‘Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha’

Don’t you just hate it when a book doesn’t turn out to be what you expected?

Everybody knows what to expect from Don Quixote. After all, it’s a classic. We even have the adjective “quixotic.”

Spoiler alert: if you are looking for a touching story of noble idealism crushed by prosaic reality, Cervantes’ Don Quixote is going to be a big letdown.

Expecting the Man of La Mancha on a hopeless crusade to right unrightable wrongs to the strains of “The Impossible Dream,” a generation of readers has quit reading Quixote after 30 disappointing pages.

Who knew there’d be risqué slapstick, Sancho’s word goofs, speeches on the evils of gunpowder, love stories, practical jokes, puppet shows, literary discussions, and the folk wisdom of proverbs?

And such a motley cast of characters! Bored aristocrats, itinerant priests, women dressed as men and men dressed as women, vagabond students, teamsters, convicts, sheepherders, innkeepers, peasants, tax collectors, runaways, con artists, and women of the night — a broad cross-section of the people you’d run into on the road in Spain in 1605.

Of course, now I’m supposed to tell you what you should expect instead.

Sorry, but it’s complicated. I couldn’t tell you what to expect from life, marriage, parenthood, or old age, either. Each of our lives is full of variety, and so is Cervantes’ novel.

But what if you sat down with Don Quixote, leaving your expectations at the door, and read the novel, open to the unexpected? Rather than looking for what you think you’ll find, take the events in the story as they come. Before you know it, you’ll have zoomed past the clichéd episode of tilting at windmills.

You may discover that Don Quixote is actually a funny book, not sappy at all.

It has a lot to laugh at. Take the comic night scene at a roadside inn where a slatternly servant girl, groping in the dark for her pre-paid client down the hall, blunders into Don Quixote’s bunk and his open arms, leading to a chain of hilarious mistaken identities and pratfalls. The scene is as side-splitting as anything in slapstick comedy.

Turn the pages laughing, and you’re in good company. According to one of his courtiers, King Phillip III heard boisterous laughter from inside a university building as he and his retinue passed by. The king quipped, “That guy is either nuts or he’s reading Don Quixote.”

But not all is horseplay.

In the five decades I’ve been re-reading Don Quixote, I never paid special attention to one of the non-funny episodes — until recently.

In Chapter 54 of Part 2, Don Quixote himself is not even present. Sancho Panza is on his way home from a month-long stay at a duke’s castle where he’d been cruelly duped into believing he was the governor of a make-believe island.

The chastened Sancho encounters a group of travelers dressed in cloaks that identify them as pilgrims, and their inability to speak Spanish as foreigners. Sancho goads his donkey forward through the crowd when one of the pilgrims seizes the reins and exclaims, “Sancho, Sancho! Don’t you know me, your dear old neighbor Ricote?”

Sancho looks closely and recognizes Ricote, a Morisco from his village. Moriscos were the descendants of the North African people whose ancestors had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula in the name of Allah 900 years earlier. Many generations later, in Cervantes’ day, these rural landscapers, domestic servants, and construction workers of Southern Spain still spoke a dialect of Arabic and practiced Islam.

War with the surging Ottoman Empire, which had cost Cervantes his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto (Greece) in 1571, had made the Morisco minority of Christian Spain what Japanese families were on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor. But in Spain, there were too many Moriscos to intern in camps, so they were simply expelled. At least 300,000 abandoned everything and fled across the Straits of Gibraltar.

Sancho’s neighbor Ricote was one of those self-deported Moriscos, and he tells Sancho a moving story of his wandering exile across Europe. “Wherever we are, we weep for Spain, the land where we were born, our native fatherland.” Even in North Africa, where the Moriscos had counted on a warm welcome from their Muslim brothers, they had been met with doors slammed shut.

Ricote’s family was unusual in that his wife and daughter, Francisca, were Christian converts. Ricote had left them unprotected in the old village when he set off to find a safe haven. A thousand miles away in Vienna, he found a place that permitted what he called freedom of conscience; that is, freedom of religion.

Ricote was in Spain again in a pilgrim’s disguise to retrieve his family and the little treasure chest he’d buried. We’d call him an illegal immigrant.

Sancho has the unhappy duty to inform Ricote that his wife and Francisca had been escorted by a relative to Algiers, and, according to local gossip, taken with them the chest of coins and pearls.

Ricote asks Sancho in tears how his beloved daughter Francisca had looked as she departed.

“She was the loveliest creature in the world,” Sancho replied. 

“Everyone was weeping — me too — and many would have loved to hide her until your return, but we didn’t dare disobey the King’s command.”

Sancho goes on to say that the son of the local nobleman was in love with Francisca, and no one had seen him since the girl left the village. Maybe he’d followed and kidnapped her.

Hmm, an ethnic minority expelled during a political crisis, the homesickness of exiles, and a father’s love for his lost daughter.

This is far from silly old men with impossible dreams and windmill giants. It’s an all-too-human story that reminds me of the one playing out now in our own homeland.

People ask, “Why read the classics?” The great writer Italo Calvino had a great answer. “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.”

Give Don Quixote a try. Who knows what it has been saving all these centuries to say to you?