He couldn't bear the thought of his little car rusting on a scrap heap. As he drove he worried about the fate of the Seat which he called in memory of his ancestor "my Rocinante". He could see where the main road lay by reason of the small dust puffs raised by the passing cars. "You can't trust it, Don Quixote," they would warn him and he could only reply, "It has been with me through many bad days, and I pray God that it may survive me." So many of his prayers had remained unanswered that he had hopes that this one prayer of his had lodged all the time like wax in the Eternal ear. A dog's years can be multiplied by seven to equal a man's, and by that calculation his car would still be in early middle age, but he noticed how already his parishioners began to regard his Seat as almost senile. As he drove he thought sadly of the day when he would have to find a new car. It was a day when the heat stood and quivered on the dry fields, and there was no air-conditioning in his little Seat 600 which he had bought, already second hand, eight years before.
Father Quixote had ordered his solitary lunch from his housekeeper and set off to buy wine at a local cooperative eight kilometres away from El Toboso on the main road to Valencia. PART ONE I HOW FATHER QUIXOTE BECAME A MONSIGNOR It happened this way.
Cohen's translation in the Penguin Classics of Cervantes' /Don Quixote./ G. ACKNOWLEDG EMENT I acknowledge with gratitude my debt to J.M. Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE For Father Leopoldo Duran, Aurelio Verde, Octavio Victoria and Miguel Fernandez, my companions on the roads of Spain, and to Tom Burns who inspired my first visit there in 1946.
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