Volume I (1605)

CHAPTER XLVII

Regarding the strange manner in which Don Quixote of La Mancha was enchanted, and other notable events

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When Don Quixote saw himself caged in that manner and placed on a cart, he said:

“I have read many extremely serious histories of knights errant, but never have I read, or seen, or heard of enchanted knights being carried in this fashion and at the pace promised by these sluggish and dilatory animals; the knights are always transported through the air with remarkable speed, enclosed in a dark and doleful cloud, or riding a chariot of fire, or mounted on a hippogryph or some other similar beast; but being carried now on an oxcart, by God that leaves me in a state of confusion!264 Perhaps in these our modern times, however, chivalry and enchantments follow a path different from the one they followed in ancient times. It also might be that since I am a new knight in the world, the first to resuscitate the now forgotten practice of errant chivalry, new kinds of enchantments and new ways of transporting the enchanted have also been devised. What do you think, Sancho my son?”

“I don’t know what I think,” responded Sancho, “since I’m not as well-read as your grace in errant writings, but even so, I’d say and even swear that these phantoms wandering around here are not entirely Catholic.”265

“Catholic? By my sainted father!” responded Don Quixote. “How can they be Catholic if they are all demons who have taken on fantastic bodies in order to come here and do this and bring me to this state? And if you wish to see the truth of this, touch them and feel them and you will see that they have no body but are composed of air, and are nothing more than appearance.”

“By God, Señor,” replied Sancho, “I have touched them, and this devil who’s so busy here is stocky and well-fleshed, and has another trait that’s very different from what I’ve heard about demons, because people say all demons stink of sulfur and brimstone and other bad odors, but this one smells of ambergris from half a league away.”

Sancho said this about Don Fernando, who, being so noble, must have smelled just as Sancho said.

“Do not be surprised at this, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote, “because I can tell you that devils know a great deal, and although they bring odors with them, they themselves do not smell at all because they are spirits, and if they do smell, it cannot be of pleasant things, but only of things that are foul and putrid. The reason is that since they, wherever they may be, carry hell with them and cannot find any kind of relief from their torments, and a pleasant odor is something that brings joy and pleasure, it is not possible for them to have an agreeable smell. And so, if it seems to you that the demon you have mentioned smells of ambergris, either you are mistaken or he wants to deceive you by making you think he is not a demon.”

All of these words passed between master and servant; fearing that Sancho would see through their deception, which he had already been very close to doing, Don Fernando and Cardenio decided to make their departure as brief as possible; they called the innkeeper aside and told him to saddle Rocinante and harness Sancho’s donkey, which he did very quickly.

Meanwhile, the priest had reached an arrangement with the officers: they would accompany him to his village, and he would pay them a daily fee. Cardenio hung Don Quixote’s shield on one side of Rocinante’s saddlebow and the basin on the other; he signaled to Sancho to mount his donkey and lead Rocinante by the reins, and on each side of the cart he placed two officers with their flintlocks. But before the cart began to move, the innkeeper’s wife, her daughter, and Maritornes came out to take their leave of Don Quixote, pretending to weep with sorrow at his misfortune, to which Don Quixote said:

“Weepeth not, good ladies, for all such adversities are innate to those who profess what I profess; and if these calamities didst not befall me, I wouldst not deem myself a famous knight errant, for such things ne’er happen to knights of little fame and renown, since there is no one in the world who remembereth them. But they do befall the valiant, for many princes and other knights envieth their virtue and courage, attempting to destroy virtuous knights by wicked means. Despite this, virtue is so powerful that through its own efforts, despite all the necromancy e’er invented by Zoroaster, it shall emerge victorious from every trial and shine its light on the world as the sun shineth down from heaven. Forgive me, beauteous ladies, if I hath offended you inadvertently, for willingly and knowingly I hath never done so to anyone; implore God that He taketh me from this prison where an evil enchanter hath placed me, and if I am freed, I ne’er shall forget the kindnesses you hath shown me in this castle but shall be grateful for them and recognize and repay them according to their merits.”

