Chapter XLIII. In which is told the pleasant story of the mule boy, with other strange happenings at the inn

“I am a mariner of love,
and on its deep and open sea
I sail along without a hope
of ever coming into port.
I follow onward toward a star
that I can make out from afar,
more beautiful and shining bright
than any Palinurus saw.
I do not know where it may lead,
and so I sail in sore confusion,
my soul intent on watching it,
full of care and yet careless.
Restraints that have no cause or need,
a modesty beyond all use,
are clouds that hide it from my sight
the more I strive to see it shine.
O clear and brightly shining star,
whose light I suffer and am tried by,
the moment you are hid from me
will be the moment of my death.”

When the singer reached this point, it seemed to Dorotea that it would not be right for Clara to miss hearing so fine a voice; and so, shaking her this way and that, she woke her, saying:

“Forgive me, child, for waking you; I do it so that you can enjoy hearing the best voice you have perhaps ever heard in all your life.”

Clara woke up all drowsy, and at first did not understand what Dorotea was telling her; and, when she asked her again, Dorotea told her again, at which Clara listened closely. But hardly had she heard two lines of what the singer went on with when such a strange trembling seized her that it was as though she were sick with some bad attack of quartan fever; and, clinging tightly to Teodora, she said to her:

“Oh, lady of my soul and of my life, why did you wake me? For the greatest kindness fortune could do me just now was to keep my eyes and my ears shut, so that I would neither see nor hear that unhappy musician.”

“What is it you are saying, child? Look here, they say the one who is singing is a mule boy.”

“He is no such thing, but a lord of places,” answered Clara, “and the place he holds in my soul he holds so securely that, unless he wishes to leave it, it will never be taken from him for all eternity.”

Dorotea was astonished at the girl’s heartfelt words, which seemed to her to go far beyond the good sense her few years promised; and so she said to her:

“You speak in such a way, Señora Clara, that I cannot understand you: explain yourself further, and tell me what you mean about souls and places, and about this musician whose voice has you so troubled. But tell me nothing for now, for I would not lose, by tending to your alarm, the pleasure I am taking in hearing the singer; for it seems to me that he is going back to his song with new verses and a new tune.”

“As you please,” answered Clara.

And, so as not to hear him, she stopped both her ears with her hands, at which Dorotea marveled too; and she, listening to what was being sung, heard it go on in this way:

“Sweet hope of mine,
who, breaking through impossibles and thorns,
keep steadfast on the road
that you yourself imagine and lay out:
let it not daunt you when you find yourself
at every step beside the step of death.
The slothful never win
an honored triumph or a victory,
nor can those men be happy
who, never standing up to fortune’s blows,
yield up, all helplessly,
their every sense to soft and easy idleness.
That love should sell its glories
dear is right reason and a bargain fair,
for there’s no richer pledge
than one whose worth is weighed by its delight;
and it is plain to all
that what costs little is not held of worth.
Love’s long persistence
at times achieves things that are impossible;
and so, though with my own
I follow the hardest of love’s enterprises,
not on that account I fear
that I shall fail to reach heaven from the earth.”

Here the voice came to its end, and Clara’s sobs to a fresh beginning. All of which inflamed Dorotea’s desire to know the cause of so sweet a song and so sad a weeping. And so she asked her again what it was she had meant to tell her a while ago. Then Clara, afraid that Luscinda might hear her, and holding Dorotea tightly in her arms, put her mouth so close to Dorotea’s ear that she could speak safely without being heard by anyone else, and said to her:

