Chapter XXXVII. Which continues the story of the famous Princess Micomicona, with other amusing adventures
All this Sancho listened to, with no small grief of soul, seeing that his hopes of a title were vanishing and going up in smoke, and that the lovely Princess Micomicona had turned into Dorotea on him, and the giant into Don Fernando, while his master lay sound asleep, quite unaware of everything that had happened. Dorotea could not be sure whether the happiness she possessed was a dream. Cardenio was in the same frame of mind, and Luscinda’s thoughts ran the same way. Don Fernando gave thanks to heaven for the favor he had received and for having been brought out of that tangled labyrinth in which he had come so near to losing both his good name and his soul; and, in short, everyone in the inn was happy and delighted at the good outcome of affairs so knotted and so desperate.
The priest, as a sensible man, set everything in its proper place, and congratulated each of them on the good fortune they had come to; but the one who rejoiced and was best pleased of all was the innkeeper’s wife, because of the promise Cardenio and the priest had made her to pay for all the damage and loss that had come to her on Don Quixote’s account. Only Sancho, as has been said already, was the afflicted one, the unlucky one, the sorrowful one; and so, with a melancholy face, he went in to his master, who had just woken up, and said to him:
“Your grace may well sleep as long as you please, Señor Sorry Figure, without troubling yourself about killing any giant or giving the princess back her kingdom: it’s all done and finished now.”
“That I can well believe,” answered Don Quixote, “for I have had with the giant the most monstrous and outrageous battle I expect to have in all the days of my life; and with one backstroke, whack! I brought his head down to the ground, and so much blood came out of him that it ran in streams over the earth as if it were water.”
“As if it were red wine, your grace would do better to say,” answered Sancho, “because I want your grace to know, if you don’t know it already, that the dead giant is a punctured wineskin, and the blood is six arrobas of red wine it had in its belly, and the head cut off is the whore that bore me, and Satan take the lot of it.”
“And what are you saying, you madman?” replied Don Quixote. “Are you in your right mind?”
“Let your grace get up,” said Sancho, “and you’ll see the fine mess you’ve made, and what we’ve got to pay; and you’ll see the queen turned into a private lady called Dorotea, along with other happenings that, once you take them in, are bound to amaze you.”
“I should marvel at none of that,” replied Don Quixote, “for, if you remember rightly, the last time we were here I told you that everything that happened here was a matter of enchantment, and it would be no great wonder if the same were true now.”
“I’d believe all of it,” answered Sancho, “if my blanket-tossing had been something of that kind too; but it wasn’t, it was real and true; and I saw with my own eyes that the innkeeper who’s here today was holding one corner of the blanket and pitching me up toward the sky with a great deal of grace and vigor, and with as much laughing as strength; and where it comes down to knowing who people are, I hold, simple man and sinner that I am, that there’s no enchantment at all, but a lot of bruising and a lot of bad luck.”
“Well, now, God will set it right,” said Don Quixote. “Give me my clothes and let me go out there, for I want to see these happenings and transformations you speak of.”
Sancho gave him his clothes, and, while he was dressing, the priest told Don Fernando and the others about Don Quixote’s mad doings, and about the trick they had used to bring him away from the Peña Pobre, where he imagined he was because of his lady’s disdain. He also told them nearly all the adventures that Sancho had related, at which they marveled and laughed not a little, for it seemed to them what it seemed to everyone: the strangest kind of madness that could find room in a disordered mind. The priest said something more: that, since the lady Dorotea’s good fortune now kept them from carrying their plan any further, they would have to invent and find another to be able to get him home to his own country. Cardenio offered to carry on with what had been begun, saying that Luscinda would take on and play the part of Dorotea.
“No,” said Don Fernando, “it mustn’t be that way: I want Dorotea to go on with her invention; for, provided this good gentleman’s village is not very far from here, I shall be glad to see his cure attempted.”
“It is no more than two days’ journey from here.”
“Well, even if it were farther, I would gladly travel it, in exchange for doing so good a deed.”
At this point Don Quixote came out, armed with all his gear, Mambrino’s helmet, dented as it was, crowning his head, the buckler slung on his arm, and propped on his trunk, or long lance. The strange presence of Don Quixote held Don Fernando and the others in suspense as they looked at his face half a league long, dry and yellow, his mismatched arms, and his measured bearing; and they stood silent, waiting to see what he would say; and he, with great gravity and composure, his eyes fixed on the beautiful Dorotea, said:
“I am informed, beautiful lady, by this my squire, that your greatness has been brought to nothing and your being undone, for from the queen and great lady you were wont to be you have turned into a private damsel. If this has come about by order of the necromancer king your father, fearing that I would not give you the needful and due aid, I say that he knew not, nor knows, the half of the Mass, and that he was little versed in the histories of chivalry; for had he read them and gone through them as attentively and at as much leisure as I went through them and read them, he would have found at every step how other knights of lesser fame than mine had achieved harder things, it being no very hard thing to kill a mere giantling, however arrogant he may be; for not many hours ago I found myself face to face with him, and… I will hold my tongue, lest they say I lie; but time, the revealer of all things, will tell it when we least expect.”
