Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (13 page)

Don Quixote, as has been said, was talking to the lady in the carriage, saying:

“O beauteous lady, thou canst do with thy person as thou wishest, for the arrogance of thy captors here lieth on the ground, vanquished by this my mighty arm; and so that thou mayest not pine to know the name of thy emancipator, know that I am called Don Quixote of La Mancha, knight errant in search of adventures, and captive of the beauteous and peerless Doña Dulcinea of Toboso, and as recompense for the boon thou hast received from me, I desire only that thou turnest toward Toboso, and on my behalf appearest before this lady and sayest unto her what deeds I have done to gain thy liberty.”

One of the squires accompanying the carriage was a Basque, who listened to everything that Don Quixote was saying; and seeing that he would not allow the carriage to move forward but said it would have to go to Toboso, the squire approached Don Quixote and, seizing his lance, in bad Castilian and even worse Basque, he said:

“Go on, mister, you go wrong; by God who make me, if don’t let carriage go, as I be Basque I kill you.”

Don Quixote understood him very well and replied with great serenity:

“If you were a gentleman, as you are not, I would already have punished your foolishness and audacity, unhappy creature.”

To which the Basque replied:

“Not gentleman me? As Christian I make vow to God you lie. Throw away lance and pull out sword and soon see which one make horse drink. Basque by land, noble by sea, noble by devil, if say other thing you lie.”

“Now you will see, said Agrajes,”
⁴
replied Don Quixote.

And after throwing his lance to the ground, he drew his sword, grasped his shield, and attacked the Basque, determined to take his life.
The Basque, who saw him coming at him in this manner, wanted to get off the mule, which, being one of the inferior ones for hire, could not be trusted, but all he could do was draw his sword; it was his good fortune, however, to be next to the carriage, and he seized one of the pillows and used it as a shield, and the two of them went at each other as if they were mortal enemies. The rest of the people tried to make peace between them but could not, because the Basque said in his tangled words that if they did not allow him to finish his fight, he himself would kill his mistress and everyone else who got in his way. The lady in the carriage, stunned and fearful at what she saw, had the coachman drive some distance away, and from there she watched the fierce contest, in the course of which the Basque went over Don Quixote’s shield and struck a great blow with his sword to his shoulder, and if it had not been protected by armor, he would have opened it to the waist. Don Quixote, who felt the pain of that enormous blow, gave a great shout, saying:

“O lady of my soul, Dulcinea, flower of beauty, come to the aid of this thy knight, who, for the sake of thy great virtue, finds himself in grave peril!”

Saying this, and grasping his sword, and protecting himself with his shield, and attacking the Basque were all one, for he was determined to venture everything on the fortune of a single blow.

The Basque, seeing him attack in this fashion, clearly understood the courage in this rash act and resolved to do the same as Don Quixote. And so he waited for him, shielded by his pillow, and unable to turn the mule one way or the other, for the mule, utterly exhausted and not made for such foolishness, could not take another step.

As has been said, Don Quixote was charging the wary Basque with his sword on high, determined to cut him in half, and the Basque, well-protected by his pillow, was waiting for him, his sword also raised, and all the onlookers were filled with fear and suspense regarding the outcome of the great blows they threatened to give to each other, and the lady in the carriage and all her maids were making a thousand vows and offerings to all the images and houses of devotion in Spain so that God would deliver the squire and themselves from the great danger in which they found themselves.

But the difficulty in all this is that at this very point and juncture, the author of the history leaves the battle pending, apologizing because he found nothing else written about the feats of Don Quixote other than what he has already recounted. It is certainly true that the second au
thor
⁵
of this work did not want to believe that so curious a history would be subjected to the laws of oblivion, or that the great minds of La Mancha possessed so little interest that they did not have in their archives or writing tables a few pages that dealt with this famous knight; and so, with this thought in mind, he did not despair of finding the conclusion to this gentle history, which, with heaven’s help, he discovered in the manner that will be revealed in part two.
⁶

Part Two of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

CHAPTER IX

In part one of this history, we left the brave Basque and the famous Don Quixote with their swords raised and unsheathed, about to deliver two downstrokes so furious that if they had entirely hit the mark, the combatants would have been cut and split in half from top to bottom and opened like pomegranates; and at that extremely uncertain point, the delectable history stopped and was interrupted, without the author giving us any information as to where the missing parts could be found.

This caused me a good deal of grief, because the pleasure of having read so small an amount was turning into displeasure at the thought of the difficult road that lay ahead in finding the large amount that, in my opinion, was missing from so charming a tale. It seemed impossible and
completely contrary to all good precedent that so good a knight should have lacked a wise man who would assume the responsibility of recording his never-before-seen deeds, something that never happened to other knights errant,

because each of them had one or two wise men whose purpose was not only to record their deeds, but to depict their slightest thoughts and fancies, no matter how secret they might be; and so good a knight could not be so unfortunate as to lack what Platir and others like him had in abundance.
²
And therefore I was not inclined to believe that so gallant a history had been left maimed and crippled, and I blamed the malignity of Time, the devourer and consumer of all things, who had either hidden it away or consumed it.

