the book of my life
NoonAugust 26, 2022 – 08:55
“As a boy I used to get angry with Cervantes who made him suffer humiliating blows”
from eri de luca
I read the Quixote in high school as a reaction to the school reading of I promessi sposi. At that time he served as an antidote to me and set me up in taverns, the official residences of Quixote. We students of that time were forced to memorize pages of Manzoni’s prose: “Goodbye, mountains rising from the waters and elevated to the sky …”. I managed to get at least a little interested in the chapter about the plague epidemic in Milan: “she came down from the threshold of one of those doors and came towards the convoy, a woman …”. It was study to inculcate due obedience from the barracks. Quixote is without “don” for me. That fake title was a supplement of derision. In that controversial and grumpy age I also got angry with Cervantes who mortified his character by making him suffer blows and humiliations, subsequent to his traveggole. Quixote misunderstands reality, but he reacts by becoming emotionally involved, intervening in an attempt to right a wrong. Cervantes threw him upside down, he didn’t let him go smoothly.
To my greater spite was the comment of Sancho who remained inert in the rear as a perfect right-thinking man. His reasonableness was a ball chained to Quixote’s foot. Cervantes raged on Quixote by slipping him into the dead ends of his feverish imagination. Even a procession carrying a statue of the Madonna is seen by Quixote as a band kidnapping a girl and therefore in silent request for her liberating intervention. I give up on specifying the ruinous outcome of the misunderstanding. As a scholastically oppressed student, I admired Quixote’s idealism, his courage to engage in battle outnumbered and at an age that then seemed penultimate. At the end of each chapter I therefore had my young reasons to blame Cervantes.
I would have remained a discontented teenage reader if I hadn’t picked up the book many years later. I was in my fifties, the same age as Quixote, noticing an age that was not at all penultimate. He pushed me to the second reading the line of a poem by Nazim Hikmet dedicated to the character of Cervantes: “You are the invincible knight of the thirsty.” It was the opposite of the obvious: he hadn’t won a single one. He opened a window and in my second reading came the wind of Hikmet’s verse. I reread and found: after each defeat Quixote would get up bruised, wounded, but indomitable and ready for the next undertaking. I saw the second half that he had escaped me as a boy, stopping at his falls. Each of them corresponded to a rise from the blows and dust, as if drawing momentum and relaunch from any and every defeat.
Here is the fulminating adjective “invincible” for someone like him who cannot be overcome once and for all. Invincible without any victory is Quixote wandering, called to intervene on the tracks of the world on the saddle of an exhausted horse. After this reading I met Gian Maria Testa, singer, author of his songs. In his concerts he read some of my pages, so he suggested that I think of a stage evening with him and with Gabriele Mirabassi’s clarinet. I wrote Quixote and the Invincibles. He began with a praise from us admiring readers, to the point of changing our calculation of time. Cervantes had written Quixote 400 and broken years earlier and then we announced that we were in 400 and broken AD, that is, after Quixote.
We told stories of current invincibles, relying on the magnificent knight of Cervantes. For many evenings of various years we have carried our friendship around together with the story. In the last days of his incurable tumor, he had the strength to be accompanied to a session of the trial I was facing in Turin for having said that the bogus Turin-Lyon high-speed railway line had to be sabotaged. The struggle of the people of the Susa Valley was part of the narrative of the indomitable cited in our evenings. Today it is up to the parents of Taranto to stand in the breach of resistance against the havoc caused by Ilva to public health. PQM For these assorted reasons I name Quixote my favorite book of literature.
August 26, 2022 | 08:55
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