It seemed to him that the litter was a bier carrying a gravely wounded or dead knight, and that it was reserved for him alone to take revenge on his behalf, and so, without another word, he couched his lance, positioned himself in the saddle, and with a gallant spirit and bearing stopped in the middle of the road along which the shirted men necessarily had to pass; when he saw that they were near, he raised his voice and said:
“Halt, O knights, or whomsoever you may be, and give an account of yourselves: from whence you come, whither you are going, and whom you carry on that bier; for by all indications either you have committed an offense or one has been committed against you, and it is needful and proper that I know of it, either to punish you for your evil deeds or to avenge the wrong that has been done to you.”
“We’re in a hurry,” responded one of the shirted men, “and the inn is far, and we can’t stop to give the accounting you ask for.”
And spurring his mule, he rode forward. Don Quixote took great offense at this reply, and seizing the mule’s bridle, he said:
“Halt, and be more courteous, and give the accounting for which I have asked; otherwise, all of you must do battle with me.”
The mule was skittish, and when his bridle was seized he became so frightened that he bucked and threw his rider to the ground. A servant who was on foot, seeing the shirted man fall, began to insult Don Quixote, who was angry by now, and without waiting to hear more, he couched his lance, attacked one of the mourners, wounded him, and knocked him to the ground; when he turned to face the rest of them, it was wonderful to see how quickly he charged and routed them, for at that moment Rocinante moved with such speed and arrogance, it seemed as if he had sprouted wings.
All the shirted men were timorous and unarmed, and at the first opportunity they immediately left the fray and began to run across the fields, holding their burning torches, and they looked like nothing so much as the figures in masks who run about on nights of revels and celebrations. The men in mourning, caught up and swaddled in their soutanes and cassocks, could not move; and so, in complete safety, Don Quixote struck them all and drove them away against their will, for they all thought he was not a man but a devil from hell who had come to take the dead body they were carrying on the litter.
Sancho saw it all, amazed at his master’s boldness, and he said to himself:
“No doubt about it, this master of mine is as courageous and brave as he says.”
A torch was burning on the ground next to the first man who had been thrown by his mule, and in its light Don Quixote could see him; and coming over to him, he put the point of his lance to his face, telling him to yield; if not, he would kill him. To which the fallen man responded:
“I have yielded and then some; I can’t move because my leg is broken; I beg your grace, if you are a Christian gentleman, not to kill me, for you would commit a great sacrilege: I am a licentiate and have taken my first vows.”
“Then what the devil has brought you here,” said Don Quixote, “being a man of the Church?”
“What, Señor?” replied the fallen man. “My misfortune.”
“An even greater one awaits you,” said Don Quixote, “if you do not answer to my satisfaction everything I asked you earlier.”
“Your grace will easily have your satisfaction,” responded the licentiate, “and so your grace should know that even though I said before that I was a licentiate, I am only a bachelor, and my name is Alonso López; I’m a native of Alcobendas, and I have come from the city of Baeza, with eleven other priests, the men who fled with the torches; we are going to the city of Segovia, escorting the dead body that lies in that litter, a gentleman who died in Baeza, where he was originally interred, and now, as I’ve said, we are carrying his bones to his grave in Segovia, his native city.”
“Who killed him?” asked Don Quixote.
“God, by means of a pestilential fever,” responded the bachelor.
“In that case,” said Don Quixote, “Our Lord has relieved me of the task which I was going to undertake to avenge his death, if anyone else had killed him; but since he was killed by the One who killed him, there is no other recourse but to be silent and shrug one’s shoulders, which is what I should do if He had killed me. And I want your reverence to know that I am a knight from La Mancha, named Don Quixote, and it is my occupation and profession to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injuries.”
“I don’t know how you can speak of righting wrongs,” said the bachelor, “for you have certainly wronged me and broken my leg, which won’t ever be right again; and in rectifying my injuries, you have injured me so much that I’ll go on being injured for the rest of my life; it was a great misadventure for me to run across a man who is seeking adventures.”
“Not all things,” responded Don Quixote, “happen in precisely the same way. The harm, Señor Bachelor Alonso López, lay in all of you coming as you did, at night, dressed in those surplices, holding burning torches, and praying, and draped in mourning, for you indeed appeared to be evil beings from the next world; as a consequence, I could not fail to fulfill my obligation and attack you, and I should have attacked even if I had known for a fact you were all demons from hell, which is what I deemed and considered you to be.”
“Since this is what fate had in store for me,” said the bachelor of arts, “I implore your grace, Señor Knight Errant (who has treated me with such errancy), to help me out from under this mule, for my leg is caught between the stirrup and the saddle.”
“I might have talked until morning!” said Don Quixote. “How long would you have waited to tell me of your plight?”
Then he called to Sancho Panza, who took no notice, because he was busy going through the provisions on a pack mule that belonged to those good gentlemen and was well-supplied with things to eat. Sancho made a sack out of his coat, gathered up as much as he could fit into that pouch, loaded it onto his donkey, and then responded to his master’s calls and helped to remove the weight of the mule from the bachelor. After placing him on the animal’s back, Sancho handed him his torch, and Don Quixote told him to follow after his companions and, on his behalf, to beg their pardon for the offense against them, which it had not been in his power to avoid committing. Sancho also said to him:
“If, by chance, those gentlemen would like to know who the valiant man is who offended them, your grace can say he is the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, also known as The Knight of the Sorrowful Face.”
