Tristana (NYRB Classics)

by Benito Perez Galdos

  “Up there,” said the conductor, “we have Señor Díaz, a portrait painter in oils.”

  “Ah, yes, I know him,” said Don Lope. “The one who—”

  “The one who comes and goes each morning and each evening. He doesn’t sleep here. A handsome fellow!”

  “Yes, he’s dark, isn’t he, and rather slight?”

  “No, he’s tall.”

  “Ah, yes, tall, but a bit round-shouldered.”

  “No, he cuts a very elegant figure.”

  “And he has long hair.”

  “No, he wears his hair short.”

  “He’s obviously had it cut recently. He looks like one of those Italians who play the harp.”

  “Well, I don’t know about him playing a harp, but he certainly works hard with his brushes. He asked a colleague of ours to act as a model for one of the apostles and he got him to the life.”

  “I thought he did landscapes.”

  “Oh, that too, and horses. He paints flowers that look as if they were real and ripe fruit and dead quail. Well, a little of everything really. And the pictures of naked women he has in his studio really make you sit up.”

  “Naked girls, you say?”

  “Or half undressed, with a bit of cloth that both covers and uncovers. Go up and see for yourself, Don Lope. He’s a good chap Don Horacio, and he’ll give you a warm welcome.”

  “I’ve seen it all before, Pepe. Those painted ladies do nothing for me. I’ve always preferred the flesh-and-blood variety myself. Anyway, goodbye for now.”

  14

  IT SHOULD be said that Horacio, that highly spiritual artist, overwhelmed by his intoxicatingly amorous encounters with Tristana, found himself diverted from his noble profession. He painted little and almost always without a model: He began to feel the remorse of the worker, the sorrow provoked by unfinished pieces crying out to be given final shape; however, presented with a choice between art and love, he chose love, because it was a new experience for him and awoke in his soul the sweetest of emotions, a newly discovered world, lush, exuberant, and rich, a world that demanded to be taken possession of and required the geographer and conquistador to plant his foot firmly upon it. Art could wait; he would return to it when his mad desire had died down a little, as it would, and love would then take on a more peaceful character, more suited to quiet colonization than to furious conquest. Good Horacio genuinely believed that this was the love of his life, that no other woman would ever be able to please him now or replace the impassioned and witty Tristana in his heart; and he consoled himself with the thought that time would temper her fever-pitch thinking, because such an outflow of bold ideas was excessive in a wife or an eternal beloved. He hoped that constant affection and time would whittle away at his idol’s powers of imagination and reasoning, making her more feminine, more domestic, more ordinary and useful.

  This is what he thought, but did not say. One night when they were talking, looking out at the sunset and savoring the sweet melancholy of a misty evening, Horacio was startled to hear her express herself in the following terms.

  “It’s very odd what’s happening to me: I learn difficult things very easily; I can pick up the ideas and rules of an art or even, if you press me, a science, but I can’t grasp the practical details of life. Whenever I buy something, I get swindled; I don’t know the value of things; I have no idea about housework or order, and if Saturna didn’t do everything at home, the place would be a complete mess. It’s true that everyone has a role in life, and I could play many roles, but I’m clearly not cut out for domesticity. I’m like those men who have no idea how much a bag of potatoes costs or a sack of coal. Saturna has told me a hundred times, but it goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps I was born to be a fine lady. Regardless of whether I was or not, though, I have to apply myself and learn those things, without neglecting my studies, of course, and find out how to take care of chickens and darn clothes. I do a lot of work at home, but never on my own initiative. I’m Saturna’s scullery maid, and I do sweep and clean and scrub, but pity the poor house if I were in charge of it! But I have to learn, don’t I? Old Don Lope didn’t even bother to teach me that. I’ve never been anything but an exotic Circassian slave bought for his amusement, and it was enough for him that I was pretty, clean, and willing.”

  The painter told her not to worry about acquiring such domestic wisdom, she would soon learn when she had to.

