“For that only?” replied Don Quixote; “why, if for being lovers they send people to the galleys I might have been rowing in them long ago.”
“The love is not the sort your worship is thinking of,” said the galley slave; “mine was that I loved a washerwoman’s basket of clean linen so well, and held it so close in my embrace, that if the arm of the law had not forced it from me, I should never have let it go of my own will to this moment; I was caught in the act, there was no occasion for torture, the case was settled, they treated me to a hundred lashes on the back, and three years of gurapas besides, and that was the end of it.”
“What are gurapas?” asked Don Quixote.
“Gurapas are galleys,” answered the galley slave, who was a young man of about four-and-twenty, and said he was a native of Piedrahita.
Don Quixote asked the same question of the second, who made no reply, so downcast and melancholy was he; but the first answered for him, and said, “He, sir, goes as a canary, I mean as a musician and a singer.”
“What!” said Don Quixote, “for being musicians and singers are people sent to the galleys too?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the galley slave, “for there is nothing worse than singing under suffering.”
“On the contrary, I have heard say,” said Don Quixote, “that he who sings scares away his woes.”
“Here it is the reverse,” said the galley slave; “for he who sings once weeps all his life.”
“I do not understand it,” said Don Quixote; but one of the guards said to him, “Sir, to sing under suffering means with the non sancta fraternity to confess under torture; they put this sinner to the torture and he confessed his crime, which was being a cuatrero, that is a cattle-stealer, and on his confession they sentenced him to six years in the galleys, besides two hundred lashes that he has already had on the back; and he is always dejected and downcast because the other thieves that were left behind and that march here ill-treat, and snub, and jeer, and despise him for confessing and not having spirit enough to say nay; for, say they, ‘nay’ has no more letters in it than ‘yea,’ and a culprit is well off when life or death with him depends on his own tongue and not on that of witnesses or evidence; and to my thinking they are not very far out.”