Blog 7 - Barbara - Placing the Reader

From one of my chapters, on Miguel Cervantes and William Shakespeare:

I rubbed by eyes and ran my hand over my doublet and over my heart. Still there, both of them. Same bouffant pants—my favorite—of the best Spanish suede. I looked at my feet. Yes. My favorite soft-leather boots, a la Madrilena. But my feet were cold. Wonder why I hadn’t made it under this soft coverlet—what? The wrong color! And my panoply, where—Oh, no! A different bed. My stomach gurgled—always did with a hangover. But what better way to celebrate my completed eight comedias than to lift a few cups with some friends? I remembered straggling home with Alfonso, and tripping over a cobblestone or two, a block away from home, in Valladolid, the court’s new home (for now, and don’t hold your breath, it’ll move again soon enough). But anyway, I had just stepped over the heavy wood-and-metal door to our building when something hit my head, or my head hit something. Those blasted flower pots were on the ground again. If I’d told Philomena once I’d told her—anyway she forgot to hang it back up with the others and I tripped against the door and hit my head on the knocker, a very interesting brass lion’s head holding a ring—I’d been wanting to write a poem about that knocker. If I don’t I just know someone else will, and become famous. Anyway, the last thing I remembered was the blackout after that impact, and the stars! Oh, my stars. I can still feel that bump over my right eye. How had I made it in here? I didn’t know this room. It must have been above our floor in the apartment building in Valladolid. I got up and staggered to the window. Where had my courtyard gone, with all the begonias and carnations in pots hung on the walls? And the ceramic-tiled fountain in the middle? And the slated roof and the little gargoyles? I could have been hallucinating from a—what does Antonio call them?—concussion, yes, one of those blows to the noggin that make you sick and you see things that aren’t there, like Don Quijote. And, speaking of Antonio, where had he gone? He always spent the night with me after a binge, a designated guide, you might call him. Well, I certainly had what Mother called an ostrich egg over my eye, but it only hut if I poked it. I was ready for breakfast. But neither my housekeeper Philomena, nor my wife, nor my daughter, nor my house was around. Why was I seeing thatched roofs? And those strange crossed timbers on the wall, black on tan. I’d never seen that anywhere in Spain—neither in Cordoba, Granada, Madrid, Alcazar de Henares, Valladolid—nor in Italy when I was young—Florence, Milan, Rome… Someone knocked. A young girl with two long blond tresses and a light-blue apron held a tray of steaming hot food I'd never seen before.