Chapter XIII. In which the adventure of the Knight of the Wood is continued, with the sensible, novel, and gentle colloquy that passed between the two squires

Knights and squires had split apart, the latter telling each other their lives and the former their loves; but the history first tells the conversation of the servants and afterward goes on to that of the masters; and so it says that, when they had moved off a little way from them, the squire of the Wood said to Sancho:

“It’s a toilsome life we lead and live, my good sir, those of us who are squires to knights-errant: truly, we eat our bread by the sweat of our brows, and that’s one of the curses God put upon our first parents.”

“You might also say,” added Sancho, “that we eat it in the ice of our bodies; for who suffers more heat and more cold than the wretched squires of knight-errantry? And it wouldn’t be so bad if we got to eat, since sorrows with bread are lighter; but now and then we go a day, or two, without breaking our fast on anything but the wind that blows.”

“All that can be borne and put up with,” said the squire of the Wood, “because of the hope we have of the reward; for unless the knight-errant a squire serves is too unlucky altogether, within a few throws, at least, he’ll find himself rewarded with a fine government of some isle or other, or with a handsome county.”

“I,” replied Sancho, “have already told my master I’ll be content with the government of some isle; and he’s so noble and so generous that he’s promised me one many and various times.”

“I,” said the squire of the Wood, “shall be satisfied for my services with a canonry, and my master has already ordered it for me, and what a canonry!”

“Your grace’s master,” said Sancho, “must be a knight of the churchly sort, and able to grant favors like that to his good squires; but mine is a layman pure and simple, though I remember when some sensible people, ill-meaning ones, to my mind, wanted to advise him to try to become an archbishop; but he would have nothing but to be an emperor, and I was trembling at the time in case he took it into his head to go into the Church, since I didn’t find myself fit to hold benefices in it; because I’ll have your grace know that, though I look like a man, I’m a beast when it comes to being a churchman.”

“Well, truly, your grace is wrong there,” said the squire of the Wood, “seeing that governments of isles aren’t all of good quality. Some are crooked, some poor, some melancholy, and, in short, the most upright and well-ordered of them brings with it a heavy load of cares and discomforts, which the luckless man whose lot it fell to takes on his shoulders. It would be far better for those of us who profess this cursed servitude to retire to our homes and there pass the time in gentler pursuits, hunting, let’s say, or fishing; for what squire is there in the world so poor that he lacks a nag, and a pair of greyhounds, and a fishing rod, to amuse himself with in his village?”

“I don’t lack any of that,” answered Sancho. “True, I haven’t got a nag, but I’ve got a donkey that’s worth twice as much as my master’s horse. May God give me a bad Easter, and let it be the very next one, if I’d trade him for the horse, even if they threw in four fanegas of barley on top. Your grace will take the worth of my gray for a joke, gray being the color of my donkey. As for greyhounds, I wouldn’t lack those, with more than enough of them in my village; and besides, hunting is most enjoyable when it’s done at somebody else’s expense.”

“Really and truly, Señor Squire,” answered the squire of the Wood, “I have proposed and resolved to leave off these drunken follies of these knights, and retire to my village, and bring up my little children, for I have three, like three Oriental pearls.”

“I have two,” said Sancho, “fit to be presented to the Pope in person, especially a girl I’m bringing up to be a countess, God willing, though in spite of her mother.”

“And how old is this lady who is being brought up to be a countess?” asked the squire of the Wood.

“Fifteen, two years more or less,” answered Sancho, “but she’s as tall as a lance, fresh as an April morning, and as strong as a street porter.”

“Those are gifts,” answered the squire of the Wood, “fit not only for a countess but for a nymph of the green wood. Oh, the daughter of a whore, the whore, and what strength the hussy must have!”

To which Sancho answered, somewhat put out:

“She’s no whore, nor was her mother, nor will either of them be, God willing, as long as I live. And speak more politely, for, for someone brought up among knights-errant, who are courtesy itself, those words don’t seem to me very well chosen.”

“Oh, how little your grace understands, Señor Squire,” replied the squire of the Wood, “in the matter of praises! What, don’t you know that when some gentleman gives the bull a good thrust of the lance in the bullring, or when anyone does something well done, the common people usually say: ‘Oh, the son of a whore, the whoreson, how well he did it!’? And what looks like abuse, used in that sense, is notable praise; and you, sir, should disown any sons or daughters who don’t do deeds that earn their parents praises like that.”

“I do disown them,” answered Sancho, “and in that way and for that very reason your grace could throw a whole whorehouse of names at me and my children and my wife, for everything they do and say is a marvel worthy of such praises; and, so that I may see them again, I beg God to get me out of mortal sin, which will be the same as delivering me from this dangerous trade of squire, into which I’ve fallen a second time, baited and tricked by a purse with a hundred ducats that I came across one day deep in the Sierra Morena; and the devil keeps setting before my eyes, here, there, no, not here but over there, a bag full of doubloons, so that I seem to touch it with my hand at every step, and hug it to me, and carry it home, and lend out money on mortgages, and buy myself rents, and live like a prince; and while I’m thinking of this, all the hardships I suffer with this half-wit of a master of mine seem easy and bearable to me, and I know he’s more of a madman than a knight.”

“That’s why,” answered the squire of the Wood, “they say greed bursts the sack; and if we’re going to talk about madmen, there’s none greater in the world than my master, for he’s one of those they speak of when they say: ‘Other people’s worries kill the donkey’; since, so that another knight may recover the wits he has lost, he plays the madman himself and goes looking for something that, once found, may very well hit him in the snout, for all I know.”

“And is he in love, perhaps?”

