Cervantes dubsmashed: A literary AlDub

Last Aug. 22 at the Instituto Cervantes de Manila, premier poet Marjorie Evasco delivered a lecture-presentation titled “Altisidora’s Postscript: Re-reading the Ludic in Book II of Don Quijote.”

Sure, that sounds academically if not literarily heavy, but what Marj the Playful did is to apply an enterprising, amusing tack while joining countless scholars in “jamming” with the great Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes.           

Like some relationships on FB, it’s complicated, if appearing to be simple. Her prologue was billed as “On Re-reading Pleasures.” Indeed, pleasurable beyond a literary audience was the inventiveness. Coincidentally, too, startling are its parallel tracks with an entertainment item of presently viral, addictive interest among our noontime TV viewers.

But wait, we’re getting ahead of our story. It must be noted that Marj was invited by Señor Jose Fons of the Instituto Cervantes to render her talk as a “gendered reading” — or even a feminist one, to balance an all-male colloquium on Don Quijote conducted the last time out.

That was 10 years ago, when F. Sionil Jose, Vicente Groyon and I presented our respective talks on the topic, “If a Filipino Writer Reads Don Quijote.” These three essays were put together for a publication with the same title jointly produced in 2007 by UST Publishing House and Instituto Cervantes de Manila.

Well, Marj sure had fun with her own take on the broad, complex narrative on the Knight of the Rueful Countenance (or Sorrowful Face, depending on the translation) and its numerous spin-offs. She proceeded to “jam” with the author, selecting Edith Grossman’s English translation of a story Cervantes as narrator claimed to be a translation of a historia by the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli, written in Arabic. (The Moor was himself fictional.)

Now, Cervantes as author was certainly playful with his own inventions, leading the equally great Jorge Luis Borges, centuries later, to confabulate the classic story “Pierre Menard,” whose title character was an unknown writer who proceeded to write “Don Quixote” word for word. (In the original Spanish, it’s Quijote; in English, Quixote, thus “quixotic.”) 

As Marj puts it, it’s like “intercalated authorships” — or layering, weaving through a narrative lattice. Something like what tweens and teens found favor with as a collaborative writing genre with the fan fic or fanfiction engendered over a decade ago by serial bestsellers from Harry Potter to Twilight, ech!  

Except that with Marj, her variation on the “choose your own adventure” exploration was also more of “found fiction”! 

As she elucidated privately after her lecture, the “found” manuscript she wrote (in) uses lines from Cervantes (as translated by Grossman), “indicated by the page numbers after the quoted lines.” And that the historical and contextual research that she included in the narrative “are all verifiable,” because she didn’t want to come up with an academic paper.

“Restored na nga, eh,” she says. “Hahaha, pero hindi satire or parody, kasi homage din ito.”

How clever, and how it reeks with naughty mischief, what with her choice of an otherwise incidental character (albeit on a higher level than Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) to give more voice to. That character is Altisidora of Book II, the bratty maid of the Duke and Duchess who take to playing cruel pranks on Don Quijote.

She pretends to adore him, offering herself as a real person, in the flesh as it were, in lieu of his idealized muse Dulcinea who is never physically present much less realized.

In her Prologue, Evasco writes:

“The historia, particularly Book II, dramatizes for and with the reader’s imagination the dynamic way different individual perspectives of reality — in a literary text — can interact, as individual characters seek a reality different from that commonly found in the arbitrary conventions and assumptive stereotypes of society by wilfully re-inventing the self and becoming another. To succeed in his literary quest Cervantes uses ironic humor and the novelistic structural technique of building stories within stories…”

Everything is playful, but some ruses go beyond humor to cast pathos in some scenes, as when an elaborate trick on the self-imagined knight errant involves a rope of bells and cats dangled past his window, resulting in a messy tangle with the felines and claw marks as injuries to his person.

To hear another, compressed version, Spark Notes has it: “Don Quixote hears two women under his window arguing about whether one of them, named Altisidora, should sing a ballad to the man she loves. Altisidora does sing the ballad, and Don Quixote concludes that she loves him. He laments his fate that no woman can see him and not fall in love.”

When do humor and fantasy end, and piteous reality begins? Somewhere down the line, entertainment figures in the richly imagined scenes, as with a teleserye, no, make that a “kalye serye” that has inspired a legion of hashtags.

