Chapter LXV. In which is made known who the Knight of the White Moon was, with the freeing of Don Gregorio, and other events

Don Antonio Moreno followed the Knight of the White Moon, and a crowd of boys followed him too, and even hounded him, until they had shut him up in a tavern inside the city. Don Antonio went in, eager to make his acquaintance; a squire came out to receive him and take off his armor; he shut himself up in a room on the ground floor, and Don Antonio with him, whose bread would not bake until he knew who he was. The Knight of the White Moon, then, seeing that this gentleman would not leave him, said to him:

“I know well, sir, what you have come for, which is to learn who I am; and, since there is no reason to deny it to you, while this servant of mine takes off my armor I will tell you, without straying one point from the truth of the matter. You should know, sir, that I am called the bachelor Sansón Carrasco; I am from the same village as Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose madness and folly move all of us who know him to pity him, and among those who have pitied him most I have been one; and, believing that his health lies in his rest and in his staying in his own country and his own house, I devised a plan to keep him there; and so, some three months ago, I went out to meet him on the road as a knight-errant, calling myself the Knight of the Mirrors, with the intention of fighting with him and vanquishing him without doing him harm, making it a condition of our fight that the vanquished should be at the discretion of the victor; and what I meant to ask of him, for I already counted him vanquished, was that he go back to his village and not leave it for a whole year, in which time he might be cured; but fortune ordained it otherwise, because he vanquished me and threw me from my horse, and so my plan came to nothing: he went on his way, and I went back, vanquished, shamed, and bruised from the fall, which was exceedingly dangerous; but that did not take away my wish to go and look for him again and vanquish him, as has been seen today. And since he is so punctilious in keeping the laws of knight-errantry, he will without any doubt keep the one I have laid on him, in fulfillment of his word. This, sir, is how matters stand, and I have nothing else whatever to tell you; I beg you not to give me away or tell Don Quixote who I am, so that my good intentions may take effect and a man who has a very fine mind may get it back again, if only the follies of chivalry will let him.”

“Oh, sir,” said Don Antonio, “may God forgive you for wronging all the world by trying to make sane the most amusing madman there is in it! Do you not see, sir, that the profit Don Quixote’s sanity might bring can never come up to the pleasure he gives with his ravings? But I imagine that all the bachelor’s ingenuity will not be enough to make sane a man so utterly mad; and if it were not against charity, I would say may Don Quixote never be cured, because with his recovery we lose not only his drolleries but those of Sancho Panza, his squire, any one of which could make melancholy itself merry again. For all that, I will hold my tongue and tell him nothing, to see whether I prove right in suspecting that the pains Señor Carrasco has taken will come to nothing.”

He answered that, be that as it may, the business was now well on its way, and he hoped for a happy outcome from it. And when Don Antonio had offered to do whatever else he might bid him, he took his leave of him; and, having his armor tied onto a mule, then and there, on the horse on which he had gone into battle, he rode out of the city that same day and went back to his own country, without anything befalling him that obliges us to tell it in this true history.

Don Antonio told the viceroy all that Carrasco had told him, which gave the viceroy no great pleasure, because with Don Quixote shut away the pleasure was lost that all those who knew of his follies might have had.

Six days Don Quixote lay in bed, dejected, sad, brooding, and in a bad humor, his imagination going back and forth over the unhappy event of his defeat. Sancho comforted him, and, among other things, said to him:

“My master, let your grace hold up your head and cheer up, if you can, and give thanks to heaven that, though you were thrown to the ground, you didn’t come out of it with a broken rib; and since you know that where they give, they also take, and that there isn’t always bacon where there are pegs, give the doctor a fig, for you don’t need him to cure you of this illness: let’s go back home and give up going about looking for adventures in lands and places we don’t know; and, if you think it over, I’m the one who’s lost most here, though it’s your grace who’s come off worst. I, who gave up wanting to be a governor any more along with the government, didn’t give up my longing to be a count, which will never come to pass if your grace gives up being a king by giving up the exercise of your chivalry; and so my hopes come to go up in smoke.”

“Be quiet, Sancho, since you see that my seclusion and retirement is not to go beyond a year; for after that I shall go back to my honorable exercises, and I shall not lack a kingdom to win and some county to give you.”

“May God hear it and sin be deaf,” said Sancho, “for I’ve always heard it said that good hope is worth more than a poor possession.”

They were at this when Don Antonio came in, saying with signs of the greatest happiness:

“A reward for good tidings, Señor Don Quixote, for Don Gregorio and the renegade who went for him are on the beach! What am I saying, on the beach? He is already at the viceroy’s house, and will be here this moment.”