“This boy who is singing, my lady, is the son of a gentleman from the kingdom of Aragon, the lord of two villages, who lived across the street from my father’s house at court; and, although my father kept the windows of his house covered with linen in the winter and with lattices in the summer, I don’t know how it was, or how it wasn’t, but this gentleman, who was a student, saw me, whether in church or somewhere else I don’t know. In the end he fell in love with me, and made it known to me from his own windows by so many signals and so many tears that I had to believe him, and even love him, without knowing what he wanted of me. Among the signs he made me, one was to join one hand to the other, giving me to understand that he would marry me; and, though I would have been very glad if it were so, being alone and without a mother I didn’t know whom to talk it over with; and so I let it be, without giving him any other favor except, when my father was out of the house and his was too, to lift the linen or the lattice a little and let him see all of me, at which he made such rejoicing that he seemed to be going out of his mind. Then the time came for my father to leave, which he found out, though not from me, for I was never able to tell him. He fell ill, as I understand it, from grief; and so on the day we left I could not see him to say goodbye, not even with my eyes. But after we had been on the road two days, as we were going into a lodging house in a village a day’s journey from here, I saw him at the door of the tavern, dressed as a mule boy, and so true to life that if I did not carry his portrait so clearly in my soul it would have been impossible to recognize him. I knew him, I was amazed, and I was glad; he looked at me on the sly, so that my father would not notice, for he always hides from him when he crosses in front of me on the roads and in the inns we come to; and, since I know who he is, and think how for love of me he comes on foot and with so much hardship, I am dying of grief, and where he sets his feet I set my eyes. I don’t know what he intends by coming, or how he has managed to get away from his father, who loves him beyond all measure, because he has no other heir, and because he deserves it, as your grace will see when you see him. And I can tell you more: everything he sings he makes up out of his own head; for I have heard that he is a very great scholar and poet. And there is more: whenever I catch sight of him or hear his singing, I shake from head to foot and take fright, afraid that my father will recognize him and come to know of our wishes. Never in my life have I spoken a word to him, and, for all that, I love him in such a way that I shall not be able to live without him. This, my lady, is all I can tell you about this musician whose voice has pleased you so much; for by that alone you will see very well that he is no mule boy, as you say, but a lord of souls and places, as I have told you.”

“Say no more, Señora Doña Clara,” said Dorotea at this point, kissing her a thousand times as she said it; “say no more, I tell you, and wait for the new day to come, for I trust in God to guide your affairs in such a way that they will have the happy end that such honest beginnings deserve.”

“Oh, my lady!” said Doña Clara. “What end can be hoped for, if his father is of such high rank and so rich that he will think I am not fit even to be his son’s maid, let alone his wife? And as for marrying behind my father’s back, I won’t do it for anything in the world. All I want is for this boy to go back and leave me; perhaps by not seeing him, and with the great distance of the journey we are making, the pain I feel now would ease, though I can tell you that this remedy I imagine will do me very little good. I don’t know what the devil this has been, or how this love I have for him got in, I being so young and he so young; for truly I believe we are the very same age, and I haven’t turned sixteen yet, because my father says I will turn sixteen this coming Saint Michael’s Day.”

Dorotea could not help laughing to hear how like a child Doña Clara talked, and she said to her:

“Let us rest, my lady, for what little I think is left of the night; God will bring the day, and we shall thrive, or my hands will serve me badly.”

With this they settled down, and throughout the inn a deep silence was kept; only the innkeeper’s daughter and Maritornes, her servant, were not asleep; and the two of them, knowing by now what humor Don Quixote suffered from, and that he was outside the inn, armed and on horseback, keeping guard, made up their minds to play some trick on him, or at least to pass the time a little listening to his nonsense.

The fact is, then, that in the whole inn there was no window that looked out on the fields, except a hole in a hayloft through which they pitched the straw in from outside. At this hole the two would-be damsels stationed themselves, and they saw that Don Quixote was on horseback, leaning on his long lance, heaving from time to time such deep and doleful sighs that it seemed his soul was being torn out of him with each one. And they heard him say, too, in a soft, tender, and loving voice:

“O my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, height of all beauty, last word and crown of good sense, archive of the finest grace, treasury of modesty, and, lastly, the ideal of everything profitable, virtuous, and delightful there is in the world! And what doth your grace now? Can it be that by any chance your mind is on your captive knight, who, only to serve you, has of his own free will chosen to expose himself to so many perils? Give me news of her, O luminary of the three faces! Perhaps you are gazing on her now in envy of her face; for she, either strolling along some gallery of her sumptuous palaces or leaning her breast upon some balcony, is considering how, saving her modesty and her greatness, she may calm the storm that this my woeful heart endures for her sake, what glory she will give my pains, what rest my care, and, in short, what life my death and what reward my services. And you, sun, who must by now be hastily saddling your horses, to rise early and go forth to see my lady, as soon as you see her, I beg you to greet her on my behalf; but beware lest, on seeing her and greeting her, you kiss her face, for I shall be more jealous of you than you were of that fleet ungrateful one who made you sweat and run so over the plains of Thessaly, or along the banks of the Peneus, for I do not well remember where it was you ran then, jealous and enamored.”

