Level A2 · Chapter 22
The Basque squire
Don Quixote attacks a coach on the Toledo road and fights a Basque squire. At the end, Cervantes claims the book was written by somebody else.
What you will learn
- Use the irregular preterite of ser, ir, estar, tener and hacer.
- Tell the story of a fight and say how each person was.
- Recognise that these forms never carry a written accent.
Before you read
Five of the most-used verbs in Spanish refuse the endings you learned last lesson. They change their stem and take a different set of endings, and they are so frequent that you cannot go round them. Hunt for them in the text: fue, fueron, tuvo, estuvo, hizo. Notice that none of them has a written accent.The story in easy Spanish
Dos días después de los molinos, los dos amigos fueron por un camino de Toledo.
Two days after the windmills, the two friends went along a road in Toledo.
Por allí pasó un coche grande con una señora dentro.
A big coach with a lady inside came past.
Detrás fueron dos frailes en mulas altas.
Behind it went two friars on tall mules.
Para don Quijote aquello fue clarísimo: los frailes robaron a una princesa.
To Don Quixote it was perfectly clear: the friars had stolen a princess.
El caballero atacó y los dos frailes tuvieron mucho miedo.
The knight attacked and the two friars were very frightened.
Escaparon corriendo por el campo y no volvieron nunca.
They fled across the field at a run and never came back.
Entonces apareció el escudero de la señora, un hombre vizcaíno.
Then the lady’s squire appeared, a Basque man.
Aquel hombre tuvo muy mal genio y habló un español extraño.
That man had a very bad temper and spoke odd Spanish.
En un segundo estuvo listo para pelear.
In one second he was ready to fight.
El vizcaíno se hizo un escudo con una almohada del coche.
The Basque made himself a shield out of a cushion from the coach.
Los dos levantaron las espadas y fueron el uno contra el otro.
The two of them raised their swords and went at each other.
Don Quijote ganó la pelea y le cortó media oreja.
Don Quixote won the fight and cut off half his ear.
La señora estuvo pálida de miedo dentro del coche.
The lady was pale with fear inside the coach.
Aquí Cervantes hizo una broma muy rara con el lector.
At this point Cervantes played a very odd joke on the reader.
Contó que encontró el resto de la historia en Toledo, en un cuaderno árabe.
He said he found the rest of the story in Toledo, in an Arabic notebook.
El autor de ese cuaderno fue Cide Hamete Benengeli, historiador arábigo.
The author of that notebook was Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian.
Vocabulary
On the road
- el coche
- the coach, the carriage
- el fraile
- the friar
- la mula
- the mule
- el escudero
- the squire
- la señora
- the lady
The fight
- la espada
- the sword
- el escudo
- the shield
- la almohada
- the pillow, the cushion
- la oreja
- the ear
- pelear
- to fight
How each one was
- tener miedo
- to be afraid
- el mal genio
- the bad temper
- pálido / pálida
- pale
- listo / lista
- ready
- extraño / extraña
- strange, odd
The book inside the book
- el cuaderno
- the notebook
- el autor
- the author
- el historiador
- the historian
- árabe
- Arabic, Arab
- la broma
- the joke
Irregular preterite: ser, ir, estar, tener, hacer
Los dos amigos fueron por un camino de Toledo.
Los frailes tuvieron mucho miedo.
El vizcaíno se hizo un escudo con una almohada.
These five verbs do two things at once: they change their stem, and they swap the regular endings for a set of their own. The good news is that once you know the pattern of estar you already know tener, and the pattern covers a dozen more verbs you will meet later.
| ser / ir | estar | tener | hacer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yo | fui | estuve | tuve | hice |
| tú | fuiste | estuviste | tuviste | hiciste |
| él, ella, usted | fue | estuvo | tuvo | hizo |
| nosotros | fuimos | estuvimos | tuvimos | hicimos |
| vosotros | fuisteis | estuvisteis | tuvisteis | hicisteis |
| ellos, ellas, ustedes | fueron | estuvieron | tuvieron | hicieron |
Four points that save you trouble
Ser and ir are the same word in this tense. Not similar, identical. Fue mi maestro is he was my teacher, fue a Toledo is he went to Toledo. Spanish has lived with this for a thousand years and nobody is ever confused, because a destination after the verb means ir and a description means ser.
No accents anywhere. Last lesson the accent was compulsory on hablé and habló. Here it is compulsory that there is none: fui, tuve, estuvo, hizo. Writing fuí or tuvó is a spelling mistake, and a very visible one.
Hacer swaps c for z in the él form. Hice but hizo. The sound stays the same, the letter changes so that it keeps sounding the same before an o.
Estar and tener share one skeleton, estuv- and tuv-, and so do a family of verbs coming later: poder gives pude, poner gives puse, saber gives supe, querer gives quise, venir gives vine, decir gives dije. All of them take these same endings with no accents.
One idiom to file away now: tener miedo is to be afraid, literally to have fear. So the friars tuvieron mucho miedo, they got very frightened. Spanish uses tener for hunger, thirst, cold, heat, fear, sleep and being right, where English uses to be.
The author who says he is not the author
The fight stops mid-swing. Cervantes tells us his source ran out, that he was in the market of Toledo, that a boy was selling old papers, and that one of them turned out to be a history of Don Quixote written in Arabic by Cide Hamete Benengeli. From that point the book you are holding is, officially, a translation.
It is a parody. Every book of chivalry claimed to come from an ancient manuscript found in a tomb or brought from Greece, so Cervantes obeys the convention and then poisons it. His invented source is an Arab, and in the Spain of 1605, thirty years before the last Moriscos were expelled, that means a narrator whom the reader has been trained to distrust. Cervantes keeps saying so: the man is a historian, so he is careful, but he is also a Moor, so perhaps he lies.
The effect is that no version of events in this book is ever the final one. There is Cide Hamete who wrote it, an anonymous Morisco who translated it, and a narrator who edits both. Four hundred years later half of modern fiction is still using the trick, and it starts here, with a Basque squire frozen in mid-air with his sword up.
Cervantes in the original
Historia de don Quijote de la Mancha, escrita por Cide Hamete Benengeli, historiador arábigo.
History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, Arab historian.
This is the title Cervantes claims to have read on the notebook in the market of Toledo. He pretends he is not the author but the reader of an Arabic book, which is exactly what every book of chivalry pretended. The word arábigo is the old form of árabe.