Tristana
Authors: Benito Perez Galdos
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Psychological, #Literary
BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS
(1843–1920) was born into a middle-class family in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. When he was nineteen, he was sent to Madrid to study law. Once there, however, he neglected his studies and plunged into the ordinary life of the capital, an experience that both developed his social and political conscience and confirmed him in his vocation as a writer. He became an assiduous theater- and concert-goer and a visitor to galleries and museums, and began publishing articles on literature, art, music, and politics. Galdós was the first to translate
The
Pickwick Papers
into Spanish, and on a visit to Paris, discovered the works of Balzac. His first novel,
La fontana de oro
, was published privately and initially met with little interest. It wasn’t long, though, before critics were hailing it as a new beginning for the Spanish novel. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Galdós wrote nearly eighty novels and some twenty plays. He also managed to find time to travel widely, in Spain and abroad, and to conduct a series of discreet affairs—one of them with fellow novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. Perhaps his most ambitious literary project, entitled
Episodios nacionales
, comprised forty-six books, each chronicling a different episode in Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar onward. He continued to write until his death at the age of seventy-six, dictating his novels to an amanuensis when blindness overtook him. Galdós provides his readers with an extraordinarily vivid picture of life in nineteenth-century Spain; his novels teem with fascinating characters from all social classes. His masterpiece is generally considered to be the vast and wonderful
Fortunata and Jacinta
, but equally impressive are such works as
Doña Perfecta
,
Misericordia
,
La de Bringas
, and
Miau
. Luis Buñuel based three of his movies—
Viridiana
,
Nazarín
, and
Tristana
—on three Galdós novels, perhaps recognizing in Galdós a fellow subversive.
MARGARET JULL COSTA
has been a translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature for nearly thirty years. Among the authors she has translated are José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many prizes, including the PEN Translation Prize. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2014 she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. She lives in the United Kingdom.
JEREMY TREGLOWN
is a writer and literary critic known most recently for his work on Spanish culture, film, and literature. His books include several biographies, including
V. S. Pritchett
, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Award for Biography, and most recently
Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936
. He was the editor of
The Times Literary Supplement
for almost a decade and is currently the Donald C. Gallup Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library at Yale. He lives in the United Kingdom.
TRISTANA
BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS
Translated from the Spanish by
MARGARET JULL COSTA
Introduction by
JEREMY TREGLOWN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Translation copyright © 2014 by Margaret Jull Costa
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Jeremy Treglown
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Darío de Regoyos y Valdés,
Portrait of Miss Jeanning
, 1885; Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, © Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa / Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843–1920.
[Tristana. English]
Tristana / by Benito Pérez Galdós ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ; introduction by Jeremy Treglown.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1 — ISBN 978-1-59017-765-5 (alk. paper)
I. Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. II. Title.
PQ6555
863'.5—dc23
2014025387
ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1
v1.0
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Copyright and More Information
WITHIN
a few pages, two people have taken over our imaginations. In some ways their predicaments are formulaic: an aging, self-mythologizing, predatory yet generous man lives with an attractive, passionate, much younger woman who is beginning to sense her separate potential. We’re warned early on that although people feel themselves to be unique and complex, their specialness is generally “an amalgamation . . . of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like . . . invisible bacteria.” This is part of what makes
Tristana
a novel of the late nineteenth century rather than just a folktale. The story will be ironic; it will be about the ordinary illusion of specialness, yet it will also reinforce that illusion.
From the outset, matters seem unlikely to end well. “Socially” speaking—in the terms of Henry James, say—Tristana’s position is not so much ambiguous as scarcely mentionable. Benito Pérez Galdós was James’s exact contemporary and understood his society no less well than James did his own, but this isn’t a novel by James or about his world, and its ironies are more robust. Tristana, we’re told in the riddling way of a folktale, “was neither daughter, niece, or wife” to Don Lope, but “she belonged to him.” Here, the always fluid narrative viewpoint is that of local gossip. She belongs to him, people say, like “a tobacco pouch,” and if that’s a double entendre, so it’s probably meant to be. Tristana isn’t just a receptacle, though, nor is she
nada
, which people also say about her. Galdós liked women—really liked them, as individuals—and his novels are keenly alert to what it was to be them. It’s striking how many of his stories have women’s names.
Tristana
was published in 1892 and by then every Western reader knew
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina
, but those are about married women who have taken their husband’s names. Few of the great pre-twentieth-century fictions written by men take their titles unequivocally from a heroine (
Pamela
is an exception;
Evelina
and
Emma
are by women writers;
Eugénie Grandet
and
Thérèse Raquin
come close but are so called because of the different kinds of power the heroines’ eponymous fathers and cousins have over them). Yet Galdós wrote
Marianela
(1878) and
Fortunata and Jacinta
(1887) as well as
Tristana
, and the third of these shows signs of wanting to become a feminist work. Its “substance,” according to one contemporary critic, is “the wakening of the consciousness of a woman who rebels against a society that condemns her to everlasting shame, and is incapable of offering her a respectable way of earning her living.” The reviewer was Spain’s first important woman novelist and first woman academic, Emilia Pardo Bazán. As it happens, she and Galdós had not long before ended a love affair, so she may be assumed to have read the story with particular interest. He was forty-nine, the same age at which his roué hero’s counting of the years “stuck fast . . . as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century.” Don Lope is fifty-seven when the book opens, and both he and, increasingly, Tristana realize that whether or not his arithmetic is stuck, he won’t get any younger. But aging isn’t mathematically regulated, and in Tristana’s case it will be violently accelerated by illness and surgery.
