Chapter XXXIII. Of the delightful talk the duchess and her damsels had with Sancho Panza, worth reading and noting
The history tells, then, that Sancho did not sleep that siesta, but, to keep his word, came to see the duchess as soon as he had eaten; and she, with the pleasure she took in hearing him, made him sit beside her on a low chair, though Sancho, out of sheer good breeding, did not want to sit; but the duchess told him to sit as a governor and talk as a squire, since on both counts he deserved the very bench of the Cid Ruy Díaz the Campeador.
Sancho shrugged, obeyed, and took his seat, and the duchess’s damsels and duennas, all of them, closed in around her, attentive, in the deepest silence, to hear what he would say; but it was the duchess who spoke first, saying:
“Now that we are alone, and no one here can hear us, I should like the lord governor to resolve certain doubts I have, which arise from the history of the great Don Quixote that is already in print; one of these doubts is that, since the good Sancho never set eyes on Dulcinea, I mean the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, nor carried her Señor Don Quixote’s letter, because it was left behind in the notebook in the Sierra Morena, how did he dare invent the answer, and that business of finding her winnowing wheat, it all being a jest and a lie, and so damaging to the good name of the peerless Dulcinea, and all of it things that do not sit well with the character and faithfulness of good squires?”
To these words, without answering with any of his own, Sancho got up from his chair and, with soft steps, his body bent over and a finger laid on his lips, made the round of the whole room, raising the hangings one by one; and then, this done, he sat down again and said:
“Now, my lady, that I’ve seen nobody is listening to us on the sly, except those present, I’ll answer without fear or alarm what I’ve been asked, and anything else I’m asked; and the first thing I say is that I take my master Don Quixote for a raving madman, though sometimes he says things that, to my mind, and to the mind of everybody who listens to him, are so sensible and run along such a good track that Satan himself couldn’t say them better; but, for all that, truly and without a doubt, it’s settled in my head that he’s a simpleton. Well, since I have this in my noddle, I make bold to have him swallow things without head or tail, like that business of the answer to the letter, and the thing from six or eight days ago, which isn’t in the history yet; that is to say, the enchantment of my lady Doña Dulcinea, for I’ve given him to understand that she’s enchanted, when it’s no more true than the hills of Úbeda.”
The duchess begged him to tell her about that enchantment or jest, and Sancho told it all just as it had happened, from which the listeners got no small pleasure; and, going on with her talk, the duchess said:
“From what the good Sancho has told me, a scruple is skipping about in my soul, and a certain whisper reaches my ears that says to me: ‘Since Don Quixote of La Mancha is mad, witless, and a simpleton, and Sancho Panza his squire knows it, and for all that serves him and follows him and hangs on his empty promises, without any doubt he must be madder and more foolish than his master; and, this being so, as it is, it will be held against you, my lady duchess, if you give this same Sancho Panza an isle to govern, for he who does not know how to govern himself, how will he know how to govern others?’”
“By God, my lady,” said Sancho, “that scruple comes out headfirst, the right way; but tell it, your grace, to speak plainly, or however it likes, for I know it speaks the truth: if I were sensible, I’d have left my master days ago. But this was my lot, and this my bad luck; I can’t help it, I have to follow him: we’re from the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, I love him, he’s grateful, he gave me his donkey colts, and, above all, I’m loyal; and so it’s impossible for anything to part us except the spade and the hoe. And if your high-flyingness doesn’t want me to be given the promised government, God made me out of less, and it might be that not giving it to me would redound to the good of my conscience; for, fool as I am, I understand that proverb that says ‘to her harm the ant grew wings’; and it might even be that Sancho the squire would go to heaven sooner than Sancho the governor. They make as good bread here as in France; and by night all cats are gray; and plenty unlucky is the person who hasn’t had his breakfast by two in the afternoon; and there’s no stomach a span bigger than another, and any of them can be stuffed full, as the saying goes, of straw and of hay; and the little birds of the field have God for their purveyor and steward; and four yards of Cuenca cloth keep you warmer than another four of fine Segovia broadcloth; and when we leave this world and go into the ground, the prince goes by as narrow a path as the day laborer, and the Pope’s body takes up no more feet of earth than the sacristan’s, though the one may be taller than the other; for when we go into the hole we all squeeze ourselves in and shrink, or they make us squeeze in and shrink, whether we like it or not, and good night. And I say again that if your ladyship won’t give me the isle because I’m a fool, I’ll know how to care nothing about it because I’m sensible; and I’ve heard tell that behind the cross stands the devil, and that all that glitters isn’t gold, and that from among the oxen, plows, and yokes they took the farmer Wamba to be king of Spain, and from among the brocades, pastimes, and riches they took Rodrigo to be eaten by snakes, if the verses of the old ballads don’t lie.”
