Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [158]
“That’s what I would have done,” responded Sancho, “if I hadn’t memorized it when your grace read it to me, and so I told it to a sacristan, and he transcribed it point for point from my memory, and he said that though he’d read many letters of excommunication, in all his days he’d never seen or read a letter as nice as that one.”
“And do you still have it in your memory, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.
“No, Señor,” responded Sancho, “because after I told it to him, and had no more use for it, I set about forgetting it; if I do remember anything, it’s that part about sullied, I mean sovereign lady, and the last part: Thine until death, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. And between these two things, I put in more than three hundred souls, and lives, and eyes of mine.”
CHAPTER XXXI
Regarding the delectable words that passed between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his squire, as well as other events
“All this does not displease me; go on,” said Don Quixote. “When you arrived, what was that queen of beauty doing? Surely you found her stringing pearls, or embroidering some heraldic device in gold thread for this her captive knight.”
“I didn’t find her doing anything,” responded Sancho, “except winnowing two fanegas1 of wheat in a corral of her house.”
“Well, you may be sure,” said Don Quixote, “that, touched by her hands, the grains of wheat were pearls. And did you notice, my friend, if it was white wheat or ordinary spring wheat?”
“It was just buckwheat,” responded Sancho.
“Well, I assure you,” said Don Quixote, “that winnowed by her hands, it undoubtedly made the finest white bread. But go on: when you gave her my letter, did she kiss it? Did she place it on her head?2 Did she engage in some ceremony worthy of such a letter? What did she do?”
“When I was about to give it to her,” responded Sancho, “she was in the middle of shaking a good part of the wheat that she had in the sieve, and she said to me: ‘Friend, put the letter on that sack; I can’t read it until I finish sifting everything I have here.’”
“A wise lady!” said Don Quixote. “That must have been so that she could read it slowly and savor it. Go on, Sancho. And while she was engaged in her task, what discourse did she have with you? What did she ask about me? And you, what did you respond? Come, tell me everything; do not leave even a half-note in the inkwell.”
“She didn’t ask me anything,” said Sancho. “But I told her how your grace, to serve her, was doing penance, naked from the waist up, here in this sierra like a savage, sleeping on the ground, not eating your bread from a cloth or combing your beard, crying and cursing your fate.”
“When you said that I cursed my fate, you misspoke,” said Don Quixote. “Rather, I bless it and shall bless it all the days of my life for making me worthy of loving so high a lady as Dulcinea of Toboso.”
“She’s so high,” responded Sancho, “that by my faith she’s a whole span taller than I am.”
“How do you know, Sancho?” said Don Quixote. “Did you measure yourself against her?”
“I measured myself this way,” responded Sancho. “When I went over to her to help her load a sack of wheat onto a donkey, we were so close that I could see she was a good span taller than me.”
“Well, it is true,” replied Don Quixote, “that her great height is accompanied and adorned by a thousand million graces of the soul! But there is one thing you will not deny, Sancho: when you approached her, did you not smell the perfume of Sheba, an aromatic, somehow pleasing fragrance whose name I cannot recall? I mean, an essence or scent as if you were in the shop of some rare glover?”
“What I can say,” said Sancho, “is that I smelled a mannish kind of odor, and it must have been that with all that moving around, she was sweaty and sort of sour.”
“That could not be,” responded Don Quixote. “You must have had a head cold or else you were