The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Frank Talbott, for his part, is pleased both by his wife’s decision and by his own remounting of the Kepone project, now tentatively titled Minidumps and subtitled The Doomsday Factor in Your Own Backyard. Besides installing that primitive monitoring device next door—no more than a remote signal that the NRR gate has been opened, so that he can keep a log of what comes and goes—he has confirmed by telephone that the state health department’s hazardous-waste inspection division can manage no more than thirty percent of the monthly routine inspections required by Maryland law for the 2200 licensed by-producers of hazardous waste material in the Old Line State: a circumstance well-known to most of those businesses and industries. A committee of the state legislature, he has learned further, is drafting a bill to encourage the treating and recycling of hazardous wastes instead of their burial. Among those openly lobbying for that bill is Willy Sherritt. Frank has not quite decided yet where he will spend the next three seasons, or what exactly he’ll be doing for money if his and Peter’s agent can’t swing a substantial advance on Minidumps. The campus lecture-circuit, maybe, though he’s not yet well-known enough to command good fees. But he sees no reason why he can’t do his homework in northern Virginia about as well as at Key Farm, if he digs up enough stuff this summer. The NRR beeper, needless to say, is the most preliminary of research aids, soon to be followed by fancier hardware: just a little tradecraft exercise, really, like Peter’s filling his fountain pen or sharpening his pencil.

  If you were here, sad Katherine says, I’d sharpen your pencil.

  Peter observes that the Talbotts’ problems seem to be bringing them together after all, though the big one is still up in the air. They seem okay. Says Kath They are okay, and wonders whether our problem isn’t maybe that we haven’t had enough problems. We hit one wretched little rock in the río of our life, and the skiff of our marriage goes the way of Rocinante Dos.

  You don’t believe that.

  Of course I don’t. But here we are: Here and There. What else did you do.

  Swam. We’ve got baby nettles here now.

  Preteen ones here. What else.

  Drove into Easton with Chipper in the Talbotts’ car and reprovisioned Story with enough for the two of us to last until Hide and Seek touch base. Safe and Sound. I mean the two of us.

  What else.

  Called you from the Acme Market in Easton to make sure you weren’t in labor with Fourth and Goal. I talked to Olive Treadway instead. You were out.

  Yeah.

  Read some more in Part Two of Don Quixote and got to thinking about

  Carla B Silver as a postmenopausal Scheherazade. Wrote a letter to Mother that she won’t be able to read. Cooked out with the Talbotts: zucchini and cherry tomatoes en brochette and soyed chicken breasts and Sebastiani Eye-of-the-Swan Pinot Noir. Ran and swam again with Chip. Called my estranged wife. And you? Says Kath Sorry: My mind wandered.

  WHAT DID KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE DO

  WHILE HER ESTRANGED HUSBAND WAS DOING ALL OF THE ABOVE?

  Oh. Plenty. If we lived under the same roof, you’d know.

  That’s right.

  Talk to your daughter now, okay? Things are worse down there than they are in that Cave of Montesinos. Here’s your biological father, Lox.

  How goes it, honey? Over.

  With a catch in her muffled but still-brave voice, our daughter reports that everything is a touch more desperate than it was this time on Day 8. In fact, it’s a whole new ball game down there. Her brother stopped crying sometime this afternoon, when she told him Joke 39½: If a seagull flies over the sea, what flies over the Bay? But he still won’t talk to her, and his silence bothers her more than his bawling did. She is afraid, says Here Today, that he may have decided to turn himself off altogether; to become the Vanished Twin.

  Come on, now, sweetheart! Over?

  She means it. There used to be about three of us down here, you know, she declares surprisingly, until you guys got into this thing of making up funny pairs of girl-and-boy names like Arts and Sciences and Wash and Wear and Renaissance and Reformation. Today we’re just Tomorrow and Tomorrow. By tomorrow . . .

  Live! Let live! What are you telling me? Over!

  The third one got discouraged out of existence: Whatserface’s Magic Language Theory. If you and Mom don’t hang it up soon, I’m going to be an only child.

