Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (88 page)

“That,” responded the Squire of the Wood, “is why they say that it’s greed that tears the sack, and if we’re going to talk about madmen, there’s nobody in the world crazier than my master, because he’s one of those who say: ‘Other people’s troubles kill the donkey,’ and to help another knight find the wits he’s lost, he pretends to be crazy and goes around looking for something that I think will hit him right in the face when he finds it.”

“Is he in love, by any chance?”

“Yes,” said the Squire of the Wood, “with a certain Casildea of Vandalia, the cruelest lady in the world, and the hardest to stomach, but indigestibility isn’t her greatest fault; her other deceits are growling in his belly, and they’ll make themselves heard before too many hours have gone by.”

“There’s no road so smooth,” replied Sancho, “that it doesn’t have
some obstacle or stumbling block; they cook beans everywhere, but in my house they do it by the potful; craziness must have more companions and friends than wisdom. But if what they say is true, that misery loves company, then I can find comfort with your grace, because you serve a master who’s as great a fool as mine.”

“A fool, but brave,” responded the Squire of the Wood, “and more of a scoundrel than foolish or brave.”

“Not mine,” responded Sancho. “I mean, there’s nothing of the scoundrel in him; mine’s as innocent as a baby; he doesn’t know how to harm anybody, he can only do good to everybody, and there’s no malice in him: a child could convince him it’s night in the middle of the day, and because he’s simple I love him with all my heart and couldn’t leave him no matter how many crazy things he does.”

“Even so, Señor,” said the Squire of the Wood, “if the blind man leads the blind man, they’re both in danger of falling into the ditch. Brother, we’d better leave soon and go back where we came from; people who look for adventures don’t always find good ones.”

Sancho had been spitting often, it seems, a certain kind of sticky, dry saliva, and the charitable woodish squire, seeing and noting this, said:

“I think we’ve talked so much our tongues are sticking to the roofs of our mouths, but I have an unsticker hanging from my saddlebow, and it’s a pretty good one.”

And he stood up and came back in a little while carrying a large wineskin and a meat pie half a meter long, and this is not an exaggeration, because it held a white rabbit so large that Sancho, when he touched it, thought it was a goat, and not a kid, either; and when Sancho saw this, he said:

“Señor, did you bring this with you?”

“Well, what did you think?” responded the other man. “Am I by any chance a run-of-the-mill squire? I carry better provisions on my horse’s rump than a general does when he goes marching.”

Sancho ate without having to be asked twice, and in the dark he wolfed down mouthfuls the size of the knots that hobble a horse. And he said:

“Your grace is a faithful and true, right and proper, magnificent and great squire, as this feast shows, and if you haven’t come here by the arts of enchantment, at least it seems that way to me; but I’m so poor and unlucky that all I have in my saddlebags is a little cheese, so hard you could break a giant’s skull with it, and to keep it company some four dozen
carob beans and the same number of hazelnuts and other kinds of nuts, thanks to the poverty of my master and the idea he has and the rule he keeps that knights errant should not live and survive on anything but dried fruits and the plants of the field.”

“By my faith, brother,” replied the Squire of the Wood, “my stomach isn’t made for thistles or wild pears or forest roots. Let our masters have their knightly opinions and rules and eat what their laws command. I have my baskets of food, and this wineskin hanging from the saddlebow, just in case, and I’m so devoted to it and love it so much that I can’t let too much time pass without giving it a thousand kisses and a thousand embraces.”

And saying this, he placed the wineskin in Sancho’s hands, who tilted it back and put it to his mouth and looked at the stars for a quarter of an hour, and when he had finished drinking, he leaned his head to one side, heaved a great sigh, and said:

“O whoreson, you damned rascal, but that’s good!”

“Do you see?” said the Squire of the Wood when he heard Sancho’s “whoreson.” “You complimented the wine by calling it whoreson.”

“And I say,” responded Sancho, “that I confess to knowing it’s no dishonor to call anybody a whoreson when your intention is to compliment him. But tell me, Señor, by the thing you love most: is this wine from Ciudad Real?”

