Cervantes Street by Jaime Manrique

Author:Jaime Manrique [Manrique, Jaime]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, ebook, book
ISBN: 9781617751073
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

During the brief hours when a thin shaft of afternoon sunlight pierced the darkness of my dungeon, I read and reread Lazarillo’s adventures until I memorized the little book. It was Lazarillo—more than the much-appreciated handfuls of food that Abu provided with some regularity—that sustained me and sweetened the hours in that fetid hole and made time move faster. Lazarillo’s picaresque adventures took me back to the Spanish soil from which I had been uprooted so long ago, and his tribulations and unbreakable peasant spirit alleviated momentarily the wretched conditions of my existence.

Confined to that damp, shallow grave, I learned to experience the passage of time in a new way. There was light—never more than a thread of it—and then there was monotonous gloom. Sometimes the darkness, and the eerie silence that accompanied it, seemed to last so long that only my bodily functions, and the chilling screams of the tortured in the dungeons of Arnaut Mamí, reminded me that I was still alive. I learned that I could illuminate the innumerable hours of soul-killing darkness with my glowing memories of Córdoba. So I revisited in my memory that city whose name was synonymous with pícaro; the city where alluring women sat knitting while facing each other on their window seats and pretended never to lift their dark eyes off their needlework—but when one of them met your gaze, great passions were awakened and men could lose their minds; that city of fabled leather artisans where the making of wool and silk was a great talent; that city that always resounded with tapping tambourines, shaking cymbals, and the piercing wails of the Moorish flutes imploring to the heavens. In my torture cell in Algiers, where water was more precious than gold, I remembered the city of my childhood whose cool streams flowed down from the springs in the Sierra Morena, making song as they splashed out of Córdoba’s fountains and then rushed down mosaic-lined channels in the Alcázar, filling the ponds that teemed with fat orange fish, and irrigated the flower beds in their gardens and the fruit trees in their orchards. The waters of the sierra brought with them cool breezes that felt like the caresses of hands oiled with balsams imported from the New World.

During those times when I began to lose hope—the only thing I possessed—I remembered too, with gladness in my heart, that city in whose gardens countless doves sang in unison all morning long, their music rising with the heat of the day, until your head was so swollen with it that you felt lost in the crescendo created by their feverish chorus; that city where flocks of swallows swelled at sunset, flying in such great numbers and so tightly together that they resembled airborne carpets sweeping the cross-topped towers of the churches and the needlelike tips of the minarets of the mosques. But foremost, I remembered that Córdoba was the birthplace of Seneca, whose philosophy of stoicism became important to me as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.