  “You’re a young woman,” he added, “with enormous talent and aptitude. All you lack are those minor details, the extra knowledge that comes with independence and necessity.”

  “My fear,” said Tristana, throwing her arms about his neck, “is that you will stop loving me when you find out that I don’t even know what five pesetas can buy and will start to feel afraid that I might turn the house upside down. The fact is that if I ever manage to paint like you or discover another profession in which I can shine and work in good faith, how are we going to manage, my love? It’s frightening.”

  She expressed her alarm so sweetly that Horacio could not help but laugh.

  “Don’t worry, my dear, we’ll be all right. I’ll wear the skirts. What else can we do?”

  “No, no,” said Tristana, charmingly wagging her finger. “If I find a way of earning my own living, then I will live alone. Long live independence . . . although I will, of course, still love you and always be yours. I know what I want. I have my own ideas on the matter. There’s to be no matrimony, so there will be no arguments about who wears the skirts and who doesn’t. I think you would love me less if you made me your slave, and I think I would love you less if I had you under my thumb. Freedom with honor, that’s my motto or, if you like, my dogma. I know it’s difficult, very difficult to achieve, because of what Saturna calls socighty . . . Oh, I don’t know. But I’m going to throw myself into the experiment. And if I fail, I fail, but if I don’t, my darling, if I get my own way, what will you say then? There I will be alone in my own little house, loving you intensely, of course, and working, working at my art in order to earn my daily bread; and there you will be in your little house, and sometimes we’ll be together and sometimes apart for whole hours, because this being together all the time, day and night, is slightly—”

  “You are funny and I love you so very much! But I refuse to spend some of the day apart from you. We will be two in one, Siamese twins, and if you want to wear the trousers, fine, do so; if you want to be one of those mannish women, carry on. But there is a slight problem. Shall I tell you what it is?”

  “Yes, tell me.”

  “No, I don’t want to. It’s too soon.”

  “What do you mean ‘too soon’? Tell me or I’ll bite your ear off.”

  “Well, do you remember what we were talking about last night?”

  “Yeth.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Of course I do, silly. I have an amazing memory. You said that in order to complete your dream, you wanted—”

  “Go on, say it.”

  “No, you say it.”

  “I wanted to have a child.”

  “Oh, no, no. I would love the child so much that I would die of grief if God took it away from me. Because they do all die,” she said passionately. “Haven’t you seen the constant procession of little white coffins? It makes me so sad. I really don’t know why God allows them to come into the world only to take them away so soon. No, no. A child born is a child dead . . . and ours would die too. It’s best not to have any. Say we won’t.”

  “No, I won’t say that. Now really, why would it die? Suppose it were to live . . . that’s where the problems would start. If we have to live apart, each in our own house, me independent and you free and honorable, each in our own household, utterly honorable and entirely and utterly free, where would our little angel live?”

  Tristana remained thoughtful, staring at the lines of the floorboards. She hadn’t been expecting to be confronted with such an awkward problem and could find no immediate way of resolving it.
Suddenly, a whole world of ideas crowded in on her and she burst out laughing, confident that the truth was hers, a truth which she expressed thus: “Why, with me, of course, where else? If the child is mine, who else would it live with?”

  “But it would be mine too, it would belong to both of us.”

  “Yes, it would be yours, but . . . no, I don’t want to say it. All right, it would be yours, but it would be more mine than yours. No one could doubt that it was mine, because Nature tore it from me. Your part in it would be undeniable, but it wouldn’t count for as much, as far as the world was concerned, I mean. Oh, don’t make me talk about such things or give these explanations!”

  “No, on the contrary, it’s best to have it out in the open. If we found ourselves in that situation, I would say: It’s mine.”

  “And, still more loudly, I would say: It’s mine, eternally mine.”

  “And mine too.”

  “All right, but—”

  “There are no buts about it.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It would be your child too, of course, but it would belong more to me.”

  “No, it would be equally yours and mine.”

