Tristana (10 page)

And adopting the noble, dignified pose that chimed so well with his appearance, and which he used so skillfully when he chose to—putting it on and clanking around in it as if it were a suit of armor—he spoke these grave words: “My child, I will not forbid you to leave the house, because such a prohibition would be unworthy of me and counter to my habits. I do not wish to play the jealous husband or the domestic tyrant, for I know better than anyone how ridiculous they can be. But although I won’t forbid you, I will say to you, in all seriousness, that it displeases me greatly to see you go out. You are, to all intents and purposes, free, and any limits on your freedom I leave entirely up to you, always keeping in mind the honor and affection I bear you.”

It was a shame he did not speak in verse, for he was the very image of the “noble father” in a Golden Age play! But the effect was rather spoiled by the fact that he spoke in prose and in slippers, which, given his straitened circumstances, were not of the finest quality. That down-at-heel gallant’s words nevertheless made an impression on the young woman, who withdrew to the kitchen to weep on the breast of her loyal friend Saturna; however, not half an hour had passed before Don Lope rang the bell to summon her again. She knew by the way in which he rang that it was for her and not Saturna, and she answered the call purely mechanically. No, he did not want any mallow tea or some warm linen, what he wanted was the sweet company of his slave, to fill the sleepless hours of that broken-down libertine, to whom the passing years were like accusing ghosts.

She found him pacing up and down in his room, wearing an old coat over his shoulders, because poverty did not allow him an elegant new dressing gown; his head was bare, as, before she came in, he had removed the cap he usually wore at night. He was a handsome man, to be sure, with the manly, wizened beauty of a figure in a Velázquez painting
.

“I called you, my child,” he said, sitting down in an armchair and seating his slave on his knees, “because I did not want to go to bed without talking a little more. I won’t be able to sleep knowing that you are upset. So tell me about your romance.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” answered Tristana, casually rejecting his caresses, as if distracted.

“Well, I’ll find out anyway. I’m not scolding you. You may be misbehaving now, but you’ve given me much to be grateful for. You loved me in my old age, you gave me your youth, your innocence; I plucked flowers when I was of an age to pick only thistles. I know I acted wrongly and that I should have left you on your stem. But it’s too late now; I can’t persuade myself that I’m old, because God seems to have placed in my soul a feeling of eternal youth . . . What do you say? What do you think? Do you find it funny? Laugh all you like, but don’t leave me. I know I can’t gild your prison cell,” and he said this with intense bitterness, “because I’m poor. Poverty is another form of old age, although I find it harder to resign myself to the latter than to the former. Being poor weighs on me not for myself but for you, because I would like to surround you with comfort, with the finery you deserve. You should be living like a princess, and here you are living like a poor orphan. I cannot dress you as I would wish to. Fortunately, you look lovely anyway, and in these difficult times, in our always ill-disguised poverty, you are and always will be a pearl.”

With gestures rather than with words, he indicated to Tristana that poverty did not bother him in the slightest.

“I know these are things that people say, but rarely feel. We resign ourselves because we have to, but poverty is a very bad thing, my child, something everyone curses. What wounds me most is not being able to gild your little cage. And how beautifully I would gild it too! I could, you know. I was rich once, or, rather, I had money enough to live not just in comfort but in something approaching luxury. You won’t remember my bachelor rooms in Calle de Luzón—you were only small then. Josefina brought you there sometimes, and the weapons adorning my living room frightened you. The times I picked you up and carried you around the house, showing you my paintings, my lion and tiger skins, my swords, the portraits of beautiful ladies . . . and still you were afraid! It was a presentiment perhaps. Who would have thought that a few years later . . . Even I, who have an infallible instinct where affairs of the heart are concerned, certainly never foresaw this, it never even occurred to me. But what a falling-off there has been since then! I have descended step by step to arrive at this shamefully miserable state. First, I had to get rid of my horses, then my carriage . . . I left my rooms in Calle de Luzón when they proved too costly. I took different rooms, and then, every few years, had to find something cheaper, ending up in this vulgar, far-flung district. At every stage, at every step, I lost more of the fine, comfortable things with which I had surrounded myself. First, it was my cellar of exquisite wines; then my Flemish and Spanish tapestries, then my paintings, then my beautiful collection of weapons, and all I’m left with now are a few hideous bits of furniture . . . But I shouldn’t really complain, because I still have you, and you are worth more than all the jewels I have lost.”

