Good News from Spain

TORMENT (312 pp.)--Perez Galdos--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

Offhand, this novel has what seems a pretty used-up plot, the story of a tarnished Cinderella. Senorita Amparo Emperador was very beautiful, very poor, and an orphan, without beaux or hope of dowry. In Madrid, in 1867, that was about as bad a fix as a girl could find herself in. So Amparo had become a slavey for her distant, stingy relatives, Rosalia and Francisco Bringas, who kept her jumping from dawn to dusk and repaid her with spoiled food and a few rare pesetas.

Then Agustin, a cousin of the Bringases, came back from America, and Amparo's situation began to look up. Agustin was a jewel of a man, kind, modest, a bit awkward socially, but enormously rich, and generous to a fault. Pushing 45, he was by all odds the finest catch in Madrid, but once he laid eyes on lovely, humble Amparo, the other senoritas had no chance. He proposed and Amparo accepted. There was just one problem: Amparo had once been seduced by a sinful priest, who kept popping up and asking for further favors. She was too weak to confess to her suitor, too decent to deceive him. To make matters worse, there were people who knew about her slip and were just envious enough to tell all to Agustin.

Universal Amparo. There are two reasons why Torment, with its routine plot and its 19th century setting, is first-rate literary news in 1953: 1) it is told with much of the eloquence and appetite for life that are the trademarks of the great men of the novel--Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Fielding; and 2) it is virtually the first chance since the turn of the century that U.S. readers have had to meet Benito Perez Galdos, one of Spain's finest writers (The Spendthrifts sold 400 copies in this country). Like his mighty peers, Perez Galdos (1843-1920) was almost compulsively prolific, wrote more than 100 novels and tossed off one that was longer than War and Peace.

Torment is no longer than the average lending-library time killer, but it gets more said about the human condition than many a contemporary novelist gives forth in his entire output. For Author Perez Galdos is bold enough to use the fine old materials of fiction as if he had just discovered them: love and lust, generosity and greed, envy and charity, understanding and pettiness. Poor Amparo is no figure in a Spanish soap opera; she is the universal woman who has sinned, under pressure of her own generosity and momentary passion, and is willing to pay. Even Polo, the unfrocked priest, is seen as a man whose 'whole nature is out of tune with his mistaken calling, a personality so split that the sharp edges are bound to stab anyone brought too close. As for Agustin, he can be seen in any land in any time, sure that he has won his way to a plateau of peace, only to discover that life does not respect bankrolls, and that it can set its traps in the heart even for the middleaged.

An Old Story. After an abortive try at suicide, Amparo finally confesses to Agustin, not even dreaming that he will have her now. And Agustin, a man of convention, says he won't. But his heart says yes, and the heart wins. Yet, as Author Perez Galdos does things, this is no commonplace happy ending. It is an end to anguish achieved by a cleansing of guilt on Amparo's part, by the courage on Agustin's to dismiss the sneers of his narrow world. An old story, but Torment shows how good it can be.

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