Tristana (17 page)

“GOODNESS
me,” Tristana said to herself, clasping her hands and staring hard at this old man, “the things the rascal knows! He’s an out-and-out scoundrel devoid of conscience, but he knows a lot, he really does!”

“Would you agree with me, my dear?” asked Don Lope, kissing her hands, making no attempt to disguise the glee he felt inside as he sensed victory.

“I would have to say ‘Yes.’ I don’t think I am cut out for domesticity, I mean, I just don’t see myself in that role . . . But I don’t know if the things I dream of will come to anything.”

“Oh, I can see it as clear as day!” retorted Don Lope with the honest conviction with which he imbued all his lies. “Believe me, a father is never wrong, and repenting of any harm I ever did, I want to be a father to you now and only a father.”

They continued talking about the same subject, and Don Lope, making good use of his strategic skills, managed to capture the enemy position, mockingly describing the banality of an eternal union with some vulgar creature and the tedium of married life.

These ideas both flattered the young woman and served as a palliative for her grave illness. She felt better that evening and, when left alone with Saturna, before the latter went to bed, she experienced moments of elation, her ambitions more keenly felt than ever. “Yes, why shouldn’t I become an actress? I will live in decorous freedom, never binding myself eternally to anyone, not even to the man I love and will always love. The freer I am, the more I will love him.”

When Saturna, with exquisite care, had attended to her bad knee, replacing the old bandage with a fresh one, she helped Tristana into bed. Tristana spent a restless night, but consoled herself with the effluvia of her overheated imagination and with the thought of her prompt recovery. She waited anxiously for morning so that she could write to Horacio, and at dawn, before Don Lope got up, she launched into a long, excitable epistle.

“My love, my own country bumpkin,
mio diletto
, I am still not well, but I am happy. It’s odd, isn’t it? I can hardly expect someone else to understand me when I cannot even understand myself! Yes, I am happy and full of hopes that slip into my soul when I least expect them. God is good and sends me these joys, doubtless because I deserve them. I feel that I will get better, and even though I show no signs of doing so, it’s enough that I feel it. That allows me to believe I will fulfill my dreams, that I will be an outstanding tragic actress, that I will be able to adore you from the castle of my actorly independence. We will love each other from castle to castle, absolute masters of our respective desires, you will be free and I will be free and yet still your wife, with our own domains, no life in common, no sacred bond, no garlic soup, nothing.

“Don’t speak to me of altars, because that makes you shrink before my eyes to such a tiny size that I cannot even see you. Maybe what I’m saying is madness, but I was born to be a chronic madwoman, I’m like a dish of mutton, either take me or leave me. No, don’t leave me. I hold on to you, I bind you to me, because my madness needs your love in order to become reason. Without you, I would grow stupid, which is the worst thing that could happen.

“I don’t want either of us to be stupid. I enlarge you in my imagination when you try to make yourself small and make you handsome again when you insist on making yourself ugly, abandoning your sublime art in order to cultivate radishes and pumpkins. Don’t oppose me in my desires, don’t banish my hopes; I want you to be a remarkable man and I intend to have my own way. I can feel it, I can see it . . . it cannot be otherwise. My inner voice amuses itself by describing to me all the perfections of your being. Don’t deny that you are as I dream you to be. Let me fabricate you, no, that’s not the word, let me compose you, no, that’s not it either, let me reconstruct you, no . . . Let me think of you however I want to. That way I am happy: let me, let me . . .”

Other letters followed, in which the imagination of the poor patient ran riot in the ideal world, galloping through it like a runaway steed, in search of the impossible end of the infinite, never tiring in its wild, splendid race.

