Chapter LIV. Which deals with things that concern this history, and no other

The duke and duchess resolved that the challenge Don Quixote had made to their vassal, for the reason already told, should go forward; and since the young man was in Flanders, where he had fled so as not to have Doña Rodríguez for a mother-in-law, they arranged to put in his place a Gascon lackey named Tosilos, first coaching him very thoroughly in everything he was to do.

Two days later the duke told Don Quixote that in four days’ time his opponent would come and present himself in the field, armed as a knight, and would maintain that the damsel lied through half her beard, and even through the whole of it, if she claimed that he had given her his word of marriage. Don Quixote was greatly pleased by such news, and promised himself to work wonders in the matter, and counted it great good fortune that an occasion had offered itself in which those lords might see how far the valor of his mighty arm extended; and so, with glee and contentment, he waited out the four days, which, by the reckoning of his desire, were turning into four hundred centuries.

Let us let them pass, as we let other things pass, and go and keep company with Sancho, who, between glad and sad, was coming along on the gray in search of his master, whose company pleased him more than being governor of all the isles in the world.

It happened, then, that before he had gone very far from the isle of his government—for he never set himself to find out whether what he governed was an isle, a city, a town, or a village—he saw coming along the road he was traveling six pilgrims with their staffs, of those foreigners who beg alms by singing, who, when they reached him, drew up in a line and, raising their voices all together, began to sing in their own tongue something Sancho could not understand, except for one word they pronounced clearly, limosna, from which he understood that it was alms they were asking for in their song; and since he, as Cide Hamete says, was exceedingly charitable, he took out of his saddlebags half a loaf and half a cheese, with which he had come provided, and gave it to them, making signs to them that this was all he had to give. They took it very willingly, and said:

“Guelte! Guelte!”

“I don’t understand,” answered Sancho, “what it is you’re asking me for, good people.”

Then one of them took a purse out of his bosom and showed it to Sancho, from which he understood that they were asking him for money; and he, putting his thumb to his throat and stretching his hand upward, gave them to understand that he had not a scrap of coin, and, spurring the gray, broke through them; and as he passed, one of them, who had been looking at him very closely, rushed at him, throwing his arms around his waist, and in a loud voice and very Castilian, said:

“God help me! What is this I see? Can it be that these arms of mine are holding my dear friend, my good neighbor Sancho Panza? Yes, I do, no doubt of it, because I’m neither asleep nor drunk just now.”

Sancho was amazed to hear himself called by his name and to find himself embraced by the foreign pilgrim, and, after looking at him for a while very closely without saying a word, he still could not recognize him; but the pilgrim, seeing his bewilderment, said to him:

“What, and is it possible, brother Sancho Panza, that you don’t know your neighbor Ricote the Morisco, the shopkeeper of your village?”

Then Sancho looked at him more closely and began to make out his features, and at last came to know him entirely, and without getting off his donkey he threw his arms around his neck and said to him:

“Who the devil would know you, Ricote, in that mummer’s getup you’re wearing? Tell me: who’s made a Frenchy of you, and how do you have the nerve to come back to Spain, where if they catch you and know you you’ll have mighty bad luck?”

“If you don’t give me away, Sancho,” answered the pilgrim, “I’m sure that in this getup there’ll be nobody who knows me; and let’s get off the road into that poplar grove you can see over there, where my companions want to eat and rest, and you’ll eat with them there, for they’re very easygoing people. I’ll have time to tell you what’s happened to me since I left our village, to obey His Majesty’s edict, which threatened the unfortunates of my nation with such severity, as you heard.”

Sancho did so, and, Ricote speaking to the other pilgrims, they went aside to the poplar grove that could be seen, well away from the highway. They threw down their staffs, took off their short capes or pilgrims’ cloaks, and were left in their doublets, and they were all young and very fine-looking men, except Ricote, who was already a man well on in years. They all carried saddlebags, and all of these, as it turned out, came well provided, at least with things that provoke thirst and call it up from two leagues off.

They stretched out on the ground, and, making tablecloths of the grass, they laid on it bread, salt, knives, walnuts, slices of cheese, and bare ham bones that, if they would not let themselves be chewed, did not refuse to be sucked. They also set out a black food that they say is called caviar, and is made of fish eggs, a great awakener of the wineskins. There was no lack of olives, dry, it is true, and without any dressing, but tasty and good for whiling away the time. But what made the bravest show on the field of that banquet were six wineskins, for each of them took his own out of his saddlebags; even the good Ricote, who had turned himself from a Morisco into a German, or a Teuton, took out his, which in size could compete with the other five.