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While the ladies of the castle conversed with Don Quixote, the priest and barber took their leave of Don Fernando and his companions, and the captain and his brother, and all the contented ladies, especially Dorotea and Luscinda. Everyone embraced and agreed to send one another their news, and Don Fernando told the priest where he should write to inform him of what happened to Don Quixote, assuring him that nothing would make him happier than to know the outcome; he, in turn, would tell the priest everything that might be to his liking, from his marriage and Zoraida’s baptism to Don Luis’s fate and Luscinda’s return home. The priest promised to do as he requested in the most punctual way. They embraced again, and again they exchanged promises.

The innkeeper came up to the priest and gave him some papers, say-ing that he had discovered them in the lining of the case that contained the novel of The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious, and since the owner had not come back for them, the priest could take them all, because he did not know how to read and did not want them. The priest thanked the innkeeper, and opening the papers, he saw that at the beginning of the manuscript it said The Novel of Rinconete and Cortadillo, 266 which led him to assume it was another novel and probably a good one, since The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious had also been good, and they might very well be by the same author, and so he kept it, intending to read it as soon as he was able.

The priest mounted his mule, as did his friend the barber, both of them wearing masks so they would not be recognized by Don Quixote, and they began to ride behind the cart. They rode in this order: first came the cart, led by its owner; at each side rode the officers, as we have said, holding their flintlocks; behind the cart came Sancho Panza on his donkey, leading Rocinante by the reins. Bringing up the rear were the priest and the barber on their large mules, their faces covered, as has been mentioned, and riding with a solemn and sober air, their pace no faster than that allowed by the very slow gait of the oxen. Don Quixote sat in the cage, his hands tied, his legs extended, his back leaning against the bars, and with so much silence and patience that he seemed not a man of flesh and blood, but a statue made of stone.

And so, slowly and silently, they rode some two leagues until they reached a valley that the ox driver thought would be a good place to rest and graze the oxen; he communicated this to the priest, but the barber said they should ride on a little farther because he knew that beyond a nearby rise was a valley that had more abundant and better grass than the one where the driver wanted to stop. They followed the barber’s advice and continued their journey.

Just then the priest turned his head and saw that six or seven well-dressed and well-mounted men were riding behind them, and they soon overtook them, since they were traveling not at the slow and leisurely pace of the oxen, but like men who were riding on canons’ mules and wanted to have their siestas at the inn that could be seen less than a league away. The diligent overtook the slothful, and courteous greetings were exchanged, and one of the newcomers, who was, in fact, a canon from Toledo and the master of those who accompanied him, seeing the orderly procession of the cart, the officers, Sancho, Rocinante, the priest, the barber, and particularly Don Quixote imprisoned in his cage, could not help asking why they were carrying the man in that fashion, although he already knew, seeing the insignia of the officers, that he must be some highway robber or another kind of criminal whose punishment was the responsibility of the Holy Brotherhood. One of the officers, to whom he had directed the question, responded:

“Señor, why this gentleman is being carried this way is something he should say, because we don’t know.”

Don Quixote heard this exchange and said:

“By chance, Señores, are your graces well-versed and expert in matters pertaining to knight errantry? Because if you are, I shall recount to you my misfortunes, and if not, there is no reason for me to weary myself in the telling.”

By this time the priest and the barber, seeing that the travelers were talking to Don Quixote of La Mancha, rode up so that they could respond in a way that would keep their deception from being revealed.

The canon, responding to what Don Quixote had said, replied:

“The truth is, brother, I know more about books of chivalry than I do about Villalpando’s Súmulas. 267 Therefore, if that is your only concern, you can tell me anything you please.”

