Chapter XVI. Of what befell the ingenious hidalgo in the inn that he imagined to be a castle

When the innkeeper saw Don Quixote lying crosswise on the ass, he asked Sancho what ailed him. Sancho answered that it was nothing, only that he had taken a fall down from a rock and his ribs were somewhat bruised. The innkeeper had for a wife a woman not of the sort that those in that trade usually have, for she was charitable by nature and grieved over the misfortunes of her neighbors; and so she came at once to tend Don Quixote, and had a daughter of hers, a maiden, young and very good-looking, help her tend her guest. There was also serving at the inn an Asturian girl, broad in the face, flat in the back of the head, snub-nosed, blind in one eye and not very sound in the other. True, the shapeliness of her body made up for her other faults: she did not stand seven palms from her feet to her head, and her shoulders, which weighed on her somewhat, made her look at the ground more than she would have liked. This graceful lass, then, helped the maiden, and the two of them made Don Quixote a very bad bed in an attic which gave clear signs of having served in other days as a hayloft for many years. In it there also lodged a muleteer, who had his bed made a little beyond our Don Quixote’s. And though his was made of the packsaddles and blankets of his mules, it was a great deal better than Don Quixote’s, which consisted only of four roughly planed boards on two benches of not very equal height, and a mattress so thin it looked like a coverlet, full of lumps which, had they not shown through some rips that they were wool, would have seemed to the touch, for hardness, to be pebbles, and two sheets made of shield leather, and a blanket whose threads, had anyone cared to count them, he would not have missed a single one in the count. On this accursed bed Don Quixote lay down, and then the innkeeper’s wife and her daughter plastered him from top to bottom, with Maritornes, for so the Asturian was called, holding the light for them; and as the innkeeper’s wife, while she was applying the poultices, saw Don Quixote so black and blue in places, she said that these looked more like blows than a fall.

“They weren’t blows,” said Sancho, “it’s just that the rock had a lot of points and knobs on it.”

And that each one had made its own bruise. And he also said to her:

“Please, your grace, madam, see that you leave some of the tow over, for there’ll be someone who needs it; my back hurts me a bit too.”

“In that case,” answered the innkeeper’s wife, “you must have fallen too.”

“I didn’t fall,” said Sancho Panza, “but from the fright I got at seeing my master fall, my body hurts me so much it feels as if they’d given me a thousand blows.”

“That may well be,” said the maiden, “for it has often happened to me that I dreamed I was falling down from a tower and never got to the ground, and when I woke up from the dream I found myself as bruised and broken as if I had really fallen.”

“That’s just the point, miss,” answered Sancho Panza, “for I, without dreaming anything, but being more awake than I am now, find myself with hardly fewer bruises than my master Don Quixote.”

“What is this gentleman’s name?” asked Maritornes the Asturian.

“Don Quixote of La Mancha,” answered Sancho Panza, “and he’s a knight-adventurer, and one of the best and strongest that have been seen in the world for a long time back.”

“What’s a knight-adventurer?” replied the girl.

“Are you so new to the world that you don’t know?” answered Sancho Panza. “Well, know, my sister, that a knight-adventurer is something that in the space of two words gets himself cudgeled and made an emperor. Today he is the most wretched creature in the world and the neediest, and tomorrow he might have two or three crowns of kingdoms to give his squire.”

“Then how is it that you, being squire to so good a lord,” said the innkeeper’s wife, “don’t have, by the look of it, so much as a county?”

“It’s still early,” answered Sancho, “because it’s only a month we’ve been out looking for adventures, and so far we haven’t run into one that deserves the name. And sometimes you go looking for one thing and find another. The truth is that if my master Don Quixote gets well of this wound, or fall, and I’m not left crippled by it, I wouldn’t trade my hopes for the best title in Spain.”

Don Quixote was listening very attentively to all this talk, and, sitting up in the bed as best he could and taking the innkeeper’s wife by the hand, he said to her:

“Believe me, beauteous lady, you may call yourself fortunate for having lodged my person in this your castle, which person is such that, if I do not praise it, it is because of what is commonly said, that self-praise debases; but my squire will tell you who I am. I only say to you that I will keep forever written in my memory the service you have done me, to thank you for it as long as my life endures; and would to high heaven that love did not hold me so conquered and so subject to its laws, and to the eyes of that beautiful ungrateful one whom I name between my teeth; for then the eyes of this fair damsel would be masters of my freedom.”

