Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [468]
Sanchica is making lace trimming; she earns eight maravedís a day free and clear, and she’s putting them in a money box to help with her dowry, but now that she’s the daughter of a governor, you’ll give her a dowry and she won’t have to work for it. The fountain in the square dried up; lightning hit the pillory, which doesn’t bother me at all.
I’m waiting for your answer to this letter, and a decision about my going to court; and with this, may God grant you more years than He does me, or as many, because I wouldn’t want to leave you without me in this world.
Your wife,
TERESA PANZA
The letters were celebrated, laughed at, approved, and admired; as a final touch, the courier arrived with the letter Sancho had sent to Don Quixote, which was also read publicly, casting doubt on the foolishness of the governor.
The duchess withdrew in order to learn from the page what had occurred in Sancho’s village, which he recounted to her in great detail, not failing to relate every circumstance; he gave her the acorns, as well as a cheese that Teresa had given him because it was very good, even better than the ones from Tronchón.3 The duchess received it with the greatest pleasure, and with that we shall leave her in order to recount the end of the governorship of the great Sancho Panza, the flower and model of all insular governors.
CHAPTER LIII
Regarding the troubled end and conclusion of the governorship of Sancho Panza
To believe that the things of this life will endure forever, unchanged, is to believe the impossible; it seems instead that everything goes around, I mean around in a circle: spring pursues summer, summer pursues estío,1 estío pursues autumn, autumn pursues winter, and winter pursues spring, and in this way time turns around a continuous wheel; only human life races to its end more quickly than time, with no hope for renewal except in the next life, which has no boundaries that limit it. So says Cide Hamete, a Muslim philosopher, because an understanding of the fleeting impermanence of our present life, and the everlasting nature of the eternal life that awaits us, has been grasped by many without the enlightenment of faith but with only the light of their natural intelligence; but here our author says this because of the speed with which the governorship of Sancho ended, evaporated, dissolved, and disappeared in shadow and smoke.
Sancho was in bed on the seventh night of the days of his governorship, full not of bread or wine, but of judging and giving opinions and issuing statutes and decrees, when sleep, notwithstanding and despite his hunger, began to close his eyes, and he heard such a great noise of bells ringing and voices shouting that it seemed as if the entire ínsula were being destroyed. He sat up in bed, listening attentively to see if he could learn what the cause might be of so much tumult; not only did he fail, but the sound of infinite trumpets and drums was added to the clamor of shouts and bells, leaving him more confused, and more full of fear and consternation; getting out of bed, he put on slippers because the floor was damp, and not bothering with a robe or anything resembling one, he went to the door of his room just in time to see more than twenty persons coming along the corridors, carrying burning torches and holding unsheathed swords in their hands, all of them shouting in loud voices:
“To arms, to arms, Señor Governor, to arms! Infinite enemies have entered the ínsula, and we are lost if your ingenuity and valor do not come to our aid!”
Clamorous, frenzied, in an uproar, they approached the place where Sancho was standing, astonished and stupefied at what he was hearing and seeing, and when they had reached him one of them said:
“Arm yourself immediately, your lordship, or else you will be lost along with the entire ínsula!”
“What do I have to do with arming?” responded