Touched by the noble words of that gentleman in decline, Tristana did not know what to say, because while she did not wish to be evasive, so as not to appear ungrateful, she did not wish to appear too affectionate either, for fear of the consequences. She dare not utter a single tender word that might indicate some weakening of her will, because she knew that the sly fellow would immediately take advantage of the situation. A thought crossed Don Lope’s mind, one that he preferred not to express, silenced by the delicacy of feeling on which he so prided himself, and which, when he spoke of his penury, prevented him from mentioning even once the sacrifices he had made for Tristana’s family. That night, he felt an urge to settle accounts as regards gratitude, but the words died on his lips, and he merely thought to himself:
Don’t forget that most of my fortune was eaten up by your parents. And can that not be weighed and measured too? Am I purely guilty? Do you not think that something should be placed on the other pan of the scales? Is this a fair way to weigh and to judge?

“Fine,” he said out loud, after a pause, during which he judged and assessed his captive’s coldness, “you clearly do not want to tell me about your romance, but you’re a fool, because you are telling me about it even without speaking, by the obvious repugnance you feel for me. Well, that’s fine, my dear,” he said, removing her from his lap and standing up. “Frankly, I’m not accustomed to arousing feelings of disgust in other people, nor with having to make so many requests in order to receive what is my due. I have more pride than that. What did you think? That I was going to get down on my knees and beg? Keep your youthful charms for one of the feeble young fellows you get nowadays, the sort one cannot call a man without belittling the word or raising the fellow up to ridiculous heights. Go to your room and think about what we have said. It might be that your romance will turn out to be a matter of complete indifference to me . . . I could see it as an easy way for you to learn by experience the gulf that can exist between one man and another . . . But it might well be, too, that it sticks in my gullet and that, without getting overly worked up about it, for the matter hardly merits it—why, it’s like crushing ants—I may have to teach you the lesson myself.”

So incensed was Tristana by this threat—which she must have found extraordinarily insolent—that she felt, rising up in her breast, the usual sense of loathing her tyrant aroused in her. And as always, when she experienced those tumultuous feelings, her cowardice instantly vanished and she felt strong enough to confront him, and attack him with a valiant riposte.

“You don’t frighten me, you know. Kill me if you want.”

And seeing her leave the room in that determined, arrogant fashion, Don Lope clutched his head and said to himself, “She clearly isn’t afraid of me anymore. So my suspicions were right.”

Meanwhile, Tristana ran to the kitchen in search of Saturna, and after much whispering and many tears, she issued her orders, which were more or less as follows: “Tomorrow, when you go to collect his letter, tell him not to bring the carriage and not to go out, but to wait for me in his studio, because I’ll be there even if it kills me . . . Oh, and tell him to send his model away, if he has one tomorrow, and to receive no one else . . . he must be alone. If that man does kill me, then at least he’ll have good reason to.”

AND FROM
that day on, they no longer went for walks.

