About this time there arrived in our town one Vicente de la Roca, the son
of a poor peasant of the same town, the said Vicente having returned from
service as a soldier in Italy and divers other parts. A captain who
chanced to pass that way with his company had carried him off from our
village when he was a boy of about twelve years, and now twelve years
later the young man came back in a soldier's uniform, arrayed in a
thousand colours, and all over glass trinkets and fine steel chains.
To-day he would appear in one gay dress, to-morrow in another; but all
flimsy and gaudy, of little substance and less worth. The peasant folk,
who are naturally malicious, and when they have nothing to do can be
malice itself, remarked all this, and took note of his finery and
jewellery, piece by piece, and discovered that he had three suits of
different colours, with garters and stockings to match; but he made so
many arrangements and combinations out of them, that if they had not
counted them, anyone would have sworn that he had made a display of more
than ten suits of clothes and twenty plumes. Do not look upon all this
that I am telling you about the clothes as uncalled for or spun out, for
they have a great deal to do with the story. He used to seat himself on a
bench under the great poplar in our plaza, and there he would keep us all
hanging open-mouthed on the stories he told us of his exploits. There was
no country on the face of the globe he had not seen, nor battle he had
not been engaged in; he had killed more Moors than there are in Morocco
and Tunis, and fought more single combats, according to his own account,
than Garcilaso, Diego Garcia de Paredes and a thousand others he named,
and out of all he had come victorious without losing a drop of blood. On
the other hand he showed marks of wounds, which, though they could not be
made out, he said were gunshot wounds received in divers encounters and
actions. Lastly, with monstrous impudence he used to say "you" to his
equals and even those who knew what he was, and declare that his arm was
his father and his deeds his pedigree, and that being a soldier he was as
good as the king himself. And to add to these swaggering ways he was a
trifle of a musician, and played the guitar with such a flourish that
some said he made it speak; nor did his accomplishments end here, for he
was something of a poet too, and on every trifle that happened in the
town he made a ballad a league long.