“What you came face to face with was two wineskins, not a giant,” the innkeeper said at this point.
Don Fernando ordered him to be quiet and on no account to interrupt Don Quixote’s discourse; and Don Quixote went on, saying:
“I say, in short, high and disinherited lady, that if for the cause I have named your father has worked this metamorphoses upon your person, you are to give it no credit whatever, for no peril exists on earth that my sword cannot cut its way through; and with it, laying the head of your enemy on the ground, I shall within a few days set your own crown upon your head.”
Don Quixote said no more, and waited for the princess to answer him; and she, who knew by now that Don Fernando had resolved to carry the deception forward until Don Quixote was brought home, answered him with a great deal of grace and gravity:
“Whoever told you, valiant Knight of the Sorry Figure, that I had changed and altered my being, told you what was not true, for the same that I was yesterday I am today. True it is that certain happy chances have wrought some change in me, for they have given me the best fortune I could have wished for myself; but not on that account have I ceased to be what I was before, nor to hold the same thoughts I have always held of availing myself of the valor of your valiant and invulnerable arm. And so, my lord, let your goodness give back his honor to the father who begot me, and hold him for a wise and prudent man, since by his science he found so easy and so sure a way to remedy my misfortune; for I believe that, had it not been for you, sir, I should never have come by the happiness I have now; and in this I speak so truly that most of these gentlemen here present are good witnesses to it. What remains is that tomorrow we set out on our way, for today we could make only a short day’s journey; and as for the rest of the happy outcome I hope for, that I shall leave to God and to the valor of your heart.”
So spoke the sensible Dorotea; and Don Quixote, on hearing it, turned to Sancho and, with signs of great anger, said to him:
“Now I tell you, Sanchuelo, that you are the biggest little rascal in Spain. Tell me, you vagabond thief, did you not tell me just now that this princess had turned into a damsel called Dorotea, and that the head I believe I cut off a giant was the whore that bore you, along with other nonsense that threw me into the greatest confusion I have ever been in in all the days of my life? I swear…”—and he looked up at heaven and clenched his teeth—“that I am of a mind to work such havoc on you as will put salt in the pate of every lying squire of knights-errant there may be in the world from now on!”
“Let your grace calm down, my master,” answered Sancho, “for it may very well be that I was mistaken about the change in the lady Princess Micomicona; but as for the giant’s head, or at least the puncturing of the skins and the blood being red wine, I’m not mistaken, as God lives! because the skins are right there, slashed, at the head of your grace’s bed, and the red wine has made a lake of the room; and if you don’t believe me, you’ll see when the eggs are fried; I mean you’ll see it when his grace the innkeeper here asks you to pay for all the damage. As for the rest, that the lady queen is just as she was, I’m glad of it with all my soul, because my share goes along with it, the same as every neighbor’s son’s.”
“Now I tell you, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that you are a numbskull; and forgive me, and enough.”
“Enough,” said Don Fernando, “and let nothing more be said about it; and, since the lady princess says we should set out tomorrow, because today it is already late, let it be so, and tonight we can spend in good conversation until the coming day, when we will all accompany Señor Don Quixote, for we wish to be witnesses of the valiant and unheard-of deeds he is to perform in the course of this great enterprise he has taken upon himself.”
“It is I who must serve and accompany you,” answered Don Quixote, “and I am most grateful for the favor done me and the good opinion held of me, which I shall endeavor to make good, or it shall cost me my life, and even more, if more it can cost me.”
Many words of courtesy and many offers passed between Don Quixote and Don Fernando; but all of it was brought to silence by a traveler who came into the inn just then, and who showed by his dress that he was a Christian lately come from the land of the Moors; for he wore a coat of blue cloth, short in the skirts, with half sleeves and no collar; his breeches were of blue linen too, with a cap of the same color; he had on a pair of date-colored half boots, and a Moorish cutlass hung from a baldric that crossed his chest. Right behind him, riding on a donkey, came a woman dressed in the Moorish fashion, her face covered by a veil over her head; she wore a little brocade cap, and was dressed in an almalafa, a mantle that hung from her shoulders down to her feet. He was a man of sturdy and well-favored build, a little over forty years of age, rather dark of face, with long mustaches and a very well-kept beard. In short, his bearing showed that, in decent clothes, anyone would have judged him a man of quality and good birth.
