Tristana (13 page)

“Well, what does, then?”

“All right,
Inés, I’ll explain how it is
. . . Listen,” she said, holding him tightly in her arms. “Having studied myself in depth, because I do study myself, you know, I have come to the conclusion that I am only good at the big things and decidedly bad at the small things.”

Horacio’s response was lost in the ensuing wave of tender caresses that filled the quiet solitude of the studio with murmurings.

AS A MORAL
and physical counterweight to those exalted afternoons and evenings, Horacio, when he returned home at night, would collapse upon the dark breast of a melancholy that was either utterly devoid of ideas or filled only with the very vaguest of thoughts, with an indefinable languor and anxiety. What was wrong? It wasn’t easy for him to find an answer. Ever since the days of his slow martyrdom at the hands of his grandfather, he had periodically suffered acute attacks of spleen, which resurfaced during any abnormal episode in his life. Not that he grew weary of Tristana during those secluded hours or was left with a bitter aftertaste from all the sweetnesses of the day, no, the image of her pursued him; the fresh memory of her many attractions set him trembling, and far from seeking an end to such ardent emotions, he longed to repeat them, fearing that they might one day desert him. Although he considered his fate to be inseparable from the fate of that remarkable woman, a dumb terror stirred in the depths of his soul, and however hard he tried, forcing his imagination to its very limits, he simply could not imagine spending the future at Tristana’s side. His idol’s grand aspirations amazed him, but when he tried to follow her along the paths that she revealed to him with such graceful tenacity, her bewitching figure disappeared into some nebulous nothingness.

Doña Trinidad (the aunt with whom Horacio lived) was, at first, unperturbed by her nephew’s melancholy, until she noticed in him a worrying indifference and indolence. He fell into a kind of waking torpor, and it was impossible to get a word out of him. He would sit motionless in his armchair in the dining room, paying not the slightest heed to the chatter of the few guests who brightened Doña Trini’s sad evenings. She was a very sweet lady, and although not yet old, she was in perennially poor health and weighed down by the many sorrows that had burdened her life, for she found no peace until she was left with no father and no husband. She blessed her solitude and felt she owed a large debt of gratitude to death.

Her troubled existence had left her with a nervous debility, a slackening of the muscles around the eyelids. She could only half open her eyes and on certain days or in certain weathers, she could do so only with some difficulty, and when the condition was at its worst, she sometimes had to lift her own eyelids with her fingers in order to see a person clearly. She also suffered from a very weak chest, and as soon as winter set in, she would be in a terrible state, coughing and wheezing, her feet and hands icy, her one thought being how best to defend both herself and the house against the cold. She adored her nephew and would not for the world have been parted from him. One night, after supper and before her guests had arrived, Doña Trini sat down, all hunched, opposite the armchair in which Horacio was sitting, smoking, and said, “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be able to withstand this wretched winter cold. It will be the death of me one day. Now if I were to go to your house in Villajoyosa, I would revive at once, but how could I leave you here all alone? Impossible, quite impossible!”

Her nephew replied that she could easily go and leave him there, for no one would eat him.

“Who knows, perhaps they would! You’re not well yourself. No, I won’t go, I won’t be parted from you for anything in the world.”

From that night on there began a stubborn struggle between the aunt’s desire to travel and her nephew’s sedentary passivity. Doña Trini longed to leave Madrid; he wanted her to leave as well, because the Madrid climate was rapidly undermining her health. He would have liked to accompany her, but how, dear God, when he could see no human way of loosening, let alone breaking the amorous chain keeping him there?

“I’ll take you there,” he told his aunt, hoping to negotiate, “then come straight back.”

“No, that won’t do.”

“I’ll come and fetch you in early spring.”

“No, that won’t do either.”