Don Quixote had come this far in his most piteous speech when the innkeeper’s daughter began to go “psst” at him and to say to him:

“My lord, may your grace come hither, if it please you.”

Hearing the voice and seeing the signs, Don Quixote turned his head and made out, by the moonlight, which was then at its fullest brightness, that they were calling him from the hole, which seemed to him a window, and even one with gilded bars, as befits castles as rich as he imagined that inn to be; and at once, in that very instant, it came into his mad imagination that once again, as on the last occasion, the fair damsel, daughter of the lady of that castle, overcome by love for him, was coming back to woo him; and with this thought, so as not to seem discourteous and ungrateful, he turned Rocinante round by the reins and went up to the hole, and, as soon as he saw the two girls, said:

“I pity you, fair lady, that you should have set your amorous thoughts where it is not possible to return them as your great worth and grace deserve; for which you must not blame this wretched knight-errant, whom love has made unable to yield his will to any other than her whom he made sole and absolute mistress of his soul in the instant his eyes first beheld her. Forgive me, good lady, and withdraw to your chamber, and do not seek, by further declaring your desires, to make me seem more ungrateful still; and if, in return for the love you bear me, you find in me anything else with which to satisfy you, provided it is not love itself, ask it of me; for I swear by that sweet enemy of mine who is absent that I will give it you forthwith, even though you should ask me for a lock of the hair of Medusa, which was all snakes, or the very rays of the sun shut up in a flask.”

“My lady needs none of that, sir knight,” said Maritornes at this point.

“Then what does your lady need, wise duenna?” answered Don Quixote.

“Only one of your beautiful hands,” said Maritornes, “so she can ease with it the great longing that has brought her to this hole, and so much at the risk of her honor that if her lord father had heard her, the smallest slice he’d have taken off her would have been her ear.”

“I should like to see that!” answered Don Quixote. “But he will take good care not to, unless he wishes to come to the most disastrous end that ever father came to in the world, for having laid hands on the delicate limbs of his lovelorn daughter.”

It seemed to Maritornes that Don Quixote would certainly give the hand they had asked for, and, working out in her mind what she was going to do, she got down from the hole and went to the stable, where she took the halter of Sancho Panza’s donkey, and came back very quickly to her hole, just when Don Quixote had stood up on Rocinante’s saddle to reach the barred window where he imagined the wounded damsel to be; and, as he gave her his hand, he said:

“Take, lady, this hand, or, to put it better, this executioner of the evildoers of the world; take this hand, I say, which no woman’s hand has ever touched, not even hers who has entire possession of my whole body. I do not give it to you to kiss, but so that you may observe the texture of its sinews, the knitting of its muscles, the breadth and spaciousness of its veins; from which you will gather what the strength of the arm must be that has such a hand.”

“We’ll see about that now,” said Maritornes.

And, making a running noose in the halter, she slipped it over his wrist, and, getting down from the hole, tied what was left of it very tightly to the bolt of the hayloft door. Don Quixote, feeling the roughness of the cord on his wrist, said:

“It seems rather that your grace is grating my hand than gracing it; do not treat it so ill, for it is not to blame for the ill my will does you, nor is it right that on so small a part you should vent the whole of your anger. Consider that one who loves well does not take such ill revenge.”

But by now not a soul was hearing these speeches of Don Quixote’s, for the moment Maritornes had him tied, she and the other girl took themselves off, dying of laughter, and left him fastened in such a way that he could not possibly get loose.

He was standing, then, as has been said, on Rocinante, his whole arm thrust through the hole and tied by the wrist to the bolt of the door, in very great fear and anxiety that, if Rocinante moved to one side or the other, he would be left hanging by the arm; and so he did not dare to make any movement at all, although from Rocinante’s patience and stillness it could well be expected that he would stand without moving for a whole century.

