Level A1 · Chapter 5

The great-grandfather's armour

The gentleman finds a hundred-year-old suit of armour in a corner, and spends four days cleaning it.

Engraving by Gustave Doré: Don Quixote sitting in a stable handling the pieces of an old suit of armour, his gaunt horse Rocinante standing over him and two dogs and some hens watching. — Gustave Doré, 1863. Public domain.

What you will learn

Point at an object and say whether it is here, there, or over there.
Handle three distances where English has only two.
Talk about a thing without naming it: esto, eso, aquello.

Before you read

In this text the gentleman is pointing at things the whole time: este, ese, aquel. Watch where each object is standing when he says it. The distance is the whole point, and the grammar section will explain why there are three of them and not two.

The story in easy Spanish

El hidalgo entra en un cuarto oscuro y polvoriento. En un rincón hay unas armas muy viejas.

The gentleman walks into a dark, dusty room. In one corner there is a very old suit of armour.

Estas armas son de sus bisabuelos. Tienen más de cien años y mucho óxido.

This armour belonged to his great-grandparents. It is over a hundred years old and covered in rust.

El hidalgo toma un peto y habla solo delante de todo el hierro. «Este peto es fuerte y esa lanza de ahí es muy larga.»

The gentleman picks up a breastplate and talks to himself in front of all that iron. "This breastplate is strong, and that lance over there is very long."

«Y aquella espada del fondo es la espada de un caballero de verdad.»

"And that sword at the far end is the sword of a real knight."

Aquí hay hierro, ahí hay polvo y allí, al fondo, hay más polvo.

Here there is iron, there there is dust, and over there, at the far end, there is more dust.

Aquello del rincón no es basura: es la historia de su familia. El hidalgo limpia todo esto durante cuatro días.

That stuff in the corner is not junk: it is his family history. The gentleman cleans the whole lot for four days.

Pero hay un problema: no tiene celada entera, solo un morrión simple. Eso no es bueno para un caballero andante.

But there is a problem: he has no full helmet, only a plain headpiece. That is not good for a knight-errant.

Vocabulary

The armour

las armas: the armour, the arms
el peto: the breastplate
la lanza: the lance
la espada: the sword
la celada: the closed helmet
el morrión: the open headpiece
el hierro: the iron

The room

el rincón: the corner (inside)
el fondo: the far end, the back
el óxido: the rust
el polvo: the dust
oscuro / oscura: dark

The family

el bisabuelo: the great-grandfather
la familia: the family

Este, ese, aquel: the three distances

Este peto es fuerte.

Esa lanza de ahí es muy larga.

Aquella espada del fondo es magnífica.

Distance. English gives you two settings, this and that. Spanish gives you three, and they line up with the three place words you already know: aquí, ahí, allí.

where the thing is	masc. sing.	fem. sing.	masc. pl.	fem. pl.	place word
near me	este	esta	estos	estas	aquí
near you	ese	esa	esos	esas	ahí
far from both of us	aquel	aquella	aquellos	aquellas	allí

este is the breastplate in his hands. ese is the lance leaning against the wall next to you. aquel is the one you have to raise your chin to look at: the sword glinting at the far end of the room. Think of aquel as that one over yonder, the word English lost a few centuries ago and never replaced.

Then there are three neuter forms: esto, eso, aquello. Use them when the thing has no name yet, or when you mean a whole situation rather than one object. Esto no es basura: this stuff, all of it. Eso no es bueno: that fact, that state of affairs. The neuters never stand in front of a noun. There is no esto peto.

One more thing, and it is the one that trips people up in writing: the demonstrative takes the place of the article. English says this breastplate with no the, and Spanish does exactly the same: este peto. Never el este peto.

(You may see éste with an accent in older books. The accent was dropped. Do not write it.)

Armour that was already museum stock

Here is the joke the first readers got instantly, and we tend to miss. That armour was not merely old: it was useless. A hundred years earlier a man in plate on a horse decided battles. By 1605 Spanish armies fought in the tercios, blocks of pikemen with arquebusiers at the corners, and no amount of iron stops a lead ball. Full plate had shrunk to a parade costume and a breastplate for officers.

So the armour hanging on a nail in a hidalgo house was doing the same work as an old photograph on a mantelpiece: proving there had once been a great-grandfather worth remembering. Every reader in 1605 knew a house like that. Our gentleman is the one man in Spain who takes the decoration down and puts it on.

And he spends four days at it, which is the detail that gives the game away. Rust does not come off. He is not preparing for battle. He is polishing a relic and calling it preparation.

Cervantes in the original · «Y lo primero que hizo fue limpiar unas armas que…»

Y lo primero que hizo fue limpiar unas armas que habían sido de sus bisabuelos, que, tomadas de orín y llenas de moho, luengos siglos había que estaban puestas y olvidadas en un rincón.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to his great-grandparents and which, eaten with rust and covered with mould, had lain forgotten in a corner for long ages.

Three words you already own: armas, bisabuelos, rincón. Orín is the old word for rust, and luengos siglos means "long centuries": Cervantes is exaggerating, and he knows it.