For example:

“How are you, my liege? The more I adore you, the more I forget your physiognomy, but I invent another that is equally to my taste and in accordance with my ideas and the perfections with which I wish to see your sublime person adorned. Shall I tell you a little about myself? I am in terrible pain! I thought I was getting better, but no, for reasons known only to himself, God does not want that. Your beautiful ideal, your Tristanita, may in time be famous, but she will certainly never be a dancer. My leg would not allow it. And for the selfsame reason, I doubt I will ever be an actress. I’m absolutely furious. It gets worse each day. The pain is terrible. What use are doctors? They understand nothing about the art of curing people. I would never have thought that an insignificant thing like a leg could have such influence over a person’s destiny, after all, a leg is just for walking on. I always thought it was the brain or the heart that was in charge, but now a stupid knee has turned despot, and those noble organs obey it. Or rather, they don’t obey it, they pay it no heed at all, but nevertheless suffer under an absurd despotism, which I trust will be only temporary. It’s as if the soldiery had suddenly risen up in revolt, but in the end, the rabble will have to submit.

“And you, my beloved king, how is it with you? If I did not have your love to sustain me, I would already have succumbed to this seditious limb, which wants to have its head. But I will not be cowed, and I continue to think the bold things I have always thought—no, I think more and more such things, and I climb ever upwards. My aspirations are clearer than ever; my ambition, if you can call it that, breaks free and dances like a mad thing. Believe me, you and I are made for greatness. Can you guess how? Well, I can’t explain how, but I know it. My heart tells me so and my heart knows everything and has never yet deceived me and cannot deceive me. You yourself do not understand your own worth. Do I need to reveal you to yourself? Look into me, for I am your mirror, and you will see the supreme Mount Tabor of artistic glory. I’m sure you won’t laugh at what I say, just as I’m sure that you are exactly as I believe you to be, the summation of moral and physical perfection. There are no defects in you, nor can there be, even though the eyes of the common people may see them. Know yourself; listen to me; surrender yourself without fear to the person who knows you far better than you do. I can’t go on. My knee hurts too much. Ah, that a bone, a wretched bone, could . . .”

Thursday

“What a day yesterday was, and what a night! But I will not be cowed. My spirit grows with suffering. Do you know, last night, when that knavish pain gave me a few moments of respite, the knowledge I have acquired from reading, and which had somehow vanished and evaporated, all came back to me. The ideas rushed in one after the other, and memory slammed the door shut so as to keep them in. Don’t be surprised; not only do I still know all that I knew, I know more, much more. Other new and unfamiliar ideas joined the old ones. I must be some kind of ideas magnet, which, as it sallies forth into the world, attracts any small ideas it meets and brings them to me. I know more, much more than before. I know everything, well, perhaps not everything. I feel so very relieved today and will devote myself to thinking about you. How good you are! Your intelligence has no equal, your artistic genius knows no bounds. I love you more deeply than ever, because you respect my freedom, because you don’t tie me to the leg of a chair or a table with the rope of matrimony. My passion demands freedom. I need a very large field to live in. I need to be free to graze on the grass that will grow all the taller as I crop it from the ground with my teeth. I wasn’t made for life in a stable. I need a limitless prairie.”

In her later letters, Tristana no longer used the vocabulary with which both had so liberally scattered their intimate conversations, whether spoken or written. She never again referred to Señó Juan or Paca de Rimini, never invented words or took the grammatical liberties that had been the spice of her piquant style. All those things were wiped from her memory, as if Horacio himself were disappearing, to be replaced by an ideal being, the bold creation of her imagination, a being who embodied all the beauties of the world, visible and invisible. Her heart burned with a vast love that one might easily term mystical, given the incorporeal and entirely unreal qualities of the being who provoked such feelings. This new, intangible Horacio bore a slight resemblance to the real one, but only slight. Tristana made of that pretty phantasm the basic truth of her existence, for she lived only for him, not realizing that she was worshipping a God of her own devising. And that worship found expression in sparkling letters, written in a tremulous hand, in between the overwrought states brought on by sleeplessness and fever, letters that she only dispatched to Villajoyosa out of mechanical habit, for they should really have been sent from the post office of daydreams to somewhere out there in imaginary space.

Wednesday

“My lord and master, my pain carries me to you, as would my joys if I had any. Pain and pleasure provoke the same desire to fly . . . if only one had wings. In the midst of the misfortunes afflicting me, God has been kind enough to give me your love. What does physical pain matter? Not a thing. I will bear it with resignation, as long as you do not hurt me. And let no one say that you are far away! I have you by my side, I sit you down next to me, I see you and touch you; I have enough imaginative power to abolish distance and shrink time at will.”

