Tristana (2 page)

Mainly, “perhaps” throws out the happily-after-after hopes associated with a folktale as well as the more pessimistic certainties associated with nineteenth-century realism. Admitted, those certainties are less than they’ve been claimed to be, whether by their proponents—especially a bit before Galdós, Henrik Ibsen, and Émile Zola—or by modern cultural historians. The fictive ironies that critics have more justly drawn attention to in all of Galdós’s work are present in
Tristana
long before its ending. He’s not a modernist novelist, but he is a transitional one and he expects us to do some work while he enjoys himself. Part of that is not making every decision for us. Don Lope is a bad man, but he’s also a good one. Well, which is he? The novelist’s shrug is nowhere more satirically vigorous than during a passage about the old bachelor’s self-serving opinions on “the man-woman relationship” and the urgent need for a repeal of the Mosaic law in relation to it. “Needless to say,” the narrator says, “all those who knew [him], 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 . . .”

“
Etcétera, etcétera
”! It’s as teasing as the blank page in
Tristram Shandy
. Galdós is a really funny writer and this, along with “perhaps,” is a crucial element in
Tristana
’s seriousness, and its sadness.

—
JEREMY TREGLOWN

IN THE
populous quarter of Chamberí, toward the water tower end rather than Cuatro Caminos, there lived, not so many years ago, an agreeable-looking gentleman with a most unusual name, and he lived not in an ancestral mansion—for there are none in that part of town—but in a cheap, plebeian rented room, with, as noisy neighbors, a tavern, a café, a shop selling milk fresh from the goat, and a narrow inner courtyard with numbered rooms. The first time I encountered this gentleman and observed his proud, soldierly bearing, like a figure in a Velázquez painting of one of Spain’s regiments in Flanders, I was informed that his name was Don Lope de Sosa, a name with more than a whiff of the theater about it
*
and worthy of a character in one of those short tales you find in books on rhetoric; and that, indeed, was the name given to him by some of his more unsavory friends; he, however, answered to Don Lope Garrido.
†
In time, I discovered that the name on his baptismal certificate was Don Juan López Garrido; so that sonorous Don Lope must have been his own invention, like a lovely ornament intended to embellish his person; and the name so suited the firm, noble lines of his lean face, his slim, erect body, his slightly hooked nose, his clear brow and lively eyes, his graying mustache and neat, provocative goatee, that he really could not have been called anything else. One had no alternative but to call him Don Lope.

The age of this excellent gentleman, in terms of the figure he gave whenever the subject came up, was a number as impossible to verify as the time on a broken clock, whose hands refuse to move. He had stuck fast at forty-nine, as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century; but not even all-powerful God could have taken from him the fifty-seven years, which, however well he wore them, were no less real for all that. He dressed as smartly and impeccably as his slender means permitted: a well-buffed top hat, a good-quality winter cape, dark gloves at every season of the year, an elegant cane in summer, and suits more appropriate to youth than to maturity. Don Lope Garrido—just to whet your appetite—was a skilled strategist in the war of love and prided himself on having stormed more bastions of virtue and captured more strongholds of chastity than he had hairs on his head. True, he was somewhat spent now and not fit for very much, but he could never quite give up that saucy hobby of his, and whenever he passed a pretty woman, or even a plain one, he would draw himself up and, albeit with no evil intentions, shoot her a meaningful glance, more paternal than mischievous, as if to say: “You had a very narrow escape! Think yourself lucky you weren’t born twenty years earlier. Beware any men who were as I once was, although, if pressed, I would say that there are no men today who could equal me in my prime. Nowadays, men or, perish the thought, gallants, young and old alike, simply don’t know how to behave in the company of a beautiful woman.”

With no profession, good Don Lope, had, in happier times, enjoyed a modest fortune, though all that remained of this was some property in Toledo, which provided him with an ever-decreasing income, and he now spent his time either in idle, agreeable chatter at his club or else methodically doing the rounds of his friends, meeting up with them in cafés or centers—perhaps a better word would be “dark corners”—of pleasure that need not be named here. The only reason he lived in such an out-of-the-way place was the cheapness of the accommodation, which, even with the added expense of the tram fare, was very reasonable indeed, and there were other benefits too: the better light, the fresher air, and the broad, smiling horizon. Not that Garrido was a night owl: he was up each morning at eight, and it took him two whole hours to shave and generally spruce himself up, for he took the same kind of meticulous, leisurely care over his appearance as might a man of the world. He spent the rest of the morning out and about until one o’clock, when he promptly partook of a frugal lunch. He then resumed his peregrinations until seven or eight in the evening, at which hour he ate a no less sober supper, whose sparseness even the most elementary of culinary arts could ill disguise. One thing we should point out is that while Don Lope was all affability and politeness at, for example, the café or his club, at home, he blended courteous but colloquial language with the indisputable authority of the master.

