True, he was somewhat spent now and not fit for very much, but he could never quite give up that saucy hobby of his, and whenever he passed a pretty woman, or even a plain one, he would draw himself up and, albeit with no evil intentions, shoot her a meaningful glance, more paternal than mischievous, as if to say: “You had a very narrow escape! Think yourself lucky you weren’t born twenty years earlier. Beware any men who were as I once was, although, if pressed, I would say that there are no men today who could equal me in my prime. Nowadays, men or, perish the thought, gallants, young and old alike, simply don’t know how to behave in the company of a beautiful woman.”

With no profession, good Don Lope, had, in happier times, enjoyed a modest fortune, though all that remained of this was some property in Toledo, which provided him with an ever-decreasing income, and he now spent his time either in idle, agreeable chatter at his club or else methodically doing the rounds of his friends, meeting up with them in cafés or centers—perhaps a better word would be “dark corners”—of pleasure that need not be named here. The only reason he lived in such an out-of-the-way place was the cheapness of the accommodation, which, even with the added expense of the tram fare, was very reasonable indeed, and there were other benefits too: the better light, the fresher air, and the broad, smiling horizon. Not that Garrido was a night owl: he was up each morning at eight, and it took him two whole hours to shave and generally spruce himself up, for he took the same kind of meticulous, leisurely care over his appearance as might a man of the world. He spent the rest of the morning out and about until one o’clock, when he promptly partook of a frugal lunch. He then resumed his peregrinations until seven or eight in the evening, at which hour he ate a no less sober supper, whose sparseness even the most elementary of culinary arts could ill disguise. One thing we should point out is that while Don Lope was all affability and politeness at, for example, the café or his club, at home, he blended courteous but colloquial language with the indisputable authority of the master.

With him lived two women, one a maid, the other a lady, at least in name, for they worked together in the kitchen and performed the same simple household tasks, with no hierarchical differences and in perfect, sisterly camaraderie, a relationship determined more by the abasement of the lady than by any conceit on the part of the maid. The latter’s name was Saturna, and she was tall and thin, with dark eyes, rather mannish in appearance and, having recently been widowed, dressed in deepest mourning. The recent loss of her husband—a bricklayer who had fallen while working on the scaffolding where the new Bank was being built—had meant that she could put her son in the local hospice for children of the poor and find employment as a maid, her first job being in Don Lope’s house—hardly an outpost in the Land of Plenty. The other woman—whom one would sometimes assume to be a servant and sometimes not, for she sat at the table with the master and addressed him informally as tú—was young, pretty, and slender, and her skin was the almost implausible white of pure alabaster; she had the palest of cheeks and dark eyes more notable for their vivacity and brightness than for their size; her remarkable eyebrows looked as if they had been drawn with the tip of the very finest of brushes; her delicate mouth, with its rather plump, round lips, was so red it seemed to contain all the blood that her face lacked; her small teeth were like pieces of concentrated crystal; her hair, caught up in a graceful tangle on the top of her head, was brown and very fine, and had the sheen of plaited silk. This singular creature’s most marked characteristic, however, was her ermine-white purity and cleanliness, for she remained unsoiled by even the most indelicate of household chores. Her perfect hands—ah, what hands!—had a mysterious quality, as did her body and her clothes, which seemed to announce to the lower orders of the physical world: La vostra miseria non mi tange.‡ Everything about her gave the impression of an intrinsic, elemental cleanliness that had been spared all contact with things unclean or impure. When she was in her ordinary clothes, with chamois leather in hand, the dust and dirt somehow respected her; and when she put on her purple dressing gown adorned with white rosettes, with her hair in a chignon pierced by gold-tipped pins, she was the very image of an aristocratic Japanese lady—what else?—given that she seemed entirely made out of paper, the same warm, flexible, living paper on which those inspired Oriental artists painted the divine and the human, the seriously comical and the comically serious. Her matte white face was made of paper, as were her dress and her fine, shapely, incomparable hands.

We should, at this point, explain the relationship between Tristana—for that was the lovely girl’s name—and the great Don Lope, lord and master of that henhouse, since it would be wrong to view them as a family. In the neighborhood, and among the few people who dropped in to visit or to snoop, there was a theory to suit every taste, and the various theories put forth on this important matter were, variously, either in fashion or out. For a period of about two or three months, it was held to be the gospel truth that the young lady was Don Lope’s niece. Then a contrary view—that she was his daughter—took hold, and there were even some who claimed to have heard her say “Papa,” just like one of those talking dolls. After which another opinion blew in, according to which she was none other than Don Lope’s legal wife. More time passed and these vain conjectures vanished without a trace, and in the view of the surrounding populace, Tristana was neither daughter, niece, or wife, in fact, she was no relation of the great Don Lope’s at all; she was nothing, and that was all there was to it, for she belonged to him as if she were a tobacco pouch, an item of furniture, or an article of clothing, with no one to dispute his ownership; and she seemed perfectly resigned to being nothing but a tobacco pouch!

*A reference to the great Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega.

†“Garrido” can mean handsome and elegant but carries, too, a suggestion of garras: claws.

‡“Your suffering does not touch me”: from Dante’s Inferno, canto 2, line 92.

2

WELL, not entirely resigned, no, because every now and then, in the year prior to the one we will be describing here, that pretty little paper doll would stamp her feet in an attempt to show that she had the character and consciousness of a free woman. Her master ruled over her with a despotism one might term “seductive,” imposing his will on her with tender authority, even, sometimes, with cuddles and caresses, thus destroying in her all initiative, apart from that required for incidental, unimportant things. She was twenty-one when, along with the doubts filling her mind about her very strange social situation, there awoke in her a desire for independence. When this process began, she still had the behavior and habits of a child; her eyes did not know how to look to the future, or if they did, they saw nothing. But one day, she noticed the shadow that her present life cast on all future spaces, and that image of herself, as a distorted, broken shadow stretching into the distance, occupied her mind for a long time, suggesting a thousand troubling, confusing thoughts.

In order to understand Tristana’s anxieties, we need to shed more light on Don Lope, so that you do not judge him to be either better or worse than he actually was. He believed that he was practicing, in all its dogmatic purity, the art of being a gentleman, or perhaps a knight, of the sedentary rather than the errant variety, but he interpreted the laws of that religion with excessive freedom, producing a very complex morality, which, despite being very much his own, was also quite widespread, the abundant fruit of the times we live in; a morality which, although it seemed to have sprung solely from him, was, in fact, an amalgamation in his mind of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like the invisible bacteria that inhabit the physical atmosphere. As an external phenomenon, Don Lope’s knightliness was obvious to everyone: he never took anything that was not his, and when it came to money matters, he carried his delicacy to quixotic extremes. He dealt gracefully with his penurious state and disguised it with consummate dignity, giving frequent proof of self-abnegation and stoically condemning materialistic appetites. For him, money was never anything more than base metal and, as such, merited the scorn of any wellborn person, regardless of the joy that might be gained from earning it. The ease with which money slipped through his fingers was further evidence of this disdain, far more convincing, indeed, than his vituperations against what he judged to be the root of all evil and the reason why there were now so few true gentlemen. As regards personal decorum, he was so meticulous, his susceptibilities so easily bruised, that he would not tolerate the most insignificant of slights or ambiguities of language that might contain within them the merest hint of disrespect.