“And what do you mean, don’t lie!” said Doña Rodríguez the duenna at this point, for she was one of the listeners. “For there’s a ballad that says they put King Rodrigo, alive and kicking, into a tomb full of toads, snakes, and lizards, and that two days later the king said from inside the tomb, in a low and doleful voice:
“‘Now they eat me, now they eat me
where the most of sin had been’;
“and, according to this, the gentleman is very right to say he’d rather be a farmer than a king, if vermin are going to eat him.”
The duchess could not keep from laughing at her duenna’s simplicity, nor could she help marveling at Sancho’s words and proverbs, and she said to him:
“The good Sancho knows by now that what a knight once promises he strives to fulfill, though it cost him his life. The duke, my lord and husband, though he is not one of the errant kind, is a knight for all that, and so he will keep his word about the promised isle, whatever the world’s envy and malice may do. Let Sancho take heart, for when he least expects it he will see himself seated on the chair of his isle and of his estate, and will grasp his government, only to trade it in for another of triple-piled brocade. What I charge him with is to take care in governing his vassals, remembering that every one of them is loyal and wellborn.”
“As for governing them well,” answered Sancho, “there’s no need to charge me with that, because I’m charitable by nature and have compassion for the poor; and don’t steal a loaf from the one who bakes and kneads; and by my faith, they won’t slip me a loaded die; I’m an old dog, and I understand every ‘here, boy, here,’ and I know how to wake myself up in good time, and I don’t let cobwebs float before my eyes, for I know where my shoe pinches: I say this because the good will find a hand and a hollow with me, and the bad neither foothold nor way in. And it seems to me that in this business of governments it’s all in the beginning, and it might be that after a fortnight as governor I’d be licking my fingers for the job and know more about it than about the work of the fields, which I was brought up in.”
“You are right, right indeed, Sancho,” said the duchess, “for nobody is born taught, and bishops are made out of men, not out of stones. But, to come back to the talk we were having a little while ago about the enchantment of the lady Dulcinea, I hold it as a certain and more than proven thing that that notion Sancho had of tricking his master and giving him to understand that the peasant girl was Dulcinea, and that if his master did not recognize her it must be because she was enchanted, was all the invention of one of the enchanters who persecute Señor Don Quixote; for really and truly I know on good authority that the peasant girl who gave the leap onto the she-ass was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, and that the good Sancho, thinking he was the deceiver, is the deceived; and there is no more doubting this truth than the things we never saw; and let Señor Sancho Panza know that we too have enchanters here who wish us well and tell us what goes on in the world, purely and simply, without tangles or contrivances; and let Sancho believe me that the leaping peasant girl was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, who is as enchanted as the mother who bore her; and when it is least expected we shall see her in her own form, and then Sancho will come out of the delusion he lives in.”
“All that may well be,” said Sancho Panza, “and now I’m ready to believe what my master tells about the cave of Montesinos, where he says the lady Dulcinea del Toboso appeared to him in the very same dress and clothes I said I’d seen her in when I enchanted her just for my own pleasure; and it must all have been the other way round, as your grace, my lady, says, because from my poor wits nobody can or should suppose I made up so sharp a trick in an instant, nor do I believe my master is so mad that he’d believe a thing so far beyond all bounds on such a thin and skinny argument as mine. But, my lady, it won’t be right for your goodness to take me for ill-meaning because of this, for a dunce like me isn’t obliged to bore into the thoughts and mischief of the wickedest enchanters: I made that up to get out of my master Don Quixote’s scoldings, and not meaning to offend him; and if it’s come out the other way round, God is in heaven, who judges hearts.”
“That is the truth of it,” said the duchess, “but tell me now, Sancho, what is this about the cave of Montesinos? I would like to hear it.”
