BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS (1843–1920) was born into a middle-class family in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. When he was nineteen, he was sent to Madrid to study law. Once there, however, he neglected his studies and plunged into the ordinary life of the capital, an experience that both developed his social and political conscience and confirmed him in his vocation as a writer. He became an assiduous theater- and concert-goer and a visitor to galleries and museums, and began publishing articles on literature, art, music, and politics. Galdós was the first to translate The Pickwick Papers into Spanish, and on a visit to Paris, discovered the works of Balzac. His first novel, La fontana de oro, was published privately and initially met with little interest. It wasn’t long, though, before critics were hailing it as a new beginning for the Spanish novel. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Galdós wrote nearly eighty novels and some twenty plays. He also managed to find time to travel widely, in Spain and abroad, and to conduct a series of discreet affairs—one of them with fellow novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. Perhaps his most ambitious literary project, entitled Episodios nacionales, comprised forty-six books, each chronicling a different episode in Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar onward. He continued to write until his death at the age of seventy-six, dictating his novels to an amanuensis when blindness overtook him. Galdós provides his readers with an extraordinarily vivid picture of life in nineteenth-century Spain; his novels teem with fascinating characters from all social classes. His masterpiece is generally considered to be the vast and wonderful Fortunata and Jacinta, but equally impressive are such works as Doña Perfecta, Misericordia, La de Bringas, and Miau. Luis Buñuel based three of his movies—Viridiana, Nazarín, and Tristana—on three Galdós novels, perhaps recognizing in Galdós a fellow subversive.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature for nearly thirty years. Among the authors she has translated are José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many prizes, including the PEN Translation Prize. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2014 she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. She lives in the United Kingdom.
JEREMY TREGLOWN is a writer and literary critic known most recently for his work on Spanish culture, film, and literature. His books include several biographies, including V. S. Pritchett, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Award for Biography, and most recently Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936. He was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement for almost a decade and is currently the Donald C. Gallup Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library at Yale. He lives in the United Kingdom.
TRISTANA
BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS
Translated from the Spanish by
MARGARET JULL COSTA
Introduction by
JEREMY TREGLOWN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Translation copyright © 2014 by Margaret Jull Costa
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Jeremy Treglown
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Darío de Regoyos y Valdés, Portrait of Miss Jeanning, 1885; Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, © Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa / Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843–1920.
[Tristana. English]
Tristana / by Benito Pérez Galdós ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ; introduction by Jeremy Treglown.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1 — ISBN 978-1-59017-765-5 (alk. paper)
I. Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. II. Title.
PQ6555
863'.5—dc23
2014025387
ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1
v1.0
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CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
TRISTANA
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Translator’s Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
WITHIN a few pages, two people have taken over our imaginations. In some ways their predicaments are formulaic: an aging, self-mythologizing, predatory yet generous man lives with an attractive, passionate, much younger woman who is beginning to sense her separate potential. We’re warned early on that although people feel themselves to be unique and complex, their specialness is generally “an amalgamation . . . of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like . . . invisible bacteria.” This is part of what makes Tristana a novel of the late nineteenth century rather than just a folktale. The story will be ironic; it will be about the ordinary illusion of specialness, yet it will also reinforce that illusion.
From the outset, matters seem unlikely to end well. “Socially” speaking—in the terms of Henry James, say—Tristana’s position is not so much ambiguous as scarcely mentionable. Benito Pérez Galdós was James’s exact contemporary and understood his society no less well than James did his own, but this isn’t a novel by James or about his world, and its ironies are more robust. Tristana, we’re told in the riddling way of a folktale, “was neither daughter, niece, or wife” to Don Lope, but “she belonged to him.” Here, the always fluid narrative viewpoint is that of local gossip. She belongs to him, people say, like “a tobacco pouch,” and if that’s a double entendre, so it’s probably meant to be. Tristana isn’t just a receptacle, though, nor is she nada, which people also say about her. Galdós liked women—really liked them, as individuals—and his novels are keenly alert to what it was to be them. It’s striking how many of his stories have women’s names. Tristana was published in 1892 and by then every Western reader knew Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but those are about married women who have taken their husband’s names. Few of the great pre-twentieth-century fictions written by men take their titles unequivocally from a heroine (Pamela is an exception; Evelina and Emma are by women writers; Eugénie Grandet and Thérèse Raquin come close but are so called because of the different kinds of power the heroines’ eponymous fathers and cousins have over them). Yet Galdós wrote Marianela (1878) and Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) as well as Tristana, and the third of these shows signs of wanting to become a feminist work. Its “substance,” according to one contemporary critic, is “the wakening of the consciousness of a woman who rebels against a society that condemns her to everlasting shame, and is incapable of offering her a respectable way of earning her living.” The reviewer was Spain’s first important woman novelist and first woman academic, Emilia Pardo Bazán. As it happens, she and Galdós had not long before ended a love affair, so she may be assumed to have read the st
ory with particular interest. He was forty-nine, the same age at which his roué hero’s counting of the years “stuck fast . . . as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century.” Don Lope is fifty-seven when the book opens, and both he and, increasingly, Tristana realize that whether or not his arithmetic is stuck, he won’t get any younger. But aging isn’t mathematically regulated, and in Tristana’s case it will be violently accelerated by illness and surgery.
