Chapter XLV. In which the doubt about Mambrino’s helmet and the packsaddle is finally settled, with other adventures that truly happened

“What do your graces think, gentlemen,” said the barber, “of what these fine gentlemen claim, since they still insist that this is not a basin but a helmet?”

“And whoever says the contrary,” said Don Quixote, “I shall make him know that he lies, if he is a knight; and if he is a squire, that he lies and lies again a thousand times.”

Our own barber, who was present at all of this and knew Don Quixote’s humor so well, wanted to egg on his folly and carry the joke further so that everyone could laugh, and he said, addressing the other barber:

“Señor Barber, or whoever you are, you should know that I am of your trade too, and have held my certificate of examination for more than twenty years, and I know every instrument of the barber’s craft very well, without missing a single one; and, no more and no less, I was a soldier for a time in my youth, and so I also know what a helmet is, and what a morion is, and a visored helmet, and other things that have to do with soldiering, I mean, with the kinds of arms soldiers carry; and I say, saving a better opinion and always deferring to a better judgment, that this piece here before us, here in this good gentleman’s hands, is not merely no barber’s basin; it stands as far from being one as black is from white and a lie from the truth; I say, too, that this, although it is a helmet, is not a whole helmet.”

“No, indeed,” said Don Quixote, “for half of it is missing, namely the beaver.”

“That is so,” said the priest, who had already grasped what his friend the barber was about.

And Cardenio, Don Fernando, and his companions confirmed the same; and even the judge, had he not been so lost in thought over the affair of Don Luis, would have lent a hand on his side to the joke; but the serious matter he was thinking of kept him so absorbed that he paid little or no attention to these pleasantries.

“God help me!” said the barber who was being made a fool of at this point. “Can it be possible that so many honorable people say that this is not a basin but a helmet? This seems a thing that could astonish a whole university, however learned it might be. Enough: if this basin is a helmet, then this packsaddle must be a horse’s trappings too, as this gentleman has said.”

“To me it looks like a packsaddle,” said Don Quixote, “but I have already said that I do not meddle in that.”

“Whether it is a packsaddle or trappings,” said the priest, “rests on nothing more than Señor Don Quixote’s saying so; for in these matters of chivalry all these gentlemen and I yield him the advantage.”

“By God, gentlemen,” said Don Quixote, “so many and so strange are the things that have befallen me in this castle, in the two times I have lodged in it, that I would not dare state anything for certain about any question asked concerning what it contains, for I imagine that everything that goes on in it is done by way of enchantment. The first time, I was sorely troubled by an enchanted Moor who is in it, and Sancho did not fare very well with some of his followers; and last night I was hung up by this arm for almost two hours, without knowing how or why I came to fall into that misfortune. So that for me to give my opinion now on a matter of such confusion would be to fall into rash judgment. As regards their saying that this is a basin and not a helmet, I have already answered; but as for declaring whether that is a packsaddle or trappings, I do not venture to give a final verdict: I leave it entirely to your graces’ good judgment. It may be that, since you have not been dubbed knights as I have, the enchantments of this place will have nothing to do with your graces, and you will have your understanding free and be able to judge the things of this castle in their real and true being, and not as they seemed to me.”

“There is no doubt,” answered Don Fernando, “but that Señor Don Quixote has spoken very well today in saying that the deciding of this case falls to us; and, so that it may proceed on firmer ground, I shall take the votes of these gentlemen in secret, and of the result I shall give a full and clear report.”

For those who knew Don Quixote’s humor, all this was matter for the greatest laughter; but those who did not know it thought it the greatest nonsense in the world, especially Don Luis’s four servants, and Don Luis no more and no less, and three other travelers who had happened to arrive at the inn and who had the look of troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, as in fact they were. But the one in the deepest despair was the barber, whose basin, there before his very eyes, had turned into Mambrino’s helmet, and whose packsaddle he no doubt thought was about to turn into a horse’s rich trappings; and one and all were laughing as they watched Don Fernando make the rounds and gather the votes, whispering into each ear so that each could declare in secret whether that jewel over which there had been so much fighting was a packsaddle or trappings. And after he had taken the votes of those who knew Don Quixote, he said in a loud voice:

“The fact is, my good man, that I am tired now of collecting so many opinions, because I find there is not one person I ask what I want to know who does not tell me it is nonsense to say that this is a donkey’s packsaddle and not a horse’s trappings, and those of a thoroughbred horse at that; and so you will have to be patient, because, in spite of you and your donkey, this is trappings and not a packsaddle, and you have pleaded and proved your side very badly.”

“May I never have a place in heaven,” said the extra barber, “if your graces are not all mistaken; and as surely as my soul may appear before God, so surely does this look to me like a packsaddle and not trappings; but laws go…, et cetera; and I say no more; and truly I’m not drunk, for I’ve had nothing this morning to break my fast, unless it was sin.”

