Brick a wall

ILLUSTRATION BY JORGE F. HERNÁNDEZ

“One of the remedies that the priest and the barber gave at that time for the evil of their friend was that they wall him up and wall the room with the books, because when he got up he would not find them - perhaps removing the cause the effect would cease - and let them say that a charmer had taken them, and the room and everything;

and this was done with great alacrity ”, Cervantes writes in so few lines the transience with which Alonso Quijana's library vanishes as a supposed remedy to the healthy disease of books that led him to go out alone and against the winds to compose the world, return to the ground and then wake up from fainting to go precisely to the exact place where his books were found like someone who goes to the first aid kit.

Don Quixote runs his hands over the empty wall and interprets the disappearance as the contraption of some charming bum, a malevolent magician who has disappeared what would seem to be the indispensable fuel of his imagination.

I often recall the unexpected desolation that Don Quixote's passage associates with the constant changes of a life on the move, and I am amazed that the suffering caused by certain shipwrecks resembles the desperate morning when Don Quixote cannot find his books or shelves. : only the brick wall, whitewashed as a metaphor for emptiness.

The truth is that over the years and the rain of certain gray hair, the passage is conformed not as a defeat without solution, but the subtle explanation that the true owner of his imagination and creativity has to undertake - against all odds of cures and barbers - one more exit to cross the fields of Montiel, now accompanied by a faithful squire, multiplying the indescribable madness of vanishing oneself from the daily monotony and embarking on another free adventure and with no other destination than to undo all the wrongs and fix all the tangles that cloud the vision of any landscape.

Don Quixote does not give up or vanquish before the empty wall and even if the tips of his fingers pass over the wall with which the library has been bricked up, it will be the strength of his memory and the impulse of his instinct who spin not only the possible magical explanation with which bricklaying lies are assumed, but the pure vitality with which he regains strength, ingenuity and courage for the tenacious return to the conquest of the entire world.

In the fall of 1987 I bought the Daniel Gil design edition of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote in two volumes because I was attracted by the comfortable box containing both volumes, the underlining typography in different colors and with enough margin spaces to navigate the reading with all the annotations that whipped me at 25 years of age.

Above all, I bought Don Quixote at the Casa del Libro in Gran Vía because it seemed urgent to read it having arrived in Madrid with the intention of getting a doctorate in its classrooms and streets and squares and taverns of yesteryear and there was a lot of shame in just citing scenes that came from more from the films about Don Quixote than from the pure reading of its paragraphs.

For months I sailed the whole of Spain carrying the best story ever told in a blue backpack and it is until now, decades after reading the same book every year, that I resign myself to digesting as an unexpected gratification weighted the convinced belief that the walls covered with so many Past illusions have not been more than incentives to prop up the memory of everything memorable and to know how to forget everything that had actually been ballast and an obstacle to come out on the white flat of a new page that has to be written with the calligraphy of the tachycardia and the emotion of all the imagined illusion so recovered ... that there is no wall to cover it.

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