Forty-first day of quarantine
Dear Fran,
The following email arrived yesterday:
«Mary, I am dedicating myself these days to search the archives for
photos that I took five, six or seven years ago and with the help of Photoscape
I work them a little, you know, I balance them, I give them a point up or down
in the contrast, another point from intensity to most, color enhancement to
quite a few and two oil point to artistic filter. Et voilà, a new photo. With any of them and with your ingenuity you
would get an impressive picture. Maybe impressionistic?
Let's leave the photos for the moment. Another of my occupations in this
necessary confinement is preparing my next trip. For this I immerse myself in
Google and with the doll I start to circulate through the streets of any city,
although where I go the last few weeks is Scotland. There are three cities and
many other towns that have seized my hand on the mouse: Perth, Aberdeen and
Inverness, along with Ballater, Kingussie and Rosehall. But since the planes,
hotels and destinations that I look at are going to be temporarily closed, when
I have been clicking on the maps for a while, zoom up, zoom down, desist and
change my activity.
It is then time for books. After a meticulous scrutiny, I start to
reread some of the books I have at home; and it is the case that I have picked
up the best book that nobody can have in their hands. The first time I read it,
I was just a youngster of nineteen or twenty; the second time, already married
and mollified by the impetus that hormones push to make up for the time between
being single and married, when I was thirty-something, I don't remember
exactly. The third one, now.
As you may have guessed the work is none other than don Quijote. Novel that, if it were not so little original, I would
say that it is the mother of all the novels that have been written from 1605 to
2020 and what is to come.
[Y en lo que dices que aquellos que allí van y vienen con nosotros son el
cura y el barbero, nuestros compatriotos y conocidos, bien podrá ser que
parezca que son ellos mesmos; pero que lo sean realmente y en efecto, eso no lo
creas en ninguna manera.]
Mary, in these lines of one of the paragraphs of chapter XLVIII, of the
First Part, almost at the end of it, we have solved the debate of those who
want to speak properly and without undermining the right that women have of
feeling protagonists, at least at the same level than what we men have, if not
even more.
Yes, you read correctly, compatriotos.
Cervantes puts in the mouth of the most famous knight-errant in the history of
knighthood, the remedy for the linguistic division I have just written above. The
priest and the barber are two men, then compatriotos.
And in the last chapter of the referred First Part, don Miguel reaffirms it:
[Acudieron todos a ver lo que en el carro venía, y, cuando conocieron a su compatrioto,
quedaron maravillados, y un muchacho acudió corriendo a dar las nuevas a su ama
y a su sobrina de que su tío y su señor venía flaco y amarillo, y tendido sobre
un montón de heno y sobre un carro de bueyes.]
Now it is the omniscient narrator, the mouth without intermediaries of
Cervantes, who describes that our compatrioto
returns to town in a cage.
Don't you think, my friend, that
since language is a living entity that it develops and suffers slanders and ‘she’
adapts to what it most needs, is crying out for this novelty of four hundred
years ago? Especially if the one who used it on such a remarkable occasion is
unanimously considered the great connoisseur of the most advanced ideas of his
time about literature and how to write books, which is as much as saying to
give life to the language.
For my part, and taught by such a distinguished writer, from now on I
will say compatrioto if I mean man, compatriota if I mean woman and compatriotes if both; and I will also
say maestro / man, maestra / woman and maestres / men and women. I promise to follow through on the case.
»
21481
21481
Y. a.
Mary
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