Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (81 page)

“As soon as I have the governorship,” said Sancho, “I’ll send for him posthaste, and I’ll send you some money; I’ll have plenty, because there are always plenty of people who lend money to governors when they don’t have any; and be sure to dress him so that you hide what he is and he looks like what he’ll become.”

“You just send the money,” said Teresa, “and I’ll dress him up as nice as you please.”

“So then we agree,” said Sancho, “that our daughter will be a countess.”

“The day I see her a countess,” responded Teresa, “will be the day I’ll have to bury her; but again I say that you should do whatever you want; women are born with the obligation to obey their husbands even if they’re fools.”

And at this she began to cry as piteously as if she already saw Sanchica dead and buried. Sancho consoled her, saying that even if he had to make her a countess, he would delay it as long as he could. This ended their conversation, and Sancho returned to see Don Quixote and arrange for their departure.

CHAPTER VI

While Sancho Panza and his wife, Teresa Cascajo, were having the incongruous talk that has just been related, Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper were not idle; a thousand indications had led them to infer that their uncle and master wished to leave for the third time and return to the practice of what was, to their minds, his calamitous chivalry, and they attempted by all means possible to dissuade him from so wicked a thought, but it was all preaching in the desert and hammering on cold iron. Even so, in one of the many exchanges they had with him, the housekeeper said:

“The truth is, Señor, that if your grace doesn’t keep your feet firmly on the ground, and stay quietly in your house, and stop wandering around the mountains and the valleys like a soul in torment looking for things that are called adventures but that I call misfortunes, then I’ll have to cry and complain to God and the king and ask them for a remedy.”

To which Don Quixote responded:

“Housekeeper, I do not know how God will respond to your complaints, or His Majesty, either; I know only that if I were king, I should excuse myself from responding to the countless importunate requests presented to me each day; one of the greatest burdens borne by kings, among so many others, is the obligation to listen to all petitions and respond to all of them; consequently, I should not want my affairs to trouble him in any way.”

To which the housekeeper said:

“Tell us, Señor, aren’t there knights in His Majesty’s court?”

“Yes,” responded Don Quixote, “quite a few, and it is fitting that there should be, as an adornment to the greatness of princes and to display the stateliness of kings.”

“Well, then, couldn’t your grace,” she replied, “be one of those who stay put to serve their king and lord in court?”

“Look, my friend,” responded Don Quixote, “not all knights can be courtiers, and not all courtiers can or should be knights errant: there has to be some of each in the world, and although we are all knights, there is a vast difference between us; courtiers, without leaving their chambers or passing beyond the threshold of the court, travel the entire world by looking at a map, not spending a
blanca
or suffering heat or cold, hunger or thirst; but we, the true knights errant, measure the earth with our own feet, exposed to the sun, the cold, the wind, and the inclemencies of heaven, both night and day, on foot and on horseback; and we know our enemies not only in portraits but in their actual persons, and no matter the danger and regardless of the occasion we do battle with them, not worrying about trifles or the laws governing duels: whether one combatant has or does not have a shorter lance or sword, or has on his person a relic, or some hidden deception, or if the sun is to be apportioned or slashed to bits,
¹
and other ceremonies of this nature that are used in private duels between individuals, which you do not know about, but I do. And you should also know something else: the good knight errant may see ten giants whose heads not only touch the clouds but go above them, each with legs that are two immense towers and whose arms resemble the masts of large and powerful ships, each eye like a huge mill wheel burning hotter than a glass furnace, yet he must not be afraid in the slightest, but with a gallant air and an intrepid heart he must charge and attack them and, if possible, defeat and rout them in an instant, even if they are armed with the shells of a certain fish that are, they say, harder than diamonds, and instead of swords they carry sharp knives of Damascene steel, or clubs studded with steel spikes, which I have seen more than a few times. I have said all this, my dear housekeeper, so that you may see the difference between one kind of knight and another, and it would be right and proper for every prince to esteem more highly the second, or I should say the first kind of knights errant, for as we read in their histories, some among them have been the salvation of not only one kingdom, but many.”

“Ah, Señor!” said his niece. “Your grace should remember that everything you say about knights errant is invention and lies, and each of their histories, if it isn’t burned, deserves to wear a sanbenito
²
or some other sign that it has been recognized as the infamous ruination of virtuous customs.”

“By the God who sustains me,” said Don Quixote, “if you were not my lawful niece, the daughter of my own sister, I should punish you so severely for the blasphemy you have uttered that it would be heard all over the world. How is it possible that a mere slip of a girl who barely knows how to manage twelve lace bobbins can dare to speak against and censure the histories of the knights errant? What would Señor Amadís have said if he had heard this? But most certainly he would have pardoned you, because he was the most humble and courteous knight of his time, and a great defender of damsels, but others could have heard you and it would not have gone so well for you, for not all of them are courteous or well-behaved: some are discourteous cowards. Not all those called knights are knights through and through; some are gold, others alchemical, and all appear to be knights, but not all can pass a test by touch-stone.
³
There are baseborn men desperate to seem knights, and highborn knights who appear ready to die in order to seem base; the former rise up through ambition or virtue, the latter descend through idleness or vice, and it is necessary for us to use our knowledge and discernment to distinguish between these two kinds of knights, so similar in names, so dissimilar in actions.”

“Lord save me!” said the niece. “Your grace knows so much that in an emergency you could stand in the pulpit or preach in the streets, and despite this you have been struck by such great blindness and such obvious foolishness that you try to make us believe that you are valiant when you are old, and strong when you are ailing, that you right wrongs when you are stooped by age, and most of all, that you are a knight when you are not, because though gentlefolk may be knights, poor men never are…!”

