Photo: Lucie Leclerc
In addition to the information shared by Chris Adyle, I found this text on the website of the Cuba Cooperation France Association.
"In the Plaza de San Francisco two old ladies wipe a bronze figure. First the beautiful beard, almost golden because of so many hands of passers-by. Then the index finger of the left hand, beautiful enough to make the nail disappear and the knuckles exquisitely modeled by the sculptor José Villa Soberón.
They make a wish under the influence of some tourist guides and popular mythology that seems to gradually give him the character of an urban saint. Among several statues in Havana, this one stands out. It is one of the few in the world dedicated to a madman.
A man who lived his harmless megalomania as a symbol of freedom
Few hallucinators have had the popularity of José María López Lledín
although no one remembers him that way. He went down in history with a romantic name: the Knight of Paris. Dressed rigorously in black, always with a cape, he could arouse envy among rockers or scientists with his long, falling hair.
He did not earn his marauding nickname between the bohemian Montparnasse or in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It seems that he was born on December 30, 1899 in Fonsagrada, a population of the indigenous community of Galicia, in Spain. I said, it seems, because in this story everything is appearance, fertilized thanks to the capacity of its protagonist fabulist.
Fonsagrada was very small. Today, only a few thousand inhabitants have remained behind the step of modernity. Like so many Galicians, José López Lledín abandoned his city to seek his fortune and in 1913 he arrived on board a German ship in Havana, a city he would never leave.
Before being "the Knight", he worked in a grocery store, a flower shop, a bookstore, a lawyer's office and a boutique. He also served with distinction and some knowledge of English in the hotels Telégrafo, Inglaterra, Saratoga and Sevilla, places where he perfected the princely manners that made him famous. Between 1914 and 1920 he kept himself as a healthy person. He saved money, sent something to his parents in Spain and helped his sister Inocencia, also an immigrant on the island.
What caused his madness? All sources agree: an unjust imprisonment in the prison of the Château caused his paraphrenia, a delusion of grandeur, imaginative and persistent that possessed him for half a century. He was arrested because of the sale of a fake lottery ticket, was accused of a murder in which he had been an accomplice, of stealing jewels or at least he was opposed to a jealous husband. Who knows? There are no testimonies only those of the prints in the press of the time, contradictory testimonies of his parents and his relations.
What is true is that in the prison of the castle (here begins his sagacity) José María declared himself indistinctly Pope, King and Knight errant, gave speeches and spent nights of anguish due to the denigrating treatment to which he was reduced, being of a noble lineage and lord of the army. The writer Eduardo Robreño in his book Como me lo contaron te lo cuento, maintains that Lledín came out free six years later with the "cloudy understanding".
In 1928, he strolled through the Park of Christ, with his long white hair, without shaving and he only asked for respect from his subjects. When he was greeted with a cry of "Chevalier D'Artagnan", "Chevalier de Paris" he answered stammering and nodded his head kindly. According to Doctor Luis Calzadilla, biographer of the singular character, even the President of the Republic in 1949 interceded to let him free in the city after a brief internment in the psychiatric hospital. With great enthusiasm he extended his power to the whole known world: the Promenade del Prado, the Avenida del Port, the church of Paula, the street Muralla, the corner of Infanta and San Lázaro. At the banks of the Central Park he camped a few times. From 1959 he took Vedado and made incursions into streets 23 and 12, around the Cinecittá restaurant.
He knocked on the doors of a few houses and left a few invitations decorated with meaningless phrases, but he didn't ask for anything for it. He never accepted alms. He accepted funerals that he paid for with a relic from his hallucinated world: painted napkins, dry leaves or pieces of pencils with colored threads.
In any park, with infules of Alfonso X (the Wise) and a refined language, he would discourse on life and religion, politics, monarchy and empires, fabulous and distant lands, imagined battles for peace or he would recall the orders given to the Pope so that he would pay homage to his friends.
In December 1977 he returned to the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana not because of his quiet dementia, but because of his advanced age and fragile health. Celia Sánchez, a guerrilla and close collaborator of Fidel Castro, requested a comfortable environment for him and gave him two suits and ties with a cape.
Upon his arrival, a team from Commander Bernabé Ordaz, the Director of the Institution, cleaned the old man, untangled and braided his mystical hair full of insects. Tired, surrounded by lackeys in white, he retired and played at being God: "I am the king of the world because the world is always at my feet. Do not look at the dirty loafers. Look at the sidewalk, look at the earth, look at the pavement, everything is below me" he confessed to his psychiatrist.
And the king of the world, the human explanation of this city, died at 1:45 on July 11, 1985. He left the legacy of a teaspoon, a Venezuelan 25-cent coin, some magazine clippings about Enrique Caruso, the presentation card of a home masseur, small pictures of some saints, several photos of himself and the Christian mandates. Also a handful of legends and songs about a man who lived his harmless megalomania as a symbol of freedom, in an era without places for aristocrats and knights errant.
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