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By Root 903 0

that if my daughter becomes a countess it will be her ruin. You’ll do whatever you want, whether you make her a duchess or a princess, but I can tell you it won’t be with my agreement or consent. Sancho, I’ve always been in favor of equality, and I can’t stand to see somebody putting on airs for no reason. They baptized me Teresa, a plain and simple name without any additions or decorations or trimmings of Dons or Doñas; my father’s name was Cascajo, and because I’m your wife, they call me Teresa Panza, though they really ought to call me Teresa Cascajo. But where laws go kings follow,2 and I’m satisfied with this name without anybody adding on a Doña that weighs so much I can’t carry it, and I don’t want to give people who see me walking around dressed in a countish or governorish way a chance to say: ‘Look at the airs that sow is putting on! Yesterday she was busy pulling on a tuft of flax for spinning, and she went to Mass and covered her head with her skirts instead of a mantilla, and today she has a hoopskirt and brooches and airs, as if we didn’t know who she was.’ If God preserves my seven senses, or five, or however many I have, I don’t intend to let anybody see me in a spot like that. You, my husband, go and be a governor or an insular and put on all the airs you like; I swear on my mother’s life that my daughter and I won’t set foot out of our village: to keep her chaste, break her leg and keep her in the house; for a chaste girl, work is her fiesta. You go with your Don Quixote and have your adventures, and leave us with our misfortunes, for God will set them right if we’re good; I certainly don’t know who gave him a Don, because his parents and grandparents never had one.”

“Now I’ll say,” replied Sancho, “that you must have an evil spirit in that body of yours. God save you, woman, what a lot of things you’ve strung together willy-nilly! What do Cascajo, brooches, proverbs, and putting on airs have to do with what I’m saying? Come here, you simple, ignorant woman, and I can call you that because you don’t understand my words and try to run away from good luck. If I had said that my daughter ought to throw herself off a tower or go roaming around the way the Infanta Doña Urraca wanted to,3 you’d be right not to go along with me; but if in two shakes and in the wink of an eye I dress her in a Doña and put a my lady on her back for you, and take her out of the dirt and put her under a canopy and up on a pedestal in a drawing room with more velvet cushions than Moors in the line of the Almohadas of Morroco,4 why won’t you consent and want what I want?”

“Do you know why, Sancho?” responded Teresa. “Because of the proverb that says: ‘Whoever tries to conceal you, reveals you!’ Nobody does more than glance at the poor, but they look closely at the rich; if a rich man was once poor, that’s where the whispers and rumors begin, and the wicked murmurs of gossips who crowd the streets like swarms of bees.”

“Look, Teresa,” responded Sancho, “and listen to what I want to tell you now; maybe you haven’t ever heard it in all the days of your life, and what I’m saying now isn’t something I made up on my own; everything I plan to say to you are the judgments of the priest who preached in this village during Lent last year, and if I remember correctly, he said that things which are present and before our eyes appear, are, and remain in our memory much more clearly and sharply than things that are past.”

(All the words that Sancho says here are the second of his statements that cause the translator to consider this chapter apocryphal, for they far exceed the capacity of Sancho, who continued, saying:)

“This accounts for the fact that when we see someone finely dressed and wearing rich clothes and with a train of servants, it seems that some force moves and induces us to respect him, although at that moment our memory recalls the lowliness in which we once saw that person; and that shame, whether of poverty or low birth, is in the past and no longer exists, and what is is only what we see in front of us in the present. And if