Chapter I
Concerning the famous hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha’s position, character and way of life
In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall, there lived not long ago one of those country gentlemen or hidalgos who keep a lance in a rack, an ancient leather shield, a scrawny hack and a greyhound for coursing. A midday stew with rather more shin of beef than leg of lamb, the leftovers for supper most nights, lardy eggs on Saturdays, lentil broth on Fridays and an occasional pigeon as a Sunday treat ate up three-quarters of his income. The rest went on a cape of black broadcloth, with breeches of velvet and slippers to match for holy days, and on weekdays he walked proudly in the finest homespun. He maintained a housekeeper the wrong side of forty, a niece the right side of twenty and a jack of all trades who was as good at saddling the nag as at plying the pruning shears. Our hidalgo himself was nearly fifty; he had a robust constitution, dried-up flesh and a withered face, and he was an early riser and a keen huntsman. His surname’s said to have been Quixada, or Quesada (as if he were a jawbone, or a cheesecake): concerning this detail there’s some discrepancy among the authors who have written on the subject, although a credible conjecture does suggest he might have been a plaintive Quexana. But this doesn’t matter much, as far as our little tale’s concerned, provided that the narrator doesn’t stray one inch from the truth.
Now you must understand that during his idle moments (which accounted for most of the year) this hidalgo took to reading books of chivalry with such relish and enthusiasm that he almost forgot about his hunting and even running his property, and his foolish curiosity reached such extremes that he sold acres of arable land to buy these books of chivalry, and took home as many of them as he could find;1 he liked none of them so much as those by the famous Feliciano de Silva,2 because the brilliance of the prose and all that intricate language seemed a treasure to him, never more so than when he was reading those amorous compliments and challenges delivered by letter, in which he often found: ‘The reason for the unreason to which my reason is subjected, so weakens my reason that I have reason to complain of your beauty.’ And also when he read: ‘… the lofty heavens which with their stars divinely fortify you in your divinity, and make you meritorious of the merits merited by your greatness.’ Such subtleties used to drive the poor gentleman to distraction, and he would rack his brains trying to understand it all and unravel its meaning, something that Aristotle himself wouldn’t have been capable of doing even if he’d come back to life for this purpose alone. He wasn’t very happy about the wounds that Sir Belianis kept on inflicting and receiving, because he imagined that, however skilful the doctors who treated him, his face and body must have been covered with gashes and scars. But, in spite of all that, he commended the author for ending his book with that promise of endless adventure, and often felt the urge to take up his quill and bring the story to a proper conclusion, as is promised there; and no doubt he’d have done so, and with success too, if other more important and insistent preoccupations hadn’t prevented him. He had frequent arguments with the village priest (a learned man – a Sigüenza graduate no less) about which had been the better knight errant, Palmerin of England3 or Amadis of Gaul; but Master Nicolás, the village barber, argued that neither of them could hold a candle to the Knight of Phoebus, and that if anyone at all could be compared to him it was Don Galaor, Amadis of Gaul’s brother, because there was no emergency he couldn’t cope with: he wasn’t one of your pernickety knights, nor was he such a blubberer as his brother, and he was every bit his equal as far as courage was concerned.
In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him. He would declare that El Cid, Ruy Díaz, had been an excellent knight, but that he couldn’t be compared to the Knight of the Burning Sword,4 who with just one back-stroke had split two fierce and enormous giants clean down the middle. He felt happier about Bernardo del Carpio, because he’d slain Roland the Enchanted at Roncesvalles, by the same method used by Hercules when he suffocated Antaeus, the son of Earth – with a bear-hug.5 He was full of praise for the giant Morgante because, despite belonging to a proud and insolent breed, he alone was affable and well-mannered.6 But his greatest favourite was Reynald of Montalban,7 most of all when he saw him sallying forth from his castle and plundering all those he met, and when in foreign parts he stole that image of Muhammad made of solid gold, as his history records. He’d have given his housekeeper, and even his niece into the bargain, to trample the traitor Ganelon in the dust.8