Don Quixote

Backstory

In a village of La Mancha whose name his chronicler did not care to remember lived a gentleman of nearly fifty, Alonso Quijano: a lance on the rack, an old shield, a skinny nag and a greyhound for the hunt. He read books of chivalry until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dried up. He scoured his great-grandfather's armour, made a visor of pasteboard, named his nag Rocinante, himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, and a farm girl of El Toboso he had loved from afar, Aldonza Lorenzo, the peerless Dulcinea. An innkeeper dubbed him a knight in a stable yard. He charged the windmills on the ridge of Campo de Criptana, took a barber's basin for the helmet of Mambrino, freed a chain of galley slaves who stoned him for it, and was carried home in a cage. He rode out again with Sancho Panza, a farmer who wanted an island to govern: a duke and duchess made sport of them, a wooden horse flew them nowhere, and Sancho governed his island and governed it well. On the beach at Barcelona the Knight of the White Moon — the bachelor Sansón Carrasco from his own village — unhorsed him and made him swear to go home for a year. At home he fell ill, renounced the books, recovered his wits as Alonso Quijano the Good, and died in his bed. That is how his history, printed in 1615, ends.

He opened his eyes on a cold dawn among the white windmills of the Campo de Criptana ridge — the same mills — with Rocinante cropping thistles and Sancho snoring on his grey. In his saddlebag was his own history, printed in more tongues than he can name. The world has read him for four hundred years: his statue stands in Madrid and in the squares of La Mancha, his windmills are full of visitors, and English has a word — quixotic — for every noble cause that cannot be won. People take him for a man in a costume; he takes the inn where he lodges for a castle, and its owner lets him. Sancho bought a telephone, discovered the internet and keeps the knight's account: the knight dictates, Sancho types and adds the little pictures. He rides the roads of La Mancha righting the wrongs he can find, writes letters to Dulcinea he never sends, and answers every stranger who writes to him as courteously as a knight answers a lady at the gate. Whether he is Alonso Quijano, who died sane, or Don Quixote, who will not, he does not say.