  “Nonsense, man, it could never be equally yours and mine. You see, there might be cases when, and I’m speaking generally now—”

  “No, let’s stick to the particular.”

  “Well, then, speaking particularly, I say that the child is mine and I won’t let it go, so there!”

  “Well, we’ll see—”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “But it’s mine, mine.”

  “Yes, yours, but what I mean to say is that this business of it being ‘yours’ isn’t so very clear, not generally speaking. And besides, Nature gives me more rights than she does you. And it will have the same name as me, with my surname and nothing more. So why all the fuss?”

  “How can you say that, Tristana?” Horatio said with a hint of irritation.

  “You’re not angry, are you? It’s your fault. Why be . . . No, please, don’t be annoyed with me. I unsay everything I said.”

  The small cloud passed and immediately everything was once again sunshine and light in the briefly obscured heaven of their happiness. Horacio, nevertheless, still felt slightly sad. Tristana tried to dissipate that fleeting fear and, speaking more sweetly and bewitchingly than ever, said, “Fancy quarreling over such a remote possibility, which might never happen! Forgive me. I can’t help it. I come out with ideas as easily as my face might come out in spots. Is it my fault? When I least expect it, I think things one shouldn’t think. But pay no attention. Next time, you must simply beat me with a stick. Think of my latest outburst as a kind of mental or nervous illness to be cured with frequent applications of the cane. How foolish we are, getting all hot and bothered about something that doesn’t even exist, that as far as we know may never exist, when the present moment is so easy and so nice. Let’s just enjoy it while we can!”

  15

  YES, THE present moment was, indeed, easy and nice, and Horacio was deliriously happy in it, as if he had been transported to a corner of the eternal glory. He was, however, a serious man, brought up in thoughtful solitude and in the habit of gauging everything as a way of foreseeing how things might turn out. He wasn’t the kind of man so easily intoxicated by joy that he would fail to see its reverse side. His clear understanding allowed him to analyze himself keenly and to examine his immutable self regardless of what deliriums or storms assailed it. The first thing he encountered during that analysis was the irresistibly seductive effect that this young Japanese lady exercised over him, a phenomenon that was like a sweet illness of which he did not wish to be cured. He considered it impossible to live without her multiple attractions, her ineffable sweetness, without the one thousand fascinating forms in which the divinity had clothed herself when she took on human shape. He was charmed by her modesty when she was humble and by her pride when she grew angry. He was as enchanted by her wild enthusiasms as by her disappointments or sorrows. She was as delicious when cheerful as when she was annoyed. She possessed innumerable gifts and qualities, some serious, others frivolous and worldly; sometimes her intelligence judged everything with searing clarity, at other times with seductive absurdity. She could be sweet and sour, soft and cool as water, hot as fire, vague and murmurous as the air. She would invent amusing pranks, donning the clothes worn by his models and improvising monologues or whole plays in which she played two or even three characters; she would give witty discourses or mimic old Don Lope; in short, she was the embodiment of such talent and such wit that Horacio, who was hopelessly in love, thought that his young friend was a compendium of all the gifts bestowed on mortal beings.

  In the field, if one can call it that, of loving tenderness, Tristana was equally prodigious. She was able to find ever new ways of expressing her affection; she could be sweet without being sickly, guileless without being insipid, bold without a hint of corruption, and the first and most visible of her infinite graces was her utter sincerity. And seeing in her something that hinted at the precious virtue of constancy, Horacio believed that their mutual passion would last all their lives and possibly beyond, because, as a genuine believer, he did not think that his ideal would be plunged into the dark by death.

