Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (85 page)

When Sancho Panza had this idea his spirit grew calm, and he considered his business successfully concluded, and he stayed there until the afternoon so that Don Quixote would think that he’d had time to go to Toboso and come back; and everything went so well for him that when he stood up to mount the donkey, he saw that coming toward him from the direction of Toboso were three peasant girls on three jackasses, or jennies, since the author does not specify which they were, though it is more likely that they were she-donkeys, for they are the ordinary mounts of village girls, but since not much depends on this, there is no reason to spend more time verifying it. In short: as soon as Sancho saw the peasant girls, he rode back as fast as he could to look for his master, Don Quixote, and found him heaving sighs and saying a thousand amorous lamentations. As soon as Don Quixote saw him, he said:

“What news, Sancho my friend? Shall I mark this day with a white stone or a black?”

“It would be better,” responded Sancho, “for your grace to mark it in red paint, like the names of the professors,
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so that everybody who looks can see it clearly.”

“That means,” replied Don Quixote, “that you bring good news.”

“So good,” responded Sancho, “that all your grace has to do is spur Rocinante and ride into the open and you’ll see the lady Dulcinea of Toboso, who is coming to see your grace with two of her damsels.”

“Holy God! What are you saying, Sancho my friend?” said Don Quixote. “Do not deceive me, or try to lighten my true sorrows with false joys.”

“What good would it do me to deceive your grace,” responded
Sancho, “especially since you’re so close to discovering that what I say is true? Use your spurs, Señor, and come with me, and you’ll see the princess riding toward us, our mistress, all dressed and adorned, like the person she is. She and her damsels are all shining gold, all strands of pearls, all diamonds, all rubies, all brocade cloth ten levels high,
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their hair, hanging loose down their backs, is like rays of the sun dancing in the wind; best of all, they’re riding three piebald pilfers, the prettiest sight you’ll ever see.”

“You must mean
palfreys,
Sancho.”

“There’s not much difference,” responded Sancho, “between
pilfers
and
palfreys,
but no matter what they’re riding, they’re the best-looking ladies anybody could want to see, especially my lady the Princess Dulcinea, who dazzles the senses.”

“Let us go, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote, “and to celebrate this news, as unexpected as it is good, I promise you the best spoils that I shall win in the first adventure I have, and if this does not satisfy you, I promise you the foals that my three mares drop this year, for as you know, they are in the village pasture,
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ready to give birth.”

“I’ll take the foals,” responded Sancho, “because it’s not very certain that the spoils of your first adventure will be any good.”

At this point they left the wood and saw the three village girls close by. Don Quixote looked carefully up and down the road to Toboso, and since he saw no one but the three peasants, he was bewildered and asked Sancho if he had left them outside the city.

“What do you mean, outside the city?” he responded. “By any chance are your grace’s eyes in the back of your head? Is that why you don’t see them riding toward us, shining like the sun at midday?”

“Sancho, I do not see anything,” said Don Quixote, “except three peasant girls on three donkeys.”

“God save me now from the devil!” responded Sancho. “Is it possible that three snow white palfreys, or whatever they’re called, look like donkeys to your grace? God help us, may this beard of mine be plucked out if that’s true!”

“Well, I can tell you, friend Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that it is as true that they are jackasses, or jennies, as it is that I am Don Quixote and you Sancho Panza; at least, that is what they seem to be.”

“Don’t speak, Señor,” said Sancho, “don’t say those things, but clear the mist from your eyes and come and do reverence to the lady of your thoughts, who is almost here.”

And having said this, he went forward to receive the three village girls, and after dismounting from his donkey, he grasped the halter of one of the three peasant girls’ mounts, fell to his knees, and said:

“Queen and princess and duchess of beauty, may your high mightiness be pleased to receive into your good graces and disposition your captive knight, who is there, turned into marble, confused and struck dumb at finding himself in your magnificent presence. I am Sancho Panza, his squire, and he is the much traveled Don Quixote of La Mancha, also called
The Knight of the Sorrowful Face.”

