In Search of Don Quixote

In Cervantes' great novel of the early seventeenth century the main character, rattled by reading countless books on chivalry, wanders out into the Spanish countryside as a knight errant, bent on conquering villains and succoring damsels in distress, not knowing that the world of chivalry he is entering had disappeared over a century earlier. In his wanderings he consistently mistakes poor peasant women for princesses, inns for castles, and innkeepers for kings. He unfailingly mistakes priests and monks for villains. His true love is a poor maid he has never met who lives in a nondescript village he has never visited. He attributes his every defeat to the work of enchanters. His words are always elevated and righteous, his deeds deranged. His family and friends, sane, caring, and dull-witted, try to cure him in ways that reveal their own lunacy. We soon begin to feel that his disconnection from reality may not be uncommon. In his memoir, Fernandez recounts the Fulbright Lectureship that took him and his family to Spain where he taught a graduate seminar in organic chemistry at the University of Madrid. But a quite different pursuit soon captured him: the Quixotic pass-time of recording the lives of those men and women who follow the footsteps of the famous knight of La Mancha. Such people add sparkle, substance, and occasional exasperation to the lives they touch. One such person is a Cracker from the piney woods of north Florida, a major character in this memoir, who transplants himself into the Hispanic community of Ybor City (Tampa) as a postal employee, becomes a civic leader, politician and writer. And using the pseudonym of the Green Hornet (a popular radio crime drama of the day) he also becomes a crime fighter. Later he encourages his family to discover the wonders of Spain, their ancestral country of origin. This calm, pleasant, outgoing man seemed to enjoy living his active life in turbulent pursuits. Another character, a Spanish dandy, focuses exclusively on satisfying his every whim with humorous, but disastrous results. And there are many others: a man capable of heartfelt gratitude beyond imagining, an ancient artisan who makes wineskins he cannot bear to sell, a righteous woman of great rectitude who believes her son was conceived miraculously, an electrician who so fears electrocution that he cannot face his work without downing several shots of cognac, a landlord who cannot bear to vacate the house he rents out, a man who schemes to have his wife's dog murdered, hunters who board a train and refuse to buy their dogs tickets, a boy whose exciting leap lands him in a pond of manure, and finally a married couple who do not agree about which side bombed their homes during the 1936 - 1939 Spanish Civil War. For four centuries people of all nations have found the character of Don Quixote fascinating. Fernandez definitely does, and he seeks that character in everyone he meets. The reader may wonder why Don Quixote retains his fascination after four centuries. Could it be the knight's determination to play out his outlandish life in spite of the disapproval of all around him? Or can it be our submerged desire to do likewise.