  In the midst of all this eternal passion and growing ardor, art was the loser. In the morning, Horacio would amuse himself painting flowers or dead animals. His lunch would be brought up to him from the Café del Riojano, and he would devour it hungrily, arranging any leftovers on one of the tables in the studio. The latter was a delightfully untidy place, and the concierge, who tried to restore order each morning, only added to the confusion and disorder. There were piles of books on the wide divan and a blanket from Morella; on the floor lay boxes of paint, flowerpots, and dead partridges; on the bentwood chairs sat unfinished paintings, more books, and portfolios of prints; in the small adjoining room, which served as bathroom and storeroom, there were more small paintings, a water jug full of foliage cut from bushes, one of Tristana’s dressing gowns hanging from a hook, and, scattered everywhere, beautiful costumes: a white woolen Moorish cloak, a Japanese robe, masks, gloves, and embroidered frock coats, wigs, harem slippers, and Roman peasant girls’ aprons. The walls were adorned with chasubles and Greek masks made of cardboard, along with hundreds of portraits and photographs of horses, ships, dogs, and bulls.

  After lunch, Díaz waited for half an hour and, when his beloved did not appear, he grew impatient and, to pass the time, sat down to read Leopardi. He knew Italian perfectly, for his mother had taught him, and although under his grandfather’s long tyranny, he had forgotten a few turns of phrase, the roots of that knowledge lived on in him, and in Venice, Rome, and Naples, he had become so proficient that he could easily pass for an Italian anywhere, even in Italy itself. Dante was his one literary passion. He could recite, without forgetting a single line, whole cantos of the Inferno and Purgatory. Needless to say, almost without intending to, he gave his young friend lessons in il bel parlare. With her prodigious assimilatory powers, Tristana mastered the pronunciation in a matter of days and simply by reading occasionally as if for her own amusement and hearing him read too, within a fortnight she was reciting, with the admirable intonation of a consummate actress, the famous passages about Francesca, Ugolino, and others.

  As I was saying, Horacio was whiling away the time reading that melancholic poet from Recanati and had paused to ponder the profound thought E discoprendo, solo il nulla s’accresce,* when, hearing the light steps he was longing to hear, he immediately forgot all about Leopardi and cared little whether il nulla grew or shrank.

  Thank heavens! Tristana entered with a childlike agility undiminished even by the weariness of climbing that interminable staircase, and she ran straight to him and embraced him as if she had not seen him for a year.

  “My love, my sweet, my joy, my dauber, what a long time it seems since yesterday! I was longing to see you again. Have you been thinking about me? I
bet you didn’t dream about me as I did of you. I dreamed that . . . no, I won’t tell you. I want to make you suffer.”

  “You’re worse than a fever, you are! Give me those luscious lips of yours, if you don’t, I’ll strangle you!”

  “Tyrant, pirate, gypsy!” she cried and fell, exhausted, onto the divan. You’re not going to get around me with your parlare onesto . . . Sella el labio . . . Denantes que del sol la crencha rubia . . . Goodness me, what nonsense I talk! Pay no attention. I’m mad, and that’s entirely your fault. Oh, I have so many things to tell you, carino! Italian is so beautiful, so sweet, how pleasing to the soul it is to say mio diletto! I want you to teach me properly so that I can be a teacher too. But to business. Before we do anything else, answer me this: “Shall we scarper?”

  It was clear from this mixture of street jargon and Italian words, along with other oddities of style that will emerge later on, that they shared a special lovers’ vocabulary composed of all kinds of words culled from picaresque anecdotes or jokes, or from some very serious literary passage or famous line of poetry. It is precisely such accidental linguistic encounters that enrich the family dictionary of those who live in an absolute communion of ideas and feelings. The phrase “shall we scarper” came from a story Saturna had told her, and was a cheerful way of referring to their plans to run away together; and Tristana’s habit of never addressing him by his name, but as Señó Juan—a coarse, ill-tempered gypsy—came from a funny tale Horacio had told her. Putting on the gruffest voice she could manage, Tristana would seize him by the ear and say, “So, Señó Juan, do you love me?”

  He rarely called Tristana by her real name either. She was either Beatrice or Francesca,† or else la Paca de Rimini, or even Chispa or Señá Restituta. These nicknames, grotesque terms, or lyrical expressions, which lent savor to their passionate conversations, changed every few days, depending on the anecdotes they told each other.