Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (9 page)

“I absolve you from perfumes,” said Don Quixote. “Just pay him in
reales,
and that will satisfy me, and be sure you fulfill what you have sworn; if you do not, by that same vow I vow that I shall return to find and punish you, and find you I shall, even if you conceal yourself like a wall lizard. And if you wish to know who commands you to do this, so that you have an even greater obligation to comply, know that I am the valiant Don
Quixote of La Mancha, the righter of wrongs and injustices, and now go with God, and do not even think of deviating from what you have promised and sworn, under penalty of the penalty I have indicated to you.”

And having said this, he spurred Rocinante and soon left them behind. The farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had crossed the wood and disappeared from view, he turned to his servant Andrés and said:

“Come here, my son; I want to pay you what I owe you, as that righter of wrongs has ordered me to do.”

“I swear,” said Andrés, “that your grace better do the right thing and obey the commands of that good knight, may he live a thousand years; for, as he’s a valiant man and a fair judge, heaven be praised, if you don’t pay me he’ll come back and do what he said!”

“I swear, too,” said the farmer, “but because I love you so much, I want to increase the debt so I can increase the payment.”

And seizing him by the arm, he tied the boy to the oak tree again and gave him so many lashes that he left him half-dead.

“Now, Señor Andrés,” said the farmer, “you can call the righter of wrongs; you’ll see how he can’t undo this one. Though I don’t think it’s over yet, because I feel like skinning you alive, just as you feared.”

But at last he untied him and gave him permission to go in search of his judge so that he could carry out the sentence. Andrés left in a fairly gloomy frame of mind, swearing he would find the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha and tell him, point by point, what had happened, and that his master would have to pay a fine and damages. Even so, the boy left weeping and his master stayed behind to laugh.

In this way the valiant Don Quixote righted a wrong, and exceedingly pleased with what had occurred, for it seemed to him that he had given a happy and noble beginning to his chivalric adventures, he was very satisfied with himself as he rode to his village, saying in a quiet voice:

“Well mayest thou call thyself the most fortunate of ladies in the world today, O most beauteous of all the beauteous, Dulcinea of Toboso! For it is thy portion to have as vassal and servant to thy entire will and disposition so valiant and renowned a knight as Don Quixote of La Mancha is and will be, for he, as all men know, received the order of chivalry yesterday and today he has righted the greatest wrong and injustice that iniquity e’er devised and cruelty e’er committed: today he removed the whip from the hand of a merciless enemy who, without reason, did flog that delicate child.”

Saying this, he arrived at a road that divided in four, and immediately there came to his imagination the crossroads where knights errant would begin to ponder which of those roads they would follow, and in order to imitate them, he remained motionless for a time, and after having thought very carefully, he loosened the reins and subjected his will to Rocinante’s, and the horse pursued his initial intent, which was to head back to his own stall.

And having gone about two miles, Don Quixote saw a great throng of people who, as he subsequently discovered, were merchants from Toledo on their way to Murcia to buy silk. There were six of them, holding sunshades, and four servants on horseback, and three boys on foot leading the mules. No sooner had Don Quixote seen them than he imagined this to be a new adventure; and in order to imitate in every way possible the deeds he had read in his books, this seemed the perfect opportunity for him to perform one that he had in mind. And so, with gallant bearing and great boldness, he set his feet firmly in the stirrups, grasped his lance, brought the shield up to his chest, and, stopping in the middle of the road, he waited until those knights errant, for that is what he deemed and considered them to be, had reached him; and when they had come close enough to see and hear him, Don Quixote raised his voice and, in an imperious manner, he said:

“Halt, all of you, unless all of you confess that in the entire world there is no damsel more beauteous than the empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea of Toboso.”

The merchants stopped when they heard these words and saw the strange appearance of the one who said them, and because of his appearance and words, they soon saw the madness of the man, but they wished to see at their leisure the purpose of the confession he was demanding, and one of them, who was something of a jokester and clever in the extreme, said:

“Señor Knight, we do not know this good lady you have mentioned; show her to us, for if she is as beautiful as you say, we will gladly and freely confess the truth you ask of us.”