Doña Trini’s stubbornness had its roots in more than just her horror of winter, which was advancing that year with sword in hand, for while she knew nothing specific about Horacio’s love life, she suspected that something abnormal and dangerous was going on, and her instincts told her this would be a good moment to take him away from Madrid. That night her eyelids were worse than usual, her vision diminished by about two-thirds, but raising her head so that she could look at him properly, she said, “It seems to me that you would paint just as well in Villajoyosa as you do here, if not better. You can find Nature and the natural world everywhere. More important, down there you would be able to slough off all your current problems and anxieties. I’m telling you this as someone who truly cares for you and knows what this treacherous world is like. There is nothing worse than becoming unhealthily attached to someone. Cut the tie now. Distance is the best remedy.”

Having said that, Doña Trini allowed her eyelids to droop again, like an embrasure closing once the shot has been fired. Horacio said nothing, but his aunt’s words stayed in his mind like seeds preparing to germinate. The kindly widow repeated her wise exhortations the following night and, two days later, the painter no longer found the idea of leaving so very foolish, nor did he now perceive a separation from his beloved as being as grave an occurrence as the planet breaking into a thousand pieces. He suddenly felt a kind of itch deep down inside him, a demand to rest. His whole existence was crying out for a truce, one of those parentheses which, in love and war, are deemed essential if lovers and combatants are to continue living and fighting.

The first time he told Tristana about Doña Trini’s wishes, Tristana screamed blue murder. He, too, grew angry, and they both protested at the very idea of that importunate journey . . . better to die than give in to tyrants. But the next day, when they spoke of it again, Tristana seemed quite resigned. She felt sorry for the poor widow. It was only natural that she would prefer not to travel alone! Horacio agreed that Doña Trini would not withstand the rigors of the Madrid winter or accept being separated from her nephew. Tristana appeared more compassionate and, who knows, perhaps her body and soul were also crying out for a truce, a parenthesis, an interruption. Their mutual desire did not wane in the least, but a separation no longer frightened them; on the contrary, knowing that it would only be for a short time, they were keen to experience the as yet unknown charm of being apart, the taste of absence, with all its disquiets, the waiting for and receiving of letters, the reciprocal longing to see each other again, the counting off of the days until they could be together again.

In short, Horacio took to his heels. They bade each other a tender farewell: they had mistakenly believed that they had sufficient serenity of mind to withstand it, but, in the end, they felt like two condemned men before the scaffold. Once he was on his way, however, Horacio, to be honest, did not feel overly sad; he breathed more easily, like a laborer on a Saturday evening, after a week of working his fingers to the bone; he savored the moral repose, the somewhat dull pleasure of feeling no strong emotions. The first day in Villajoyosa, nothing of note happened. He felt perfectly satisfied and comfortable in his exile. On the second day, however, the tranquil sea of his mind began to stir and grow choppy, and the mounting waves grew rougher. After four days, he felt horribly lonely, sad, and deprived. Everything bored him: the house, Doña Trini, their relatives. He sought solace in art, but art brought him only dejection and rage. The beautiful countryside, the blue sea, the picturesque rocks, the wild pine woods made him scowl. Her first letter consoled him in his solitude; it was filled with the sweet pain of absence and that old cliché
nessun maggior dolore
*
. . . as well as the vocabulary they had forged together in their long, loving conversations. They had agreed initially that they would write two brief letters a week, but this turned into
a daily letter every day
as Tristana put it. If his letters burned, hers positively scalded. An example:

“Yesterday was the cruelest of days and last night the foulest of nights, worthy of all the dogs in Satan’s pack of hounds. Why did you leave? I feel calmer today though; I went to hear mass and prayed a lot. I realized that I mustn’t complain, that I must restrain my egotism. God has given me so many good things and I mustn’t be so demanding. You should tell me off and beat me and even love me a little less (no, please don’t do that!), when I get so upset over such a brief and necessary absence. You tell me to calm down, and I am much calmer.
Tu duca, tu maestro, tu signore
.
†
I know that my Señó Juan will come back soon, that he will always love me, and his Paquita de Rimini waits confidently, resigned to her
solichewed
. . .”

