Lunatics, Lovers and Poets Read online




  First published by And Other Stories, 2016

  High Wycombe, England – Los Angeles, USA

  www.andotherstories.org

  This selection © And Other Stories and Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts Ltd 2016. The twelve original stories of this anthology are published in Spanish by Galaxia Gutenberg.

  The copyright on the pieces in the anthology remain with the individual authors.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  Introduction © Salman Rushdie 2016

  Author copyright on individual stories as noted in table of contents: Ben Okri; Kamila Shamsie; Juan Gabriel Vásquez; Yuri Herrera; Nell Leyshon; Marcos Giralt Torrente; Hisham Matar; Soledad Puértolas; Vicente Molina Foix; Deborah Levy; Rhidian Brook; Valeria Luiselli © 2016

  English language translation copyright on individual translations as noted in table of contents: Anne McLean; Lisa Dillman; Samantha Schnee; Rosalind Harvey; Frank Wynne; Christina MacSweeney © 2016

  Note from the Editors © Daniel Hahn and Margarita Valencia 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 9781908276780

  eBook ISBN 9781908276797

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Copy-editor: Ana Fletcher; Typesetting and eBook creation: Tetragon, London; Typefaces: Linotype Swift Neue, Verlag; Cover Design: Hannah Naughton.

  This project was undertaken with the generous support of the British Council and AC/E (Acción Cultural Española). And Other Stories is also supported by public funding from Arts Council England.

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  Contents

  Introduction by Salman Rushdie

  Don Quixote and the Ambiguity of Reading

  by Ben Okri

  Mir Aslam of Kolachi by Kamila Shamsie

  The Dogs of War by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

  (tr. Anne McLean)

  Coriolanus by Yuri Herrera (tr. Lisa Dillman)

  Glass by Nell Leyshon

  Opening Windows by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  (tr. Samantha Schnee)

  The Piano Bar by Hisham Matar

  The Secret Life of Shakespeareans by Soledad Puértolas

  (tr. Rosalind Harvey)

  Egyptian Puppet by Vicente Molina Foix

  (tr. Frank Wynne)

  The Glass Woman by Deborah Levy

  The Anthology Massacre by Rhidian Brook

  Shakespeare, New Mexico by Valeria Luiselli

  (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

  Note from the Editors

  About the Contributors

  ‌

  ‌Introduction

  Salman Rushdie

  As we honour the four hundredth anniversaries of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, it may be worth noting that while it’s generally accepted that the two giants died on the same date, 23 April 1616, it actually wasn’t the same day. By 1616 Spain had moved on to using the Gregorian calendar, while England still used the Julian, and was eleven days behind. (England clung to the old Julian dating system until 1752, and when the change finally came, there were riots and, it’s said, mobs in the streets shouting ‘Give us back our eleven days!’) Both the coincidence of the dates and the difference in the calendars would, one suspects, have delighted the playful, erudite sensibilities of the two fathers of modern literature.

  We don’t know if they were aware of each other, but they had a good deal in common, beginning right there in the ‘don’t know’ zone, because they are both men of mystery, there are missing years in the record and, even more tellingly, missing documents. Neither man left behind much personal material. Very little to nothing in the way of letters, work diaries, abandoned drafts; just the colossal, completed oeuvres. ‘The rest is silence.’ Consequently, both men have been prey to the kind of idiot theories that seek to dispute their authorship. A cursory internet search ‘reveals’, for example, that not only did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare’s works, he wrote Don Quixote as well. (My favourite crazy Shakespeare theory is that his plays were not written by him but by someone else of the same name.) And of course Cervantes faced a challenge to his authorship in his own lifetime, when a certain pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, whose identity is also uncertain, published his fake sequel to Don Quixote and goaded Cervantes into writing the real Book Two, whose characters are aware of the plagiarist Avellaneda and hold him in much contempt.

  Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political / historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time.

  Take a look at the opening scenes of Hamlet. Act One, Scene One is a ghost story. ‘Is not this something more than fantasy?’ Barnardo asks Horatio, and of course the play is much more than that. Act One, Scene Two brings on the intrigue at the court of Elsinore: the angry scholar prince, his recently widowed mother wedded to his uncle (‘O most wicked speed / To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets’). Act One, Scene Three, and here’s Ophelia, telling her dubious father Polonius the beginning of what will become a sad love story: ‘My lord, he hath importuned me with love / In honourable fashion.’ Act One, Scene Four, and it’s a ghost story again, and something is rotten in the state of Denmark. As the play proceeds, it goes on metamorphosing, becoming by turns a suicide story, a murder story, a political conspiracy and a revenge tragedy. It has comic moments and a play within the play. It contains some of the highest poetry ever written in English and it ends in melodramatic puddles of blood.

  This is what we who come after inherit from the Bard: the knowledge a work can be everything at once. The French tradition, more severe, separates tragedy (Racine) and comedy (Molière). Shakespeare mashes them up together, and so, thanks to him, can we.

