Chapter VII. Of what passed between Don Quixote and his squire, with other most famous events

As soon as the housekeeper saw Sancho Panza shutting himself up with his master, she guessed what they were up to; and, imagining that out of that consultation would come the decision on his third sally, she took her mantle and, full of anguish and distress, went off to look for the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, for she thought that, since he was well spoken and a new friend of her master’s, he might persuade him to give up so crazed a purpose.

She found him walking up and down in the courtyard of his house, and, when she saw him, she let herself fall at his feet, sweating and distraught. When Carrasco saw her with such signs of grief and alarm, he said to her:

“What is this, Mistress Housekeeper? What has happened to you, that you look as if your soul were about to be torn out of you?”

“It’s nothing, my dear Señor Sansón, only that my master is breaking out; he’s breaking out for certain!”

“And where is he breaking out, madam?” asked Sansón. “Has some part of his body burst?”

“He’s not breaking out,” she answered, “anywhere but through the door of his madness. I mean, Señor Bachelor of my soul, that he wants to go out again, and this will be the third time, to look all over the world for what he calls ventures, though I can’t understand how he gives them that name. The first time they brought him back to us slung across a donkey, beaten to a pulp. The second time he came in an ox-cart, shut up and locked in a cage, where he was convinced he was enchanted; and the poor man was in such a state that the mother who bore him wouldn’t have known him: thin, yellow, his eyes sunk into the farthest attics of his brain; so that, to bring him round a little, I went through upward of six hundred eggs, God knows it, and so does the world, and so do my hens, who won’t let me tell a lie.”

“That I very well believe,” answered the bachelor, “for they are such good hens, so fat and so well brought up, that they would not say one thing for another if they burst. In effect, Mistress Housekeeper, is there nothing else, and has no other mishap occurred, but the one you fear Señor Don Quixote means to commit?”

“No, sir,” she answered.

“Then do not worry,” answered the bachelor, “but go home, and good luck to you, and have something hot ready for me to eat at midday, and on the way go along saying the prayer of Saint Apollonia, if you know it, for I shall be there shortly, and you will see wonders.”

“Woe is me!” replied the housekeeper. “The prayer of Saint Apollonia, your grace says I should say? That would be if my master had it in his teeth, but he hasn’t got it anywhere but in his skull.”

“I know what I am saying, Mistress Housekeeper: go along and do not start disputing with me, for you know that I am a bachelor of Salamanca, and there is no bacheloring beyond that,” answered Carrasco.

And with this the housekeeper went off, and the bachelor went at once to look for the priest, to discuss with him what will be told in due time.

During the time that Don Quixote and Sancho were shut up together, the words passed between them that the history tells with great exactness and in a true account.

Sancho said to his master:

“Sir, I’ve now got my wife seduced into letting me go with your grace wherever you choose to take me.”

“Induced, you should say, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “not seduced.”

“Once or twice,” answered Sancho, “if I remember right, I’ve begged your grace not to correct my vocables, as long as you understand what I mean by them, and that when you don’t understand them, you should say: ‘Sancho, or devil, I don’t understand you’; and if I don’t make myself plain, then you can correct me; for I’m so fossil…”

“I do not understand you, Sancho,” said Don Quixote at once, “for I do not know what ‘I’m so fossil’ means.”

“So fossil means,” answered Sancho, “I’m so… so like that.”

“Now I understand you even less,” replied Don Quixote.

“Well, if you can’t understand me,” answered Sancho, “I don’t know how to say it: I don’t know any more, and God be with me.”

“Now, now I have it,” answered Don Quixote. “You mean that you are so docile, gentle, and tractable that you will take what I tell you and go along with what I teach you.”

“I’ll bet,” said Sancho, “that you saw through me and understood me from the very start, only you wanted to confuse me so as to hear me say another two hundred blunders.”

“That may be,” replied Don Quixote. “And, in effect, what does Teresa say?”

“Teresa says,” said Sancho, “that I should tie my finger up tight with your grace, and let papers speak and beards keep quiet, because he who sets the terms doesn’t squabble after, for one ‘take this’ is worth more than two ‘I’ll give you.’ And I say a woman’s advice is a small thing, but the man who won’t take it is mad.”

