Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós Page A

Horacio, who, shortly after their first intimate encounters, began to notice that while his young lover was growing in his eyes, he was shrinking in hers. This surprised him and almost began to irritate him, because he had imagined that Tristana would be his subordinate as regards intelligence and willpower, the sort of wife who lives off the moral and intellectual sap of her husband and who sees and feels with his eyes and heart. It turned out, however, that the young woman had her own ideas, hurling herself into the empty spaces of thought and displaying the boldest of aspirations.
    “Look, love of my life,” she would say to him during the long rambling conversations that propelled them from the transports of love to life’s most serious problems, “I love you with all my heart, and I know that I could never live without you. Every woman aspires to marry the man she loves, but not me. According to society’s rules, I cannot marry. I couldn’t marry anyone, not even you, not with my head held high, because, however kind and good you might be, I would always have the uncomfortable feeling that I had given you less than you deserve, and I would be afraid that, sooner or later, in a moment of bad temper or tiredness, you would say to me that you’d had to close your eyes in order to make me your wife. Is that pride or something else? I love you and will always love you, but I want to be free. That’s why I need to find a way of making a living. Difficult, isn’t it? Saturna pokes fun at me. According to her, there are only three careers open to women: marriage, the theater, and . . . well, frankly, I don’t fancy any of them. So we’ll have to find another. But I wonder: Is it madness to have a talent and cultivate it and live by it? Do I understand so little of the world that I’m thinking what’s possible is, in fact, impossible? You tell me, because you know more than I do.”
    And after much beating about the bush, Horacio, deeply embarrassed, would find himself agreeing with Saturna.
    “But you,” he would add, “you are an exception, and the rule doesn’t apply to you. You will find the formula, you will perhaps resolve the prickly problem of the free woman—”
    “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