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.

3

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.