Cervantes’ House
Mills and Loon
Today, having a black hole in my teaching schedule, I went down to the centre of Alcalá de Henares to visit the house of the town’s most famous son – Miguel Cervantes – author of ‘El ingenioso caballero don Quixote de la Mancha.’ ( know to its friends as just Don Quixote.)
I don’t know what the illustrious lights of the Town Council are playing at but if I were custodian of the house of the nation’s most famous writer, I’d make it a little more interesting.
I was greeted by a security guard who intoned the litany of what I could not do and then pointed to a room. It was an anodyne arrangement of furniture that could have been from a fifth form production of The Crucible. There was no atmosphere. No sense of it being a special place. I felt so sorry for the teachers who had brought their charges here in the hope of igniting some passion for literature.
Upstairs there were some copies of Quixote from variious times and places but again no sense of the importance of the work. The contrast with how the English treat and package Shakespeare – the sheer bardolatry of it all – was striking and sad.
I have been in dentists’ waiting rooms that had more sense of occasion and gravitas. This sad non-thing of a house-cum- municipal office must have Cervantes spinning in is grave. Cervantes the Drill, the angels will be calling him.
