Tristana (11 page)

“Free and honorable, of course, because I don’t think I am dishonoring myself by loving you, whether we live together or not. But now you’ll tell me that I’ve lost all sense of morality.”

“No, not at all. I believe—”

“I’m a very bad woman, you know. Be honest, now, weren’t you a little frightened by what I just said. I’ve dreamed of that honorable freedom for a long time now, and I have a much clearer sense of that free and honorable life since I’ve been in love with you and now that my intelligence has awoken and I’m constantly being surprised by the winds of knowledge that blow through my mind like a draft through a half-open door. I think about it all the time, and think about you, and I can’t help cursing the people who never taught me an art or even a trade, because if they had set me to stitching shoes, by now I would be a skilled worker, possibly a mistress of my trade. But I’m still young, don’t you think? Now you’re laughing at me. That means that I’m young for love, but too old to learn a skill. Don’t worry. I will become young again, I’ll slough off the years, I’ll return to childhood and make up for lost time by sheer hard work. A strong will can overcome anything, don’t you think?”

Captivated by such determination, Horacio became more loving with each day that passed, his love reinforced by admiration. Her exuberant imagination awoke in him new mental energies; the sphere of his ideas grew larger, and so infectious was that powerful combination of strong feelings and deep thoughts that together they reached new heights, experienced a tempestuous intoxication of the senses, filled with daringly utopian moments, both social and erotic. They philosophized with a rare freedom even as they exchanged wild endearments and caresses, and overcome by tiredness, they would talk languidly until they ran out of breath. Their mouths fell silent, but their spirits continued to flutter about in space.

Meanwhile, nothing worthy of note was happening in Tristana’s relations with her master, who had adopted an expectant, observational stance, and while being particularly attentive to her, he abstained from any displays of affection. He would see her come home late on certain nights and observe her closely; but he did not reprimand her, sensing that, at the slightest hint of conflict, his slave would reveal her intention to declare her emancipation. On some evenings, they would talk about various topics, but Don Lope, with cold tactical skill, would avoid any mention of the “romance”; and she revealed such spirit, and her mother-of-pearl Japanese face was so transformed by her dark eyes bright with intelligence, that Don Lope, restraining his desire to cover her in kisses, would be filled with melancholy and say to himself, “She’s really blossoming. She must be in love.”

Quite often, he would find her in the dining room at unusual hours, sitting beneath the circle of light from the hanging lamp, copying a figure from an engraving or one of the objects in the room.

“Very good,” he said to her on the third or fourth occasion on which he found her thus engaged. “You’re making progress, my dear, you really are. I can see the difference between now and the night before last.”

And shutting himself up in his room with his melancholy, the poor, declining gallant would thump his fist on the table and exclaim, “Another fact. The man is a painter.”

But he did not want to make any direct investigations, finding such activities offensive to his sense of decorum and inappropriate to his never profaned knightliness. One afternoon, however, while he was standing on the platform of the tram talking to one of the conductors, who was a friend of his, he asked, “Is there an artist’s studio around here, Pepe?”

At precisely that moment, they were passing the cross street formed by some new buildings intended for the poor, among which was a fine, large building of bare brick, topped off by a kind of glass house, like the studio of a photographer or artist.

“Up there,” said the conductor, “we have Señor Díaz, a portrait painter in oils.”

“Ah, yes, I know him,” said Don Lope. “The one who—”

“The one who comes and goes each morning and each evening. He doesn’t sleep here. A handsome fellow!”

“Yes, he’s dark, isn’t he, and rather slight?”

“No, he’s tall.”

“Ah, yes, tall, but a bit round-shouldered.”

“No, he cuts a very elegant figure.”

“And he has long hair.”

“No, he wears his hair short.”

“He’s obviously had it cut recently. He looks like one of those Italians who play the harp.”

“Well, I don’t know about him playing a harp, but he certainly works hard with his brushes. He asked a colleague of ours to act as a model for one of the apostles and he got him to the life.”

“I thought he did landscapes.”

“Oh, that too, and horses. He paints flowers that look as if they were real and ripe fruit and dead quail. Well, a little of everything really. And the pictures of naked women he has in his studio really make you sit up.”

