Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (119 page)

Never be guided by arbitrariness in law, which tends to have a good deal of influence on ignorant men who take pride in being clever. Let the tears of the poor find in you more compassion, but not more justice, than the briefs of the wealthy. Try to discover the truth in all the promises and gifts of the rich man, as well as in the poor man’s sobs and entreaties. When there can and should be a place for impartiality, do not bring the entire rigor of the law to bear on the offender, for the reputation of the harsh judge is not better than that of the compassionate one. If you happen to bend the staff of justice, let it be with the weight not of a gift, but of mercy. If you judge the case of one of your enemies, put your injury out of your mind and turn your thoughts to the truth of the question. Do not be blinded by your own passion in another’s trial, for most of the time the mistakes you make cannot be remedied, and if they can, it will be to the detriment of your good name and even your fortune. If a beautiful woman comes to you to plead for justice, turn your eyes from her tears and your ears from her sobs, and consider without haste the substance of what she is asking if you do not want your reason to be drowned in her weeping and your goodness in her sighs. If you must punish a man with deeds, do not abuse him with words, for the pain of punishment is
enough for the unfortunate man without the addition of malicious speech. Consider the culprit who falls under your jurisdiction as a fallen man subject to the conditions of our depraved nature, and to the extent that you can, without doing injury to the opposing party, show him compassion and clemency, because although all the attributes of God are equal, in our view mercy is more brilliant and splendid than justice.

If you follow these precepts and rules, Sancho, your days will be long, your fame eternal, your rewards overflowing, your joy indescribable; you will marry your children as you wish, they and your grandchildren will have titles, you will live in peace and harmony with all people, and in the final moments of your life, in a gentle and ripe old age, the moment of your death will come and the tender, delicate hands of your great-great-grandchildren will close your eyes. What I have said to you so far are the teachings that will adorn your soul; now listen to the ones that will serve to adorn your body.”

CHAPTER XLIII

Who could have heard this past speech of Don Quixote and not taken him for a very wise and well-intentioned person? But, as has been said so often in the course of this great history, he spoke nonsense only with regard to chivalry, and in other conversations he demonstrated a clear and confident understanding, so that his actions constantly belied his judgment, and his judgment belied his actions; but in this matter of the additional advice he gave to Sancho, he showed that he possessed great cleverness and revealed to a very high degree both his intelligence and his madness.

Sancho listened to him very attentively and attempted to commit his advice to memory, like a man who intended to follow it and use it to bring the gestation of his governorship to a successful delivery. And so Don Quixote continued, and he said:

“With regard to how you should govern your person and house, Sancho, the first thing I recommend is that you keep clean, and that you trim your nails and not allow them to grow, as some men do whose
ignorance has led them to believe that long nails beautify their hands, as if those superfluous growths that they refuse to cut were nails, when they are actually the claws of a lizard-eating kestrel: a filthy and extraordinary abuse. Do not go around, Sancho, unbelted and negligent; slovenly clothing is an indication of a listless spirit, unless slovenliness and negligence are actually a sign of shrewdness, as was judged to be the case with Julius Caesar. Determine with intelligence the worth of your position, and if it allows you to give your servants livery, let it be modest and useful rather than showy and splendid, and divide it between your servants and the poor: I mean that if you are going to dress six pages, dress three of them and three poor men, and in this way you will have pages both in heaven and on the ground; this unusual manner of giving livery cannot be understood by the vainglorious. Do not eat garlic or onions lest their smell reveal your peasant origins. Walk slowly; speak calmly, but not in a way that makes it seem you are listening to yourself, for all affectation is wrong. Eat sparingly at midday and even less for supper, for the health of the entire body is forged in the workshop of the stomach. Be temperate in your drinking, remembering that too much wine cannot keep either a secret or a promise. Be careful, Sancho, not to chew with your mouth full or to eructate in front of anyone.”

“I don’t understand
eructate,”
said Sancho.

And Don Quixote said:

“
Eructate,
Sancho, means
to belch,
which is one of the crudest words in the Castilian language, although it is very expressive, and so educated people have had recourse to Latin, and instead of
belch
they say
eructate,
and instead of
belches, eructations;
and if some do not understand these terms, it matters very little, for in time their use will be introduced into the language and they will easily be understood; this enriches the language, over which the common people and usage have control.”

“Truly, Señor,” said Sancho, “one of the pieces of advice and counsel that I plan to carry in my memory will be not to belch, because I tend to do that very often.”

“
Eructate,
Sancho, not
belch,”
said Don Quixote.

“I’ll say
eructate
from now on,” responded Sancho, “and by my faith, I won’t forget.”

“Sancho, you also should not mix into your speech the host of proverbs that you customarily use, for although proverbs are short maxims, the ones you bring in are often so far-fetched that they seem more like nonsense than like maxims.”

“God can remedy that,” responded Sancho, “because I know more
proverbs than a book, and so many of them come into my mouth at one time when I talk that they fight with one another to get out, but my tongue tosses out the first ones it finds, even if they’re not to the point. But I’ll be careful from now on to say the ones that suit the gravity of my position, because in a well-stocked house, supper is soon cooked; and if you cut the cards, you don’t deal; and the man who sounds the alarm is safe; and for giving and keeping, you need some sense.”

“Go on, Sancho!” said Don Quixote. “Force the proverbs in, string them together one after another on a thread! No one will stop you! My mother punishes me and I deceive her! I tell you to avoid proverbs, and in an instant you have come out with a litany of them that have as much to do with what we are discussing as the hills of Úbeda. Look, Sancho, I am not saying that an appropriate proverb is wrong, but loading and stringing together proverbs any which way makes your conversation lifeless and lowborn.

