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!
*A reference to the great Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega.
†“Garrido” can mean handsome and elegant but carries, too, a suggestion of garras: claws.
‡“Your suffering does not touch me”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 2, line 92.
2
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.
Given these beliefs, Don Lope was wholeheartedly in favor of smugglers and thieves, and had it been in his power, he would definitely have sided with them in a tight spot. He hated the police, both secret and uniformed, and heaped insults on guards and customs officers alike, as well as those half-wits in charge of “public order,” who, in his opinion, never protected the weak from the strong. He tolerated the civil guard, although he—damn it—would have organized them quite differently, giving the members legal and executive powers, as knights of the one true religion on the highways and byways of the land. As for the army, Don Lope’s ideas verged on the eccentric. As he saw it, the army was merely a political instrument, one that was both stupid and costly to boot, whereas it should, in his view, be a religious and military organization, like the old knightly orders, drawn from the people, with service being obligatory and with hereditary leaders, generalships being handed down from father to son, in short, such a complex, labyrinthine system that not even he could understand it. As regards the church, he thought it was little more than a bad joke played by the past on the present, which society was too timid or stupid to reject. Not that he was irreligious; on the contrary, his faith was far stronger than that of many who go sniffing around altars and clinging to the skirts of the priests. The ingenious Don Lope had no time for the latter at all, because he could find no place for them in the pseudo-knightly system concocted by his idle imagination; he used to say: “We are the true priests, we who watch over honor and morality, we who fight for the innocent, we, the enemies of evil, hypocrisy, and injustice . . . and base metal.”
There had been episodes in this man’s life that would have exalted him in a high degree, and had anyone—with nothing better to do—decided to write his biography, those glowing examples of generosity and self-denial would have helped obscure, up to a point, the darker side of his character and conduct. And we should speak of these, as the antecedents and causes of what we will describe in due course. Don Lope was always a very good friend to his friends, a man who would do anything to help loved ones who found themselves in desperate straits. Helpful to the point of heroism, he put no limits on his generous impulses. His knightliness verged on vanity, and vanity always has a price—just as the luxury of good intentions is always the most expensive—and Don Lope’s fortunes suffered as a result. His family motto, “Give your shirt to your friend,” was not a mere rhetorical affectation. He may not have given his shirt, but he had often, like Saint Martin, given half his cloak away, and quite recently, his shirt—that most useful of items because closest to our skin—had been at grave risk.
A childhood friend, whom he loved dearly, Don Antonio Reluz by name, a comrade in certain more or less respectable acts of chivalry, put good Don Lope’s altruistic fervor—for that is what it was—fully to the test. When Reluz fell in love with and married a very distinguished young lady, he rejected his friend’s knightly ideas and practices, judging that they neither constituted a profession nor put food on the table, and so he devoted himself to investing his wife’s meager capital in profitable business deals. He did quite well the first few years. He became involved in the buying and selling of barley, in contracts for military supplies, and other such honest trades, upon which Garrido looked down with lofty disdain. Around 1880, when both had crossed over into their fifties, Reluz’s star suddenly waned, and every deal he made went bad on him. In the end, he was laid low by a faithless colleague, a treacherous friend, and overnight that blow left him penniless, dishonored, and, worse still, in prison.
“You see!” Don Lope said. “Now are you convinced that you and I are not made to be mere hawkers? I warned you at the start, but you took no notice. We don’t belong in the modern age, dear Antonio, we are too decent to be involved in such dealings. Leave them to the rabble.”
These were not the most consoling of words, and Reluz listened without blinking, saying nothing, wondering how and when he would fire the bullet with which he intended to put an end to his unbearable suffering.
Garrido was quick to respond, and immediately offered to make the supreme sacrifice of his shirt.
“To save your honor, I would give you the . . . Besides, you know that this is not a matter of favors, but of duty; we are true friends, and what I do for you, you would do for me.”
Although the debts that had muddied Reluz’s good name hardly amounted to a king’s ransom, they were enough to demolish the rather shaky edifice of Don Lope’s very small fortune, for Don Lope, entrenched in his altruistic dogma, did the decent, manly thing, and sold off first a small property he had in Toledo, then his collection of old paintings, which were not perhaps of the first order, but whose value lay in the hours of pleasure and amusement they represented.