How the reader interprets this disabling misfortune to a large extent determines how the book is understood and evaluated. Pardo Bazán and, following her, some recent critics have seen it as at best an arbitrary way of moving the plot along, at worst a peculiarly male kind of fictional revenge on a woman for daring to be free (Tristana’s romance with Horacio begins, after all, on one of the long
walks
she used to take with the maid, Saturna, despite the crude old Spanish proverb that said ‘A woman’s place is at home with a broken leg’). In life, though, illness and disability do afflict people and alter their relationships, and generally in ways that seem to have no meaning. Galdós’s plotting may be rough-and-ready, but it’s all too real. Among the realities that concern him is the role played in life by luck.
We’re nudged by the backstory into wondering where things began to go wrong for Tristana (does her name imply something essentially sad in her?), or for any of the other characters. Like most women in her world, she has been given next to no education—this even though her mother, Josefina, had literary ambitions. Her father, Antonio, was unlucky with money; only Don Lope’s generosity saved the family from ruin. Released from prison, the demoralized Antonio soon dies, and his widow falls victim to what would now be called an obsessive-compulsive disorder. (How vividly madness draws out Galdós’s always observant sympathy.) Josefina dies, too, handing her daughter over to Don Lope to look after—a responsibility that he abuses, and not only in today’s terms. The narrative asserts, albeit in Galdós’s dry, hard-to-gauge way, that Don Lope’s “moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns.” We hear about this
mutilación
long before Tristana is operated on, but it seems relevant that the same word is used then.
Others have been unlucky, too. Saturna’s husband was killed in a workplace accident, so she became Don Lope’s servant and put her son into institutional care, along with children born blind or deaf, whose plights Galdós again dwells on. (Luis Buñuel makes more of this boy in his powerful, very free film adaptation.) Don Lope endures the consequences of the liberality he seems to have been born with, and which is one of his more appealing traits. Yet this is no victim culture. Under siege from her sexually remorseless guardian, Tristana—who is in her early twenties—nonetheless finds “moments of brief, pale happiness, tiny hints of what the pleasures of love might be.” She will experience them more fully with Horacio. Shocked when she wakes up to the situation she’s in, she’s also realistic about it: honest both about her seducer’s good qualities and about the extent to which her problems derive from her upbringing and the values of her society. And while she’s a fantasist, she’s also pragmatic: enterprising and independent in her outings to different parts of Madrid; quick to make the most of her affair with Horacio; brave in physical adversity. If anyone is self-pitying here, it’s the rich young artist to whose tales about his dreadful upbringing Tristana listens so eagerly. Horacio is the eligible man who can’t or won’t commit, which is lucky, in a way, given that commitment is something Tristana doesn’t want.
Now everything seems to fall apart and this is where the novel may, but shouldn’t, disappoint—loose though the author’s handling of its elements briefly becomes. Horacio goes off to the Mediterranean with his aunt and on both sides the affair with Tristana turns for a time into a solipsistic fantasy buoyed up on a flood of letters. Then she becomes ill and when she and Horacio next meet . . . but an introduction ought not to give away too much. Perhaps it’s better to put forth some questions. Is the way things go now between Horacio and Tristana implausible? Does Horacio behave badly? What about the by now increasingly vulnerable Don Lope, and the new turns taken by Tristana’s ambitiousness, and above all about how she and Don Lope fetch up? The most explicit question is asked by the novel itself, at the end. It’s about the two characters both as individuals and together—
uno y otro
—but also implicitly it’s about how much we think any human narrative can or should tell us. Galdós’s answer is: “Perhaps”—“
Tal vez
.”
Literally, the Spanish words mean “such a time.” This isn’t how they should be translated but, to see the problem the other way around, a Spanish person reading “perhaps” might not know that in English the word carries distant memories of
hap
, meaning chance, as in “mishap” and also, strangely, “happiness.” Almost subliminally, for a Spanish writer to isolate
tal vez
like this can be seen as subtly heightening the story’s ponderings on the passage of time, on aging, on lost pasts and imagined futures: Tristana’s exuberant dreams of freedom, of becoming an actor, a painter, a musician, a saint; Don Lope’s quixotic regrets for a more gallant past, all those “rare muskets and rusty harquebuses, pistols, halberds, Moorish and Christian flintlocks, hilted swords, breastplates and backplates” which decorated his walls but which, in another part of himself and in the today of that part of the novel, he knows have no value except the money they can raise to help his friend, Tristana’s father. “One has what one has,” he believes, “until someone else needs it.”