“You are certainly correct in what you say, my dear niece,” responded Don Quixote, “and I could tell you things about lineage that would astonish you, but I shall not say them in order not to mix the human with the divine. Look, my friends, there are four kinds of lineage and, listen
carefully, all the lineages in the world can be reduced to these: some had humble beginnings, and extended and expanded until they reached the heights of greatness; others had noble beginnings, and preserved them, and still preserve and maintain them just as they were; still others may have had noble beginnings but, like pyramids, they tapered to a point, having diminished and annihilated their origins until they ended in nothingness, as the tip of the pyramid is nothing compared to its base or bottom; finally, there are others, and these are the majority, that did not have a good beginning or a reasonable middle, and therefore in the end they have no name, like the lineages of ordinary plebeians. An example of the first, those who had a humble beginning and rose to the greatness they now possess, is the Ottoman Dynasty, which began with a humble, lowborn shepherd and rose to the pinnacle that we see today. Of the second kind of lineage, which began in greatness and preserved it without increasing it, an example would be the many princes by inheritance who maintain their greatness without increasing or decreasing it, and peacefully stay within the borders of their states. Of those who began great and ended in a point there are thousands of examples: all the pharaohs and Ptolemies of Egypt, the Caesars of Rome, and the entire horde, if that name can be given to them, of countless princes, monarchs, lords, Medes, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Barbarians, all these lineages and nobilities, and those who originated them, have ended in a point, in nothingness, for it would not be possible now to find any of their descendants, and if we did, they would be in a low and humble state. Regarding the plebeian lineages I have nothing to say, except that they serve only to increase the number of the living, and their greatness does not merit any other fame or praise.

From all that I have said I want you to infer, you foolish women, that the confusion surrounding lineages is great, and the only ones that appear distinguished and illustrious are those that display those qualities in their virtue, and in the wealth and generosity of their nobles. I said virtue, wealth, and generosity, because the great man who is vicious will be extremely vicious, and the closefisted rich man will be a miserly beggar, for the person who possesses wealth is not made happy by having it but by spending it, and not spending it haphazardly but in knowing how to spend it well. An impoverished knight has no way to show he is a knight except through his virtue, by being affable, well-mannered, courteous, civil, and diligent, not proud, arrogant, or prone to gossip, and above all, by being charitable, for with two
maravedís
given joyfully to a poor man, he will show that he is as generous as the man who gives alms to the loud
ringing of bells; no one who sees a knight adorned with these virtues can fail to judge and consider him to be of good breeding, even if he does not know him, and his not being so would be remarkable; praise was always the reward of virtue, and virtuous men cannot avoid being praised.

There are two roads, my dears, which men can take to become rich and honored: one is that of letters, the other that of arms. I have more arms than letters, and my inclination is toward arms, for I was born under the influence of the planet Mars, and so I am almost compelled to follow his path, and follow it I must despite the rest of the world; it will be useless to try to persuade me that I do not wish what heaven wishes, fortune ordains, reason demands, and, above all, what my will desires; for, knowing as I do the countless travails that accompany knight errantry, I also know the infinite benefits that can be attained through it; I know that the path of virtue is very narrow, and the road of wickedness is broad and spacious; I know that their endings and conclusions are different, because the expansive, spacious road of wickedness ends in death, and the road of virtue, so narrow and difficult, ends in life, not the life that ends, but life everlasting; and I know, as our great Castilian poet
⁴
says, that

“Oh, woe is me,” said the niece, “my uncle’s a poet, too! He knows everything, he understands everything, and I’d wager that if he wanted to be a mason, he’d know how to build a house as well as a cage.”

“I promise you, my niece,” responded Don Quixote, “that if these chivalric ideas did not carry with them all my thoughts, there would be nothing I should not make and no curiosity my hands would not create, especially cages and toothpicks.”

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and when they asked who was there, Sancho Panza responded that it was he, and as soon as the housekeeper learned who it was she ran to hide, not wanting to see him because she despised him so much. The niece opened the door, and Sancho’s master came to greet him with open arms, and the two men shut themselves away in Don Quixote’s room, where they had another conversation just as good as the previous one.

CHAPTER VII

When the housekeeper saw that Sancho Panza had shut himself away with her master, she knew what their business was, and imagining that this consultation would result in a determination to embark on a third sally, she put on her cloak and, filled with sorrow and grief, went to find Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, for it seemed to her that because he was well-spoken and a recent friend, he could persuade her master to abandon his mad intentions.

She found him walking in the courtyard of his house, and when she saw him she fell at his feet, perspiring in her distress. When Carrasco saw this display of sorrow and alarm, he said to her:

“What is it, Señora? What has happened? You look as if your heart would break.”

“It’s nothing, Señor Sansón, except that my master’s pushing out, he’s pushing out, no doubt about it!”

“And where is he pushing out, Señora?” asked Sansón. “Has he broken any part of his body?”

“He isn’t pushing out anywhere,” she responded, “except through the door of his madness. I mean, dear Señor Bachelor, that he wants to leave again, and this will be the third time, to search the wide world for what he calls ventures, and I don’t understand how he can give them that name.
¹
The first time they brought him back to us lying across a donkey,
beaten and battered. The second time he came home in an oxcart, locked in a cage and claiming he was enchanted, and the poor man was in such a state that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him: skinny, pale, his eyes sunk right into the top of his head; to bring him back to himself a little, I used more than six hundred eggs; God knows that, and so does everybody else, and my hens, too, and they wouldn’t let me lie.”