Benito Pérez Galdós

“ Paoletti had eaten but little; Leon hardly anything. Fixing his expressive eyes on Leon’s face, the Italian said with startling emphasis:
“Señor Don Leon, of all the world you seem to me the most to be pitied. Our poor Doña María is not to be pitied; no, only to be admired. If she dies she will enter the realm of the blest wearing many crowns, and among them the crown of martyrdom; if she lives she will be an example to all women. She is a fair lily, combining the graces of beauty, purity and fragrance.” ”

“ The soul may grow to the dignity of its sorrows and borrow from them a sort of majesty to rule the spirit.”
“True,” said Leon sadly. “Our very wounds reveal a secret and ineffable fount of compensation. Pepa—my darling, my heart’s wife—wife, I say, by an unwritten law on which we may not act, which can never be of any avail; but which lurks in my soul like the germ of truth, a holy seed buried in the depths of being.—Look into your soul and you will see yourself nobler and more worthy in your sorrow than in the satisfaction of your passion. ”

“ We have both sinned; you, out of sheer cynicism and absolute ignoring of right, I out of weakness of will. In you there is nothing but evil, there is no door by which good can enter into your darkened soul; in me, though my deeds have been evil, faith is still left—a way by which good may come in. Your sin stands alone in its hideous blackness; mine has brought with it the precious grace of repentance. You are not capable of any amendment; I am. You see nothing beyond; I see salvation, because I see amendment. To me, the very idea of sin suggests that of pardon. ”

“ Leon started like a man who has been struck.
“Such a question is an insult. The very disquietude of my conscience impels me to desire that María should not die.”
“Very good. Then if you wish that María should live,” said Moreno, laying his hand on his friends’ shoulder, “the first indispensable thing is to soothe the irritation produced by her jealousy—which, unfortunately, is but too well-founded; her mind has received a terrible shock, and it must be allowed to recover its balance. Every life has, as it were a rhythm, a beat, of its own, to which it goes on regularly and smoothly. ”

“ Padre Paoletti told me that you had come and gone early; and I quite understood it. I long to talk to you and comfort you....”
“Comfort me?” said María much puzzled, “for my loneliness, my solitude ... but I have suffered long in silence, and the Lord has not denied me sweet consolation. What are we here for but to suffer? We have only to get that well into our minds and then no grief can find us unprepared.”
“Oh!” cried Pilar with eager admiration and kissing her friend, “how good you are! What a saint! What a beautiful exception in this wretched world! ”

“ He could not grant a family to an atheist!”
“Your blasphemy appals me,” said Leon, who could endure no more. “Can a sacrament be more utterly annulled, or a bond more effectually cut? Between you and me, María, there is a great gulf—bottomless and infinite; a space of endless desert in which, try as I may, I cannot see a single idea or feeling that we can have in common. Let us part forever; do not try to bring together two distinct worlds which cannot approach each other without tempest and lightnings. If there ever were two irreconcilable beings, we are they. ”

“ Paoletti said in tones which he meant to be awful:
“Thou Soul! that I believed to be victorious, and that art yet yielding to the Foe: God will not forgive those who show no forgiveness!” And falling on his knees, he took the crucifix between his hands and prayed in silence. He was in truth in deep distress—a shepherd striving to save his favourite lamb. For some time María neither spoke nor moved. At length, with a deep sigh, she said in accents of despair: “I am a miserable sinner and cannot hope to be saved.” ”

“ What never fails to stir it up is the brutal and overwhelming passion of jealousy, so well painted by Calderon as the hydra whose double nature, diabolical and seraphical, betrays its birth as the hybrid offspring of Love, which is divine, and Envy, the daughter of all the devils. The sudden frenzy that had sprung up in María’s soul was more akin to its mother Envy than to its father Love. It was an instrument of torture and torment, a rack without respite, a fire that grew fiercer each instant. ”

“ Leon found himself gazing into the depths of that vacant mystery, made deeper by the clouds of gauze, and recognised the look he had last seen on her features—a look less of love than of irony.
His brain was busy with all the solemn thoughts that besiege a man in the great crises of life: he reflected on the wide distance that divides us from true happiness—a distance that mind cannot measure, and that man has no means of shortening. ”