As he came in he asked for a room, and, when they told him there was none to be had in the inn, he seemed distressed; and, going up to the one who by her dress appeared to be a Moorish woman, he lifted her down in his arms. Luscinda, Dorotea, the innkeeper’s wife, her daughter, and Maritornes, drawn by the novelty of a costume they had never seen before, gathered round the Moorish woman; and Dorotea, who was always gracious, courteous, and sensible, thinking that both she and the man who had brought her were troubled by the want of a room, said to her:
“Do not be much distressed, my lady, at the lack of comfort here, for it is the nature of inns not to have any; but even so, if you would care to share with us”—pointing to Luscinda—“perhaps in the course of your journey you will have met with other welcomes not so good.”
The veiled woman made no answer to this, nor did anything but rise from where she had been sitting; and, with both hands crossed upon her breast and her head bowed, she bent her body in token of her thanks. From her silence they imagined that she must certainly be a Moor and did not know how to speak Christian. Just then the captive came up, who until then had been busy with other things; and, seeing that they all had the woman who came with him surrounded, and that she met everything they said to her with silence, he said:
“Ladies, this maiden hardly understands my language, nor can she speak any other but the one of her own country, and that is why she must not have answered, nor answers now, what she has been asked.”
“She is not being asked anything else,” answered Luscinda, “but only being offered our company for tonight and a share of the place where we settle ourselves, where she will be looked after as well as the accommodation allows, with the goodwill that binds us to serve all strangers who stand in need of it, especially when it is a woman who is to be served.”
“For her and for myself,” answered the captive, “I kiss your hands, my lady, and I value the favor offered very highly, as is only right; for on such an occasion, and coming from such persons as your looks show you to be, it is plain to see that it must be very great.”
“Tell me, sir,” said Dorotea, “is this lady a Christian or a Moor? For her dress and her silence make us think she is what we would rather she were not.”
“A Moor she is in her dress and in her body, but in her soul she is a very great Christian, for she has the greatest desire to be one.”
“Then she has not been baptized?” replied Luscinda.
“There has been no opportunity for it,” answered the captive, “since she left Algiers, her native country and land; and up to now she has not found herself in danger of death so close as to oblige us to baptize her before she had learned all the ceremonies that our Mother the Holy Church commands; but God will be pleased to see her baptized soon, with the decency that the quality of her person deserves, which is more than her dress or mine would show.”
With these words he made all who were listening to him eager to know who the Moorish woman and the captive might be, but no one wished to ask them just then, seeing that the moment called rather for getting them some rest than for asking about their lives. Dorotea took her by the hand and led her to sit down beside her, and begged her to take off her veil. She looked at the captive, as if asking him to tell her what they were saying and what she should do. He told her in Arabic that they were asking her to take off her veil, and that she should do so; and so she took it off, and uncovered a face so beautiful that Dorotea held her to be more beautiful than Luscinda, and Luscinda more beautiful than Dorotea, and all the bystanders recognized that, if any face could match those two, it was the Moorish woman’s, and there were even some who rated hers above them in one respect or another. And, since beauty has the prerogative and grace of reconciling minds and winning hearts, all of them at once gave way to the desire to serve and make much of the beautiful Moorish woman.
Don Fernando asked the captive what the Moorish woman’s name was, and he answered that it was Lela Zoraida; and, as soon as she heard this, she understood what they had asked the Christian, and said in great haste, full of distress and charm:
“No, no Zoraida: María, María!” giving them to understand that her name was María and not Zoraida.
These words, and the deep feeling with which the Moorish woman spoke them, drew more than one tear from some of those who heard her, the women especially, who are by nature tender and compassionate. Luscinda embraced her with great love, saying to her:
“Yes, yes: María, María.”
To which the Moorish woman answered:
“Yes, yes: María; Zoraida macange!” which means “no.”
