The Bureaucrat in His Labyrinth

I was introduced to nineteenth-century novels when I was eleven and living with my family in Madrid. But the nineteenth century I got to know was not Spain’s. If the tiny library of the British school I attended had Benito Pérez Galdós in translation, I don’t remember it, even though Madrid is the city where most of his novels are set. Instead there was a shelf of Dickens novels, which I read voraciously if indiscriminately, forgetting the plots as I went. Galdós, thirty years younger than Dickens, was in his youth himself an avid reader of the English novelist, and Dickens’s influence can be noted in his sprawling casts, his broadly drawn “types,” and his landscapes of urban squalor. The two writers also share a reformer’s zeal, though in England Dickens’s characters contend with rapid industrialization, while in Spain Galdós’s are faced with government ineptitude and entrenched reactionary forces.

In the English-speaking world Galdós is little known, though not for lack of trying on the part of translators and publishers. When I set out to write this review, I imagined that only a handful of his books had been translated, but in fact some thirty novels have appeared in English over the past 150 years, several of them more than once. Of these, only a few are still in print, and contemporary readers already acquainted with Galdós are likely to have read one of two novels: Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) or Tristana (1892).

The two attract different readerships. Fortunata and Jacinta is an ambitious realist doorstopper, generally judged Spain’s greatest nineteenth-century novel. It tells the story of two women involved with the same (unworthy) man, as well as the story of Madrid, from its teeming center to its expanding outskirts. Tristana is a shorter, more eccentric novel about a girl, orphaned at nineteen, who is adopted and genially preyed upon by a friend of her father’s. It was adapted for the screen by Luis Buñuel and became an art house classic. (Buñuel also adapted the Galdós novels Nazarín and Halma, the latter as Viridiana.^*)

Fortunata and Jacinta wasn’t translated into English until 1973, almost a century after its original publication. This may have been in part because of its daunting size, but the delay says something about Spain’s low position in the ranks of nineteenth-century literature—after all, the length of War and Peace or Les Misérables is taken as a badge of pride. It may suggest something, too, about the inclination of readers in translation to expect national literatures to fit a certain profile—romantic and costumbrista in the case of nineteenth-century Spain. Among previous generations the most popular Galdós novel in English was Doña Perfecta, an early work about a domineering provincial mother who thwarts her daughter’s marriage to an urbane cousin. Its language and plot are melodramatic, and its village setting is simpler than the many-layered Madrid of Fortunata and Jacinta. But its underlying theme—a modern, liberal Spain at war with the corrupting forces of tradition—is present in all his fiction.

Inspired by Balzac’s Comédie humaine, in the 1870s Galdós embarked on the first of his two vast novel cycles, one historical and one social. These days in Spain attention has turned to his historical cycle, the Episodios nacionales, which is mostly unavailable in English. This was an enormous project: forty-six novels, published in five series over the course of his career, in which he set out to chronicle the constant low-grade conflict between Spanish monarchists and liberals during the nineteenth century.

Galdós is firmly ensconced in the Spanish canon, second only to Cervantes. The beginning of the pandemic happened to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of his death in January 1920. The celebrations planned for the year were mostly canceled, though not before photographs appeared of readers waiting in long lines for free copies of a few of the Episodios. During the pandemic, marathon readings of the Episodios became popular; Mario Vargas Llosa went further, reading much of Galdós’s oeuvre and turning the experience into a book, La mirada quieta (de Pérez Galdós) (The Quiet Gaze of Pérez Galdós). The anniversary also led to the mild rekindling of long-standing arguments about Galdós’s legacy. While he was alive, some resentful younger writers saw him as an unrefined, meat-and-potatoes writer (or a garbancero, literally a “chickpea slinger,” as he was famously called). His critics today take a similar line, calling him stodgy and didactic, though acknowledging his importance. The most moving centenary tribute came from the novelist Almudena Grandes, who wrote about the enduring power of the Episodios to illuminate the country’s history, noting that readers of Galdós can plainly see the Spanish Civil War as the final outbreak in a struggle dating back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The most recent Galdós novel to resurface in English is Miaow, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (following her 2014 version of Tristana). Miaow was written immediately after Fortunata and Jacinta, in 1887–1888, emerging in the middle of Galdós’s other celebrated novel cycle, the Novelas españolas contemporáneas, a minutely observed panorama of life in Madrid in the second half of the nineteenth century. Minor characters in one novel pop up to play major roles in another, so the protagonist of Miaow is actually first glimpsed in Fortunata and Jacinta, when an old man, “his face…contorted in the most terrible anxiety,” loiters on the fringes of a conversation among government employees in a café. This is Ramón Villaamil, a lifelong bureaucrat who has been let go from the Ministry of the Treasury just two months before he was set to retire, and who is now forced to grovel for a new post so that he won’t lose his pension.

