• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This is the truth concerning the helmet, the horse, and the knight that Don Quixote saw: in that area there were two villages, one of them so small it did not have an apothecary or a barber, but the other, which was nearby, did, and so the barber in the larger one served the smaller, where a man happened to be sick and needed to be bled, and another needed to have his beard trimmed, and consequently the barber was traveling there, carrying a brass basin; as luck would have it, as he was traveling it began to rain, and to keep his hat from being stained, for it must have been new, he put the basin on his head, and since it was clean, at a distance of half a league, it glistened. He was riding a gray donkey, as Sancho had said, which gave rise to Don Quixote’s thinking that he saw a dappled gray, a knight, and a gold helmet, for everything he saw he very easily accommodated to his chivalric nonsense and errant thoughts. And when he saw the poor gentleman approaching, without saying a word to him, and with Rocinante at full gallop, he attacked with lowered pike, intending to run him through, but when he drew near, without stopping the fury of his charge, he cried:

“Defend yourself, base creature, or hand over to me of your own free will what is so rightly mine!”

The barber, who never imagined or feared such a thing when he saw that apparition bearing down on him, had no other choice, in order to protect himself from the lance, than to fall off his donkey; and as soon as he touched the ground, he leaped up as nimbly as a deer and began to run across the plain, so fast the wind could not catch him. He left the basin on the ground, which satisfied Don Quixote, who said that the heathen had behaved with discretion and imitated the beaver, which, finding itself pursued by hunters, bites and tears off the thing for which he knows, by natural instinct, he is being hunted down.3 He told Sancho to pick up the helmet, and the squire, lifting the basin in his hands, said:

“By God, this is a good basin and must be worth eight reales if it’s worth a maravedí.”

And he gave it to his master, who then put it on his head, turning it around from one side to the other, looking for the visor; and since he did not find it, he said:

“No doubt the heathen for whom this famous sallet helmet was first forged must have had an extremely large head; worst of all, half of it is missing.”

When Sancho heard the basin called a sallet, he could not contain his laughter, but then he recalled his master’s wrath, and he broke off in the middle.

“Why are you laughing, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.

“It makes me laugh,” he responded, “to think of the big head on that heathen owner of this old helmet, which looks exactly like a barber’s basin.”

“Do you know what I imagine, Sancho? This famous piece of the enchanted helmet, by some strange accident, must have fallen into the hands of one who could not recognize or estimate its value, and not knowing what he was doing, and seeing that it was made of purest gold, he must have melted down one half to take advantage of its high price, and from the other half he made this, which resembles a barber’s basin, as you say. Be that as it may, I recognize it, and its transmutation does not matter to me, for I shall repair it in the first village that has a blacksmith, and in a manner that will leave far behind the one made and forged by the god of smithies for the god of war;4 in the meantime, I shall do the best I can to wear it, for something is better than nothing, especially since it will serve quite well to protect me from any stones that people may throw at me.”

“It will,” said Sancho, “if they’re not using a slingshot like they did in the battle of the two armies, when they made the sign of the cross over your grace’s molars and broke the cruet that held the blessed potion that made me vomit up my innards.”

“Losing it does not grieve me greatly, for you know, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that I have the recipe committed to memory.”

“So do I,” responded Sancho,