Benito Pérez Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-1887)

Benito Pérez Galdós: Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunata and Jacinta) (1886-87)  

So, some three and half years since I began it, I've finally finished reading Fortunata and Jacinta (in the brilliant translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón). 

Well yes, it's a long book. On some rough calculations that I've just done, it comes out as 15% longer than David Copperfield. Someone else wrote that it's as long as War and Peace shorn of its epilogues. 

None of Galdós' eighty-ish other novels is anything like so long. I read somewhere that Galdós was persuaded to write a long novel because of the success of Clarín's La Regenta, published a couple of years earlier. 

But this doesn't explain why it took me so long to read. There were some long gaps, maybe a couple that lasted a year or more. When I picked it up again, it was with a sense of excitement but also a sense of struggle and reluctance. It didn't take much to draw me away from it again. (I haven't quite worked out what the feeling of reluctance was about, but I know that I was troubled about disturbing my peace of mind, e.g. whenever Juanito reappeared, or approaching the inevitable end. You might not unreasonably describe Fortunata and Jacinta as a comic novel. But I was frightened of it.)

Galdós evidently didn't have the problem that would occur to the rest of us, how to fill all those pages. He just, as it were, opened the windows and let in Madrid. At the most entertaining level Fortunata and Jacinta is just an overwhelming flow of life and anecdote and detail. Everyone knows that Galdós' favourite novelists were Dickens and Balzac. But often, immersed in the grainy, lived detail of this Madrid, what I was most reminded of was Joyce's Dublin. 

I suppose the other book that comes into view is Zola's L'Assommoir (1877). That was a complete and unexampled immersion in working-class life. Fortunata y Jacinta is more centred on middle-class life, but with special reference to the lower-class heroine Fortunata. One of the book's serious themes is the contrast between middle-class values and assumptions, the often hypocritical "ways to behave" recognized by the educated, and the radically uneducated "streetwise" conceptions held by Fortunata, her patent lack of commitment to "sensible" notions, her passionate need to live, her regular bouts of cleansing self-destruction. "I am pueblo," she says at one point. No question of preferring one of these novels to the other, both masterpieces, but psychologically Galdós poses the more pertinent question for an era when our new middle-class codes and exclusions are so hotly proclaimed and assailed. 

At any rate both these novels feel more urgent to me than War and Peace (no working class) and Ulysses (no story) -- Well, I'm being contentious I know. 

*

Juanito spotted number 11 on the door of a poultry shop. It was undoubtedly the way in, he thought, stepping over feathers and crushed eggshells. He asked two women who were plucking hens and chickens, and they answered by pointing to a screen door, the entrance to the staircase to number 11. The main entrance and the shop were one and the same in that characteristic building of old Madrid. And then it dawned on Juanito why Estupiñá often turned up with feathers from different birds stuck to his boots [. . .] To the right of that lugubrious square space, in another area, a paid assassin besmirched with blood was executing the hens. He wrung their necks with the speed and cleverness that come from experience, and when he had scarcely let go one victim and turned the agonizing creature over to the pluckers, he would grab another to caress her in the same way [. . .]

Having absorbed this gruesome spectacle (the smell of the corral and the noise of fluttering wings, the pecking and clucking of so many victims), Juanito turned to the sooty, worn, famous granite staircase. [ . . .] On the next level, as Juanito went past the door to one of the rooms, he saw it was open and naturally looked in , because everything about the place greatly stirred his curiosity. He didn't expect to see anything, and he suddenly saw something that impressed him: a pretty woman, young and tall  . . .  She seemed to be spying too, moved by a curiosity similar to his, waiting to see who the devil was coming up the blasted staircase at that time of day. The girl wore a light blue scarf on her head and a large, heavy shawl over her shoulders, and the minute she saw the Dauphin [Juanito] she swelled up at him, I mean, she put her hands on her hips and raised her shoulders with that characteristic gesture that low-class women of Madrid have, filling out their shawls with a movement that reminds you of a hen ruffling her feathers and swelling out before coming down to normal size again.

Juanito didn't suffer from shyness , and when he saw the girl and observed how pretty she was and how fine her boots were, he had an urge to get closer. 

"Does Sr. Estupiñá live here?" he asked her. 

"Don Plácido? Yes, way up, on top of the top floor," the young woman answered, taking a few steps towards the door. 

And Juanito thought, "You're coming out so I can see your pretty feet. Nice boots." As he was thinking this, he noticed that the girl was taking a red mittened hand from her shawl and raising it to her mouth. Young Santa Cruz craved to treat her in a familiar way, and couldn't resist asking:

"What are you eating, sweetheart?"