Miau (as it is titled in Spanish) happens to have been my introduction to Galdós some thirty years ago, during my junior year abroad in Madrid. I had signed up for a yearlong nineteenth-century Spanish literature course, taught by the elegant Galician novelist Marina Mayoral. Among my favorite readings were the essays of Mariano José de Larra, a proto-flaneur of 1830s Madrid whose newspaper dispatches on city life were startlingly modern and metafictional. The final reading of the semester was Miau. The novel is a tragicomedy of civil servitude, but its comic aspects were lost on me as a college student, or at least escaped my memory. The picture I retained was of Villaamil standing forlorn on the steps of some government office, rejected and humiliated yet again. And I remembered the women of the novel—Villaamil’s wife, Doña Pura; his sister-in-law, Milagros; and his daughter Abelarda—as household martyrs, scrimping and saving to feed the family.

I must have been powerfully convinced of the noble pathos of poverty, because the reality of the novel is livelier and stranger than those memories would suggest. The reader’s introduction to Villaamil is indicative of Galdós’s curious tone, at once portentous and antic. As night falls, the old man is writing yet another beseeching letter to an acquaintance. Doña Pura comes in to bring him a lamp, and in a gothic vision befitting William Blake, “the tiny room and its inhabitant emerged out of the darkness like something rising up from the void.” Galdós gives an almost expressionist description of Villaamil. He has

yellow skin so deeply lined that the shadows cast by the folds resembled dark stains…the face of an old, consumptive tiger who had once dazzled the audiences of traveling menageries but whose garishly striped skin was all that remained of his former beauty.

The old tiger is a sad sight, but also a target for mockery, much like the rest of his family. As the novel opens, Villaamil’s grandson, Luis, is chased home by his schoolmates, who chant “Miaow, Miaow, Miaow.” This is what the local wits call Luis’s grandmother, aunt, and great-aunt, thanks to their resemblance to three cats: “Es que son ellas muy relamidas,” as Luis is told in Galdós’s Spanish. The word relamidas is perfect and hard to translate. Broken down into its constituent parts, it means “well-licked,” as cats tend to be; the dictionary definition is “affected” or “overly groomed.” The three women do indeed fuss over their clothes: they have no choice, because poverty forces them to remake the same outfits over and over, tearing out seams and sewing on new trimmings. Catlike, too, are their features: “the same small, slightly pouting mouth, the same indefinable line connecting nose and mouth, the same round, lively eyes.” Their great passion is the opera, which they attend assiduously, provided with free tickets by Abelarda’s fiancé, Ponce, a weedy theater critic (shades of Galdós, who began his career writing theater reviews).

The gossipy personage who explains to Luis why his grandmother and aunts are called the Miaows is none other than God, a recurring bit player in the novel. He appears when Luis has a fainting fit on his way home from delivering a letter for his grandfather, announcing, “I am God. Don’t you recognize me?” He then comforts and scolds Luis in fond tones, revealing that he truly does know all, including the wrong answers that Luis, a lackluster student, has been giving in class. (“What madness made you say that ‘the participle expresses the idea of the verb in the abstract?’”) Galdós, who was a well-known skeptic, has some fun here with the Creator, literally and figuratively bringing him down to earth. His appearance may be divine (“Luis had never seen such a hand, strong and manly, but also fine and white as a lady’s hand”), but his way of speaking could not be more ordinary.