  In a famous essay, Milan Kundera proposed that the novel has two progenitors, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; yet both these voluminous, encyclopaedic fictions show the influence of Cervantes. Sterne’s Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are openly modelled on Quixote and Sancho Panza, while Richardson’s realism owes a good deal to Cervantes’s debunking of the foolish mediaeval literary tradition whose delusions hold Don Quixote in thrall. In Cervantes’s masterpiece, as in Shakespeare’s work, pratfalls coexist with nobility, pathos and emotion with bawdiness and ribaldry, culminating in the infinitely moving moment when the real world asserts itself and the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance accepts that he has been a foolish, mad old man, ‘looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests.’

  They are both self-conscious writers, modern in a way that most of the modern masters would recognise, the one creating plays that are highly aware of their theatricality, of being staged; the other creating fiction that is acutely conscious of its fictive nature, even to the point of inventing an imaginary narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli – a narrator, interestingly, with Arab antecedents.

  And they are both as fond of, and adept at, low life as they are of high ideas, and their galleries of rascals, whores, cutpurses and drunks would be at home in the same taverns. This earthiness is what reveals them both to be realists in the grand manner, even when they are posing as fantasists, and so, again, we who come after can learn from them that magic is pointless except when in the service of realism – was there ever a more rea
list magician than Prospero? – and realism can do with the injection of a healthy dose of the fabulist. Finally, though they both use tropes that originate in folktale, myth and fable, they refuse to moralise, and in this above all else they are more modern than many who followed them. They do not tell us what to think or feel, but they show us how to do so.

  Of the two, Cervantes was the man of action, fighting in battles, being seriously wounded, losing the use of his left hand, being enslaved by the corsairs of Algiers for five years until his family raised the money for his ransom. Shakespeare had no such dramas in his personal experience; yet of the two he seems to have been the writer more interested in war and soldiering. Othello, Macbeth, Lear are all tales of men at war (within themselves, yes, but on the field of battle, too). Cervantes used his painful experiences, for example in the Captive’s Tale in Quixote and in a couple of plays, but the battle on which Don Quixote embarks is – to use modern words – absurdist and existential rather than ‘real’. Strangely, the Spanish warrior wrote of the comic futility of going into battle and created the great iconic figure of the warrior as fool (one thinks of Heller’s Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for more recent explorations of this theme), while the imagination of the English poet-dramatist plunged (like Tolstoy, like Mailer) headlong towards war.

  In their differences, they embody very contemporary opposites, just as, in their similarities, they agree on a great deal that is still useful to their inheritors; of whom a very distinguished selection will have more to say in the pages that follow hereafter.

  ‌

  ‌Don Quixote

  and the Ambiguity of Reading

  Ben Okri

  When he came into the printing workshop, we thought he was drunk. He had come to see for himself the machine that multiplies realities. He came in with his machete drawn. He had been passing by on one of his adventures to the North. He had heard that there was a war going on between giants and men. He wanted to fight against the giants. He claimed to have fought them before.

  When he came into the shop he had the idea that the printing machine was in some way antagonistic to him. We had been working the shafts and the steel plates, applying oils and clearing the machine of impediments. He approached the machine as though it were a dangerous foe.

  It took a while to realise he wasn’t drunk at all. He seemed rough in speech. He was sober, but had a restless spirit and boundless imagination. Conversation with him was difficult. He was liable to misunderstand the simplest thing you said. His companion, Sancho, seemed the only person who could calm him down. We asked Sancho to get him to drop his machete. But Sancho too had diabolical notions about the printing machine. We had two mad people in that tight space.

  There have been many accounts of what happened when Don Quixote stumbled into the first printing workshop he had ever encountered. Most of the accounts are lies. When an event passes into legend more people always claim they were there at the time. I was there when it happened. I was there.

  ‘Let me see how it works!’ Don Quixote commanded, waving the machete close to my chin.

  He stood over the machine, his eyes flashing. I noticed his beard for the first time. It was long and white and pointed. His eyes had great vigour. His proximity made the space around him charged. What it was charged with I cannot say.

  ‘What would you like to see?’ I asked.

  ‘Print something.’

  ‘Anything?’

  He gave me a sharp look.

  ‘Yes.’

  I continued printing what was on the blocks. I worked laboriously, sweating under the ferocity of his eyes. It was hard to work while he breathed down my neck. Eventually I pulled out some freshly printed pages.

  ‘You have to wait for them to dry,’ I said.

  ‘I will wait.’

  He still had the machete. His eyes made you think he was mad.

  For him, waiting involved a special passion. I had never seen anyone wait with such intensity. It was as if by the force of his spirit he was regulating the motions of the moon or the subtle energies that flow through all things. When a person is touched by greatness might it not be because they are resonating with this subtle energy that runs through spider’s webs and the intricate motion of the stars?

  While he was waiting I noticed that he was concentrating on a shield of cobwebs in a high corner of the workshop. I was ashamed of the state of the place, and became defensive.

