Chapter XIX. Of the sensible talk Sancho had with his master, and of the adventure that befell him with a dead body, with other famous happenings

“It seems to me, sir, that all these misfortunes that have come upon us these past days have without any doubt been the punishment for the sin your grace committed against the order of your knighthood by not keeping the oath you swore not to eat bread off a tablecloth nor take your pleasure with the queen, with all the rest that goes with it and that your grace swore to keep, until you took that helmet of Malandrino, or whatever the Moor’s name is, for I don’t rightly remember.”

“You are quite right, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “but, to tell you the truth, it had slipped my memory; and you may also take it as certain that it was for your fault in not reminding me of it in time that the business of the blanket befell you; but I will make amends, for in the order of chivalry there are ways of settling everything.”

“Why, did I swear anything, by any chance?” answered Sancho.

“It does not matter that you have not sworn,” said Don Quixote. “It is enough that I understand you are not altogether safe from being held an accomplice, and, just in case, it will do no harm to provide ourselves with a remedy.”

“Well, if that’s how it is,” said Sancho, “mind your grace doesn’t forget this again, the way you did the oath; maybe the phantoms will get the urge to amuse themselves with me again, and even with your grace if they see you so stubborn.”

In this and other talk night overtook them in the middle of the road, without their having or finding anywhere to take shelter that night; and the bad part of it was that they were dying of hunger, for with the loss of the saddlebags they had lost their whole larder and store of provisions. And, to round off this misfortune, an adventure befell them which, without any contrivance at all, truly looked like one. It was that the night closed in rather dark; but for all that they kept going, Sancho believing that, since this was the king’s highroad, within a league or two he would in all reason find some inn on it. Going along in this way, then, the night dark, the squire hungry, and the master with a good appetite, they saw coming toward them along the very road they were traveling a great multitude of lights, which looked for all the world like moving stars. Sancho was struck dumb at the sight of them, and Don Quixote was far from easy; the one pulled his ass up by the halter, and the other his nag by the reins, and they stood still, watching closely to see what this could be, and they saw that the lights were coming nearer and nearer, and the closer they came, the bigger they looked; at which sight Sancho began to shake like a man with the quicksilver palsy, and the hair on Don Quixote’s head stood on end; and he, taking a little heart, said:

“This, Sancho, must beyond a doubt be a very great and very perilous adventure, in which I shall need to show all my valor and strength.” “Unhappy me!” answered Sancho. “If this adventure should happen to be one of phantoms, the way it’s starting to look to me, where will there be ribs to stand it?” “However many phantoms they may be,” said Don Quixote, “I will not allow them to touch so much as a thread of your clothes; for if they made sport of you the other time, it was because I could not leap the walls of the yard, but now we are in the open field, where I shall be able to wield my sword as I please.”

“And if they enchant you and numb you, the way they did the other time,” said Sancho, “what good will it do whether we’re in the open field or not?”

“For all that,” replied Don Quixote, “I beg you, Sancho, to keep up a good heart, for experience will show you how good a heart I have.”

“I will, if it please God,” answered Sancho.

And, the two of them drawing off to one side of the road, they set themselves again to watch closely what that business of the traveling lights might be; and very shortly after they made out a number of men in white surplices, the fearful sight of whom finished off Sancho Panza’s courage altogether, so that his teeth began to chatter like a man in the chill of a quartan fever; and the chattering and clattering grew worse when they saw plainly what it was, for they made out as many as twenty men in surplices, all on horseback, with lighted torches in their hands; behind them came a litter draped in mourning, and after it six more on horseback, in mourning down to their mules’ hooves; for they could see well enough from the leisurely way the beasts went that they were not horses. The men in surplices went along murmuring among themselves in a low and pitiful voice. This strange vision, at such an hour and in so lonely a place, was quite enough to put fear into Sancho’s heart, and even into his master’s; and so it would have been as far as Don Quixote was concerned, for Sancho’s courage had already gone completely to wreck. The opposite befell his master, to whom at that moment it was vividly pictured in his imagination that this was one of the adventures of his books. He fancied that the litter was a bier carrying some sorely wounded or slain knight, whose vengeance was reserved for him alone; and without further reasoning he couched his long lance, settled himself firmly in the saddle, and with gallant spirit and bearing took his stand in the middle of the road where the men in surplices had to pass, and when he saw them close he raised his voice and said: “Halt, knights, or whoever you may be, and give me an account of who you are, where you come from, where you are going, and what it is you carry on that bier; for, by all the signs, either you have done some foul wrong or some foul wrong has been done to you, and it is fitting and needful that I should know it, either to punish you for the evil you have done or to avenge you for the wrong that was done you.”