How the reader interprets this disabling misfortune to a large extent determines how the book is understood and evaluated. Pardo Bazán and, following her, some recent critics have seen it as at best an arbitrary way of moving the plot along, at worst a peculiarly male kind of fictional revenge on a woman for daring to be free (Tristana’s romance with Horacio begins, after all, on one of the long walks she used to take with the maid, Saturna, despite the crude old Spanish proverb that said ‘A woman’s place is at home with a broken leg’). In life, though, illness and disability do afflict people and alter their relationships, and generally in ways that seem to have no meaning. Galdós’s plotting may be rough-and-ready, but it’s all too real. Among the realities that concern him is the role played in life by luck.
We’re nudged by the backstory into wondering where things began to go wrong for Tristana (does her name imply something essentially sad in her?), or for any of the other characters. Like most women in her world, she has been given next to no education—this even though her mother, Josefina, had literary ambitions. Her father, Antonio, was unlucky with money; only Don Lope’s generosity saved the family from ruin. Released from prison, the demoralized Antonio soon dies, and his widow falls victim to what would now be called an obsessive-compulsive disorder. (How vividly madness draws out Galdós’s always observant sympathy.) Josefina dies, too, handing her daughter over to Don Lope to look after—a responsibility that he abuses, and not only in today’s terms. The narrative asserts, albeit in Galdós’s dry, hard-to-gauge way, that Don Lope’s “moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns.” We hear about this mutilación long before Tristana is operated on, but it seems relevant that the same word is used then.
Others have been unlucky, too. Saturna’s husband was killed in a workplace accident, so she became Don Lope’s servant and put her son into institutional care, along with children born blind or deaf, whose plights Galdós again dwells on. (Luis Buñuel makes more of this boy in his powerful, very free film adaptation.) Don Lope endures the consequences of the liberality he seems to have been born with, and which is one of his more appealing traits. Yet this is no victim culture. Under siege from her sexually remorseless guardian, Tristana—who is in her early twenties—nonetheless finds “moments of brief, pale happiness, tiny hints of what the pleasures of love might be.” She will experience them more fully with Horacio. Shocked when she wakes up to the situation she’s in, she’s also realistic about it: honest both about her seducer’s good qualities and about the extent to which her problems derive from her upbringing and the values of her society. And while she’s a fantasist, she’s also pragmatic: enterprising and independent in her outings to different parts of Madrid; quick to make the most of her affair with Horacio; brave in physical adversity. If anyone is self-pitying here, it’s the rich young artist to whose tales about his dreadful upbringing Tristana listens so eagerly. Horacio is the eligible man who can’t or won’t commit, which is lucky, in a way, given that commitment is something Tristana doesn’t want.
Now everything seems to fall apart and this is where the novel may, but shouldn’t, disappoint—loose though the author’s handling of its elements briefly becomes. Horacio goes off to the Mediterranean with his aunt and on both sides the affair with Tristana turns for a time into a solipsistic fantasy buoyed up on a flood of letters. Then she becomes ill and when she and Horacio next meet . . . but an introduction ought not to give away too much. Perhaps it’s better to put forth some questions. Is the way things go now between Horacio and Tristana implausible? Does Horacio behave badly? What about the by now increasingly vulnerable Don Lope, and the new turns taken by Tristana’s ambitiousness, and above all about how she and Don Lope fetch up? The most explicit question is asked by the novel itself, at the end. It’s about the two characters both as individuals and together—uno y otro—but also implicitly it’s about how much we think any human narrative can or should tell us. Galdós’s answer is: “Perhaps”—“Tal vez.”