They began to eat with the greatest relish and very slowly, savoring every mouthful, which they took up on the point of the knife, and only a very little of each thing, and then, all at once, all together, they raised their arms and their wineskins into the air; with their mouths set to the skins’ mouths and their eyes nailed on the sky, it seemed nothing less than that they were taking aim at it; and in this way, wagging their heads from side to side, signs that vouched for the pleasure they were getting, they kept at it a good while, decanting the innards of the vessels into their stomachs.

Sancho watched it all, and was grieved by none of it; rather, to comply with the proverb, which he knew very well, of “when you go to Rome, do as you see done,” he asked Ricote for the wineskin, and took his aim like the rest, and with no less relish than they.

Four times the wineskins allowed themselves to be tipped up; but the fifth was not possible, because by then they were drier and more shriveled than esparto grass, a thing that withered the merriment they had shown until then. Every so often one of them would join his right hand with Sancho’s and say:

“Español y tudesqui, tuto uno: bon compaño” (Spaniard and German, all one: a boon companion).

And Sancho would answer: Bon compaño, jura Di! (boon companion, by God!)

And he would burst into a laugh that lasted him an hour, without remembering at the time anything of what had happened to him in his government; for over the time and the while when one eats and drinks, cares are apt to have little jurisdiction. At last, the wine’s running out was the beginning of a sleep that came over them all, and they dropped off on their very tables and tablecloths; only Ricote and Sancho stayed awake, because they had done more eating than drinking; and Ricote, taking Sancho off to one side, they sat down at the foot of a beech tree, leaving the pilgrims buried in sweet sleep; and Ricote, without stumbling once into his Morisco tongue, spoke the following words to him in pure Castilian:

“You know well, O Sancho Panza, my neighbor and friend, how the proclamation and edict His Majesty ordered published against those of my nation struck terror and dread into all of us; in me, at least, it struck them in such a way that it seems to me that, before the time granted us for taking ourselves out of Spain, I already had the full rigor of the penalty carried out on my person and on my children’s. I arranged, then, prudently as it seemed to me, just like a man who knows that by a certain time they will take from him the house he lives in, and provides himself with another to move to; I arranged, I say, to leave my village alone, without my family, and go and look for a place to take them in comfort and without the haste in which the others left; because I saw clearly, and all our elders saw, that those proclamations were not mere threats, as some said, but true laws, which were to be put into execution at their appointed time; and I was forced to believe this truth by knowing the vile and reckless designs our people had, and such that it seems to me it was divine inspiration that moved His Majesty to put into effect so gallant a resolution, not because we were all guilty, for some were firm and true Christians; but they were so few that they could not stand against those who were not, and it was not well to rear the serpent in one’s bosom, keeping enemies inside the house. In short, with just reason we were punished with the penalty of exile, mild and gentle in the opinion of some, but in ours the most terrible that could be given us. Wherever we may be, it is for Spain that we weep, for, when all is said, we were born in it and it is our natural homeland; nowhere do we find the welcome our misfortune longs for, and in Barbary, and in all the parts of Africa, where we hoped to be received, welcomed, and made much of, that is where they offend and mistreat us most. We did not know our blessing until we lost it; and so great is the longing nearly all of us have to return to Spain that most of those, and they are many, who know the language as I do come back to it, and leave their wives and children there forsaken: so great is the love they bear it; and now I know and feel by experience what people are wont to say: that sweet is the love of one’s homeland. I left our village, as I say, and went into France, and though they gave us a good welcome there, I wanted to see everything. I went on to Italy and reached Germany, and there it seemed to me one could live with more freedom, because its inhabitants do not look into many niceties: each one lives as he pleases, because in most of it people live with freedom of conscience. I left a house rented in a village near Augsburg; I joined these pilgrims, many of whom are in the habit of coming to Spain every year to visit its shrines, which they look on as their Indies, and as a most certain trade and known profit. They travel over nearly the whole of it, and there is no village they do not leave fed and watered, as the saying goes, and with a real, at least, in money, and at the end of their journey they come away with more than a hundred escudos to spare, which, changed into gold, either in the hollow of their staffs or among the patches of their cloaks, or by whatever cunning they can, they take out of the kingdom and get across to their own lands, in spite of the guards at the posts and ports where they are searched. Now, Sancho, my intention is to take out the treasure I left buried, which, since it is outside the village, I shall be able to do without danger, and to write to, or cross over from Valencia to, my daughter and my wife, who I know is in Algiers, and find a way to bring them to some port in France, and from there take them to Germany, where we will wait for whatever God may please to do with us; for, in short, Sancho, I know for certain that my daughter the Ricota and my wife Francisca Ricota are Catholic Christians, and though I am less of one, still I have more of the Christian than of the Moor, and I always pray God to open the eyes of my understanding and make known to me how I am to serve him. And what has me amazed is not knowing why my wife and daughter went to Barbary rather than to France, where she could live as a Christian.”

