Umber Nuno is my brother’s alter-ego of Umberto Eco of all people, has just emailed me again, giving me a brief introduction to his latest work (which Umero had read to us at the Thanksgiving table, and which I eventually will post here, and which has the supremely stupid title: Il Knight, El Squiro, Da Wizard, y Del Map-O to ???). This introduction is so stupid and so funny to me that I am posting it here.
The Phantasm of the Counterintuitive
When I embarked on the journey towards the tower of words that ultimately became Il Knight, El Squiro, Da Wizard, y Del Map-O to ??? , I could hardly have foreseen the forest for the trees, an exquisite contradiction as much of the narrative concerns both forest and trees. A lonely night in Belize during the coldest night of the summer of 1973 was the birthplace for the exodus of this literary conundrum. Batting away the spiders and butter-churns that constantly inhabit my dream life, I seized upon the kernel of a rickety garden of decomposing flowers, alive and yet past the point of death. Without delving into simplicity for simplicity’s sake, there was a knight in my dream.
From my earliest days as a photo-journalist covering the uprising of immigrant stockbrokers in Pre-Delavian Panama, the subject of servitude and cosmopolitan insubordination has haunted me, a specter with the staying power of a middle reliever on those famous 1970’s Cuban barnstorming baseball teams. The representations of this fascination, negatives showing suited human males quietly shouting mutely while phones ring invisibly all around them, slowly merged with an almost preternatural subjugation into devilry and mischief and became a Marquez-ian White Whale, Ahab in a laundry room. I had to write.
Poring extensively through my long-deceased father’s notes, I quickly deciphered a pattern linking prolonged exposure to tin clothing of any kind and gout. Drawing a parallel between the bloated excesses of the parlor games of ether-drunk Finnish housewives and the reproductive traits of the African stoat was an obvious result, and with help from my long-time editor Gloria Tanaka, I avoided these pitfalls and steered directly down the Nile of the Bogart/Hepburn dramaturgical Queen.
Da Wizard was a complete surprise to me. Not having envisioned magic of any kind encroaching on the denouement, I resisted the birth of this character, going so far as to scribble out paragraph after paragraph that his fictional self insisted upon. His power, in the end, was greater than the futile “no” I uttered, and ultimately became the story’s only truly human character, in spite of his inherent connection to the world of the unreal. By the time 1980 rolled around and the three pages were painstakingly rounding into shape, I poured Kool-Aid containers worth of tears out of my benign eyes at the thought of losing a force of nature such as he to the whim of completion…
