Tristana (3 page)

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.

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; this 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.

However, the refined tastes that once so embellished her character, thus adding even more charm to her natural graces, vanished without a trace. In her crazed obsession with moving house and with cleanliness, Josefina forgot all about her past. Her memory, like a tarnished mirror, preserved not a single idea, name, or phrase from the fictional world she had so loved. One day, Don Lope tried to remind the unfortunate lady of her past, but saw only blank ignorance on her face, as if he were speaking to her of some previous life. She understood nothing, could remember nothing, and did not even know who Pedro Calderón was, thinking at first that he was perhaps a house agent or the owner of the removal carts. On another occasion, he found her washing her slippers, with, beside her, laid out to dry, her photograph albums. Tristana, with tears in her eyes, stood observing this picture of desolation, and shot an imploring look at that friend of the family, urging him to leave the poor, sick woman alone. The worst of it was that the good gentleman also had to resign himself to paying the unfortunate family’s many expenses, which, what with the endless moving, the frequent breakages and damage to the furniture, mounted relentlessly. That soap-fueled deluge was drowning them all. As luck would have it, after one of those changes of domicile or perhaps because they had arrived in a new house whose walls positively ran with damp or perhaps because Josefina was wearing a pair of shoes that had recently been submitted to her new cleaning system, the time came for her to surrender her soul to God. A rheumatic fever, which rampaged through her body, sword in hand, brought an end to her sad days. The most depressing aspect of her death was that, in order to pay the doctor, the pharmacist, and the undertaker, as well as the bills that Josefina had run up buying food and perfumes, Don Lope had to dig still deeper into his already depleted fortune and sacrifice his most beloved possession: his collection of weapons, ancient and modern, which he had accumulated with all the eagerness and deep pleasure of the connoisseur. The unimaginably noble and austere collection of rare muskets and rusty harquebuses, pistols, halberds, Moorish and Christian flintlocks, hilted swords, breastplates and backplates, which adorned the gentleman’s living room along with many other fine objects from the worlds of war and hunting, was sold for a song to a mere hawker. When Don Lope saw his precious arsenal leave his house, he felt troubled and bewildered, but his large soul was nonetheless able to suppress the grief rising up within him and to put on a mask of stoical, dignified serenity. All he had left now was his collection of portraits of beautiful women, which included both delicate miniatures and modern photographs, in which truth replaces art: a museum of his amorous encounters, just as his collection of guns and flags had spoken of the grandeur of a once glorious kingdom. That was all he had left, a few eloquent, albeit silent images, which, while important as trophies, meant very little in terms of base metal.

When she died, Josefina, as so often happens, partly recovered the mind she had lost, and thanks to that, briefly relived her past, recognizing and cursing, like the dying Don Quixote, the follies of her widowhood. Before she turned her eyes to God, she had time to turn them to Don Lope, who was at her side, and to commend to him her orphaned daughter, placing her under his protection; and the noble gentleman accepted this charge effusively, promising what people always promise on these solemn occasions. In short: Reluz’s widow closed her eyes, easing, as she passed to a better life, the lives of those who had hitherto been groaning beneath the tyranny of her constant house-moves and cleaning. Tristana went to live with Don Lope and (hard and painful though it is to say), after only two months, he had added her to his very long list of victories over innocence.

THE CONSCIENCE
of this warrior of love was, as we have seen, capable of shining forth like a bright star, but on other occasions, it revealed itself to be as horribly arid as a dead planet. The problem was that the good gentleman’s moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns. In accordance with the fusty old dogma of a knight sedentary, Don Lope accepted neither guilt nor responsibility when it came to anything involving the ladies. While he would never have courted the wife, spouse, or mistress of a close friend, he considered that, otherwise, everything was permitted in matters of love. Men like him, Adam’s spoiled brats, had received from heaven a tacit bull that allowed them to dispense with all morality, which was the policeman of the common herd, not the law of the gentleman. His conscience, so sensitive on other points, was, on that point, harder and deader than a pebble, with the difference being that the pebble, when struck by the rim of a wagon wheel, usually gives off a spark, whereas Don Lope’s conscience, in affairs of the heart, would have given off no sparks at all even if it had been pounded by the hooves of Santiago’s horse.