The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  The knight agrees; though he still takes Montesinos’s word for it that the enchanted require neither food nor drink, he found in his previous voyage that they are not therefore exempt from craving both. He even permits one of the duke’s staff to demonstrate the raising, trimming, and furling of the boat’s sail and the operation of its tiller, he having learned that his enchanter’s navigation is too direct in its accuracy to bother avoiding rocks and rapids. But so steadfastly does he refuse their offer of some money as well, they are obliged to conceal a purse of six reales among the loaves and water casks, the baskets of dates and olives and fine Manchegan cheese aged in oil.

  They then send him off with much ceremony from their pier—well below those rapids that were the undoing of Rocinante II—down the Ebro toward the sea. Crowds of townspeople, including the duke and duchess themselves, follow his progress for a while in boats of their own, in carriages along the riverbank, on horseback, and on foot. One by one then they salute him and return to their usual pursuits; by nightfall Rocinante III is unaccompanied but for a pair of the duke’s mounted men under orders to follow the knight unobtrusively, both for his protection and to report his adventures to their master and mistress. These scouts remain some distance behind, keeping the vessel just in sight, until at afternoon’s end Quixote steers the craft behind a small wooded island and, instead of drawing up to shore and sleeping under a tree as he did before, anchors Rocinante III in midstream and beds comfortably down on deck, under the stars.

  The scouts make camp in an almond grove alongshore, and next morning—though they wake dew-damp and muscle-sore at first light—find their quarry flown. They gallop a long way downstream, certain of overtaking him; they see other vessels, more and more of them as the Ebro widens into a busy waterway in its lower reaches, but no Rocinante III. Presently they meet the duke’s earlier messenger on his way back toward Barataria with Governor Panza, whose joy at that messenger’s message turns to vexation now at theirs. A brace of proper ninnies, he calls them, for not standing alternate watches through the night! Did they suppose the duke sent a pair of scouts to keep each other warm in bed? He dispatches one of them, with the messenger, to search back upriver as far as Barataria while he and the second return downstream; the team that first espies Rocinante III will send word to the other as well as to the duke and duchess.

  But though they carry out this sensible plan—Sancho and his companion all the way to Cabo de Tortosa, where the Ebro meets the sea—neither party crosses paths again with Don Quixote de la Mancha. They cannot believe him lost at sea: How could he reach the Ebro’s mouth without their seeing him? That he might have turned off, upstream, into one of the river’s tributaries, seems unlikely; they scout those tributaries anyhow, in vain, and have finally to conclude that the Knight of the Rueful Countenance has redisappeared as mysteriously as he reappeared—the more mysteriously in that the duke’s boat has disappeared along with him.

  Baffled, they return to Barataria and their daily lives. How Sancho’s ingenious administration of that island ended may be found in Chapter LIII of Part Two of Don Quixote; for the rest, as the duke remarked earlier, a Part Two without the main character is scarcely worth recounting. Sancho Panza, the scouts, the messenger, the two fishermen, the duke and duchess, the burro Dapple and the old mare Rocinante—all live until they die. The seventeenth century becomes the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth. As surely as its stony rivers run to the sea, Spain’s hard history becomes the history of Spain.

  Where is Don Quixote?

  A light easterly stirs Rocinante III’s standing rigging. The anchor rode creaks in its chock as the boat swings; wavelets lap the hull. From a confused dream of America, the knight wakes to find a bright moon setting astern, downriver. Eucalyptus scents the air; he does not recall seeing or smelling any along the Ebro. And how is it that the moon is about to set downstream, when the Ebro flows southeastward?

  He strolls the dewy deck. Already it comes naturally to him to move from cockpit to foredeck, steadying himself with grabrail, shroud, or spar—whatever comes to hand. The river is wider than he remembers; he looks vainly through the near-full moonlight for that wooded islet. Perhaps the boat has dragged around some bend? He is new at such matters, but the anchor appears to be holding, and the breeze and current seem to him far too gentle to drag even an ill-set hook.

