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.
*“There is no greater pain [than to remember a happy time when one is in misery]”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 5, line 121.
†“You are my leader, my master, my teacher”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 2, line 140.
17
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.”
And another day:
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’m beside myself with anxiety and fear. Since yesterday I have done nothing but imagine misfortunes and disasters: that you die, for example, and Don Lope comes to tell me the news with a joyful smile on his face, or that I die and they put me in that horrible coffin and throw earth on top of me. No, no, I don’t want to die, I really don’t. I don’t want to know about the beyond, it doesn’t interest me. I hope they resuscitate me and restore my dear little life to me. I hate the thought of my own skeleton. I hope they give me back my nice, young flesh along with all the kisses you’ve planted on it. I don’t want to be nothing but cold bones and, later, dust. No, that’s just a trick. I don’t like the idea of my spirit going from star to star asking for hospitality or having a bald, irascible Saint Peter slam the door in my face. Because even if I were certain of being allowed into Paradise, I still don’t want to hear about death. I want my life and the earth on which I’ve known both pain and pleasure, and where my naughty Señó Juan lives. I don’t want wings, large or small, nor to live among a lot of boring, harp-plucking angels. You can keep the harps and accordions and the celestial lights. Give me life, health, and love and everything I desire.
“I find the problem of my life more overwhelming the more I think about it. I want to be somebody in the world, to cultivate an art, to live by my own means. I’m so easily discouraged. Am I really attempting the impossible? I want to have a profession, and yet I’m useless, I know nothing about anything. It’s just awful.
“My ambition is to not have to depend on anyone, not even on the man I adore. I don’t want to be his mistress—so undignified—or a woman maintained by a few men purely for their amusement, like a hunting dog; nor do I want the man of my dreams to become a husband. I see no happiness in marriage. To put it in my own words, I want to be married to myself and to be my own head of the household. I wouldn’t know how to love out of obligation; I can only promise constancy and endless loyalty in a state of total freedom. I feel like protesting against men, who have appropriated the whole world for themselves and left us women only the narrowest of paths to take, the ones that were too narrow for them to walk along . . .
“I’m being boring, aren’t I? Pay no attention. What ravings! I have no idea what I’m thinking or writing; my head is a hotbed of nonsense. Poor me! Pity me, make fun of me . . . Tell them to put me in a straitjacket and lock me in a cage. I can’t give you any jokes today, I’m simply not in the mood. All I can do is cry, and this piece of paper carries with it a pharmasea of tears. Why was I born, tell me that. Why didn’t I just stay out there, in the lap of Lady Nothingness, so beautiful, so tranquil, so sleepy, so . . . ? I don’t know how to end.”
While these stormy winds were traveling the long distance between the Mediterranean town of Villajoyosa and Madrid, a crisis was brewing inside Horacio, the work of the inexorable law of adaptation, which first had to find the right conditions in which to operate. He loved the mildness of the climate, and the charms of the countryside finally opened up a path, if one can put it like that, through the fog shrouding his soul. Art conspired with Nature to win him over and having, one day, after many fruitless attempts, managed to paint a superb seascape, he remained forever bound to the blue sea, the luminous beaches, and the smiling face of the earth. The landscapes near and far, the town’s picturesque amphitheater, the almond trees, the many faces of farmworkers and sailors all filled him with an intense desire to transpose it onto canvas; he began to work feverishly, and time, which had seemed so long-drawn-out and tedious, now became brief and fleeting, so much so that, after a month of living in Villajoyosa, the mornings ate up the afternoons and the afternoons the evenings and the evenings devoured the nights, and the artist sometimes forgot to eat.
He also began to feel the instinctive bond of the homeowner, the same nameless attraction that keeps the plant rooted in the soil and the spirit anchored in small domestic trifles. He owned the beautiful house in which he was living with Doña Trini, but it took him a whole month to begin to appreciate its comforts and its delightful situation. The vegetable garden, populated with ancient fruit trees, some very rare and all beautifully preserved, was also his, as were the strawberry patch, the asparagus bed, and the lush vegetable plots; his was the swift, abundant stream that flowed through the garden and surrounding fields. Not far from the house, he could also view with proprietorial eyes a stand of elegant palm trees of biblical beauty and an austere olive grove, full of gnarled, warty specimens like those in the garden of Gethsemane. When he wasn’t painting, he went for long walks in the company of the simple village folk, and his eyes never wearied of contemplating the vast expanse of blue sky, the ever-admirable pharmasea, which changed its color from moment to moment, like a vast sentient being, infinitely impressionable. The lateen sails, sometimes white, sometimes burnished gold, added piquant touches to the majesty of that grandiose element, which, on some afternoons, looked m
ilky and drowsy, on others choppy and transparent, revealing along its quiet shores crystalline, emerald-green shoals.
