Don Quixote

While he sleeps it off, his friends stage an intervention. The village priest, Pero Pérez, and the barber, Master Nicolás, go through his library with the niece and the housekeeper, who want every book burned. The priest turns literary critic, sparing a few (the great Amadis of Gaul, the lively Tirant lo Blanc) and condemning the rest to the yard. One of the books on the shelf is La Galatea by a certain Cervantes, “a great friend of mine,” says the priest, who has had more experience in reverses than in verses. They wall up the library door and tell Don Quixote that an enchanter carried the room away.

Two weeks later he sets out again, this time with a squire. Sancho Panza is a neighbour, a farm labourer, an honest man with very little salt in his head, who leaves his wife and children because his master promises that any day now they might win an island, and Sancho will govern it. From here on the book is a double act: the gaunt, lofty knight talking like a romance, and the short, round, practical squire talking in proverbs and thinking about lunch.

Almost at once they see thirty or forty windmills on the plain. To Don Quixote they are giants with arms two leagues long. Sancho tells him plainly they are windmills. The knight charges anyway, his lance catches a sail, and he and Rocinante are flung across the field. Undaunted, he explains that an enchanter turned the giants into windmills at the last moment to rob him of his glory.

Then comes a fight with a furious Basque squire, swords raised—and the story simply stops. The narrator confesses he has run out of material. Weeks later, in the Toledo silk market, he spots a boy selling old papers in Arabic, finds that they continue the tale, and pays a Morisco to translate them. The true author, it turns out, is an Arab historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes has slipped a fake author between himself and his book, and he will play with that trick for the next thousand pages.

The adventures now come thick and fast, and most of them end with Don Quixote on the ground. He shares acorns with goatherds and treats them to a soaring speech about a lost Golden Age when nobody said “mine” and “yours.”

Rocinante makes advances to some Galician ponies and the whole party is thrashed by their drivers. At another inn, which is also a castle, a midnight farce breaks out when the kind, ugly serving girl Maritornes stumbles into the wrong bed in the dark and fists fly in every direction. Don Quixote brews the magic balsam of Fierabras from oil, wine, salt and rosemary; it makes him violently sick and then better, and makes Sancho so much sicker he thinks he is dying. When they leave without paying, some guests toss Sancho in a blanket in the yard, like a dog at carnival.

Then a great cloud of dust rises on the road. To Don Quixote it is two vast armies about to clash, the forces of the emperor Alifanfaron and King Pentapolin of the Rolled-up Sleeve, and he names the knights in each army in loving detail. They are two flocks of sheep. He charges, spears several, and the shepherds knock out a fistful of his teeth with their slings. That night, after he scatters a funeral procession of mourners in white, Sancho gives him his famous title, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, because his face by torchlight is the saddest he has ever seen.

Finally Don Quixote sees a rider coming with something golden gleaming on his head: the enchanted helmet of Mambrino. It is a country barber who has put his brass shaving basin on his head to keep his new hat dry in the rain. The barber flees, and Don Quixote wears the basin proudly for the rest of Part One.

On the road they meet a chain of convicts being marched to the king’s galleys. Don Quixote interviews each man, decides that forcing anyone into slavery is against the law of God and nature, and attacks the guards. The freed prisoners repay him by stoning him and stealing Sancho’s coat. Their leader, the brilliant crook Ginés de Pasamonte, who is writing his own autobiography (unfinished, he explains, because his life isn’t over yet), later steals Sancho’s donkey too.

Afraid of the Holy Brotherhood, the rural police, they flee into the wild Sierra Morena. There they meet Cardenio, a young nobleman driven half mad by love: his beloved Luscinda was stolen from him by his treacherous friend, Don Fernando.

Inspired, Don Quixote decides to go mad on purpose, as the great Amadis did when spurned by his lady. Since Dulcinea hasn’t actually spurned him, he admits this is even finer: to go mad with no reason at all. He strips to his shirt and turns somersaults on the rocks to give Sancho something to report, then sends him off with a love letter. Sancho, who cannot read and never notices that his master has kept the notebook with the letter in it, heads for home and meets the priest and the barber, who have come looking for their friend.

They hatch a plan to lure him out of the mountains, and luck gives them the perfect actress: Dorotea, a farmer’s daughter seduced and abandoned by the same Don Fernando, hiding in the hills dressed as a boy. She agrees to play the Princess Micomicona, whose kingdom has been seized by a giant. Don Quixote vows to restore her throne, and the party sets off. On the road the boy Andrés reappears, still unpaid and badly scarred. He begs the knight, if he ever sees him being cut to pieces again, please not to help him.

The whole company returns to the same inn, which becomes a kind of theatre where everyone’s story comes home. The priest reads aloud a novel found in a trunk, The Ill-Advised Curiosity: a Florentine named Anselmo is so determined to test his wife Camilla’s faithfulness that he persuades his best friend Lothario to court her. The test works far too well, and all three are ruined. It is a little tragedy set inside a comedy, about a man who could not leave a good thing alone.