On the other hand, it seemed to me that since works as modern as
Deceptions of Jealousy
and
Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares
³
had been found among Don Quixote’s books, his history also had to be modern, and though it might not be written down, it had to live on in the memories of people from his village and from other villages nearby. This thought left me disconcerted and longing to know, really and truly and in its entirety, the life and miracles of our famous Spaniard Don Quixote of La Mancha, the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and in these calamitous times to take up the exercise and profession of chivalric arms, righting wrongs, defending widows, and protecting those maidens who rode, with whips and palfreys, and bearing all their virginity on their backs, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley; and unless some villain, or some farmer with hatchet and pitchfork, or some enormous giant forced her, a maiden could, in days of yore, after eighty years of never once sleeping under a roof, go to her grave as pure as the day her mother bore her. I say, then, that for these and many other reasons, our gallant Don Quixote is deserving of continual and memorable praise, as am I, on account of the toil and effort I have put into finding the conclusion of this amiable history, though I know very well that if heaven, cir
cumstances, and fortune do not assist me, the world will be deprived of the almost two hours of entertainment and pleasure the attentive reader may derive from it. This is how I happened to find it:

One day when I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclinations to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco
⁴
who knew Castilian, and could read it for me, was in the vicinity, and it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of a better and older language,
⁵
I would have found him. In short, fortune provided me with one, and when I told him what I wanted and placed the book in his hands, he opened it in the middle, read for a short while, and began to laugh.

I asked him why he was laughing, and he replied that it was because of something written in the margin of the book as an annotation. I told him to tell me what it was, and he, still laughing, said:

“As I have said, here in the margin is written: ‘This Dulcinea of Toboso, referred to so often in this history, they say had the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha.’”

When I heard him say “Dulcinea of Toboso,” I was astounded and filled with anticipation, for it occurred to me that those volumes contained the history of Don Quixote. With this thought in mind, I urged him to read the beginning, which he did, extemporizing a translation of the Arabic into Castilian and saying that it said:
History of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli,
⁶
an Arab Historian.
I needed a good deal of cleverness to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears; moving more quickly than the silk merchant, I bought all the papers and notebooks from the boy for half a
real,
but if he had been astute and known how much I wanted them, he certainly could have demanded and received more than six
reales
for their purchase. I immediately went with the Morisco to the cloister of the main church and asked him to render the journals, all those that dealt with Don Quixote, into the Castilian language, without taking away or
adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he might desire. He was satisfied with two
arrobas
of raisins and two
fanegas
of wheat,
⁷
and he promised to translate them well and faithfully and very quickly. But to facilitate the arrangement and not allow such a wonderful find out of my hands, I brought him to my house, where, in a little more than a month and a half, he translated the entire history, just as it is recounted here.

In the first notebook there was a very realistic depiction of the battle of Don Quixote with the Basque, both in the postures recounted in the history, their swords raised, one covered by his round shield, the other by his pillow, and the Basque’s mule so lifelike that at the distance of a crossbow shot one could see that it was a mule for hire. At the mule’s feet was a caption that read:
Don Sancho de Azpetia,
which, no doubt, was the Basque’s name; and at the feet of Rocinante was another that said:
Don Quixote.
Rocinante was so wonderfully depicted, so long and lank, so skinny and lean, with so prominent a backbone, and an appearance so obviously consumptive, that it was clear with what foresight and accuracy he had been given the name Rocinante. Next to him was Sancho Panza, holding the halter of his donkey, and at its feet was another caption that said:
Sancho Zancas,
⁸
and as the picture showed, he must have had a big belly, short stature, and long shanks, and for this reason he was given the name Panza as well as Zancas, for from time to time the history calls him by both these surnames. A few other details were worthy of notice, but they are of little importance and relevance to the true account of this history, for no history is bad if it is true.

If any objection can be raised regarding the truth of this one, it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much. So it appears to me, for when he could and should have wielded his pen to praise the virtues of so good a knight, it seems he intentionally passes over them in silence; this is something badly done and poorly thought out, since historians must and ought to be exact, truthful, and absolutely free of passions, for neither interest, fear, rancor, nor affection should make them deviate from the path of the truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, repository of great deeds, witness to the past, example and adviser to the present, and forewarning to the future. In
this account I know there will be found everything that could be rightly desired in the most pleasant history, and if something of value is missing from it, in my opinion the fault lies with the dog who was its author rather than with any defect in its subject. In short, its second part, according to the translation, began in this manner:

With the sharp-edged swords of the two valiant and enraged combatants held and raised on high, they seemed to threaten heaven, earth, and the abyss: such was their boldness and bearing. The first to strike a blow was the choleric Basque, and he delivered it with so much force and fury that if his sword had not turned on its way down, that single blow would have been enough to end this fierce combat and all the adventures of our knight; but good fortune, which had greater things in store for Don Quixote, twisted the sword of his adversary, so that although it struck his left shoulder, it did no more than tear through the armor along that side, taking with it as it passed a good part of his helmet and half an ear, both of which, in fearful ruin, fell to the ground, leaving him in a very sad state.