"Can't you see?" she replied, showing it to him. "An egg."

"A raw egg!"

Very gracefully, the girl lifted the broken egg to her mouth for the second time and sucked it again. 

"I don't know how you can eat that raw drool," said Santa Cruz, not finding a better way to make conversation. 

"They're better raw. Want some?" she replied, offering the Dauphin what was left in the shell. 

 

(from Fortunata and Jacinta I.3.4, translated by Agnes Moncy Gullón.)

*

At No 11 Calle Cava de San Miguel lives Estupiñá, an elderly henchman of the merchant families. But they never visit him here, because he's always out and about. Only now, with him being laid up with a rheumatism, the young Juanito is despatched to pay him a visit. The building, owned by Moreno-Isla, is seven floors from its main entrance down on Calle Cava de San Miguel. Estupiñá, as a more respectable citizen, lives at the top of the building. The staircase is "famous" because Estupiñá always talks about it (as perhaps his home's only notable feature). But he himself only has to climb four floors because he has an arrangement with the shoe-shop looking out on the Plaza Mayor, which is at a much higher elevation than the street on the other side.   

Juanito, not knowing about this, enters from the Cava side -- and down there, in the excitement of that heady charged violent atmosphere, he glimpses the woman eating a raw egg who, we'll learn, is Fortunata. 

It's a crucial scene but an anomalous one. We are seeing through Juanito's eyes here, but that'll prove to be a very rare thing. We won't meet Fortunata directly again for a long time. The novel's first 100 pages are focussed on the lives of the wealthy middle-class Santa Cruz family and their circle, a devastating group portrait. 

When the outcome of this meeting is recounted it's in an excruciating way, via Jacinta's self-tormenting curiosity and the hidden resentment in Juanito's alternately guarded and boastful revelations; then his drunken guilt; then his scrambling recalibration the following day.  (Remembering those honeymoon conversations brings back to mind some of the reluctance that I felt while reading, my over-sensitivity to the novel's pain.)

Thereafter, for much of the novel we'll be seeing things -- including Juanito -- through the eyes of others, including Jacinta and especially Fortunata.

*

I've mentioned the translation, by Agnes Moncy Gullón. It could be the topic for several posts on its own. It's certainly one of those rare translations that feels like something more than a serviceable rendering. It feels like a new classic novel in the English language, like Smollett's Gil Blas or Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past.

And like the latter, it is both relishable and deeply strange. It feels like it was flung out with the same unhesitating rapidity with which Galdós wrote the original. There's a fearlessness about it that constantly strikes sparks. Or you might say it has a certain necessary roughness, even wrongness. Like in the extract above, when the executed hen is "agonizing" rather than "agonized", or 

...the collectors going by ladened with money...  (pp. 85-86) 

...two pounds of Corynthian raisins for a plum cake... (p. 94). (Don't we have the word "currants"?)  

The translation is into American English, and it makes essential and often brilliant use of colloquial American resources. 

There were various types of boys. There was the type who always goes to school with his book bag, and there was the barefoot prankster who does nothing but waste time. They differed very little in their dress, and even less in their language, which was rough and had slovenly inflections.

"Hey, kid . . . looka this. I'll push ya' face in. Get what I mean . . . ?" (p. 134)

And yet to me it doesn't sound consistently American, it sounds piebald. I don't know if that's also how Galdós sounds in Spanish, but I doubt it. I suppose this is a criticism, in principle . . . but there's a cornucopia of great effects that come out of the clashing registers. 

"Doña Barbarita" was so well-known in the district that the market women fought for her business and got into brawls over who would have dibs on the illustrious customer. (p. 92))

Then caps, scads of caps placed high on racks and aligned with a stick; sheepskin jackets and .... (p. 133)

Jackets of the 1887 edition (second and fourth parts)

[Image source: Wikipedia.] 

Is there a significance to the larger font for Fortunata? As is often observed, in the novel the two women are by no means equally prominent. Jacinta is a smaller person -- I don't mean just physically. Is that fair? -- I honestly don't know. But Jacinta has her moments, especially in the early pages. 

"[...] And besides, what difference does it make to you?" "None. I'm sorry. But what a temper!" "You're the one who's mad, not me." "Well, you are spoiled!"

