On my desk lay on old copy of Cervantes’ novel. Leafing idly through its pages, I fell into a reverie and saw Don Quixote ride forth on a hitherto unpublished adventure to defend purity of worship:
When Don Quixote returned to La Mancha, sadder but little wiser because of his misadventures, he foreswore the reading of all books of knight-errantry. Henceforth, he declared, he would read only the Bible. Precipitate as always, he settled immediately into the Old Testament and soon identified himself entirely with an offended Jehovah thundering down the first commandment to quaking but faithless Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
He followed the chosen people through the entirety of their Old Testament pilgrimage, alert always to the slightest hint of false worship, brooking no interruptions from an anxious Sancho Panza, until he had wound his way through Malachi and the Apocrypha and come to rest at the foot of Matthew, chapter two.
There it was that the faithful Sancho found him, Bible open, feet.asplay beneath the table, gazing fixedly in a sort of visionary trance. Later, he told Sancho this tale:
He found himself in darkness, he said, mounted, and following three sinister figures silhouetted against a starry horizon. They were sinister, he had decided, because they seemed to be star gazers, a sure sign of astrology, Babylon, and false worship. Seeing them stop and knock at a stable door on the outskirts of Bethlehem, he dismounted and crept closer.
Only then did he notice at his side a heavy tug balking his every forward step. By the light of the opening door, he saw, instead of his customary broadsword, an enormous weapon resting in a bejeweled scabbard and stretching its seven-foot length obliquely to the ground some feet behind him. He saw inscribed on its massive golden hilt the legend “Word of God.” Comforted but clumsily burdened, Don Quixote heaved himself toward the door.
Inside, a young woman stood before three figures lying prone at her feet. She grew round-eyed at the armored shape lurching through the door and drew her loose robe shelteringly over the bundle she clasped at her bosom. In a trice, Don Quixote’s bemused eye took in the awful scene: Here these caitiffs had crept under cover of blackest night to enact the foul ritual of creature worship. “Have done, you miscreants!” he cried. “Leave off the b.asphemous worship of this maid!”
Then, g.asping the sword’s hilt, he swept his arm upward to draw. But the blade, longer than his arm, never cleared the scabbard. Poised as always, he eyed the hilt above, the sheath below, the blade between. Mary and the maji eyed them, too. Slow miles tugged at the corners of their mouths as they understood his predicament. Not to be deterred, Don Quixote gripped the two-edged blade and slid the remainder hand over hand from its holster, knicking himself on it edges along the way.
The four continued to stare in puzzled amusement while the intruder, winded by so ponderous a weapon, reversed ends, g.asped in both hands the hilt, and brought the sword tip heavily to rest on the ground in front of him. Next moment, consternation swept all trace of mirth from their faces; the stranger was in deadly earnest. Already, he was tensing to lift the blade.
“Hold now, my good man,” protested Balthasar. “You much mistake our intent. We have come here to worship the baby Jesus, the Messiah promised in the Jewish Scriptures and to…”
“Nay, ’tis the woman you worship,” grunted Don Quixote as he strained into the upward swing of his weapon, his face apoplectic, his armor rattling from the shuddering of his overtaxed muscles — the miraculous sword weighed easily six stone.
” ‘Tis my Son they worship,” the maid mildly demurred. “Me they honor for his sake.” And so saying, she threw back the fold of her cloak to reveal the face of the infant asleep in her arms.
Her words gave pause to Don Quixote; he recalled something in Isaiah about them. But the respite was momentary, for his effort to wrestle the sword off the ground had addled his brain. “But…they bowed…before you.” His words and his breath came in staccato bursts.
“But if she hold the babe, how can we bow before him without…”?
Lamentably, Balthasar never finished his question, for at the word “without” the sword, which had been rising slowly but jerkily, reached its zenith. It wavered there, indecisive for a moment, then plunged precipitously through the backside of the arc, burying its point in the ground behind its bearer. Don Quixote’s helmeted figure followed it like the fixed leg of a compass, until, losing all balance, he crashed down backwards in a din of metal, his helmet fetching a ringing dint against the sword’s edge.
He was never sure of events after that, for he lay completely winded from the fall while the room swam dizzily about and star-like sparks exploded noiselessly overhead. In the largest explosion of all, he thought he saw Gabriel, the archangel.
“Don Quixote,” said the archangel severely, “your zeal is exceeded only by your ignorance. Know, then, that you have pursued the first commandment to the detriment of the fourth: ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’ Had you paid more heed to Holy Mother Church, you would have known before you took this flight of fancy that latria, worship, she accords to God alone in obedience to the first commandment; dulia, honor, she accords to parents and all others due our respect. The maid yonder is Mary, Mother of our Lord, due highest honors of all as being closest to her Son. The Holy Spirit so taught by her own mouth when he moved her to predict that all generations should call her blessed. These magi honor her and worship her Son with one and the same bow; they do no b.asphemy.”
The last words of the archangel came more and more faintly to Don Quixote until they seemed to echo at a great distance. Lying there, he felt his shoulder jerk in a violent twitch, no doubt a muscle spasming from his fall. But then the room and the hovering faces blurred in a final swift turn, and next moment he awoke to the clear light of day and to the anxious Sancho jostling him.
Sancho reported later that the old gentleman set off at once for his parish church, where he blessed himself thrice with holy water and then sought his priest, from whom he begged absolution for the sin of presumption: Never again, he promised, would he try to wield so wondrous and weighty a weapon as the Word of God without the assistance of Holy Church into whose hands it had been delivered in the first place.