At this the bachelor rode off, and Don Quixote asked Sancho what had moved him to call him The Knight of the Sorrowful Face at that moment and at no other.
“I’ll tell you,” responded Sancho. “I was looking at you for a while in the light of the torch that unlucky man was carrying, and the truth is that your grace has the sorriest-looking face I’ve seen recently, and it must be on account of your weariness after this battle, or the molars and teeth you’ve lost.”
“It is not that,” responded Don Quixote, “but rather that the wise man whose task it will be to write the history of my deeds must have thought it would be a good idea if I took some appellative title as did the knights of the past: one was called The Knight of the Blazing Sword; another, The Knight of the Unicorn; yet another, The Knight of the Damsels; this one, The Knight of the Phoenix; that one, The Knight of the Griffon; the other, The Knight of Death;3 and by these names and insignias they were known all around the world. And so I say that the wise man I have already mentioned must have put on your tongue and in your thoughts the idea of calling me The Knight of the Sorrowful Face, which is what I plan to call myself from now on; and so that this name may be even more fitting, I resolve to have depicted on my shield, when there is time, a very sorrowful face.”
“There’s no reason to waste time and money making that face,” said Sancho. “What your grace should do instead is uncover yours and show it to those who are looking at you, and right away, without any images or shields, they’ll call you The Knight of the Sorrowful Face; be
lieve me, I’m telling you the truth, because I promise your grace, Señor, and I’m only joking, that hunger and your missing teeth give you such a sorry-looking face that, as I’ve said, you can easily do without the sorrowful picture.”
Don Quixote laughed at Sancho’s witticism, but even so, he resolved to call himself by that name as soon as his shield, or buckler, could be painted as he had imagined.
Then the bachelor returned and said to Don Quixote:
“I forgot to say that your grace should be advised that you have been excommunicated for having laid violent hands on something sacred, juxta illud: Si quis suadente diabolo, etc.”4
“I do not understand those Latin words,” Don Quixote responded, “but I do know very well that I did not use my hands but this lance; furthermore, I did not think I was attacking priests or things of the Church, which I respect and adore as the Catholic and faithful Christian I am, but phantoms and apparitions of the next world. Even so, I remember what happened to El Cid Ruy Díaz when he broke the chair of the king’s ambassador before his holiness the pope, for which he was excommunicated, and on that day good Rodrigo de Vivar showed himself to be a very honored and valiant knight.”5
On hearing this, the bachelor left without saying a word in reply. Don Quixote wanted to see if the body on the litter was actually bones or not, but Sancho did not agree, saying:
“Señor, your grace has come to the end of this dangerous adventure more safely than all the others I have seen; these people, though they’ve been defeated and routed, may realize that only one man defeated them and be ashamed and embarrassed by that, and they may rally and look for us, and give us something we won’t forget. The donkey is carrying what it should, the mountains are nearby, hunger is pressing, and there’s nothing else to do but withdraw as fast as we can and, as they say, let the dead go to the grave and the living to the loaf of bread.”
And riding ahead on his donkey, he asked his master to follow him, and since it seemed to Don Quixote that Sancho was right, he followed him without another word. After riding a short while between two hills, they found themselves in a broad, secluded valley, where they dismounted, and Sancho lightened the donkey’s load, and they stretched out on the green grass, and with hunger as their sauce, they had breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper all at once, satisfying their stomachs with more than one of the comestibles that the dead man’s priests—who rarely permit themselves to go hungry—carried in their saddlebag of provisions.
But they suffered another misfortune, which Sancho considered the worst of all, and it was that they had no wine to drink or even water to put to their lips; troubled by thirst, Sancho, seeing that the meadow where they were sitting was full of abundant green grass, said what will be recounted in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XX
Regarding the most incomparable and singular adventure ever concluded with less danger by a famous knight, and which was concluded by the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha
“It’s not possible, Señor, for this grass not to be a sign that somewhere nearby there’s a spring or brook that waters these plants, and so it would be a good idea for us to go a little farther until we find a place where we can quench this terrible thirst that’s plaguing us and is, no doubt about it, harder to bear than hunger.”
This seemed good advice to Don Quixote, and after packing away the remains of their supper on the donkey, he led Rocinante by the reins, and Sancho held his donkey’s halter, and they began to walk to the top of the meadow, feeling their way because the dark of night did not allow them to see anything at all; but they had not gone two hundred paces when a sound of crashing reached their ears, as if water were hurtling over large, high cliffs. The sound made them very happy, and they stopped to hear where it was coming from, when they suddenly heard another exceedingly loud noise that watered down their joy at finding water, especially Sancho’s, for he was naturally fearful and not very brave. I say that they heard the sound of rhythmic pounding, along with a certain clanking of irons and chains that, accompanied by the clamorous fury of the water, would have put terror in any heart other than Don Quixote’s.