From him to her:

“What a day I’ve had! I tried to paint a donkey and what I produced was something resembling a wineskin with ears. I’m at my wit’s end: I can’t see color or line, all I can see is my Restituta, who lights up my eyes with her love for me. The image of my savage
monster
pursues me day and night, wilier than the Holy Spirit and more efficacious than all the salt in the
pharmasea
.” [Editor’s note:
Pharmasea
means
sea
, after an Andalusian story about a ship’s doctor who treated everything with salt water.]

“My aunt is not well. I can’t leave her. If I committed such a barbaric act, you yourself would never forgive me. My boredom is one terrible torment that our friend Alighieri neglected to write about . . .

“I’ve just reread your letter from Thursday, the one about paper birds, the one about ecstasies . . .
inteligenti pauca
—a word to the wise . . . When God launched you into the world, he clutched his august head, overwhelmed by regret and sorrow at having spent on you all the wit he had saved up to make a hundred generations. Please don’t tell me that you are worthless, that you are a zero.
I’m
the zero. I say unto you, even if it makes you blush as furiously as an aurora borealis, I say unto you, O my Restituta, that compared with you, all the good things in the world are not worth one
céntimo
; and all the glories of humanity dreamed up by ambition and pursued by fortune, are
an old shoe
compared with the glory of being your lord and master . . . I wouldn’t change places with anyone . . . No, I take that back. I would like to be Bismarck so that I could create an empire and make you its empress. My love, I will be your humble vassal: Stamp on me, spit on me and order me to be whipped.”

From her to him:

“Don’t even joke about my Señó Juan ever ceasing to love me. You obviously don’t know your Panchita de Rimini, who is not afraid of death and feels brave enough to
suicide herself
as elegantly as you like. I would kill myself as easily as someone drinking a glass of water. How delightful, how stimulating to one’s curiosity! To find out at last what lies beyond and to see the face of the
pusultra
! To be cured once and for all of that annoying little question
to be or not to be
, as Shikespeer put it! So no more telling me that you love me a little less, because . . . if you could see Don Lepe’s fine collection of revolvers . . . And I can use them too, you know, and if I get cross, bang, I’ll be sleeping out the siesta with the Holy Spirit . . .”

And the wheels on the mail carriage of the train that carried this cargo of sentimentalism back and forth did not catch fire nor did the engine travel any faster, like a steed driven onwards by red-hot spurs! All that ardor lay hidden on the paper on which it was written.

TRISTANA’S
moods were so changeable and so vehement that she passed easily from unfettered, epileptic joy to dark despair. Here is an example:

“
Caro bene, mio diletto
, is it true that you love and esteem me so very much? I can hardly believe it’s true. Tell me, do you really exist or are you nothing but an empty phantasm, the child of my fevered imagination, of the dreams of beauty and greatness that trouble my mind? Please be so kind as to send me a supplementary letter just to reassure me or a telegram saying:
I exist. Signed, Señó Juan
. I’m so happy that sometimes I feel as if I were suspended in midair, as if my feet didn’t touch the ground, as if I could smell eternity and breathe the breeze that blows somewhere up there beyond the sun. I can’t sleep, but then what need of sleep have I? I want to spend the whole night thinking about how much I love you and counting the minutes until I see your precious face again. Are the Just who sit in ecstasy at the right hand of the Holy Trinity as happy as me? No, they’re not, they can’t be . . . There’s only one thing that stands in the way of me and absolute happiness, one tiny, bothersome fear, like the speck of dust that gets in your eye and makes you suffer so horribly. And that is the suspicion that you do not yet love me enough, that you have not yet reached the outer limit of loving—but why speak of limits, when there are none—the threshold of the final heaven, because I never tire of asking for more, always more, I want only infinite things, you see, it’s either the infinite or nothing. How many hugs do you think I will give you when you come home? Start counting. As many as the seconds it would take an ant to walk around the globe. No, more, far more. As many seconds as it would take an ant to split the globe in two with its little feet, trudging round and round on the same line. I leave it up to you to make the calculations, my little fool.”