Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós Read Free Book Online Page B

this was going on, Saturna noticed that her mistress and the handsome stranger were standing a matter of inches apart, and so she crept away. “Thank heavens,” she thought, spying on them from afar, “he’s taken the bait; they’re talking at last.” What did Tristana say to the young man? We don’t know. All we know is that Tristana answered “Yes” to everything, “Yes, Yes, Yes . . .” getting ever louder, like someone who, overwhelmed by feelings stronger than her own will, loses all sense of propriety. She was like someone drowning, grabbing hold of a piece of wood, believing it will save her, and it would be absurd to expect her to behave in a decorous fashion as she seizes hold of that plank. The brief, categorical responses given by Don Lope’s little girl, that “Yes” pronounced three times with growing intensity of tone, was the profound voice of the preservation instinct speaking, a cry for help from a desperate soul. The little scene was brief and profitable.
    When Tristana returned to Saturna’s side, she put her hand to her brow and, trembling, said, “I must be mad. Only now do I realize how mad. I showed no tact, no guile, no dignity. I surrendered myself, Saturna. Whatever will he think of me? I just didn’t know what I was doing . . . I was simply dragged along by some kind of vertigo . . . I answered ‘Yes’ to everything he said . . . as if, oh, you’ve no idea, as if my soul were pouring out through my very eyes. His eyes were burning into me. And there I was thinking I knew some of those useful female wiles! He’ll think I’m an idiot, that I have no shame. But I just couldn’t pretend or play the shy little miss. The truth leapt to my lips and my feelings overflowed. I tried to drown them out and ended up drowning. Is that what being in love is? All I know is that I love him with all my heart, and that’s more or less what I said. How shameful! I love him and yet I don’t even know him, I don’t know who he is or even his name. This isn’t how love affairs should start . . . not usually anyway, they should develop by stages, with a few sly yeas and nays along the way, with some degree of cunning. But I can’t be like that: I surrender my heart when it tells me to surrender it. What do you think, Saturna? Will he think I’m a loose woman? Advise me, guide me. I don’t know about these things. Wait, listen: Tomorrow, when you come back from doing the shopping, you’ll find him on the corner where we spoke and he’ll give you a note for me. By all that’s most precious to you, by the health of your own son, Saturna, please don’t refuse me this favor, I’ll be eternally grateful. Bring me that little piece of paper, I beg you, if you don’t want me to die tomorrow.”

8
    “I’VE loved you ever since I was born . . .” Thus began the first letter, no, the second, which was preceded by a brief conversation in the street, huddled under a streetlamp, a conversation that was interrupted with hypocritical severity by Saturna, and during which the lovers spontaneously addressed each other as tú , without any prior agreement, as if there were no other possible form of address. She was astonished at how her eyes had deceived her when she had first encountered this stranger. When she had seen him that afternoon with the deaf-mute children, she took him for a grown man of some thirty or more years. How silly! He was a mere boy! He couldn’t be more than twenty-five, although he did have a slightly pensive, melancholic air about him, more appropriate to someone older. She knew now that his eyes shone, that his dark skin was tanned by the sun, that his voice was like soft music, of a kind Tristana had never heard before and which, once she had heard it, soothed the very cells of her brain. “I’ve loved you and been looking for you ever since before I was born,” said her third letter, a letter imbued with a kind of wild spiritualism. “Don’t think badly of