“We’re in a hurry,” answered one of the men in surplices, “and the inn is far off, and we can’t stop to give as full an account as you ask for.”

And, spurring his mule, he went on. Don Quixote took great offense at this answer, and, seizing the bridle, he said:

“Halt, and be better mannered, and give me an account of what I have asked you; if not, you are all in battle with me.”

The mule was skittish, and when he took it by the bridle it shied in such a way that, rearing up on its hind legs, it threw its master to the ground over its haunches. A lad who was going on foot, seeing the man in the surplice fall, began to abuse Don Quixote, who, by now in a rage, without waiting any longer, couched his long lance and charged at one of the men in mourning, and, wounding him badly, brought him to the ground; and, as he wheeled on the rest, it was a sight to see how quickly he attacked them and put them to rout; for it seemed for all the world as if wings had sprouted on Rocinante at that instant, so lightly and so proudly did he go.

All the men in surplices were timid folk and unarmed, and so, easily and in a moment, they left the fray and began to run across that field with their torches lit, looking for all the world like the maskers who run about on a night of merrymaking and festival. The men in mourning, too, tangled and wrapped up in their skirts and cassocks, could not stir; so that Don Quixote, entirely at his ease, thrashed them all and made them quit the field much against their will, for they all thought that this was no man but a devil from hell come out to take from them the dead body they were carrying in the litter. Sancho watched it all, amazed at his master’s boldness, and said to himself:

“There’s no doubt this master of mine is as brave and bold as he says.”

There was a torch burning on the ground beside the first man the mule had thrown, by whose light Don Quixote could see him; and, going up to him, he put the point of his long lance to his face, telling him to surrender, or else he would kill him. To which the fallen man answered:

“I’m surrendered enough as it is, for I can’t move, since I have a broken leg; I beg your grace, if you are a Christian knight, not to kill me; for you will commit a great sacrilege, since I am a licentiate and have taken the first orders.”

“Then who the devil has brought you here,” said Don Quixote, “being a man of the Church?”

“Who, sir?” replied the fallen man. “My misfortune.”

“Then a greater one threatens you,” said Don Quixote, “if you do not satisfy me on everything I asked you at first.”

“Your grace shall easily be satisfied,” answered the licentiate. “And so your grace must know that, although a moment ago I called myself a licentiate, I am no more than a bachelor; Alonso López is my name; I was born in Alcobendas; I am coming from the city of Baeza along with eleven other priests, who are the ones who ran off with the torches; we are going to the city of Segovia escorting a dead body, which is in that litter, and which is that of a gentleman who died in Baeza, where he was laid in a vault; and now, as I say, we were taking his bones to his tomb, which is in Segovia, where he was born.”

“And who killed him?” asked Don Quixote.

“God, by means of some pestilent fevers that took him,” answered the bachelor.

“In that case,” said Don Quixote, “our Lord has spared me the labor I would have had to take in avenging his death if anyone else had killed him; but, since he was killed by the one who killed him, there is nothing to do but keep silent and shrug one’s shoulders, for I would do the same if he were to kill me myself. And I wish your reverence to know that I am a knight of La Mancha, Don Quixote by name, whose office and calling it is to go about the world righting wrongs and undoing grievances.”

“I don’t know how that business of righting wrongs can be,” said the bachelor, “for in my case you have taken me from right and made me wrong, leaving me with a broken leg that will never be right again all the days of its life; and the grievance you have undone in me has been to leave me so aggrieved that I shall stay aggrieved forever; and it has been misadventure enough to run into you, going about looking for adventures as you do.”

“Not all things,” answered Don Quixote, “happen in the same way. The harm lay, Señor Bachelor Alonso López, in your coming as you came, by night, dressed in those surplices, with your torches lit, praying, covered in mourning, so that you truly looked like something evil and from the other world; and so I could not fail to do my duty by attacking you, and I would have attacked you even if I had known for certain that you were the very Satans of hell, for such I judged you to be and took you for all along.” “Since my fate has willed it so,” said the bachelor, “I beg your grace, sir knight-errant (whose errantry has done me such an ill turn), to help me out from under this mule, for it has one of my legs caught between the stirrup and the saddle.”

“You might as well have told me tomorrow!” said Don Quixote. “And how long were you going to wait before telling me your trouble?”

