Chapter XVII. In which are continued the countless troubles that the brave Don Quixote and his good squire Sancho Panza went through in the inn that, to his cost, he took for a castle

By now Don Quixote had come round from his swoon, and, using the very tone with which, the day before, lying flat in the vale of the stakes, he had called to his squire, he began calling him now, saying:

“Sancho, my friend, are you asleep? Are you asleep, friend Sancho?”

“How can I sleep, curse me,” answered Sancho, full of grief and spite, “when it looks as if all the devils in hell have been at me tonight?”

“You may well believe it is so, no doubt,” answered Don Quixote, “for either I know little or this castle is enchanted. For you must know… But what I wish to tell you now you must swear to keep secret until after my death.”

“I swear,” answered Sancho.

“I say this,” replied Don Quixote, “because I am averse to taking away anyone’s honor.”

“I say I swear,” Sancho said again, “that I’ll keep quiet about it until after your grace’s days are over, and God grant I may be able to let it out tomorrow.” “Do I treat you so badly, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “that you would like to see me dead so soon?”

“It isn’t that,” answered Sancho, “it’s just that I’m against keeping things a long time, and I wouldn’t want them to go rotten on me from being kept.”

“Be that as it may,” said Don Quixote, “for I trust more to your love and your courtesy; and so you must know that tonight there has befallen me one of the strangest adventures I could ever extol; and, to tell it to you briefly, you will know that a little while ago there came to me the daughter of the lord of this castle, who is the most comely and beauteous damsel that may be found in a great part of the earth. What could I tell you of the adornment of her person? What of her gallant understanding? What of other hidden things, which, to keep the faith I owe my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, I will let pass untouched and in silence? I wish only to tell you that heaven, envious of so great a good as fortune had placed in my hands, or perhaps, and this is the more certain, because, as I have said, this castle is enchanted, at the moment when I was with her in the sweetest and most loving converse, without my seeing it or knowing where it came from, there came a hand fastened to some arm of some monstrous giant and planted me such a punch on the jaws that I have them all bathed in blood; and afterward it pounded me in such a way that I am worse off than yesterday when the Galicians, because of Rocinante’s excesses, did us the wrong you know of. From which I conjecture that the treasure of this damsel’s beauty must be guarded by some enchanted Moor, and it must not be meant for me.”

“Nor for me either,” answered Sancho, “because more than four hundred Moors have thrashed me, so that the pounding of the stakes was cakes and fancy bread. But tell me, sir, how can you call this a good and rare adventure, when it has left us the way it has? Your grace is not so badly off, at least, since you held in your hands that incomparable beauteousness you spoke of; but what did I get, except the worst wallops I expect to get in all my life? Unlucky me, and the mother who bore me, for I’m not a knight-errant and never mean to be one, and of all the mishaps the biggest share falls to me!”

“Then you have been thrashed too?” answered Don Quixote.

“Haven’t I told you so, curse my whole line?” said Sancho.

“Do not worry, my friend,” said Don Quixote, “for I will now make the precious balm with which we will be healed in the twinkling of an eye.”

At this point the trooper finished lighting his lamp and came in to see the man he thought was dead; and as soon as Sancho saw him come in, seeing him in his shirt, with a cloth around his head and a lamp in his hand, and with a very ugly face, he asked his master:

“Sir, can this be, by any chance, the enchanted Moor, coming back to give us more punishment, if he left anything in the inkwell?”

“It cannot be the Moor,” answered Don Quixote, “because enchanted beings do not let themselves be seen by anyone.”

“They may not let you see them, but they let you feel them,” said Sancho. “If you doubt it, ask my back.”

“Mine could tell it too,” answered Don Quixote, “but that is not sufficient evidence for believing that this one we see is the enchanted Moor.” The trooper came up, and, finding them talking in such calm conversation, he stood bewildered. True, Don Quixote was still lying face up, unable to move, from sheer bruising and plastering. The trooper went up to him and said to him:

“Well, how goes it, my good man?”

“I would speak more civilly,” answered Don Quixote, “if I were you. Is it the custom in this land to speak in that way to knights-errant, you blockhead?”

The trooper, seeing himself treated so badly by a man so poor in looks, could not stand it, and, raising the lamp, oil and all, he hit Don Quixote over the head with it, so that he left him with a fine broken pate; and, as everything was left in darkness, he went out at once; and Sancho Panza said:

“No doubt, sir, this is the enchanted Moor, and he must be keeping the treasure for others, and for us he keeps only the punches and the lamp-bashings.”

“So it is,” answered Don Quixote, “and there is no point in paying heed to these matters of enchantment, nor any reason to get angry or annoyed with them; for, since they are invisible and phantasmal, we will find no one to take vengeance on, however hard we try. Get up, Sancho, if you can, and call the warden of this fortress, and see that I am given a little oil, wine, salt, and rosemary to make the health-giving balm; for truly I believe I need it badly now, because a great deal of blood is flowing from the wound this phantom has given me.”