  Good lord! Katherine?

  We should hang it up, Peter. I certainly want to.

  I want to too! Come on back here!

  I guess not.

  You guess not. I guess I guess not, too. We guess not, honey. Not quite yet, anyhow. Over? You still there, honey? Over?

  Over and Out.

  DAY 10: WYE 1.

  To Story’s log Peter Sagamore says Wednesday 25 June ‘80: Sky hazy, air humid, breeze SW light but steady. Texas still frying, Countdown begins for trial release of radioactive gas from Three Mile Island, Maryland wetlands law suffers setback, blah blah blah. Where’s K, and what am I doing here? Leave me alone, Muse.

  But she will not. Instead, this morning he doesn’t even telephone Nopoint Point or do his a.m. workout, but after breakfast says to Andrew Sherritt—who is more concerned now about K & Co. than about Peter, and has decided to bike on home—See you soon, pal; thanks for the company; and, grim-mouthed at what he’s doing but ridden now by a rider who dwarfs even those seven several others, without so much as a howdy-do to the Talbotts he forges through the forenoon through

  PART TWO OF THAT POSSIBLE THREE-PART DON QUIXOTE STORY,

  namely, “Rocinante III.”

  Wake up, Dee Kew, he urges his hero, last seen concussed and drowning in an unnamed river. No response. He repeats the invocation as a command en español: ¡Recorde, Don Quijote de la Mancha! ¡Arriba! The third time he puts his words into the authoritative mouth of Don Carlos de Barja, Duke of Villahermosa, the alleged original of that duke who entertains Don Quixote and sponsors his illusions through much of the middle of Part Two of Cervantes’s novel.

  The old knight stirs, opens his eyes, lifts his head, and looks around as if expecting to find himself in heaven or hell. Seeing instead a well-appointed bedchamber in a noble seventeenth-century Spanish household, he falls back upon his pillow and presses his fingertips to his temples.

  God and El Cide be praised! he says, as much to himself as to the elegant couple standing by his bedside. I thought my story done, but I see I’ve begun another chapter, with an aching head. To whom do I owe my rescue, please, and where am I now in the errant plot of my adventures?

  Taking a cold compress from a serving-maid, the duchess herself applies it to Quixote’s brow and declares that he is the welcome guest of two enchanted admirers of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance and his squire. Governor Sancho Panza; admirers also of Part One of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote et cetera, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. That he is doubtless presently somewhere in the course of Part Two of that history, in which she and her husband are honored to play a small role—not too far along in it, they hope, as they look forward to sharing his company for many a chapter to come.

  More particularly, adds the duke, you are on the Island of Barataria, fetched here by two fishermen who happened to be chatting on the riverbank when they heard a great clang and saw you carried under by the current. They fished you out: That is their metier.

  I must reward them, Don Quixote declares, though it’s to my Moorish enchanter that I owe both my peril and my rescue. In my purse, sir, are four reales; kindly divide them between those fishermen.

  The duke replies with a smile In your purse there is at the moment nothing, my friend, and nothing is what you owe your rescuers. I’ve clapped the pair of them into jail until the return of Governor Panza, who will judge their case again as he has done before.

  This second mention of El Gobernador reminds Quixote of the first, which he was almost too dazed to register, and of the object of his upstream trek. He craves expla
nation: How did Sancho’s ambition come to be fulfilled? Where is the fellow now, and where in Spain for that matter is this Island of Barataria? How is it that his rescuers are in jail, and what happened to his four reales? But the duchess insists that he rest: Time enough tomorrow for exposition.

  In the seventeenth century, a man in his fifties bordered upon old age. All those chapters on the road, however, and lately upon the river, have so toughened the whimsical old bachelor Alonso Quijano into Don Quixote that by midday, after another short nap, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance is on his feet, his head no less clear than before his accident, and his curiosity no longer to be put off. Very well: His hosts explain to him that “Barataria” is one among several villages under the duke’s hegemony, and that he and the duchess were pleased to bestow its administration, some chapters ago, upon the illustrious Sancho Panza, whose practical wisdom had been made manifest to the world by the Cide Hamete Benengeli in Don Quixote, Part One. Nor was their confidence misplaced: All afternoon they regale their new guest with such anecdotes of Sancho’s executive good sense as may be found in Chapters XLV, XLVII, XLIX, and LI of Part Two. His sagacity in these matters is the more admirable, they agree, inasmuch as he took office grieving sorely the loss of his master.

