Tristana (NYRB Classics)

by Benito Perez Galdos

  However, the refined tastes that once so embellished her character, thus adding even more charm to her natural graces, vanished without a trace. In her crazed obsession with moving house and with cleanliness, Josefina forgot all about her past. Her memory, like a tarnished mirror, preserved not a single idea, name, or phrase from the fictional world she had so loved. One day, Don Lope tried to remind the unfortunate lady of her past, but saw only blank ignorance on her face, as if he were speaking to her of some previous life. She understood nothing, could remember nothing, and did not even know who Pedro Calderón was, thinking at first that he was perhaps a house agent or the owner of the removal carts. On another occasion, he found her washing her slippers, with, beside her, laid out to dry, her photograph albums. Tristana, with tears in her eyes, stood observing this picture of desolation, and shot an imploring look at that friend of the family, urging him to leave the poor, sick woman alone. The worst of it was that the good gentleman also had to resign himself to paying the unfortunate family’s many expenses, which, what with the endless moving, the frequent breakages and damage to the furniture, mounted relentlessly. That soap-fueled deluge was drowning them all. As luck would have it, after one of those changes of domicile or perhaps because they had arrived in a new house whose walls positively ran with damp or perhaps because Josefina was wearing a pair of shoes that had recently been submitted to her new cleaning system, the time came for her to surrender her soul to God. A rheumatic fever, which rampaged through her body, sword in hand, brought an end to her sad days. The most depressing aspect of her death was that, in order to pay the doctor, the pharmacist, and the undertaker, as well as the bills that Josefina had run up buying food and perfumes, Don Lope had to dig still deeper into his already depleted fortune and sacrifice his most beloved possession: his collection of weapons, ancient and modern, which he had accumulated with all the eagerness and deep pleasure of the connoisseur. The unimaginably noble and austere collection of rare muskets and rusty harquebuses, pistols, halberds, Moorish and Christian flintlocks, hilted swords, breastplates and backplates, which adorned the gentleman’s living room along with many other fine objects from the worlds of war and hunting, was sold for a song to a mere hawker. When Don Lope saw his precious arsenal leave his house, he felt troubled and bewildered, but his large soul was nonetheless able to suppress the grief rising up within him and to put on a mask of stoical, dignified serenity. All he had left now was his collection of portraits of beautiful women, which included both delicate miniatures and modern photographs, in which truth replaces art: a museum of his amorous encounters, just as his collection of guns and flags had spoken of the grandeur of a once glorious kingdom. That was all he had left, a few eloquent, albeit silent images, which, while important as trophies, meant very little in terms of base metal.

  When she died, Josefina, as so often happens, partly recovered the mind she had lost, and thanks to that, briefly relived her past, recognizing and cursing, like the dying Don Quixote, the follies of her widowhood. Before she turned her eyes to God, she had time to turn them to Don Lope, who was at her side, and to commend to him her orphaned daughter, placing her under his protection; and the noble gentleman accepted this charge effusively, promising what people always promise on these solemn occasions. In short: Reluz’s widow closed her eyes, easing, as she passed to a better life, the lives of those who had hitherto been groaning beneath the tyranny of her constant house-moves and cleaning. Tristana went to live with Don Lope and (hard and painful though it is to say), after only two months, he had added her to his very long list of victories over innocence.

  *Golden Age plays by, respectively, Tirso de Molina, Juan Ruíz de Alarcón, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

  4

  THE CONSCIENCE of this warrior of love was, as we have seen, capable of shining forth like a bright star, but on other occasions, it revealed itself to be as horribly arid as a dead planet. The problem was that the good gentleman’s moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns. In accordance with the fusty old dogma of a knight sedentary, Don Lope accepted neither guilt nor responsibility when it came to anything involving the ladies. While he would never have courted the wife, spouse, or mistress of a close friend, he considered that, otherwise, everything was permitted in matters of love. Men like him, Adam’s spoiled brats, had received from heaven a tacit bull that allowed them to dispense with all morality, which was the policeman of the common herd, not the law of the gentleman. His conscience, so sensitive on other points, was, on that point, harder and deader than a pebble, with the difference being that the pebble, when struck by the rim of a wagon wheel, usually gives off a spark, whereas Don Lope’s conscience, in affairs of the heart, would have given off no sparks at all even if it had been pounded by the hooves of Santiago’s horse.