“Bravo! What a winetaster!” responded the Squire of the Wood. “It’s from there and no place else, and it’s aged a few years.”

“You can’t fool me!” said Sancho. “You shouldn’t think it was beyond me to know about this wine. Does it surprise you, Señor Squire, that I have so great and natural an instinct for knowing wines that if I just smell one I know where it comes from, its lineage, its taste, its age, and how it will change, and everything else that has anything to do with it? But it’s no wonder, because in my family, on my father’s side, were the two best winetasters that La Mancha had in many years, and to prove it I’ll tell you a story about them. The two of them were asked to taste some wine from a cask and say what they thought about its condition and quality, and whether it was a good or bad wine. One tasted it with the tip of his tongue; the other only brought it up to his nose. The first said that the wine tasted of iron, the second that it tasted more of tanned leather. The owner said the cask was clean and the wine had not been fortified in a way that could have given it the taste of iron or leather. Even so, the two famous winetasters insisted that what they said was true. Time passed, the wine was sold, and when the cask was cleaned, inside it they
found a small key on a leather strap. So your grace can see that a man who comes from that kind of family can give his opinion about matters like these.”

“That’s why I say,” said the Squire of the Wood, “that we should stop looking for adventures, and if we have loaves of bread, we shouldn’t go around looking for cakes, and we ought to go back home: God will find us there, if He wants to.”

“I’ll serve my master until he gets to Zaragoza; after that, we’ll work out something.”

In short, the two good squires spoke so much and drank so much that only sleep could stop their tongues and allay their thirst, for it would have been impossible to take it away altogether; and so, with both of them holding on to the almost empty wineskin, and with mouthfuls of food half-chewed in their mouths, they fell asleep, which is where we shall leave them now in order to recount what befell the Knight of the Wood and the Knight of the Sorrowful Face.

CHAPTER XIV

Among the many words that passed between Don Quixote and the Knight of the Forest, the history says that the Knight of the Wood said to Don Quixote:

“Finally, Señor Knight, I want you to know that my destiny or, I should say, my own free choice, led me to fall in love with the peerless Casildea of Vandalia. I call her without peer because she has none, in the greatness of her stature or in the loftiness of her rank and beauty. This Casildea, then, whom I am describing to you, repaid my virtuous thoughts and courteous desires by having me, as his stepmother did with Hercules, engage in many different kinds of dangers, promising me at the end of each one that at the end of the next my hopes would be realized; but my labors have been linked together for so long that I have lost count, nor do I know which will be the final one that initiates the satisfaction of my virtuous desires. On one occasion she ordered me to chal
lenge that famous giantess of Sevilla called La Giralda,
¹
who is as valiant and strong as if she were made of bronze and, without moving from one spot, is the most changeable and fickle woman in the world. I came, I saw, I conquered her, and I made her keep still and to the point, because for more than a week only north winds blew. Another time she ordered me to weigh the ancient stones of the corpulent Bulls of Guisando,
²
an undertaking better suited to laborers than to knights. On yet another occasion she ordered me to hurl and fling myself into the abyss of Cabra,
³
a singular and most fearful danger, and bring her a detailed report of what lies in its dark depths. I halted the movement of La Giralda, I weighed the Bulls of Guisando, I threw myself into the chasm and brought to light what lay hidden there in darkness, and my hopes are deader than dead, and her commands and disdain are more alive than ever. In short, most recently she has ordered me to travel through all the provinces of Spain and have all the knights errant wandering there confess that she alone is the greatest beauty of all the ladies in the world today, and that I am the most valiant and most perfectly enamored knight on earth; to satisfy this request I have already traveled most of Spain and conquered many knights who dared contradict me. But what gratifies me the most and makes me proudest is having conquered in single combat that most famous knight, Don Quixote of La Mancha, and forced him to confess that my Casildea is more beautiful than his Dulcinea; with this one conquest I consider that I have conquered all the knights in the world, because Don Quixote has conquered them all, and since I conquered him, his glory, fame, and honor have passed and been transferred to my person.

and as a consequence, the innumerable deeds of the aforementioned Don Quixote are mine and redound to my credit.”