Needless to say, everything that Horacio saw was immediately communicated to Tristana.
From him to her:
“Ah, my love, you have no idea how beautiful it is here! But how could you when, until only recently, I myself was blind to such beauty and poetry? I so admire and love this corner of the planet, thinking that one day we will love and admire it together. But what am I saying? You are here, because I carry you within me, and I am sure that your eyes see what my eyes see! Ah, Restitutilla, how you would love my house, our house, if you were to see it! It’s not enough that you are here in spirit. In spirit! Pure rhetoric, my love, that fills the lips but leaves the heart empty. Come and you will see for yourself. Resolve once and for all to leave that absurd old man and let us be married before this incomparable altar or before whatever other altar the world assigns to us, and which we will accept in order to keep the world happy . . . Do you know, I have told my illustrious aunt about us. I could keep the secret no longer. To my amazement, my dear, she didn’t turn a hair. But even if she had, what difference would that make? I told her that I am devoted to you, that I cannot live without you, and she burst out laughing. How could she treat something so serious as a joke? But better that than grimaces. Tell me that you’re pleased with my news and that when you read these words, it will make you want to come racing down here. Tell me that you have packed your trunks and are on your way. I don’t know what my aunt would think of such an impetulous decision. Let her think what she likes. Tell me that you would enjoy this deliciously obscure life; that you would love this rustic peace; that here you would be healed of all the mad effervescences that trouble your mind; and that you long to be a happy, sturdy peasant—a wealthy bourgeois lady in the midst of all this simplicity and abundance—with, as your little husband, the maddest of artists, the most spiritual inhabitant of this land of light, fecundity, and poetry.
“Nota bene: I have a dovecote that tells the time, with thirty or more pairs of doves. I get up at dawn, and my first duty is to open their door. Out come my beloved friends, and to greet the new day, they fly about a little, tracing graceful spirals in the air; then they come and eat from my hand or strut around me, speaking to me in cooings, a language I regret to say I cannot translate for you. You would have to hear it and understand it for yourself.”
18
FROM TRISTANA to Horacio:
“How very enthusiastic and silly my Señó Juan has grown! And how the glories of your new home have effaced all memory of the desert in which I live! You have even forgotten our vocabulary, and I am no longer Frasquita de Rimini. Well, well. I would like to be enthused by your rusticicity (you know how I like to invent words) which makes one forget the gold and the scepter. I do as you tell me, and I obey . . . insofar as I can. It must be a beautiful country . . . Imagine me as a peasant, keeping chickens, getting fatter by the day, more animal than human, and with a ring called husband through my nose! I will be a delight to the eyes and you an equally charming sight, with your early tomatoes and your late oranges, setting forth to gather prawns, and painting donkeys in baggy breeches or people in harness . . . no, the other way around. I can hear your doves from here and I understand their cooings. Ask them why I am so troubled by this mad ambition; why I want the impossible and always will, until the impossible itself stands in front of me and says: ‘Can’t you see me, you fool?’ Ask them why I dream of being transported to another world, in which I will be free and honorable, loving you more than my own dear eyes . . . Enough, enough, per pietà. I’m drunk today. I have drunk down all your letters from the previous days and find them horribly full of cheap alcohol. You hoaxer!
“Fresh news! Don Lope, the great Don Lope, before whom the Earth falls silent and prostrates itself, is poorly. His rheumatism has taken it upon itself to avenge the innumerable husbands he cuckolded, as well as the honest virgins and vulnerable wives whom he sacrificed on the unspeakable altar of his lust. What a sad figure he cuts now! And yet I still feel sorry for this poor fallen Don Juan, because with the exception of his utterly shameless behavior toward women, he is kind and gentlemanly. Now that he walks with a limp and is no good for anything, he has suddenly resolved to understand me, to show some respect for my eagerness to learn a profession. Poor Don Lepe! Before, he used to make fun of me, now he applauds me and tears out the few hairs he has left on his head, furious that he did not understand earlier how reasonable my desires were.
“So, at considerable personal sacrifice, he has found me an English tutor, a woman, although you might well mistake her for one of the masculine gender or perhaps for neither one nor the other; she’s a tall, bony, awkward woman, with a hideously ruddy face and a hat that looks like a birdcage. Her name is Doña Malvina and she previously worked in the evangelical chapel as a Protestant preacher, until they cut off her wages and she was obliged to give English lessons instead . . . But wait until I tell you the really important news: My teacher says that I have an extraordinary gift for languages and is amazed that she only has to teach me something once for me to know it. She assures me that in six months I will know as much English as Chaskaperas or Lord Mascaole himself. And as well as teaching me English, she is refreshing my French, and then we will sink our teeth into German. Give me a kiss, you poltroon. I just don’t know how you can be so innorant that you can’t understand English.
