“Let them say what they like,” he said to himself, remembering the sacrifices he had made in supporting her mother and saving her father from dishonor, “I’ve earned her. Didn’t Josefina ask me to take care of her? Well, what better care could she have? I’m certainly keeping her safe from harm. Now no one would dare to touch so much as the hem of her garment.” At first, our gallant took exquisite pains to guard his treasure; he feared she might rebel, startled by the difference in age, far greater than allowed for by the rules of love. He was assailed by fears and doubts; in his conscience he came very close to feeling something like a faint tickling, the precursor of remorse. That did not last long, however, and the gentleman soon recovered his usual robust self-confidence. In the end, the devastating action of time dulled his enthusiasm sufficiently for him to relax the rigor of his restless vigilance and arrive at a stage similar to that reached by many married couples when the vast capital of tenderness has been spent and they must begin to eke out, with prudent economy, the modest income of a quiet and somewhat insipid affection. We should point out that not for a moment did it occur to the gentleman to marry his victim, for he abhorred marriage; he held it to be the most horrific form of slavery dreamed up by the terrestrial powers-that-be to keep poor humanity under their thumb.

Tristana accepted this way of life almost without realizing the gravity of her situation. Her own innocence, while timidly suggesting to her defensive measures she had no idea how to deploy, also blindfolded her, and only time and the systematic continuance of her dishonor allowed her to gauge and appreciate her sorry plight. She was much handicapped by her neglected education, and her downfall came in the form of the tricks and snares laid for her by that rogue Don Lope, who made up for what the years were taking away from him with verbal subtlety and gallant compliments of the highest order, of the kind hardly used anymore, because those who knew how to use them are a dying breed. While her mature suitor could not capture her heart, he was adept at the skillful manipulation of her imagination, arousing in her a state of false passion, which, to his mind, occasionally resembled the real thing.

Señorita Reluz went through that stormy test like someone suffering the ups and downs of an intense fever, and during it, she experienced moments of brief, pale happiness, tiny hints of what the pleasures of love might be. Don Lope carefully captivated her imagination, sowing it with ideas that encouraged her to accept such a life; he fostered the young woman’s readiness to idealize things, to see them as they are not or as we would like them to be. Most striking of all, in the early days, was that Tristana gave no thought to the monstrous fact that her tyrant was almost three times her age. To put this in the clearest possible terms, we have to say that she was completely unaware of that gap, doubtless due to his own consummate gifts as a seducer and to the perfidious way in which Nature helped him in his treacherous enterprises, by keeping him in an almost miraculous state of preservation. So superior were his personal attractions that it proved very difficult for time to destroy them. The artifice and the false illusion of love could not last, though. One day, Don Lope realized that the fascination he exercised over the poor girl had ended, and when she, for her part, came to her senses, she was profoundly shocked, a state from which she would take a long time to recover. She suddenly saw the old man in Don Lope, and his old man’s presumption in contravening the laws of Nature by playing the role of the young gallant loomed ever larger in her imagination. Yet Don Lope was not as old as Tristana felt him to be, nor had he deteriorated to the point where he deserved to be thrown out as a useless piece of junk, but because, in private, age imposes its own laws, and it is not so easy to disguise as when one is out and about, in chosen places and at chosen times, a thousand motives for disillusion arose in her, against which the aging suitor, for all his art and talent, was defenseless.

Tristana’s awakening was merely one stage in the profound crisis she went through approximately eight months after first losing her honor, when she was nearly twenty-two. Up until then, Señorita Reluz, who was behind in her moral development, had been all thoughtlessness and doll-like passivity, with no ideas of her own, living entirely under the influence of someone else’s ideas, and so docile in her feelings that it was easy to evoke them in whatever form and for whatever purpose one wished. Then there came a time when, like the shoot of a perennial plant that pushes its way up into life on a warm spring day, her mind suddenly flowered and filled with ideas, in tight little buds to begin with, then in splendid clusters. Indecipherable desires awoke in her heart. She felt restless, ambitious, although for quite what she didn’t know, for something very far off, very high up, which her eyes could not see; she was occasionally troubled by fears and anxieties, sometimes by a cheerful confidence; she saw her situation with absolute clarity, as well as her own sad lot in humanity; she felt something that had slipped unexpectedly through the doors of her soul: pride, an awareness that she was no ordinary person; she was surprised by the growing hubbub in her intellect, saying: “Here I am. Haven’t you noticed the grand thoughts I have?” And as the doll’s stuffing was gradually changing into the blood and marrow of a woman, she began to find the mean little life she led in the grip of Don Lope Garrido both boring and repugnant.

5

AND AMONG the thousand and one things Tristana learned during that time, without anyone having to teach her, was the art of dissembling, making use of the ductility of words, adding flexible springs to the mechanism of life, dampers to muffle the noise, the kind of skillful deviations from the rectilinear path that are almost always dangerous. For, without either of them realizing it, Don Lope had made her his pupil, and some of the ideas that were now blooming afresh in her young mind sprang from the seedbed of her lover’s and, alas for her, her teacher’s mind. Tristana was at the age and season of life when ideas stick, when the most serious contagions of personal vocabulary, manners, and even character occur.

The young lady and the maid became close friends. Without the company and care of Saturna, Tristana’s life would have been intolerable. They chatted while they worked and, when they rested, chatted some more. Saturna told her about her life, painting a genuinely realistic picture of the world and of men, neither blackening nor poeticizing either; and Tristana, who barely had a past life to recount, threw herself into the empty spaces of supposition and presumption, building castles for her future life, the way children do out of a few bricks and some earth. History and poetry came together in happy marriage. Saturna taught and Don Lope’s little girl created, basing her bold ideals on the other woman’s deeds.

“Look,” Tristana would say to Saturna, who was more true friend than servant, “not everything that perverse man teaches us is nonsense, and there’s more to some of what he says than meets the eye.