“Yes,” said the squire of the Wood, “with one Casildea de Vandalia, the most hard-boiled and the most roasted lady to be found in the whole world; but it isn’t on the foot of her hardness that he limps, for other and greater frauds are growling in his belly, and it will all come out before many hours have passed.”

“There’s no road so smooth,” replied Sancho, “that it hasn’t some stumble or gully; in other houses they cook beans, and in mine by the cauldronful; madness must have more companions and hangers-on than good sense. But if what’s commonly said is true, that having companions in hardship is usually a relief in it, I’ll be able to console myself with your grace, since you serve another master as foolish as mine.”

“Foolish, but brave,” answered the squire of the Wood, “and more of a rogue than either foolish or brave.”

“That’s not mine,” answered Sancho. “I mean, he hasn’t a bit of the rogue in him; on the contrary, he has a soul as plain as a pitcher: he doesn’t know how to do harm to anyone, only good to everyone, and he hasn’t an ounce of malice: a child could make him believe it’s night in the middle of the day; and for this simplicity I love him like the strings of my heart, and I can’t bring myself to leave him, no matter what foolishness he gets up to.”

“For all that, brother and sir,” said the squire of the Wood, “when one blind man guides another, the two of them risk falling into the ditch. Better for us to retreat in good order and get back to our own stalls; for those who go looking for adventures don’t always find good ones.”

Sancho kept spitting, it seemed, a certain kind of sticky and rather dry spittle; which, being seen and noticed by the charitable woodland squire, he said:

“It seems to me that, from all this talking, our tongues are sticking to the roofs of our mouths; but I carry an unsticker hanging from my horse’s saddlebow that is as good as they come.”

And, getting up, he came back a little later with a great wineskin and a pie half a yard across; and this is no exaggeration, for it was made of a white rabbit so large that Sancho, on touching it, took it to be of some billy goat, let alone a kid; and seeing this, Sancho said:

“And your grace carries this about with you, sir?”

“Well, what did you think?” answered the other. “Am I by any chance some squire of water and wool? I carry better stores on my horse’s crupper than a general takes with him on the march.”

Sancho ate without waiting to be asked, gulping down in the dark mouthfuls the size of tether knots. And he said:

“Your grace is a true and loyal squire, sound and in working order, magnificent and grand, as this banquet shows, for if it hasn’t come here by art of enchantment, it looks like it, at least; and not like me, miserable and luckless, who carry nothing in my saddlebags but a bit of cheese so hard you could crack a giant’s skull with it, keeping company with four dozen carob beans and as many hazelnuts and walnuts, thanks to my master’s stinginess and the opinion he holds and the rule he keeps that knights-errant must be fed and sustained on nothing but dried fruit and the herbs of the field.”

“On my faith, brother,” replied the squire of the Wood, “I haven’t got the stomach for thistles, or wild pears, or roots from the woods. Let our masters keep their opinions and their chivalric laws, that’s their business, and let them eat what they themselves prescribe. I carry cold meats, and this wineskin hanging from the saddlebow, just in case; and it’s so dear to me, and I love it so, that hardly a moment goes by without my giving it a thousand kisses and a thousand hugs.”

And, saying this, he put it into Sancho’s hands, and Sancho, tilting it up to his mouth, stayed gazing at the stars for a quarter of an hour, and when he had finished drinking let his head drop to one side and, heaving a great sigh, said:

“Oh, the son of a whore, the rascal, how Catholic it is!”

“There, you see,” said the squire of the Wood, on hearing Sancho’s son of a whore, “how you’ve praised this wine by calling it a son of a whore?”

“I say,” answered Sancho, “that I confess I know it’s no dishonor to call anyone a son of a whore, when it falls within the meaning of praising him. But tell me, sir, by the life of what you love best: is this wine from Ciudad Real?”

“What a wine taster!” answered the squire of the Wood. “Truly, it’s from nowhere else, and it has a few years of age on it.”

“You’re telling me!” said Sancho. “Don’t take me for less, as if it were beyond me to recognize it. Isn’t it something, Señor Squire, that I should have so great and so natural an instinct in this matter of knowing wines that, give me any one to smell, and I hit on its homeland, its lineage, its flavor, how long it will keep, and the turns it will take, with every circumstance belonging to wine? But there’s no cause for wonder, since on my father’s side there were in my family the two most excellent wine tasters La Mancha has known in many long years; and as proof of it, here’s what happened to them: ‘The two of them were given wine from a cask to taste and asked their opinion of its state, quality, goodness, or badness. One tasted it with the tip of his tongue; the other did no more than raise it to his nose. The first said the wine tasted of iron; the second said it tasted more of cordovan leather. The owner said the cask was clean and the wine had no seasoning in it from which it could have picked up a taste of iron or of cordovan. For all that, the two famous wine tasters held firm to what they had said. Time passed, the wine was sold, and on cleaning out the cask they found in it a little key hanging from a cordovan thong.’ So your grace can see whether someone who comes of that breed can give his opinion in cases like these.”

“That’s why I say,” said the squire of the Wood, “that we should give up going around looking for adventures; and since we have loaves, let’s not go looking for cakes, and let’s go back to our huts, for God will find us there, if He wants to.”

“Until my master gets to Zaragoza, I’ll serve him; after that, we’ll all understand each other.”

In the end, so much did the two good squires talk and so much did they drink that sleep was obliged to bind their tongues and allay their thirst, for to quench it would have been impossible; and so, both of them clutching the by now nearly empty wineskin, with half-chewed mouthfuls in their mouths, they fell asleep, and there we shall leave them for now, to tell what passed between the Knight of the Wood and the Knight of the Sorry Figure.