Platero y yo - Text Fragments

 (...) The Gypsies

Look at her, Platero. There she comes down the street, in the copper sun, tall and straight, looking at no one...

How well she carries her past beauty, still vigorous, as if carved in oak, a yellow kerchief for a belt, in Winter the blue skirt hemmed with white!

Off to the Town Hall, to get permission to camp down, as always, behind the cemetery. Do you remember the gypsies' wretched tents, their fires, their flashy women and their starving donkeys. The donkeys, Platero! All the donkeys in Friseta must be shaking with fear, as they hear the gypsy sounds behind their low courtyards! I have no fear for Platero, to reach his stall they'd have to jump over half the village; and Rengel, the caretaker, is fond of me and also of Platero. But, to scare him, as a joke, I say in a dark, grave voice: - Inside, Platero, go inside! I'm going to shut the gate, or else they might steal you.

Platero, certain that the gypsies won't steal him, passes trotting through the gate which slams behind him with a clang of iron and crystal, and hops from the marble courtyard to the flower yard, and from there, like an arrow, breaking – brutal! – a plant in his brief getaway. (...)