Galdós’s novels are built around dialogue; often they feel like a cross between fiction and drama. Miaow even includes the equivalent of stage directions in parentheses: “(leaping passionately to his feet),” for instance. Characters express themselves volubly and openly, talking to themselves as often as they talk to others. Canelo, a dog that lives downstairs from Villaamil, also talks: “Up you go, my master, and don’t delay, because today they’re definitely in the money…. They’ve even bought a chunk of Italian sausage as big as my head, and it smells divine.” A constant swarm of chatter surrounds everyone: the gossip of Canelo’s owners, the idle talk of Villaamil’s former office colleagues, God’s bossy interventions. The narrator’s voice, as confiding and jocular as any character’s, joins the chorus, dubbing Abelarda “the Insignificant” and making light of the Villaamils’ plight: “At around this time, early March, the unhappy family again began to notice the symptoms of ‘nomoneyitis.’” Jull Costa’s translation is steady and assured, giving the reader a sense of Galdós’s rather mannered Spanish without reaching too hard for novelty, thus avoiding some of the bumpiness of earlier translations.

Dialogue is the motor of one of the novel’s most important subplots, as well. Villaamil had another daughter, Luisa, who married Víctor Cadalso, a handsome schemer intent on climbing the ranks of the ministry. Luisa died soon after giving birth to Luis, maddened by her love for the fickle Víctor. Now, at this low moment for the family, Víctor returns and claims a place in the household. For no reason other than malice, it seems, he turns his charm on Abelarda, simultaneously wooing her and keeping her at arm’s length with long manipulative speeches cribbed from the pages of gothic romance:

I am a condemned man, a reprobate…. I cannot ask you to save me, because fate would never allow that. Therefore, if I come to you and tell you that I love you, do not believe me; it is a lie, it is a vile trap I am setting for you…

Abelarda tries to respond in the same vein, with clever verbal gymnastics, but she stutters and chokes, convinced that “her poor brain lacked the necessary reasoning power.” Víctor, meanwhile, is more aroused by his own rhetoric than by the act of physical conquest. Content to drive Abelarda as mad as her sister, he abandons her before she can even surrender to him.

While Víctor courts Abelarda, her father, increasingly desperate, is besieging his old colleagues and friends. Over and over he visits the offices of the Treasury, which still feels like his home: “Villaamil felt a deep affection for the great pile that was the ministry: he loved it in the way a faithful servant loves the house and family whose bread he has eaten for many a long year.” The ministry is his adversary but also his refuge. It becomes almost its own character, persisting unchanged despite the constant rotation of officials under successive regimes. In his description of it, Galdós waxes more lyrical than usual:

Neither Dante nor Quevedo, on their respective fantastic journeyings, could have even dreamed of anything like that labyrinth of offices…. The bustle and buzz of those hives where the bitter honey of the Administration is made.

The civil servants who greet Villaamil on his visits, and make fun of him behind his back, represent a cross section of Madrid eccentrics. Among his most loyal friends is Don Buenaventura Pantoja, whose passion for the bureaucracy is so intense that he’s suspicious of anyone who makes a living outside it: “Any large sums of money other than those included in the state budget sent a shiver down his spine.” But Pantoja’s public-spirited probity is balanced by a personal stinginess with his friends. No help can be expected from him, or from anyone else. Though Villaamil has been a loyal employee for decades, at this critical moment he can find no lever to pull.