With him lived two women, one a maid, the other a lady, at least in name, for they worked together in the kitchen and performed the same simple household tasks, with no hierarchical differences and in perfect, sisterly camaraderie, a relationship determined more by the abasement of the lady than by any conceit on the part of the maid. The latter’s name was Saturna, and she was tall and thin, with dark eyes, rather mannish in appearance and, having recently been widowed, dressed in deepest mourning. The recent loss of her husband—a bricklayer who had fallen while working on the scaffolding where the new Bank was being built—had meant that she could put her son in the local hospice for children of the poor and find employment as a maid, her first job being in Don Lope’s house—hardly an outpost in the Land of Plenty. The other woman—whom one would sometimes assume to be a servant and sometimes not, for she sat at the table with the master and addressed him informally as
tú
—was young, pretty, and slender, and her skin was the almost implausible white of pure alabaster; she had the palest of cheeks and dark eyes more notable for their vivacity and brightness than for their size; her remarkable eyebrows looked as if they had been drawn with the tip of the very finest of brushes; her delicate mouth, with its rather plump, round lips, was so red it seemed to contain all the blood that her face lacked; her small teeth were like pieces of concentrated crystal; her hair, caught up in a graceful tangle on the top of her head, was brown and very fine, and had the sheen of plaited silk. This singular creature’s most marked characteristic, however, was her ermine-white purity and cleanliness, for she remained unsoiled by even the most indelicate of household chores. Her perfect hands—ah, what hands!—had a mysterious quality, as did her body and her clothes, which seemed to announce to the lower orders of the physical world:
La vostra miseria non mi tange
.
‡
Everything about her gave the impression of an intrinsic, elemental cleanliness that had been spared all contact with things unclean or impure. When she was in her ordinary clothes, with chamois leather in hand, the dust and dirt somehow respected her; and when she put on her purple dressing gown adorned with white rosettes, with her hair in a chignon pierced by gold-tipped pins, she was the very image of an aristocratic Japanese lady—what else?—given that she seemed entirely made out of paper, the same warm, flexible, living paper on which those inspired Oriental artists painted the divine and the human, the seriously comical and the comically serious. Her matte white face was made of paper, as were her dress and her fine, shapely, incomparable hands.

We should, at this point, explain the relationship between Tristana—for that was the lovely girl’s name—and the great Don Lope, lord and master of that henhouse, since it would be wrong to view them as a family. In the neighborhood, and among the few people who dropped in to visit or to snoop, there was a theory to suit every taste, and the various theories put forth on this important matter were, variously, either in fashion or out. For a period of about two or three months, it was held to be the gospel truth that the young lady was Don Lope’s niece. Then a contrary view—that she was his daughter—took hold, and there were even some who claimed to have heard her say “Papa,” just like one of those talking dolls. After which another opinion blew in, according to which she was none other than Don Lope’s legal wife. More time passed and these vain conjectures vanished without a trace, and in the view of the surrounding populace, Tristana was neither daughter, niece, or wife, in fact, she was no relation of the great Don Lope’s at all; she was nothing, and that was all there was to it, for she belonged to him as if she were a tobacco pouch, an item of furniture, or an article of clothing, with no one to dispute his ownership; and she seemed perfectly resigned to being nothing but a tobacco pouch!

WELL,
not entirely resigned, no, because every now and then, in the year prior to the one we will be describing here, that pretty little paper doll would stamp her feet in an attempt to show that she had the character and consciousness of a free woman. Her master ruled over her with a despotism one might term “seductive,” imposing his will on her with tender authority, even, sometimes, with cuddles and caresses, thus destroying in her all initiative, apart from that required for incidental, unimportant things. She was twenty-one when, along with the doubts filling her mind about her very strange social situation, there awoke in her a desire for independence. When this process began, she still had the behavior and habits of a child; her eyes did not know how to look to the future, or if they did, they saw nothing. But one day, she noticed the shadow that her present life cast on all future spaces, and that image of herself, as a distorted, broken shadow stretching into the distance, occupied her mind for a long time, suggesting a thousand troubling, confusing thoughts.

In order to understand Tristana’s anxieties, we need to shed more light on Don Lope, so that you do not judge him to be either better or worse than he actually was. He believed that he was practicing, in all its dogmatic purity, the art of being a gentleman, or perhaps a knight, of the sedentary rather than the errant variety, but he interpreted the laws of that religion with excessive freedom, producing a very complex morality, which, despite being very much his own, was also quite widespread, the abundant fruit of the times we live in; a morality which, although it seemed to have sprung solely from him, was, in fact, an amalgamation in his mind of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like the invisible bacteria that inhabit the physical atmosphere. As an external phenomenon, Don Lope’s knightliness was obvious to everyone: he never took anything that was not his, and when it came to money matters, he carried his delicacy to quixotic extremes. He dealt gracefully with his penurious state and disguised it with consummate dignity, giving frequent proof of self-abnegation and stoically condemning materialistic appetites. For him, money was never anything more than base metal and, as such, merited the scorn of any wellborn person, regardless of the joy that might be gained from earning it. The ease with which money slipped through his fingers was further evidence of this disdain, far more convincing, indeed, than his vituperations against what he judged to be the root of all evil and the reason why there were now so few true gentlemen. As regards personal decorum, he was so meticulous, his susceptibilities so easily bruised, that he would not tolerate the most insignificant of slights or ambiguities of language that might contain within them the merest hint of disrespect. He had fought many a duel in his time, and so keen was he to maintain the laws governing a man’s personal dignity that he became a living rule book on affairs of honor, and if anyone had any doubts about the intricate etiquette of dueling, the great Don Lope would be consulted and he would opine and pronounce with priestly authority, as if he were giving his opinion on an important theological or philosophical problem.

The point of honor was, for Don Lope, the be-all and end-all of the science of living, which he rounded off with a series of totally conflicting views. While his disinterestedness might be considered a virtue, his scorn for the State and for Justice, as human organisms, could not. He loathed the legal profession, and as for the footling employees of the tax office, who stood between the institutions and the taxpayer with outstretched hand, he believed them to be suitable fodder for the galleys. In an age in which paper ruled rather than steel, an age overrun with empty formulae, he deplored the fact that gentlemen were no longer allowed to carry a sword with them in order to deal with those throngs of impertinent good-for-nothings. Society, he believed, had created various mechanisms whose sole object was to support mere idlers and to persecute and rob wellborn gentlefolk.