The barber’s foolish talk caused no less laughter than Don Quixote’s nonsense, and Don Quixote said at this point:

“There is nothing more to be done here but for each man to take what is his, and whom God gave it to, may Saint Peter bless it for him.”

One of the four said:

“Unless this is some heavy joke, I cannot bring myself to believe that men of such good understanding as all those here are, or seem to be, would dare to say and affirm that this is not a basin nor that a packsaddle; but, since I see that they do affirm it and say it, I can only conclude that there is some mystery behind insisting on a thing so contrary to what truth itself and experience itself show us; for, I swear by—and he swore it out in full—not all the people living in the world today will make me believe anything other than that this is a barber’s basin and that an ass’s packsaddle.”

“It might well be a she-ass’s,” said the priest.

“It comes to the same thing,” said the servant, “for the case doesn’t turn on that, but on whether it is or is not a packsaddle, as your graces say.”

Hearing this, one of the troopers who had come in, and who had heard the quarrel and dispute, said, full of anger and annoyance:

“It’s as much a packsaddle as my father is my father; and whoever has said or says anything else must be soaked in the grape.”

“You lie like a base-born knave,” answered Don Quixote.

And, raising the long lance, which he never let out of his hands, he was about to bring down such a blow on the man’s head that, had the trooper not dodged it, it would have laid him out flat on the spot. The long lance shattered on the ground, and the other troopers, seeing their comrade so ill-treated, raised their voices calling for help in the name of the Holy Brotherhood.

The innkeeper, who belonged to the brotherhood, ran in at once for his staff of office and his sword, and took his stand beside his comrades; Don Luis’s servants surrounded Don Luis, so that he would not slip away from them in the uproar; the barber, seeing the house turned upside down, laid hold of his packsaddle again, and Sancho did the same; Don Quixote put his hand to his sword and charged at the troopers. Don Luis was shouting to his servants to leave him alone and go to the help of Don Quixote, and of Cardenio, and of Don Fernando, who were all taking Don Quixote’s side. The priest was shouting, the innkeeper’s wife was screaming, her daughter was in distress, Maritornes was weeping, Dorotea was bewildered, Luscinda stunned, and Doña Clara in a faint. The barber was pummeling Sancho, Sancho was pounding the barber; Don Luis, when one of his servants made bold to seize him by the arm so that he should not get away, gave him a punch that bathed his teeth in blood; the judge was defending him; Don Fernando had a trooper under his feet and was measuring the man’s body with them to his heart’s content. The innkeeper raised his voice again, calling for help in the name of the Holy Brotherhood: so that the whole inn was all weeping, shouting, screaming, confusion, fears, alarms, mishaps, sword cuts, punches, cudgelings, kicks, and shedding of blood. And in the midst of this chaos, this tangle and labyrinth of things, it came into Don Quixote’s memory that he found himself plunged headlong into the discord of King Agramante’s camp; and so he said, in a voice that thundered through the inn:

“Hold, everyone; everyone sheathe; everyone be still; everyone hear me, if everyone wishes to stay alive!”

At this great voice they all stopped, and he went on:

“Did I not tell you, gentlemen, that this castle was enchanted, and that some legion of demons must dwell in it? In confirmation of which, I would have you see with your own eyes how the discord of Agramante’s camp has passed over and been transported here among us. Look how there they fight over the sword, here over the horse, over yonder for the eagle, and here again for the helmet, and all of us are fighting, and none of us understands the others. Come, then, your grace, Señor Judge, and your grace, Señor Priest, and let the one serve as King Agramante and the other as King Sobrino, and bring us to peace; for, by God Almighty, it is a great piece of villainy that so many persons of quality as are here should kill one another for such trifling causes.”

The troopers, who did not understand Don Quixote’s turns of phrase and saw themselves being roughly handled by Don Fernando, Cardenio, and their companions, refused to be calmed; the barber was willing, for in the quarrel he had had both his beard and his packsaddle torn to pieces; Sancho, at the least word from his master, obeyed like a good servant; Don Luis’s four servants also kept quiet, seeing how little they stood to gain by not doing so. Only the innkeeper insisted that the insolence of that madman, who turned his inn upside down at every step, ought to be punished. At last the uproar died down for the time being; in Don Quixote’s imagination the packsaddle stayed trappings until doomsday, the basin stayed a helmet, and the inn a castle.