  He admires his little craft’s sheer, her high bow, the glinting dew on her well-joined deck and graceful tiller. If it was agreeable to drift and pole down the Guadiana on Rocinante II, how much more so to feel the breeze lift Rocinante III (as happened once or twice the afternoon before, when he accidentally got her sail trimmed right) and surge her along with only the lightest hand on her tiller. How must it be, then, to leave land astern altogether, like those true knights-errant Cristoforo Colombo and Prince Henry’s Descobridores?

  Comes again the perfume of eucalyptus, and he understands this night to be literally enchanted, the river to have once more metamorphosed, as did the Guadiana into the Ebro. Though he can have slept only a few hours, he feels refreshed. Full of calm purpose, he hoists the lateen sail; lets it luff while he weighs and secures the anchor. Unhurriedly, as the boat gathers sternway, he steps to the tiller, brings her bow around, trims the sheet, and glides down the track of the moon. He does not yet care what waterway this is; that it flows westward is enough. Somewhere aboard, he divines, is a purse of six reales, maybe eight. He need not even look for it.

  There are heights in the Serranía de Cuenca where an unlikely portage of two dozen kilometers—from Cella on the Jiloca to Orihuela del Tremedal on the Gallo, for example, or from Medinaceli on the Jalón to Sigüenza on the Henares—might fetch an intrepid white-water canoeist from a headwater of the Ebro system to one of the Tagus, whereon he might then make his rocky way west to Deflowered Aranjuez, past improbable Toledo, on and on to where Tajo becomes Tejo and flows green and Portuguese to Lisbon and the sea. No matter. Here are no rapids, boulders, spillways, snags. The sun rises astern and sets ahead, day after Iberian day; the breeze seems always on one or the other quarter or abeam, never forward of the mast.

  As with Rocinante II, the knight presently grows adept at managing its larger and abler successor. Not for a day at a time, but for weeks on end he navigates downriver, becoming ever more expert both at handling his craft and at subsisting by himself. Weathered already, he scarcely minds the occasional rough wind or rainshower, once he knows how to secure the boat. He discards his makeshift armor, as unnecessary as it is cumbersome. On the river’s more open stretches he teaches himself navigation and piloting from a book he finds among the jugs of Valdepeñas and the several purses of coin. He begins a log of his journey: observations of the changing weather and the passing scene; notes of his infrequent stops and provisioning transactions, which he makes as brief as possible. He works the log back to include the voyage from Montesinos’s palace to Barataria.

  In time he comes to understand a new order of enchantment: not crystal palaces and magical swords and fire-breathing dragons, but brisk or mild southeasterlies, the language of clouds, the working out of compass courses, current sets, and time/speed/distance calculations, the inexhaustible charm of a dozen simple knots, each with its uses. From a map of Iberia, which he finds among rolled nautical charts and boxed navigational instruments in the forepeak, he eventually infers his location and identifies the villages he sails past—seldom, however, stopping to verify his identifications. He learns the stars; he practices with sextant and chronometer. He forms the opinion that two smaller sails, on separate masts, would be more manageable than his single large one, and that an optional squaresail on the foremast might be better offwind than a lateen, just as the lateen is better than the square for upwind work. He does not know that Prince Henry’s caravels revolutionized sailing with that discovery two centuries earlier. In time he reckons himself to be approaching the Sea of Straw and the city founded by Ulysses.

  What of Sancho Pa
nza, the object of his seaborne search? Not until he anchored Rocinante III behind that little island on the first evening out of Barataria did Don Quixote realize that in his busy pleasure with learning to steer and trim sail, he had neglected utterly to keep an eye out for his squire, for Dapple, for Rocinante. By when he weighed anchor on that transformed river some hours later, repaying his debt to Sancho was scarcely even his official goal. He told his logbook, when it occurred to him weeks later to begin one, that it was his enchanter he was now in search of, to repay—but not in coin—his greatest debt of all. But even as he penned those words, he somehow understood that the Cide Hamete Benengeli is no less a fiction than Don Quixote de la Mancha, the Knight of Doleful Aspect.

  No: He is presently looking for Lisbon, which his chart tells him he will find about twenty-five kilometers down that widening of the Tagus called (for its amber reflection of the afternoon sun) the Sea of Straw. He will then seek the port of call after that, and the one after that, and along the way perhaps come to understand where and why he’s voyaging. Or it may be that, like the river, those questions will transform themselves into others, with other answers.

