstream, fetches up broadside against a rock, and swamps; it spins again and is pinned against another, only its stem and gunwales above water. Where its port bow scraped the first rock, the paint is gone; the eye there seems now to weep, or wink.

  The knight scrambles three more steps downstream, loses his footing on the mossy pebbles, falls hard on his right side. His basin-helmet strikes with a clang the same stone that closed Rocinante’s portside eye. His last image, as the waters sweep over him, is neither of Dulcinea del Toboso nor of Sancho Panza: It is a sudden v
ision of the Moor in whom he has so misplaced his trust, now calmly inscribing—in beautiful, heartless Arabic—the sentence Thus ends Part Two of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

  And thus could end, notes Peter Sagamore, Part One of a possible three-part Don Quixote story, the general outlines of whose next installment, like a walled town rising from a river, one can already begin to discern.

  WHAT PREGNANT-FANCIED, GUILTY-CONSCIENCED PETER SAGAMORE

  DID WITH THE REST OF DAY 9

  Damn near nothing.

  Ate light lunch with Chip and the Talbotts up on the Key Farm farmhouse porch: a lunch toward which he was permitted to contribute only the last of the fresh fruit we laid in in Annapolis: half a dozen ripe pears. He’s going to have to borrow Chip’s bike or the Talbotts’ car and go buy provisions if he really means to stonewall it there on Wye Island, as he guesses he does.

  Listened to Chip’s sober-but-excited account of what he and Franklin Key Talbott accomplished that morning while Peter worked Captain Donald Quicksoat down and upstream and Leah Allan Silver Talbott made notes for the lecture course on Postmodern American Fiction she means to offer at that northern branch campus of the University of Virginia come September. She has accepted that tenured associate professorship, and the decision has energized her. It is not a terrific job, she and Peter agree, but in a tight market it will do; anyhow she hopes to publish her way out of it in two or three years. She appears relieved, even happy, to have taken the step, Peter will report tonight to Katherine, and to let the marital chips fall where they may.