Chapter LI. Which deals with what the goatherd told all those who were carrying Don Quixote away

“Three leagues from this valley there is a village which, small as it is, is one of the richest in all these parts; and in it there lived a farmer of great honor, so much so that, although honor goes along with riches, he had more of it from the virtue he possessed than from the wealth he had acquired. But what made him happiest, as he used to say, was having a daughter of such surpassing beauty, rare good sense, grace, and virtue that whoever knew her and looked at her marveled to see the surpassing gifts with which heaven and nature had enriched her. As a child she was beautiful, and she kept growing in loveliness, and at the age of sixteen she was most beautiful. The fame of her beauty began to spread through all the neighboring villages; but why do I say only the neighboring ones, when it reached far-off cities, and found its way even into royal halls and into the ears of every kind of people, who came from every quarter to see her as a rare thing, or as a wonder-working image? Her father guarded her, and she guarded herself; for there are no padlocks, guards, or locks that guard a maiden better than those of her own modesty.

“The father’s wealth and the daughter’s beauty moved many, from the village and from outside it, to ask for her hand; but he, as the one whose part it was to dispose of so rich a jewel, was perplexed, unable to make up his mind to which of the countless suitors who pestered him he would give her. And among the many who had so good a desire, I was one, and I was given many great hopes of success by knowing that her father knew who I was: a native of the same village, of clean blood, in the flower of my age, very rich in property and no less accomplished in wit. Another man of the same village, with all these same qualities, also asked for her, which caused the father’s will to hang in suspense and in the balance, for it seemed to him that his daughter would be well bestowed on either of us; and, to get out of this perplexity, he decided to tell Leandra, for that is the name of the rich girl who has left me in misery, pointing out that, since the two of us were equal, it was right to leave it to the will of his beloved daughter to choose as she pleased: a thing all fathers who mean to settle their children in life would do well to copy; I am not saying that they should let them choose among things base and bad, but that they should set good ones before them, and of the good ones let them choose as they please. What Leandra’s pleasure was I do not know; I only know that her father put us both off with his daughter’s youth and with general words that neither bound him nor released us either. My rival is called Anselmo, and I Eugenio, so that you may know the names of the persons this tragedy contains, the end of which is still pending; though it is plain enough that it will be disastrous.

“At this time there came to our village one Vicente de la Rosa, the son of a poor farmer of the same place; and this Vicente was coming back from the Italies and various other parts, where he had been a soldier. He had been taken from our village when he was a boy of about twelve by a captain who happened to pass that way with his company, and the young man came back twelve years later, dressed in soldier’s fashion, painted in a thousand colors, hung with a thousand trinkets of crystal and fine chains of steel. One day he would put on one finery and the next day another; but all of them flimsy, gaudy, of little weight and less worth. The country people, who are naturally malicious, and, when idleness gives them room, are malice itself, took note of it and counted up his finery and trappings point by point, and found that the suits of clothes were three, of different colors, with their garters and stockings; but he made so many combinations and contrivances out of them that, had they not been counted, there would have been those who would swear he had shown off more than ten suits of clothes and more than twenty plumes. And let not what I am telling you about the clothes seem irrelevant and superfluous, for they play a good part in this story.

“He used to sit on a stone bench that stands under a great poplar in our square, and there he would keep us all open-mouthed, hanging on the exploits he went on telling us. There was no land in all the world he had not seen, nor battle he had not been in; he had killed more Moors than Morocco and Tunis hold, and fought more single combats, according to him, than Gante and Luna, Diego García de Paredes, and a thousand others he named; and he had come out of all of them victorious, without their having spilled a single drop of his blood. On the other hand, he would show us the marks of wounds which, though they could not be made out, he gave us to understand were harquebus shots received in various skirmishes and actions. In short, with unheard-of arrogance he called his equals, and the very people who knew him, vos, as one speaks to inferiors, and said that his arm was his father, his deeds his lineage, and that, being a soldier, he owed nothing to the king himself. On top of these arrogances he was something of a musician and strummed a guitar in such a way that some said he made it talk; but his graces did not stop there, for he had the grace of a poet too, and so out of every trifle that happened in the village he would compose a ballad a league and a half long in the writing.