Thursday

“You don’t need to tell me, I know that you are as you should be. I can feel it inside. Your peerless intelligence, your artistic genius, send sparks up into my brain. Your lofty sense of goodness seems to have made its nest in my heart. Ah, the power of the spirit! When I think very hard about you, the pain goes. You are my medicine, or at least the anesthetic of which my doctor knows nothing. You should see him. Miquis is astonished at my serenity. He knows I adore you, but he doesn’t know your true worth, nor that you are the divinity’s choicest fragment. If he did, he would be more sparing in prescribing sedatives, which are far less effective than the thought of you. I have the pain under control at the moment, because I needed a moment’s calm in order to write to you. By sheer willpower, of which I have a good deal, and by sheer force of thought, I manage to achieve an occasional respite from pain. Devil take this leg of mine. They can cut it off for all I care. I don’t need it. I will love as spiritually with one leg as with two . . . or none at all.”

Friday

“I don’t have to see your marvelous creations. I can see them as clearly as if they were there before my eyes. Nature holds no secrets for you. She is not so much your teacher as your friend. She slips into your works unasked, and your eyes fix her on the canvas before your brushes do. When I am better, I will do the same. The certainty of what I have to do stirs inside me. We will work together, because I won’t be able to be an actress; I see now that it would be impossible. But I could be a painter. I can’t get the idea out of my head. A few lessons from you would be enough for me to follow in your footsteps, although always some way behind, of course. Will you teach me? Yes, you will, because your largeness of soul goes hand in hand with your understanding, and, although you won’t admit it, you are utter goodness, absolute kindness, supreme beauty.”

YOU CAN
imagine the effect on Horacio of these disjointed but subtle thoughts. He found himself transformed into an ideal being, and with each letter that arrived, he was filled with more and more doubts about his own personality, sometimes even going so far as to ask himself if he was as he really was or as painted by the indomitable pen of Don Lepe’s visionary little girl. However, his unease and confusion did not prevent him from seeing the danger that lay behind her letters, and he began to think that Paquita de Rimini was perhaps sicker in the head than in her extremities. Assailed by gloomy thoughts and full of anxieties and suspicions, he resolved to travel to Madrid, and had everything ready for the journey at the end of February, when Doña Trinidad suddenly started coughing up blood, and that, alas, kept him tied to Villajoyosa.

At the same time, events of extreme gravity were taking place in Madrid and in Don Lope’s house, and these we will describe now. Tristana’s condition had deteriorated so much that all her willpower was helpless in the face of the intense pain and fever, vomiting, and general malaise. A desperate and bewildered Don Lope, lacking the presence of mind the situation called for, tried to exorcize the danger by crying out to heaven, at first piteously, then with threats and blasphemies. In his blind fear, he thought a change of treatment would save the patient. Miquis was duly dismissed, only to be recalled because his successor was the kind who cured with leeches, and while this provided some relief at first, it soon demolished Tristana’s little remaining strength.

Tristana was cheered by the return of Miquis, because she liked and trusted him, and the therapeutic powers of his sheer affability helped lift her spirits. For a few hours each day, strong sedatives restored to her the precious ability to find consolation in her own imagination, to forget the danger she was in and ponder imaginary hopes and remote glories. She took advantage of those moments to write a few brief, succinct letters, which Don Lope himself would take to the post office, making no mystery now of his indulgent attitude.

“Enough of subterfuge, my dear,” he said in confiding, paternal tones. “For me there are no secrets. And if writing your little letters brings you comfort, I will not scold you or try to stop you writing them. No one understands you better than I, and the man lucky enough to read your scribblings is not worthy of them, nor does he deserve such an honor. In time, you will come around to my way of thinking. Meanwhile, my little one, write as much as you wish, and if one day, you are not up to wielding your pen, then you can dictate your words to me, and I will be your secretary. You see how little importance I give to this childish game. For these are childish amusements, which I understand perfectly, because I too was once twenty years old, I too was foolish, and would address every girl I met as
my beautiful ideal
and offer her my pale hand!”