  I should very much like to know how I was lost, says Don Quixote, and the duchess explains that, having lowered him at his own insistence into the infamous Cave of Montesinos, Sancho and his cousin waited as long as they dared and then drew up the rope, which they were horrified to find had nothing at the end of it. They lowered it again; they called down into the cave-mouth; they lowered a lantern, in case Don Quixote was groping about lost down there. But their calls went unanswered; the lantern came back up extinguished time after time, the rope slack. They considered lowering one of themselves into the cave; but neither of them was strong enough to raise the other unaided. Besides, in the squire’s opinion, for either of them to go down into that fearful place would be like throwing a copper coin into a well to retrieve a gold one dropped accidentally.

  Says Don Quixote That is Sancho Panza’s very voice.

  And so after three days of lowering and raising the rope in vain like luckless fishermen, the pair abandoned their vigil as hopeless, returned to Sancho’s cousin’s village, and announced the sad news. Your squire then said good-bye to his cousin and went his sorrowing way, which led eventually to us and to his distinguished governorship of this island, in which, were it not for his bereavement, he would have rejoiced as much as we. Thus the weeks and chapters passed, during which we have faithfully recorded his wise sayings and judgments, in case there should be a sequel to Hamete Benengeli’s famous history. But after the publication of Part One of that history, your career was so unfortunately brief that we could scarcely imagine its being padded out to fill a second volume, even with the Annals of Barataria thrown in.

  Just two days ago, however (the duke went on), a local fisherman complained to His Excellency the Governor that his boat had been stolen from the riverbank some distance downstream from here while he was relieving himself in a wild-olive grove nearby. So great had been his natural need, he said, he had not bothered either to tie the boat up or to pocket the four reales he had just earned by selling his catch. As he stepped out of the bushes, he saw the thief poling away downriver with his boat and his money. Governor Panza asked the fellow to describe the stolen property. The fisherman declared that it was a spanking new vessel painted in the Portuguese style and named Rocinante Two after Don Quixote’s famous horse, about which he and his companions had heard such tales from the governor himself. The boat was fitted with a magnificent mast and sail, he said, fully equipped in all particulars, and worth a hundred reales at the very least.

  Hearing this, Governor Panza at once pronounced the fellow either a liar or a fool: A fisherman with such a splendid new vessel, he declared, would have shat his breeches rather than leave it unsecured.

  That is quite so, says Don Quixote. No offense to your lordships intended, but Sancho might have added as well that the fish of this river are of famously poor quality and would not have fetched the two reales I found in that leaky old skiff, much less four. Moreover, there was neither sail nor mast aboard, not even oars, and no fishing tackle of any sort.

  As to the fish, declares the duchess, you’re mistaken: The fish of the Ebro are as fine as any in Spain. But as to the rest, you’re right. Governor Panza then asked for a description of the thief, demanding that it come closer to the truth than that of the missing property. The fisherman acknowledged that in his vexation he had perhaps improved the vessel a bit; as for the thief, he bid God strike him dead if the rascal was not a lanky gray-beard in outlandish armor more suitable for tilting at windmills than for angling after trout. And having stolen the boat and pocketed the money (the fisherman guessed it was three reales after all, not four), the old thief shouted a prayer of thanks to the Moor El Seedy Something-or-other, proving himself to be an infidel as well as a pirate.

  On your life, Governor Panza threatened him (says the duke), tell me what sort of helmet this thief wore on his head, and whether the infidel he prayed to was the famous enchanter El Cide Hamete Benengeli or some other Moor. That was the very name, the fisherman swore: As for the thief s helmet, it looked like nothing so much as a brass spittoon or a barber’s basin, such as they say the famous Don Quixote used to go about in.