“May it please God,” replied Don Quixote. “I should like you to know, Señor, that I am in this cage because I have been enchanted through the envy and fraud of evil enchanters, for virtue is persecuted by evildoers more than it is loved by good people. I am a knight errant, not one of those whose names were never remembered by Fame or eternalized in her memory, but one who in spite of envy herself, and in defiance of all the magi of Persia, brahmans of India, and gymnosophists of Ethiopia, will have his name inscribed in the temple of immortality so that it may serve as an example and standard to future times, when knights errant can see the path they must follow if they wish to reach the honorable zenith and pinnacle of the practice of arms.”

“Señor Don Quixote of La Mancha is telling the truth,” said the priest. “He is enchanted, borne in this cart not because of his faults and sins, but on account of the evil intentions of those who are angered by virtue and enraged by valor. This, Señor, is the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, about whom you may have heard, whose valiant deeds and noble feats will be inscribed on everlasting bronze and eternal marble no matter how Envy attempts to hide them or Malice to obscure them.”

When the canon heard both the prisoner and the free man speaking in this fashion, he almost crossed himself in astonishment, unable to imagine what had happened, and everyone with him felt the same astonishment. At this point Sancho Panza, who had approached in order to hear the conversation, wanted to put the finishing touches on everything and said:

“Now, Señores, you may love me or hate me for what I say, but the truth of the matter is that my master, Don Quixote, is as enchanted as my mother; he’s in his right mind, he eats and drinks and does what he has to do like other men, like he did yesterday before they put him in the cage. If this is true, how can you make me believe he’s enchanted? I’ve heard lots of people say that when you’re enchanted you don’t eat, or sleep, or talk, and my master, if he isn’t held back, will talk more than thirty lawyers.”

And turning to look at the priest, he continued, saying:

“Ah Señor Priest, Señor Priest! Did your grace think I didn’t know you? Can you think I don’t understand and guess where these new enchantments are heading? Well, you should know that I recognize you no matter how you cover your face and understand you no matter how you hide your lies. In short, where envy rules, virtue cannot survive, and generosity cannot live with miserliness. Devil confound it, if it wasn’t for your reverence, my master would be married by now to Princess Micomicona and I’d be a count at least, because I expected nothing less from the goodness of my master, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, and from the greatness of my services! But now I see that what they say is true: the wheel of fortune turns faster than a water wheel, and those who only yesterday were on top of the world today are down on the ground. I grieve for my children and my wife, for when they could and should have expected to see their father come through the door as a governor or viceroy of some ínsula or kingdom, they’ll see him come in a stableboy. I’ve said all this, Señor Priest, just to urge your fathership to take into account the bad treatment my master is receiving, and to be careful that God doesn’t demand an accounting from you in the next life for my master’s imprisonment, and make you responsible for all the boons and mercies my master, Don Quixote, can’t do while he’s in the cage.”

“I can’t believe it!” said the barber. “You, too, Sancho? In the same guild as your master? By God, you’ve taken in so much of his lunacy and knighthood, it looks like you’ll be keeping him company in the cage and be as enchanted as he is! It was an unlucky day for you when he made you pregnant with his promises, an evil hour when you got that ínsula you want so much into your head.”

“I’m not pregnant by anybody,” responded Sancho, “and I’m not a man who’d let himself get pregnant even by the king, and though I’m poor I’m an Old Christian, and I don’t owe anything to anybody, and if I want ínsulas, other people want things that are worse; each man is the child of his actions, and because I’m a man I could be a pope, let alone the governor of an ínsula, especially since my master could win so many he might not have enough people to give them to. Your grace should be careful what you say, Señor Barber, because there’s more to life than trimming beards, and there’s some difference between one Pedro and the other. I say this because we all know one another, and you can’t throw crooked dice with me. As for the enchantment of my master, only God knows the truth, and let’s leave it at that, because things get worse when you stir them.”

