“But, even so, I’ll make an effort to tell a story, and if I manage to tell it and my fear doesn’t stop me, it’s the best of all stories; and your grace should pay careful attention, because here I go. ‘once upon a time, and may good come to all and evil to him who seeks it . . .’ And, Senor, your grace should notice that the beginnings the ancients gave to their tales didn’t come out of nowhere; this was a maxim of the Roman Cato Nonsensor, and it says: ‘Evil to him who seeks it,’ which fits here like the ring on your finger and means that your grace should stay put and not go looking for evil anywhere, and we should take another route, nobody’s forcing us to continue on this one with so many frightening things to scare us.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Sancho continued, “that somewhere in Extremadura there was a goatherd, I mean to say the man tended goats, and this goatherd I was telling you about in my story was named Lupe Ruiz, and this Lupe Ruiz was in love with a shepherdess named Torralba, and this shepherdess named Torralba was the daughter of a rich herder, and this rich herder---“
“If you tell your story this way, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “repeating everything you say two times, you will not finish in two days; tell it in a continuous way, and speak like a man of understanding, or do not say anything at all.”
“The way I’m telling it,” responded Sancho, “is how tales are told in my village, and I don’t know any other way to tell it, and it isn’t right for your grace to ask me to do things in new ways.”
“Tell it however you wish,” responded Don Quixote. “Fate has willed that I cannot help listening to you, and so continue.”
“And so it was, Senor of my soul.” Sancho continued, “ that, as I’ve already said, this goatherd was in love with Torralba, the shepherdess, who was a stout girl, and wild, and a little mannish because she had something of a mustache; it’s as if I could see her now.”
“Then did you know her?” said Don Quixote.
“I didn’t know her” responded Sancho. “ But the man who told me this story said it was so true and correct that I certainly could, when I told it to somebody else, affirm and swear that I had seen it all. And so, as the days came and went, the devil, who never sleeps and is always stirring up trouble, turn the love that the goatherd had for the shepherdess into hate and ill will, and the reason was, the gossips said, a certain amount of jealousy that she made him feel, and it went to far, into forbidden areas, and then the goatherd hated her so much that in order not to see her he wanted to leave his home and go where he would never lay eyes on her again. Torralba, when she found herself rejected by Lope, began to love him dearly, though she had never loved him before.”
“That is the nature of women” said Don Quixote. “They reject the man who loves them and love the man who despises them. Go on, Sancho”
“It so happened”, said Sancho. “ that the goatherd put his plan into effect, and, driving his goats ahead of him, he sat out through the countryside of Extremadura, heading for the kingdom of Portugal. Torralba, who found this out, went after him, and followed him at a distance, walking barefoot, with a staff in her hand and some sandbags around her neck, and in them she was carrying, people say, a piece of mirror, and a broken comb, and some kind of paint for her face; but, whatever it was that she was carrying. I don’t want to take the trouble to find out about it, so I’ll just say that the people say that the goatherd and his flock came to the Guadiana River, and at that time of year it was rising and almost flooding it’s banks, and at the part he came to there wasn’t any boat or barge or anybody to ferry him and his flock t the other side, and this caused him a lot of grief because he saw that Torralba was coming closer and closer and would bother him with her pleading and her tears; but he kept looking around until he saw a fisherman with a boat, one so small that only one person and one goat could fit on it; even so he talked to him and they arranged for the fisherman to ferry him and his three hundred goats across the river. The fisherman got into the boat and ferried across a goat; he came back, and ferried another one, he came back again, and again he ferried one across. Your grace has to keep count of the goats the fisherman ferries across, because if you miss one the story will be over and it wont be possible to say another word. And so I go on and say that the landing on the other side was very muddy and slippery, and it took the fisherman a long time to go back and forth. Even so, he came back for another goat, and another, and another--“
Just say he ferried them all” said Don Quixote. “If you keep going back and forth like that, it will take you years to get them across.”
“How many have gone across so far?” said Sancho.
“How the devil should I know?” responded Don Quixote.
“That’s just what I told your grace to do: to keep a good count. Well, by God, the story’s over, and there’s no way to go on.”
“How can that be?” responded Don Quixite. “Is it so essential to the story to know the exact number of goats that have crossed that a mistake in the count means you cannot continue the tale?”
“No Senor, I can’t” responded Sancho,”because as soon as I asked your grace to tell me how many goats had crossed, and you said you didn’t know, at that very moment I forgot everything I had left to say, and by my faith, it was very interesting and pleasing,”
“Do you mean to say that the story is finished?” said Don Quixote.
“As finished as my mother”, said Sancho.
“I tell you truthfully, responded Don Quixote, “that you have told one of the strangest tales, stories or histories that anyone in the world ever thought of, and this manner of telling it and then stopping it is something I shall never see, and have never seen, in my life, although I expected nothing else from your intellect: but Iam not surprised, for perhaps the sound of the pounding, which has not ceased, has clouded your understanding.”
“That may be,” responded Sancho, but I know that in my story, there’s nothing else to say: it ended right where you lost count of the number of goats that had crossed.”
“Then let it end where it will,” said Don Quixote, “and let us see if Rocinante can mave.”
From Miguel De Servante's Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman.
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