Tristana (22 page)

When she was finally allowed to leave her bed, the narrow room in which the poor invalid spent her hours stuck in an armchair was transformed into an artist’s studio. Horacio’s patience and solicitude as a teacher knew no bounds, but a strange thing happened: not only did Tristana seem rather uninterested in the art of Apelles; her aptitude too, so evident months before, waned and disappeared, doubtless due to a lack of confidence. Horacio could not believe it, remembering how effortlessly his pupil had understood and manipulated color; and, in the end, to their mutual amazement, both of them began to lose interest and grow bored, either postponing their lessons or cutting them short. After only a few days of such attempts, they barely painted at all, but spent the time talking, until conversation languished too, as it does between people who have said all they have to say to each other and are reduced to speaking only of the ordinary, everyday things of life.

When Tristana tried walking on crutches, her first attempt at that strange system of locomotion was an occasion for much laughter and joking.

“It’s quite impossible,” she said cheerily, “for anyone to walk elegantly on crutches. However hard I try, I will never be able to skip along on these sticks. I’ll be like one of those crippled women who beg for alms at the door of the church. Not that it matters. I will simply have to accept it!”

Horacio proposed sending her a wheelchair so that she could take a turn outdoors. She thanked him for the gift, which duly arrived two days later, although she did not use it for another three or four months. Saddest of all, though, were Horacio’s frequent absences. His withdrawal was so slow and gradual that it went almost unnoticed. He began by missing a day, saying that he had various urgent errands to run; the next week, he played truant twice; then three times, then five, and finally no one even bothered to count the days he missed but only the days on which he appeared. Tristana did not seem put out by these absences; she always received him affectionately and watched him leave without apparent sadness. She never asked him why he had not come, still less told him off. Another circumstance worthy of note was the fact that they never spoke about the past: that particular novel, they both seemed to agree, was over and done with, doubtless because it seemed so improbable and false, rather like the books we were mad about in our youth and which, in our maturity, seem somewhat paltry.

With her first music and organ lessons, Tristana emerged almost abruptly, as if by magic, from the spiritual stagnation into which she had sunk. It was like a sudden resurrection, full of life, enthusiasm, and passion, an affirmation of Señorita Reluz’s true nature, revealing in her, in the first flush of that new experience, a marvelous talent. Her teacher was a small, affable man endowed with phenomenal patience, so practiced as a teacher and so adept at communicating his methods that he could have made an organist out of a deaf-mute. Under his intelligent guidance, Tristana quickly overcame any initial difficulties, to the surprise and excitement of all who witnessed that miracle. Don Lope was stunned and filled with admiration, and when Tristana pressed down the keys, eliciting from them the sweetest of chords, the poor gentleman waxed positively sentimental, like a grandfather whose sole purpose in life is to spoil the grandchildren on whom he dotes. Her teacher soon added a few notions about harmony to the lessons about mechanisms, fingering, and sight-reading, and it was amazing to see how easily the young woman absorbed these difficult concepts. It was as if she knew the rules before they were revealed to her; she leapt ahead, and whatever she learned remained deeply engraved on her mind. Her diminutive teacher, a devout Christian, who spent his life going from choir to choir and from chapel to chapel, playing solemn masses, funerals, and novenas, saw in his pupil an example of God’s favor, of artistic and religious predestination.

“The girl’s a genius,” he said, gazing at her admiringly, “and sometimes she seems almost a saint.”

“Saint Cecilia!” cried Don Lope gaily, his voice almost breaking. “What a daughter, what a woman, what a divinity!”

Horacio could barely conceal his emotion when he heard Tristana playing music of a liturgical nature or a fugue, shaping each musical phrase with astonishing skill; he was hard put to hide his tears, embarrassed to be shedding them. When Tristana, aflame with religious inspiration, immersed herself in the music, translating that grave instrument into the language of her very soul, she was unaware of anyone and oblivious to her small but fervent audience. Emotion and the expression of that emotion absorbed her entirely; her face became transfigured, taking on a celestial beauty; her soul abandoned earthly things in order to be rocked in the vaporous breast of the sweetest of ideals. One day, when her kindly teacher heard her improvising with unusual grace and boldness, his admiration reached new heights for the ease with which she modulated her playing, shifted keys, and generally revealed a knowledge of harmony he had never taught her, as if she were possessed of a mysterious divinatory power, given only to certain privileged souls, for whom art holds no secrets. From that day on, her teacher attended the lessons with an interest that went beyond the purely educational, pouring all his five senses into his pupil, as if she were a much-adored only child. The aging musician and the aging gallant sat in ecstasy before the invalid, and while one, with paternal love, showed her the arcane secrets of the art, the other revealed his pure and tender feelings through sighs and the occasional passionate look. Once the lesson was over, Tristana would take a turn about the room on her crutches, and Don Lope and the other old man both felt, as they watched her, that Saint Cecilia herself could not have moved or walked in any other way.

At around this time, that is, when Tristana was making these leaps of progress, Horacio’s visits again became more frequent, then suddenly grew notably less so. With the arrival of summer, two whole weeks went by without a visit from him, but when he did come, Tristana, to please and amuse him, would favor him with a performance; he would sit alone in the darkest corner of the room listening, in profound, trancelike concentration, to her wonderful playing, his eyes fixed on some indeterminate point in space, while his soul wandered free in those regions where dream and reality mingle. And Tristana was so absorbed by that art, which she had so eagerly cultivated, that she did not and could not think of anything else. Each day she wanted more and better music. Her mind was in the grip of perfection, which held her fascinated. Oblivious to what was happening in the outside world, her isolation became complete, absolute. One day, Horacio went to see her and left without her even realizing he had been there.

That afternoon, when no one was expecting it, he set off for Villajoyosa, as it was said that his aunt, who was still living there, was close to death. And it was true, for three days after her nephew arrived, Doña Trini closed the heavy gates of her eyes never to open them again. Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of autumn, Horacio fell ill, although not gravely so. Friendly letters passed between him and Tristana and even Don Lope, and these continued to come and go every two or three weeks, following the same route taken by the incendiary letters once written by Señó Juan and Paquita de Rimini. Tristana wrote hers very quickly and hurriedly, topping and tailing them with only polite expressions of friendship. Under the influence of one of those inspirations that fills the mind with a profound and true knowledge of things, Tristana believed, as firmly as one believes in the light from the sun, that she would never see Horacio again. And so it was. One November morning, a grave-faced Don Lope entered her room, and in a tone that was neither joyful nor sad, as if he were merely commenting on the weather, he gave her the news coolly and tersely.

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

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.

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.