Sancho got up, his bones aching sorely, and went in the dark to where the innkeeper was; and, meeting the trooper, who was listening to see what would become of his enemy, he said to him:

“Sir, whoever you may be, do us the kindness and favor of giving us a little rosemary, oil, salt, and wine, for it’s needed to cure one of the best knights-errant there are on earth, who is lying in that bed, sorely wounded at the hands of the enchanted Moor who is in this inn.” When the trooper heard this, he took him for a man out of his wits; and, as day was beginning to break, he opened the gate of the inn, and, calling the innkeeper, told him what that good man wanted. The innkeeper supplied him with all he wanted, and Sancho took it to Don Quixote, who was holding his head in his hands, complaining of the pain from the lamp-bashing, which had done him no more harm than to raise two rather large lumps, and what he thought was blood was nothing but the sweat he was sweating from the anguish of the recent storm. In short, he took his simples, of which he made a compound, mixing them all together and setting them to boil for a good while, until he judged them done. Then he asked for a flask to pour it into, and, as there was none in the inn, he decided to put it in a tin oil jug or cruet, of which the innkeeper made him a free gift. And then over the jug he said more than eighty Our Fathers and as many Hail Marys, Salves, and Creeds, and with every word he made the sign of the cross by way of blessing; at all of which there were present Sancho, the innkeeper, and the trooper; for the muleteer was by now quietly going about the care of his mules. This done, he himself wished to test at once the virtue of that precious balm, as he imagined it; and so he drank, of what could not fit in the jug and was left in the pot in which it had been boiled, nearly half an azumbre; and scarcely had he finished drinking it when he began to vomit, so that nothing was left in his stomach; and with the retching and heaving of the vomiting he broke into a most copious sweat, for which reason he ordered them to cover him up and leave him alone. They did so, and he stayed asleep more than three hours, at the end of which he woke up and felt greatly relieved in body, and so much better of his bruising that he took himself to be well; and he truly believed he had hit upon the balm of Fierabrás, and that with that remedy he could from then on undertake, without any fear, any ruins, battles, and frays, however perilous they might be.

Sancho Panza, who also took his master’s improvement for a miracle, begged him to give him what was left in the pot, which was no small amount. Don Quixote granted it, and he, taking it in both hands, in good faith and with a better will, tossed it down and stowed away very little less than his master. Now the fact is that poor Sancho’s stomach must not have been as delicate as his master’s, and so, before he vomited, he was seized with such retching and nausea, with such cold sweats and fainting fits, that he thought well and truly that his last hour had come; and, seeing himself so afflicted and distressed, he cursed the balm and the thief who had given it to him. Seeing him in that state, Don Quixote said to him:

“I believe, Sancho, that all this trouble comes to you from not being a dubbed knight, for I am of the opinion that this liquor must do no good to those who are not.”

“If your grace knew that,” replied Sancho, “bad luck to me and all my kin! Why did you let me taste it?”

At this the brew did its work, and the poor squire began to drain himself through both channels at such a rate that neither the rush mat on which he had thrown himself down again nor the canvas blanket he covered himself with were any good afterward. He sweated and sweated again with such fits and seizures that not only he but everyone thought his life was coming to an end. This storm and misery lasted him nearly two hours, at the end of which he was not left like his master, but so battered and broken that he could not stand.

But Don Quixote, who, as has been said, felt relieved and sound, wanted to set off at once in search of adventures, for it seemed to him that all the time he lingered there was being taken from the world and from those in it who needed his favor and protection; and all the more with the security and confidence he placed in his balm. And so, driven by this desire, he saddled Rocinante himself and put the packsaddle on his squire’s donkey, and he also helped his squire to dress and to get up on the ass. Then he mounted his horse, and, going over to a corner of the inn, he took hold of a long lance that stood there, to serve him as his lance.

Everyone in the inn, who were more than twenty people, stood watching him; the innkeeper’s daughter was watching him too, and he for his part never took his eyes off her, and from time to time he heaved a sigh that seemed to be torn from the depths of his bowels, and they all thought it must be from the pain he felt in his ribs; at least those thought so who had seen him being poulticed the night before.

When the two of them were mounted, he stopped at the gate of the inn, called the innkeeper, and said to him in a very calm and grave voice:

“Many and very great are the favors, sir warden, that I have received in this your castle, and I am most deeply bound to thank you for them all the days of my life. If I can repay them by avenging you on some arrogant wretch who hath done you some wrong, know that my office is none other than to aid those who have little power, and to avenge those who suffer wrongs, and to punish treachery. Search your memory, and if you find anything of this kind to entrust to me, you have but to say it; for I promise you, by the order of knighthood I received, to see you satisfied and repaid wholly to your liking.”

The innkeeper answered him with the same calm:

“Sir knight, I have no need for your grace to avenge any wrong for me, because I know how to take whatever vengeance I see fit when wrongs are done me. All I need is for your grace to pay me what you have spent tonight at the inn, both for the straw and barley for your two beasts and for supper and beds.”