  There is the ancient city on its seven hills. Reluctantly he stops to have his little ship refitted for coastwise cruising. Appraising the local craft with a now less innocent eye, he modifies his preliminary sketches and discusses with a number of boatwrights yet further alterations. In many particulars, he yields to their experienced judgment; where they disagree among themselves, he makes his own decision. On a few matters (the optional squaresail, for example, which they all deem not worth the expense and bother except on larger craft, for long passagemaking), he stands his ground against their concerted opinion. Given the enchanted accrual of “interest” on his unspent reales, he reckons that paying for these alterations will be no problem; all the same, he bargains with three builders before settling on a price, and becomes more knowledgeable in the process.

  No one along the Lisbon waterfront regards his appearance or behavior as unusual. Eager as he is to cast off for wherever, he enjoys moving through the city unarmored and unremarked. When not dealing with the boatwrights, he spends much time in the Torre de Belém, staring out to the Foz do Rio Tejo and the sea beyond. He also shops for a few items not included in the duke and duchess’s extraordinary provisioning, though he has no clear idea where he will go next. At a bookseller’s in the Bairro Alto, in course of looking for a better manual of celestial navigation, he picks up and puts down a number of chivalric romances, wondering mildly what about them had ever interested him. He buys a Spanish translation of The Odyssey and an edition of Camoëns’s Lusiads, which he means to attempt in the original Portuguese. While paying for these, he observes that the clerk himself is reading a Portuguese translation of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Parts I & II—not by the Cide Hamete Benengeli, but by someone he now recalls having heard the duchess mention: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

  Without declaring his own identity, as in chapters past he would have done, he reproves the clerk for thus abetting imposture or literacy piracy: The circumstance that Benengeli is not a Christian does not license his history to be sold under false authorship or imitated and extended without his authorization. The clerk, amused, replies that there have in fact been such imitations and false sequels; indeed, that it was the true author’s indignation at one such that prompted Part Two of the book in hand, a full decade after the great success of Part One. But the perpetrator of that false sequel was not Hamete Benengeli, for that admirable Moor is as much a figment of great Cervantes’s imagination as are Sancho Panza and Don Quixote himself.

  Quixote resists the temptation to prove the fellow wrong. Instead he remarks, ironically, that a true Part Two of Don Quixote’s history must recount such matters as the knight’s reading and approving Part One; his setting out on the road again with Sancho Panza; his fateful descent into the Cave of Montesinos, and Sancho’s governorship of the Island of Barataria. That is a book he would pay much for, if only to learn where Don Quixote sailed to from Lisbon.

  For jumbling fiction and fact, the clerk responds, you take the prize. He shows him the book’s table of contents, from which Quixote infers that its first part is the same he read in La Mancha, and that its second does indeed include the episodes mentioned, followed by others unfamiliar to him. None involves a voyage to Lisbon, much less beyond it. The chapter headings conclude with his chastened return to his home village . . . and his peaceful death there.

  The knight (he scarcely now thinks of himself as one) is perplexed, the more so because, unaccountably, those unfamiliar chapter titles seem right to him, even the mention of his death. But now he hears the clerk speak of the book as the greatest novel ever written, and concludes that its second part must be a work of fiction extrapolated from the true history of Part One: an ingenious if somewhat high-handed idea. Remembering his long and painfully consequential enchantment by novels of chivalry, he pronounces it a reckless thing indeed to confuse the boundary between life and art. All the same, he buys the book in order to see how this Cervantes fellow measures up beside the errorless Moor.

  For the next several weeks, however, he is too busy studying celestial navigation, coastwise piloting, and the finer points of sailing, both from his books and in conversation with seasoned mariners along the waterfront, to look into his alleged adventures after the Cave of Montesinos. For experience, he sails out several times with fishermen, and picks up useful pointers not only about light-and heavy-weather sailing, docking and mooring and navigating, but also about catching and preparing fish. Two or three of his new companions have voyaged in larger vessels to Brazil and Mexico, even to the vast, scarcely colonized new world to the north of those fabulous territories. Could one sail there alone, he inquires, in a boat much like this? They advise him that if he is so eager to end his life, it would be quicker and less expensive to throw himself off the cliffs of Cape St. Vincent, or over the side. Not one of them would set out from Lisbon down the coast of Portugal to Sagres singlehanded, much less across the ocean; a sailor without a shipmate, they agree, is Don Quixote without Sancho Panza, or vice versa: unimaginable.

