Tristana (NYRB Classics)

by Benito Perez Galdos

  He vanished, but his image lingered in the mind of Don Lope’s slave, and the following day, when she was out walking with Saturna, she saw him again. He was wearing the same suit, but this time he had his coat on and a white scarf around his neck, because there was a cool breeze blowing. She regarded him with a kind of brazen innocence, delighted to see him again, and he returned her gaze, stopping a discreet distance away. “It’s as if he wanted to speak to me,” she thought. “But why doesn’t he just say what he has to say.” Saturna was laughing at this timid exchange of glances, and Tristana, blushing, pretended to laugh too. That night, she could not rest and, not daring to reveal her feelings to Saturna, she had these very grave thoughts: “I really like him! I wish he would get up the courage to speak. I don’t know who he is and yet I think about him night and day. What is going on? Am I mad? Is this just the despair of the prisoner who has discovered a tiny hole through which she can escape? I don’t know what all this means, I only know that I need him to speak to me, even if only by signs, like the deaf-mute children, or for him to write to me. It doesn’t frighten me the idea of writing to him first or saying ‘Yes’ before he has even asked me . . . What madness! But I wonder who he is. He might be a rogue, a . . . No, he’s clearly not like other people. He’s the only one, that much is clear. There is no one else. And fancy meeting the ‘only one’ and finding that he’s even more afraid than I am of telling me that I’m his ‘only one’! No, I’ll speak to him, I’ll go over and ask him the time or something, or I’ll be like the hospice boys and beg a match off him. What nonsense! What would he think of me? He’d think I was a flibbertigibbet. No, he has to be the one to approach me.”

  The following evening, when it was almost dark, when mistress and servant were traveling on the open-top tram, there he was again! They saw him get on at the Glorieta de Quevedo, but because the tram was quite crowded, he had to stand on the platform at the front. Tristana felt so breathless that she occasionally had to stand up in order to breathe more easily. She felt a terrible weight pressing on her lungs, and the idea that, when she got off the tram, the stranger might decide to break his silence filled her with confusion and trepidation. What would she say to him? She would have no alternative but to pretend to be shocked, alarmed, and offended, to reject him outright and tell him “No.” That would be the polite, decent thing to do. They got off, and the gentleman followed them at a chaste distance. Don Lope’s slave didn’t dare to look back, but Saturna took it upon herself to do so for them both. They kept stopping for the most obscure reasons, retracing their steps to look in a shopwindow, but the gentleman remained as silent as a Trappist monk. In their disorderly wanderings, the two women bumped into some boys playing on the pavement, and one of them fell to the ground, screaming, while the others raced for their houses, making a devil of a racket. There was general confusion, a childish tumult, angry mothers rushing to their front doors . . . So many helpful hands reached out to pick up the fallen boy that another fell over too, and the noise only grew.

  While all this was going on, Saturna noticed that her mistress and the handsome stranger were standing a matter of inches apart, and so she crept away. “Thank heavens,” she thought, spying on them from afar, “he’s taken the bait; they’re talking at last.” What did Tristana say to the young man? We don’t know. All we know is that Tristana answered “Yes” to everything, “Yes, Yes, Yes . . .” getting ever louder, like someone who, overwhelmed by feelings stronger than her own will, loses all sense of propriety. She was like someone drowning, grabbing hold of a piece of wood, believing it will save her, and it would be absurd to expect her to behave in a decorous fashion as she seizes hold of that plank. The brief, categorical responses given by Don Lope’s little girl, that “Yes” pronounced three times with growing intensity of tone, was the profound voice of the preservation instinct speaking, a cry for help from a desperate soul. The little scene was brief and profitable.