The innkeeper’s wife and her daughter and good Maritornes were bewildered as they listened to the words of the knight-errant, which they understood as if he were speaking Greek, though they could tell that they all tended toward offers of service and compliments; and, not being used to such language, they stared at him and wondered at him, and he seemed to them a different sort of man from those they were used to; and, thanking him for his offers in innkeepers’ words, they left him; and Maritornes the Asturian tended Sancho, who needed it no less than his master.

The muleteer had arranged with her that the two of them would take their pleasure together that night, and she had given him her word that, as soon as the guests were quiet and her masters asleep, she would come looking for him and satisfy his desire in whatever he asked. And it is told of this good lass that she never gave such a word without keeping it, even if she gave it in the woods and without any witness; for she prided herself greatly on being of hidalgo stock, and did not count it a disgrace to be employed in serving at the inn, because, she said, misfortunes and bad luck had brought her to that state.

Don Quixote’s hard, narrow, mean, and treacherous bed stood first, in the middle of that starry stable, and next to it Sancho made his, which consisted only of a rush mat and a blanket that looked more like sheared canvas than wool. After these two beds came the muleteer’s, made, as has been said, of the packsaddles and all the gear of the two finest of his mules, though he had twelve, glossy, plump, and famous, for he was one of the rich muleteers of Arévalo, according to the author of this history, who makes special mention of this muleteer because he knew him very well, and some will even have it that he was some kin of his. Besides which, Cide Mahamate Benengeli was a very careful historian and very exact in all things; and this is plain to see, since the things that have been told, small and paltry as they are, he would not pass over in silence; from which grave historians may take an example, who tell us of actions so briefly and succinctly that they hardly reach our lips, leaving in the inkwell, through carelessness, malice, or ignorance, the most substantial part of the work. A thousand blessings on the author of Tablante de Ricamonte, and on him of that other book in which the deeds of Count Tomillas are told; and with what exactness they describe everything!

I say, then, that after the muleteer had looked in on his string and given them their second feed, he stretched out on his packsaddles and settled down to wait for his most exact Maritornes. Sancho was by now poulticed and in bed, and though he tried to sleep, the pain in his ribs would not let him; and Don Quixote, with the pain in his own, had his eyes open like a hare’s. The whole inn was silent, and in all of it there was no other light than what was given by a lamp that hung burning in the middle of the gateway.

This marvelous stillness, and the thoughts our knight always carried with him of the events that are told at every turn in the books that were the authors of his misfortune, brought to his imagination one of the strangest follies that can well be imagined. And it was that he imagined he had come to a famous castle—for, as has been said, all the inns where he lodged were castles in his eyes—and that the innkeeper’s daughter was the daughter of the lord of the castle, and that she, overcome by his gallant bearing, had fallen in love with him and had promised that that night, without her parents’ knowledge, she would come and lie with him for a good while; and, taking all this fantasy, which he had built for himself, as firm and true, he began to fret and to think of the perilous trial his chastity was about to face, and he resolved in his heart not to commit treason against his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, even if Queen Guinevere herself, with her lady Quintañona, should present herself before him.

Thinking, then, of these absurdities, the time and the hour came—an ill-starred one for him—of the Asturian’s coming, who, in her shift and barefoot, her hair gathered up in a fustian net, with silent and wary steps, came into the room where the three were lodged, in search of the muleteer. But scarcely had she reached the door when Don Quixote heard her, and, sitting up in bed in spite of his plasters and with pain in his ribs, he opened his arms to receive his beauteous damsel. The Asturian girl, who, all hunched up and keeping quiet, was going along with her hands out in front of her looking for her sweetheart, ran into Don Quixote’s arms, and he caught her tightly by one wrist and, drawing her toward him, without her daring to say a word, made her sit down on the bed. Then he felt her shift, and, though it was of sackcloth, to him it seemed to be of the finest and sheerest silk. She wore some glass beads on her wrists, but to him they gave off the gleam of precious Oriental pearls. Her hair, which in some ways came close to a horse’s mane, he took for threads of the brightest Arabian gold, whose splendor darkened that of the sun itself. And her breath, which no doubt smelled of stale cold salad left over from the night before, seemed to him to waft from her mouth a sweet and aromatic fragrance; and, in short, he pictured her in his imagination in the same shape and manner as he had read in his books of that other princess who came, overcome by love, to see the sorely wounded knight, with all the adornments that are set down here. And so great was the poor hidalgo’s blindness that neither touch, nor breath, nor other things the good maiden carried about her, which could have made anyone but a muleteer vomit, undeceived him; on the contrary, it seemed to him that he held in his arms the goddess of beauty. And, holding her fast, he began to say to her in a low and loving voice:

“Would that I found myself in a position, beauteous and exalted lady, to repay so great a favor as that which the sight of your great beauteousness hath done me, but fortune, which never tires of persecuting the good, has seen fit to lay me in this bed, where I lie so broken and battered that, though my will might wish to satisfy yours, it would be impossible. And what is more, to this impossibility is added another, greater one, which is the plighted faith I have given to the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, sole lady of my most hidden thoughts; for were this not in the way, I would not be so witless a knight as to let slip by the fortunate occasion in which your great goodness has placed me.”

Maritornes was in the greatest distress and all in a sweat at finding herself held so fast by Don Quixote, and, without understanding or paying attention to the words he was saying to her, she was trying, without uttering a word, to free herself. The good muleteer, whom his wicked desires kept awake, had heard his doxy from the moment she came in at the door; he had been listening attentively to everything Don Quixote said, and, jealous that the Asturian had broken her word to him for another, he came closer and closer to Don Quixote’s bed and stood still to see where those words would end, which he could not understand. But when he saw that the girl was struggling to get free and Don Quixote was striving to hold her, the joke struck him as a bad one, and he raised his arm on high and brought down so terrible a punch on the lean jaws of the enamored knight that he bathed his whole mouth in blood; and, not content with this, he climbed up onto his ribs and, at rather more than a trot, paced them all from one end to the other.

The bed, which was rather flimsy and stood on no firm foundations, unable to bear the addition of the muleteer, came down to the floor, at whose great crash the innkeeper woke up, and at once imagined it must be some brawl of Maritornes’s, because, though he had shouted for her, she did not answer. With this suspicion he got up, and, lighting an oil lamp, went toward where he had heard the scuffle. The girl, seeing that her master was coming, and that he had a terrible temper, all frightened and flustered, took refuge in the bed of Sancho Panza, who was still asleep, and there she huddled up and curled into a ball. The innkeeper came in saying:

“Where are you, whore? I’ll wager this is your doing.”

At this Sancho woke up, and, feeling that bulk almost on top of him, he thought he was having a nightmare and began to throw punches this way and that, and among others he landed I don’t know how many on Maritornes, who, smarting from the pain, cast modesty to the winds and paid Sancho back with so many that, much against his will, she drove the sleep from him; and he, seeing himself treated this way without knowing by whom, raised himself up as best he could and grappled with Maritornes, and between the two of them there began the hardest-fought and most comical skirmish in the world. The muleteer, then, seeing by the light of the innkeeper’s lamp how it was going with his lady, left Don Quixote and ran to give her the help she needed. The innkeeper did the same, but with a different intention, for he went to punish the girl, believing no doubt that she alone was the cause of all that harmony. And so, as the saying goes, the cat at the rat, the rat at the rope, the rope at the stick: the muleteer was hitting Sancho, Sancho the girl, the girl him, the innkeeper the girl, and they were all laying on so fast that none of them gave himself a moment’s respite; and the best of it was that the innkeeper’s lamp died, and, once they were in darkness, they all hit out so mercilessly at random that wherever they laid a hand they left nothing whole.

There happened to be lodging at the inn that night a trooper of those they call of the Old Holy Brotherhood of Toledo, who, likewise hearing the strange din of the fight, grabbed his short staff of office and the tin box with his warrants, and went into the room in the dark, saying:

“Halt in the name of the law! Halt in the name of the Holy Brotherhood!”

And the first one he came upon was the battered Don Quixote, who lay on his collapsed bed, stretched out face up, quite senseless, and, groping for his beard and grabbing hold of it, he kept on saying:

“Help for the law!”

But seeing that the man he was holding did not stir or move, he took it that he was dead and that those inside were his killers; and with this suspicion he raised his voice, saying:

“Shut the gate of the inn! See that nobody gets away, for they’ve killed a man here!”

This cry startled them all, and each one left off the fight at whatever point the cry caught him. The innkeeper withdrew to his room, the muleteer to his packsaddles, the girl to her quarters; only the luckless Don Quixote and Sancho could not move from where they were. At this the trooper let go of Don Quixote’s beard and went out in quest of a light so that he could hunt down and arrest the culprits; but he did not find one, because the innkeeper had put out the lamp on purpose when he withdrew to his room, and the trooper was obliged to go to the fireplace, where, with a great deal of trouble and time, he lit another oil lamp.