  He reads The Lusiads and resolves, despite the fishermen’s advice, to try Rocinante III alone down the Portuguese coast to Cape St. Vincent and the Sagres headland, from where the Discoverers set forth in their caravels. His refitted vessel is ready. After several trials on the Sea of Straw and adjustments to the rig, he provisions her and, one sharp blue morning, sets out.

  A fifteen-knot westerly whips straight into the mouth of the Tagus; he has his hands full tacking the ten miles out from Lisbon past Belem to the ocean, where for the first time he and Rocinante must deal with sizable waves as well as wind. Five-and six-footers they are, white-capped and dismaying even under a brilliant sky; but he finds that with her shortened sailplan and versatile rig, Rocinante III rides them like a seabird. He is too busy and excited to feel ill. With his heart in his throat, he turns south around the Island of Bugia, off the Foz do Rio Tejo, and lays a compass course for Cape Espichel, about twenty miles ahead, keeping the curved, rock-skirted shore always in sight. Four hours on a galloping beam-reach puts him there—and there, he knows, he should stop for the day.

  But though his route, like the Discoverers’, is southerly, toward Africa, the breeze he’s reaching on blows straight from North America. He holds his southward course; it will now carry him for the first time out of sight of land, past the Capes of Sines and Sardão to Cape St. Vincent, if he is lucky, one hundred miles ahead: to Sagres, the southwesternmost tip of Europe. The sun is past the meridian; it will set in the empty west, rise over Iberia, and set again, he calculates, before he sees the St. Vincent light, if he ever does. Should he stray to leeward during the night, he will pile up on the rocky palisades; should he stray too far to windward, he will miss the cape altogether and wander toward Africa in fact, but never reach it in that boat. So large and sturdy-seeming in the
Ebro and the Tagus, Rocinante III is a cockleshell out here, and the afternoon wanes. Turn back, old fellow, every reasonable voice in him implores. His inspirers now, however, are no longer Amadis of Gaul and Palmerín of England, but the equally improbable Columbus, Magellan, Melgueiro. More knowledgeable, they, and vastly more experienced than he, in larger vessels with larger crews—but then, he is not bound for the Cape of Good Hope or the Capes of Virginia, only for Cabo de São Vicente. He does not even cross himself; he simply presses on.

  Remarkably, he gets there, and in better time than he estimated. The wind veers aft, northwest; he deploys his squaresail to advantage. The breeze holds through the night and all the next day. Rocinante sizzles along. Only once, in a moment more of euphoria than of exhaustion, he lets the boat broach to, takes green water aboard, and tastes what the terror of his final moments will be like, when they arrive. But the little craft struggles to its feet, as does its skipper; the seething water finds the scuppers; the sails refill; the voyage proceeds. Everything above and below decks is soaked (Camoëns is drowned; Cervantes, merely baptized). No matter. He has taken harder falls from the first Rocinante; he and her successor have come through.

  And there it rises, just toward sunset: the high promontory of Cape St. Vincent. He is unspeakably relieved to see it heave into view—and he has still to get around it and find harbor for the night. But even as he admires the play of last light upon cliffs and lighthouse, and the surf pounding against Portugal, his heart turns to where that light comes from: dull red, descending into blue haze westward.

  Part Two of this possible three-part Don Quixote story (Peter Sagamore notes) should leave its hero there on Europe’s tip, bounded on three sides by the sea, no land in sight except the spectacular cliff he stands upon, among the ice plants and the blowholes, beside Prince Henry’s old navigation school with its great stone compass-rose. Rocinante III rides in a nearby harbor on the Lagos coast. Her skipper (and only passenger) lives aboard. Now and then he sails out beyond the jetties to fish for his dinner, but he plans no further voyages in her. From the Sagres headland, he has seen terrifying storms blow through and well-manned ships carried under; she cannot take him where he wants to go.