  When Tristana returned to Saturna’s side, she put her hand to her brow and, trembling, said, “I must be mad. Only now do I realize how mad. I showed no tact, no guile, no dignity. I surrendered myself, Saturna. Whatever will he think of me? I just didn’t know what I was doing . . . I was simply dragged along by some kind of vertigo . . . I answered ‘Yes’ to everything he said . . . as if, oh, you’ve no idea, as if my soul were pouring out through my very eyes. His eyes were burning into me. And there I was thinking I knew some of those useful female wiles! He’ll think I’m an idiot, that I have no shame. But I just couldn’t pretend or play the shy little miss. The truth leapt to my lips and my feelings overflowed. I tried to drown them out and ended up drowning. Is that what being in love is? All I know is that I love him with all my heart, and that’s more or less what I said. How shameful! I love him and yet I don’t even know him, I don’t know who he is or even his name. This isn’t how love affairs should start . . . not usually anyway, they should develop by stages, with a few sly yeas and nays along the way, with some degree of cunning. But I can’t be like that: I surrender my heart when it tells me to surrender it. What do you think, Saturna? Will he think I’m a loose woman? Advise me, guide me. I don’t know about these things. Wait, listen: Tomorrow, when you come back from doing the shopping, you’ll find him on the corner where we spoke and he’ll give you a note for me. By all that’s most precious to you, by the health of your own son, Saturna, please don’t refuse me this favor, I’ll be eternally grateful. Bring me that little piece of paper, I beg you, if you don’t want me to die tomorrow.”

  8

  “I’VE loved you ever since I was born . . .” Thus began the first letter, no, the second, which was preceded by a brief conversation in the street, huddled under a streetlamp, a conversation that was interrupted with hypocritical severity by Saturna, and during which the lovers spontaneously addressed each other as tú, without any prior agreement, as if there were no other possible form of address. She was astonished at how her eyes had deceived her when she had first encountered this stranger. When she had seen him that afternoon with the deaf-mute children, she took him for a grown man of some thirty or more years. How silly! He was a mere boy! He couldn’t be more than twenty-five, although he did have a slightly pensive, melancholic air about him, more appropriate to someone older. She knew now that his eyes shone, that his dark skin was tanned by the sun, that his voice was like soft music, of a kind Tristana had never heard before and which, once she had heard it, soothed the very cells of her brain. “I’ve loved you and been looking for you ever since before I was born,” said her third letter, a letter imbued with a kind of wild spiritualism. “Don’t think badly of me if I show myself to you with no veil of any kind, because the veil of false decorum with which the world orders us to disguise our feelings crumbled in my hands when I tried to put it on. Love me as I am, and were I ever to discover that you had interpreted my sincerity as forwardness or shamelessness, I would not hesitate to take my own life.”

  And he wrote to her: “The day I found you was the last day of a long exile.”

  And she: “If, one day, you find in me something that displeases you, please be kind enough to conceal your discovery from me. You are a good man and if, for any reason, you were to cease loving me or caring for me, you would deceive me, wouldn’t you, allowing me to believe that your feelings for me remained the same? Kill me a thousand times over rather than stop loving me.”

  And after these things had been written, the world did not fall apart. On the contrary, everything remained the same on earth and in heaven. But who was he, this young man? Horacio Díaz was the son of a Spanish father and an Austrian mother from the country known as Italia irredenta; he was born at sea, when his parents were sailing from Fiume to Algeria, and was subsequently brought up in Oran until he was five; in Savannah, Georgia, until he was nine; and in Shanghai until he was twelve—cradled by the ocean waves, transported from one world to another, he was the innocent victim of the wandering and eternally expatriate life of his consul father.
After all those comings and goings and wearisome traipsing about the globe and under the influence of those many diabolical climates, his mother died when he was only twelve and his father when he was thirteen, leaving him in the power of his paternal grandfather, with whom he lived in Alicante for fifteen years, suffering more under his fierce despotism than the poor galley slaves forced to row in those heavy, ancient ships.

