Chapter XXVI. In which are continued the lover’s refinements that Don Quixote performed in the Sierra Morena

And, going back to tell what he of the Sorry Figure did once he found himself alone, the history says that, as soon as Don Quixote had finished his tumbles or turns, bare below the waist and dressed above it, and saw that Sancho had left without caring to wait and see more foolishness, he climbed up onto the point of a high rock and there began again to ponder what he had pondered many other times without ever coming to a decision. And it was which would be better and suit him more: to imitate Roldán in the outrageous mad deeds he committed, or Amadís in his melancholy ones. And, talking to himself, he said: “If Roldán was as good a knight and as valiant as everyone says, what wonder is that? For, after all, he was enchanted, and no one could kill him except by driving a pin worth a blanca into the sole of his foot, and he always went shod in seven soles of iron. Though his tricks were no use to him against Bernardo del Carpio, who saw through them and choked him to death in his arms at Roncesvalles. But, setting aside the matter of his valor, let us come to the matter of losing his wits, for it is certain that he lost them, because of the signs he found by the fountain and the news the shepherd gave him that Angelica had slept more than two siestas with Medoro, a curly-haired little Moor and page to Agramante; and if he understood this to be true, and that his lady had done him a foul wrong, it was no great thing that he went mad. But I, how can I imitate him in his madness if I do not imitate him in the occasion for it? For I dare swear that my Dulcinea del Toboso has not seen a Moor in all the days of her life, just as he is, in his own dress, and that she is today as the mother who bore her; and I should do her open wrong if, imagining anything else of her, I went mad with that kind of madness of Roldán the Furious. On the other hand, I see that Amadís of Gaul, without losing his wits and without doing mad things, won as much fame as a lover as the best of them; for what he did, according to his history, was no more than this: finding himself disdained by his lady Oriana, who had commanded him not to come before her until she was pleased to allow it, he withdrew to the Peña Pobre in the company of a hermit, and there he wept his fill and commended himself to God, until heaven came to his aid in the midst of his greatest woe and need. And if this is true, as it is, why should I take the trouble now to strip myself entirely, or bring grief to these trees, which have done me no harm at all? Nor have I any reason to muddy the clear water of these brooks, which are to give me drink when I am thirsty. Long live the memory of Amadís, and let him be imitated by Don Quixote of La Mancha in all that he can; of whom it will be said what was said of the other: that if he did not achieve great things, he died attempting them; and if I am not cast off or disdained by Dulcinea del Toboso, it is enough for me, as I have said, to be absent from her. Come, then, to work: come to my memory, deeds of Amadís, and teach me where I am to begin imitating you. But I know already that the most he did was to pray and commend himself to God; but what shall I do for a rosary, since I have none?” At this it came into his head how he would make one, and it was that he tore a long strip from the tails of his shirt, which were hanging loose, and tied eleven knots in it, one fatter than the rest, and this served him as a rosary the whole time he was there, where he said a million Hail Marys. And what wearied him greatly was not finding another hermit thereabouts to hear his confession and give him comfort. And so he passed the time walking up and down the little meadow, writing and carving on the bark of the trees and in the fine sand a great many verses, all suited to his sadness, and some in praise of Dulcinea. But the ones that could be found whole and could be read, after he was found there, were no more than these that follow:

Trees and grasses, plants, and all
you who stand within this place,
so tall, so green, so many too,
if my grief gives you no joy,
hear the holy plaints I raise.
Let my sorrow not alarm you,
dreadful as it well may be,
for, to pay you what he owes,
here Don Quixote wept and mourned
the absence of Dulcinea
del Toboso.

Here is the place to which the most
faithful of lovers comes to hide
from his lady, and has come
to such misfortune, knowing not
how it happened, or which way.
Love keeps him tossed from post to post,
for Love is of a wicked breed;
and so, until he filled a cask,
here Don Quixote wept and mourned
the absence of Dulcinea
del Toboso.

Seeking after adventures
in among the rugged rocks,
cursing a hard and stony heart,
for among the crags and brambles
the sad wretch finds misadventures,
Love struck him with his scourge
and not with his gentle strap;
and, when it caught him on the nape,
here Don Quixote wept and mourned
the absence of Dulcinea
del Toboso.

