Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [263]
At about this time a certain Vicente de la Rosa1 came to town; he was the son of a poor farmer from our village and had been a soldier in Italy and in many other places. He had been taken away from our village when he was a boy of twelve by a captain passing through with his troops, and the boy returned twelve years later dressed as a soldier, decked out in a thousand colors and wearing a thousand glass trinkets and thin metal chains. One day he would put on one piece of finery, and the next day another, but all of them were flimsy and garish, lightweight and worthless. Farmers, who by nature are crafty, and who become the very embodiment of craftiness when idleness gives them the opportunity, noticed this, and counted each object and piece of finery, and discovered that he had three outfits, each a different color, with garters and hose to match, but he mixed and combined them so cleverly that if you did not keep count, you would have sworn he had displayed more than ten matched outfits and more than twenty proud plumes. And do not think that what I am saying about his clothes is irrelevant or trivial, because they play an important part in this story.
He would sit on a stone bench that is under a great poplar tree in our village square, and there he would keep us all openmouthed with suspense as he recounted great deeds to us. There was no land anywhere in the world that he had not seen, and no battle in which he had not fought; he had killed as many Moors as live in Morocco and Tunis and had engaged in more single combat than Gante and Luna,2 Diego García de Paredes, and another thousand men he named, and from all of them he had emerged victorious, without shedding a single drop of blood. On the other hand, he would show us the scars of wounds, and even though we could not make them out, he let us know that they had been caused by shots from flintlocks in various battles and skirmishes. Finally, with unparalleled arrogance, he would address his equals, even those who knew him, as vos,3 saying that his father was his fighting arm, his lineage his deeds, and as a soldier he owed nothing to no man, not even the king. In addition to this arrogance, he was something of a musician who could strum a guitar so well that some said he could make it speak, but his talents did not end here; he also was a poet, and for each trivial event in the village he would compose a ballad at least a league and a half long.
This soldier, then, whom I have just described, this Vicente de la Rosa, this brave gallant, this musician and poet, was often seen and observed by Leandra from a window in her house that overlooked the square. She became infatuated with the glitter of his bright clothes and enchanted by his ballads, for he made twenty copies of each one he composed; she heard of the deeds that he himself attributed to himself, and finally, as the devil must have ordained, she fell in love with him before the presumptuousness of asking for her hand had even occurred to him. And since, in matters of love, no affair is easier to conclude successfully than the one supported by the lady’s desire, Leandra and Vicente easily reached an understanding, and before any of her many suitors became aware of her desire, she had satisfied it by leaving the house of her dearly loved father, for she had no mother, and fleeing the village with the soldier, who emerged more triumphant from this undertaking than from the many others he had claimed for himself.
This turn of events astonished the entire village, as well as anyone who even heard