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.”

Mainly, “perhaps” throws out the happily-after-after hopes associated with a folktale as well as the more pessimistic certainties associated with nineteenth-century realism. Admitted, those certainties are less than they’ve been claimed to be, whether by their proponents—especially a bit before Galdós, Henrik Ibsen, and Émile Zola—or by modern cultural historians. The fictive ironies that critics have more justly drawn attention to in all of Galdós’s work are present in Tristana long before its ending. He’s not a modernist novelist, but he is a transitional one and he expects us to do some work while he enjoys himself. Part of that is not making every decision for us. Don Lope is a bad man, but he’s also a good one. Well, which is he? The novelist’s shrug is nowhere more satirically vigorous than during a passage about the old bachelor’s self-serving opinions on “the man-woman relationship” and the urgent need for a repeal of the Mosaic law in relation to it. “Needless to say,” the narrator says, “all those who knew [him], myself included, abominate such ideas and wholeheartedly deplore the fact that this foolish gentleman’s conduct proved to be such a faithful application of his perverse doctrines. It should be added that among those of us who value the major principles that form the basis . . . etcetera, etcetera . . . , it makes our hair stand on end just to think what the social machine would be like if its enlightened operators took it into their heads to . . .”

“Etcétera, etcétera”! It’s as teasing as the blank page in Tristram Shandy. Galdós is a really funny writer and this, along with “perhaps,” is a crucial element in Tristana’s seriousness, and its sadness.

—JEREMY TREGLOWN

TRISTANA

1

IN THE populous quarter of Chamberí, toward the water tower end rather than Cuatro Caminos, there lived, not so many years ago, an agreeable-looking gentleman with a most unusual name, and he lived not in an ancestral mansion—for there are none in that part of town—but in a cheap, plebeian rented room, with, as noisy neighbors, a tavern, a café, a shop selling milk fresh from the goat, and a narrow inner courtyard with numbered rooms. The first time I encountered this gentleman and observed his proud, soldierly bearing, like a figure in a Velázquez painting of one of Spain’s regiments in Flanders, I was informed that his name was Don Lope de Sosa, a name with more than a whiff of the theater about it* and worthy of a character in one of those short tales you find in books on rhetoric; and that, indeed, was the name given to him by some of his more unsavory friends; he, however, answered to Don Lope Garrido.† In time, I discovered that the name on his baptismal certificate was Don Juan López Garrido; so that sonorous Don Lope must have been his own invention, like a lovely ornament intended to embellish his person; and the name so suited the firm, noble lines of his lean face, his slim, erect body, his slightly hooked nose, his clear brow and lively eyes, his graying mustache and neat, provocative goatee, that he really could not have been called anything else. One had no alternative but to call him Don Lope.

The age of this excellent gentleman, in terms of the figure he gave whenever the subject came up, was a number as impossible to verify as the time on a broken clock, whose hands refuse to move. He had stuck fast at forty-nine, as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century; but not even all-powerful God could have taken from him the fifty-seven years, which, however well he wore them, were no less real for all that. He dressed as smartly and impeccably as his slender means permitted: a well-buffed top hat, a good-quality winter cape, dark gloves at every season of the year, an elegant cane in summer, and suits more appropriate to youth than to maturity. Don Lope Garrido—just to whet your appetite—was a skilled strategist in the war of love and prided himself on having stormed more bastions of virtue and captured more strongholds of chastity than he had hairs on his head.