“And so say I,” answered Don Quixote. “Speak on, Sancho, my friend; go ahead, for you are talking pearls today.”

“The fact is,” replied Sancho, “that, as your grace knows better than I do, we’re all subject to death, and here today and gone tomorrow, and the lamb goes as soon as the old ram, and nobody in this world can promise himself more hours of life than God chooses to give him, because death is deaf, and when it comes knocking at the doors of our life, it’s always in a hurry, and neither prayers nor force nor scepters nor miters will make it stop, as is common talk and report, and as they tell us from the pulpits.”

“All that is true,” said Don Quixote, “but I do not know where you are heading.”

“Where I’m heading,” said Sancho, “is that your grace should fix me a known wage of what you’re to give me every month for as long as I serve you, and that the said wage be paid to me out of your estate; for I don’t want to be at the mercy of favors, which come late, or badly, or never; God help me with what’s my own. In short, I want to know what I’m earning, little or much as it may be, for the hen lays on one egg, and many littles make a lot, and while something’s being gained nothing is lost. True, if it should happen, which I neither believe nor expect, that your grace gave me the isle you’ve promised me, I’m not so ungrateful, or such a stickler, that I won’t want the income of that isle to be valued and deducted from my wage pro cata.”

“Sancho, my friend,” answered Don Quixote, “sometimes a cat may be as good as a rat.”

“I see,” said Sancho. “I’ll bet I ought to have said rata and not cata; but it doesn’t matter at all, since your grace has understood me.”

“And understood you so well,” answered Don Quixote, “that I have reached the bottom of your thoughts, and I know the target you are shooting at with the countless arrows of your proverbs. Look, Sancho: I would gladly fix you a wage, if I had found in any of the histories of knights-errant an example that revealed to me and showed me, through the smallest chink, what they used to earn every month, or every year; but I have read all or most of their histories, and I do not remember reading that any knight-errant ever fixed a known wage for his squire. I know only that they all served for favor, and that, when they least expected it, if things had gone well for their masters, they found themselves rewarded with an isle, or with something equivalent, and at the very least they were left with a title and a lordship. If on these hopes and terms you, Sancho, care to come back and serve me, so be it, and welcome: for to think that I am going to wrench the ancient usage of knight-errantry off its hinges and out of its bounds is to think of what will never be. So, my Sancho, go back to your house and explain my intention to your Teresa; and if she is pleased, and you are pleased, to serve for favor with me, bene quidem (very well); and if not, we shall be as good friends as before; for if the dovecote does not lack feed, it will not lack doves. And mark, my son, that good hope is worth more than a poor possession, and a good claim more than bad pay. I speak in this way, Sancho, to let you understand that I too, like you, can shower proverbs as if they had rained down. And, in short, I mean to say, and I do say to you, that if you do not wish to come with me for favor and run the fortune I shall run, God be with you and make you a saint; for I shall not lack squires more obedient, more diligent, and not so clumsy or so talkative as you.”

When Sancho heard his master’s firm resolution, the sky clouded over for him and the wings of his heart drooped, because he had believed that his master would not go without him for all the wealth in the world; and so, while he stood there in suspense and lost in thought, Sansón Carrasco came in with the niece, eager to hear by what arguments he was persuading his master not to go back to looking for adventures. Sansón, a famous joker, came up, and, embracing him as he had the first time, said to him in a loud voice:

“O flower of knight-errantry! O shining light of arms! O honor and mirror of the Spanish nation! May it please God almighty, as is set forth more fully elsewhere, that the person or persons who place any hindrance in the way of your third sally, or obstruct it, may never find a way out of the labyrinth of their desires, nor ever see fulfilled what they wickedly desire.”

And, turning to the housekeeper, he said to her:

“The housekeeper may very well stop saying the prayer of Saint Apollonia, for I know it is the precise determination of the spheres that Señor Don Quixote should go back to carrying out his high and novel designs, and I would lay a heavy burden on my conscience if I did not urge and persuade this knight not to keep the strength of his valiant arm and the goodness of his most valorous spirit cramped and held back any longer, because by his delay he defrauds the redress of wrongs, the protection of orphans, the honor of damsels, the support of widows, and the stay of wives, and other things of this sort that touch, concern, depend upon, and belong to the order of knight-errantry. Come, my Señor Don Quixote, handsome and brave, let your grace and your greatness set out on the road today rather than tomorrow; and if anything should be lacking to put it into effect, here I am to supply it with my person and my purse; and if there should be need to serve your magnificence as squire, I shall count it the happiest of good fortune!”

