The first impression is that she is crazy, like Don Quixote de la Mancha, a knight errant who, from reading chivalric novels so much, lost his mind and left home to “undo wrongs.” Angeles Carmona, street actress, 60 years old, and with a resume that scares, she doesn’t have a hair of madness, or she has all of her white hair because of literature, the scene and the arts. Amid the bustle reactivated by the pseudo-end of the pandemic, it can be found in various parts of the Historic Center of Toledo, from the Arco de la Sangre to the Plaza de Zocodover; or in the Alcaná next to the primada cathedral, scene where Miguel de Cervantes located the origin of his
universal novel to the rescue of some scrolls written by a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli.
Woman or man, what difference does it make. Carmona is the essence of the best known and perhaps least read protagonist in the history of literature by the general public. In the distance, his lean figure surmounted by a brass funnel has futuristic airs, and on the old thousand-year-old cobblestones of the streets of Toledo he trots, challenges, recites, twists, fights and suffers like Don Quixote, while the neighbors and tourists of the capital of Castilla-La Mancha watch in amazement, others amazed, and there are even who lightens the pace to meet such a character.
If you stand before Ángeles Carmona you realize that she has brought poor Alonso Quijano to the strike queue, as stated in the poster that she places next to her while she develops her show, two scarce square meters of Toledo street where she counts those who want listen to ‘Don Quixote’. And it does it in Spanish, English, French and Basque, because of the fact that he was born in San Sebastián even though he has lived in Toledo for 22 years. The show lasts an hour and a half and is an extract from the first 25 chapters. Work gives her to eat, but she does not ask for much more because her world is imagination and not the mainland, the one that did step next to her master Sancho Panza, which does not appear anywhere.
Love for the Golden Age
The constipation that he caught a few days ago due to the cold street has postponed our meeting, which takes place in the ABC newsroom, suitcase in hand, already changed clothes and closed the ‘chiringuito’. She says that before the pandemic an Australian theater company invited her to lunch after admiring her performance. Later, when the coronavirus locked people at home, it received from them a transfer of 1,500 euros “Because, dear friend, we are very worried about you, what you are going to live on.” «I act because I like it, but my thing is the dissemination of knowledge. I have a great facility to transform all the authors of the Golden age in something easy, simple and attractive, which is very difficult, and to make it reach the general public “, she explains excitedly, and says that she reached the current character after many dramatized routes, conferences and other acts, her work outside the cultural world ‘ officer ‘, so forgetful. «I saw myself on the street and I had nowhere to eat, like the turtles in ‘I Ching’, which live on air. That is how what I do now arose », adds this Quixote with an egg carton breastplate and shield (« Don Quixote had eggs, you have to have eggs to go out on the street », he says); at the bottom there was a brass funnel that he found in an abandoned house and that a woman told him was to make sausages, and four reeds that he collected from the Tagus River as a spear, in addition to a microphone so as not to become hoarse. “I wear four years with total successI make a living from it, from what goes into the pot, I have no other job. And I’m here every day. At least, the City Council has provided him with plastic bands to protect his street scene from the circulating virus.
Now she is excited because her adaptation of ‘Don Quixote’ is going to take the form of a book with the title of ‘Don Quixote Express‘, in Celya Editorial. “People do not read the entire ‘Quixote’, but they do read 50 pages where the story is told,” he adds, although what he really dreams of is going to schools telling children the most outstanding works of literature as stories Spanish. Provided that the famous gentleman leaves the unemployment lists and does not have to emigrate to Australia.
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