Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, author of vast, sprawling novels
such as Fortunata and Jacinta, can be accessed somewhat more expediently
via his 1893 novella Tristana, recently published in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. The work’s relative compactness
diminishes nothing; Tristana possesses a snow globe quality, an entire
world in miniature, presented and circumscribed as though under glass.
The title suggests an unhappy tale, and Tristana
indeed contains a panoply of circumscribed, unhappy circumstances and events:
oppressed childhoods as dire as any in Dickens, sexual and spiritual
exploitation, frustrated love and destroyed hopes, physical degradation and
suffering connected to illness, age and enervation. But a deep psychological sensitivity;
crisp, ironic tone; subtle but ample humor; complex, memorable characters; and exceptionally
rich language help leaven these heavy aspects.
In its age-old situation of an older man’s relationship with
a young woman, Tristana feels nearly iconic. Pérez Galdós sets the tone early, through a tableau vivant in which he first
introduces, recounted at arm’s length by an unnamed narrator, his two central
characters.
Don Juan López Garrido – “Don Lope” - is “an
agreeable-looking gentleman…like a figure in a Velázquez painting of one of
Spain’s regiments in Flanders.” His name, “with more than a whiff of the
theater about it,” echoes that of dramatist Lope de Vega and links him to
Spain’s vanished golden age. As though living in the wrong period, Don Lope
also possesses a morality of “his own…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.”
Sitting at table with him in this portrait is a young woman
a third his age, Tristana, about whom the narrator initially keeps the reader, along
with the rest of Madrid, guessing as to her precise relation to Don Lope: is
she servant, niece, daughter - perhaps even wife? With dark eyes, skin of “pure
alabaster,” red lips, and “small teeth …like pieces of concentrated crystal” -
a subtly amusing description that might have been lifted from a Siglo de Oro
poem - she too is linked to the past. Even her name derives from her mother’s
obsession with the theater of the golden age, “which created an ideal society
to serve as a model and example to our own crude, vulgar realities.”
Whatever air of chivalry may wrap Don Lope in the novel’s
first lines, however, abruptly dissipates when we learn that, having taken in
the adolescent Tristana as his charge after the death of her father and madness
of her mother, the manipulative old man has within mere months added her “to
his very long list of victories over innocence” and kept Tristana “as if she
were nothing more than a tobacco pouch.” From the beginning, then, Pérez Galdós pointedly
rejects a literature that aims to present an ideal society, leaping instead directly
into the world’s “crude, vulgar realities.”
The ensuing narrative delicately traces relations between Tristana and
Don Lope, beginning with further background, then, coincident with Tristana’s
awakening to the injustice of her situation, slowing to portray her growing
self-awareness and desire to make something of herself. A clandestine
attachment with a young painter, Horacio Diaz, occupies the bright center of
the story, until the trajectory begins a descent marked by adverse irruptions
of life - distance, illness, the impositions of an older generation – that
imperil youth, love, hope and self-determination.
Tristana contains a thematic concern with the
position of women articulated explicitly without ever becoming polemical. Pérez Galdós devotes
considerable attention to Tristana’s awakening, “the doll’s stuffing…gradually
changing into the blood and marrow of a woman.” But as Don Lope’s maid Saturna
succinctly states the case, a young woman without independent means faces
but three choices: marriage, the theater, or prostitution. The word “freedom,”
observes Saturna, “isn’t one that sounds good in a woman’s mouth.” Tristana
ponders whether there may be some other way: “Do I understand so little of the
world that I’m thinking what’s possible is, in fact, impossible?” Pérez Galdós’ direct
manner in raising these thematic concerns is evident in the young woman’s
simple statement, upon arriving at a moment of illuminated self-awareness:
“Here I am.”
This directness continues as Tristana questions other
constraints on women’s lives - in education, sexuality, marriage and motherhood.
Inspired by Horacio, who encourages her to “find the formula…to perhaps resolve
the prickly problem of the free woman,” Tristana looks to art as a possible
path, bemoaning women’s education in the arts as “insubstantial…intended to
help girls bring a good son-in-law home.” She asserts her sexual independence
in defying Don Lope’s threats in order to be with Horacio, declaring, “I am not
an adulteress; the only person I am deceiving is someone who has no right to
tyrannize me. My infidelity, therefore, is not infidelity at all.” Marriage she
sees as an arrangement between willing individuals, not some unity of souls: “Living
as one for the other! Two for one! What nonsense…” During a lengthy discussion with Horacio concerning the
possibility of their having children, Tristana fiercely asserts her view of
fatherhood as little more than a mechanical function; were she to become a
mother, the child would be hers, not theirs.