He then shouted to Sancho Panza to come; but Sancho did not trouble himself to come, because he was busy plundering a sumpter mule those good gentlemen had brought along, well stocked with things to eat. Sancho made a sack of his coat, and, gathering up all he could and all the bag would hold, he loaded his donkey, and then he answered his master’s shouts and helped to get the good bachelor free of the mule that pinned him; and, setting him on top of it, he gave him the torch, and Don Quixote told him to follow the track of his companions and to beg their pardon on his behalf for the grievance, which it had not been in his power to avoid doing them. Sancho also said to him:

“If by any chance those gentlemen want to know who the valiant man was who left them in such a state, your grace can tell them it’s the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who by another name is called the Knight of the Sorry Figure.”

With this the bachelor went off; and Don Quixote asked Sancho what had moved him to call him the Knight of the Sorry Figure, then more than at any other time.

“I’ll tell you,” answered Sancho. “It’s because I’ve been looking at you for a while by the light of that torch the luckless fellow is carrying, and truly your grace has lately got the sorriest figure I ever saw; and it must have been caused either by the weariness of this fight or by the lack of your molars and teeth.”

“It is not that,” answered Don Quixote, “but rather that the sage whose charge it must be to write the history of my exploits will have thought it would be well for me to take some byname, as all the knights of the past took one: one was called he of the Burning Sword; another, he of the Unicorn; that one, he of the Damsels; this one, he of the Phoenix; the next, the Knight of the Griffin; and yet another, he of Death; and by these names and devices they were known over the whole round of the earth. And so I say that the aforesaid sage will have put it into your tongue and your thoughts just now to call me the Knight of the Sorry Figure, as I intend to call myself from this day forward; and, so that such a name may suit me better, I resolve to have a very sorry figure painted on my shield when there is an occasion.” “There’s no call to spend time and money on having that figure made,” said Sancho. “What has to be done is for your grace to uncover your own and show your face to those who look at you; for without anything more, and without any other picture or shield, they’ll call you he of the Sorry Figure; and believe me I’m telling you the truth, for I promise your grace, sir, and let this be said in jest, that hunger and the lack of molars give you such a bad face that, as I’ve said already, the sorry painting can very well be done without.”

Don Quixote laughed at Sancho’s wit, but, for all that, he resolved to call himself by that name as soon as he could have his shield, or buckler, painted as he had imagined.

At this point the bachelor came back and said to Don Quixote:

“I forgot to tell your grace to take note that your grace is now excommunicated for having laid hands with violence on a sacred thing: juxta illud: Si quis suadente diabolo, etc. (according to that canon: If anyone, at the devil’s urging, and so on).”

“That Latin I do not understand,” answered Don Quixote, “but this I know well: that it was not my hands I laid on it but this long lance; besides which, I did not think I was offending priests or things of the Church, which I respect and revere as the Catholic and faithful Christian that I am, but phantoms and monsters from the other world; and, even if it were so, I have in my memory what happened to the Cid Ruy Díaz when he broke the chair of that king’s ambassador in the presence of His Holiness the Pope, for which the Pope excommunicated him; and that day the good Rodrigo de Vivar bore himself as a most honorable and valiant knight.”

On hearing this the bachelor went off, as has been said, without answering him a word. Don Quixote would have liked to see whether the body that came in the litter was bones or not, but Sancho would not allow it, saying to him:

“Sir, your grace has finished this dangerous adventure the most safely of all the ones I’ve seen; these people, though beaten and routed, might come to realize that it was just one person who beat them, and, stung and ashamed at it, they might pull themselves together again and come looking for us, and give us plenty to think about. The donkey is as he ought to be, the mountains are near, hunger is pressing, there’s nothing to do but retreat at a decent pace, and, as they say, let the dead man go to his grave and the living to his loaf.” And, herding his ass along in front, he begged his master to follow him; and his master, thinking Sancho was right, followed him without another word in reply. And after they had gone a short way between two little hills, they found themselves in a wide and hidden valley, where they dismounted; and Sancho unloaded the donkey, and, stretched out on the green grass, with their hunger for sauce, they breakfasted, dined, had their afternoon bite, and supped all at one sitting, satisfying their stomachs from more than one basket of cold meats that the clerical gentlemen of the deceased—who seldom let themselves fare badly—had been carrying on their sumpter mule. But another misfortune befell them, which Sancho held to be the worst of all, and it was that they had no wine to drink, nor even water to wet their lips; and, plagued by thirst, Sancho, seeing that the meadow where they were was thick with fine green grass, said what will be told in the following chapter.