In short, Don Quixote, seeing himself tied, and that the ladies had gone, began to imagine that all this was being done by way of enchantment, as on the last occasion, when in that same castle that enchanted Moor of a muleteer had pounded him; and he cursed to himself his lack of good sense and judgment, since, having come off so badly from that castle the first time, he had ventured to go into it a second, it being a maxim of knights-errant that, when they have tried an adventure and not come off well in it, it is a sign that it is not reserved for them but for others; and so they have no need to try it a second time. For all that, he kept pulling at his arm to see whether he could get loose; but it was so well fastened that all his attempts were in vain. True it is that he pulled carefully, so that Rocinante would not move; and, though he would have liked to sit down and settle himself in the saddle, he could do nothing but stand, or wrench off his hand.

There came the longing for Amadís’s sword, against which no enchantment whatever had any power; there came the cursing of his fortune; there came the magnifying of the loss the world would suffer from his absence for as long as he stayed there enchanted, for he had no doubt at all come to believe that he was; there came the remembering once more of his beloved Dulcinea del Toboso; there came the calling on his good squire Sancho Panza, who, buried in sleep and stretched out on his donkey’s packsaddle, did not at that moment remember the mother who bore him; there he called on the sages Lirgandeo and Alquife to help him; there he invoked his good friend Urganda to come to his aid; and, finally, there the morning found him, so desperate and bewildered that he was bellowing like a bull; for he did not hope that with the day his woe would be remedied, since he took it to be eternal, believing himself enchanted. And what made him believe this was seeing that Rocinante did not stir, little or much; and he believed that in that state, without eating or drinking or sleeping, he and his horse would have to remain until that evil influence of the stars had passed, or until some other, wiser enchanter disenchanted him.

But he was much mistaken in his belief, for hardly had day begun to break when four men on horseback came to the inn, very well turned out and equipped, with their firelocks across their saddlebows. They knocked loudly at the door of the inn, which was still shut; and Don Quixote, seeing this from where he had not yet given up standing sentry, said in a loud and arrogant voice:

“Knights, or squires, or whoever you may be: you have no business knocking at the gates of this castle; for it is plain enough that at such an hour either those within are sleeping or it is not the custom for fortresses to be opened until the sun has spread over all the ground. Stand back, and wait for the day to clear, and then we shall see whether it will be right or not that they open to you.”

“What the devil of a fortress or castle is this,” said one of them, “that we should have to keep such ceremonies? If you’re the innkeeper, have them open up for us, for we’re travelers who want nothing more than to give our mounts some barley and go on our way, because we’re in a hurry.”

“Does it seem to you, gentlemen, that I have the look of an innkeeper?” answered Don Quixote.

“I don’t know what you have the look of,” answered the other, “but I know you’re talking nonsense when you call this inn a castle.”

“A castle it is,” replied Don Quixote, “and one of the best in this whole province; and it has people inside who have held the scepter in their hand and worn the crown on their head.”

“It would be better the other way round,” said the traveler: “the scepter on the head and the crown in the hand. And it may be, if it comes to that, that there’s some company of players inside, who often have those crowns and scepters you speak of; for in so small an inn, and one where they keep as quiet as they do in this one, I don’t believe any persons worthy of crown and scepter are lodging.”

“You know little of the world,” replied Don Quixote, “since you are ignorant of the things that commonly happen in knight-errantry.”

The companions who had come with the questioner grew tired of the colloquy he was holding with Don Quixote, and so they began to knock again with great fury; so much so that the innkeeper woke up, and indeed everyone in the inn; and so he got up to ask who was knocking. It happened at this point that one of the mounts the four who were knocking were riding came up to sniff at Rocinante, who, melancholy and sad, with drooping ears, was holding up his outstretched master without moving; and since, after all, he was flesh, though he seemed to be made of wood, he could not help feeling it and sniffing back at the one who had come to caress him; and so he had hardly moved at all when Don Quixote’s feet, which were close together, slid apart, and, slipping off the saddle, they would have brought him down to the ground had he not been left hanging by the arm: a thing that caused him such pain that he thought either his wrist was being cut off or his arm torn from its socket; for he was left so close to the ground that he was kissing the earth with the very tips of his toes, which was to his harm, because, feeling how little he lacked to set the soles of his feet on the ground, he wore himself out straining and stretching as far as he could to reach the floor: just like those who are put to the torture of the pulley, hoisted so that they touch and do not touch, and who themselves increase their pain by the eagerness with which they stretch, deceived by the hope that comes to them that, if they stretch only a little more, they will reach the ground.