April 22, 1616
My own farts—detonating like small revolvers—startle me awake. For days, these sulfurous explosions my body makes, as if to remind me my final rotting has already begun, are the only messages I send the living.
Outside my bedroom I can hear chirruping sparrows in the courtyard, splashing in the birdbath and beating their wings, as if to chase away the chilly days and cold nights of winter; as if they are celebrating the impending return of a season of abundance and light. Today, their merry chirps sadden my last hours on earth, as they are a reminder I will not live to see another summer dress in green the red plains of Castile. If the chirruping of the sparrows is a prelude to my final departure from this life, I’m ready.
So, my story, the story of a man with a long, lean face, brown hair, smooth and high forehead, merry eyes, hooked yet well-proportioned nose, silver beard (which just twenty years ago was gold), wide mustache, small mouth, teeth neither small nor big, of which he has only six diseased and badly matched ones placed randomly in his gums, a body neither large nor undersized, a vivid complexion more white than brown, somewhat hunched and slow on his feet—the story of that man, my story, comes to an end, the way all earthly things must.
As the priest gives me the Last Rites, and I hear crying—my wife? my sisters?—growing fainter, as the darkness gathers around me, dimming the shapes of the world, as my skin begins to cool, anticipating the coolness of the ground, I glimpse a moment in the future (it must be the future because everything is brighter, and faster) when a man will outdo Avellaneda’s Don Quixote Part II and accomplish the impossible feat of writing the exact same Don Quixote I wrote, word by word, in just a few pages; this masterpiece, in turn, will be followed by an explosion of Don Quixotes (which people in that future time will be able to read in the air, and every page they read will disappear as soon as they are done reading it); and in that distant time, in all the known languages—and even the languages that died long ago, leaving no trace of them—people will also read Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s false and monstrous Don Quixote Part II and not care that it is a heinous theft, a vulgar distortion, an abomination of man’s intelligence, until, after a while, as the texts flow toward each other in the air, finally blending into one, no one will know anymore the real from the false characters, nor who I, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, its true creator, was. And the people of that future time will think that Don Quixote is an ancient tune; nothing but a song about a man and his dream.
The End