  And now hear the gabbled words that issued forth from Saturna’s mouth, more whispered than spoken: “Oh, Señorita, what a palaver! I went to see him, as arranged, at number five in that street down there, and I boldly attacked those wretched stairs. He said he lived on the top floor, the very top, and so I kept on going, up and up, with another flight of stairs always before me. It still makes me smile. It’s a new house. Inside, there’s a courtyard surrounded by rooms that are rented out by the week, and then floors and more floors, until finally . . . It’s like a dovecote that place, with lightning rods for neighbors and a view of the very clouds themselves. I thought I’d never arrive. Finally, lungs heaving, I got there. Imagine a really big room, a huge window with all the light from the sky flooding in, the walls painted red and hung with paintings, bare canvases, heads without bodies, bodies without heads, pictures of women, breasts and all, hairy men, arms without people and faces without ears, all the very color of our own flesh. Honestly, all that nudity was downright embarrassing. Then there were divans, antique-looking chairs, plaster busts with blank eyes and hands and bare feet . . . all made of plaster too. A big easel, and another smaller one, and resting on the chairs or nailed to the walls, paintings small and large, some finished, some not, some showing a nice patch of blue sky, as bright as the real one, and then a bit of a tree, some railings, and a few potted plants; and in another there were some oranges and peaches . . . really beautiful. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there were some pretty fabrics too and a suit of armor like the ones warriors used to wear. Oh, it did make me smile! And there he was with his letter already written. And me being a nosy parker, I asked him if he lived in that rather drafty place, and he said yes and no, because he sleeps at his aunt’s house in Monteleón, but spends the day there and has his lunch in one of those cafés next to the water tower.”

  “I knew he was a painter,” said Tristana, barely able to breathe for sheer joy. “What you saw was his studio, silly. Oh, it must be really lovely!”

  As well as furiously writing to each other every day, they met each afternoon. Tristana would leave the house with Saturna, and Horacio would be waiting for them just this side of Cuatro Caminos. Saturna would then let them go off on their own, hanging back discreetly so as to allow them all the time they needed to wander along the lush banks of the Oeste or Lozoya canals or the arid slopes of Amaniel. He wore a cloak and she a little veil and a short overcoat, and they would walk along arm in arm, oblivious to the world, its troubles and its vanities, living entirely for each other and for a dual “I,” as they strolled dreamily along or sat, enraptured, together. They spoke mainly about the present, but autobiography also somehow slipped into their sweet, confiding conversations, all love and idealism, all billing and cooing, with the occasional fond complaint or request made, mouth to mouth, by the insatiable egotism that demands a promise to love ever more and more, offering, in turn, an endless increase in love, regardless of the limits set by all things human.

  As regards biographical details, Horacio was more forthcoming than Don Lope’s slave. She would like to have been equally open and sincere, but felt gagged by her fear of certain dark areas in her past. He, on the other hand, burned to tell her about his life, the unhappiest, saddest youth imaginable; now that he was happy, however, he enjoyed rummaging around in the sad depths of his martyrdom. When he lost both his parents, he was taken in by his paternal grandfather, beneath whose tyranny he suffered and groaned from adolescence through to manhood. Youth? He barely knew the meaning of the word. He was ignorant of the innocent pleasures, childish pranks, and frivolous restlessness with which a boy rehearses the actions of the man. There was no wild beast to compare with this grandfather, no prison more horrible than the dirty, stinking hardware store in which Horacio was kept shut up for some fifteen years, with his grandfather obdurately opposing his grandson’s innate love of painting and imposing on him instead the hateful shackles of calculus, and filling his mind up, like stoppers to keep his ideas in, with a thousand and one unpleasant chores involving accounts, invoices, and other such devilry; his grandfather had been the equal of the cruelest tyrants of antiquity or of the modern Turkish empire, and was the terror of the whole family. He sent his wife to an early grave and his male children hated him so much that they all emigrated. Two of his daughters allowed themselves to be carried off and the others made bad marriages in order to escape their father’s house.

