Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes

  We returned to Constantinople, and the following year, 1573, we heard how Señor Don Juan had conquered Tunis, capturing that kingdom from the Turks and turning it over to Muley Hamet, thereby destroying the hopes of Muley Hamida, the cruelest and most valiant Moor in the world, that he would return to the throne.12 The Great Turk felt this loss very deeply, and, making use of the sagacity that all those of his house possess, he made peace with the Venetians, who desired it much more than he did, and the following year, which was 1574, he attacked the Goletta13 and the fort that Señor Don Juan had left partially constructed near Tunis. During all these battles I was at the oar, without any hope of freedom; at least, I did not hope to obtain it by means of a ransom, because I had decided not to write the news of my misfortune to my father. In the end, the Goletta was lost, and the fort as well, attacked by seventy-five thousand regular Turkish soldiers and more than four hundred thousand Moors and Arabs from the rest of Africa, and this vast army had so many weapons and supplies, and so many sappers, that they could have picked up earth and covered over the Goletta and the fort using only their bare hands.

  The Goletta, until that time considered impregnable, was the first to fall, not because of any fault in its defenders, who did in its defense everything they should have done and all that they could do, but because experience showed how easily earthworks could be built in that desert sand, for at one time water was found at a depth of two spans, but the Turks did not find it at a depth of two varas;14 and so, with countless sacks of sand they built earthworks so high that they rose above the walls of the fort, and their soldiers could fire down on the fort, and no one could stay there or help in its defense. It was the general opinion that our forces should not have closed themselves inside the Goletta but waited for the landing in open country, and those who say this speak from a distance and with little experience of this kind of warfare, because inside the Goletta and the fort there were barely seven thousand soldiers, and how could so small a number, no matter how brave, have gone into open country and defended the forts at the same time against the far larger numbers of the enemy? And how is it possible not to lose a fort when there is no relief, and it is surrounded by so many resolute enemies fighting on their own land? But it seemed to many, and it seemed to me, that it was a special grace and mercy that heaven conferred on Spain when it allowed the destruction of that breeding ground and shelter for wickedness, that voracious, gluttonous devourer of infinite amounts of money spent there to no avail, yet serving no other purpose than to preserve the happy memory of its having been captured by the invincible Carlos V, as if those stones were necessary to make his fame eternal, as it is now and forever will be. The fort was lost, too, but the Turks had to take it a span at a time, because the soldiers who defended it fought so valiantly and fiercely that they killed more than twenty-five thousand of the enemy in twenty-two general assaults. Three hundred of our soldiers survived, every one of them wounded when he was taken prisoner, a sure and certain sign of their tenacity and valor and of how well they defended and protected their positions. A small fortress or tower in the middle of the lagoon, commanded by Don Juan Zanoguera, a famous gentleman and soldier from Valencia, surrendered on advantageous terms. They captured Don Pedro Puertocarrero, the general in command of the Goletta, who did everything possible to defend the fortress and felt its loss so deeply that he died of sorrow on the road to Constantinople, where he was being taken as a prisoner. They also captured the general in command of the fort, whose name was Gabrio Cervellón, a Milanese gentleman who was a great engineer and a very courageous soldier.

  Many notable men died in those two forts; one was Pagán Doria, a knight of the Order of St. John, an extremely generous man who showed great liberality to his brother, the famous Juan de Andrea Doria; what made his death even sadder was that he died at the hands of some Arabs whom he trusted when he saw that the fort was lost; they offered to take him, dressed as a Moor, to Tabarca, a small port where the Genoese who engage in the coral trade along these shores keep a house; these Arabs cut off his head and took it to the commander of the Turkish fleet, who confirmed for them our Spanish proverb: ‘For the treason we are grateful, though we find the traitor hateful.’ And so, they say, the commander ordered the two who brought him the present to be hanged because they did not bring the man to him alive. Among the Christians captured in the fort, there was one named Don Pedro de Aguilar, a native of Andalucía, though I do not know the town, who had been an ensign, and a soldier of great note and rare intelligence; he had a special gift for what they call poetry. I say this because his luck brought him to my galley, and my bench, to be the slave of my master, and before we left that port this gentleman composed two sonnets as epitaphs, one for the Goletta and the other for the fort. The truth is I must recite them, because I know them by heart, and I believe they will give you more pleasure than grief.”

  When the captive named Don Pedro de Aguilar, Don Fernando looked at his companions, and all three of them smiled, and when the captive mentioned the sonnets, one of them said:

  “Before your grace continues, I beg you to tell me what happened to this Don Pedro de Aguilar.”

  “What I do know,” responded the captive, “is that after spending two years in Constantinople he escaped, disguised as an Albanian and in the company of a Greek spy, and I do not know if he obtained his freedom, though I believe he did, because a year later I saw the Greek in Constantinople but could not ask if they had been successful.”

  “Well, they were,” responded the gentleman, “for Don Pedro is my brother, and he is now in our home, safe, rich, and married, with three children.”

  “Thanks be to God,” said the captive, “for the mercies he has received; in my opinion, there is no joy on earth equal to that of regaining the freedom one has lost.”

  “What is more,” replied the gentleman, “I know the sonnets my brother wrote.”

  “Then your grace should recite them,” said the captive, “for I am certain you can say them better than I.”

  “I would be happy to,” responded the gentleman. “The one to the Goletta says:

  CHAPTER XL

  In which the history of the captive continues

  SONNET

  O blissful souls, who from the mortal veil

  freed and unconfined, flew from this low earth,

  borne on the wings of brave and virtuous deeds

  to the highest, holiest spheres of glorious heav’n,

  ablaze with fury and with righteous zeal,

  and summoning all your honor and your strength,

  you colored the ocean and the sandy ground

  with your own blood, and with the enemy’s;

  you lost your lives before you lost the valor

  of your weary, battling arms; in death,

  though you are vanquished, victory is yours.

  Your mortal, melancholy fall, between

  the ramparts and the attacking horde, brings you

  fame in this world, blessed glory in the next.”

  “That is how I remember it, too,” said the captive.

  “And the one to the fort, if I remember correctly,” said the gentleman, “reads like this:

  SONNET

  Up from this sterile, devastated ground,

  these scattered clods of earth, these ruined stones,

  the saintly souls of three thousand warriors

  rose, immortal, to their glorious home,

  after wielding, in vain, the emboldened might

  of their courageous arms until, at last,

  the exhausted few, too few to resist,

  gave up their lives to the enemy’s sharp blade.

  This is ground that has been the constant home

  of a thousand sad, heroic memories

  in times long gone and in the present day.

  From its hard bosom no more righteous souls

  have risen to the shining gates of heaven,

  nor has it held the bodies of braver men.”
/>
  They liked the sonnets, the captive was glad to hear the news about his comrade, and, continuing with his story, he said:

  “Having conquered the Goletta and the fort, the Turks ordered the Goletta to be dismantled, because it had been so damaged there was nothing left to raze, and in order to do this more quickly and easily, they mined it in three places; they could not blow up what had seemed its weakest part, that is, the old walls, but what was left standing of the new fortifications built by El Fratín1 came down easily. Then the fleet returned to Constantinople, triumphant and victorious, and a few months after that my master, Uchalí, died;2 he was called Uchalí Fartax—in the Turkish language it means “the Renegade with Scabies”—which is, in fact, what he was, for it is customary among the Turks to name people for some fault or virtue that they have, and this is because they have only four family names, and these come from the Ottoman house;3 the rest, as I have said, take their first and second names from physical defects or character traits. And this man with scabies rowed in the galleys as a slave of the Great Lord for fourteen years, and when he was past the age of thirty-four he became a renegade because of his fury at a Turk who slapped him while he was rowing: in order to take his revenge, he abandoned his faith; his valor was so great that, without using the vile and devious means that most of the Great Turk’s favorites employ in order to succeed, he became king of Algiers and then admiral of the sea, which is the third position in that empire. He came from Calabria, and morally he was a good man who treated his captives very humanely; he had three thousand of them, and after his death they were divided, according to the terms of his will, between the Great Turk, who is the heir of everyone who dies and shares in the inheritance with the dead man’s children, and his renegades; I was passed along to a Venetian renegade who had been a cabin boy when he was captured by Uchalí, who was very fond of the boy and pampered him a good deal, yet he became the cruelest renegade anyone has ever seen. His name was Azán Agá, and he became very rich, and he also became king of Algiers;4 I came there with him from Constantinople, rather happy to be so close to Spain, not because I intended to write to anyone about my misfortunes, but to see if my luck would be better in Algiers than it had been in Constantinople, where I had tried a thousand different ways to escape, and none had been successful; in Algiers I intended to look for other means to achieve what I desired, for the hope of obtaining my freedom never left me, and when what I devised, planned, and attempted did not correspond to my intentions, I did not give up but sought out some other hope to sustain me, no matter how weak and fragile.

  This was how I spent my life, locked in a prison or house that the Turks call a bagnio, where they hold Christian captives, those that belong to the king as well as some that belong to private individuals, and the ones they call ‘stockpiled,’ which is like saying ‘public prisoners,’ who serve the city in public works and in other employment for the general good; these captives find it very difficult to obtain their freedom, because they have no individual master, and there is no one with whom to negotiate their ransom even if a ransom is available. As I have said, some private individuals bring their captives to these bagnios, principally when they are ready to be ransomed, because there they can be kept, not working and in safety, until the ransom money arrives. The king’s captives who are about to be ransomed do not go out with the work crews, either, unless payment of their ransom is delayed, and then, to make them write more urgently for the money, they are obliged to work and are sent out with the others for wood, which is no easy labor. I was one of those waiting for ransom, for when they learned that I was a captain, though I told them of my limited possibilities and lack of wealth, they put me with the gentlemen and the people awaiting ransom. They put a chain on me, more as a sign that I was to be ransomed than to hold me, and I spent my days in that bagnio, with many other gentlemen and people of note who had been selected to be held for ransom. Although hunger and scant clothing troubled us at times, even most of the time, nothing troubled us as much as constantly hearing and seeing my master’s remarkably and exceptionally cruel treatment of Christians. Each day he hanged someone, impaled someone, cut off someone’s ears, and with so little provocation, or without any provocation at all, that the Turks knew he did it merely for the sake of doing it and because it was in his nature to murder the entire human race. The only one who held his own with him was a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra,5 who did things that will be remembered by those people for many years, and all to gain his liberty, yet his master never beat him, or ordered anyone else to beat him, or said an unkind word to him; for the most minor of all the things he did we were afraid he would be impaled, and more than once he feared the same thing; if I had the time, I would tell you something of what that soldier did, which would entertain and amaze you much more than this recounting of my history.

  In any case, overlooking the courtyard of our prison were the windows of the house of a wealthy and important Moor, and these, as is true in most Moorish houses, were more slits than windows, yet even these were covered with very heavy and tightly woven jalousies. One day I happened to be on a flat roof in our prison with three companions; we were passing the time by trying to see how far we could jump with our chains on, for we were alone, all the other Christians having gone out to work; by chance I looked up and saw that through one of those narrow little windows I’ve mentioned a reed appeared, with a handkerchief tied to the end of it, and the reed was moving about, almost as if it were signaling that we should come and take it. We thought about it, and one of the men who was with me went to stand under the reed to see if it would drop, or what would happen, but as soon as he reached the spot, the reed was raised and moved from side to side, as if shaking its head no. The Christian came back, and again the reed was raised and lowered with the same movements as before. Another of my companions approached, and again the same thing happened. Then the third man approached, the same thing was repeated, and seeing this, I wanted to try my luck, too, and as soon as I placed myself under the reed it was dropped inside the bagnio and fell at my feet. I immediately untied the handkerchief, which had a knot in it, and inside were ten cianiís, which are coins of base gold used by the Moors, each one worth ten of our reales. It goes without saying that I was delighted with this discovery, and my happiness was as great as my amazement at the thought of where that gift had come from, and why it was directed to me, since the signs of not wanting to drop the reed for anyone but me clearly indicated that I was the object of the favor.

  I took the money, broke the reed, returned to the roof, looked at the window, and saw an extremely white hand emerge and open and close the window very quickly. With this we understood or imagined that a woman who lived in that house must have done us this kindness, and as a sign that we thanked her for it we made our salaams in the Moorish manner, bending our heads, bowing from the waist, and crossing our arms on our chests. A short while later a small cross made of reeds was dangled from the window and immediately pulled back in. This con-firmed that a Christian woman was probably a captive in that house and was the one who had done us the good turn, but the whiteness of her hand and the bracelets we saw on it disabused us of the thought that she was a slave; then we imagined she must be a renegade Christian, for they are often taken as legitimate wives by their masters, who consider this good fortune since the men esteem them more than the women of their own nation. In all our speculations, however, we were very far from the truth of the matter, although from then on we spent all our time looking at the window where our north star of a reed had appeared; but two weeks went by, and we did not see it again, or the hand, or any other signal of any kind.

  During this time, although we made every effort to learn who lived in that house, and if there was a renegade Christian woman there, no one would tell us anything except that it belonged to a very prominent and wealthy Moor named Agi Morato,6 who had been the governor of La Pata,7 which is a very distinguished position among those people. But when we leas
t expected another shower of cianiís, we suddenly saw the reed appear, another handkerchief attached to it that had an even larger knot; this occurred when the bagnio, as on the previous occasion, was deserted and empty of people. We made the same test: each of the three men, the same ones who had been with me the last time, went forward before I did, but the reed was not given up to anyone but me, because as soon as I walked forward, it dropped. I untied the knot and found forty Spanish gold escudos and a paper written in Arabic, at the bottom of which a large cross had been drawn. I kissed the cross, took the escudos, and returned to the roof, where we all made our salaams; the hand appeared again, I signaled that I would read the letter, and the window closed.

  We were all astounded and overjoyed at what had happened, but since none of us understood Arabic, our desire to know what the paper said was immense, and the difficulty in finding someone to read it to us was even greater. Finally, I decided to trust a renegade, a native of Murcia, who claimed to be a great friend of mine and made pledges to me obliging him to keep any secrets I confided in him, because certain renegades, when they intend to return to Christian lands, take with them signed statements from important captives testifying, in whatever fashion they can, that the renegade is a moral man, and always has treated Christians well, and desires to escape at the first opportunity. Some obtain these declarations with good intentions; others use them as a possible defense when they come to plunder Christian lands: if they happen to be shipwrecked or are taken prisoner, they show their declarations and say that these papers prove their intention to remain in Christian lands, which was the reason they came on a raid with the Turks. In this way they avoid the initial violence of their captors and reconcile with the Church, and no one does them any harm, and at the first opportunity they return to Barbary to be what they were before. There are others, however, who obtain and use these papers with good intentions and remain in Christian lands.