What It Is
A village barber's brass basin that Don Quixote wins on the road and comes to call Mambrino's helmet. The barber put it on his head so the rain would not spoil his new hat, and, clean as it was, it shone from half a league away; the gentleman sees a knight with a golden helmet on a dapple-gray horse, where there is a man on a dun donkey. The piece has three names, and that is what makes it pay off: basin for the barber and for Sancho Panza, helmet for the one who conquered it, and a mixed name the squire ends up coining, bacielmo. Unlike the windmills, which the book leaves between two men on a plain, the basin crosses the whole of Part One and reaches an inn full of witnesses, who submit it to a vote. The gentleman keeps it until Part Two, in which he puts it on full of curds in the lions adventure, and the book never says that it has stopped being a basin for anyone other than him.
Where It Appears
The piece is desired before it is seen. In Chapter X of Part One, after the helmet cracks in the fight with the Biscayan, the gentleman swears to lead the life of the Marquis of Mantua until he takes by force another helmet equal to it from some knight, and supports the oath on the precedent of Mambrino's helmet, which the text says cost Sacripante dear.
Yo hago juramento al Criador de todas las cosas y a los santos cuatro Evangelios, donde más largamente están escritos, de hacer la vida que hizo el grande marqués de Mantua cuando juró de vengar la muerte de su sobrino Valdovinos, que fue de no comer pan a manteles, ni con su mujer folgar, y otras cosas que, aunque dellas no me acuerdo, las doy aquí por expresadas, hasta tomar entera venganza del que tal desaguisado me fizo, I swear to the Creator of all things and to the holy four Gospels, where they are most fully written, to lead the life that the great marquis of Mantua led when he swore to avenge the death of his nephew Valdovinos, which was not to eat bread at a tablecloth, nor to take his ease with his wife, and other things that, though I do not recall them, I here give as expressed, until I take complete vengeance on the one who did me such an outrage.
In Chapter XIX of Part One, Sancho reminds him of the oath and attributes to it the blanket-tossing and the kicks of recent days. The gentleman does not deny it and promises amends.
In Chapter XXI of Part One, with the rain and the fright of the fulling mills still fresh, the gentleman sees the helmet where there is a man with something that shines, and asks the question that calls for a witness.
¿no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene, sobre un caballo rucio rodado, que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?, do you not see that knight coming toward us, on a dapple-gray horse, who wears on his head a golden helmet?
Sancho describes without naming: man, donkey, thing that shines. He does not deny the shine, he denies only the name.
no es sino un hombre sobre un asno pardo, como el mío, que trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra, he is nothing but a man on a dun donkey, like mine, who wears on his head something that shines.
The narrator then tells what was there, the basin and the rain, and explains the mechanism without calling it invention: the gentleman does not see out of nothing, he accommodates what he sees to what he has from the books.
todas las cosas que veía, con mucha facilidad las acomodaba a sus desvariadas caballerías y malandantes pensamientos, everything he saw he very easily accommodated to his deranged chivalries and ill-starred thoughts.
In Chapter XXII of Part One, when he frees the galley slaves and they stone him, the student takes the basin from his head and breaks it with blows on his back and on the ground. In Chapter XXV of Part One it reappears dented in Sancho's saddlebag, who takes it to make a barber's basin of it at home, and the gentleman draws from this the fineness of the helmet's temper. When the squire cites the basin as proof that the promises of kingdoms and insulas are wind, the answer is the doctrine of the enchanters: they change the things of knights according to the will to favor or to destroy them, and for this reason the helmet seems a basin to everyone, so that no one will take it from him.
In Chapter XXXVII of Part One, he goes out to face the fiction of Dorothea with the dented Mambrino's helmet on his head, and no one in the room says anything.
In Chapter XLIV of Part One, the barber from whom he took it enters the inn, recognizes the packsaddle that Sancho is handling, and claims the basin as well. The gentleman swears by the order of chivalry that that is the same helmet, with nothing added or removed, but as for the packsaddle he refuses to pass sentence: the change from harness to packsaddle he attributes to the transformations of which chivalry is full.
de haberse convertido de jaez en albarda, no sabré dar otra razón si no es la ordinaria: que como esas transformaciones se ven en los sucesos de la caballería, as for its having been converted from harness into packsaddle, I shall not know how to give another reason but the ordinary one: that, as such transformations are seen in the events of chivalry.
In Chapter XLV of Part One, the other barber, the one from the gentleman's village, enters into the jest and declares that it is a helmet, but not a whole helmet, and Don Fernando takes the votes in secret, from ear to ear, and announces the result.
El caso es, buen hombre, que ya yo estoy cansado de tomar tantos pareceres, porque veo que a ninguno pregunto lo que deseo saber que no me diga que es disparate el decir que ésta sea albarda de jumento, sino jaez de caballo, y aun de caballo castizo, the fact is, good man, that I am now tired of taking so many opinions, because I see that there is no one I ask what I wish to know who does not tell me that it is nonsense to say that this is a packsaddle of an ass, and not the harness of a horse, and even of a thoroughbred horse.
In Chapter XLVI of Part One, the Brotherhood officers arbitrate the quarrel between the barber and Sancho, and the helmet question is resolved without deciding what the piece is: the priest, on the sly, gives eight reales for the basin, and the barber signs a note that he will not claim to have been cheated. In Chapter I of Part Two, on the visit of the priest and the barber, the gentleman still sends a message to the barber: I say this so that Mr. Basin may know that I understand him. And in Chapter XVII of Part Two, before facing the lions, he jams on his head the helmet in which Sancho, having nowhere else to put some curds bought from the shepherds, had hidden them, and the whey runs down his face.
What It Means
The helmet is the only object in the book on which the whole world is called to give an opinion. At the windmills or the flocks, the one who contradicts the gentleman is Sancho and no one else; at the inn, the barber, the priest, Cardenio, Don Fernando, and his companions vote, while the judge, absorbed, and the Brotherhood officers, who do not understand the jest, merely watch, and the result is that the basin remains a helmet in Don Quixote's imagination, the packsaddle a harness, the inn a castle. What the vote does is turn the madman's fiction into a verdict of serious people, for the laughter of those who know about the jest, and what it cannot do is change the gentleman's belief, which only reacts when what is at stake is the order he serves.
Between Chapter XXI of Part One and Chapter XLIV of Part One the gentleman does two things with the helmet that the text does not reconcile. He swears by the order of chivalry that the piece is the same one he won, and in the same scene refuses to give an opinion on the packsaddle, referring it to the enchantment of the castle. Two readings: he chooses where enchantment serves and where it bothers, and the helmet is the piece he cannot give up because it sustains the oath of Chapter X of Part One; or he is faithful to what he recalls of each object, and believes in the helmet because he won it and doubts the packsaddle because he never saw it. The outcome of Chapter XLVI of Part One is the answer of people without faith in the books: eight reales and a receipt, without anyone needing to say what the thing is.
Relationships
- The work: Don Quixote.
- Standard themes: Appearance and Reality, Madness.
- Themes in the work: Appearance and Reality, Madness.
- Characters: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Dorothea.
- Neighboring symbols: the windmills, the first time the gentleman explains what he sees through the wizard, and the inn, where the basin is voted on.