Once things were quiet, then, and they had all been made friends at the persuasion of the judge and the priest, Don Luis’s servants began again to press him to come away with them at once; and, while he was coming to terms with them, the judge consulted with Don Fernando, Cardenio, and the priest as to what he ought to do in the case, telling them what Don Luis had said to him. In the end it was agreed that Don Fernando should tell Don Luis’s servants who he was, and that it was his wish that Don Luis should go with him to Andalusia, where his brother the marquis would esteem him as Don Luis’s worth deserved; for it was clear from what Don Luis intended that he would not go back before his father’s eyes this time, though they cut him to pieces. When the four, then, had understood Don Fernando’s rank and Don Luis’s intention, they decided among themselves that three of them should go back and tell his father what had happened, and that the other should stay to serve Don Luis and keep by his side until they returned to fetch him, or until he learned what his father ordered them to do.

In this way that whole contraption of quarrels was calmed, by the authority of Agramante and the prudence of King Sobrino; but the enemy of concord and the rival of peace, seeing himself scorned and mocked, and seeing how little fruit he had reaped from having thrown them all into so confused a labyrinth, made up his mind to try his hand again and raise up new quarrels and new unrest.

It so happened, then, that the troopers calmed down, having caught something of the rank of those they had been fighting with, and withdrew from the fray, since it seemed to them that, however things turned out, they were bound to come off worst in the battle; but one of them, the one who had been pounded and trampled by Don Fernando, remembered that among certain warrants he was carrying for the arrest of some criminals, there was one against Don Quixote, whose arrest the Holy Brotherhood had ordered on account of the freedom he had given the galley slaves, just as Sancho, with very good reason, had feared.

With this in mind, then, he wanted to make sure whether the description of Don Quixote he carried fitted him; and, drawing a parchment from his bosom, he came upon the one he was looking for; and, setting himself to read it slowly, for he was not a good reader, at every word he read he looked up at Don Quixote, comparing the marks in the warrant with Don Quixote’s face, and he found that he was beyond any doubt the man the warrant described. And no sooner had he made sure than, folding up his parchment, he held the warrant in his left hand while his right hand gripped Don Quixote’s collar so hard that he could not draw breath, shouting loudly:

“Help for the Holy Brotherhood! And so that you may see I ask it in earnest, read this warrant, which says that this highway robber is to be arrested.”

The priest took the warrant and saw that everything the trooper said was true, and that the description matched Don Quixote; who, finding himself so ill-used by that base miscreant, with his anger at its height and every bone in his body cracking, seized the trooper by the throat with both hands as best he could, so that, had the trooper not been rescued by his comrades, he would have given up his life there before Don Quixote gave up his hold. The innkeeper, who was bound to take the part of those of his calling, ran at once to the trooper’s help. The innkeeper’s wife, seeing her husband in a brawl again, raised her voice again, and Maritornes and her daughter at once took up the same tune, calling for help to heaven and to those who were there. Sancho, seeing what was happening, said:

“As the Lord lives, everything my master says about the enchantments of this castle is true, for it isn’t possible to live in it for one hour in peace!”

Don Fernando parted the trooper and Don Quixote, and, to the satisfaction of both, unpinned their hands, which they had firmly locked, the one in the collar of the other’s doublet, and the other on the throat of the first; but the troopers did not stop demanding their prisoner for all that, and calling on the others to help them hand him over bound and delivered entirely to their will, for so it was fitting for the service of the king and of the Holy Brotherhood, in whose name they once more asked for help and assistance in making the arrest of that robber and footpad of paths and highways. Don Quixote laughed to hear these words; and, with great composure, he said:

“Come hither, base and ill-born rabble: do you call it highway robbery to give freedom to those in chains, to set prisoners loose, to succor the wretched, to raise the fallen, to relieve the needy? Ah, infamous crew, deserving, for your low and vile understanding, that heaven should never impart to you the worth contained in knight-errantry, nor give you to understand the sin and ignorance you are in by not revering the very shadow, let alone the presence, of any knight-errant! Come hither, ye thieves in a troop and no troopers, highwaymen licensed by the Holy Brotherhood; tell me: what ignoramus put his name to a warrant for the arrest of a knight such as I? Who was it that did not know that knights-errant are exempt from every jurisdiction of the courts, and that their law is their sword, their charters their mettle, their decrees their will? Who was the dolt, I say again, who does not know that there is no patent of hidalgo rank with as many privileges and exemptions as a knight-errant acquires on the day he is dubbed a knight and gives himself up to the hard exercise of chivalry? What knight-errant ever paid poll tax, sales tax, the queen’s-slipper levy, crown money, road toll, or ferry fee? What tailor ever charged him for the making of a suit he made him? What castellan ever took him into his castle and made him pay his share of the reckoning? What king did not seat him at his table? What damsel did not fall in love with him and yield herself to him, surrendered, at his pleasure and will? And, finally, what knight-errant has there been, is there, or will there be in the world, who has not the mettle to give, all by himself, four hundred blows to four hundred troopers who might stand before him?”