  ‘We clean the place once every we–’

  He cut through my explanation with the sword of his wit.

  ‘If only,’ he said, with a glint in his eyes, ‘if only we knew the webs that connect us it would be easier to send a message to the highest authorities with a tug of thought than by protesting at their gates.’

  He must have noticed the blankness of my look.

  ‘I believe that the true warrior acts on the secret foundations of things, don’t you?’

  I gave him a look of incomprehension. The level at which he spoke was too elevated for me. Then I noticed something else about Don Quixote. He was a walking encyclopaedia of nonsense and wonders. While waiting he began a dissertation on the analogies between the spider’s web and people’s inability to alter the world. He philosophised while we waited. I couldn’t make out much of what he said. I heard fall from his lips words like Amadis of Gaul, Plato, the Knights of the Arduous Road. He mentioned the tragedies of Sophocles, the last ironic paragraph of Things Fall Apart, and a fragment of Okigbo which he quoted over and over again. Then he let fall a string of Luo proverbs, incanted a Swahili song, and strung out an Urhobo fable from which he drew threads of a luminous wisdom that held us spellbound.

  When something extraordinary is happening in your life, time has a way of becoming an underwater phenomenon. It may be the distance of forty years, but there was a curious charm about those hours. It was a charm tinged with the old African magic that one rarely encounters. Sometimes one comes upon a seer emerging briefly from a long solitude in the forest. Don Quixote was like one of those seers. Like a story made real for a moment, he came into our lives, and then he was gone.

  Afterwards all one heard of him were legends. He had waged battles with corrupt government officials, and embarked on campaigns in the forests of the North where Boko Haram terrorised the nation. It was even rumoured that he had been selected to join a resettlement programme on Mars. These are stories his madness generated. It is hard to say whether his deeds exceeded our imagination, or whether we are poor reporters of the marvellous.

  Let it be said, while I have breath, that he made us more imaginative, just by being himself. I had never felt myself more locked in the box of my possibilities than in the presence of that man. He was a call to greatness. We failed to take up that challenge, cowards that most of us are. That failure is the lingering regret of my life. For a life passes, a life is lived. It is lived under fear and caution. One thinks of one’s family. One thinks of one’s self. But the life passes. And it is only the fires that your life lit in other people’s souls that count. This I know now in the long, uneventful autumn of my life. There are some people one should never have met, because they introduce into your heart an eternal regret for the greater life you did not live.

  The paper dried, and when I was satisfied Don Quixote would not have ink smudges on his face, I let him have what we had been printing. I did not know it would have the strange effect that it had.

  He read the text very slowly. In all my life I have not met anyone who read more slowly. This puzzled me. It was because of reading too many books that he lost his mind. He couldn’t have read so many books if he read so slowly.

  ‘You are taking so much time,’ I said to him.

  The tension in the room changed. Sancho Panza, leaning his fat frame against the door, gasped. I did not understand the gasp and turned towards him. Then I felt the machete whizzing past my face, a cool breeze at the end of my nose. How calmly we regard extreme things after they have happened. I turned to
Don Quixote. He had manipulated his face into a most peculiar shape.

  ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that I read sixty-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-two books by taking instructions from you in how to read?’

  The manner in which he spoke confused me. He made words sound more than they are. Other people say words and they mean less. He makes words feel like more. He makes your hairs stand on end when he speaks. I felt a furry growth at the side of my face when he addressed me. I stared at him, mesmerised.

  ‘So you presume to tell Don Quixote how to read?’

  My mouth was dry.

  ‘Pull up your ears! Clear them of wax! Get rid of that dim expression! Stand up straight, young man, and listen!’

  I drew breath. I felt faint. With a few syllables he could induce madness. His speech rocked the back of my skull. I don’t know what came over me. One after the other, I pulled my ears. I tweaked them up straight like a rabbit’s. All the while he stared at me with terrifying concentration. If he had gone on longer I might have gone up in flames. I made an effort to stand up straight, till my head grazed the ceiling of his contempt.

  ‘What did I say?’ he bellowed. ‘Listen!’

  I swallowed. It was a bruising adventure to be in his presence.

  ‘In the course of a fifty-year reading career,’ he said, directing at me an unblinking focus, ‘I have experimented with three hundred and twenty-two modes of reading. I have read speedily like a bright young fool, crabbily like a teacher, querulously like a scholar, wistfully like a traveller, and punctiliously like a lawyer. I have read selectively like a politician, comparatively like a critic, contemptuously like a tyrant, glancingly like a journalist, competitively like an author, laboriously like an aristocrat. I have read critically like an archaeologist, microscopically like a scientist, reverentially like the blind, indirectly like a poet. Like a peasant I have read carefully, like a composer attentively, like a schoolboy hurriedly, like a shaman magically. I have read in every single possible way there is of reading. You can’t read the number and variety of books I have read without a compendium of ways of reading.’