  He professed the most erroneous and tenuous of principles, and backed them up with historical facts, which were as ingenious as they were sacrilegious. He held that in the man-woman relationship, the only law is anarchy—if anarchy can be a law—and that sovereign love should bow only to its own intrinsic rules, and that any external limitations placed on its sovereignty weakened the race and impoverished the blood flowing through humanity’s veins. He said, rather wittily, that the articles of the Ten Commandments dealing with the peccata minuta had been added by Moses to God’s original work for purely political reasons, and that those reasons of State have continued to influence successive ages, necessitating some policy of the passions; however, as civilization has progressed, those reasons have lost all logical force, and the fact that the effects subsisted long after the causes had disappeared was due entirely to habit and human idleness. Repeal of those outdated articles was long overdue, and the legislators should stop shilly-shallying and set to work. Society itself was crying out for such changes, rejecting what their leaders insisted on preserving despite growing pressure from the customs and realities of life. Ah, if that good old man Moses were to look up, he would be the first to correct his work, recognizing that life moves on.

  Needless to say, all those who knew Garrido, 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 adopt Don Lope’s mad ideas and repeal the articles or commandments which he, in word and deed, proclaimed useless. If hell did not exist, it would be necessary to create one just for Don Lope, so that he could spend an eternity doing penance for his mockery of morality and thus serve as a perennial lesson for the many who, while without openly declaring themselves to be his supporters, are nonetheless to be found throughout this sinful world of ours.

  The gentleman was very pleased with his acquisition, for the girl was pretty, bright, with graceful gestures, firm skin, and a seductive voice. “Let them say what they like,” he said to himself, remembering the sacrifices he had made in supporting her mother and saving her father from dishonor, “I’ve earned her. Didn’t Josefina ask me to take care of her? Well, what better care could she have? I’m certainly keeping her safe from harm. Now no one would dare to touch so much as the hem of her garment.” At first, our gallant took exquisite pains to guard his treasure; he feared she might rebel, startled by the difference in age, far greater than allowed for by the rules of love. He was assailed by fears and doubts; in his conscience he came very close to feeling something like a faint tickling, the precursor of remorse. That did not last long, however, and the gentleman soon recovered his usual robust self-confidence. In the end, the devastating action of time dulled his enthusiasm sufficiently for him to relax the rigor of his restless vigilance and arrive at a stage similar to that reached by man
y married couples when the vast capital of tenderness has been spent and they must begin to eke out, with prudent economy, the modest income of a quiet and somewhat insipid affection. We should point out that not for a moment did it occur to the gentleman to marry his victim, for he abhorred marriage; he held it to be the most horrific form of slavery dreamed up by the terrestrial powers-that-be to keep poor humanity under their thumb.

  Tristana accepted this way of life almost without realizing the gravity of her situation. Her own innocence, while timidly suggesting to her defensive measures she had no idea how to deploy, also blindfolded her, and only time and the systematic continuance of her dishonor allowed her to gauge and appreciate her sorry plight. She was much handicapped by her neglected education, and her downfall came in the form of the tricks and snares laid for her by that rogue Don Lope, who made up for what the years were taking away from him with verbal subtlety and gallant compliments of the highest order, of the kind hardly used anymore, because those who knew how to use them are a dying breed. While her mature suitor could not capture her heart, he was adept at the skillful manipulation of her imagination, arousing in her a state of false passion, which, to his mind, occasionally resembled the real thing.

  Señorita Reluz went through that stormy test like someone suffering the ups and downs of an intense fever, and during it, she experienced moments of brief, pale happiness, tiny hints of what the pleasures of love might be. Don Lope carefully captivated her imagination, sowing it with ideas that encouraged her to accept such a life; he fostered the young woman’s readiness to idealize things, to see them as they are not or as we would like them to be. Most striking of all, in the early days, was that Tristana gave no thought to the monstrous fact that her tyrant was almost three times her age. To put this in the clearest possible terms, we have to say that she was completely unaware of that gap, doubtless due to his own consummate gifts as a seducer and to the perfidious way in which Nature helped him in his treacherous enterprises, by keeping him in an almost miraculous state of preservation. So superior were his personal attractions that it proved very difficult for time to destroy them. The artifice and the false illusion of love could not last, though. One day, Don Lope realized that the fascination he exercised over the poor girl had ended, and when she, for her part, came to her senses, she was profoundly shocked, a state from which she would take a long time to recover. She suddenly saw the old man in Don Lope, and his old man’s presumption in contravening the laws of Nature by playing the role of the young gallant loomed ever larger in her imagination. Yet Don Lope was not as old as Tristana felt him to be, nor had he deteriorated to the point where he deserved to be thrown out as a useless piece of junk, but because, in private, age imposes its own laws, and it is not so easy to disguise as when one is out and about, in chosen places and at chosen times, a thousand motives for disillusion arose in her, against which the aging suitor, for all his art and talent, was defenseless.