Galdós excels at the portrayal of weak men. One of the most memorable characters in Fortunata and Jacinta is Maximiliano Rubín, a physically pathetic and mentally unstable apprentice pharmacist whose love for the beautiful and vital Jacinta is his undoing. In Miaow, Luis is a similar type: well intentioned and sweet but sickly and subject to fits. Villaamil himself fluctuates between helplessness and rage, veering into madness as the novel comes to a close. On his visits to the ministry he rants about his plans for a universal income tax, occasioning glee among his malicious former colleagues when the planks in his plan form a familiar acronym: MIAOW. He succumbs to magical thinking, insisting again and again that he has no hope of finding a new post, in an attempt to trick fate: “According to his theory, what happens is always the opposite of what one expects…. Villaamil had always used this system with great success.”

Born in the Canary Islands in 1843, Galdós was the tenth and last child in a large, prosperous family. He left the Canaries to study law in Madrid, then drifted into journalism. By the time he was twenty-seven he had published his first novel and settled down to live in the city for the rest of his life, with a sister and sister-in-law as housekeepers. He was known as a reserved, quiet figure, not a devotee of the café culture he captured so well in Fortunata and Jacinta. From his student days on, he walked the city as if it were a classroom, “making a study of streets, alleys, narrow stretches, byways, tiny plazas and corners.”

He never married, but he had a series of lovers, including the feminist novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. Theirs was an interesting affair of equals, kept secret until long after his death. Her own novels are nearly as celebrated as his, and she was at least as learned, introducing Tolstoy to Spanish readers in a series of public lectures and becoming the first female college professor in Spain. She was an imposing presence, intellectually and physically. As she joked with Galdós in a letter, “Do you want to know the truth? I’ve always held back a little with you for fear of causing physical harm.”

In the mid-1880s, when he was in his early forties, finishing up Fortunata and Jacinta and beginning to contemplate Miaow, Galdós sent a letter to his publisher complaining of all the petitioners he had to meet and all the recommendations he had to write. He was the sort of figure Villaamil might have importuned: busy and sought after, not just as a writer but as a congressional deputy. But he was worried about money nonetheless. He supported himself with his writing, churning out newspaper features (two true crime tales just before Miaow) and stories on commission.

In early 1887 his mood was further darkened by the disappointing reception of Fortunata and Jacinta, and by news of his mother’s death in the Canary Islands. But after a European trip that summer, he wrote Miaow in a matter of six months. After he completed it, Galdós described it in a letter as a minor, insignificant work. It was his habit to find fault with each book as he completed it, including even Fortunata and Jacinta: “very defective. All my care was for the characters, and I neglected the plot.”

Fortunata and Jacinta is, in fact, oddly structured: characters enter and exit the narrative abruptly. The reader latches on to one character after another before finally realizing nearly halfway through the novel that its true protagonist is Fortunata. Miaow also progresses by fits and starts, only gradually settling on Villaamil as its focal point. Both novels, however, thoroughly deliver in the end, with powerful, morally complex concluding acts. In Miaow the sardonic narrator adds an extra layer of ambiguity, tipping the tragic final scenes partially into farce. Villaamil, despondent, decides that he must take matters into his own hands. At the end of a drawn-out farewell to life as he has known it, including a feast at a tavern and a surreal conversation with a flock of sparrows, the old man delivers himself into the embrace of his trusty maxim: “Always imagine the opposite of what you want. So, I will imagine that I don’t die and am taken home.”

The slipperiness of Galdós’s moral judgments is what still holds the reader’s attention. It’s not just the tendency of his characters to teeter between foolishness and saintliness; it’s his ability to sympathetically inhabit characters seized by great, lopsided passions (Tristana’s for free love; Maximiliano Rubín’s for a woman beyond his reach; Villaamil’s for the ministry) and then deal them surprising and even grotesque fates. Like Miaow’s God, he is all-seeing and understanding, but with a streak of sadism cloaked in a twinkly, avuncular manner. This undermining of convention is what Buñuel responded to in his film adaptations. “[You’re] so sensible, ministerial, and bourgeois in conversation,” Pardo Bazán wrote to Galdós, but “[in writing] so nihilist and reckless.” Hardly the profile of a garbancero.