Ingenio
JohnW. 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