The barber did not want to answer Sancho in case his simplicities uncovered what he and the priest had tried so hard to conceal; because of this same fear, the priest asked the canon to ride ahead with him, and he would explain the mystery of the caged man and tell him other things that he would find amusing. The canon did so, and moving ahead with his servants and with the priest, he listened attentively to everything the priest wished to tell him regarding the condition, life, madness, and customs of Don Quixote, which was a brief account of the origin and cause of his delusions and the series of events that had brought him to that cage, and the scheme they had devised to bring him home to see if they somehow could find a cure for his madness. The canon and his servants were astonished a second time when they heard Don Quixote’s remarkable story, and when it was ended, the canon said:

“Truly, Señor Priest, it seems to me that the books called novels of chivalry are prejudicial to the nation, and though I, moved by a false and idle taste, have read the beginning of almost every one that has ever been published, I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another. In my opinion, this kind of writing and composition belongs to the genre called Milesian tales,268 which are foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time. Although the principal aim of these books is to delight, I do not know how they can, being so full of so many excessively foolish elements; for delight conceived in the soul must arise from the beauty and harmony it sees or contemplates in the things that the eyes or the imagination place before it, and nothing that possesses ugliness and disorder can please us. What beauty, what proportion between parts and the whole, or the whole and its parts, can there be in a book or tale in which a boy of sixteen, with one thrust of his sword, fells a giant as big as a tower and splits him in two as if he were marzipan, and, when a battle is depicted, after saying that there are more than a million combatants on the side of the enemy, if the hero of the book fights them, whether we like it or not, of necessity we must believe that this knight achieves victory only through the valor of his mighty arm? What shall we say of the ease with which a hereditary queen or empress falls into the arms of an errant and unknown knight? What mind, unless it is completely barbaric or untutored, can be pleased to read that a great tower filled with knights sails the seas like a ship before a favorable wind, and is in Lombardy at nightfall, and by dawn the next day it is in the lands of Prester John of the Indies, or in others never described by Ptolemy or seen by Marco Polo? If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing. I have seen no book of chivalry that creates a complete tale, a body with all its members intact, so that the middle corresponds to the beginning, and the end to the beginning and the middle; instead, they are composed with so many members that the intention seems to be to shape a chimera or a monster rather than to create a well-proportioned figure. Furthermore, the style is fatiguing, the action incredible, the love lascivious, the courtesies clumsy, the battles long, the language foolish, the journeys nonsensical, and, finally, since they are totally lacking in intelligent artifice, they deserve to be banished, like unproductive people, from Christian nations.”

The priest listened with great attention, and thought the canon a man of fine understanding who was correct in everything he said, and so he told him that since he held the same opinion, and felt a good deal of animosity toward books of chivalry, he had burned all of Don Quixote’s, of which there were many. He recounted the examination he had made of them, those he had condemned to the flames and those he had saved, and at this the canon laughed more than a little and said that despite all the bad things he had said about those books, he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, describing shipwrecks, storms, skirmishes, and battles; depicting a valiant captain with all the traits needed to be one, showing him to be a wise predictor of his enemy’s clever moves, an eloquent orator in persuading or dissuading his soldiers, mature in counsel, unhesitating in resolve, as valiant in waiting as in the attack; portraying a tragic, lamentable incident or a joyful, unexpected event, a most beautiful lady who is virtuous, discreet, and modest or a Christian knight who is courageous and kind, an insolent barbarian braggart or a prince who is courteous, valiant, and astute; and representing the goodness and loyalty of vassals and the greatness and generosity of lords. The writer can show his conversance with astrology, his excellence as a cosmographer, his knowledge of music, his intelligence in matters of state, and perhaps he will have the opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a necromancer, if he should wish to. He can display the guile of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon,269 the friendship of Euryalus,270 the liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency and truthfulness of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus,271 the prudence of Cato, in short, all of those characteristics that make a noble man perfect, sometimes placing them all in one individual, sometimes dividing them among several.

“And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as in verse.”

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