Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [386]
“Señora González, or whatever your grace’s name may be…”
“Doña Rodríguez de Grijalba is my name,” responded the duenna. “How can I help you, brother?”
To which Sancho responded:
“I would like your grace to please go out of the castle gate, where you’ll find a donkey of mine, and if your grace would be so kind, have him taken, or take him yourself, to the stable, because the poor thing is a little fearful and doesn’t like to be left alone under any circumstances.”
“If the master is as clever as his servant,” responded the duenna, “then we’re certainly sitting pretty! Go on, brother, and may bad luck follow you and whoever brought you here, and take care of your jackass yourself; the duennas in this house are not accustomed to duties of that nature.”
“Well, the truth is,” responded Sancho, “that I’ve heard my master, and he knows all about histories, telling the one about Lancelot,
when he from Britanny came,
ladies tended to him,
and duennas cared for his steed;
and in the case of my donkey, I wouldn’t trade him for the steed of Señor Lancelot.”
“Brother, if you’re a jester,” replied the duenna, “then keep your jokes for people who like them and pay you for them; you won’t get anything but a fig2 from me.”
“That’s fine,” responded Sancho, “as long as it’s nice and ripe, because your grace won’t lose the hand if you count years as points.”
“Whoreson,” said the duenna, in a rage, “if I’m old or not is God’s business, not yours, you garlic-stuffed scoundrel!”
And she said this in so loud a voice that the duchess heard her, and turning around and seeing the duenna so agitated, and her eyes ablaze, she asked whom she was berating.
“He’s right here,” responded the duenna, “this good man who asked me very insistently to go and put a donkey of his at the castle gate into the stable, and brought up as an example that somewhere, I don’t know where, some ladies healed somebody named Lancelot and some duennas took care of his horse, and then, for good measure, he called me old.”
“I would consider that the worst insult,” responded the duchess, “that anyone could say to me.”
And speaking to Sancho, she said:
“Be advised, Sancho my friend, that Doña Rodríguez is very young, and wears that headdress more for reasons of authority and custom than because of her years.”
“May the ones I have left to live be cursed,” responded Sancho, “if I said it for that reason; I said it only because I’m so fond of my donkey that it seemed to me I couldn’t entrust him to any person more charitable than Señora Doña Rodríguez.”
Don Quixote, who heard all of this, said:
“Is that the kind of talk appropriate to this place?”
“Señor,” responded Sancho, “each person must talk of what he needs no matter where he is; here I remembered about my donkey, and here I talked about him; if I remembered about him in the stable, I’d talk about him there.”
To which the duke said:
“Sancho is absolutely correct, and there is no reason to blame him for anything; the donkey will be given food to his heart’s content, and Sancho need not worry, for the donkey will be treated as if he were Sancho himself.”
With these remarks, pleasing to everyone except Don Quixote, they proceeded upstairs and brought Don Quixote into a room adorned with rich tapestries of gold and brocade; six maidens removed his armor and served as pages, all of them instructed and advised by the duke and duchess as to what they were to do and how they were to treat Don Quixote so that he would imagine and believe they were treating him as a knight errant. When his armor had been removed, Don Quixote was left in his narrow breeches and chamois doublet—dry, tall, thin, his jaws kissing each other inside his mouth—and if the maidens who were serving him had not been charged with hiding their laughter, for this was one of the precise orders their mistress and master had given them, they would have split their sides laughing.
They asked that they