When Cybil left me she gave me a copy of Don Quixote in the original Spanish, even though as she may not have known, but certainly should have assumed, I didn’t read Spanish. She was the only woman I ever slept with whom I assumed when I met would never sleep with me. In fact she did more than that. It was really incredible.
I thought about her quite fondly for years years, even to this day cause it’s not like you’d complain when a woman like that ultimately leaves you any more than you’d fault the setting sun. And I kept the copy of Don Q. on the shelf not opening it–merely storing it with all the others I have–and not learning Spanish.
I took I down, though, when I moved out of that old house on Madison and thought about tossing it into the box of old sweaters and coffee mugs that was going to the thrift store. I held it, that thick, impronounceable, unlikely book so unlike the woman who gave it to me. It couldn’t belong to me, I thought and I thumbed the pages back to front aerating them for the first time in 10 years, if it was a day. That’s when I saw the inscription.
To me, of course. It read:
This Book Makes No Sense In English: Love Always, Cybil.
Though now I want to more than anything, I still may never learn the Spanish Language.
-M
1 Comment
July 24, 2007 at 3:58 pm
[...] I recall a monologue or essay by David Sedaris or David Rakoff on how to appear more worldly and erudite in public than one actually is. David, whichever, advised when one was speaking of a profound book or writer, like Don Quixote, and is asked if one has read it to reply, “Well, not in English.” Assuming your companions are sycophantic and shallow that should usually be a stumper, and preclude having to divulge any more info which you do not know because, of course, you haven’t read it in spanish either. [...]