Don Quixote was stunned at what he heard the Knight of the Wood say and was about to tell him he was lying a thousand times over, and he
had the
You lie
on the tip of his tongue but did his best to restrain himself in order to have the Knight of the Wood confess his lie with his own mouth, and so, very calmly, he said:

“With regard to your grace, Señor Knight, having vanquished almost all the knights errant in Spain, and even the world, I say nothing; but your having conquered Don Quixote of La Mancha: about that I do have my doubts. It might have been another who resembled him, although there are few men who do.”

“What do you mean?” replied the Knight of the Wood. “By the heaven above us, I fought with Don Quixote, and I conquered and defeated him; he is a man of tall stature, a dry face, long, lanky limbs, graying hair, an aquiline, somewhat hooked nose, and a large, black, drooping mustache. He does battle under the name
The Knight of the Sorrowful Face,
and for a squire he has a peasant named Sancho Panza; he sits on the back and holds the reins of a famous horse called Rocinante; finally, the lady of his desire, at one time known as Aldonza Lorenzo, is a certain Dulcinea of Toboso, like my lady, who is named Casildea and comes from Andalucía and therefore is called Casildea of Vandalia. If all this is not enough to validate the truth of what I say, here is my sword, which will oblige incredulity itself to give me credence.”

“Be calm, Señor Knight,” said Don Quixote, “and hear what I wish to tell you. You should know that this Don Quixote whom you have mentioned is the dearest friend I have in the world; I could even say that I value him as I do my own person, and by the description you have given me, which is detailed and accurate, I can only think that he is indeed the one you have conquered. On the other hand, I see with my eyes and touch with my hands the impossibility of his being the one, and yet there are many enchanters who are his enemies, especially one who ordinarily pursues him, and one of these may have taken on his appearance and allowed himself to be vanquished in order to cheat Don Quixote of the fame that his high chivalric deeds have earned and won for him throughout the known world. And as confirmation of this, I also want you to know that these enchanters, his adversaries, only two days ago transformed the figure and person of the beauteous Dulcinea of Toboso into a foul, lowborn peasant girl, and in the same fashion they must have transformed Don Quixote; if this is not enough to persuade you of the truth of what I say, here is Don Quixote himself, who will sustain it with arms, on foot or on horseback, or in whatever manner pleases you.”

And saying this, he rose to his feet and grasped his sword, waiting to see what decision would be made by the Knight of the Wood, who responded in the same tranquil voice, saying:

“The man who pays his debts does not mind guaranties: the man, Señor Don Quixote, who could vanquish you transformed can certainly hope to defeat you in your own person. But since it is not right for knights to engage in feats of arms in the dark, like robbers and thieves, let us wait for day so that the sun may see our deeds. And a condition of our combat must be that the vanquished submits to the will of the victor and does everything he desires as long as his commands respect a knight’s virtue.”

“I am more than happy with this condition and agreement,” responded Don Quixote.

And, having said this, they went to the place where their squires were and found them snoring, in the same positions they were in when sleep overcame them. The knights woke them and ordered them to ready the horses, because as soon as the sun rose, the two of them would have to engage in bloody, single, and unequaled combat; at this news, Sancho was surprised and stunned and fearful for the health of his master because of the brave deeds the Squire of the Wood had attributed to his knight; but, without saying a word, the squires went to find their animals, for by this time all three horses and the donkey had smelled one another and were standing close together.

On the way, the Squire of the Wood said to Sancho:

“You should know, brother, that it’s the custom among fighting men in Andalucía, when they are seconds in any dispute, not to stand idly by with their hands folded while the challengers do battle. I say this so you’ll know that while our masters are fighting, we have to fight, too, and smash each other to pieces.”