Tristana (NYRB Classics)

by Benito Perez Galdos

  “Did you hear? Our Don Horacio is getting married.”

  28

  THE AGING gallant thought Tristana looked slightly taken aback when she received this cup of poison, but she so quickly and confidently regained her composure that Don Lepe could not with any certainty establish his captive’s state of mind after this definitive end to her wild passion. Like someone plunging into a tranquil ocean, she leapt into the mare magnum of music and spent hours there, now diving down to the depths, now bobbing gracefully up to the surface, completely out of touch with human life and with certain ideas that still tormented her. She never mentioned Horacio again, and although the painter continued to write her the occasional friendly letter, Don Lope was the one who read and responded to them. He was careful not to talk to Tristana about her former adoring lover, and despite all his wisdom and experience, he never knew for sure if Tristana’s sad, serene attitude concealed either disappointment or a sense that she had been profoundly wrong to feel so disappointed with the Horacio who came back into her life. But how could Don Lope know this, when she herself did not?

  On fine winter afternoons, she went out in the wheelchair, with Saturna pushing. One of the most marked characteristics of the new Señorita Reluz was a complete absence of vanity: She took little care over her appearance and dressed very simply in a shawl and silk head scarf; however, she was still always well shod and frequently quarreled with the shoemaker over any discomfort caused by her one boot. It always struck her as odd having only one shoe to wear. The years would pass, and she never could accustom herself to not seeing the boot or shoe for her right foot.

  A year after the operation, her face had grown so thin that to many of those who had known her when she was well, she was now barely recognizable as a wheelchair-bound invalid. She was only twenty-five but looked forty. The wooden leg, with which she was fitted two months after her flesh-and-blood leg had been taken from her, was the finest of its kind, but she could not get used to walking on it with only a stick for support. She preferred to use crutches, even though these made her hunch up her shoulders, thus spoiling the elegant beauty of her neck and upper body. She took to spending her afternoons in the church and, to facilitate that innocent pastime, Don Lope moved from the top of Paseo de Santa Engracia to Paseo del Obelisco, where there were four or five churches within easy reach, nice, modern ones, as well as the parish church of Chamberí. This change of abode suited Don Lope too, since he saved a little money on rent, money that came in handy for other expenses in these calamitous times. Most striking of all was that Tristana’s liking for the church communicated itself to her former tyrant, and without the latter even noticing, he began spending pleasant hours in the church of the Servants of the Holy Sacrament, of Our Lady of Life Reparatrice, and of St. Fermin, attending novenas and expositions of the Blessed Sacrament. By the time Don Lope had noticed this new stage in his old-man’s habits, he was in no condition to be able to appreciate the oddness of this change. His understanding grew clouded; his body aged with terrible speed; he dragged his feet like an octogenarian, and his head and hands shook. In the end, such was Tristana’s enthusiasm for the peace of the church, for the serenity of the services and the chatter of the other regular attendees, all of them devout women, that she reduced the number of hours she devoted to music in order to spend more time in religious contemplation. Like Don Lope, she did not notice this new metamorphosis, which happened in slow stages; and if, at first, she felt only a liking for the church, rather than religious zeal, if her visits were, initially, what one might call acts of pious dilettantism, they soon became acts of genuine piety, and by barely noticeable degrees, these were joined by the Catholic practices of mass, penance, and communion.

  And since good Don Lope lived only through and for her, reflecting her sentiments and plagiarizing her ideas, he, too, gradually became immersed in that life, from which his sad old age drew a childish consolation. Occasionally, in moments of lucidity that resembled brief awakenings from a troubled sleep, he would cast an interrogative eye over himself and think, “Is it really me, Lope Garrido, doing these things? I must be senile, yes, senile. The man in me has died, my whole being has been gradually dying, beginning with the present, and advancing, as it dies, toward the past, until nothing is left but the child. Yes, I’m a child, and I think and live as a child. I can see it in this young woman’s kindness toward me. I spoiled her, and now she spoils me.”

  As for Tristana, would this be her final metamorphosis? Or perhaps this change was purely external, and inside there still survived the remarkable unity of her passion for the ideal. The perfect, beautiful being whom she had loved, having constructed him out of materials drawn from reality, had vanished with the reappearance of the person who had been the genesis of that intellectual creation; but the type, in all his essential, faultless beauty, survived intact in the mind of the young invalid. If she was capable of changing her way of loving him, that embodiment of all perfections could also change. First he was a man, then he became God, the beginning and end of all things.