“This soldier, then, whom I have painted here, this Vicente de la Rosa, this bravo, this gallant, this musician, this poet, was seen and watched many times by Leandra from a window of her house that looked out on the square. She was smitten by the tinsel of his showy clothes, his ballads enchanted her, for of each one he composed he gave out twenty copies, the exploits he had related of himself reached her ears, and, in short, for so the devil must have ordained it, she came to fall in love with him before he had even presumed to court her. And since, in matters of love, none is more easily brought about than one that has the lady’s desire on its side, Leandra and Vicente came to an understanding easily; and before any of her many suitors realized what she desired, she had already fulfilled it, having left the house of her dear and beloved father, for she has no mother, and run away from the village with the soldier, who came out of this enterprise with more triumph than out of all the many he claimed for himself.

“The event astonished the whole village, and even everyone who heard of it; I was stunned, Anselmo thunderstruck, the father grieved, her kinsfolk shamed, the law on the alert, the troopers at the ready; the roads were watched, the woods and every other place were searched, and at the end of three days they found the willful Leandra in a cave in the mountains, stripped to her shift, and without the large sum of money and the very precious jewels she had taken from her home. They brought her back into the presence of her stricken father; they asked her about her misfortune; she confessed without being pressed that Vicente de la Roca had deceived her, and under his promise to be her husband had persuaded her to leave her father’s house; that he would take her to the richest and most pleasure-loving city in the whole wide world, which was Naples; and that she, ill-advised and worse deceived, had believed him; and, robbing her father, had given herself up to him the very night she had disappeared; and that he took her to a rugged mountain and shut her up in the cave where they had found her. She also told how the soldier, without taking her honor, had robbed her of all she had, and left her in that cave, and gone away: a turn of events that set everyone marveling anew.

“The young man’s continence was hard for us to believe, but she affirmed it so earnestly that it helped the disconsolate father to console himself, taking no account of the riches that had been carried off, since his daughter had been left to him with the jewel that, once lost, leaves no hope of ever being recovered. The same day Leandra appeared, her father made her disappear from our sight, and took her to be shut up in a convent in a town not far from here, hoping that time will wear away some part of the bad name his daughter brought on herself. Leandra’s youth served as an excuse for her fault, at least with those who had no stake in whether she was bad or good; but those who knew her good sense and great intelligence did not put her sin down to ignorance, but to her forwardness and to the natural inclination of women, which for the most part tends to be wayward and ill-regulated.

“With Leandra shut away, Anselmo’s eyes were left blind, or at least without anything to look at that gave them pleasure, and mine in darkness, with no light to guide them to anything pleasant; with Leandra’s absence our sadness grew, our patience shrank, we cursed the soldier’s finery and execrated the carelessness of Leandra’s father. In the end Anselmo and I resolved to quit the village and make our way to this valley, where he, grazing a great number of sheep of his own, and I a large flock of goats, also mine, pass our lives among the trees, giving vent to our passions, or singing together the praises or the blame of the beautiful Leandra, or sighing alone and alone confiding our complaints to heaven.

“In imitation of us, many others of Leandra’s suitors have come to these rugged mountains, following the same pursuit as ours; and there are so many of them that it seems as if this place has become the pastoral Arcadia, it is so crowded with shepherds and sheepfolds, and there is no part of it where the name of the beautiful Leandra is not heard. This one curses her and calls her willful, fickle, and wanton; that one condemns her as easy and light; one acquits and pardons her, another passes judgment on her and reviles her; one celebrates her beauty, another denounces her nature; and, in short, all dishonor her and all adore her, and the madness of them all goes so far that there is one who complains of her disdain without ever having spoken to her, and even one who laments and feels the raging sickness of jealousy, which she never gave to anyone; for, as I have said, her sin was known before her desire. There is no hollow in the rocks, no brookside, no shade of a tree that is not taken up by some shepherd telling his misfortunes to the winds; the echo repeats the name of Leandra wherever it can form itself: Leandra the mountains ring, Leandra the brooks murmur, and Leandra holds us all in suspense and enchanted, hoping without hope and fearing without knowing what we fear. Among all these madmen, the one who shows the least and the most sense is my rival Anselmo, who, having so many other things to complain of, complains only of absence; and he sings his complaints to a rebeck, on which he is an admirable player, in verses that show his good understanding. I follow another road, easier and, in my opinion, the wisest, which is to speak ill of the fickleness of women, of their inconstancy, their double dealing, their dead promises, their broken faith, and, in short, the little judgment they have in knowing where to place their thoughts and the intentions they have. And this, gentlemen, was the reason for the words and remarks I addressed to this goat when I came here; for, being a female, I hold her cheap, though she is the best of all my herd. This is the story I promised to tell you; if I have been long-winded in the telling, I shall not be short in serving you: near here I have my fold, and in it I have fresh milk and the very tastiest cheese, with various other ripe fruits, no less pleasing to the eye than to the taste.”