Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [294]
Along this harsh, rock-strewn terrain we climb
to the peak, high seat of immortality,
never reached if these rigors are declined.”
“Oh, woe is me,” said the niece, “my uncle’s a poet, too! He knows everything, he understands everything, and I’d wager that if he wanted to be a mason, he’d know how to build a house as well as a cage.”
“I promise you, my niece,” responded Don Quixote, “that if these chivalric ideas did not carry with them all my thoughts, there would be nothing I should not make and no curiosity my hands would not create, especially cages and toothpicks.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door, and when they asked who was there, Sancho Panza responded that it was he, and as soon as the housekeeper learned who it was she ran to hide, not wanting to see him because she despised him so much. The niece opened the door, and Sancho’s master came to greet him with open arms, and the two men shut themselves away in Don Quixote’s room, where they had another conversation just as good as the previous one.
CHAPTER VII
Regarding the conversation that Don Quixote had with his squire, as well as other exceptionally famous events
When the housekeeper saw that Sancho Panza had shut himself away with her master, she knew what their business was, and imagining that this consultation would result in a determination to embark on a third sally, she put on her cloak and, filled with sorrow and grief, went to find Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, for it seemed to her that because he was well-spoken and a recent friend, he could persuade her master to abandon his mad intentions.
She found him walking in the courtyard of his house, and when she saw him she fell at his feet, perspiring in her distress. When Carrasco saw this display of sorrow and alarm, he said to her:
“What is it, Señora? What has happened? You look as if your heart would break.”
“It’s nothing, Señor Sansón, except that my master’s pushing out, he’s pushing out, no doubt about it!”
“And where is he pushing out, Señora?” asked Sansón. “Has he broken any part of his body?”
“He isn’t pushing out anywhere,” she responded, “except through the door of his madness. I mean, dear Señor Bachelor, that he wants to leave again, and this will be the third time, to search the wide world for what he calls ventures, and I don’t understand how he can give them that name.1 The first time they brought him back to us lying across a donkey, beaten and battered. The second time he came home in an oxcart, locked in a cage and claiming he was enchanted, and the poor man was in such a state that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him: skinny, pale, his eyes sunk right into the top of his head; to bring him back to himself a little, I used more than six hundred eggs; God knows that, and so does everybody else, and my hens, too, and they wouldn’t let me lie.”
“I certainly can believe that,” responded the bachelor, “for they are so good, so plump, and so well-bred that they would not tell a falsehood even if it killed them. In fact, Señora, is there something else, some mishap other than the one you fear Señor Don Quixote plans to undertake?”
“No, Señor,” she responded.
“Well then, don’t worry,” responded the bachelor, “but go home in peace and prepare a hot lunch for me, and on the way say St. Apollonia’s prayer,2 if you know it; I’ll be there soon, and then you’ll see wonders.”
“Lord save us!” replied the housekeeper. “Did your grace say I should say St. Apollonia’s prayer? That would work if my master’s trouble was in his teeth, but his is in his brain.”
“I know