Errant Destinations by Andrea Jeftanovic;

Author:Andrea Jeftanovic;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Doors and Ellipses

We spend our life opening and closing doors. The Puerta de Alcalá is in Madrid, the city where I lived in 1997. I had an internship in the School of Letters, which offered courses on the narrative, cinema, and theater arts. More than a formal educational institute, it was a space of creativity because the methodology of each course entailed writing exercises by which we ventured from narrative statements to dialogues, to dramatic scenes whereby character A recounted to character B grave news about character C, about whom the latter knew nothing. A situation, thirty minutes of writing, and a reading of those disconnected fragments, possible seeds of something. The professors indicated our errors, clichés, overwrought constructions, and, with luck, one phrase or another survived for that which we call literature. It was the era of Alejandro Gándara, Juan José Millás, Jesús Díaz, José Sanchís Sinisterra, José Miguel Corrales, Carlos García Gual. I doubt that they remember me. They were tough, demanding, sarcastic, but after class we went out for drinks, a situation that struck me as curious, given the formal, hierarchical nature of professor-student relations in Chile. I was intrigued that a third of the class was “on strike,” a tangible example of what is a state of wellbeing. As an example of the humanist landscape of that time, there were only two of us foreigners in the entire School: a Venezuelan and me. Globalization and migratory waves would come later.

The Puerta de Madrid is in Alcalá, the Puerta de Alcalá is in Madrid. I cross the Puerta de Madrid in 2010 to stay in Alcalá, where I was invited to take up a literary residency in the university as part of the Festival of the Word, an eclectic event that incorporates art, music, theater, and literature, and the essence of which is the awarding of the Cervantes Prize. On my first trip I recall that the taxi driver that drove me early in the morning from the Barajas Airport to my residence in the Puerta del Sol pointed out the Puerta de Alcalá as the first monument of the city. While we circled the roundabout in the scant light, he recounted the story of its construction by King Carlos III and urged me to examine the semicircular arches with the head of a lion, the Ionic capitals, and cornices. He was a taxi driver accustomed to transporting foreigners and he kept a well-worn tourist guide. While I listened to him, I glanced sideways at the Cibeles Fountain and the sculpture of two nude children. This time, upon arriving at Alcalá, the official driver of the University indicated for me the Puerta de Madrid: a façade of reddish brick, narrow streets, ancient walls. He tells me that we are crossing through one of the doors of the old walled sector, rebuilt in 1788 by the very same Carlos III. Three times Carlos, three doors: I remember the statue of the king mounted on a steed in the monument of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.

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