But
I never intended to stop with Quixote in La Mancha. The meseta, after
all, is where the New World began; where the fleets were ordered west
into 'The End of the World.' Although Cervantes is Spain's most famous
writer, Jorge Luis Borges is his contemporary. He is a product of Argentina,
not of Spain; a symbol of the impact of Spain on the world. He is also
considered by many to be the world's most honored travel writer. He writes
of Quixote,
"Defeated
by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in 1614 in the town of his birth.
He is survived only a short time by Miguel de Cervantes. For both the
dreamer and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two
worlds; the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of
the seventeenth century. They never suspected that in the eyes of the
future, La Mancha and Montiel and the lean figure of the Knight of Mournful
Countenance would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sinbad or the
vast geographies of Ariosto. For in the beginning of literature there
is myth, as there is also in the end of it."
I
went out and buttoned my jacket and walked across a red-dirt field. The
sun was setting and the sky was orange and lavender. There were several
small buildings, and since I didn't know if this was a private residence,
I kept low while examining the whitewashed walls, the small and thick
windows and the five hundred year old red-tiled roofs. I learned that
this was a farm when I passed the chicken coupe, and understood the importance
of this architecture: in La Mancha the summers are devilish and the winters
freezing.
Nothing
can stabilize the temperature like these walls and tiny windows. At the
end of the farm, I found a pair of ceramic colanders half buried in mud.
Standing they would be ten feet tall. I dinged them with my knuckles and
peered inside - empty. Ralph later explained that these were the storage
units for olive oil.
"So how do you extract the oil?" I asked.
"The (wind) mills," he said, "They have these flat presses with an indent
for the oil. The press flattens the olives and the oil leaks into the
indents and runs into the barrels."
)
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