Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [229]
“The boy who is singing, Señora, is the son of a gentleman from the kingdom of Aragón who is the lord of two villages, and who had a house across from my father’s house in Madrid, and though my father covered the windows of his house with canvas in winter and jalousies in summer,2 I don’t know how it happened, but this young man, as he was going to school, saw me somehow, I don’t know if it was in church or somewhere else, and he fell in love with me and let me know it from the windows of his house with so many gestures and so many tears that I had to believe him, and even love him in return without knowing exactly what he wanted of me. One of his gestures was to join his hands, giving me to understand that he would marry me; that would have made me very happy, but as I was alone and motherless and had no one to talk to, I did nothing and did not favor him; but when my father was out of the house, and his father, too, I would raise the canvas or jalousie a little and let him see me full-length, which sent him into such raptures it seemed he would lose his mind.
Then the time came for my father to leave Madrid, and the boy learned about it, but not from me, because I never had the chance to tell him. He was taken ill, as I understand it, with grief, and so the day we were to leave I could not see him to say goodbye, if only with my eyes. But after we had been traveling for two days, as we were entering an inn in a village about a day’s travel from here, I saw him in the doorway, dressed in the clothes of a muledriver’s boy and looking so natural that if I did not carry his image engraved in my heart, it would have been impossible to recognize him. But I did recognize him, to my amazement and joy; he looked at me without my father’s seeing him, and he always hides his face from my father when he passes us on the roads and in the inns where we stay; since I know who he is and believe that it is on account of his love for me that he is traveling on foot and suffering so much hardship, I am dying of sorrow and follow his every step with my eyes. I don’t know why he has come here or how he managed to escape his father, who loves him very, very much because he is his only heir, and because he deserves it, as your grace will agree when you see him. And let me tell you something else: everything he sings he makes up in his own head, and I have heard that he’s a very fine student and poet. And there’s more: whenever I see him or hear him sing, I tremble from head to toe, worried and fearful that my father will recognize him and learn of our feelings and desires. I have never said a word to him in my life, and even so, I love him so much I cannot live without him. This, Señora, is all that I can tell you about this musician whose voice has given you so much joy, but it alone says clearly that he is not a muledriver’s boy, as you say, but a lord with vassals and lands, as I have told you.”
“Say no more, Señora Doña Clara,” said Dorotea as she gave her a thousand kisses, “say no more and wait for the new day, for with God’s help I hope to arrange this affair so that it has the happy ending such virtuous beginnings deserve.”
“Oh, Señora!” said Doña Clara. “What ending can we expect if his father is so distinguished and wealthy that he won’t think me good enough to be his son’s maid, let alone his wife? Then, too, I would not marry without my father’s knowledge for anything in the world. All I want is for this boy to go home and leave me; perhaps if I don’t see him, and with the great distance we have to travel, the grief I feel now may begin to fade, though I can say that I don’t believe this remedy will do me much good at all. I don’t know what the devil this is, or how I ever fell so much in love with him, since I am so young and so is he; I think we’re both the same age, I’m almost sixteen, and my father says I’ll turn sixteen on Michaelmas Day.”
Dorotea could not help laughing when she heard how childishly