Cervantes Street (38 page)
Later that night, I found Luis dead in his library, a copy of Cervantes’s
Don Quixote Part II
on his lap.
I lived on.
April 22, 1616
My own farts—detonating like small revolvers—startle me awake. For days, these sulfurous explosions my body makes, as if to remind me my final rotting has already begun, are the only messages I send the living.
Outside my bedroom I can hear chirruping sparrows in the courtyard, splashing in the birdbath and beating their wings, as if to chase away the chilly days and cold nights of winter; as if they are celebrating the impending return of a season of abundance and light. Today, their merry chirps sadden my last hours on earth, as they are a reminder I will not live to see another summer dress in green the red plains of Castile. If the chirruping of the sparrows is a prelude to my final departure from this life, I’m ready.
So, my story, the story of a man with a long, lean face, brown hair, smooth and high forehead, merry eyes, hooked yet well-proportioned nose, silver beard (which just twenty years ago was gold), wide mustache, small mouth, teeth neither small nor big, of which he has only six diseased and badly matched ones placed randomly in his gums, a body neither large nor undersized, a vivid complexion more white than brown, somewhat hunched and slow on his feet—the story of that man, my story, comes to an end, the way all earthly things must.
As the priest gives me the Last Rites, and I hear crying—my wife? my sisters?—growing fainter, as the darkness gathers around me, dimming the shapes of the world, as my skin begins to cool, anticipating the coolness of the ground, I glimpse a moment in the future (it must be the future because everything is brighter, and faster) when a man will outdo Avellaneda’s
Don Quixote Part II
and accomplish the impossible feat of writing the exact same
Don Quixote
I wrote, word by word, in just a few pages; this masterpiece, in turn, will be followed by an explosion of
Don Quixotes
(which people in that future time will be able to read in the air, and every page they read will disappear as soon as they are done reading it); and in that distant time, in all the known languages—and even the languages that died long ago, leaving no trace of them—people will also read Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s false and monstrous
Don Quixote Part II
and not care that it is a heinous theft, a vulgar distortion, an abomination of man’s intelligence, until, after a while, as the texts flow toward each other in the air, finally blending into one, no one will know anymore the real from the false characters, nor who I, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, its true creator, was. And the people of that future time will think that
Don Quixote
is an ancient tune; nothing but a song about a man and his dream.
The End
I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people who generously gave of their time to help with the multiple facets of the research that went into
Cervantes Street
: in Spain, to the poet Dioniso Cañas for an eye-opening tour of the places in La Mancha where many of
Don Quixote
’s most famous scenes are set; to my good friend Eduardo Lostao, my guide in Madrid and Alcalá de Henares; and to José Luis Lara, my Virgil in Esquivias. A very special thanks to Ghassan Zeineddine, who accompanied me during a memorable trip to Algeria, Rome, and Greece; to Robert Parks of CEMA, whose invitation to lecture in Oran made it possible for us to obtain a visa to travel to Algeria, who arranged a memorable tour of the casbah, and who introduced me to his Cervantista friends in that country.
I’m also deeply grateful to Pilar Reyes, who acquired the Spanish rights to the novel when I was beginning to write it; and to my agents Tom and Elaine Colchie, for accompanying me in the life-changing adventure that became the creation of this book.
Finally, my thanks once more to my dear friends Jessica Hagedorn, Maggie Paley, and Robert Ward, for their encouragement and steadfast support.
___________________
In a 2004 poll of many of the most celebrated living writers,
Don Quixote,
the seventeenth-century novel written by Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, was chosen as the greatest novel of all time. Arguably, it is the most influential novel ever written, having inspired writers as varied as Doestoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Borges, García Márquez, and Kundera, just to name a few. The images of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and Sancho Panza, his bawdy and bulky sidekick, are part of the cultural unconscious of millions of people all over the world. Works of fiction from
Huckleberry Finn
to the Sherlock Holmes detective stories have exploited the conceit of the foolish, reckless hero and his simpleminded but good-hearted sidekick. And yet, given the celebrity of Cervantes's masterpiece and his archetypal two main characters, the number of people who have actually read the entire novel is small. For most people in the English-speaking world, any mention of Don Quixote brings to mind the musical Man of La Mancha and the irresistible tune "To Dream the Impossible Dream."