To which Sancho answered:

“Look, Ricote, that can’t have been in their hands, because Juan Tiopieyo, your wife’s brother, took them; and since he must be a thoroughgoing Moor, he went where things were best set up; and I can tell you something else: I think you’re going in vain to look for what you left shut away; because we had news that they took a lot of pearls and a lot of money in gold from your brother-in-law and your wife, which they were carrying undeclared.”

“That may well be,” replied Ricote, “but I know, Sancho, that they didn’t touch my hoard, because I didn’t reveal to them where it was, for fear of some mishap; and so, Sancho, if you’ll come with me and help me dig it up and hide it, I’ll give you two hundred escudos, with which you can relieve your needs, for you know that I know you have plenty of them.”

“I would do it,” answered Sancho, “but I’m not a bit greedy; for if I were, I let an office slip out of my hands this morning in which I could have made the walls of my house of gold and been eating off silver plates within six months; and so, for this reason as well as because it seems to me I’d be betraying my king by giving aid to his enemies, I wouldn’t go with you, even if, instead of the two hundred escudos you promise me, you gave me four hundred cash down right here.”

“And what office is it you’ve given up, Sancho?” asked Ricote.

“I’ve given up being governor of an isle,” answered Sancho, “and such an isle that, on my faith, they won’t find another like it in a hurry.”

“And where is this isle?” asked Ricote.

“Where?” answered Sancho. “Two leagues from here, and it’s called the isle of Barataria.”

“Hush, Sancho,” said Ricote, “for isles are out there in the sea; there are no isles on the mainland.”

“Why not?” replied Sancho. “I tell you, Ricote my friend, that I left it this morning, and yesterday I was in it governing at my pleasure, like a Sagittarius; but for all that, I’ve left it, because the governor’s trade seemed a dangerous one to me.”

“And what have you gained by the government?” asked Ricote.

“I’ve gained,” answered Sancho, “the knowledge that I’m no good for governing, unless it’s a herd of cattle, and that the riches that are gained in such governments are gained at the cost of losing rest and sleep, and even food; because on isles governors must eat little, especially if they have doctors looking after their health.”

“I don’t understand you, Sancho,” said Ricote, “but it seems to me that everything you say is nonsense; for who would give you isles to govern? Were there no men in the world better fitted to be governors than you are? Hush, Sancho, and come to your senses, and see whether you’ll come with me, as I’ve told you, to help me dig up the treasure I left hidden; for truly it’s so great that it can be called a treasure, and I’ll give you enough to live on, as I’ve told you.”

“I’ve already told you, Ricote,” replied Sancho, “that I won’t; be content that you won’t be given away by me, and go on your way and good luck to you, and let me go on mine; for I know that the well-gotten is lost, and the ill-gotten, both it and its owner.”

“I won’t press it, Sancho,” said Ricote, “but tell me: were you in our village when my wife, my daughter, and my brother-in-law left it?”

“Yes, I was,” answered Sancho, “and I can tell you your daughter came out looking so lovely that everyone in the village came out to see her, and all of them said she was the most beautiful creature in the world. She went weeping and embracing all her friends and acquaintances, and all who came up to see her, and she asked them all to commend her to God and to Our Lady his mother; and this with so much feeling that it made me weep, and I’m not much given to weeping. And on my faith, many had a mind to hide her and go out and take her from them on the road; but the fear of going against the king’s order held them back. The one who showed himself most stricken was Don Pedro Gregorio, that rich young heir to an entailed estate whom you know, who they say loved her dearly, and since she left he has never been seen again in our village, and we all think he went after her to carry her off; but so far nothing has been heard.”

“I always had an uneasy suspicion,” said Ricote, “that that gentleman was sweet on my daughter; but, trusting in my Ricota’s virtue, it never troubled me to know that he loved her; for you’ll have heard it said, Sancho, that Morisco women seldom or never mixed in love with Old Christians, and my daughter, who, as far as I believe, cared more about being a Christian than about being in love, would pay no heed to the courting of that young heir.”

“God grant it,” replied Sancho, “for it would go ill with them both. And let me leave here, Ricote my friend, for I want to get tonight to where my master Don Quixote is.”

“God go with you, brother Sancho, for my companions are already stirring, and it’s time for us too to go on our way.”

And then the two embraced, and Sancho mounted his gray, and Ricote leaned on his staff, and they parted.