“ In the silence of the night and of empty rooms the clocks, with their regular ticking, like breathing, seem to live and watch. Perched on the chimney-shelves, these bronze personages, with faces like masks with twelve eyes, would make us believe that they can hear and understand by the same internal organs which produce that ceaseless and rythmical beat. The clock in María’s boudoir was the only witness to her proceedings; the portrait of Leon even knew nothing about them, for it hung with its face to the wall. ”

“ Well—I do not deny it; you may learn from me at any rate the virtue of candour, the merits of confession, of which an atheist is incapable. I plead guilty; the giddy whirl of the world, the weakness of Man’s nature, the blandishments of flattery and applause have led me, I own, into antagonism to those laws, human and divine, which I acknowledge and respect. I am the first to accuse myself, as I was the first to cast a stone at the scandals of my family, and the first to defend you so long as I believed in your integrity—you know that. ”

“ Paoletti at once retired to pray in the chapel, which was ablaze with tapers; the husband and the physician remained to watch with infinite anguish and pity the drama of a diseased brain where ideas—or intangible fluids—and organic life—or a mysterious essence—were going the circuit of the nervous centres in a bewildering round, their obscure struggle hastening on the divorce which we call death. Everything was done that lay in human power to avert immediate danger and divert the mischief from the centre to the extremities. ”

“ Paoletti stood lost in thought.
“There is no fundamental and moral bond between us,” Leon went on. “María and I are two separate souls: in my mind I see her and myself as the very idea incarnate of divorce.”
“Yes—a group of statuary—a work of art!” said Paoletti, a lightning shaft of malice flashing across the dark cloud of his austerity.
“Well, yes—a work of art—which did not originate spontaneously, mark you, but was somebody’s doing, somebody’s work. My wife does not love me. ”

“ I have discovered the whole truth. You cannot deny it, for the present throws light on the past and your crime of to-day betrays that of yesterday. You have lost all decency; you do not even hide the distant date of your intimacy—and here, in this house, where you have buried yourself to revel in your sin, you pass whole days playing with that child ... with that sniffling little brat!...”
Leon glared at his wife with a terrible expression; his eyes darted arrows of wrath. María drew a deep breath and added in a hoarse voice: “With her child—which is yours.” ”

“ There was a pause; then Paoletti said severely:
“It is clear to me that María loves you, and that you are the real traitor to the contract—guilty to-day as you were yesterday and from the beginning. Without further knowledge of the facts, I cannot pronounce on the step taken by my beloved daughter; but such a step, such a proceeding, taken as it stands, argues that she still loves you, and that her tender soul is full of sweetness and kindness for a man who is wholly undeserving of them.” ”

“ Pepa’s passionate devotion, and the tenacity which made her give it the pre-eminence over every other feeling, far from causing him any anxiety, altogether bewitched him; he saw in it the offering of her whole heart without reserve, the incalculating generosity which prompts a soul to abandon itself wholly without any concealment, without cloking its faults or veiling a single thought. Those who have been beggars for love cannot repel that which flows in their way, though the tide be too strong and boils and foams. ”

“ The magnitude of her own misery blinded her to every other; she could not think that any living soul could be troubled by another cause than this dreaded truce between Leon and María which had been so abruptly announced.
No arguments to prove that the source of our anguish may be a lie have any effect in extracting the sting; on the contrary, a syllogism is the worst forceps in the world and when it is applied to extract only a thorn it seems to increase the smart a hundred-fold. Pepa, when she tried to convince herself that Pilar’s information was a fiction, only tortured herself the more. ”

“ And just as the centurion gave the Redeemer a sponge dipped in vinegar for refreshment when he was athirst, the priest poured honey and vinegar into María’s parched soul.
“Jealous!” he said. “Jealous, when you have fired your heart with the love that is never unrequited! Unless I have failed to enter into the feelings of my illustrious penitent, she must have fortitude, and grace, and a sense of divine love which will raise her above such base anxieties. ”

“ She looked like a mad creature as she went close up to her husband and said to him in a low voice:
“I am as bad as you. I am an unworthy wretch. I forgot my God, my duty, and my dignity for your sake.... Wretch! I do not deserve to be called a saint, for a saint....” She glanced at her handsome dress with horror. “Women who devote themselves truly to God would not have put on this livery of sin. I am ashamed to see myself so tricked out. ”

