Read Online The Dialogue of the Dogs by Miguel de Cervantes - Free Book Online Page A

of them are useless, irredeemable vagabonds, just winesponges and maggots.
    Scipio
: That’ll do, Berganza. Let’s not backslide. Keep going, because the night is getting short, and I’d hate for the sun to light up the sky and throw us back into a dark age of silence.
    Berganza
: Silence is golden, so listen and glisten. When my master saw how well I imitated the Neapolitan canter, and since it’s easy to add to tricks once they’ve been invented, he made me some handworked leather trappings and a little sedan chair that fit on my back. Above it he put a little manikin with a small lance for tilting at hoops, and taught me to run straight toward a ring he had hung between two poles. On show days he let it get around that The Learned Dog would tilt at rings and perform other new, never-before-seen feats—which I then proceeded to ad-lib, as they say, so as not to make my master out a liar.
    We arrived, then, after a prodigious tramp, atMontilla, home of the great and famous holy man Marqués de Priego, master of the house of Aguilar and Montilla. They put my master up in a wayfarer’s hospital because he’d called ahead for himself. He then went around posting the usual handbills and, since the fame of The Learned Dog’s abilities and wit had preceded him, in less than an hour the courtyard had filled with people. My master fairly glowed to see the bounty of his harvest, and that day he played the showman to perfection.
    The entertainment began with a series of jumps I made through the hoop of a sieve, as big around as a barrel stave. My master cued me with the usual questions. When he lowered a rattan cane he carried, it was always the signal for a jump, and when he held it up, I knew to stand still. His first command that day (the most memorable of my life) was to call, “Come, friend Gavilan, jump for that randy old man you know who dyes his beard black. If you’d prefer not to, jump for the pomp and circumstance of Doña Pimpinela de Plafagonia, who used to run around with that Galician waitress in Valdeastillas. Don’t you like magic, Gavilan my boy? Then jump for the scholar Pasillas, who calls himself doctor even though he never graduated. My, but you’re lazy! Why don’t you jump? Ah, now I take your meaning—jump for the wine of Esquivias, famous as those of Ciudad Real, San Martín and Rivadavia.”
    He lowered the stick and I jumped, all the time feeling sorry for the targets of his sarcastic digs.
    Then he turned to the gallery and declaimed,“Don’t think for a minute, worthy senators, that what this dog knows is anything to sneeze at. I have taught him twenty-four tricks that even a hawk would fly in to see. You’d walk thirty leagues just to watch the least of them. He knows how to dance the sarabande and the chaconne better than their own inventors, to drink himself a cask of wine without spilling a drop, and to chant his scales as good as any Benedictine. All these things and too many others yet to tell, your mercies will see over all the days that our troop stops here. For now, let’s see The Learned Dog jump again, and from there things will really get interesting.”
    With this he kept his “senators” in suspense, and got them all fired up to see everything I could do. My master turned to me and said, “Gavilan my boy, go back and, with your effortless agility and grace, do all the jumps you’ve just done, only backwards. But you have to do it in tribute to the famous witch who they say used to live around here.”
    He had hardly said this before the head nurse of the hospital, an old woman who looked well over sixty, raised her voice and screeched, “Knave, charlatan, trickster, whoreson, there’s no witch here! If by this you mean Camacha, she has already paid for her sin, and where she is, God knows. If you mean me, fancy boy, I am not now, nor have I ever in my life been a witch. And if anybody ever thought me one, thanks to false witnesses, an arbitrary law, and a capricious,