The reading is interrupted by shouts from upstairs: Don Quixote, fighting in his sleep, has slashed the innkeeper’s wine-skins, believing he is beheading Micomicona’s giant. Red wine runs everywhere. Then a carriage arrives carrying Don Fernando and a veiled Luscinda. In one great scene of recognition, Cardenio gets his Luscinda back and Fernando, shamed, returns to Dorotea.

At dinner Don Quixote gives a surprisingly wise speech on whether soldiers or scholars do more good, and argues for soldiers. Then a newcomer, a captain named Ruy Pérez de Viedma, tells the story of his years as a slave in Algiers and his escape with Zoraida, a Moorish woman who became a Christian and fled with him. Into this tale Cervantes drops a Spanish soldier, “something de Saavedra,” famous among the captives for his daring escapes. It is the author himself.

The barber whose basin was taken turns up and demands it back. The guests, enjoying the joke, solemnly vote that it is indeed a helmet, and a brawl breaks out. Finally the priest and barber build a wooden cage, put on masks, and carry the sleeping knight off in it on an ox-cart, telling him he is enchanted. On the slow road home he argues about books with a canon from Toledo, attacks a procession of penitents, takes a last beating and arrives home in his cage. Part One ends by hinting at a third sally.

Ten years later, in 1615, Part Two opens a month after the cage. Don Quixote seems almost sane, until the conversation turns to knights. Then Sancho brings astonishing news: there is a book about them. A young bachelor of arts from Salamanca, Sansón Carrasco, confirms it. More than twelve thousand copies are in print, the bachelor says, and everyone is talking about it. Readers have complaints too: how did Sancho ride his donkey after it was stolen? What happened to the hundred gold crowns? Sancho, delighted to be famous, sorts out the plot holes himself.

So the knight and squire ride out a third time, now as celebrities. First stop: El Toboso, to pay homage to Dulcinea. Sancho, cornered, pulls off his masterstroke: he points at three peasant girls riding by on donkeys and announces that the lady and her damsels have arrived. Don Quixote sees only a round-faced, snub-nosed country girl who smells of raw garlic, and concludes that enchanters have transformed his lady. The squire who once followed the knight’s fantasies is now writing them.

The adventures in Part Two are stranger and sadder. A knight in a coat of little mirrors challenges Don Quixote and is defeated; underneath the visor is Sansón Carrasco, who had hoped to beat him and send him home, and his squire is a neighbour wearing a huge fake nose. Riding with a sensible gentleman in a green coat, Don Diego de Miranda, he demands that the king’s lions be let out of their cage so he can fight them; the lion yawns, turns around and shows him its backside. He descends on a rope into the Cave of Montesinos and comes up describing marvels, including an enchanted Dulcinea who sends her lady-in-waiting to borrow six reals. At an inn he watches a puppet show by Master Pedro—the old galley slave Ginés in disguise—and, carried away, hacks the puppet Moors to pieces, then pays for the damage.

Then they meet the readers. Out hunting near the Ebro, a Duke and Duchess come upon the pair, and since they have read Part One, they know exactly whom they are dealing with. They invite them to their castle and turn it into a stage, treating Don Quixote as a real knight-errant so they can enjoy the show. For the first time in his life, the novel notes, he is entirely convinced that he is a true knight, because everyone treats him like one.

The Duke’s household throws itself into the game. A grand night pageant brings on Merlin, who announces that Dulcinea can be disenchanted only if Sancho gives himself three thousand three hundred lashes on his bare backside. A bearded Countess Trifaldi arrives with a troop of bearded duennas, begging for help; the cure is to fly on Clavileño, a wooden horse steered by a peg in its forehead. Knight and squire mount it blindfolded while servants blow wind at them with bellows and warm their faces with burning tow on the ends of canes, and the adventure ends when the horse, stuffed with fireworks, explodes under them.

There are crueller pranks: a sack of cats with bells tied to their tails is let loose in Don Quixote’s room, and one scratches his face badly. A young maid, Altisidora, pretends to be dying of love for him, and he gently tells her that his heart belongs to Dulcinea. At the castle’s table a stern chaplain tells him to go home and look after his estate, and Don Quixote answers with real dignity.

Finally the Duke delivers on the old promise and makes Sancho governor of an “island.” Before he goes, Don Quixote gives him advice on governing that is so sound—be humble, be merciful, don’t be ashamed of your origins, keep your nails trimmed—that it could be pinned above any manager’s desk.

Sancho’s island, called Barataria, is a little town on the Duke’s land, and the whole government is one more joke for the Duke’s amusement. Nobody expects much of an illiterate peasant. Then Sancho sits down to judge cases. An old man swears he repaid a debt while handing his cane to the lender to hold; Sancho has the cane broken open, and out roll the gold coins. A woman claims she was assaulted and is paid off with a purse; Sancho tells the man to try to take it back, and when she fights him off like a tiger, he points out that a woman who could defend a purse that well could have defended herself, and returns the money.