  So affected was Governor Panza by this news (the duchess continues), he prayed my husband to appoint a vice-governor at once to take over the administration of Barataria, so that he himself could set out that very day in pursuit of this alleged thief, who was either his late master come back from the dead or a shameless impostor. If the former, then no crime had taken place, only a miracle of resurrection; for Don Quixote of La Mancha could no more be induced to steal than Rocinante to fly. If the latter, then very likely the rascal was a thief as well as a fraud, whose neck the governor himself would wring with pleasure.

  We offered him a boat for his search (the duke declares), very like the one described by the fisherman; but Governor Panza distrusts all conveyances except his faithful Dapple. He set out upon her that same evening, leading Rocinante behind him and following the banks of the Ebro downstream; and very sorry we were to see him go, for his government has been as merry as it was wise.

  Then yesterday (says the duchess) those two fishermen fetched you here, half drowned, claiming they had caught the thief and recovered the stolen boat, much the worse for wear, but not the three reales. My husband ordered them searched, and found on one of them—the same who claims to be the master of Rocinante Two—a purse with four reales in it, whereupon we bound them both over on suspicion of theft until Governor Panza returns to try their case. And we dispatched a messenger after the governor to tell him that the man he seeks is our honored guest. There is our story thus far.

  Don Quixote, who has followed this narrative like a tennis match, thanks his hosts for their care and prays the duke not only to dismiss all charges against his rescuers, who are guilty of nothing worse than the sin of all fishermen, exaggeration, but also to give the boat owner those four reales, of which two indeed were in the vessel when he set off in it, thinking it put there by the Enchanter for his conveyance. He presumes the other two to have come from that source as well, and hopes the sum will cover what damage he has unintentionally done the boat. He then thanks God and Hamete Benengeli for leading him from the Cave of Montesinos to the Island of Barataria and so nearly to a reunion with Sancho Panza himself, the very object of his search. Having observed how that latter enchanter works, he does not doubt that in this chapter he must overtake his squire, who is searching for him, so that they can proceed together to the consummation of their story.

  But how is it, he wonders, that the duke and duchess speak of the Ebro, when it was the Guadiana (known for the poor quality of its fish) he went down upon from the palace of Montesinos, and whose course he retraced the next day, which led him here
?

  His hosts assure him that he is mistaken. The Guadiana rises in the plain of Montiel, in the heart of La Mancha in New Castile; it flows westward through Extremadura to Badajoz, where it turns southward to become for half a hundred kilometers the border between Spain and Portugal. It then strays through the cork-oak and olive groves of Portuguese Alentejo, after which it empties into the Atlantic at the Gulf of Cádiz, between the rocky Algarve and the Coast of Light. The Ebro, on the other hand, rises in the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain, flows eastward through Old Castile and Aragon into Catalonia, and empties into the Mediterranean. The two systems are divided by mountain ranges; there is no navigating from one to the other.

  No matter, says Don Quixote: Such is his faith now in the Cide Hamete Benengeli, it would not surprise him to be enchanted in the space of one paragraph from the Duero to the Nile or from the Guadalquivir to the waters of heaven, to say nothing of the Guadiana to the Ebro. Nor does he imagine that the duke’s messenger will reach Sancho Panza before he himself does, even with a day’s head start. What is best for the story is what the great Moor causes to come to pass, and it were best for the story that the searcher be found by the one he seeks.

  He then begs from their lordships the loan of that vessel they had offered Sancho; for he has learned in Rocinante II that a mere skiff poled downstream can cover more kilometers in one day than Dapple and the first Rocinante can cover in three. Amused at the prospect of further comedy in the reciprocal pursuit of knight by squire and vice versa, the duke and duchess oblige him with one of several trim and gaily painted pleasure craft maintained for their household. They insist only that he permit them to provision the vessel modestly, lest his enchantment wear thin to the point of hunger and thirst, and to cause the name Rocinante III to be lettered upon its bows and transom.