They did, however, stroll about in the brief field of his studio, from the pole of the ideal to that of reality; they traveled the whole globe, from the human to the divine, never quite able to determine the dividing line between the two, because the human seemed to them the very stuff of heaven, and the divine, in their eyes, clothed itself in mortal flesh. When their joyful intoxication allowed Tristana to take in the world in which she spent those sweet hours, a new aspiration revealed itself to her spirit: art, which up until then had been merely a dream to her, but which now she could see and understand at first hand. Her imagination lit up and her eyes were enchanted by the human and inanimate forms that her lover translated from Nature and with which he filled his studio; and although she had seen paintings before, she had never observed how they were made from such close quarters. She would stick her finger into the fresh paint, thinking that she would thus gain a better appreciation of the secrets of the painted picture and catch it in the midst of its mysterious gestation. After watching Horacio work, she was even more captivated by that delicious art, which seemed so simply done, and she herself felt a desire to try her own skills. He placed a palette in her left hand, a brush in her right, and encouraged her to copy something. At first, alas, amid much laughter and frustration, she could only cover the canvas with shapeless blotches; on the second day, amazingly enough, she managed to mix a few colors and apply them to the right spot and even blend them together rather well. How funny! What if she turned out to be a painter too! She clearly had talent, for her hand became less clumsy by the hour, and if her hand couldn’t help her, then her mind would march arrogantly ahead of her, knowing
how it was done
, even though she couldn’t actually do it. Disheartened by the difficulties encountered, she would grow impatient, and Horacio would laugh, saying, “It’s not a game, you know!”

She complained bitterly because she had never had at her side people who might have been able to recognize her aptitude and encourage her to apply it to the study of one art form or another.

“It seems to me now that if I had been taught drawing when I was a child, I would be able to paint now and live independently, earning my own living from my honest labors. But it never occurred to my poor mama to give me anything more than the kind of insubstantial education intended to help girls bring a good son-in-law home, namely, being able to play the piano a little, having a smattering of French, and a few other such accomplishments. If they had at least taught me a few languages, so that, when I was left alone and poor, I could have become a language teacher! And that wretched man has educated me for nothing but idleness and his own pleasure, Turkish-fashion. And I am utterly useless. As you see, I love painting; I feel a real vocation for it, a facility. Or am I being immodest? No, don’t tell me. Praise me, encourage me. Well, if difficulties are to be overcome with willpower, patience, and application, then I will overcome them, and I will be a painter, and we will study together and my paintings—you’ll be green with envy!—will make yours look puny. No, that’s not true, you are the very king of painters! Don’t get annoyed with me; you are, because I say so. I have an instinct for these things. I may not know how to make the paintings myself, but I have excellent judgment.”

These painterly ambitions, these arrogant outbursts, delighted kindly Horacio, who, shortly after their first intimate encounters, began to notice that while his young lover was growing in his eyes, he was shrinking in hers. This surprised him and
almost
began to irritate him, because he had imagined that Tristana would be his subordinate as regards intelligence and willpower, the sort of wife who lives off the moral and intellectual sap of her husband and who sees and feels with his eyes and heart. It turned out, however, that the young woman had her own ideas, hurling herself into the empty spaces of thought and displaying the boldest of aspirations.

“Look, love of my life,” she would say to him during the long rambling conversations that propelled them from the transports of love to life’s most serious problems, “I love you with all my heart, and I know that I could never live without you. Every woman aspires to marry the man she loves, but not me. According to society’s rules, I cannot marry. I couldn’t marry anyone, not even you, not with my head held high, because, however kind and good you might be, I would always have the uncomfortable feeling that I had given you less than you deserve, and I would be afraid that, sooner or later, in a moment of bad temper or tiredness, you would say to me that you’d had to close your eyes in order to make me your wife. Is that pride or something else? I love you and will always love you, but I want to be free. That’s why I need to find a way of making a living. Difficult, isn’t it? Saturna pokes fun at me. According to her, there are only three careers open to women: marriage, the theater, and . . . well, frankly, I don’t fancy any of them. So we’ll have to find another. But I wonder: Is it madness to have a talent and cultivate it and live by it? Do I understand so little of the world that I’m thinking what’s possible is, in fact, impossible? You tell me, because you know more than I do.”

And after much beating about the bush, Horacio, deeply embarrassed, would find himself agreeing with Saturna.

“But you,” he would add, “you are an exception, and the rule doesn’t apply to you. You will find the formula, you will perhaps resolve the prickly problem of the free woman—”