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been much battered in various removals, and in which Don Lope kept the record of his love life. On the walls were the nails on which his displays of weapons had once hung. His study was crammed with things that cried out for more space, and in the dining room all that remained was the table and some rickety chairs whose leather upholstery was all dirty and torn. The sheer monumental bulk of Don Lope’s wooden bed, complete with columns and an elegant canopy, still impressed, but the blue damask curtains hung in tatters. Tristana’s room, next to her master’s, was the least marked by disaster, thanks to the exquisite care with which she defended the furnishings from disintegration and poverty.
    And while the house declared, in the expressive way things do, the unstoppable decline of that knight sedentary, the gallant himself was rapidly becoming a painful image of the vain and fleeting nature of human glory. Dejection and sadness at his own ruination must have had much to do with the “fall” of that needy gentleman, deepening the lines on his forehead far more than the years or the rumbustious life he had led since he was in his twenties. His hair, which had started to gray when he was forty or so, had always remained strong and thick; now, however, it was beginning to fall out in clumps, which he would have restored to their rightful place had there been some appropriate alchemy available. His teeth were in good condition, at least those that were visible; but his hitherto admirable molars were beginning to rebel, refusing to chew his food properly or else breaking off, as if they were biting into each other. His soldierly features were gradually losing their firm lines, and it took an iron will to preserve his hitherto slender figure. At home, his will slackened, reserving its efforts for the street, for walks, and for the club.
    Normally, if he found both women still awake when he came back at night, he would pause to chat with them, briefly with Saturna, whom he would then dispatch to bed, and at greater length with Tristana. There came a time, though, when he would nearly always enter silently and irritably and go straight to his room, where the poor captive Tristana would have to listen and put up with his complaints about his persistent cough, his rheumatism, or his difficulty in breathing. Don Lope would curse and swear, as if he believed that Nature had no right to make him suffer or as if he considered himself to be a favored mortal, immune to the miseries afflicting the rest of humanity. To make matters worse, he found himself obliged to sleep with his head wrapped in an ugly cloth, and his bedroom stank of the concoctions he used for his rheumatism and his catarrh.
    But these trifles, which cut Don Lope’s pride to the quick, did not affect Tristana as much as the annoying obsessions that began to take hold of the poor gentleman, for along with his pitiful physical and moral collapse, he began to be pricked by jealousy. Sensing that he was now an old lion, he, who had never considered any other man his rival, was suddenly filled with anxieties and saw robbers and enemies hiding in his very shadow. Aware of his own decrepitude, he was devoured by egotism, like a kind of senile leprosy, and the idea that the poor young woman should compare him, even if only mentally, with imagined exemplars of youth and beauty, soured his life. His good judgment, it should be said, did not desert him entirely, and in his lucid moments, which usually occurred in the morning, he recognized the inappropriateness and irrationality of his behavior and tried to calm his captive with trusting, affectionate words.
    These moments of calm did not last long, however, because when night fell, and the old man and the girl were alone, the former sank back into his atavistic egotism, submitting her to humiliating interrogations and, once, overwhelmed by the torment he felt at the alarming gap between his morbid frailty and Tristana’s vigor