Tristana Read Online Free PDF Page B

cry and others that would make you laugh, and stories with complicated plots and bursting with tremendous passions, and I don’t know what else. The trouble is I can’t write, I mean, not neatly, and I make all kinds of grammatical errors and even spelling mistakes. But ideas, if they are ideas, I’ve no shortage of them.”
    “Ah, Señorita,” said Saturna, smiling and raising her fine dark eyes from the stocking she was darning, “you are much deceived if you think that something like that would be enough to feed a free and honest lady! That’s for men to do, and even then . . . the ones who live solely on their imaginations never get fat. They may use feather quills, but when it comes to feathering their own nests, they don’t stand a chance. For example, Pepe Ruiz, my late husband’s foster brother, who knows about these things because he works in the foundry where they make the lead letters for printing presses, he always used to say that it’s nothing but hunger and poverty for people who live by the pen, and that in Spain you don’t earn your daily bread by the sweat of your brow but with your tongue, meaning that the only ones who get rich are the politicians who spend their lives speechifying. Brain work? Forget it! Dramas and stories and books that make you laugh and cry? Mere talk. The people who write those things won’t earn enough to feed themselves unless they’ve got friends in high places. That’s how things work in gov’ment.”
    “Well, do you know what I think?” said Tristana with great feeling. “I think I could make a go of it in government or politics too. No, don’t laugh. I know how to make speeches. It’s really easy. I would just have to read a few reports of the debates in parliament and I could cobble together enough words to fill half a newspaper.”
    “No, you have to be a man to do that, Señorita! Our petticoats get in the way, just like they do when it comes to riding a horse. My late husband always used to say that if he hadn’t been so shy, he would have gone farther than most, because he used to come up with the kind of bright ideas you hear in parliament, from a Castelar or a Cánovas, you know, ways of saving the country and all that; but whenever the poor old thing wanted to say his piece at the Working Men’s Circle or at meetings with his ‘colleagues,’ his throat would tighten and he couldn’t even get the first word out, and that’s always the most difficult part, he just couldn’t get started. And of course if he couldn’t get started, he couldn’t be an orator or a politician.”
    “Oh, how stupid. I certainly wouldn’t have any trouble getting started,” Tristana said, then added in a discouraged tone, “The problem is we’re stuck, tied down in a thousand ways. I’ve also thought that I could perhaps learn other languages. I’ve only got a smattering of French, which I learned at school, and I’m already forgetting that. But how wonderful to be able to speak English, German, Italian! It seems to me that I could, that I’d be a quick learner too. I have a sense—how can I put it?—I have a sense that I already know a little before I’ve even started studying, as if I had been English or German in another life and that had left a kind of linguistic trace in me.”
    “Now languages,” said Saturna, looking at Tristana with maternal solicitude, “that’s something that would be worth learning, because you can earn quite a lot from teaching, and, besides, it would be good to be able to understand what foreigners were going on about. Perhaps the master could find you a good teacher.”
    “Don’t mention your master to me. I expect nothing from him.” Then thoughtfully, staring at the light, she said, “I don’t know when or how this will end, but it will have to end somehow.”
    She fell silent, plunged in somber thought. Pursued by the idea of escaping Don Lope’s house, she could hear in her mind the deep rumble of Madrid, she