Don Quixote cheered up a little and said:

“In truth I am inclined to say that I would have been glad if it had all turned out the other way round, because it would have obliged me to cross over to Barbary, where by the might of my arm I would have given freedom not only to Don Gregorio but to every Christian captive there is in Barbary. But what am I saying, wretch that I am? Am I not the vanquished one? Am I not the one overthrown? Am I not the one who may not take up arms for a year? Then what am I promising? What am I boasting of, if the distaff suits me better now than the sword?”

“Leave that alone, sir,” said Sancho. “Let the hen live, even with the pip, for today it’s you and tomorrow it’s me; and in these matters of clashes and knocks there’s no taking their measure, for the one who falls today can get up tomorrow, unless he wants to stay in bed; I mean, unless he lets himself lose heart and doesn’t gather new spirit for new quarrels. And let your grace get up now to receive Don Gregorio, for it seems to me the people are in an uproar, and he must be in the house already.”

And so it was in truth; because Don Gregorio and the renegade had already given the viceroy an account of their going and coming, and Don Gregorio, eager to see Ana Félix, came with the renegade to Don Antonio’s house; and though Don Gregorio, when they got him out of Algiers, had been in woman’s dress, in the boat he had exchanged it for that of a captive who had escaped with him; but in whatever dress he had come, he would have shown himself a person to be desired, served, and esteemed, because he was exceedingly handsome, and his age, by the look of him, seventeen or eighteen. Ricote and his daughter came out to receive him: the father with tears and the daughter with modesty. They did not embrace each other, because where there is much love there is not apt to be too much boldness. The two beauties of Don Gregorio and Ana Félix together amazed every one of those present. It was silence that spoke there for the two lovers, and their eyes were the tongues that revealed their happy and modest thoughts.

The renegade told of the scheme and the means he had used to get Don Gregorio out; Don Gregorio told of the dangers and straits he had been in among the women with whom he had been left, not in a long discourse but in brief words, in which he showed that his good sense ran ahead of his years. Finally, Ricote paid and rewarded generously both the renegade and those who had pulled at the oars. The renegade was reincorporated and reconciled with the Church, and from a rotten limb he became clean and sound again through penance and repentance.

Two days later the viceroy discussed with Don Antonio what way they might find for Ana Félix and her father to stay in Spain, since it seemed to them there could be no harm at all in so Christian a daughter and a father so well intentioned, by all appearances, remaining in it. Don Antonio offered to go to the court to negotiate it, since he had to go there in any case on other business, giving them to understand that there, by means of favor and gifts, many difficult things are brought off.

“It is no use,” said Ricote, who was present at this conversation, “hoping for favors or gifts, because with the great Don Bernardino de Velasco, Count of Salazar, to whom His Majesty gave charge of our expulsion, pleas are of no avail, nor promises, nor gifts, nor pity; because, though it is true that he mixes mercy with justice, as he sees that the whole body of our nation is tainted and rotten, he uses on it the cautery that burns rather than the ointment that soothes; and so, with prudence, with shrewdness, with diligence, and with the fears he instills, he has carried on his strong shoulders the burden of this great undertaking to its due execution, without our schemes, stratagems, entreaties, and frauds being able to dazzle his Argus eyes, which he keeps ever on the alert, so that not one of our people may stay behind or be hidden from him, who, like a hidden root, might in time come to sprout later and bear poisonous fruit in Spain, now clean, now rid of the fears in which our numbers held her. A heroic resolve of the great Philip the Third, and unheard-of prudence in having entrusted it to this Don Bernardino de Velasco!”

“Be that as it may, once I am there I will make every effort possible, and let heaven do as it pleases best,” said Don Antonio. “Don Gregorio will go with me to comfort the grief his parents must be feeling at his absence; Ana Félix will stay with my wife in my house, or in a convent, and I know the lord viceroy will be pleased to have the good Ricote stay in his until he sees how I fare in my dealings.”

The viceroy agreed to everything that had been proposed, but Don Gregorio, learning what was going on, said that he neither could nor would leave Doña Ana Félix on any account; but, intending to see his parents and to find a way of coming back for her, he fell in with the arrangement decided upon. Ana Félix stayed with Don Antonio’s wife, and Ricote at the viceroy’s house.

The day came for Don Antonio’s departure, and for that of Don Quixote and Sancho, which was two days later still; for his fall did not allow him to set out any sooner. There were tears, there were sighs, swoons, and sobs when Don Gregorio took his leave of Ana Félix. Ricote offered Don Gregorio a thousand escudos, if he wanted them; but he took none, except only five that Don Antonio lent him, promising to repay them at court. With this the two of them set out, and Don Quixote and Sancho afterward, as has been said: Don Quixote unarmed and in traveling clothes, Sancho on foot, because the gray was loaded with the armor.