“Don’t worry,” he said to his sad friend. “Stand firm in the face of misfortune and, besides, I have done nothing of particular merit. In these putrescent times, people treat the most basic of obligations as if they were displays of virtue. One has what one has, until someone else needs it. That is the law that governs human relationships, and the rest is nothing but egotism and mercenariness. Base metal only ceases to be base when one offers it to someone who has the misfortune to need it. I have no children. Take what I have: we won’t go without our crust of bread.”
Needless to say, Reluz was deeply moved to hear these words. And he never did fire that bullet; he had no reason to, for alas, no sooner had he left prison and returned home than he caught a vicious fever that carried him off in a matter of days. It was doubtless brought on by his feelings of gratitude and by the terrible emotions he had been through. He left behind him an inconsolable widow—who tried very hard to follow him to the grave by a natural death, but failed—and a daughter of only nineteen, called Tristana.
3
RELUZ’S widow had been very pretty before all this upset and commotion. However, the aging process was not so quick and clear that it dimmed Don Lope’s desire to court her, for although his knightly code forbade him from wooing the wife of a living friend, the death of that friend left him free to apply, as he saw fit, the law of love. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, things did not turn out well, because when he uttered his first tender words to the inconsolable widow, her response was far from expected and it became clear that her mind was not working as it should; in short, poor Josefina Solís lacked many of the mental mechanisms necessary for good judgment and sensible action. She was tormented in particular by two of the thousands of obsessions besieging her mind: moving house and cleanliness. Each week or, at least, each month, she would summon the removal carts, who made a small fortune that year traipsing her goods and chattels around all the streets and squares in Madrid. Every house was magnificent on the day they moved in and detestable, inhospitable, and vile a week later. In this house she nearly froze to death, while in that one she roasted; th
is house was plagued by noisy neighbors and another by the most brazen of mice; and every house contained the longing for somewhere else, for the removals cart, an infinite desire for the unknown.
Don Lope tried to put a stop to this costly madness, but soon saw that it was impossible. Josefina spent the brief time between moves washing and scrubbing everything in sight, driven by nervous scruples and feelings of profound disgust, far stronger than the most powerful, instinctive impulse. She would shake no one by the hand, afraid that she might catch shingles or some kind of repugnant pustule. She ate only eggs, having first washed the shell, but even these she ate very warily for fear that the hen who had laid them might have been pecking at something impure. A fly sent her wild with panic. She would dismiss the maids at a moment’s notice for some innocent contravention of her eccentric cleaning methods. It wasn’t enough that she ruined the furniture with water and scouring, she also washed the rugs, the spring mattresses, and even the piano inside and out. She surrounded herself with disinfectants and antiseptics, and even the food they ate smelled faintly of camphor. If I tell you that she washed the clocks, I need say no more. She plunged her daughter in the bathtub three times a day, and the cat fled in disgust, unable to bear the washing regimen imposed on him by his mistress.
Don Lope regretted his friend’s mental decay with all his heart and missed the sweet, kind Josefina of former days, for she had been a pleasant, rather well-educated person, who even fancied herself a woman of letters. In private, she wrote poetry, which she showed only to her closest friends, and she displayed unusual discernment when it came to literature and contemporary authors. By temperament, upbringing, and atavism—two of her uncles were members of the Academy and another had fled to London with the romantic poets Duque de Rivas and Alcalá Galiano—she hated the realist trend in literature and worshipped idealism and the fine, beautifully turned phrase. She firmly believed that when it came to taste, there was the aristocratic and the plebeian, and she did not hesitate to assign herself a very obscure little corner among the most eminent writers. She loved the old plays, and knew by heart entire speeches from Don Gil of the Green Breeches, The Suspicious Truth, and The Prodigious Magician.* She had a son, who died when he was twelve, and whom she called Lisardo, as if he were a character out of a play by Tirso de Molino or Agustín Moreto. Her daughter owed her name, Tristana, to her mother’s passion for the noble, chivalrous art of the theater, which created an ideal society to serve as a constant model and example to our own crude, vulgar realities.
Tristana (NYRB Classics) Page 2