“ And she pointed in the direction of Suertebella.
“María” said Leon gravely and turning pale, “I do not like to see you a propagator of base slander. I should find it very difficult to cease to respect you; but if you wish that I should never fail in the consideration which I owe to you, never repeat that question. Be silent ... go ... leave me. You do not want my love since your religion is all in all to you; go, serve your altars, and leave me alone with my conscience.” ”

“ For I too am a fanatic; you have taught me to be, like you, a bigot—an ardent, even a relentless bigot. We will part, each to his own shore, and let the waste that lies between us be as the ocean of oblivion. Nay, to soothe our consciences, I will say the ocean of forgiveness. Each may forgive; both may forget ... good-bye.”
While he was speaking María’s feelings of anger and revenge had given way to other and very different sentiments, calmer and more contemplative, which by degrees took absolute possession of her agitated mind. ”

“ Those who cannot actually witness it can fancy themselves in that room, filled with light and suffering, and they sob and revel in the picture, imagining what they cannot see. It is easily conjured up, and their spirits quake before it. In the halls and passages, all deserted and all blazing with tapers, the still air gives an impression of suspended breath, speechless and awe-stricken. There is not a sound—except that in some remote corner there is a rustle—as it were a whisper—of a woman’s dress that stealthily hastens by and is lost in the distance. ”

“ My friend, my lover—husband—all in all, the only soul to which my soul is kin, dare as much as I can dare!” she exclaimed with that fervid courage which sometimes made her so beautiful. “The straight and easy way lies before us, the only way: Flight. The carriage is waiting; there is nothing to stop us, we want nothing. You are rich—I am even richer—everything favours us, urges us to act....”
“Impossible! Madness!” said Leon gloomily. ”

“ María waved her hand in negation. Then, turning her head towards Paoletti that he might hear her better, she said:
“And if I do not cast out—what you bid me cast out, will it delay my salvation?”
“Nay, angel of goodness! Never for an instant have I doubted of your salvation. What, can a soul so full of merits be lost? Never.—There is no need for you to tell me that these feelings which have come to agitate you are untainted by rancour, and will not prevent your full forgiveness of those by whom offences have come. Am I wrong?” ”

“ You—not my wife—I your lover; both living in the practice of social anarchy, our illicit connection an outrage on the noblest and most necessary institution of human society; I haunted by a ghost, and you by a living man, who on every possible occasion would proclaim and urge his rights; neither of us having any claims against others while the whole world would have claims against us. ”

“ It was an entire revolution of woman’s nature claiming its rights, and throwing off all that was false and assumed to raise the triumphant standard of truth and of that nobler part which—whether she be lover, wife, or mother, good or bad—makes her a true woman; makes her the other half of man—the Eve to Adam—whether faithful or faithless, a heroine or a baggage. This revolution is sometimes occasioned by the passion of love; but not invariably, because love in its innocent simplicity yields to the sophistries and treacherous blandishments of its brother mysticism. ”

“ Sweetest soul, purified by prayer, by unfailing piety, by heroic mortification of the evil within, by incessant absorption into the divine idea—spread your wings, whiter than sunlit clouds—fear not, soar upwards, fix your eyes on the goal, open your ears to the hymn that greets you, inhale the ineffable fragrance of Paradise, be bold to enter the fatherly presence of the Creator of the sun and stars—who will welcome you with the smile which gave birth to light itself, and receive you as a martyr and a saint. ”

“ As the moment draws near when I may hope to embrace my wife and child, I have the honour of informing the first of those beloved beings that I have made up my mind to forgive her, provided she hastens to submit to my authority as a husband, seeing that my supposed departure from this world is some excuse for her delinquency. At the same time if the above-mentioned beloved being persists in believing that I am still food for the fish in the Gulf of Mexico, I hereby take the liberty of assuring her that I shall avail myself of the rights granted to me by law. ”

“ Alas for me—and for you, too, dear friend of my soul—we are alone and undefended; everything, every one, is against us: religion, laws, relations—the good and the evil alike—the whole world. When the great Gustavo enlarged on the legal advantage his client had over me I flew into a rage—still, I controlled myself to say that Federico could not insist on exercising paternal authority, and that if he was determined on a quarrel I would accuse him of the things you know of. ”