The addition of del Toboso to the name of Dulcinea caused no little laughter among those who found the verses here set down, for they imagined that Don Quixote must have imagined that if, in naming Dulcinea, he did not also say del Toboso, the stanza could not be understood; and so it was in truth, as he afterward confessed. He wrote many others, but, as has been said, no more than these three stanzas could be made out clean and whole. In this, and in sighing, and in calling on the fauns and silvans of those woods, on the nymphs of the rivers, on doleful and dewy Echo, to answer, console, and listen to him, he passed his time, and in looking for some herbs to sustain himself until Sancho came back; for if, as Sancho was three days away, he had been three weeks, the Knight of the Sorry Figure would have been so disfigured that the mother who bore him would not have known him.

And it will be well to leave him, wrapped up in his sighs and verses, so as to tell what befell Sancho Panza on his errand. And it was that, coming out onto the highroad, he set out in search of El Toboso, and the next day he reached the inn where the misfortune of the blanket had befallen him; and he had hardly caught sight of it when he felt he was flying through the air again, and he did not want to go inside, though he arrived at an hour when he could and should have done so, since it was dinnertime and he was longing to taste something hot; since for many days now it had all been cold fare.

This need drove him to go up close to the inn, still in doubt whether he would go in or not. And while he was in this state, two persons came out of the inn who recognized him at once; and one said to the other:

“Tell me, Señor Licentiate, that man on the horse, isn’t he Sancho Panza, the one our adventurer’s housekeeper said had gone off with his master as squire?”

“Yes, he is,” said the licentiate, “and that is our Don Quixote’s horse.” And they knew him so well because they were the priest and the barber of his own village, the ones who had held the inquisition and general act of faith upon the books. These, as soon as they were quite sure it was Sancho Panza and Rocinante, eager to have news of Don Quixote, went up to him; and the priest called him by his name, saying to him:

“Sancho Panza, my friend, where is your master?”

Sancho Panza knew them at once, and decided to keep hidden the place where his master was and the state he was in; and so he answered them that his master was busy in a certain place and with a certain matter of great importance to him, which he could not reveal, by the eyes in his head.

“No, no,” said the barber, “Sancho Panza; if you don’t tell us where he is, we shall imagine, as we imagine already, that you have killed and robbed him, since you come riding on his horse. Truly, you shall produce for us the owner of the nag, or there will be trouble over it.”

“There’s no call for threats with me, for I’m not a man to rob or kill anybody: let each man’s fate kill him, or God, who made him. My master is doing penance in the middle of this mountain, very much to his liking.”

And then, all in a rush and without stopping, he told them how he had left him, the adventures that had befallen him, and how he was carrying the letter to the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, who was the daughter of Lorenzo Corchuelo, with whom his master was in love up to the liver.

The two were amazed at what Sancho Panza was telling them; and, though they already knew of Don Quixote’s madness and its kind, every time they heard of it they were amazed anew. They begged Sancho Panza to let them see the letter he was taking to the lady Dulcinea del Toboso. He said it was written in a notebook and that it was his master’s order that he should have it copied onto paper in the first village he came to; at which the priest told him to show it to him, for he would copy it out in a very good hand. Sancho Panza put his hand inside his shirt, looking for the little book, but he did not find it, nor could he have found it if he had gone on looking until now, for Don Quixote had kept it and had not given it to him, nor had it occurred to Sancho to ask him for it.

When Sancho saw that he could not find the book, his face began to turn deathly pale; and, feeling himself all over again very quickly, he saw again that he could not find it; and, without more ado, he grabbed his beard with both fists and tore out half of it, and then, quickly and without stopping, he gave himself half a dozen punches on the face and nose, so that he bathed them all in blood. Seeing which, the priest and the barber asked him what had happened to him, that he was treating himself so badly.

“What should have happened to me,” answered Sancho, “except that between one hand and the other, in the blink of an eye, I’ve lost three donkey colts, each of them like a castle?”

“How is that?” retorted the barber.

“I’ve lost the notebook,” answered Sancho, “that had a letter in it for Dulcinea and an order signed by his master, by which he ordered his niece to give me three donkey colts out of four or five that were at home.” And with this he told them of the loss of the gray. The priest consoled him, and told him that, once they found his master, he would have him renew the order and make out the draft again on paper, as was the use and custom, for those made in notebooks were never accepted or honored.