By this time Don Quixote had kneeled down next to Sancho and looked, with startled eyes and confused vision, at the person Sancho was calling queen and lady, and since he could see nothing except a peasant girl, and one not especially attractive, since she was round-faced and snub-nosed, he was so astounded and amazed that he did not dare open his mouth. The peasant girls were equally astonished at seeing those two men, so different from each other, kneeling and not allowing their companion to continue on her way; but the one who had been stopped was annoyed and angry, and breaking the silence, she said:

“Out of the way, damn it, and let us pass; we’re in a hurry!”

To which Sancho responded:

“O princess and universal lady of Toboso! How can your magnanimous heart not soften at seeing the pillar and support of knight errantry on his knees in your sublimal presence?”

Hearing which, another of the girls said:

“Hey, whoa, I’ll tan your hide, you miserable donkey! Look at how the gentry are making fun of us country girls now, like we didn’t know how to give as good as we get! You go on your way, and let us go on ours, if you want to stay healthy.”

“Stand up, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for I see that Fortune, not satisfied with my sorrows, has captured all the roads by which some joy might come to the wretched spirit that inhabits this flesh. And thou, O highest virtue that can be desired, summit of human courtesy, sole remedy for this afflicted heart that adoreth thee! The wicked enchanter who pursueth me hath placed clouds and cataracts over my eyes, so that for them alone but not for others he hath changed and transformed thy peerless beauty and countenance into the figure of a poor peasant, and if
he hath not also turned mine into that of a monster abominable in thy sight, ceaseth not to regard me kindly and lovingly and see in this submission of mine as I kneel before thy deformed beauty, the humility with which my soul adoreth thee.”

“You can tell that to my grandpa!” responded the village girl. “I just love listening to crackpated things! Step aside and let us pass, and we’ll thank you for it.”

Sancho stepped aside and let her pass, delighted to have gotten out of his difficulty so easily.

As soon as the peasant girl who had played the part of Dulcinea was released, she spurred her
pilfer
with a goad that she had on the end of a stick and began to gallop across the meadow. And since the goad irritated the jenny more than usual, she began to buck and threw the lady Dulcinea to the ground; when Don Quixote saw this, he hurried to help her up, and Sancho began to adjust and tighten her packsaddle, which had slipped under the donkey’s belly. When the saddle had been put in place, and Don Quixote tried to lift his enchanted lady in his arms and put her back on the donkey, the lady got up from the ground and saved him the trouble, because she moved back, ran a short distance, and, placing both hands on the donkey’s rump, jumped right into the saddle, as agile as a hawk and sitting astride as if she were a man; and then Sancho said:

“By St. Roque, our mistress is faster than a falcon, and she could teach the most skilled Cordoban or Mexican how to ride! She was over the hind bow of the saddle in one jump, and without any spurs she makes that palfrey run like a zebra. And her damsels are not far behind; they’re all running like the wind.”

And it was true, because when Dulcinea was mounted, they all spurred their mounts and fell in behind her and broke into a gallop and did not look back for more than half a league. Don Quixote followed them with his eyes, and when he could no longer see them, he turned to Sancho and said:

“Sancho, what do you think of how the enchanters despise me? Look at the extent of their malice and ill will, for they have chosen to deprive me of the happiness I might have had at seeing my lady in her rightful person. In truth, I was born to be a model of misfortune, the target and mark for the arrows of affliction. And you must also know, Sancho, that it was not enough for these traitors to have changed and transformed my Dulcinea, but they had to transform and change her into a figure as low-
born and ugly as that peasant, and take away something that so rightfully belongs to noble ladies, which is a sweet smell, since they are always surrounded by perfumes and flowers. For I shall tell you, Sancho, that when I came to help Dulcinea onto her palfrey, as you call it, though it looked like a donkey to me, I smelled an odor of raw garlic that almost made me faint and poisoned my soul.”

“Oh, you dogs!” shouted Sancho. “Oh, you miserable, evil enchanters, if only I could see you all strung by the gills like sardines on a fisherman’s reed! You know so much, and can do so much, and do even more evil. It should have been enough, you villains, to turn the pearls of my lady’s eyes into cork-tree galls, and her hair of purest gold into the bristles of a red ox tail, and all her good features into bad, without doing anything to her smell, because from that we could have imagined what was hidden beneath her ugly shell; though to tell you the truth, I never saw her ugliness, only her beauty, which was made even greater by a mole she had on the right side of her lip, like a mustache, with six or seven blond hairs like threads of gold and longer than a span.”