But these important questions recede, and the novel takes an
unexpected narrative turn, when Horacio’s decision to take care of an infirm
aunt sends him indefinitely to the country. What has amounted largely to
exposition is now supplanted by the letters Tristana and Horacio write to one
another. Mixing flirtatiousness and playfulness, coy mockery, ironies and
ecstasies, and a darker premonitory undercurrent, these letters form the
energetic, exquisitely inventive centerpiece of Tristana, Pérez Galdós’ young
lovers express themselves in feverish flights of prose, their hopes buoying them above the surrounding social muck, their love seeming to
push language to new limits. They conjure lovers’ nicknames, subjugate words to
their desires by twisting spelling and exaggerating phonetic components, pull
in foreign terms and phrases, draw on literary references, and employ
interjections, exclamations and nonce words where a proper word doesn’t
suffice, as when Tristana writes to Horacio:
…I am positively stuffed with
knowledge. Goodness, how much I knoo!
In the space of eight days I have swallowed more pages than you could buy
lentils for five thousand pesetas. If you could see my little brain from
inside, you would be frightened. Ideas are positively fighting for space in
there. I have far too many of them and I don’t know wheech ones to keep. I will as easily bite into a volume of History
as into a treatise on Philosophy. I bet you don’t know what Señor Leibniz’s
monads are. And no, I did not say nomads.
And if I come across a book on Medicine, I don’t rear back from that either.
No, I wade straight in. I want to know more and more and more. By the way…no, I
won’t tell you now. Another day. It’s very late; I’ve stayed awake so as to
write you; the pale torch of the moon
is burning out, my love. I can hear the cock crowing, the harbinger of the new day, and already the sweet juice of henbane is
flowing through my veins…Go on, my rustic love, admit that the bit about
henbane made you laugh. Anyway, I am exhausted, and I am going to my almo lecho, my sacred couch, yes sir,
and there’ll be no turning back: almo,
almo.”
This epistolary section of Tristana also limits our
knowledge of the action to what is being reported by the two young lovers, at
last allowed to speak for themselves nearly free of the dispassionate narrator.
In the spaces between these letters, though, one reads an entire invisible
story, outlined by the difficulties of maintaining the relationship through
nothing but writing.
Pérez
Galdós complicates the resolution of the “prickly problem” first by this
love affair, in which art loses out as Horacio turns to painting “flowers and
dead animals” as a “cargo of sentimentalism” flies back and forth on the mail
carriage, and then by injecting a dose of reality so abruptly factual – an
illness and surgery, evoking Charles Bovary’s botched clubfoot operation in Madame
Bovary - as to irreparably contaminate any “idealized” conception or
promise of happiness. It’s an invention that relieves Pérez Galdós of fleshing out how Tristana might
have fought for her independence (and according to the introduction came in for criticism), but it also stresses the unpredictable “cruel
realities” life can impose in a moment and serves as a potent physical symbol
of the cutting off of Tristana’s potential.
The glow from the lovers’ letters
fades as reality intervenes and as the softening of Don Lope’s hard edges
brings him again closer to Tristana in scenes that render him all too
wretchedly human. The years go by; age, infirmity and submersion in the facile
comforts of religion take their toll. The narrative, again recounted
matter-of-factly by the outside observer, regains its snow globe quality. The
tossed-off question posed by this narrator at the novel’s end manages to be both
affectingly poignant and, in its detachment and irony, sharply pointed, underscoring how lugubriously such a triste
tale might have been told. In Tristana's overt rejection of past literary
approaches, and its vivid, assured portrait of artistic aspiration and the
multifold impediments to its realization, perhaps the telling of the story, the creation of art, is
as much the subject of Pérez Galdós’ novel as is Tristana herself. As an artistic creation, balancing piercing
social criticism with a tremendous sympathy and tenderness, this short,
beautiful novel is anything but unrealized.