By now night was coming on, and, on the orders of those who had come with Don Fernando, the innkeeper had taken pains and care to get them as good a supper as he possibly could. When the hour came, then, they all sat down at a long table like the ones in a servants’ hall, for there was neither a round one nor a square one in the inn; and they gave the head and chief seat, though he declined it, to Don Quixote, who wanted the lady Micomicona at his side, since he was her guardian. Then Luscinda and Zoraida sat down, and facing them Don Fernando and Cardenio, and then the captive and the other gentlemen, and, beside the ladies, the priest and the barber. And so they ate their supper in great contentment, which grew greater still when they saw that Don Quixote, leaving off eating, and moved by a spirit like the one that had moved him to talk as much as he talked when he supped with the goatherds, began to say:
“Truly, gentlemen, if one considers it well, great and unheard-of things are seen by those who profess the order of knight-errantry. If not, who among the living in this world, coming in now through the gate of this castle and seeing us as we are, would judge and believe that we are who we are? Who could say that this lady at my side is the great queen we all know her to be, and that I am that Knight of the Sorry Figure who goes about out there in the mouth of fame? Now there can be no doubt that this art and calling surpasses every art and every calling that men have invented, and is to be held in esteem all the higher as it is exposed to greater dangers. Let them stand aside, those who say that letters have the advantage over arms, for I shall tell them, whoever they may be, that they do not know what they are saying. For the reason such people commonly give, and the one they lean on most, is that the labors of the mind exceed those of the body, and that arms are exercised with the body alone, as though their exercise were a porter’s trade, for which nothing more is needed than good strength; or as though, in what we who profess them call arms, there were not contained the acts of fortitude, which ask a great deal of understanding to carry out; or as though the warrior who has an army in his charge, or the defense of a besieged city, did not labor with his mind as much as with his body. If not, let us see whether bodily strength will serve to find out and guess the enemy’s intent, his designs, his stratagems, the difficulties, or to forestall the harm that is feared: for all these things are works of the understanding, in which the body has no part at all. Since it is so, then, that arms require mind, as letters do, let us now see which of the two minds, the scholar’s or the warrior’s, labors more. And this will be known from the end and goal toward which each is directed, for that purpose is to be prized more highly which has the nobler end for its object. The end and goal of letters is… and I do not speak now of divine letters, whose aim is to lead and guide souls to heaven, for to an end so endless as that no other can be compared; I speak of human letters, whose end is to keep distributive justice in its proper place, to give each man what is his own, and to see to it that good laws are understood and kept. An end, certainly, generous and lofty and worthy of great praise, but not of so much as is due to the end that arms aim at, which have for their object and end peace, the greatest good that men can desire in this life. And so the first good news the world and mankind ever had was the news the angels brought on the night that was our day, when they sang in the air: ‘Glory be in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will’; and the greeting that the best master of earth and heaven taught his close followers and favored ones was that when they entered any house they should say: ‘Peace be on this house’; and many other times he said to them: ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave you: peace be with you,’ as a jewel and pledge given and bequeathed by such a hand: a jewel lacking which no good of any kind can exist, on earth or in heaven. This peace is war’s true end, for to say arms is the same as to say war. Granting, then, this truth, that the end of war is peace, and that in this it has the advantage over the end of letters, let us come now to the bodily labors of the scholar and those of the man who professes arms, and let us see which are greater.”
In such a manner, and in such good terms, did Don Quixote go on with his discourse that for the time being none of those who were listening to him could take him for a madman; rather, since most of them were gentlemen, to whom arms belong by right, they listened to him very gladly; and he went on, saying:
“I say, then, that the hardships of the student are these: chiefly poverty (not because all of them are poor, but to put the case at the furthest extreme it can reach); and, having said that he suffers poverty, it seems to me that nothing more need be said of his ill fortune, for he who is poor has nothing good. This poverty he suffers in all its parts, now in hunger, now in cold, now in nakedness, now in all of them together; and yet, for all that, it is not so great that he does not eat, even if it is a little later than is the custom, even if it is from the leftovers of the rich; for the student’s worst misery is this business they call among themselves ‘going for the soup’; and they never lack some other man’s brazier or fireplace which, if it does not warm them, will at least take the edge off their cold; and, in the end, at night they sleep under a roof. I will not go on to other small matters, namely, the shortage of shirts and the shoes in no great surplus, the thinness and threadbareness of their clothes, nor that gorging of themselves with such relish when good luck sets some banquet in their way. By this road I have painted, rough and hard, stumbling here, falling there, getting up farther on, falling down again back here, they reach the degree they long for; and, that once attained, we have seen many who, having passed through these Syrtes and these Scyllas and Charybdises, as if carried aloft on the wings of favoring fortune, I say we have seen them command and govern the world from a chair, their hunger turned into plenty, their cold into comfort, their nakedness into finery, and their sleeping on a mat into reposing in holland linen and damask: a reward justly earned by their virtue. But their hardships, set against and compared with those of the soldier in the field, fall far behind in everything, as I shall now tell.”