“If I were to show her to you,” replied Don Quixote, “where would the virtue be in your confessing so obvious a truth? The significance lies in not seeing her and believing, confessing, affirming, swearing, and defending that truth; if you do not, you must do battle with me, audacious and arrogant people. And whether you come one by one, as the order of chivalry demands, or all at once, in the vicious manner of those of your
ilk, here I am, ready and waiting for you, certain of the rightness of my claim.”

“Señor Knight,” replied the merchant, “in the name of all these princes, of whom I am one, and in order not to burden our consciences with the confession of something we have never seen or heard, and which, moreover, is so prejudicial to the empresses and queens of Alcarria and Extremadura, I implore your grace to have the goodness to show us a portrait of this lady, even if it is no larger than a grain of wheat; for with a single thread one has the entire skein, and we will be satisfied and certain, and your grace will be recompensed and requited, and although I believe we are so partial to your position that even if her portrait shows us that she is blind in one eye and that blood and brimstone flow from the other, despite all that, to please your grace, we will praise her in everything you might wish.”

“Nothing flows from her, vile rabble,” replied Don Quixote, burning with rage. “Nothing flows from her, I say, but amber and delicate musk; and she is not blind or humpbacked but as upright as a peak of the Guadarramas. But you will pay for how you have blasphemed against beauty as extraordinary as that of my lady!”

And, having said this, he lowered his lance and charged the man who had spoken, with so much rage and fury that if, to the daring merchant’s good fortune, Rocinante had not tripped and fallen on the way, things would have gone badly for him. Rocinante fell, and his master rolled some distance on the ground, and when he tried to get up, he could not: he was too burdened by lance, shield, spurs, helmet, and the weight of his ancient armor. And as he struggled to stand, and failed, he said:

“Flee not, cowards; wretches, attend; for it is no fault of mine but of my mount that I lie here.”

One of the muledrivers, who could not have been very well intentioned, heard the poor man on the ground making these insolent statements, and he could not stand by without giving him his response in the ribs. And walking up to him, he took the lance, broke it into pieces, and with one of them he began to beat our knight so furiously that notwithstanding and in spite of his armor, he thrashed Don Quixote as if he were threshing wheat. His masters shouted for him to stop and let him be, but by now the muledriver’s blood was up and he did not want to leave the game until he had brought into play the last of his rage, and having recourse to the other pieces of the lance, he shattered them all on the wretched man on the ground, who, despite that storm of blows raining down on him, did not once close his mouth but continued to rail against
heaven and earth and these wicked knaves, which is what they seemed to him.

The muledriver tired, and the merchants continued on their way, taking with them stories to tell about the beaten man for the rest of the journey. And he, when he found himself alone, tried again to see if he could stand, but if he could not when he was hale and healthy, how could he when he was beaten almost to a pulp? And still he considered himself fortunate, for it seemed to him that this was the kind of mishap that befell knights errant, and he attributed it all to his horse’s misstep, but his body was so bruised and beaten it was not possible for him to stand.

CHAPTER V

Seeing, then, that in fact he could not move, he took refuge in his usual remedy, which was to think about some situation from his books, and his madness made him recall that of Valdovinos and the Marquis of Mantua, when Carloto left him wounded in the highlands,
¹
a history known to children, acknowledged by youths, celebrated, and even believed by the old, and, despite all this, no truer than the miracles of Mohammed. This is the tale that seemed to him perfectly suited for the situation in which he found himself, and so, with displays of great emotion, he began to roll about on the ground and to say with faint breath exactly what people say was said by the wounded Knight of the Wood:

And in this way he continued reciting the ballad until the lines that say:

And as luck would have it, when he reached this line, a farmer from his village happened to pass by, a neighbor of his on the way home after taking a load of wheat to the mill; the farmer, seeing a man lying there, approached and asked who he was and what the trouble was that made him complain so pitifully. Don Quixote no doubt thought the farmer was the Marquis of Mantua, his uncle, and so the only answer he gave was to go on with the ballad, recounting his misfortune and the love of the emperor’s son for his wife, all of it just as it is told in the ballad.