  Three years had passed since the operation so skillfully carried out by Miquis and his friend, and Señorita Reluz, without neglecting music entirely, now regarded it with scorn, as an inferior thing of little value. She spent the afternoon in the church of the Servants of the Holy Sacrament, seated on a pew, which, given the fixity and constancy with which she occupied it, appeared to belong to her. Her crutches, propped up beside her, kept her grim company. In the end, the nuns made friends with her, and this resulted in Tristana becoming more involved in the life of the church. For example, on solemn occasions, Tristana would sometimes play the organ, to the joy of the nuns and the whole congregation. The “cripple lady” became a popular figure among those who assiduously attended services morning and evening, and the acolytes already considered her part of the fabric of the building and, indeed, the institution.

  29

  DON LOPE did not get the lonely, solitary old age he so richly deserved as a fitting conclusion to a life of dissipation and vice, because his relatives saved him from the terrible poverty threatening him. Without the help of his cousins the Señoras de Garrido Godoy, who lived in Jaén, and without the largesse of his nephew Don Primitivo de Acuña, the archdeacon of Baeza, that gallant in decline would have had to beg for alms or deliver his noble bones to the poorhouse. Even though those hysterical, old-fashioned, God-fearing spinsters believed their egregious relative to be a monster, or, rather, a devil let loose upon the world, blood outweighed the bad opinion they had of him, and in a modest way, they helped him in his poverty. As for the good archdeacon, on a visit to Madrid, he tried to obtain from his uncle certain concessions of a moral order; the two men conferred. Don Lope heard what his nephew had to say with growing indignation, and the cleric left feeling utterly downhearted. And nothing more was said of the matter. More time passed, and five years after Tristana’s illness, the cleric returned to the fray, trusting in the persuasive power of some new arguments.

  “Uncle, you have spent your life offending against God, and the most infamous, most ignominious of those offenses is your criminal union with—”

  “But we no longer—”

  “That doesn’t matter. You and she will both go to hell and all your good intentions now will be worth nothing.”

  In short, the archdeacon wanted them to marry. How ludicrous, what a terrible irony, given the individual we are dealing with here, Don Lope, a man of radical, dissolute ideas!

  “I may be in my dotage,” said he, drawing himself up with some difficulty onto the tips of his toes, “I may have been reduced once more to being a snotty-nosed brat, but, please, Primitivo, don’t treat me like an imbecile.”

  The good cleric set out his plans very simply. He was not asking, he was blackmailing. Here’s how.

  “Your devout cousins,” he said, “are offering, if you will fall into line and bow to the commandments of divine law . . . they are offering, I repeat, to transfer to you their tw
o estates in Arjonilla, which would mean that you could live comfortably for however many more days the Lord sees fit to grant you, as well as being able to bequeath to your widow—”

  “My widow!”

  “Yes, because your cousins—quite rightly—require you to marry.”

  Don Lope burst out laughing, not at this extravagant proposal but at himself. The deal was done. How could he reject their proposition when, by accepting it, he would be safeguarding Tristana’s existence after his death?

  Yes, the deal was done. Who would have thought it? Don Lope, who had lately learned how to make the sign of the cross over forehead and mouth, never ceased now to cross himself. In short, they married, and when they emerged from the church, Don Lope was still not convinced that he had truly abjured his beloved doctrine of bachelorhood. Contrary to his expectations, Tristana had no objections to the absurd plan. She accepted it with indifference; indeed, she had come to regard all earthly things with utter disdain. She barely noticed that she had been married off, that a few brief formulaic words had made her Don Lope’s legitimate wife, filing her away in one of society’s honorable pigeonholes. She felt nothing, accepting it as something imposed on her by the outside world, like having to register your address with the town hall, pay your taxes, or comply with police regulations.

  Thanks to the improvement in his fortunes, Don Lope was able to rent a larger house in Paseo del Obelisco, which had a courtyard-cum-garden. Under this new regimen, the old rake revived; he seemed less senile, less slow-witted, and as he neared the end of his life, he felt stirring inside him—quite how or why he did not know—tendencies he had never known before, the obsessions and longings of a placid bourgeois gentleman. He had hitherto been ignorant of the urgent need to plant a tree, not stopping until he had achieved his desire, until he saw that the plant had taken root and grown fresh new leaves. And while his lady wife was at church praying, he—his religious enthusiasms having already somewhat waned—spent that time taking care of the six hens and the one arrogant cockerel he had in his courtyard. What delight, what excitement, going to see if the hens had laid an egg and, if so, how large, and then preparing the clutch of eggs that would become chicks, which, when they hatched out, were just adorable, so bold and eager to live life to the full! Don Lope was beside himself with contentment, and Tristana shared his excitement. At around that time, she took up a new hobby, that preeminent branch of the culinary arts: cake-making. A skillful teacher taught her how to make a few different sorts of cake, and she made them so well, so very well, that Don Lope, after sampling them, licked his fingers and praised God. Were they happy, the two of them? Perhaps.

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like, as ever, to thank both Annella McDermott for all her help and advice, and my husband, Ben Sherriff, who is always my first reader.