Antonio Muñoz Molina: "Destructive and delusional fictions such as the one that Muslims are invading us and are going to Islamize Europe are triumphing today."

A portrait of the Golden Age genius who, unlike Quevedo, Góngora, Lope, or Saint Teresa, had no one to paint him. A portrait of Miguel de Cervantes—the one we know from the books, with his ruffed collar and sharp beard, attributed to Juan de Jáuregui, is not him—and, above all, of his immortal character, Don Quixote. From that book that Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 1956) first found as a child in a trunk in the hayloft on the top floor. A Quixote with charred edges that his maternal grandfather had saved from the bonfire in the courtyard of the farmhouse in Úbeda where he worked as a muleteer when the militiamen came to collectivize it in 1936. A Quixote that is the book that the author of Winter in Lisbon has read most often and in which he delves to explore laughter, fiction, madness, lies, the wickerwork of life, intertwining them with his own, in The Summer of Cervantes (Seix Barral).

A Cervantes, he notes, who "had a life of tremendous wealth" but "who since childhood has known poverty, a shattered nobility; his father was a surgeon, a barber, who pulled teeth and mended crooked arms." Then, "Cervantes had a very nomadic life. At 20, he found himself in Italy and encountered the most important literary and aesthetic avant-garde in Europe, which left its mark on him." "And suddenly he was in the army, and as a novice, he found himself in the Battle of Lepanto. He was badly wounded and underwent another schooling, captivity, which gave him a vision of the other side of the Mediterranean. He found himself in that world for five years. And he spoke that mixed language of Algiers," he emphasized.

“When he returned to Spain, he saw that his aspirations had been thwarted and he had to dedicate himself to working as a tax collector, seizing wheat and oil for the Spanish Armada, for which he wrote an admiring poem. And then he saw the decline of all that,” he summarized. He added that “as a writer, he was someone who had had some success in the theater and suddenly found himself pushed aside. And this combination of knowledge and being somewhat on the sidelines gave him his peculiar lucidity.”

“There has never been a machine of deception, domination, and manipulation like the one we have now.”

“For me, he's the model of a writer because he simultaneously possesses a passion for literature and a knowledge of reality; he knows how a peasant, a criminal, speaks,” Muñoz Molina asserts. And he intones a mea culpa: “As a young man, fiction was everything to me. Little by little, I realized the arrogance that can exist in the artist and the need to try to make fiction more closely related to the real world. And to see the real world apart from fiction. As a child, I lived in nature, but I didn't see it. I began to look at nature when I was in my forties.”

And he addresses more aspects of Don Quixote . “For us, it's Cervantes' masterpiece, but in his time, what gave prestige was epic poetry. Don Quixote was a commercial success; it was quickly translated, but it didn't give him what he aspired to: recognition as part of the poetic elite. That's why he died editing Persiles and Sigismunda , with aristocratic characters, which he believed would give him that fame. It reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle, who for us is Sherlock Holmes, but for him it was a disgrace because he wanted to be considered a literary author and wrote long, dense historical novels.”

A Quixote that begins, he observes, as "a mixture of an Italian short novel and a slasher, and suddenly begins to expand and is like an explosion." A work in which the protagonist's madness "is not exactly the struggle of the ideal against the vulgarity of reality, but rather that of someone so steeped in theoretical abstractions that they have lost touch with reality and want to impose their mental construct on what is before them. Don Quixote, once convinced of something, is oblivious to reality and can be completely harmful," he warns. A reflection that Muñoz Molina brings to a timely reality that provokes "a lot of fear" in him.

"There are parties with governmental responsibilities that celebrate the Battle of Roncesvalles, even though it was fantastic."

“In the first part of Don Quixote , he doesn't want to see things. In the second, he's deceived. These are the two sides of being human. The ease with which we deceive ourselves and with which we can be deceived. It's always been there, but now the forces that lead you to self-deception and that deceive you are colossal; they can't be compared, not just with the 17th century, but with 30 years ago. And in the face of the triumph of destructive fiction and delirious fiction today, literature can help us be on guard, but there has never been a machine of deception, domination, and manipulation like the one we have now.”

And he cites "the fiction that immigrants are invading us and are going to Islamize Spain and Europe, a delirious and destructive fiction that convinces millions. And we see the Battle of Roncesvalles being celebrated again, that government parties are celebrating it despite its fantasy." "We are experiencing the mixture of the reactionary wave and the machinery of deception, of the elimination of reality. There is a toxic mix between the most primitive and these terrifying forces. Today we are much more alienated than Don Quixote," he concludes.