The new prince of Spanish ingenuity is the most Cervantes of the latest Cervantes Awards. Luis Mateo Díez has both the silhouette of Don Miguel and Don Quixote. The mustache and goatee could be the writer’s or the gentleman’s. He has such a reputation as a Cervantine that despite how little the horizontal and palatial Alcalá de Henares resembles his beloved Villablino, with its stone walls and flagstone roofs, no one was surprised on Tuesday to see him walking through its squares. Luis Mateo also shares with Cervantes that demiurgic capacity, which only talent allows, of having first fabled and then described imaginary lands to explain to us what happens in our and real lands. Luis Mateo Diez explained in the Auditorium of the auditoriums of letters and before the kings how Don Quixote was sown in him since he was a child and germinated in his work full, as was the hidalgo, of “heroes of failure” who fascinate by the desire to live life at all costs despite injuries and absences. Perhaps the Quixotic are the only credible heroes.
If Don Quixote, a book of books, is useful for anything, it is to explain humanity and the world, which are not always the same. Madness, irony, criticism, humor, vices, sanity, landscapes, customs and desires fit together without any looseness. I read yesterday that if only one book had to be given to the aliens so that they would understand humanity, despite the centuries, they would have to be given Don Quixote. When Luis Mateo received the Cervantes Prize, Luis Mateo also confessed the other side of writing. “Life is discovered by writing.” And it is profoundly true that one does not know what he thinks about things until the moment he decides to put them into a text. No one knows if they disagree with themselves until they change a comma for a period when rereading the argument. Reading and writing as an essential exercise of freedom. That’s what books are for. Read to understand others and write to understand yourself.