When you mount a horse, do not lean your body back over the hind bow of the saddle, or hold your legs stiff and sticking out at an angle from the belly of the horse, or ride so carelessly that it looks as if you were riding your donkey, for riding a horse makes gentlemen of some men and stable boys of others. Be moderate in your sleeping, for the man who does not get up with the sun does not possess the day; and remember, Sancho, that diligence is the mother of good fortune, and sloth, her opposite, never reached the conclusion demanded by good intentions. This final piece of advice that I wish to give you now, although it may not serve for the adornment of the body, I want you to remember very well, for I believe it will be no less useful to you than those I have given you so far, and it is that you should never become involved in arguing about lineages, at least, in comparing one to the other, because of necessity, when they are compared, one has to be better, and you will be despised by the one you place lower, and not rewarded in any way by the one you deem higher. Your dress should be full-length breeches, a long doublet, and a slightly longer cape; absolutely no pantaloons, for they do not become gentlemen or governors. For now, this is what has occurred to me to tell you; time will pass, and my precepts will be appropriate to the occasion, if you are careful to inform me about the circumstances in which you find yourself.”

“Señor,” responded Sancho, “I see very well that everything your grace has told me is good, holy, and beneficial, but what good will the precepts do if I don’t remember a single one? It’s true that what you said
about not letting my nails grow and getting married again won’t slip my mind if I can help it, but those other useless and complicated and troublesome things I don’t remember, and I won’t remember them any more than I do yesterday’s clouds, and so you’ll have to write them down for me, and though I don’t know how to read or write, I’ll give them to my confessor so that he can slip them in and remind me of them whenever it’s necessary.”

“O, sinner that I am!” responded Don Quixote. “How bad it seems in governors not to be able to read or write! Because you must know, Sancho, that a man not knowing how to read, or being left-handed, means one of two things: either he was the child of parents who were too poor and lowborn, or he was so mischievous and badly behaved himself that he could not absorb good habits or good instruction. This is a great fault in you, and I would like you at least to learn to sign your name.”

“I know how to sign my name very well,” responded Sancho, “because when I was steward of a brotherhood in my village, I learned to make some letters like the marks on bundles, and they told me that they said my name; better yet, I’ll pretend that my right hand has been hurt, and I’ll have somebody else sign for me; there’s a remedy for everything except death, and since I’ll be in charge of everything, I can do whatever I want; then, too, when your father’s the magistrate….
¹
And being agovernor, which is more than being a magistrate, just let them come and they’ll see what happens! No, let them make fun of me and speak ill of me: they’ll come for wool and go home shorn; and when God loves you, your house knows it; and the rich man’s folly passes for good judgment in the world; and since that’s what I’ll be, being a governor and a very generous one, which is what I plan to be, nobody will notice any faults in me. No, just be like honey and the flies will go after you; you’re only worth as much as you have, my grandmother used to say; and you won’t get revenge on a well-established man.”

“O, may you be accursed, Sancho!” said Don Quixote at this point. “May sixty thousand devils take you and your proverbs! For the past hour you have been stringing them together and with each one giving me a cruel taste of torment. I assure you that one day these proverbs will lead you to the gallows; because of them your vassals will take the governorship away from you, or rise up against you. Tell me, where do you find them, you ignorant man, and how do you apply them, you fool, when to
say only one that is really applicable, I have to perspire and labor like a ditchdigger?”

“By God, my lord and master,” replied Sancho, “your grace complains about very small things. Why the devil does it trouble you when I make use of my fortune, when I have no other, and no other wealth except proverbs and more proverbs? And right now four have come to mind that are a perfect fit, like pears in a wicker basket, but I won’t say them, because golden silence is what they call Sancho.”

“That Sancho is not you,” said Don Quixote, “because not only are you not golden silence, you are foolish speech and stubborn persistence, but even so I should like to know which four proverbs came to mind just now that were so to the point, because I have been searching my mind, and I have a good one, and I cannot think of a single proverb.”

“Which ones could be better,” said Sancho, “than ‘Never put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth’ and ‘There’s no answer to get out of my house and what do you want with my wife’ and ‘Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s bad luck for the pitcher’? They’re all just fine. Because nobody should take on his governor or the person in authority because he’ll come out of it hurt, like the man who puts his finger between two wisdom teeth, and if they’re not wisdom teeth but just plain molars, it doesn’t matter; and there’s no reply to what the governor says, like the ‘Leave my house and what do you want with my wife.’ As for the stone and the pitcher, even a blind man can see that. So whoever sees the mote in somebody else’s eye has to see the beam in his own, so that nobody can say about him: ‘The dead woman was frightened by the one with her throat cut.’ And your grace knows very well that the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man does in somebody else’s.”

“That is not so, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote, “for the fool knows nothing whether in his own house or in another’s, because on a foundation of foolishness no reasonable building can be erected. Enough of this now, Sancho, for if you govern badly, the fault will be yours and mine the shame; but it consoles me that I did what I had to do and advised you with all the truth and wisdom of which I am capable: now I am relieved of my obligation and my promise. May God guide you, Sancho, and govern you in your governorship, and free me of the misgivings I still have that you will turn the entire ínsula upside down, something I could avoid by revealing to the duke who you are, and telling him that this plump little body of yours is nothing but a sack filled with proverbs and guile.”

“Señor,” replied Sancho, “if your grace believes I’m not worthy of this governorship, I’ll let it go right now, for I care more for a sliver of nail from my soul than I do for my whole body, and just plain Sancho will get by on bread and onions as well as the governor does on partridges and capons; besides, everyone’s equal when they sleep, the great and the small, the poor and the rich; and if your grace thinks about it, you’ll see that it was you alone who gave me the idea of governing, because I don’t know any more about the governorships of ínsulas than a vulture; if you think the devil will carry me off because I’m a governor, I’d rather go to heaven as Sancho than to hell as a governor.”