Tristana Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

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    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