TRANSLATION: The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May
The third book in the Episodios Nacionales of Spain
THE NINETEENTH OF MARCH AND THE SECOND OF MAY by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation.
The third volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain
The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May follows Gabriel Araceli from the tranquil gardens of the Royal Residence to the blood-soaked streets of Madrid in the spring of 1808, as Napoleon’s armies enter Spain and ordinary Spaniards rise up against them.
Gabriel is seventeen, working as a typesetter in Madrid and living for his weekend journeys to Aranjuez, where the orphan Inés lives with her uncle, the good-hearted Latinist Father Don Celestino. Their courtship unfolds in some of Galdós’s most beautiful prose. But this private idyll is shattered when Inés’s relations arrive to claim her, Don Mauro Requejo and his sister Doña Restituta, a pair of grotesques worthy of Dickens at his most savagely comic.
The Requejos carry Inés off to Madrid and imprison her in their shop, where she sews from five in the morning until eleven at night. Gabriel abandons his trade and infiltrates the household as a servant, only to discover that Don Mauro intends to marry Inés himself. Meanwhile, outside the shop walls, Spain is falling apart. The court at Aranjuez erupts; Godoy is dragged from hiding; Carlos IV abdicates and the French pour into Madrid. Gabriel witnesses the Aranjuez uprising from inside the mob, through streets lit by torches and filled with fury.
The novel’s climax is the Second of May, 1808, the day Goya painted, the day that began Spain’s war against Napoleon. Gabriel fights in the streets of Madrid against the Mameluke cavalry and French artillery, and the novel ends with one of the most extraordinary passages in nineteenth-century fiction, in which one man’s experience of dying is described in a sensational manner that anticipated literary modernism by more than half a century.
Pérez Galdós weaves domestic comedy, political upheaval, street-level violence, and desperate love into a novel that moves from the lyrical to the grotesque to the devastating. Of the ten novels in the First Series, The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May is the one in which the private life of Gabriel and the historic tragedy of Spain collide most unforgettably.
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About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of its 46 volumes have ever been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.
Excerpt
History records that the tumult began because the mob insisted upon knowing the identity of a veiled lady who, accompanied by two honour guards, was leaving the Generalísimo’s residence in a carriage. Some maintain that a light was seen in one of the palace windows, taken for a signal to begin the affray.
Of the shot and the bugle-call I have no doubt, for I heard them clearly. As for the light, I did not see it myself, though I believe I heard Lopito say that he saw it, although I am not entirely certain even of that. It matters little whether it appeared or not: the first explanation is, if not certain, at least very plausible, for the centre of the conspiracy was in the Royal Palace, and the principal conspirators were, as all the world knows, the Prince of Asturias, his uncle, his brother, his friends and adherents, many gentlemen of the household, senior officials of the King’s chamber, and several ministers.
The rioters multiplied at every moment, for new waves of people swelled the main mass, without a single soldier appearing to restrain the civilians. It was not long before the door of the palace of the Prince of the Peace, whose name the enraged rabble pronounced amid horrible oaths and threats, was battered to the ground by repeated blows and strokes of the axe.
The mob is always brave in the presence of these defenceless idols whose hour of downfall has struck. Such men have the misfortune of finding themselves abandoned all at once by lukewarm friends, by paid servants, and even by those who owe everything to the wretch who falls; so that to the hands of hatred, just or unjust, are joined the hands of ingratitude, the most despicable of all vices, to finish off the victim. Feeling the support of ingratitude, the mob takes courage, believes itself omnipotent and inspired by some divine star, and afterwards proudly attributes the victory to itself. The truth is that all sudden falls, like sudden elevations of the same kind, have an inner mechanism operated by hands more skilled than those of the common people.
When the door of the house gave way, the mob poured into its interior, bellowing with rage. Its savage roaring filled me with terror and indignation, especially when I considered that it was about to slake its thirst for vengeance upon the person of a defenceless man. It was the first time I had seen the people administering justice on its own account, and from that hour I have detested it as a judge.
To the cries of “Death to Godoy!” were joined questions of ferocious impatience: “Have they caught him?” “Have they killed him?” Everyone wished to enter, but it was impossible, for the house was already crammed with people. From outside and through the balconies, which were flung wide open, one could see the glare of the torches: sinister cries and the crash of furniture and vessels being smashed beneath the claws of the beast issued from the house to join the concert without. In an instant a great bonfire was kindled that illuminated the whole street: the bells of every church and convent in the town rang without ceasing, though it was impossible to tell whether that clamour was the sounding of alarm or the pealing of triumph.
Lopito, who was dancing like an adolescent demon beside the bonfire, came up to me and said:
“Gabriel, aren’t you excited? What are you doing standing there so cold? Come, let us go up into the palace. For once it belongs to us. Don’t they say he stole everything from the nation?”
Half dragged by my young friend I entered the palace and climbed to the upper rooms, pushing our way through the possessed who were going up and down. I passed through all the halls I had walked two days before, arrived at the Prince’s own study, and saw the desk where I had written my name. The multitude surged up and down, opening cupboards, tearing tapestries, overturning sofas and armchairs in the belief that the object of its wrath might be found behind some piece of furniture; it forced doors open with its fists; kicked painted screens to splinters; vented its indignation upon innocent Chinese vases; scattered sumptuous uniforms across the floor; tore clothing; stared with stupid astonishment at its own terrifying face in the mirrors, and then smashed them; put to its mouth the remains of a supper that still lay warm upon the dining-room table; hurled itself upon fine furniture to break it; spat upon Goya’s paintings; struck everything for the simple pleasure of discharging its fists upon some surface. It had the voluptuousness of destruction, the brutal instinct as natural to children by age as to those who are children by ignorance; it smashed objects of art with relish, as a boy in his spite smashes the primer he cannot understand; and in this work of extermination the terrible beast employed at once, in a fearsome coalition, all its instruments: its hands, its paws, its claws, its nails, and its teeth, dealing out punches, kicks, stamps, scratches, bites, headbutts, and gnawings.
The rage of the monster increased when these phrases ran from mouth to mouth: “The dog isn’t here.” “The wretch has got away.” Indeed the Prince was nowhere to be found, which pleased me.
When the mob cannot sate its hunger for destruction upon the human object of its hatred, it likes to take its revenge upon the innocent bodies of the furniture that belonged to him. So it has been in every riot in our repertoire, and so it was in this one, more famous than any for the various causes that provoked it. Convinced, then, that they would not lay hands upon so much as a hair of the Prince of the Peace, the conspirators conceived the heroic notion of burning all the treasures of the palace they had just sacked.
With incomparable joy, with the intoxication of triumph and the consciousness of their irresistible strength, the new masters of the palace began to hurl from the balconies chairs, sofas, tapestries, vases, paintings, candelabra, mirrors, clothing, papers, china, and a thousand other wicked accomplices of the infamous policies of Godoy. The beast carried out this office with a certain order, without ceasing to cry: “Death to that scoundrel, that thief!” and “Long live the King! Long live the Prince of Asturias!”
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