The farmer was astounded when he heard these absurdities, and after removing the visor, which had been shattered in the beating, he wiped the fallen man’s face, which was covered in dust, and as soon as he had wiped it he recognized him and said:

“Señor Quijana!”—for this must have been his name when he was in his right mind and had not yet changed from a quiet gentleman into a knight errant—“Who has done this to your grace?”

But Don Quixote went on reciting his ballad in response to every question. Seeing this, the good man, as carefully as he could, removed the breastplate and backpiece to see if he was wounded but did not see blood or cuts of any kind. He managed to lift him from the ground and with a good deal of effort put him on his own donkey, because he thought it a steadier mount. He gathered up his arms, even the broken pieces of the lance, and tied them on Rocinante, and leading the horse by the reins and the jackass by the halter, he began to walk toward his village, very dispirited at hearing the nonsense that Don Quixote was saying; Don Quixote was no less dispirited, for he was so beaten and broken that he could barely keep his seat on the burro, and from time to time he would raise his sighs to heaven, which obliged the farmer to ask him again to tell him what was wrong; one cannot help but think that the devil made Don Quixote recall stories suited to the events that had occurred, because at that point, forgetting about Valdovinos, he remembered the Moor Abindarráez, when the governor of Antequera, Rodrigo de Narváez, captured him and brought him back to his domain as his prisoner.
²
So when the farmer asked him again how he felt and what was wrong, he answered with the same words and phrases that the captive
scion of the Abencerraje family said to Rodrigo de Narváez, just as he had read them in the history of
Diana
, by Jorge de Montemayor, where they are written, and he did this so deliberately that as the farmer walked along he despaired at hearing such an enormous amount of foolishness; in this way he realized that his neighbor was mad, and he hurried to reach the village in order to rid himself of the impatience Don Quixote provoked in him with his long-winded harangue. When it was concluded, Don Quixote went on to say:

“Your grace should know, Don Rodrigo de Narváez, that this beautiful Jarifa I have mentioned to you is now the lovely Dulcinea of Toboso, for whose sake I have performed, perform now, and shall perform in the future the most famous feats of chivalry the world has seen, sees now, and will ever see.”

To this the farmer replied:

“Look, your grace, poor sinner that I am, I’m not Don Rodrigo de Narváez or the Marquis of Mantua, but Pedro Alonso, your neighbor, and your grace isn’t Valdovinos or Abindarráez, but an honorable gentleman, Señor Quijana.”

“I know who I am,” replied Don Quixote, “and I know I can be not only those I have mentioned but the Twelve Peers of France
³
as well, and even all the nine paragons of Fame,
⁴
for my deeds will surpass all those they performed, together or singly.”

Having these exchanges and others like them, they reached the village as night was falling, but the farmer waited until it grew a little darker, so that no one would see what a poor knight the beaten gentleman was. When he thought the right time had come, he entered the village and came to Don Quixote’s house, which was in an uproar; the priest and barber, who were great friends of Don Quixote, were there, and in a loud voice his housekeeper was saying to them:

“What does your grace think, Señor Licentiate Pero Pérez”—for this was the priest’s name—“of my master’s misfortune? Three days and no sign of him, or his horse, or his shield, or his lance, or his armor. Woe is me! Now I know, and it’s as true as the death I owe God, that those accursed books of chivalry he’s always reading have driven him crazy; and now I remember hearing him say time and time again, when he was talking to
himself, that he wanted to become a knight errant and go out in the wide world in search of adventures. Those books should go straight to Satan and Barrabas, for they have ruined the finest mind in all of La Mancha.”