“Abroad, I will abroad!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. “I want us both to be foreigners somewhere so that we can walk around, arm in arm, without anyone knowing who we are.”
“Yes, my love. What a joy it is to see you!”
“Among the French,” she sang, “and among the English . . . I don’t think I can stand my own personal Tyrant of Syracuse for very much longer. Saturna calls him Don Lepe,§ and so that’s what I call him too. He’s trying very hard to look pathetic. He barely speaks to me, which I don’t mind at all. He’s putting on an act, hoping that I’ll feel sorry for him. He was very chatty last night, though, and regaled me with some of his ‘adventures.’ The rogue probably thinks he can impress me with such examples, but he’s wrong. I can’t stand the sight of him. Oh, there are days when I feel sorry for him, but on others, I loathe him, and last night I loathed him, because when he was telling me about his sordid escapades—they would make your hair stand on end—I sensed a depraved intention on his part to excite my imagination. He’s a sly dog. I felt like telling him that the only ‘adventure’ I’m interested in is my own adventure with my beloved Señó Juan, whom I adore with all my ‘irrational powers.’ ”
“You know, I would rather like to hear Don Lope recounting his amorous tales.”
“They’re pretty good. The one about the Marquesa del Cabañal is the funniest of all! She was led to Don Lepe by her own husband, who was more jealous than Othello himself. But I think I’ve told you that one before. Then there was the nun he kidnapped from the convent of San Pablo in Toledo. And that same year, he killed a man in a duel, a general who claimed his wife was the most virtuous woman in Spain; said wife promptly eloped with Don Lope to Barcelona, where he had seven affairs in a month, each one of them worthy of a novel. He must have something about him, and he doesn’t lack for courage either.”
“Don’t get too excited about your Don Juan, Restituta.”
“The only man I get excited about is my dauber here. I have such bad taste! Look at those eyes—so ugly, so dull! And that mouth? It makes one sick to look at it, and those clothes, so inelegant! I don’t know how I can bear to look at you! No, it’s too much. Get out of my sight this instant!”
“And what about you? With those huge tusks of yours and that beetroot of a nose and that barrel of a body! Your fingers are like pincers!”
“All the better to tear off your donkey pelt strip by strip. Why are you so ugly! Gran Dio, morir si giovine.”¶
“Ah, my angel, lovelier than all the Holy Fathers and more bewitching by far than the Council of Trent and Don Alfonso the Wise . . . Do you know what I have just thought? What if your Don Lepe were to come through that door right now?”
“Oh, you don’t know Don Lepe. He would never come here, he wouldn’t play the jealous husband for all the money in the world. Apart from having seduced a lot of more or less virtuous women, he is the very epitome of dignity.”
“And what if I were to go to your house at night and he were to find me there?”
“Then, purely as a preventative measure, he might well slice you in two or turn your skull into a box in which to store the bullets from his revolver. He may be a gentleman to his fingertips, but if someone were to touch a raw nerve, he could react very violently. So it would be best not to go. I don’t know how he found out about us, but he did. The rascal knows about everything, well, he’s as wise as a wily old dog and has long experience as a master of naughtiness. Yesterday, he remarked very sarcastically: ‘So we’ve found ourselves a little artist, have we?’ I didn’t answer. I pay no attention. One fine day, he’ll arrive home and find that the bird has flown. Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti!** Where shall we go, my love? A dó will you take me? La ci darem la mano . . . †† I know I’m not making any sense. Ideas rush pell-mell into my head, arguing about who should go first, rather as if lots of people were trying to leave church at once and got stuck in the doorway and . . . Oh, just love me, love me profusely, for everything else is mere noise. Sometimes I have sad ideas, for example, that I will end up very unhappy and see all my dreams of happiness go up in smoke. That’s why I cling to the idea of gaining my independence and doing something with whatever talent I may have. If I really do have a gift, why shouldn’t I put it to good use, just as other women exploit their beauty or their grace?”
“That is a most noble wish,” said Horacio thoughtfully. “But don’t be in such a hurry, don’t cling too hard to that ambition, because it might prove impracticable. Give yourself unreservedly to me. Be my life’s companion; help and sustain me with your love. Could there be a more beautiful trade or art? Making happy the man who will make you happy? What more could you want?”
“What more could I want?” she asked, staring down at the floor. “Diverse lingue, orribile favelle . . . parole di dolore, accenti d’ira . . . ‡‡ Not that I’m comparing, of course . . . Señó Juan, do you really love me? You asked me: ‘What more?’ Well, nothing more. I will accept that there is nothing more. I warn you, though, that I’m an absolute disaster as a housewife. I get everything wrong and I’ll cause you all kinds of upsets. And I’m an equally perfect treasure, too, when it comes to shopping and other such women’s business. I need only tell you that I don’t know the names of the streets and can’t go out alone without getting lost! The other day, I couldn’t even manage to get from Puerta del Sol to Calle de Peligros, found myself heading off in completely the wrong direction and ended up in Plaza de la Cebada. I have no sense of direction at all. That same day, I bought some hairpins at the market, gave the stallholder five pesetas, and forgot to take the change. By the time I realized my mistake, I was already on the tram . . . I even caught the wrong tram and got one going to El Barrio. From all these things and something else that I observe in myself, I deduce . . . But tell me what you’re thinking about? Will you really never love anyone more than you love your Paquita de Rimini? I’ll say it again . . . No, I won’t.”
“Finish your sentence,” he said, feeling rather uncomfortable. “I must cure you of that annoying habit of never finishing a thought.”
“Beat me, beat me, then . . . break a rib or two. You have such a temper! ‘Nor golden ceiling made by the wise Moor and supported on pillars of jasper . . .’ No, that doesn’t make sense either.”
“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.
*“Discovery reveals that only nothingness grows”: from Leopardi’s poem “Ad Angelo Mai.”
†A reference to Francesca di Rimini in Dante’s Inferno, who was damned for her illicit affair with the handsome brother of her deformed husband. The lovers create endless variations on their pet names for each other: Paca, Paquita, Panchita, Frasquita, Curra, Currita de Rimini—which recur throughout their letters and conversations.
‡A line from a play by the Duque de Rivas, from the scene in which Don Álvaro is about to elope with Leonor, who hesitates because of her feelings for her father.
§Saber más que Lepe (“to know more than Lepe”) is an idiom meaning “to be very shrewd.”
¶“Dear God! To die so young!”: from Violetta’s aria in act 3 of Verdi’s La Traviata.
**“Ah, Pisa, shame of the people!”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 33, line 79.
†† “There we give each other our hands”: from the aria in act 1 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
‡‡“Tongues confused, a language strained in anguish, with cadences of anger, shrill outcries”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 3, lines 25–26, describing the entrance to hell.
16
AS A MORAL and physical counterweight to those exalted af
ternoons 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 shou
ld 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.”
Tristana Page 10