“Naked girls, you say?”

“Or half undressed, with a bit of cloth that both covers and uncovers. Go up and see for yourself, Don Lope. He’s a good chap Don Horacio, and he’ll give you a warm welcome.”

“I’ve seen it all before, Pepe. Those painted ladies do nothing for me. I’ve always preferred the flesh-and-blood variety myself. Anyway, goodbye for now.”

IT SHOULD
be said that Horacio, that highly spiritual artist, overwhelmed by his intoxicatingly amorous encounters with Tristana, found himself diverted from his noble profession. He painted little and almost always without a model: He began to feel the remorse of the worker, the sorrow provoked by unfinished pieces crying out to be given final shape; however, presented with a choice between art and love, he chose love, because it was a new experience for him and awoke in his soul the sweetest of emotions, a newly discovered world, lush, exuberant, and rich, a world that demanded to be taken possession of and required the geographer and conquistador to plant his foot firmly upon it. Art could wait; he would return to it when his mad desire had died down a little, as it would, and love would then take on a more peaceful character, more suited to quiet colonization than to furious conquest. Good Horacio genuinely believed that this was the love of his life, that no other woman would ever be able to please him now or replace the impassioned and witty Tristana in his heart; and he consoled himself with the thought that time would temper her fever-pitch thinking, because such an outflow of bold ideas was excessive in a wife or an eternal beloved. He hoped that constant affection and time would whittle away at his idol’s powers of imagination and reasoning, making her more feminine, more domestic, more ordinary and useful.

This is what he thought, but did not say. One night when they were talking, looking out at the sunset and savoring the sweet melancholy of a misty evening, Horacio was startled to hear her express herself in the following terms.

“It’s very odd what’s happening to me: I learn difficult things very easily; I can pick up the ideas and rules of an art or even, if you press me, a science, but I can’t grasp the practical details of life. Whenever I buy something, I get swindled; I don’t know the value of things; I have no idea about housework or order, and if Saturna didn’t do everything at home, the place would be a complete mess. It’s true that everyone has a role in life, and I could play many roles, but I’m clearly not cut out for domesticity. I’m like those men who have no idea how much a bag of potatoes costs or a sack of coal. Saturna has told me a hundred times, but it goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps I was born to be a fine lady. Regardless of whether I was or not, though, I have to apply myself and learn those things, without neglecting my studies, of course, and find out how to take care of chickens and darn clothes. I do a lot of work at home, but never on my own initiative. I’m Saturna’s scullery maid, and I do sweep and clean and scrub, but pity the poor house if I were in charge of it! But I have to learn, don’t I? Old Don Lope didn’t even bother to teach me that. I’ve never been anything but an exotic Circassian slave bought for his amusement, and it was enough for him that I was pretty, clean, and willing.”

The painter told her not to worry about acquiring such domestic wisdom, she would soon learn when she had to.

“You’re a young woman,” he added, “with enormous talent and aptitude. All you lack are those minor details, the extra knowledge that comes with independence and necessity.”

“My fear,” said Tristana, throwing her arms about his neck, “is that you will stop loving me when you find out that I don’t even know what five pesetas can buy and will start to feel afraid that I might turn the house upside down. The fact is that if I ever manage to paint like you or discover another profession in which I can shine and work in good faith, how are we going to manage, my love? It’s frightening.”

She expressed her alarm so sweetly that Horacio could not help but laugh.

“Don’t worry, my dear, we’ll be all right. I’ll wear the skirts. What else can we do?”

“No, no,” said Tristana, charmingly wagging her finger. “If I find a way of earning my own living, then I will live alone. Long live independence . . . although I will, of course, still love you and always be yours. I know what I want. I have my own ideas on the matter. There’s to be no matrimony, so there will be no arguments about who wears the skirts and who doesn’t. I think you would love me less if you made me your slave, and I think I would love you less if I had you under my thumb. Freedom with honor, that’s my motto or, if you like, my dogma. I know it’s difficult, very difficult to achieve, because of what Saturna calls
socighty
. . . Oh, I don’t know. But I’m going to throw myself into the experiment. And if I fail, I fail, but if I don’t, my darling, if I get my own way, what will you say then? There I will be alone in my own little house, loving you intensely, of course, and working, working at my art in order to earn my daily bread; and there you will be in your little house, and sometimes we’ll be together and sometimes apart for whole hours, because this being together all the time, day and night, is slightly—”

“You are funny and I love you so very much! But I refuse to spend some of the day apart from you. We will be two in one, Siamese twins, and if you want to wear the trousers, fine, do so; if you want to be one of those mannish women, carry on. But there is a slight problem. Shall I tell you what it is?”