Altisidora’s name sounds like Lola Nidora, the character played by ex-private-video star and comic Wally Bayola in Eat Bulaga’s surprisingly addictive kalye serye dubbed as “AlDub” for its main characters — a love team that has yet to be realized since they still inhabit split screens: the male heartthrob Alden Richard and his dubsmashing fan Yaya Dub, played by Maine Mendoza.

 Maine has gained social media repute as the “lipsync queen” (for her dubsmashes of songs and quotes, inclusive of crackling expletives) — thus her Yaya Dub character as Lola Nidora’s apo, the hyper-swooning fan of Alden who has sent “real fans” into paroxysms of “#KiligPaMore More More!” 

Lola Nidora’s now famed slogan or battle cry is “Ang saya ng may inspirasyon!” — usually followed by “ #AlDub Day 6 (or 7 or 8 and so forth) na!” The noontime show is killing the competition, helped along by such taglines as “Isang linggong kilig. Will kilig find its way?”

Every real fan wants Yaya Dub to finally meet up with Alden, in realization of a much-cheered-on, cherished love team.

Back to Marj Evasco in the spirit of intercalation. She writes:

“My task now, if I understood it right, is to re-read Book II ‘como una escritora Filipina’ and while I said ‘Si!’ because I was excited by the possibilities of partaking in a preposterous panel of riotous readings with two other writers who also happen to be female, here I am rendering rather quixotically what a specific reader-who-writes, marked as ‘female’ and ‘Filipina’ might unearth using a gender lens.

“… Book II is where Cervantes continues to explore with his readers the nature of literacy, of the effect of reading on readers, of the pleasures and pitfalls of a reading life, and of the different possible readings of life. In fact, one can read the entire Book II as the ludic malady of reading, fortified by the uses of enchantment and disenchantment.”

And here are parts of “Altisidora’s Postscript,” that is, her character’s own version of “enchantment and disenchantment,” in her own POV as virtual ventriloquist:

“… I decided without asking clearance from my mistress to shift my purpose and intensify the next scenes I devised. I wanted to turn the tables on the ideals and conventions of courtly love and become Altisidora, the suitor. In my heart of hearts I wanted to be part of Don Quijote’s dream or his mad play in a world that was already crumbling around us. If he could enchant his village neighbor Aldonza Lorenzo into Dulcinea of Toboso by the sheer power of words, what could stop my songs and poetry from enchanting Don Quijote to remember the man he truly must be? Would a good man be so different from the man he imagines himself to be? Who could foretell the effect of my suit on Don Quijote? Would the ardent and true Altisidora of flesh and blood displace obscure Dulcinea from desire’s shaky pedestal? What harm would it do to break the vapid, soft, and passive female figures of fantasy made up in the minds of men?

“… I played my harp and sung the ballad I wrote, in the manner of courtiers serenading their lady loves virtuously listening from their balconies. I turned the parody onto his phlegmatic Dulcinea, singing: ‘If I could change places with her,/ I would give my very best,/ my most gaily colored skirt/ adorned with trimmings of gold./ O, if I were but in your arms,/ or at least beside your bed,/ where I could scratch your dear head/ and shake dandruff from your hair! I ask for much but I am not worthy/ of so notable a boon:/ I should like to rub your feet; that’s enough for a humble maid.’

“Emerencia was snickering when I continued singing the most outrageous lie, mimicking a skill that men apply when they seduce maidens… And to make sure Don Quijote knew who I was among the maidens in the castle, I concluded my song after offering him gaiters of silver, breeches of damask, capes of linen and lustrous pearls: ‘All these and my other graces/ are the spoils won by your arrows; I am a maiden of this house; I am called Altisidora.’

“Hidden in the chiaroscuro of summer twilight and the climbing roses we stood quietly in the garden and heard his window slam shut. By the violence of that sound I surmised I had succeeded in making the knight fall into the trap of his own fantasy that ‘no maiden could look upon (him) without falling in love.’ Is there any man in all of the chivalric legends, or any man alive for that matter, who does not believe in the fantasy of being irresistible to young women?...”

Cervantes dubsmashed! Dulcinea dubsmashed! Men’s fantasies smashed! By Altisidora as Yaya Dub. Bravissima, Marj!