The night, as we have said, was dark, and they happened to walk under some tall trees whose leaves, moved by the gentle breeze, made a muffled, frightening sound; in short, the solitude, the place, the darkness, the noise of the water, and the murmur of the leaves all combined to cause panic and consternation, especially when they saw that the pounding did not stop, the wind did not cease, and morning did not come; added to this was their not knowing where they were. But Don Quixote, accompanied by his intrepid heart, leaped onto Rocinante, and, holding his shield, he grasped his lance and said:
“Sancho, my friend, know that I was born, by the will of heaven, in this our iron age, to revive the one of gold, or the Golden Age, as it is called. I am he for whom are reserved dangers, great deeds, valiant feats. I am, I repeat, he who is to revive the Knights of the Round Table, the Twelve Peers of France, the Nine Worthies, he who is to make the world forget the Platirs, Tablants, Olivants, and Tirants, the Phoebuses and Belianises, and the entire horde of famous knights errant of a bygone age, by performing in this time in which I find myself such great and extraordinary deeds and feats of arms that they will overshadow the brightest they ever achieved. Note well, my faithful and loyal squire, the darkness of this night, its strange silence, the indistinct and confused sound of these trees, the fearful clamor of the water we came seeking, which seems to be falling and crashing from the high mountains of the moon, and the unceasing noise of pounding that wounds and pains our ears; all these things, taken together and separately, are enough to instill fear, terror, and dread in the bosom of Mars himself, not to mention one who is unaccustomed to such occurrences and adventures. But these things I have described for you are inspiration and encouragement to my valor, which makes my heart almost burst in my bosom with the desire to embark on this adventure, no matter how difficult it may prove to be. And so, tighten the cinches on Rocinante, and God be with you, and wait for me here no more than three days, and if I have not come back by then, you may return to our village, and from there, as a boon and good deed for my sake, you will go to Toboso and tell my peerless lady Dulcinea that her captive knight died performing deeds that would make him worthy of being called her own.”
When Sancho heard his master’s words, he began to cry with the greatest tenderness in the world, and he said:
“Señor, I don’t know why your grace wants to embark on this fearful adventure; it’s night, nobody can see us here, we can turn around and get away from the danger, even if we don’t drink anything for three days, and since there’s nobody here to see us, there’s nobody to call us cowards; besides, I’ve heard the sermons of our village priest, and your grace knows him very well, and he says that whoever goes looking for danger perishes; so it isn’t a good idea to tempt God by undertaking something so terrible that you can’t get out of it except through some miracle, and heaven has done enough of them for your grace, letting you escape being tossed in the blanket, like I was, and letting you come out victorious, free, and unharmed, over so many enemies who were escorting the dead man. And if all this doesn’t touch or soften your hard heart, let it be moved by thinking and believing that as soon as your grace has left this place, fear will make me give up my soul to anybody who wants to take it. I left my home and my children and my wife to serve your grace, thinking I would be better off, not worse; but just as greed makes the sack burst, it has torn my hopes apart when they were brightest for getting that wretched, ill-starred ínsula your grace has promised me so often; I see that as payment and reward you want to leave me now in a desolate place far from all other human beings. By the One God, Señor, you must not wrong me so, and if your grace absolutely refuses to think again about embarking on this deed, at least put it off until morning, for the lore I learned when I was a shepherd tells me it’s less than three hours till dawn, because the mouth of the Horn is over my head and midnight’s in line
with my left arm.”1
“How can you, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “see where that line is, or where the mouth of any Horn or any head is, if the night is so dark there is not a single star visible in all the sky?”
“That’s true,” said Sancho, “but fear has many eyes and can see things under the ground, let alone high in the sky; even so, it stands to reason that it won’t be long until daylight.”
“However long it may be,” responded Don Quixote, “let no one say of me, now or ever, that tears and pleas turned me from doing what I, as a knight, was obliged to do; and so I beg you, Sancho, to be quiet, for God, who has placed in my heart the desire to embark on this incomparable and most fearsome adventure, will surely look after my well-being and console you in your grief. What you must do is tighten Rocinante’s cinches and remain here; I shall soon return, either alive or dead.”
Sancho, seeing his master’s firm resolve, and how little he accomplished with tears, advice, and pleas, decided to take advantage of his task and do what he could to make Don Quixote wait until day, and so, as he was tightening the horse’s cinches, he very cunningly and quietly tied Rocinante’s forelegs together with his donkey’s halter, and when Don Quixote tried to leave he could not because his horse could not move except by hops and jumps. Seeing the success of his deception, Sancho Panza said:
“Oh, Señor, heaven, moved by my tears and prayers, has willed Rocinante not to move, and if you persist, and spur and urge him on, that will anger Fortune, and it will be, as they say, like kicking at thorns.”
At this Don Quixote grew desperate, for no matter how hard he spurred his horse, he could not make him move; then, not realizing that the animal’s legs had been tied, he thought it a good idea to be calm and wait, either for the dawn or until Rocinante could move forward, believing, no doubt, that this situation was caused by something other than Sancho’s labors, and so he said to him:
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