I don't know what Alonso Quixano had inside him that made him go mad. I don't know what made him wake up one morning and put a bedpan on his head, calling himself a knight errant and dragging his poor old horse out of her comfortable pasture on a warm June day with the cool shade of an olive tree nearby. It may be the very same madness that lives inside me, that made me agree to read a chapter of Don Quixote (in the original Spanish) in front of 100 or so people in honour of the 400th anniversary of its publication. Maybe old Alonso Quixano's spirit left his body as he charged at those windmills the same way my brain left my body when the time came to read in front of all those native Spanish speakers. Or maybe he would've blocked it all out of his memory like I did and thought the whole experience just a dream. The both of us waking up the next day with the name Dulcinea on the tips of our tongues.
This piece of flash fiction was inspired by Jennifer Keys Lavallee, '06 BA, who still has horrifying flashbacks of reading Don Quixote out loud in her 400-level Spanish class. Submit your own memory at newtrail@ualberta.ca
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