Ingenio
John W. Evans
After my wife moved out
I enrolled in a night class. Don Quixote. The novel Auden said more people had claimed to read than had actually read. I hadn’t read it or claimed to have read it. Each week an affable polymath walked us through a dozen or so chapters. Ingenio, he explained, had no exact translation in English. The closest analog might be ingenious, but in a fantastical sense: imaginative, improbable. Optimistic, deft, and daft. With ingenio Quixote transformed a world made unbearable into one filled with magic. The house-poor madman with a stubborn horse encountered damsels in distress, squires, and princesses. Every inn was his castle. Each doorway the entrance to a vast and hidden kingdom.
Multiple narrators told his story in conflicting accounts, as novels within the novel, and at least one fake sequel that was published as a hoax so Cervantes would finish the real one.
Had our happiness those last months been our hoax, filling us with false starts and endings?
How long had our marriage really been in trouble?
“The windmill scene isn’t such a big deal,” the professor told us.
“It’s only popular because so few people read past it.”
After the windmill scene the plot grew weirder and less certain.
Quixote abandoned a boy while stuck inside
a flying wooden horse. He argued with priests at a wedding and undid enchantments cast by an old friend dressed up as the moon, which was how I thought about my marriage at the very end: held together by magic, revived mostly in fevers and dreams that left me feeling sad and cheated when I woke up. At the very end ingenio fails Don Quixote. When Sancho Panza commands the dying hero to see his quest to its end
Quixote apologizes for having poisoned his friend with hope, for hope is always born at the same time as love. Most evenings after class I walked a big loop around the campus with no particular destination in mind. I wanted every billboard to become a windmill and every stranger secretly a narrator watching me nose my patient beast across a kingdom, toward a future wife who did not yet know she loved me. I went on so many first dates. I argued with my ex-wife and called my lawyer. Quixote is crazy, a narrator says in the last pages. He is sure no author could have invented him. I did not like Quixote, but I did not feel entirely invented either. In time, after a few months, I stopped going to class. I told anyone who would listen that I was improving myself after my divorce in new ways. It sounded unreal, even to me. There were simpler truths still to sort out.