“But how could your grace disembark in Osuna, my lady,” asked Don Quixote, “if it is not a sea port?”
Before Dorotea could respond, the priest began to speak, saying:
“My lady the princess must mean that after she disembarked in Málaga, the first place she heard of your grace was in Osuna.”
“That is just what I meant,” said Dorotea.
“And now that is settled,” said the priest, “and Your Majesty can continue.”
“There is no need to continue,” responded Dorotea, “except to say in conclusion that my good fortune has been so great in finding Don Quixote that I already consider and think of myself as queen and mistress of my entire kingdom, for he, in his courtesy and nobility, has promised me the boon of going with me wherever I may lead, and that is nowhere else but to Pandafilando of the Gloomy Glance so that he may kill him and restore to me what the giant has so unjustly usurped; all this will happen exactly as I have said, because this is what Tinacrio the Mage, my good father, prophesied; he also said, and left it written in Chaldean or Greek, neither of which I can read, that if the knight of his prophecy, after cutting off the head of the giant, wished to marry me, I should, immediately and without argument, give myself to him to be his legitimate wife and grant him possession of both my kingdom and my person.”
“What do you think, friend Sancho?” said Don Quixote at this point. “Do you hear what is taking place? Did I not tell you? Now see if we have a kingdom to rule and a queen to marry.”
“I’ll swear we do,” said Sancho, “and damn the man who doesn’t marry after he slits open the gullet of Señor Pandahilado! Tell me the queen’s not a good catch! All the fleas in my bed should be so nice!”
And saying this, he kicked his heels in the air twice, displaying enormous joy, and then he went to grasp the reins of Dorotea’s mule, brought it to a halt, and kneeled before her, asking that she give him her hands to kiss as a sign that he had received her as his queen and mistress. Which of those present did not laugh at seeing the madness of the master and the simplemindedness of the servant? Dorotea, in effect, held out her hands for him to kiss and promised to make him a great lord in her kingdom when heaven in its mercy would allow her to recover and enjoy it. Sancho thanked her with words that renewed every-one’s laughter.
“This, Señores,” continued Dorotea, “is my history; all that remains for me to say is that of the entire entourage I took with me from my kingdom, the only one left is this good bearded squire; the others drowned in a great storm that broke over us when we were in sight of port, and he and I escaped on two planks and reached land as if by miracle; and so the story of my life, as you may have noticed, is one of miracle and mystery. And if I have gone too far in anything, or have not been as accurate as I should have been, blame what the Señor Licentiate said at the beginning of my tale: continual and extraordinary difficulties take away the memory of the one who suffers them.”
“Mine will not be taken away, O noble and valiant lady,” said Don Quixote, “no matter how great and unprecedented the difficulties I may suffer in serving thee! Therefore I again confirm the boon I have promised, and I vow to go with thee to the ends of the earth until I encounter thy savage enemy whose arrogant head I intend, with the help of God and my strong arm, to cut off with the sharp edge of this…I cannot say good sword, thanks to Ginés of Pasamonte, who stole mine from me.”4
He muttered this last remark between clenched teeth and then continued, saying:
“And after I have cut off his head and placed thee in peaceful possession of thy kingdom, it will be left to thine own will to do with thy person as thou desirest; so long as my memory is filled with, and my will held captive by, and my reason lost because of a certain lady…I shall say no more, for it is not possible for me to consider or even think of marrying, although it were with one as unique as the phoenix.”
Sancho was so displeased by what his master had said about not wanting to marry that he became very angry, and raising his voice, he said:
“I vow and I swear, Señor Don Quixote, that your grace is not in your right mind. How can your grace have any doubts about marrying a princess as noble as this one? Does your grace think fate will offer you good fortune like this around every corner? Is my lady Dulcinea, by some chance, more beautiful? No, certainly not, not even by half, and I’d go so far as to say she can’t even touch the shoes of the lady we have before us. So woe is me, I’ll never get the rank I’m hoping for if your grace goes around asking for the moon. Marry, marry right now, Satan take you, and take the kingdom that has dropped into your hands without you lifting a finger, and when you’re king make me a marquis or a governor, and then the devil can make off with all the rest.”
Don Quixote could not endure hearing such blasphemies said against his lady Dulcinea; he raised his lance, and without saying a word to Sancho, in absolute silence, he struck him twice with blows so hard he knocked him to the ground, and if Dorotea had not called to him and told him to stop, he no doubt would have killed him then and there.
“Do you think,”5 he said after a while, “base wretch, that you will always be able to treat me with disrespect, that it will always be a matter of your erring and my forgiving you? You are mistaken, depraved villain, something you undoubtedly are since you dare speak ill of the incomparable Dulcinea. Do you not realize, you coarse, contemptible ruffian, that if it were not for the valor she inspires in my arm, I should not have the strength to kill a flea? Tell me, insidious viper’s tongue, who do you think has won this kingdom and cut off the head of this giant and made you a marquis, all of which I consider already accomplished, concluded, and finished, if not the valor of Dulcinea, wielding my arm as the instrument of her great deeds? In me she does combat, and in me she conquers, and I live and breathe in her, and have life and being. Oh, foul whoreson! What an ingrate you are, for you see yourself raised from the dust of the earth to be a titled lord, and you respond to this great benefit by speaking ill of the one who performed it for you!”
Sancho was not so badly beaten that he did not hear everything his master said to him, and after getting to his feet in some haste, he went to stand behind Dorotea’s palfrey, and from there he said to his master:
“Tell me, Señor: if your grace is determined not to marry this great princess, it’s clear the kingdom won’t be yours; and if it isn’t, what favors can you do for me? That’s what I’m complaining about; your grace should marry this queen for now, when we have her here like a gift from heaven, and afterwards you can go back to my lady Dulcinea; there must have been kings in the world who lived with their mistresses. As for beauty, I won’t get involved in that; if truth be told, they both seem fine to me, though I’ve never seen the lady Dulcinea.”
“What do you mean, you have not seen her, you blasphemous traitor?” said Don Quixote. “Have you not just brought me a message from her?”
“I mean I didn’t look at her so carefully,” said Sancho, “that I could notice her beauty in particular and her good features point by point, but on the whole, she seemed fine to me.”
“Now I forgive you,” said Don Quixote, “and you must pardon the anger I have shown you; for first impulses are not in the hands of men.”
“I can see that,” responded Sancho, “just like in me a desire to talk is always my first impulse, and I can never help saying, not even once, what’s on my tongue.”
“Even so,” said Don Quixote, “think about what you say, Sancho, because you can carry the jug to the fountain only so many times…and I shall say no more.”
“Well,” responded Sancho, “God’s in His heaven, and He sees all the snares, and He’ll be the judge of who does worse: me in not saying the right thing or your grace in not doing it.”
“Enough,” said Dorotea. “Make haste, Sancho, and kiss your master’s hand and beg his pardon, and from now be more careful in your praise and blame, and do not speak ill of that Señora Tobosa, whom I do not know except to serve her, and trust in
God that you will not lack an estate where you will live like a prince.”
Sancho, with his eyes on the ground, went to ask for his master’s hand, and his master gave it to him with a serene bearing, and after Sancho had kissed his hand, Don Quixote gave him his blessing and told him to walk ahead a little, because he had to speak to him and ask him things that were very important. Sancho did so, and the two of them moved ahead of the others, and Don Quixote said:
“Since your return I have not had the occasion or opportunity to ask you many details about the message you carried and the reply you brought back; and now, since fortune has granted us both the time and the place, do not deny me the happiness you can afford me with this good news.”
“Your grace can ask whatever you want,” responded Sancho, “and I’ll finish off each question as easily as it was begun. But, Señor, I beg your grace not to be so vengeful from now on.”
“Why do you say that, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.
“I say it,” he responded, “because the blows you gave me just now were more because of the dispute the devil started between us the other night than because of what I said against my lady Dulcinea; I love and worship her like a relic, even if she isn’t one, just because she belongs to your grace.”
“As you value your life, Sancho, do not speak of this again,” said Don Quixote, “for it brings me grief; I forgave you then, and you know what they say: a new sin demands a new penance.”6
While Don Quixote and Sancho were engaged in this conversation, the priest told Dorotea that she had shown great cleverness not only in the story, but in making it so brief and so similar to the tales in books of chivalry. She said she had often spent time reading them but did not know where the provinces or the sea ports were, and that is why she had made the mistake of saying she had disembarked at Osuna.
“I realized that,” said the priest, “which is why I hastened to say what I did, and that settled everything. But isn’t it strange to see how easily this unfortunate gentleman believes all those inventions and lies simply because they are in the same style and manner as his foolish books?”
“It is,” said Cardenio, “and so unusual and out of the ordinary that I don’t know if anyone wanting to invent and fabricate such a story would have the wit to succeed.”
“Well, there’s something else in this,” said the priest. “Aside from the foolish things this good gentleman says with reference to his madness, if you speak to him of other matters, he talks rationally and shows a clear, calm understanding in everything; in other words, except if the subject is chivalry, no one would think he does not have a very good mind.”
While they were having this conversation, Don Quixote continued his and said to Sancho:
“Panza my friend, let us make peace and forget about our quarrels, and tell me now, without anger or rancor: where, how, and when did you find Dulcinea? What was she doing? What did you say to her? What did she reply? What was her expression when she read my letter? Who transcribed it for you? Tell me everything you saw that is worth knowing, asking, and answering, not exaggerating or falsifying in order to give me pleasure, and not omitting anything, for that will take my pleasure away.”
“Señor,” responded Sancho, “if truth be told, nobody transcribed the letter for me because I didn’t take any letter.”
“What you say is true,” said Don Quixote. “I found the notebook where I wrote the letter in my possession two days after you left, which caused me great sorrow; I did not know what you would do when you discovered that you did not have the letter, and I believed you would return when you realized you did not have it.”
“That’s what I would have done,” responded Sancho, “if I hadn’t memorized it when your grace read it to me, and so I told it to a sacristan, and he transcribed it point for point from my memory, and he said that though he’d read many letters of excommunication, in all his days he’d never seen or read a letter as nice as that one.”
“And do you still have it in your memory, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.
“No, Señor,” responded Sancho, “because after I told it to him, and had no more use for it, I set about forgetting it; if I do remember anything, it’s that part about sullied, I mean sovereign lady, and the last part: Thine until death, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. And between these two things, I put in more than three hundred souls, and lives, and eyes of mine.”
CHAPTER XXXI
Regarding the delectable words that passed between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his squire, as well as other events
“All this does not displease me; go on,” said Don Quixote. “When you arrived, what was that queen of beauty doing? Surely you found her stringing pearls, or embroidering some heraldic device in gold thread for this her captive knight.”
“I didn’t find her doing anything,” responded Sancho, “except winnowing two fanegas1 of wheat in a corral of her house.”
“Well, you may be sure,” said Don Quixote, “that, touched by her hands, the grains of wheat were pearls. And did you notice, my friend, if it was white wheat or ordinary spring wheat?”
“It was just buckwheat,” responded Sancho.
“Well, I assure you,” said Don Quixote, “that winnowed by her hands, it undoubtedly made the finest white bread. But go on: when you gave her my letter, did she kiss it? Did she place it on her head?2 Did she engage in some ceremony worthy of such a letter? What did she do?”
“When I was about to give it to her,” responded Sancho, “she was in the middle of shaking a good part of the wheat that she had in the sieve, and she said to me: ‘Friend, put the letter on that sack; I can’t read it until I finish sifting everything I have here.’”
“A wise lady!” said Don Quixote. “That must have been so that she could read it slowly and savor it. Go on, Sancho. And while she was engaged in her task, what discourse did she have with you? What did she ask about me? And you, what did you respond? Come, tell me everything; do not leave even a half-note in the inkwell.”
“She didn’t ask me anything,” said Sancho. “But I told her how your grace, to serve her, was doing penance, naked from the waist up, here in this sierra like a savage, sleeping on the ground, not eating your bread from a cloth or combing your beard, crying and cursing your fate.”
“When you said that I cursed my fate, you misspoke,” said Don Quixote. “Rather, I bless it and shall bless it all the days of my life for making me worthy of loving so high a lady as Dulcinea of Toboso.”
“She’s so high,” responded Sancho, “that by my faith she’s a whole span taller than I am.”
“How do you know, Sancho?” said Don Quixote. “Did you measure yourself against her?”
“I measured myself this way,” responded Sancho. “When I went over to her to help her load a sack of wheat onto a donkey, we were so close that I could see she was a good span taller than me.”
“Well, it is true,” replied Don Quixote, “that her great height is accompanied and adorned by a thousand million graces of the soul! But there is one thing you will not deny, Sancho: when you approached her, did you not smell the perfume of Sheba, an aromatic, somehow pleasing fragrance whose name I cannot recall? I mean, an essence or scent as if you were in the shop of some rare glover?”
“What I can say,” said Sancho, “is that I smelled a mannish kind of odor, and it must have been that with all that moving around, she was sweaty and sort of sour.”
“That could not be,” responded Don Quixote. “You must have had a head cold or else you were smelling yourself, because I know very well the fragrance of that rose among thorns, that lily of the field, that delicate liquid ambergris.”
“That may be,” responded Sancho, “because very often the same smell comes from me, though at the time I thought it was coming from her grace the lady Dulcinea, but there’s no reason to be surprised, since one devil looks like another.”
“All right, then,” Don Quixote went on, “she finished sifting the wheat and sent it to t
he mill. What did she do when she read the letter?”
“She didn’t read the letter,” said Sancho, “because she said she didn’t know how to read or write; instead, she tore it into tiny pieces, saying that she didn’t want to give it to anybody else to read because she didn’t want people in the village knowing her secrets, and she was satisfied with what I had told her about the love your grace had for her and the special penance you were doing for her sake. Finally, she told me to tell your grace that she kissed your hands, and had more desire to see you than to write to you, and so she begged and commanded, in view of your letter, that you leave these wild places, and stop doing crazy things, and set out right away for Toboso, if something more important didn’t come along, because she wanted to see your grace very much. She laughed a lot when I told her that your grace was called The Knight of the Sorrowful Face. I asked her if the Basque we met so long ago had come there, and she said he had, and that he was a very fine man. I also asked her about the galley slaves, but she said that so far she hadn’t seen a single one.”
“Everything is fine to this point,” said Don Quixote. “But tell me: when she said goodbye, what jewel did she give you as a reward for the news of me that you brought to her? Because it is a traditional and ancient custom among knights errant and their ladies to give the squires, maidens, or dwarves who bring the knights news of their ladies, or the ladies news of their knights, the gift of a precious jewel in gratitude for the message.”
“That may be true, and I think it’s a good custom; but that must have been in the past; nowadays the custom must be just to give a piece of bread and some cheese, for that’s what my lady Dulcinea handed me over the corral fence when she said goodbye; and it even looked like the cheese was made of sheep’s milk.”
“She is liberal in the extreme,” said Don Quixote, “and if she did not present you with a jewel of gold, no doubt it was because she did not have one near at hand, but it is never the wrong time for a gift: I shall see her and you will have your reward. Do you know what astounds me, Sancho? It seems to me that you flew there and back, because it has taken you a little more than three days to go to Toboso and come back here again, a distance of more than thirty leagues; which leads me to believe that the wise necromancer who watches over my affairs and is my friend (because perforce there is one, there must be one, else I should not be a good knight errant), I say that he must have helped you on your journey without your realizing it, for there are wise men who pick up a knight errant sleeping in his bed, and without his knowing how or by what means, the knight awakens the following day more than a thousand leagues distant from where he went to sleep. If not for this, knights errant could not help each other when they are in danger, as they do constantly. For one may be doing battle in the mountains of Armenia with a dragon, or a fierce monster, or another knight, and matters are going badly for him and he is on the point of death, and then, when you least expect it, another knight appears on a cloud or in a chariot of fire, a knight who is his friend and was in England just a short while before, and who comes to his aid and saves him from death and that night finds himself at home, enjoying his supper; and the distance between the two places is usually two or three thousand leagues. All of this is accomplished through the skill and wisdom of the wise enchanters who watch over these valiant knights. And so, Sancho my friend, it is not difficult for me to believe that you have traveled back and forth in so short a time between here and Toboso, for, as I have said, some friendly sorcerer must have carried you through the air without your realizing it.”
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