“Yes, tell me.”

“No, I don’t want to. It’s too soon.”

“What do you mean ‘too soon’? Tell me or I’ll bite your ear off.”

“Well, do you remember what we were talking about last night?”

“Yeth.”

“You don’t.”

“Of course I do, silly. I have an amazing memory. You said that in order to complete your dream, you wanted—”

“Go on, say it.”

“No, you say it.”

“I wanted to have a child.”

“Oh, no, no. I would love the child so much that I would die of grief if God took it away from me. Because they do all die,” she said passionately. “Haven’t you seen the constant procession of little white coffins? It makes me so sad. I really don’t know why God allows them to come into the world only to take them away so soon. No, no. A child born is a child dead . . . and ours would die too. It’s best not to have any. Say we won’t.”

“No, I won’t say that. Now really, why would it die? Suppose it were to live . . . that’s where the problems would start. If we have to live apart, each in our own house, me independent and you free and honorable, each in our own household, utterly honorable and entirely and utterly free, where would our little angel live?”

Tristana remained thoughtful, staring at the lines of the floorboards. She hadn’t been expecting to be confronted with such an awkward problem and could find no immediate way of resolving it. Suddenly, a whole world of ideas crowded in on her and she burst out laughing, confident that the truth was hers, a truth which she expressed thus: “Why, with me, of course, where else? If the child is mine, who else would it live with?”

“But it would be mine too, it would belong to both of us.”

“Yes, it would be yours, but . . . no, I don’t want to say it. All right, it would be yours, but it would be more mine than yours. No one could doubt that it was mine, because Nature tore it from me. Your part in it would be undeniable, but it wouldn’t count for as much, as far as the world was concerned, I mean. Oh, don’t make me talk about such things or give these explanations!”

“No, on the contrary, it’s best to have it out in the open. If we found ourselves in that situation, I would say: It’s mine.”

“And, still more loudly, I would say: It’s mine, eternally mine.”

“And mine too.”

“All right, but—”

“There are no buts about it.”

“No, you don’t understand. It would be your child too, of course, but it would belong more to me.”

“No, it would be equally yours and mine.”

“Nonsense, man, it could never be equally yours and mine. You see, there might be cases when, and I’m speaking generally now—”

“No, let’s stick to the particular.”

“Well, then, speaking particularly, I say that the child is mine and I won’t let it go, so there!”

“Well, we’ll see—”

“No, we won’t.”

“But it’s mine, mine.”

“Yes, yours, but what I mean to say is that this business of it being ‘yours’ isn’t so very clear, not generally speaking. And besides, Nature gives me more rights than she does you. And it will have the same name as me, with my surname and nothing more. So why all the fuss?”

“How can you say that, Tristana?” Horatio said with a hint of irritation.

“You’re not angry, are you? It’s your fault. Why be . . . No, please, don’t be annoyed with me. I unsay everything I said.”

The small cloud passed and immediately everything was once again sunshine and light in the briefly obscured heaven of their happiness. Horacio, nevertheless, still felt slightly sad. Tristana tried to dissipate that fleeting fear and, speaking more sweetly and bewitchingly than ever, said, “Fancy quarreling over such a remote possibility, which might never happen! Forgive me. I can’t help it. I come out with ideas as easily as my face might come out in spots. Is it my fault? When I least expect it, I think things one shouldn’t think. But pay no attention. Next time, you must simply beat me with a stick. Think of my latest outburst as a kind of mental or nervous illness to be cured with frequent applications of the cane. How foolish we are, getting all hot and bothered about something that doesn’t even exist, that as far as we know may never exist, when the present moment is so easy and so nice. Let’s just enjoy it while we can!”