His cruellest trial is lunch. A court doctor, Pedro Recio, stands behind his chair with a wand and has every dish whisked away as unhealthy, and the governor nearly starves in front of a banquet. He solves a famous logic puzzle about a bridge and a gallows by choosing mercy.

On the seventh night, the Duke’s men stage a fake enemy invasion, strap him between two big shields like a turtle and trample all over him. When it’s over, Sancho gets up, goes quietly to the stable, kisses his donkey on the forehead and saddles it. He tells them he was born to plough, not to govern, and would rather sleep under an oak in freedom than between fine sheets under the weight of a government. He came into office without a penny, he says, and leaves without one.

On the road back he meets his old neighbour Ricote, a Morisco driven into exile by the king’s expulsion of his people, who has come home in disguise to dig up his buried savings; then Sancho tumbles into a pit in the dark and has to be hauled out. Even Sancho’s comic road is lined with real suffering.

Leaving the castle, Don Quixote tells Sancho that freedom is one of the most precious gifts heaven has given to people. At an inn they overhear two gentlemen discussing a new Second Part of Don Quixote by someone calling himself Avellaneda—a real fake sequel, published in 1614 while Cervantes was still writing his own. The true Don Quixote is outraged to hear that his counterfeit has stopped loving Dulcinea and gone to the jousts at Saragossa, so he heads for Barcelona instead, to prove the other book a liar.

In Barcelona, Don Quixote sees the sea for the first time, is paraded through the streets with a sign on his back, and consults an “enchanted” talking head. Then, on the beach one morning, a knight with a white moon on his shield challenges him: if he loses, he must go home and give up arms for a year. Don Quixote is knocked flat. With a lance at his visor, he refuses to deny Dulcinea’s beauty: she is the most beautiful woman in the world, he says, and he the most unfortunate knight on earth, so take his life. The Knight of the White Moon only wants the year. He is Sansón Carrasco again, and this time he wins.

Don Quixote plans to spend his year as a shepherd with Sancho. They are run over by a herd of pigs. Sancho earns money by whipping himself for Dulcinea’s sake, though mostly he whips the trees. At an inn they meet Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from Avellaneda’s fake book, and have him swear before a notary that he has never met the true Don Quixote.

At home a fever keeps him in bed six days. Then he wakes from a long sleep with a clear mind. He is no longer Don Quixote, he says, but Alonso Quixano, known for his good life as “the Good,” and he curses the books of chivalry. Sancho, weeping, begs him to get up and ride out again as shepherds; perhaps they’ll find Dulcinea disenchanted behind a bush. In his will he leaves his estate to his niece, on condition that she never marries a man who reads books of chivalry, and he dies in his bed. The priest has the notary certify that he died, so that no other author can bring him back to life. The last word goes to Cide Hamete’s pen, hung up on a shelf by a brass wire: for me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him.

Adventures follow, and most end with the knight on the ground. He attacks two flocks of sheep he takes for armies and loses his teeth. Sancho is tossed in a blanket at an inn. A barber’s brass basin becomes the golden helmet of Mambrino. Don Quixote frees a chain of galley slaves, who stone him for his trouble, then hides in the Sierra Morena, where he decides to go mad for love on purpose.

The priest and barber recruit Dorotea, a wronged young woman, to play a princess in distress and lure him home. At the inn they all return to, love stories collide and resolve, a captive tells of his escape from Algiers (Cervantes slips himself in as “something de Saavedra”), and the knight fights wine-skins in his sleep. At last his friends lock him in a wooden cage on an ox-cart, tell him he is enchanted, and carry him home.

In Part Two (1615) the pair discover that a book about them is a bestseller. They ride out as celebrities. At El Toboso, Sancho passes off a garlicky peasant girl as Dulcinea, and the knight decides she has been enchanted. The squire who once followed his master’s fantasies is now inventing them. A Duke and Duchess who have read Part One invite them to their castle and stage elaborate pranks: a flying wooden horse, a demand that Sancho whip himself 3,300 times to free Dulcinea, a sack of cats.

They also give Sancho his island, a little town called Barataria, expecting a farce. Instead he judges cases with real wisdom, nearly starves under a doctor’s orders, survives a fake invasion, and then quietly resigns, saddles his donkey and leaves with exactly what he came with, choosing freedom over power.

A fake Part Two by a writer called Avellaneda has appeared, so Don Quixote heads for Barcelona to prove it wrong. There, on the beach, the Knight of the White Moon—really his young neighbour Sansón Carrasco—defeats him and orders him home for a year. Even flat on his back, he will not deny that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world. On the way home the pair meet a character from the fake book and make him swear he never met the real Don Quixote.

Home again, he falls ill, wakes from a long sleep sane, and calls himself Alonso Quixano the Good. He renounces the books of chivalry, makes his will and dies, while Sancho begs him to get up and ride out once more. The priest has a notary certify the death, so that no other writer can ever bring him back.