Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [reading well .txt] 📗

taken aback by such a message, and turning to Señor Montesinos I asked him, ‘Is it possible, Señor Montesinos, that persons of distinction under enchantment can be in need?’ To which he replied, ‘Believe me, Señor Don Quixote, that which is called need is to be met with everywhere, and penetrates all quarters and reaches everyone, and does not spare even the enchanted; and as the lady Dulcinea del Toboso sends to beg those six reals, and the pledge is to all appearance a good one, there is nothing for it but to give them to her, for no doubt she must be in some great strait.’ ‘I will take no pledge of her,’ I replied, ‘nor yet can I give her what she asks, for all I have is four reals;’ which I gave (they were those which thou, Sancho, gavest me the other day to bestow in alms upon the poor I met along the road), and I said, ‘Tell your mistress, my dear, that I am grieved to the heart because of her distresses, and wish I was a Fucar648 to remedy them, and that I would have her know that I cannot be, and ought not be, in health while deprived of the happiness of seeing her and enjoying her discreet conversation, and that I implore her as earnestly as I can, to allow herself to be seen and addressed by this her captive servant and forlorn knight. Tell her, too, that when she least expects it she will hear it announced that I have made an oath and vow after the fashion of that which the Marquis of Mantua made to avenge his nephew Baldwin, when he found him at the point of death in the heart of the mountains,649 which was, not to eat bread off a tablecloth, and other trifling matters which he added, until he had avenged him; and I will make the same to take no rest, and to roam the seven regions of the earth more thoroughly than the Infante Don Pedro of Portugal ever roamed them,650 until I have disenchanted her.’ ‘All that and more, you owe my lady,’ the damsel’s answer to me, and taking the four reals, instead of making me a curtsey she cut a caper, springing two full yards into the air.”

“O blessed God!” exclaimed Sancho aloud at this, “is it possible that such things can be in the world, and that enchanters and enchantments can have such power in it as to have changed my master’s right senses into a craze so full of absurdity! O señor, señor, for God’s sake, consider yourself, have a care for your honour, and give no credit to this silly stuff that has left you scant and short of wits.”

“Thou talkest in this way because thou lovest me, Sancho,” said Don Quixote; “and not being experienced in the things of the world, everything that has some difficulty about it seems to thee impossible; but time will pass, as I said before, and I will tell thee some of the things I saw down there which will make thee believe what I have related now, the truth of which admits of neither reply nor question.”

XXIV

Wherein are related a thousand trifling matters, as trivial as they are necessary to the right understanding of this great history.

He who translated this great history from the original written by its first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, says that on coming to the chapter giving the adventures of the cave of Montesinos he found written on the margin of it, in Hamete’s own hand, these exact words:

“I cannot convince or persuade myself that everything that is written in the preceding chapter could have precisely happened to the valiant Don Quixote; and for this reason, that all the adventures that have occurred up to the present have been possible and probable; but as for this one of the cave, I see no way of accepting it as true, as it passes all reasonable bounds. For me to believe that Don Quixote could lie, he being the most truthful gentleman and the noblest knight of his time, is impossible; he would not have told a lie though he were shot to death with arrows. On the other hand, I reflect that he related and told the story with all the circumstances detailed, and that he could not in so short a space have fabricated such a vast complication of absurdities; if, then, this adventure seems apocryphal, it is no fault of mine; and so, without affirming its falsehood or its truth, I write it down. Decide for thyself in thy wisdom, reader; for I am not bound, nor is it in my power, to do more; though certain it is they say that at the time of his death he retracted, and said he had invented it, thinking it matched and tallied with the adventures he had read of in his histories.” And then he goes on to say:

The cousin was amazed as well at Sancho’s boldness as at the patience of his master, and concluded that the good temper the latter displayed arose from the happiness he felt at having seen his lady Dulcinea, even enchanted as she was; because otherwise the words and language Sancho had addressed to him deserved a thrashing; for indeed he seemed to him to have been rather impudent to his master, to whom he now observed, “I, Señor Don Quixote of La Mancha, look upon the time I have spent in travelling with your worship as very well employed, for I have gained four things in the course of it; the first is that I have made your acquaintance, which I consider great good fortune; the second, that I have learned what the cave of Montesinos contains, together with the transformations of Guadiana and of the lakes of Ruidera; which will be of use to me