With this Sancho was consoled, and said that, if that was so, the loss of Dulcinea’s letter did not trouble him much, because he knew it almost by heart, and they could take it down from him wherever and whenever they liked. “Say it, then, Sancho,” said the barber, “and we will copy it afterward.” Sancho Panza stopped to scratch his head to bring the letter to mind, and now he stood on one foot and now on the other; sometimes he looked at the ground, sometimes at the sky; and, after he had gnawed off half the tip of one finger, keeping in suspense those who were waiting for him to say it at last, he said, after a very long while:

“By God, Señor Licentiate, the devil take anything I can remember of the letter; though at the beginning it said: ‘High and slovenly lady.’” “It wouldn’t say slovenly,” said the barber, “but superhuman or sovereign lady.” “That’s it,” said Sancho. “Then, if I remember right, it went on…, if I remember right: ‘the lagging and lacking sleep, and the wounded kisses your grace’s hands, ungrateful and most unknown beauty,’ and I don’t know what it said about health and sickness that he was sending her, and it went trickling along like that, until it ended in ‘Yours until death, the Knight of the Sorry Figure.’”

The two were not a little amused to see Sancho Panza’s good memory, and they praised it highly, and asked him to say the letter twice more, so that they too might learn it by heart to copy it out in due course. Sancho said it three more times, and as many times he said another three thousand absurdities. After this, he likewise told them about his master’s doings, but he did not say a word about the blanket-tossing that had befallen him at that inn, which he refused to enter. He also said how his master, once Sancho brought him a favorable dispatch from the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, was to set out on the road to see about becoming an emperor, or at least a monarch; for they had agreed on it between the two of them, and it was a very easy thing for him to become one, given the worth of his person and the strength of his arm; and that, once he was one, he was to marry Sancho off, because by then he would be a widower, for it could not be otherwise, and was to give him for a wife one of the empress’s damsels, heiress to a rich and great estate on the mainland, without any he-isles or she-isles, for he did not want them any more.

Sancho said this with such composure, wiping his nose every now and then, and with so little sense, that the two were amazed anew, considering how violent Don Quixote’s madness must have been, since it had carried off this poor man’s wits along with it. They did not want to tire themselves getting him out of the error he was in, for it seemed to them that, since it did his conscience no harm, it was better to leave him in it, and it would give them more pleasure to hear his foolishness. And so they told him to pray to God for his master’s health, for it was a thing contingent and highly practicable for him to come, in the course of time, to be an emperor, as he said, or at least an archbishop, or some other dignity of equal rank. To which Sancho answered:

“Gentlemen, if fortune should turn things around so that my master took a fancy not to be an emperor but to be an archbishop, I’d like to know now what archbishops-errant usually give their squires.” “They usually give them,” answered the priest, “some benefice, simple or with cure of souls, or some sacristanship, which brings them a good deal in fixed income, not counting the altar fees, which are usually reckoned at as much again.”

“For that,” retorted Sancho, “the squire will have to be unmarried and know how to serve at Mass, at least; and if that’s so, poor wretch that I am, for I’m married and I don’t know the first letter of the ABC! What will become of me if my master takes a fancy to be an archbishop, and not an emperor, as is the use and custom of knights-errant?”

“Don’t worry, Sancho, my friend,” said the barber, “for we shall beg your master here and advise him, and even put it to him as a case of conscience, to be an emperor and not an archbishop, which will come easier to him, since he is more of a fighter than a scholar.”

“That’s how it has seemed to me,” answered Sancho, “though I can tell you he has a knack for everything. What I mean to do for my part is pray to Our Lord to send him to those parts where it will best serve Him and where He’ll do me the most favors.”

“You speak like a sensible man,” said the priest, “and you will act like a good Christian. But what must be done now is to arrange how to get your master out of that useless penance you say he is doing; and, to think out the way we are to go about it, and to eat, for it is time now, it will be well for us to go into this inn.”

Sancho said they should go in, and he would wait out there, and he would tell them afterward why he did not go in and why it did not suit him to go in; but he begged them to bring him out something to eat, something hot, and some barley for Rocinante as well. They went in and left him, and soon after the barber brought him out something to eat. Afterward, when the two of them had thought hard about the way they would go about getting what they wanted, the priest hit on an idea well suited to Don Quixote’s taste and to what they wanted. And it was that he told the barber that what he had thought of was that he himself would dress up as a damsel-errant, and the barber should try to rig himself out as a squire as best he could, and that in this way they would go to where Don Quixote was, she pretending to be an afflicted damsel in distress, and she would ask a boon of him, which he could not fail to grant her, as a valiant knight-errant. And the boon she meant to ask of him was that he should come with her wherever she might lead him, to redress a grievance that a wicked knight had done her; and that she would also entreat him not to order her to take off her mask, nor ask her anything of her estate, until he had done her right against that wicked knight; and that the barber might be sure that Don Quixote would agree to everything asked of him in these terms; and that in this way they would get him out of there and take him to his village, where they would try to see whether his strange madness had any remedy.