“That mole,” said Don Quixote, “according to the correspondence that exists between those on the face and those on the body, must be matched by another that Dulcinea has on the broad part of her thigh, on the same side as the one on her face, but the hairs you have mentioned are very long for a mole.”

“Well, I can tell your grace,” responded Sancho, “that they looked like they’d been born there.”

“I can believe it, my friend,” replied Don Quixote, “because nature put nothing on Dulcinea that was not perfect and complete, and so, if she had a hundred moles like the one you describe, on her they would not be moles but shining moons and stars. But tell me, Sancho: the saddle that seemed like a packsaddle to me, the one that you adjusted, was it a simple saddle or a sidesaddle?”

“It was,” responded Sancho, “just a high-bowed saddle, with a covering so rich it must have been worth half a kingdom.”

“And to think I did not see all of that, Sancho!” said Don Quixote. “Now I say it again, and shall say it a thousand more times: I am the most unfortunate of men.”

When he heard the foolish things said by his master, who had been so exquisitely deceived, it was all the scoundrel Sancho could do to hide his laughter. Finally, after much more conversation between them, they re-
mounted their animals and followed the road to Zaragoza, where they hoped to arrive in time to take part in the solemn festival held in that celebrated city every year. But before they arrived, certain things happened to them, so numerous, great, and unusual that they deserve to be described and read, as will soon be seen.

CHAPTER XI

Don Quixote was thoughtful as he went on his way, considering the awful trick the enchanters had played on him when they turned his lady Dulcinea into the ugly figure of the peasant girl, and he could not imagine what remedy he might have that would return her to her original state; these thoughts distracted him so much that, without realizing it, he dropped the reins, and Rocinante, sensing the freedom that had been given to him, stopped at every step to graze on the green grass that grew so abundantly in those fields. Sancho brought his master back from his preoccupations by saying:

“Señor, sorrows were made not for animals but for men; but if men feel them too much, they turn into animals; your grace should restrain yourself, and come back to yourself, and pick up Rocinante’s reins, and liven up and rouse yourself, and show the bravery that knights errant ought to have. What the devil is this? What kind of mood is this? Are we here or in France?
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Let Satan carry off all the Dulcineas in the world, for the well-being of a single knight errant is worth more than all the enchantments and transformations on earth.”

“Be quiet, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote in a voice that was not particularly faint. “Be quiet, I say, and do not speak blasphemies against that enchanted lady, for I alone am to blame for her affliction and misfortune: her tribulations were born of the envy those villains have for me.”

“That’s what I say, too,” responded Sancho. “If you saw her once and see her now, how could your heart not weep?”

“That is something you can rightfully say, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “for you saw her in the fullness and completeness of her beauty; the enchantment did not go so far as to cloud your sight or hide her beauty from you: it directs the strength of its poison only against me and my eyes. But with it all, Sancho, I have realized something, which is that you described her beauty to me very badly, for if I remember correctly, you said that she had eyes like pearls, and eyes that seem to be of pearl are more appropriate to bream than to a lady; my belief is that Dulcinea’s eyes must be like green emeralds and almond-shaped, with two celestial arcs as eyebrows; you should take those pearls from her eyes and move them down to her teeth, for you undoubtedly became confused, Sancho, and said eyes instead of teeth.”

“Everything’s possible,” responded Sancho, “because I was as upset by her beauty as your grace was by her ugliness. But let us leave everything to God, for He knows the things that will happen in this vale of tears, this evil world of ours, where hardly anything’s untouched by wickedness, lies, and deception. One thing grieves me, Señor, more than any other, which is to think what should be done when your grace conquers a giant or another knight and orders him to appear before the beauty of the lady Dulcinea: where will this poor giant or this poor wretch of a conquered knight find her? It seems to me I can see them wandering around Toboso like idiots, looking for my lady Dulcinea, and even if they find her in the middle of the street, they won’t recognize her any more than they’d know my father.”