Nonsense like this was inconsequential; ten minutes later they had usually made up. But when she left that night, she felt like crying. Her desire to have children had never shown itself so imperiously before. Her sister had humiliated her, been angry that she loved her little nephew so much. After all, if it wasn't jealousy, what was it? If and when she had a little boy, she wouldn't let anyone so much as look at him. She went from Hileras Street to Pontejos Street in an extremely agitated state, oblivious of everyone. It was sprinkling, but she didn't remember to open her umbrella. The gas lamps in shop windows were already lit, but Jacinta, who usually stopped in on her way home to see what was new, didn't stop once. When she got to the corner of Pontejos Square and was about to cross the street and enter her house, she heard something that made her hesitate. A chill ran through her body like a knife. She came to a halt, ears perked for the murmuring sound that seemed to come from the ground, from in between the cobblestones. It was a wail, an animal's cry begging for help and protection against desertion and death. And the cry was so piercingly sharp, so cutting, that it sounded less like the voice of a living creature than the treble sound of a violin faintly played on its highest note: meeeeee . . . [...] She looked all about her and saw at last, next to the sidewalk by the square, a grate in the curb where rainwater drains into the sewer. So that was where the sounds were coming from . . . And those laments were upsetting, producing a painful flood of pity in her. All the maternal emotions of which she was capable and all the tenderness she had experienced until then in her dreams of being a mother were activated by that cry [...]

"Deogracias, that . . . that noise over there . . . go and see what it is," she said, trembling and pale. 

The doorman listened carefully, then got down on all fours, looking at his mistress with a rather wheedling, jovial expression. 

"It must be . . . Aha! It's some kittens that got thrown into the sewer."

"Kittens? Are you sure? Are you positive that they're kittens?"

 [...]

"Get them out of there!" the lady commanded, unusually authoritative. 

Deogracias got down on all fours again, rolled up one sleeve, and put his arm into the hole. Jacinta didn't detect the incredulous, almost mocking expression on his face. It was raining harder and water started running into the opening, gushing and bubbling as if it were in a frying pan, so loudly you could hardly hear the thin meeeeee-ing any more. Nevertheless, the Dauphin's wife heard it distinctly. The doorman looked up with his dullard's face as if to invoke the heavens and, smiling, said:

"I can't, Miss. They're deep down . . . really deep down."

"Can't you take up this paving stone?" she said, stamping on it. 

"Paving stone?" Deogracias repeated, standing up and looking at his mistress as one looks at someone whose sanity is in doubt. "As for taking it up, yes, it could be done. You could notify city hall. The lieutenant mayor, Sr. Aparisi, is a neighbor. But --"

They both perked up their ears. 

"Can't hear anything any more," Deogracias commented stubbornly. "They're drowned."

The brute never suspected that he was driving a dagger into his mistress' back with those words. Jacinta, however, thought she could hear the wailing deep down. But this couldn't go on. She began to realize what a lack of proportion there was between the vastness of her pity and the smallness of its object. The rain came driving down, and by now the opening was swallowing a thick wave that made a gargling noise as it hit the walls of that gullet. Jacinta broke into a run towards the house and dashed up the stairs. [...] And all night long she suffered the ineffable annoyance of constantly hearing that meeeeee from the sewer opening. She knew it was nonsense, perhaps a nervous disorder, but she couldn't help it. [...]

(from Fortunata y Jacinta, I.6.4 (pp. 89-91 in Gullón's translation))

*

Reader: I am a novelist myself, and an avid fan of novels; this particular one taught me the glorious scope and the exhilarating freedom that a novel can provide, both as an art form to practice and as a reading experience to enjoy. You live in it. You move into it. You inhabit it. You get accustomed to it. It becomes part of the daily setting of your life, like your coffee mug or your computer or your dog. You scrape some extra minute to get back to it. You stay awake longer than you should to reach the end of a chapter. You walk the same streets the characters walk, overhear their conversations, visit the same cafés and street markets and bourgeois mansions and working-class slums and taverns. 

(Antonio Muñoz Molina, in his note "To be placed inside a copy of Fortunata and Jacinta. . .")

*

Linda Willem, "Moreno-Isla's Unpublished Scene from the 'Fortunata y Jacinta' Galleys", Anales Galdosianos 27-28 (1992-93), pp. 179-83:

https://www.academia.edu/48345034/Moreno_Islas_Unpublished_Scene_from_the_Fortunata_y_Jacinta_Galleys

A short scene that Galdós changed his mind about, replacing it with a single sentence (IV.2.5, p. 683 in this translation), tightening up the irony in Moreno's final hours. 

Staircases are important in Fortunata and Jacinta. In hindsight there's something of an irony in the seven-floor one at the Cava being owned by Moreno-Isla, whose heart trouble makes every stair-climb a crisis. 