Then Sancho Panza told her point by point what has been related about that adventure. Hearing which, the duchess said:
“From this event it may be inferred that, since the great Don Quixote says he saw there the same peasant girl Sancho saw on the way out of El Toboso, she is without a doubt Dulcinea, and that the enchanters hereabouts are very busy and excessively curious.”
“That’s what I say,” said Sancho Panza, “that if my lady Dulcinea del Toboso is enchanted, so much the worse for her; for I’m not going to pick a quarrel, not I, with my master’s enemies, who must be many and wicked. True it is that the one I saw was a peasant girl, and I took her for a peasant girl, and I judged her to be that same peasant girl; and if that one was Dulcinea, it isn’t to be put down to my account, nor is it to run against me, or else there’ll be a fight over it. No, but let them come at me at every turn with tell-me-and-I’ll-tell-you, ‘Sancho said it, Sancho did it, Sancho came back and Sancho went back,’ as if Sancho were some nobody, and not the very same Sancho Panza who’s going about in books all over the world by now, as Sansón Carrasco told me, who is, at the very least, a person bacheloried by Salamanca, and people like that can’t lie except when they feel like it or it suits them very well; so there’s no reason for anybody to pick a quarrel with me, and since I have a good name, and, as I heard my master say, a good name is worth more than great riches, just fit me into that government and you’ll see wonders; for whoever has been a good squire will be a good governor.”
“All that the good Sancho has said here,” said the duchess, “are Catonian maxims, or at least drawn from the very bowels of Micael Verino himself, florentibus occidit annis (he died in the flower of his years). In short, in short, to speak in his own fashion, under a bad cloak there is often a good drinker.”
“Truly, my lady,” answered Sancho, “in my life I’ve never drunk out of wickedness; out of thirst it could well be, for I’ve nothing of the hypocrite in me: I drink when I feel like it, and when I don’t feel like it and they give it to me, so as not to seem either finicky or ill-mannered; for when a friend drinks your health, what heart could be so made of marble as not to drink his in return? But though I lace the boots on, I don’t muddy them; all the more since the squires of knights-errant nearly always drink water, because they’re forever going through forests, woods and meadows, mountains and crags, without finding a mercy of a drop of wine, though they’d give an eye for it.”
“I believe it,” answered the duchess. “And for now let Sancho go and rest, for later we shall talk at greater length and give orders for him to go soon and fit himself, as he says, into that government.”
Sancho kissed the duchess’s hands again, and begged her to do him the favor of having good care taken of his gray, because he was the light of his eyes.
“What gray is this?” asked the duchess.
“My ass,” answered Sancho, “for, so as not to call him by that name, I usually call him the gray; and I begged this lady duenna, when I came into this castle, to look after him, and she got as flustered as if I’d told her she was ugly or old, when it ought to be more proper and natural for duennas to feed donkeys than to lend dignity to drawing rooms. Oh, God help me, and how badly a hidalgo of my village got on with these ladies!”
“He must have been some peasant,” said Doña Rodríguez the duenna, “for if he had been a hidalgo and wellborn, he would have set them on the horn of the moon.”
“Come, now,” said the duchess, “let there be no more of this: let Doña Rodríguez be quiet and Señor Panza calm himself, and let the gray’s comfort be left in my charge; for, since he is Sancho’s treasure, I shall put him on the apple of my eye.”
“It’s enough for him to be in the stable,” answered Sancho, “for on the apple of your greatness’s eye neither he nor I are worthy to be for a single moment, and I’d consent to it as soon as I’d stab myself; for though my master says that in courtesies it’s a case of better lose the hand by holding one card too many than one too few, in donkeyish and asinine ones you have to go with the compass in your hand and in measured terms.”
“Let Sancho take him to his government,” said the duchess, “and there he can pamper him as he likes, and even pension him off from work.”
“Don’t think, my lady duchess, that your grace has said anything much,” said Sancho, “for I’ve seen more than two asses go to governments, and if I took mine it wouldn’t be anything new.”
Sancho’s words renewed the duchess’s laughter and delight; and, sending him off to rest, she went to give the duke an account of what had passed with him, and between the two of them they laid out the plan and the orders for playing a jest on Don Quixote that would be famous and would fit the chivalric style; and in that style they played many on him, so apt and so clever that they are the best adventures this great history contains.