The Novel on the Tram

by Benito Pérez Galdós

III

Without taking my eyes off the bundle of books I started to think about the relationship between the news I had had from the mouth of Don Cascajares and the scene I had just read in that scandal sheet, a roman feuilleton no doubt translated from some silly novel by Ponson du Terrail or Montépin. It may be silly I said to myself, but the fact is I'm interested in this countess who has fallen victim to the nastiness of an insufferable butler who only exists in the disturbed mind of some novelist born to terrify simple souls. And what will he do to take his revenge? He'd be capable of framing some atrocity to bring to an end in sensational style such a chapter. And what will the count do? And that young man Cascajares mentioned on the tram and Mudarra in the serial, what will he do? Who is he? What is there between the countess and that unknown gentleman? I'd give my eye teeth to know.

These were my thoughts when I raised my eyes and looked over the inside of the tram with them. To my horror I saw a person who made me shake with fear. While I was engrossed in the interesting reading of the feuilleton, the tram had stopped several times to take on or let off passengers. On one of these occasions this man had got on whose sudden presence now produced such a strong impression on me. It was him, Mudarra, the butler in person, sitting opposite me, with his knees touching my knees. I took a second to examine him from head to toe and saw in him the features I had already read about. He could be no-one else: even the most trifling details of his clothing clearly indicated it was him. I recognized his dark and lustrous complexion, his unruly hair, the curls of which sprang up in opposite directions like the snakes of Medusa. His deep-sunk eyes were covered by the thickness of his bushy eyebrows and his beard was no less unkempt than his hair, while his feet were twisted inwards like those of parrots. The same look in a nutshell, the same man in his appearance, in his clothes, in the way he breathed and in the way he coughed, even in the way he put his hand into his pocket to pay his fare.

Suddenly I saw him take out a letter writing case and I noticed that this object had on its cover a great gilded M, the first letter of his surname. He opened it, took out a letter and looked at the envelope with a demonic smile and I even thought I heard him mutter: "How well I've imitated the handwriting!" The letter was indeed a small one with the envelope addressed in a feminine scrawl. I watched him closely as he took pleasure in his infamous action until he saw that I had indiscreetly and discourteously stretched my face in order to read the address. He gave me a stare that hit me like a blow and put the letter back in the case.

The tram kept going and in the short time it had taken me to read an extract from the novel, to reflect on such strange occurrences and to see Mudarra in the flesh, a character out of a book, hard to believe in, made human and now my companion on this journey, we had left behind the calle de Alcalá, were currently crossing the Puerta del Sol and making a triumphal entrance into the calle Mayor, making a way for ourselves between other vehicles, making slow-moving covered waggons speed up and frightening pedestrians who, in the tumult of the street and dazed by so many diverse noises, only saw the solid outline of the tram when it was almost on top of them. I continued to look at that man as one looks at an object of whose existence one is uncertain and I did not take my eyes from his repugnant face till I saw him get up, ask for the tram to stop and get off, losing sight of him then among the crowd on the street.

Various passengers got off and got on and the living décor of the tram changed completely. The more I thought of it, the more alive was the curiosity that event aroused in me, which I had to begin with considered as forced into my head exclusively by the juxtaposition of various feelings occasioned by my erstwhile conversation and subsequent reading, but which I finally imagined as indubitably true.

When the man in whom I thought to see the awful butler got off the tram, I was still thinking about the incident with the letter and I explained it to myself as best I could, hoping not to have on such a delicate matter an imagination less fertile than the novelist who had written what only moments before I had read. Mudarra, I thought, desirous of taking his revenge on the countess, that unfortunate lady, had copied her writing and written a letter to a certain gentleman of her acquaintance. In the letter she had given him a rendezvous in her own home. The young man had arrived at the time indicated and shortly afterwards the husband, whom the butler had warned so that he would catch his unfaithful wife in flagrante which was in itself an admirable idea! An action, which in life has points for and against, fits snugly in a novel like a ring on a finger. The lady would faint, the lover would panic and the husband would commit an atrocity and, lurking behind a curtain, the face of the butler would light up diabolically.

As an avid reader of numerous bad novels, I gave that twist to what was unconsciously developing in my imagination on the basis of the words of a friend, the reading of a piece of torn-off paper and the sight of someone I had never laid eyes on before.

IV

The tram kept on going and going and whether because of the heat that could be felt inside it or the slow and monotonous movement of the vehicle that gives rise to a certain amount of dizziness which then turns into sleep, what is certain is that I felt my eyelids droop, leaned to my left-hand side, placing my elbow on the bundle of books, and closed my eyes. While in this position I continued to see the row of faces of both sexes in front of me, some bearded, some shaven, some laughing, some very stiff and serious. Afterwards it seemed to me that, obeying the contraction of a single muscle, all those faces winked and grimaced, opening and closing their eyes and their mouths, and showing me in turn a series of teeth that varied from whiter than white to yellowish, some as sharp as knives, others broken and worn. Those eight noses set under sixteen eyes varying in colour and expression, got bigger or smaller and changed shape; the mouths opened in a horizontal line producing silent laughter or stretched forward forming sharp-pointed snouts similar to the interesting face of a certain distinguished animal which has brought down on itself the anathema of being unnameable.