  Tristana’s awakening was merely one stage in the profound crisis she went through approximately eight months after first losing her honor, when she was nearly twenty-two. Up until then, Señorita Reluz, who was behind in her moral development, had been all thoughtlessness and doll-like passivity, with no ideas of her own, living entirely under the influence of someone else’s ideas, and so docile in her feelings that it was easy to evoke them in whatever form and for whatever purpose one wished. Then there came a time when, like the shoot of a perennial plant that pushes its way up into life on a warm spring day, her mind suddenly flowered and filled with ideas, in tight little buds to begin with, then in splendid clusters. Indecipherable desires awoke in her heart. She felt restless, ambitious, although for quite what she didn’t know, for something very far off, very high up, which her eyes could not see; she was occasionally troubled by fears and anxieties, sometimes by a cheerful confidence; she saw her situation with absolute clarity, as well as her own sad lot in humanity; she felt something that had slipped unexpectedly through the doors of her soul: pride, an awareness that she was no ordinary person; she was surprised by the growing hubbub in her intellect, saying: “Here I am. Haven’t you noticed the grand thoughts I have?” And as the doll’s stuffing was gradually changing into the blood and marrow of a woman, she began to find the mean little life she led in the grip of Don Lope Garrido both boring and repugnant.

  5

  AND AMONG the thousand and one things Tristana learned during that time, without anyone having to teach her, was the art of dissembling, making use of the ductility of words, adding flexible springs to the mechanism of life, dampers to muffle the noise, the kind of skillful deviations from the rectilinear path that are almost always dangerous. For, without either of them realizing it, Don Lope had made her his pupil, and some of the ideas that were now blooming afresh in her young mind sprang from the seedbed of her lover’s and, alas for her, her teacher’s mind. Tristana was at the age and season of life when ideas stick, when the most serious contagions of personal vocabulary, manners, and even character occur.

  The young lady and the maid became close friends. Without the company and care of Saturna, Tristana’s life would have been intolerable. They chatted while they worked and, when they rested, chatted some more. Saturna told her about her life, painting a genuinely realistic picture of the world and of men, neither blackening nor poeticizing either; and Tristana, who barely had a past life to recount, threw herself into the empty spaces of supposition and presumption, building castles for her future life, the way children do out of a few bricks and some earth. History and poetry came together in happy marriage. Saturna taught and Don Lope’s little girl created, basing her bold ideals on the other woman’s deeds.

  “Look,” Tristana would say to Saturna, who was more true friend than servant, “not everything that perverse man teaches us is nonsense, and there’s more to some of what he says than meets the eye. Because you can’t deny he has talent. For example, what he says about matrimony is absolutely right, don’t you think? For my part—and I know you’ll tell me off for this—I think the whole idea of chaining yourself to another person for the rest of your life is the invention of the devil. Don’t you agree? You’ll laugh when I tell you that I never intend to marry, that I’d like to remain forever free. I know what you’re thinking, that I’m worrying needlessly, because after what this man has done to me and having no money of my own, no one’s going to want to take me anyway. Isn’t that right?”

  “No, Señorita, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” Saturna replied at once. “There’s a pair of trousers for every occasion, and that includes marriage. I was married once myself, and while I don’t regret it one bit, I certainly wouldn’t bother going to the altar again. Yes, freedom, Señorita, that’s the word, although it isn’t one that sounds good in a woman’s mouth. You know what they call women who kick over the traces, don’t you? They call them free—free and easy. So if you want to preserve your reputation, you have to submit to a little slavery. If women had trades and careers, as all those rascally men do, that would be another matter. But there are only three careers open to those who wear skirts: marriage, which is a career of sorts; the theater . . . working as an actress, which isn’t a bad way of earning your living; and . . . well, I’d rather not mention the third one. I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

  “Well, given the choice, I don’t much like the first, still less the third, but I would certainly take up the second if I had any talent, except I really don’t think I have. I know it’s hard to be free—and honest. And what does a woman with no income live on? If they’d let us be doctors, lawyers, even pharmacists, or scribes, if not government ministers or senators, then we would be able to manage, but sewing? How many stitches would you have to sew in order to maintain a household? When I think what will become of me, I feel like crying. If I could be a nun, I’d be applying for a place right now, but I couldn’t stand being shut up for the rest of my life. I want to live, to see the world and find out why we’re here. Yes, I want t
o live and be free. Do you think a woman could become a painter and earn money painting pretty pictures? Paintings are expensive. My father paid a thousand pesetas for one that was nothing but a few mountains in the background, four bare trees, and in the foreground a pond with two ducks on it. Or could a woman perhaps become a writer and write plays or prayer books or even fables? That seems easy enough to me. These last few nights, lying awake and not knowing how to fill the time, I’ve invented all kinds of dramas, some that would make you cry and others that would make you laugh, and stories with complicated plots and bursting with tremendous passions, and I don’t know what else. The trouble is I can’t write, I mean, not neatly, and I make all kinds of grammatical errors and even spelling mistakes. But ideas, if they are ideas, I’ve no shortage of them.”