  This tiger took poor Horacio in at the age of thirteen and, as a preventative measure, tethered him by the ankles to the legs of the desk so that he wouldn’t be able to stray into the shop or abandon the tedious tasks he was obliged to perform. And if he was found idly drawing pictures with his pen, blows would rain down on him. The tiger wanted, at all costs, to instill in his grandson a love of commerce, because all that stuff and nonsense about art was, in his opinion, nothing but a very stupid way to die of hunger. Horacio’s companion in these travails and sufferings was his grandfather’s assistant, old and bald as a coot, thin and sallow-complexioned, who, in secret, for fear of riling his master—whom he served as faithfully as a dog—offered the lad his affectionate protection, covering up for any shortcomings and seeking pretexts to take him with him on errands, so that the boy could at least stretch his legs and enjoy a little diversion. The boy was docile and had few defenses against his grandfather’s despotism. He preferred to suffer rather than risk angering his tyrant, whose ire was aroused by the slightest thing. Horacio submitted, and soon no longer needed to be tied to the desk and could move with a certain freedom around that foul, stinking den, so dark that the gaslight had to be lit at four o’clock in the afternoon. He gradually adapted to that hideous mold, renouncing childhood, becoming old at fifteen, and unconsciously imitating the long-suffering attitude and the mechanical gestures of Hermógenes, the bald, yellow-skinned assistant, who, having no personality, likewise had no age, and was neither young nor old.

  Even though that horrible life shriveled both body and soul, as if they were grapes laid out in the sun, Horacio nevertheless managed to keep alive his inner fire, his artistic passion, and when his grandfather allowed him a few hours of freedom on a Sunday and treated him like a human being, giving him one real to spend as he pleased, what did the boy do? He found paper and pencils and drew whatever he saw. It was a terrible torment to him that, although the shop was full of tubes of paint, brushes, palettes, and all the other materials required for the art he so loved, he wasn’t allowed to use them. He was always hoping for better times, watching the monotonous days go by, each day the same as the next, like the identical grains of sand in an hourglass. What sustained him was his faith in his destiny, which allowed him to withstand that mean, wretched existence.

  His cruel grandfather was as tightfisted as the miserly schoolteacher Cabra in Quevedo’s The Swindler, and he gave his grandson and Hermógenes just enough food to keep them from starving, with no culinary refinements, as these, in his view, merely clogged up the digestive system. He wouldn’t let Horacio play with other boys, because company, even if not entirely bad, served only to corrupt: boys nowadays were as riddled with vices as men. And as for women . . . that particular aspect of life was the one that most worried the tyrant, and if he had ever discovered that his grandson had developed a soft spot for some girl, he would have beaten him to within an inch of his life. In short, he refused to allow the boy a will of his own, because other people’s wills were as much of an obstacle to him as were his own physical aches and pains, and seeing a flicker of self-will in another person provoked in him something like a toothache. He wanted Horacio to embrace t
he same profession as him, to acquire a taste for “merchandise,” for scrupulous accounting, commercial rectitude, and the actual running of the shop; he wanted to make a man of him, a wealthy man; he would arrange a suitable marriage for him, that is, provide a mother for the children he was sure to have, build a modest, orderly house for him, and continue to rule over his existence into old age and over the lives of his heirs and successors too. In order to achieve this aim, which Don Felipe Díaz deemed to be as noble a struggle as the struggle to save his soul, the most important thing was to cure Horacio of his foolish, childish desire to represent objects by applying paint to a piece of wood or canvas. What nonsense! Wanting to reproduce Nature, when Nature was right there in front of his eyes! What was the point of that? What is a painting? A lie, like the theater, a dumb show, and however skillfully painted a sky might be, it could never compare with the real thing. According to him, all artists were fools, madmen, falsifiers, whose sole utility was the money they spent in shops buying the tools of their trade. They were, moreover, vile usurpers of the divine gifts, and were insulting God by trying to imitate him, creating the ghosts or shadows of things that only divine action could and should create; indeed, the hottest spot in hell would be reserved for them for committing such a crime. Don Felipe despised actors and poets for the same reasons, just as he prided himself on never having read a line of poetry or seen a play; he also made much of the fact that he had never traveled, be it by train, carriage, or coach, and had never absented himself from his shop except to attend mass or deal with some matter of extreme urgency.