Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (69 page)

“May it please God,” replied Don Quixote. “I should like you to know, Señor, that I am in this cage because I have been enchanted through the envy and fraud of evil enchanters, for virtue is persecuted by evildoers more than it is loved by good people. I am a knight errant, not one of those whose names were never remembered by Fame or eternalized in her memory, but one who in spite of envy herself, and in defiance of all the magi of Persia, brahmans of India, and gymnosophists of Ethiopia, will have his name inscribed in the temple of immortality so that it may serve as an example and standard to future times, when knights errant can see the path they must follow if they wish to reach the honorable zenith and pinnacle of the practice of arms.”

“Señor Don Quixote of La Mancha is telling the truth,” said the priest. “He is enchanted, borne in this cart not because of his faults and sins, but on account of the evil intentions of those who are angered by virtue and enraged by valor. This, Señor, is the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, about whom you may have heard, whose valiant deeds and noble
feats will be inscribed on everlasting bronze and eternal marble no matter how Envy attempts to hide them or Malice to obscure them.”

When the canon heard both the prisoner and the free man speaking in this fashion, he almost crossed himself in astonishment, unable to imagine what had happened, and everyone with him felt the same astonishment. At this point Sancho Panza, who had approached in order to hear the conversation, wanted to put the finishing touches on everything and said:

“Now, Señores, you may love me or hate me for what I say, but the truth of the matter is that my master, Don Quixote, is as enchanted as my mother; he’s in his right mind, he eats and drinks and does what he has to do like other men, like he did yesterday before they put him in the cage. If this is true, how can you make me believe he’s enchanted? I’ve heard lots of people say that when you’re enchanted you don’t eat, or sleep, or talk, and my master, if he isn’t held back, will talk more than thirty lawyers.”

And turning to look at the priest, he continued, saying:

“Ah Señor Priest, Señor Priest! Did your grace think I didn’t know you? Can you think I don’t understand and guess where these new enchantments are heading? Well, you should know that I recognize you no matter how you cover your face and understand you no matter how you hide your lies. In short, where envy rules, virtue cannot survive, and generosity cannot live with miserliness. Devil confound it, if it wasn’t for your reverence, my master would be married by now to Princess Micomicona and I’d be a count at least, because I expected nothing less from the goodness of my master, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, and from the greatness of my services! But now I see that what they say is true: the wheel of fortune turns faster than a water wheel, and those who only yesterday were on top of the world today are down on the ground. I grieve for my children and my wife, for when they could and should have expected to see their father come through the door as a governor or viceroy of some ínsula or kingdom, they’ll see him come in a stableboy. I’ve said all this, Señor Priest, just to urge your fathership to take into account the bad treatment my master is receiving, and to be careful that God doesn’t demand an accounting from you in the next life for my master’s imprisonment, and make you responsible for all the boons and mercies my master, Don Quixote, can’t do while he’s in the cage.”

“I can’t believe it!” said the barber. “You, too, Sancho? In the same guild as your master? By God, you’ve taken in so much of his lunacy and
knighthood, it looks like you’ll be keeping him company in the cage and be as enchanted as he is! It was an unlucky day for you when he made you pregnant with his promises, an evil hour when you got that ínsula you want so much into your head.”

“I’m not pregnant by anybody,” responded Sancho, “and I’m not a man who’d let himself get pregnant even by the king, and though I’m poor I’m an Old Christian, and I don’t owe anything to anybody, and if I want ínsulas, other people want things that are worse; each man is the child of his actions, and because I’m a man I could be a pope, let alone the governor of an ínsula, especially since my master could win so many he might not have enough people to give them to. Your grace should be careful what you say, Señor Barber, because there’s more to life than trimming beards, and there’s some difference between one Pedro and the other. I say this because we all know one another, and you can’t throw crooked dice with me. As for the enchantment of my master, only God knows the truth, and let’s leave it at that, because things get worse when you stir them.”

The barber did not want to answer Sancho in case his simplicities uncovered what he and the priest had tried so hard to conceal; because of this same fear, the priest asked the canon to ride ahead with him, and he would explain the mystery of the caged man and tell him other things that he would find amusing. The canon did so, and moving ahead with his servants and with the priest, he listened attentively to everything the priest wished to tell him regarding the condition, life, madness, and customs of Don Quixote, which was a brief account of the origin and cause of his delusions and the series of events that had brought him to that cage, and the scheme they had devised to bring him home to see if they somehow could find a cure for his madness. The canon and his servants were astonished a second time when they heard Don Quixote’s remarkable story, and when it was ended, the canon said:

“Truly, Señor Priest, it seems to me that the books called novels of chivalry are prejudicial to the nation, and though I, moved by a false and idle taste, have read the beginning of almost every one that has ever been published, I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another. In my opinion, this kind of writing and composition belongs to the genre called Milesian tales,
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which are foolish
stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time. Although the principal aim of these books is to delight, I do not know how they can, being so full of so many excessively foolish elements; for delight conceived in the soul must arise from the beauty and harmony it sees or contemplates in the things that the eyes or the imagination place before it, and nothing that possesses ugliness and disorder can please us. What beauty, what proportion between parts and the whole, or the whole and its parts, can there be in a book or tale in which a boy of sixteen, with one thrust of his sword, fells a giant as big as a tower and splits him in two as if he were marzipan, and, when a battle is depicted, after saying that there are more than a million combatants on the side of the enemy, if the hero of the book fights them, whether we like it or not, of necessity we must believe that this knight achieves victory only through the valor of his mighty arm? What shall we say of the ease with which a hereditary queen or empress falls into the arms of an errant and unknown knight? What mind, unless it is completely barbaric or untutored, can be pleased to read that a great tower filled with knights sails the seas like a ship before a favorable wind, and is in Lombardy at nightfall, and by dawn the next day it is in the lands of Prester John of the Indies, or in others never described by Ptolemy or seen by Marco Polo? If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing. I have seen no book of chivalry that creates a complete tale, a body with all its members intact, so that the middle corresponds to the beginning, and the end to the beginning and the middle; instead, they are composed with so many members that the intention seems to be to shape a chimera or a monster rather than to create a well-proportioned figure. Furthermore, the style is fatiguing, the action incredible, the love lascivious, the courtesies clumsy, the battles long, the language foolish, the journeys nonsensical, and, finally, since they are totally lacking in intelligent artifice, they deserve to be banished, like unproductive people, from Christian nations.”

The priest listened with great attention, and thought the canon a man of fine understanding who was correct in everything he said, and so he told him that since he held the same opinion, and felt a good deal of animosity toward books of chivalry, he had burned all of Don Quixote’s, of which there were many. He recounted the examination he had made of them, those he had condemned to the flames and those he had saved, and at this the canon laughed more than a little and said that despite all the bad things he had said about those books, he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, describing shipwrecks, storms, skirmishes, and battles; depicting a valiant captain with all the traits needed to be one, showing him to be a wise predictor of his enemy’s clever moves, an eloquent orator in persuading or dissuading his soldiers, mature in counsel, unhesitating in resolve, as valiant in waiting as in the attack; portraying a tragic, lamentable incident or a joyful, unexpected event, a most beautiful lady who is virtuous, discreet, and modest or a Christian knight who is courageous and kind, an insolent barbarian braggart or a prince who is courteous, valiant, and astute; and representing the goodness and loyalty of vassals and the greatness and generosity of lords. The writer can show his conversance with astrology, his excellence as a cosmographer, his knowledge of music, his intelligence in matters of state, and perhaps he will have the opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a necromancer, if he should wish to. He can display the guile of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon,
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the friendship of Euryalus,
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the liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency and truthfulness of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus,
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the prudence of Cato, in short, all of those characteristics that make a noble man perfect, sometimes placing them all in one individual, sometimes dividing them among several.

“And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention,
and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as in verse.”

CHAPTER XLVIII

“It is just as your grace says, Señor Canon,” said the priest, “and for this reason the books of this kind that have been written so far are most worthy of rebuke, their authors caring nothing for solid discourse or the art and rules that could have guided them and made them as famous in prose as the two princes of Greek and Latin poetry are in verse.”

“I, at least,” replied the canon, “have felt a certain temptation to write a book of chivalry in which I followed all the points I have mentioned, and, to tell the truth, I have already written more than a hundred pages. In order to learn if they correspond to my estimation of them, I have given them to intelligent, learned men who are very fond of this kind of reading, and to other men who are ignorant and care only for the pleasure of hearing nonsense, and from all of them I have received a most agreeable approval; even so, I have not pursued the matter further, for it not only seemed unsuited to my profession, but I also saw that the number of simpleminded men is greater than that of the prudent, and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools, I do not wish to subject myself to the confused judgment of the presumptuous mob, who tend to be the ones who read these books. But what most influenced me to put the task of finishing it out of my mind was an argument I had with myself, based on the plays that are produced now, and the argument said:

‘If all, or almost all, the plays that are popular now, imaginative works as well as historical ones, are known to be nonsense and without rhyme or reason, and despite this the mob hears them with pleasure and thinks of them and approves of them as good, when they are very far from being so, and the authors who compose them and the actors who perform them say they must be like this because that is just how the mob wants them, and no other way; the plays that have a design and follow the story as art demands appeal to a handful of discerning persons who understand them, while everyone else is incapable of comprehending their artistry; and since, as far as the authors and actors are concerned, it is better to earn a living with the crowd than a reputation with the elite, this is what would happen to my book after I had singed my eyebrows trying to keep the precepts I have mentioned and had become the tailor who wasn’t paid.’
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And although I have attempted at times to persuade the actors that they are mistaken in thinking as they do and that they would attract a larger audience and gain more renown with artful plays than with nonsensical ones, they are so bound and committed to their opinion that there is no argument or evidence to make them change their minds. I remember that one day I said to one of these stubborn men: