Chapter V. In which the account of our knight’s misfortune is continued

Seeing, then, that in effect he could not stir, he resolved to fall back on his usual remedy, which was to think of some passage from his books; and his madness brought to his mind the tale of Valdovinos and the Marquis of Mantua, from the time Carloto left Valdovinos wounded on the mountainside, a story known to children, not unknown to young men, celebrated and even believed by old men; and for all that, no truer than the miracles of Mohammed. This one, then, seemed to him to fit exactly the pass in which he found himself; and so, with signs of deep feeling, he began to roll about on the ground and to say in a feeble voice the very words they say the wounded knight of the wood spoke:

“Where are you, my lady, where,
that my sorrow grieves you not?
Either you know nothing, lady,
or you are false and faithless.”

And in this way he went on with the ballad until those lines that say:

“O noble Marquis of Mantua,
my uncle and my lord by blood!”

And as luck would have it, just as he reached this line, there happened to pass by a farmer from his own village, a neighbor of his, who was coming back from taking a load of wheat to the mill; and he, seeing a man lying there, went up to him and asked who he was and what ailed him that he lamented so mournfully. Don Quixote no doubt believed that this was the Marquis of Mantua, his uncle; and so he gave him no answer but to go on with his ballad, in which he gave him an account of his misfortune and of the amours of the Emperor’s son with his wife, all just as the ballad sings it.

The farmer stood amazed to hear such nonsense; and, taking off the visor, which the beating had already knocked to pieces, he wiped the man’s face, which was covered with dust; and scarcely had he wiped it when he recognized him and said:

“Señor Quixana”—for so he must have been called when he was in his right mind and had not yet passed from quiet hidalgo to knight-errant—“who has left your grace in this state?”

But to everything he asked, the other went on with his ballad. Seeing this, the good man took off his breastplate and backplate as best he could, to see whether he had any wound; but he saw no blood or mark of any kind. He managed to lift him off the ground, and with no little effort he got him up on his own donkey, since it seemed a more peaceable mount. He gathered up the armor, down to the splinters of the lance, and tied it on Rocinante, whom he took by the reins, and the ass by the halter, and set off toward his village, very thoughtful at hearing the nonsense Don Quixote was talking; and no less thoughtful was Don Quixote, who, from sheer bruising and battering, could not keep himself upright on the donkey, and from time to time heaved sighs that he sent up to heaven; so that once again he obliged the farmer to ask him to say what ailed him; and it seems as if the devil himself brought to his memory the tales that suited his own adventures, for at that moment, forgetting Valdovinos, he remembered the Moor Abindarráez, when the warden of Antequera, Rodrigo de Narváez, took him prisoner and carried him off captive to his fortress. So that when the farmer asked him again how he was and what he felt, he answered with the very words and speeches that the captive Abencerraje gave Rodrigo de Narváez, just as he had read that story where it is set down, in Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana; and he made such apt use of it that the farmer was sending himself to the devil at hearing such a heap of foolishness; and from this he knew that his neighbor was mad, and he hurried to reach the village, to be rid of the annoyance Don Quixote was causing him with his long harangue. At the end of which, the knight said:

“Your grace must know, Señor Don Rodrigo de Narváez, that this beautiful Jarifa I have spoken of is now the lovely Dulcinea del Toboso, for whom I have done, do, and shall do the most famous deeds of chivalry that have been seen, are seen, or ever shall be seen in the world.”

To this the farmer answered:

“Look, your grace, sir, sinner that I am, I’m not Don Rodrigo de Narváez, or the Marquis of Mantua, but Pedro Alonso, your neighbor; and your grace is not Valdovinos, or Abindarráez, but the honorable hidalgo Señor Quixana.”

“I know who I am,” answered Don Quixote, “and I know that I can be not only those I have named, but every one of the Twelve Peers of France, and the Nine Worthies too, all of them, for my exploits will surpass all those that they performed, all of them together and each one by himself.”

With this talk and more of the same they reached the village at nightfall, but the farmer waited until it was somewhat darker, so that no one would see the battered hidalgo cutting so poor a figure as a knight. When the hour came that seemed right to him, then, he rode into the village and on to Don Quixote’s house, and found it all in an uproar; and there were the priest and the barber of the village, who were great friends of Don Quixote’s, and his housekeeper was saying to them at the top of her voice:

“What does your grace think, Señor Licentiate Pero Pérez”—for that was the priest’s name—“of my master’s misfortune? It’s three days now that there’s been no sign of him, or of the nag, or the leather shield, or the lance, or the armor. Woe is me! I can see it, and it’s as true as I was born to die, that these cursed books of chivalry he has and reads all the time have turned his brain; for now I remember hearing him say many times, talking to himself, that he wanted to become a knight-errant and go off in search of adventures through the wide world. To Satan and to Barabbas with such books, that have ruined the finest mind in all La Mancha.”

The niece said the same, and more besides:

“You should know, Master Nicolás”—for that was the barber’s name—“that it often happened that my uncle would sit reading these heartless books of misadventures for two days and nights together, at the end of which he would fling the book from his hands, and lay hand to his sword, and go slashing at the walls; and when he was very tired he would say he had killed four giants as big as four towers, and the sweat he sweated from weariness he said was blood from the wounds he had taken in the battle; and then he would gulp down a big jug of cold water, and he would be well and calm again, saying that the water was a most precious potion that the sage Esquife had brought him, a great enchanter and friend of his. But it’s all my fault, for not warning your graces of my uncle’s follies, so that you could have cured him before it came to what it has come to, and burned all these excommunicated books, and he has plenty of them, which well deserve to be burned like the books of heretics.”

“That is what I say too,” said the priest, “and upon my faith, tomorrow shall not pass without a public act of faith being held upon them, and their being condemned to the fire, so that they may not give whoever reads them occasion to do what my good friend must have done.”

All this the farmer and Don Quixote were listening to, and from it the farmer came to understand his neighbor’s illness completely; and so he began to call out:

“Open up, your graces, for Señor Valdovinos and for the lord Marquis of Mantua, who comes sorely wounded, and for the Moor Señor Abindarráez, whom the valiant Rodrigo de Narváez, warden of Antequera, brings here captive.”

At these shouts they all came out, and, the men recognizing their friend and the women their master and uncle, who had not yet got down from the donkey, because he could not, they ran to embrace him. He said:

“Hold, all of you, for I come sorely wounded through the fault of my horse. Carry me to my bed and summon, if it be possible, the wise Urganda, that she may heal and search my wounds.”

“There now, curse the hour!” said the housekeeper at this. “Didn’t my heart tell me rightly which foot my master limped on! Up you go, your grace, and welcome, for we’ll know how to cure you here without that Hurgada coming. Cursed, I say, once more and a hundred times more, be these books of chivalry that have brought your grace to such a state!”

They carried him at once to his bed, and, searching his wounds, they found none; and he said it was all bruises, from having had a great fall with Rocinante, his horse, while fighting ten giants, the most outrageous and daring that could be found in a great part of the earth.

“Ta, ta!” said the priest. “So there are giants in the dance? By the holy cross, I’ll burn them tomorrow before night comes.”

They asked Don Quixote a thousand questions, and he would answer none of them except to say that they should give him something to eat and let him sleep, which was what mattered most to him. This was done, and the priest questioned the farmer at great length about how he had found Don Quixote. He told him everything, along with the nonsense the knight had talked when he found him and while he was bringing him home; which only made the licentiate more eager to do what he did the next day, which was to call on his friend the barber, Master Nicolás, with whom he came to Don Quixote’s house,