I climb into a bubble bath on a Friday evening with a red leaflet I had picked up the previous week by some outdoor bookstands in Madrid.
I realize it’s a leaflet about “Book Friday”, a project coinciding with the American “Black Friday". It recommends that people read a book rather than falling for the Black Friday appeal of discounted deals for other kinds of object. The day was the idea of Hugo Prestel, a third generation bookseller and a Madrid garbage collector. It celebrates, the leaflet says, “el objeto más enriquecedor y duradero: el libro” / “the most enriching and enduring object: the book.”
Speaking of lasting books, the Madrid trip re-introduced me to one in particular, Calderón de la Barca’s play “La Vida Es Sueño”, which was one of the books I’d studied as part of my Spanish courses back in university. We were staying in Alcalá de Henares, actually its own city albeit part of the Community of Madrid, as CMH had been invited to do some practices with Atletico, and that’s where one of their practice grounds is. It’s quite a way out, I thought, when first organizing things, then realized that Alcalá is a UNESCO heritage site and figured that may actually be kind of interesting, and it was.
On our last evening there, we took the short tour of the Corral de Comedias, a theater alongside Alcalá’s main square, Plaza Cervantes, that first opened in 1602. It wasn’t a regular tour. The guide recited a monologue. Her words, expressions and gestures transported us back through the stages of the theater’s life. She began right back when the theater was a patio, tucked between houses, and resident animals had to be shooed away to make room for the performers. In those early days the plays were religious, “translating” stories that were in Latin for people who did not understand Latin.
The theater then became a place for entertainment, a more official structure, where hundreds crammed in to watch long plays - calling out for lines to be repeated if they hadn’t heard them over the din of the audience. Women were in a cordoned-off area at the back, fanning themselves in the heat and using their fans to communicate with suitors in other parts of the theater. The theater established connections with the court in Madrid, linkages that meant it kept going when the majority of other corrals were shut down for their unsanitary conditions.
Eventually though it entered a period of decline, as people found other forms of entertainment. It became a cinema for a while, then students at Alcalá University researched its origins, took a look behind the movie screen and discovered the structure of the theater still largely intact, leading to its renovation and re-opening in the 2000s, done carefully and thoughtfully so that when you walk down under the stage you can still see the original patio, as well as a contraption that was used for people to magically disappear and reappear on stage, and a machine for making the sound of thunder. Earlier in the monologue the guide had shown us another machine, a spinning barrel that generated the sound of wind.
Some of Calderón de la Barca’s plays were performed there, says a sign near the theater entrance. I imagine one of them was La Vida es Sueño. Back at home, I dug my old copy off the shelves, pencil marks on all the pages, and marveled at the way these words have travelled across four centuries - books are lasting indeed.
That last evening that we were in Alcalá was the city’s Christmas lighting festival, and it was packed. Though a waiter told us that that is usually the case during the weekend in Alcalá, regardless of the season. What I had thought would be a sleepy town on the outskirts of Madrid turned out to be quite a party place. A procession of giants (a tradition from the early 1500s) arrived outside the town tall next to the theater, a stage hosted music that all generations could bop to and a small ferris wheel provided views of the festivities from up in the air.
A while later we returned to the theater for the evening’s performance. It happened to be a monologue too - “El maestro Juan Martínez que estaba allí" - this one transporting us to the life of a flamenco dancer traveling through Istanbul, Romania and then Russia just as the Russian revolution broke out in 1917. As the play draws to a close, Martinez is looking out from the Odessa docks to a boat that is likely taking him back, after six years of chaos and hardship, to Europe. Suddenly he feels frozen to the spot. What will “home” be like and will he be remembered? Which is real, he wonders, the life he left behind or the one he is about to return to? They are thoughts that echo Segismundo’s refrain in La Vida es Sueño:
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.”
“What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is small
As all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are but dreams.”
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