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By Root 851 0

usual remedy, which was to think about some situation from his books, and his madness made him recall that of Valdovinos and the Marquis of Mantua, when Carloto left him wounded in the highlands,1 a history known to children, acknowledged by youths, celebrated, and even believed by the old, and, despite all this, no truer than the miracles of Mohammed. This is the tale that seemed to him perfectly suited for the situation in which he found himself, and so, with displays of great emotion, he began to roll about on the ground and to say with faint breath exactly what people say was said by the wounded Knight of the Wood:

“Where art thou, my lady,

that thou weepest not for my ills?

Dost not know of them, lady,

Or art thou truly false?”

And in this way he continued reciting the ballad until the lines that say:

“O noble Marquis of Mantua,

mine uncle and natural lord!”

And as luck would have it, when he reached this line, a farmer from his village happened to pass by, a neighbor of his on the way home after taking a load of wheat to the mill; the farmer, seeing a man lying there, approached and asked who he was and what the trouble was that made him complain so pitifully. Don Quixote no doubt thought the farmer was the Marquis of Mantua, his uncle, and so the only answer he gave was to go on with the ballad, recounting his misfortune and the love of the emperor’s son for his wife, all of it just as it is told in the ballad.

The farmer was astounded when he heard these absurdities, and after removing the visor, which had been shattered in the beating, he wiped the fallen man’s face, which was covered in dust, and as soon as he had wiped it he recognized him and said:

“Señor Quijana!”—for this must have been his name when he was in his right mind and had not yet changed from a quiet gentleman into a knight errant—“Who has done this to your grace?”

But Don Quixote went on reciting his ballad in response to every question. Seeing this, the good man, as carefully as he could, removed the breastplate and backpiece to see if he was wounded but did not see blood or cuts of any kind. He managed to lift him from the ground and with a good deal of effort put him on his own donkey, because he thought it a steadier mount. He gathered up his arms, even the broken pieces of the lance, and tied them on Rocinante, and leading the horse by the reins and the jackass by the halter, he began to walk toward his village, very dispirited at hearing the nonsense that Don Quixote was saying; Don Quixote was no less dispirited, for he was so beaten and broken that he could barely keep his seat on the burro, and from time to time he would raise his sighs to heaven, which obliged the farmer to ask him again to tell him what was wrong; one cannot help but think that the devil made Don Quixote recall stories suited to the events that had occurred, because at that point, forgetting about Valdovinos, he remembered the Moor Abindarráez, when the governor of Antequera, Rodrigo de Narváez, captured him and brought him back to his domain as his prisoner.2 So when the farmer asked him again how he felt and what was wrong, he answered with the same words and phrases that the captive scion of the Abencerraje family said to Rodrigo de Narváez, just as he had read them in the history of Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor, where they are written, and he did this so deliberately that as the farmer walked along he despaired at hearing such an enormous amount of foolishness; in this way he realized that his neighbor was mad, and he hurried to reach the village in order to rid himself of the impatience Don Quixote provoked in him with his long-winded harangue. When it was concluded, Don Quixote went on to say:

“Your grace should know, Don Rodrigo de Narváez, that this beautiful Jarifa I have mentioned to you is now the lovely Dulcinea of Toboso, for whose sake I have performed, perform now, and shall perform in the future the most famous feats of chivalry the world has seen, sees now, and will ever see.”

To this the farmer replied:

“Look, your grace, poor sinner