At this, Don Quixote, turning to Sancho, said:

“Did I not tell you, Sancho, that I would have squires to spare? See who is offering to be one: none other than the unheard-of bachelor Sansón Carrasco, perpetual jester and merrymaker of the courtyards of the schools of Salamanca, sound of person, nimble of limb, close-mouthed, enduring of heat and cold alike, of hunger and of thirst alike, with all those qualities that are required to be the squire of a knight-errant. But heaven forbid that, to follow my own pleasure, I should hamstring and break the pillar of letters and the vessel of the sciences, and cut down the eminent palm of the good and liberal arts. Let the new Sansón stay in his own country, and, doing it honor, honor at the same time the gray hairs of his aged parents; for I shall be content with any squire, since Sancho does not deign to come with me.”

“I do deign,” answered Sancho, moved and with his eyes full of tears; and he went on: “It won’t be said of me, my master, ‘bread eaten, company broken up’; no, for I don’t come of any ungrateful stock, since the whole world knows, and my village especially, who the Panzas were that I descend from; and what’s more, I’ve known and seen through, by many good deeds and by more good words, the desire your grace has to do me favors; and if I’ve gone into accounts of so much more or so much less about my wage, it was to please my wife; for when she takes it in hand to urge a thing, there’s no mallet that drives home the hoops of a barrel the way she drives at getting what she wants done; but in effect a man has to be a man, and a woman a woman; and since I’m a man everywhere else, which I can’t deny, I mean to be one in my own house too, whoever it may grieve; and so there’s nothing more to be done, but for your grace to draw up your will with its codicil, in such a way that it can’t be revolted, and let’s set out on the road at once, so that Señor Sansón’s soul doesn’t suffer, for he says his conscience lictates that he persuade your grace to go out a third time into the world; and I offer myself afresh to serve your grace faithfully and loyally, as well as and better than all the squires who have served knights-errant in times past and present.”

The bachelor was amazed to hear Sancho Panza’s terms and manner of speaking; for although he had read the first history of his master, he had never believed that Sancho was as amusing as they paint him there; but hearing him say now a will and codicil that cannot be revolted, instead of a will and codicil that cannot be revoked, he believed everything he had read about him and set him down as one of the most solemn simpletons of our times; and he said to himself that two such madmen as this master and man had never been seen in the world.

At last Don Quixote and Sancho embraced and were friends again, and with the opinion and approval of the great Carrasco, who was their oracle for the time being, it was arranged that their departure should be three days later; in which time there would be an opportunity to make ready what was needed for the journey, and to look for a visored helmet, which Don Quixote said he must by all means take with him. Sansón offered him one, because he knew that a friend of his who had it would not refuse it to him, although it was darker with rust and mold than bright and clean with polished steel.

The curses that the two of them, housekeeper and niece, heaped on the bachelor were past counting: they tore their hair, they scratched their faces, and, in the manner of the hired mourners who were then in use, they lamented the departure as if it were their master’s death. The design Sansón had in persuading him to go out again was to do what the history tells further on, all on the advice of the priest and the barber, with whom he had discussed it beforehand.

In short, in those three days Don Quixote and Sancho supplied themselves with what seemed suitable to them; and, Sancho having pacified his wife, and Don Quixote his niece and his housekeeper, at nightfall, without anyone seeing them but the bachelor, who chose to accompany them half a league from the village, they set out on the road to El Toboso: Don Quixote on his good Rocinante, and Sancho on his old gray, the saddlebags stocked with things touching on the bucolic, that is, on eating, and the purse with money that Don Quixote gave him for whatever might come up. Sansón embraced him and begged him to let him know of his good or bad fortune, so that he could rejoice at the one or grieve at the other, as the laws of their friendship required. Don Quixote promised him he would, Sansón turned back to his village, and the two of them took the road to the great city of El Toboso.