“English is a very lovely language, almost as lovely as you, for you are like a fresh new rose in May . . . if roses in May were as black as my shoes. Anyway, I am in a fever of activity. I study all the hours of the day and devour everything that I’m taught. Forgive my immodesty, but I can’t help myself: I’m a prodigy. I’m amazed that I seem to know things as soon as they’re shown to me. And by the way, Señó Juan, you of the orange trees and the baggy breeches, Did you buy a steel nib pen from your neighbor’s gardener’s son? Of course not, what you bought was an ivory candlestick belonging to the mother-in-law of the . . . Sultan of Morocco.
“I nibble your ear. My regards to the doves. To be or not to be . . . All the world’s a stage.”
From Señó Juan to Señá Restituta:
“Dearest lovekins, you little monkey, don’t be such an intellectual. You frighten me. For my part, I would say that in my rusticicity (new word duly accepted), I almost feel like forgetting the little I know. Long live Nature! Down with Science! I would like to share your hatred of the obscure life, ma non posso. My orange trees are laden with blossoms—infuriating, isn’t it?—and golden fruit. It does one’s heart good to see them. I have some chickens who, each time they lay an egg, ask the heavens, cackling as they do so, why you don’t come and eat them. Their eggs are large enough to contain a small elephant. The doves say they want nothing to do with the English, not even with those who hope to emulate the great Shasspirr. Otherwise, they understand and practice honorable freedom and free honor. I forgot to mention that I have three nanny goats with udders the size of the drum they use to draw the lottery tickets from. There is absolutely no comparison between their milk and the milk they sell in the dairy next to your house, that virginal, lacteal effusion we used to find so disgusting. The goats await you, my twopenny-halfpenny Englishwoman, to offer you their tumescent breasts. Tell me something . . . have you eaten any turrón this Christmas? I have enough almonds and hazelnuts here to give you and all your tribe indigestion. Come and I will show you how to make turrón from Jijona and from Alicante and the really delicious sort they make with egg yolk, although it could never be as sweet as your gypsy heart. Do you like roast kid? I say this because if you were to eat it here, you would be licking your fingers; no, I would lick those fingles for you, for they are as precious as Saint John’s pointing forefingle. You see, I do remember the vocabulary. The pharmasea is rather rough today, because the west wind is tickling it and making it nervous . . .
“As long as you don’t get angry and call me prosaic, I
must tell you that I now eat enough for seven men. I adore roast garlic soup, salt cod, and rice in all its many guises, turkey and red mullet with pine nuts. I drink gallons of that delicious water from Engedi or, rather, Aspe, and I am growing fat and even handsome, so that you will fall in love with me when you see me and delight in my charms or my appas, as we and the French say. What appas I have! And what about you? Please do not wither away with all that studying. I fear that Señá Malvina will infect you with her ugliness and her mannishness. Don’t become too philosophical, don’t climb up to the stars, because I’m much too fat now to climb up after you and pick you as I would pick a lemon from one of my trees. Don’t you envy my way of life? What are you waiting for? If we don’t do it now, when will we, per Baco? Please come. I’m preparing your room, which will be manifissent, a worthy setting for such a jewel. Say yes, is it such a labor (like that of the mountain that gave birth to a mouse) to say the word? Only say it and I will run and fetch you. Oh donna di virtú! Even if you become more of a know-it-all than Minerva herself and speak to me in Greek to make your meaning clearer; even if you know by heart the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals and the logarithm tables, I will still adore you with all the force of my supine ignorance.”
From Señorita Reluz:
“Such sorrow, such anxiety, such fear! I think only of dreadful things. I’m grateful to this foul cold I’m suffering from, because at least it gives me an excuse to be constantly dabbing at my eyes. Weeping consoles me. If you were to ask me why I’m crying, I wouldn’t know how to answer. Ah, yes, I would. I’m weeping because I can’t see you, because I don’t know when I will see you again. Your absence is killing me. I’m jealous of that blue sea, the boats, the oranges, the doves, and fearful that all those lovely things will be what Galleot was for Lancelot and Guinevere. In a place full of so many good things, surely there must be pretty girls as well. Because for all my knowitallness (another of my invented words), I would kill myself if you were to leave me. You would be solely responsible for that tragedy . . .
Tristana Page 11