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“Even so,” responded the bachelor, “some people who have read the history say they would have been pleased if its authors had forgotten about some of the infinite beatings given to Señor Don Quixote in various encounters.”

“That’s where the truth of the history comes in,” said Sancho.

“They also could have kept quiet about them for the sake of fairness,” said Don Quixote, “because the actions that do not change or alter the truth of the history do not need to be written if they belittle the hero. By my faith, Aeneas was not as pious as Virgil depicts him, or Ulysses as prudent as Homer describes him.”

“That is true,” replied Sansón, “but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.”

“Well, if this Moorish gentleman is interested in telling the truth,” said Sancho, “then among all the beatings my master received, you’re bound to find mine, because they never took the measure of his grace’s shoulders without taking it for my whole body; but there’s no reason for me to be surprised, because as my master himself says, all the members must share in the head’s pain.”

“You are very crafty, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote. “By my faith, you have no lack of memory when you want to remember.”

“When I would like to forget the beatings I’ve gotten,” said Sancho, “the welts won’t let me, because they’re still fresh on my ribs.”

“Be quiet, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “and do not interrupt the bachelor, whom I implore to continue telling me what is said about me in this history.”

“And about me,” said Sancho. “They also say I’m one of the principal presonages in it.”

“Personages, not presonages, Sancho my friend,” said Sansón.

“Another one who corrects my vocablery?” said Sancho. “Well, both of you keep it up and we’ll never finish.”

“As God is my witness, Sancho,” responded the bachelor, “you are the second person in the history, and there are some who would rather hear you talk than the cleverest person in it, though there are also some who say you were much too credulous when you believed that the governorship of the ínsula offered to you by Señor Don Quixote, here present, could be true.”

“The sun has not yet gone down,” said Don Quixote, “and as Sancho grows older, with the experience granted by his years he will be more skilled and more capable of being a governor than he is now.”

“By God, Señor,” said Sancho, “the island that I can’t govern at the age I am now I won’t be able to govern if I get to be as old as Methuselah. The trouble is that this ínsula is hidden someplace, I don’t know where, it’s not that I don’t have the good sense to govern it.”

“Trust in God, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that everything will turn out well and perhaps even better than you expect; not a leaf quivers on a tree unless God wills it.”

“That’s true,” said Sansón. “If it is God’s will, Sancho will have a thousand islands to govern, not just one.”

“I have seen some governors,” said Sancho, “who, in my opinion, don’t come up to the sole of my shoe, and even so they’re called lordship and are served their food on silver.”

“They aren’t governors of ínsulas,” replied Sansón, “but of other, more tractable realms; those who govern ínsulas have to know grammar at the very least.”

“I can accept the gram all right,” said Sancho, “but the mar I won’t go near because I don’t understand it. But leaving the question of my being a governor in the hands of God, and may He place me wherever He chooses, I say, Señor Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, that it makes me very happy that the author of the history has spoken about me in such a way that the things said about me do not give offense; for by my faith as a good squire, if things had been said about me that did not suit an Old Christian, which is what I am, even the deaf would