“Then this is an inn?” replied Don Quixote.

“And a very respectable one,” answered the innkeeper.

“I have been living in error until now,” answered Don Quixote, “for truly I thought it was a castle, and no bad one; but since it is so that it is not a castle but an inn, what can be done for now is that you forgo the payment, for I cannot go against the order of knights-errant, of whom I know for certain, without having read anything to the contrary until now, that they never paid for lodging or for anything else in any inn where they stayed, because any good reception given them is owed them by right and by law, in payment for the unbearable toil they suffer seeking adventures by night and by day, in winter and in summer, on foot and on horseback, in thirst and in hunger, in heat and in cold, subject to all the harshness of the skies and to all the discomforts of the earth.”

“That has little to do with me,” answered the innkeeper. “Let me be paid what I’m owed, and let’s have done with tales and chivalries, for I have no concern with anything but collecting what’s mine.”

“You are a witless and a wretched hosteler,” answered Don Quixote.

And, setting his heels to Rocinante and bringing his long lance across, he rode out of the inn without anyone stopping him, and, without looking to see whether his squire was following him, he went a good distance off.

The innkeeper, seeing him go without paying, went to collect from Sancho Panza, who said that since his master had not been willing to pay, he would not pay either; because, being a knight-errant’s squire as he was, the same rule and reason held for him as for his master about not paying for anything in taverns and inns. The innkeeper grew very annoyed at this, and threatened him that if he did not pay, he would get it out of him in a way he would regret. To which Sancho answered that, by the law of chivalry his master had received, he would not pay a single cornado even if it cost him his life; for the good old custom of knights-errant was not going to be lost on his account, nor would the squires of such knights who were yet to come into the world complain of him, reproaching him for breaking so just a law.

The bad luck of the unhappy Sancho would have it that among the people who were in the inn there were four wool carders from Segovia, three needle makers from the Potro of Córdoba, and two neighbors from the Heria of Seville, merry folk, well-meaning, mischievous, and playful, who, almost as if urged and moved by one and the same spirit, came up to Sancho, and, getting him down off the ass, one of them went in for the blanket off the guest’s bed, and, throwing him into it, they looked up and saw that the ceiling was somewhat lower than they needed for their work, and they decided to go out into the yard, whose only limit was the sky. And there, with Sancho placed in the middle of the blanket, they began to toss him up high and to make sport of him as they would of a dog at Shrovetide. The cries the wretched blanket-tossed man let out were so many that they reached his master’s ears; and he, stopping to listen closely, believed that some new adventure was coming to him, until he clearly recognized that the one shouting was his squire; and, turning his reins, he came back to the inn at a labored gallop, and, finding it shut, rode around it to see if he could find a way in; but he had no sooner reached the walls of the yard, which were not very high, than he saw the cruel game being played on his squire. He saw him go up and come down through the air with such grace and speed that, had his anger allowed him, I am of the opinion he would have laughed. He tried to climb from his horse onto the top of the wall, but he was so battered and broken that he could not even get down; and so, from on top of his horse, he began to hurl so many insults and taunts at those who were tossing Sancho that it is impossible to manage to write them down; but not for that did they stop their laughter and their work, nor did the flying Sancho leave off his complaints, mixed now with threats and now with pleas; but it was all of little use, nor did it help, until they let him go out of sheer weariness. They brought him his ass there, and, setting him on it, they wrapped him in his coat. And the compassionate Maritornes, seeing him so exhausted, thought it would be well to help him with a jug of water, and so she brought it to him from the well, since it was colder. Sancho took it, and, raising it to his mouth, he stopped at the cries his master was giving him, saying:

“Sancho, my son, do not drink water! My son, do not drink it, for it will kill you! See? Here I have the most holy balm”—and he showed him the jug of the brew—“and with two drops of it, if you drink them, you will be healed without a doubt.”

At these cries Sancho turned his eyes, as if askance, and said with louder ones:

“Has your grace forgotten, by any chance, that I’m not a knight, or do you want me to finish vomiting up what guts I had left over from last night? Keep your liquor, and all the devils with it, and leave me alone.”

And his finishing saying this and his beginning to drink were one and the same; but as he saw at the first swallow that it was water, he would not go on, and begged Maritornes to bring him some wine, and she did so very willingly, and paid for it with her own money; for, in effect, it is said of her that, though she was in that line of work, she had some shadows and faint traces of a Christian.

As soon as Sancho had drunk, he drummed his heels on his ass’s flanks, and, when the inn gate had been flung wide for him, out he rode, very pleased at not having paid anything and at having gotten his way, though it had been at the expense of his usual sureties, which were his shoulders. True, the innkeeper kept his saddlebags in payment for what was owed him; but Sancho did not miss them, so flustered was he when he left. The innkeeper wanted to bar the gate well as soon as he saw him outside, but the blanket-tossers would not allow it, for they were people who, even if Don Quixote had truly been one of the knights-errant of the Round Table, would not have valued him at two ardites.