Literally, the Spanish words mean “such a time.” This isn’t how they should be translated but, to see the problem the other way around, a Spanish person reading “perhaps” might not know that in English the word carries distant memories of hap, meaning chance, as in “mishap” and also, strangely, “happiness.” Almost subliminally, for a Spanish writer to isolate tal vez like this can be seen as subtly heightening the story’s ponderings on the passage of time, on aging, on lost pasts and imagined futures: Tristana’s exuberant dreams of freedom, of becoming an actor, a painter, a musician, a saint; Don Lope’s quixotic regrets for a more gallant past, all those “rare muskets and rusty harquebuses, pistols, halberds, Moorish and Christian flintlocks, hilted swords, breastplates and backplates” which decorated his walls but which, in another part of himself and in the today of that part of the novel, he knows have no value except the money they can raise to help his friend, Tristana’s father. “One has what one has,” he believes, “until someone else needs it.”
Mainly, “perhaps” throws out the happily-after-after hopes associated with a folktale as well as the more pessimistic certainties associated with nineteenth-century realism. Admitted, those certainties are less than they’ve been claimed to be, whether by their proponents—especially a bit before Galdós, Henrik Ibsen, and Émile Zola—or by modern cultural historians. The fictive ironies that critics have more justly drawn attention to in all of Galdós’s work are present in Tristana long before its ending. He’s not a modernist novelist, but he is a transitional one and he expects us to do some work while he enjoys himself. Part of that is not making every decision for us. Don Lope is a bad man, but he’s also a good one. Well, which is he? The novelist’s shrug is nowhere more satirically vigorous than during a passage about the old bachelor’s self-serving opinions on “the man-woman relationship” and the urgent need for a repeal of the Mosaic law in relation to it. “Needless to say,” the narrator says, “all those who knew [him], myself included, abominate such ideas and wholeheartedly deplore the fact that this foolish gentleman’s conduct proved to be such a faithful application of his perverse doctrines. It should be added that among those of us who value the major principles that form the basis . . . etcetera, etcetera . . . , it makes our hair stand on end just to think what the social machine would be like if its enlightened operators took it into their heads to . . .”
“Etcétera, etcétera”! It’s as teasing as the blank page in Tristram Shandy. Galdós is a really funny writer and this, along with “perhaps,” is a crucial element in Tristana’s seriousness, and its sadness.
—JEREMY TREGLOWN
TRISTANA
1
IN THE populous quarter of Chamberí, toward the water tower end rather than Cuatro Caminos, there lived, not so many years ago, an agreeable-looking gentleman with a most unusual name, and he lived not in an ancestral mansion—for there are none in that part of town—but in a cheap, plebeian rented room, with, as noisy neighbors, a tavern, a café, a shop selling milk fresh from the goat, and a narrow inner courtyard with numbered rooms. The first time I encountered this gentleman and observed his proud, soldierly bearing, like a figure in a Velázquez painting of one of Spain’s regiments in Flanders, I was informed that his name was Don Lope de Sosa, a name with more than a whiff of the theater about it* and worthy of a character in one of those short tales you find in books on rhetoric; and that, indeed, was the name given to him by some of
his more unsavory friends; he, however, answered to Don Lope Garrido.† In time, I discovered that the name on his baptismal certificate was Don Juan López Garrido; so that sonorous Don Lope must have been his own invention, like a lovely ornament intended to embellish his person; and the name so suited the firm, noble lines of his lean face, his slim, erect body, his slightly hooked nose, his clear brow and lively eyes, his graying mustache and neat, provocative goatee, that he really could not have been called anything else. One had no alternative but to call him Don Lope.
The age of this excellent gentleman, in terms of the figure he gave whenever the subject came up, was a number as impossible to verify as the time on a broken clock, whose hands refuse to move. He had stuck fast at forty-nine, as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century; but not even all-powerful God could have taken from him the fifty-seven years, which, however well he wore them, were no less real for all that. He dressed as smartly and impeccably as his slender means permitted: a well-buffed top hat, a good-quality winter cape, dark gloves at every season of the year, an elegant cane in summer, and suits more appropriate to youth than to maturity. Don Lope Garrido—just to whet your appetite—was a skilled strategist in the war of love and prided himself on having stormed more bastions of virtue and captured more strongholds of chastity than he had hairs on his head. True, he was somewhat spent now and not fit for very much, but he could never quite give up that saucy hobby of his, and whenever he passed a pretty woman, or even a plain one, he would draw himself up and, albeit with no evil intentions, shoot her a meaningful glance, more paternal than mischievous, as if to say: “You had a very narrow escape! Think yourself lucky you weren’t born twenty years earlier. Beware any men who were as I once was, although, if pressed, I would say that there are no men today who could equal me in my prime. Nowadays, men or, perish the thought, gallants, young and old alike, simply don’t know how to behave in the company of a beautiful woman.”
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