7. The Crazy Man

Dressed in mourning, with my beard cut like a Nazarene’s and my narrow brimmed hat, I must present a strange figure riding Platero’s soft grey back.

When on the way to the vineyards I across the last streets, bright with whitewash and sun, the gypsy children come running after us, shaggy and oily-smooth, showing tense brown bellies through their red, green, and yellow rags. They give long shrill cries of:

“The crazy man! The crazy man! The crazy man!”

Already the green fields lie before us, facing the vast pure sky of burning indigo, my eyes - how far removed from what I hear!- open nobly, receiving into their calm that nameless quietude, that divine, harmonious serenity which lives in the endlessness of the horizon.

There in the distance, among the high garden patches, a few sharp-pitched cries persist, finely veiled, intermittant, panting, tedious:

“The cra-azy man! The cra-azy man!”