You stand at the mirror in your bathroom. You look at yourself in the mirror. You look for D’Artagnan leaping from the balcony to the back of the horse waiting for him in the lane. You hope to see the Black Corsair swinging from the mast of the Folgore at the attack on Maracaibo. You imagine, in your mirror, the Count of Monte Cristo—you yourself, young, with those motionless gray hairs daubed at your temples like a sea of stone—and you see in your mirror Alejandro Sevilla, yourself, filming The Seven Boys from Ecija, and you are all seven of them, you alone are all you need to incarnate the seven generous Spanish bandits of the eighteenth century. You are the hunchback Enrique de Lagardere, the gentleman in disguise to deceive the court of Louis XIII and save the honor of Blanche de Nevers . . . except that now, Alejandro, you can’t shake off the imaginary hump, it’s stuck to your body, the deformity isn’t made of rubber anymore, it’s made of bone, and then you shake your head so the mirror will give back to you the dashing figure of the masked Zorro, ready to defend violated justice in Old California.