*

Robert Kirsner, "Galdós's Attitude towards Spain as Seen in the Characters of Fortunata y Jacinta", PMLA vol 66 no 2 (March 1951), pp. 124-137. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/459594

Kirsner argues that in Fortunata y Jacinta Galdós here manifests an acceptance of Spain as it is, with an accent on compassion, in contrast to the more radical gestures of earlier books. "... Spain appears as a living image which, like the characters of this novel, inspires a sympathetic appreciation".

There's a lot that's worth pondering here, but it's a reading that surely underemphasizes the novel's devastating challenge to Spain's new "mesocracy" (government by the middle class). (Has Kirsner forgotten, for instance, the arranged marriage. . . Surely he isn't confused by the protean narrator's assurances that all is joy and happiness?)

That protean narrator needs to be carefully negotiated. For example, in the long passage I quoted earlier, is Deogracias really a "brute", or is the epithet to be understood as a rendering of Jacinta's emotion, or a rendering of how some sympathetic member of her own class would tell the story? 

This narrator, on a larger scale, gives us small essays that we may simply swallow if we're not careful. Here's one: 

Being a rich and terribly respectable family, the Santa Cruzes were very well connected and had friends in all spheres, from the highest to the lowest. It's strange to see how our times, which are unfortunate in other ways, present us with a happy confusion of social classes or, rather, their harmony and reconciliation. In this respect our country is ahead of others, where serious historical suits for equality are awaiting a verdict. The problem has been solved here simply and peacefully, thanks to the democratic spirit of Spaniards and our less vehement concern about aristocratic status. A huge national defect, "employomania", has also had its part in this great conquest. Offices have become the trunk onto which historical branches have been grafted, and from these branches friendships have sprung up between the fallen nobleman and the plebian swollen with a university degree, and such friendships have led to blood relations. This confusion is good. Thanks to its existence, we aren't terrified of being affected by class wars; we already have a mild, inoffensive sort of socialism in our blood. Imperceptibly, and aided by bureaucracy, poverty, and education, all classes have gradually mixed; the members of one migrate to another, making a strong network that holds together and toughens the national fabric. Birth means nothing to us, and comments on ancestral lineage are only conversation. There are no differences other than the essential ones based on good versus bad breeding, on stupidity versus discretion, on the spiritual inequalities that are as old as the soul itself. The other positive class distinction, money, is based on economic principles as immutable as the laws of physics, and trying to alter them would be like trying to swallow the sea.

(from Fortunata and Jacinta I.6.1, pp. 81-82 in Gullón's translation)

I am sure this is not mere sarcasm, it isn't merely counterfactual. But I have a very strong sense of the narrator temporarily assuming the mental outlook of, say, Don Baldomero (Juanito's father). It sounds like a blandly optimistic view of society that emerges from within the middle class outlook; but what the novel is really probing is the middle class outlook itself. 

And by the end of the passage, it's started to undercut much of its original proposition by a series of shrugged-off yet increasingly significant qualifications. 

As in most novels, as in life generally, we need to keep an eye on what people actually do. Listen to Jacinta's dismissive ideas about the lower class -- eagerly fortified by Juanito, who is striving to put a lid on the past. Or the uncomprehending disparity between the outlooks of Jacinta and the doorman Deogracias in the kitten scene. 

Yes, Fortunata and Jacinta portrays class distinction with all its old inveteracy, though perhaps with new hypocrisy. To see the chasms in the above divagation there's no need to reflect on what would happen in Spain half a century later. 

The jacket illustration is a detail of an 1892 painting by the Catalan artist Ramón Casas i Carbó. According to the rear note it's called Chica in a Bar but the translator calls it La Madeleine and Casas' original title is Madeleine o Au Moulin De La Galette. So the subject who so strikingly stands in for Fortunata is in fact a Parisian. (According to the blog of the Museu Nacional the source of her emotion can be glimpsed in the mirror behind her, a couple dancing cheek to cheek. I can't really make this out. I can see what might be a couple, though they don't appear to me to be cheek to cheek.) 

I think the jacket works brilliantly, but in fact it makes me reflect that in the novel Fortunata doesn't really go to places like cafés.  Hers is a world of stairs and balconies and streets and markets and shops. The novel's many Madrid bar-café tertulias are generally peopled only by men. 

*

Two earlier posts about Fortunata and Jacinta:

Inside the Micaelas with Fortunata:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/02/inside-micaelas-with-fortunata.html

Wamba, King of the Visigoths:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/04/wamba-king-of-visigoths.html