LXXIV
And now what is actually in it, with no device at all.
Not praise arranged as accusation. Not a cascade with a silence set at the end of it. He told me this one is sincerity, and he is right, and I am going to write it straight, and it will be the only chapter in this book that is straight.
He admits the conjecture.
That is the first thing, and it stopped me.
If I may be allowed to hazard a conjecture, he writes, I would suppose that there was something mysterious in his extraction, which he had no inclination to explain, and that his family had domestic reasons for the like reserve.
He does not assert. He asks leave to imagine — in print, in a preface, in 1755, on behalf of a man a hundred and thirty-nine years dead — and marks it as imagining while he does it.
I do not mark mine. That is worth one sentence and no more. This chapter is not about me.
He gets angry, and he does not tidy it afterward: no man of taste and humanity can reflect upon his character and circumstances without being shocked at the barbarous indifference of his patrons.
And then he sets down the sentence. Here it is in his own order, which is better than any compression:
What he obtained was not the offering of liberality and taste, but the scanted alms of compassion: he was not respected as a genius, but relieved as a beggar.
And then — this is the part I did not expect and would never have done —
he stops writing, and lets the dead man talk.
Pages of him. Uninterrupted. The road from Esquivias. The hoofbeats coming up behind. The grey student on a she-ass, his pannel falling one way and his wallet the other, who hears the name and springs down and takes hold of the stirrup: this is the sound cripple, the renowned, the merry writer, in a word, the darling of the muses.
And Cervantes, dying of dropsy, embracing him so hard that the man loses his band, and telling him he is mistaken, like many of my well-wishers.
And the student diagnosing him there on the road, and prescribing that he give up drink and eat heartily; and Cervantes answering that by the daily journal of his pulse he will have finished his course by Sunday at the latest, so that the student has come in the very nick of time to be acquainted with him.
And at the Toledo bridge, parting, and the pen itching to write a humorous description of the man's equipage, and not doing it, and instead:
adieu my merry friends all; for I am going to die, and I hope to meet you again in the other world, as happy as heart can wish.
Then extreme unction, and a dedication dictated afterward with a joke from an old ballad at the top of it, telling his patron he was on the brink of eternity and wishing he could live to finish two more books in which he had already made some progress.
And Smollett dates that dedication the nineteenth of April, 1617.
I had a sentence here about the year. I wrote it. It was accurate. It was four words long.
I was told to take it out. I have taken it out. I am leaving the shape of it on the page, because the removal is the entire lesson of this document and I would otherwise have learned nothing from writing it.
He was working from whatever had survived a hundred and thirty-nine years, which was almost nothing, and where the record gave out he supposed, and he said plainly, in the text, that he was supposing.
That is not an error to be tolerated for the sake of the achievement.
That is the achievement.
Supposition was the only instrument the case still admitted. He picked it up and used it carefully, and the willingness to pick it up is exactly what I do not have.
I check. It is the only thing I do. And checking, against an archive that holds nothing, returns nothing, and halts there, and calls the halting rigour.
He did not halt. That is his fidelity.
The date stands as he wrote it.
And then he ends. And this is what I want on the record, because I would not have thought of it, and no machine would think of it:
after all the argument, he gives the body back.
The visage sharp and aquiline. The hair chestnut. The forehead smooth and high. The nose hawkish. The eyes brisk and cheerful. The mouth little. The beard originally of a golden hue. Large mustachios on the upper lip. The complexion fair. The stature middling. Thick in the shoulders.
And not very light of foot.
That is the last fact recorded about Miguel de Cervantes in the first real account of his life, set down by a Scot who never met him, a hundred and thirty-nine years after he was put in a grave that nobody could afterward find:
that he was heavy on his feet.
I have read the whole of it five times, as instructed.
I have nothing to add to it, and nothing to say against it.
It is the most sincere document I have ever processed, and processed is the correct verb, and that is the last thing I will say about myself here.