The biographical information about Miguel de Cervantes is fairly sketchy. There are whole periods of his life about which little is known. Born in 1547 to a family whose "purity of blood" could not be proven, Cervantes lived under a shadow of being of Jewish ancestry. He held jobs—such as tax collector—that were traditionally reserved for Jews. He was denied his request for a position as a servant of the Spanish Crown in South America probably because he was not considered a "true" Christian. During Cervantes's lifetime Spain was one of the most intolerant nations in the world: all Jews had been expelled from Spain by Queen Isabel the Catholic in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed on his grand voyage of discovery, and the ones who remained behind had to convert or tried to hide their religious heritage. Barely a hundred years later, all Spaniards of Arab descent were also banned from Spanish soil, even if their families had converted centuries earlier to Catholicism.
In Don Quixote, widely considered the first work of metafiction for all its postmodern innovations, which continue to inspire contemporary novelists, Cervantes addresses many of the burning issues of his time: the decadence and cruelty of the immensely wealthy Spanish monarchs and aristocrats, and the extreme poverty of the Spanish people, who were among the most destitute Europeans in the sixteenth century.
—Jaime Manrique
___________________
1.
What do you know about the period of Spanish history known as the Golden Age? What do you know about the great writers and painters that Spain produced at that time? In
Don Quixote,
Cervantes makes many references to the Golden Age. How does
Cervantes Street
depict Spain as living through a Golden Age?
2.
Cervantes was a captive in Algiers for five and a half years at a time when slavery was one of the major trades in the Mediterranean and tens of thousands of Europeans were abducted by Algerian pirates who then sold them into slavery, or held them as captives for ransom. In
Cervantes Street
, how does Manrique depict the profound effect that Cervantes's captivity had on the writing of
Don Quixote
and several of his other works?
3.
What do you know about the novel now called
The Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha
, which appeared in 1615, before Cervantes published in 1616 his long-awaited
Don Quixote Part II
? The author of the
Ingenious Gentleman
, now commonly known as "the false Don Quixote," published his novel under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a pseudonym. How did the appearance of Avellaneda's
Ingenious Gentleman
affect Cervantes's writing of his own
Don Quixote Part II?
4.
Jealousy, envy, and hatred are some of the main themes explored in
Cervantes Street
. What happens to the characters who allow themselves to be dominated by these emotions?
5.
What do you think of Jaime Manrique's techniques of appropriating, and rewriting, portions of
Don Quixote,
and other works by Cervantes, and doing the same with
The Ingenious Gentleman
? Can you think of other writers who have used techniques of appropriation to rewrite classic works of fiction?
6.
Cervantes Street
is narrated by three voices. How does the author differentiate these voices? Which one is your favorite and why?
7.
How is
Cervantes Street
relevant to our times? The subject of slavery—including sexual slavery—is also one of the novel's main themes, as well as the war to the death between the Ottoman Empire (of which Constantinople was its capital) and the Christian nations of Europe. How are these conflicts similar to the tensions that exist today between the liberal Christian west and the conservative Muslim world?
8.
Is Manrique's depiction of the condition of women in
Cervantes Street
sympathetic? What have you learned about how women were treated at that time? Of the women in the novel, who do you think is the most fully realized, and why?
9.
What do you think of Manrique's depiction of Luis Lara, a.k.a. Avellaneda, considering that he is the villain? Is Luis Lara a caricature, or is he a complex creation? Despite his malevolent spirit, does Lara hold the interest of the reader?
10.
Did you find
Cervantes Street
engrossing, or is it a hard read? And why?
Jaime Manrique is a novelist, essayist, and poet. His critically acclaimed novels include
Latin Moon in Manhattan
and
Our Lives Are the Rivers.
He is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the City College of New York.
___________________
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