Emilia Pardo Bazan

(1857-1921)
Spain
Although not widely known in the United States, Emilia Pardo Bazan is a central and influential
figure in nineteenth-century Spanish literature, the author of more than twenty novels as well as a
number of short stories and critical essays on literary and other subjects. The only child of titled
Spanish royalty, Pardo Bazan inherited the title of Countess. Yet despite her aristocratic background,
her political views were scarcely traditional. An early feminist, she expressed in a variety of writings
her profound objections to the oppressive conditions for women in Spanish society. Her fiction is in
the tradition of the naturalism practiced by her French counterparts, Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert,
although Pardo Bazan distinguished Spanish naturalism as less deterministic than that of her French
contemporaries.
'The Revolver' first appeared in a Spanish newspaper.

~The Revolver~
In a burst of confidence, one of those provoked by the familiarity and companionship of bathing
resorts, the woman suffering from heart trouble told me about her illness, with all the details of
chokings, violent palpitations, dizziness, fainting spells, and collapses, in which one sees the final
hour approach... As she spoke, I looked her over carefully. She was a woman of about thirty-five or
thirty-six, maimed by suffering at least I thought so, but, on close scrutiny, I began to suspect that
there was something more than the physical in her ruin. As a matter of fact, she spoke and expressed
herself like someone who had suffered a good deal, and I know that the ills of the body, when not of
imminent gravity, are usually not enough to produce such a wasting away, such extreme dejection.
And, noting how the broad leaves of the plane tree, touched with carmine by the artistic hand of
autumn, fell to the ground majestically and lay stretched out like severed hands, I remarked, in order
to gain her confidence, on the passing of all life, the melancholy of the transitoriness of everything...
“Nothing is anything,” she answered, understanding at once that not curiosity but compassion was
beckoning at the gates of her spirit. “Nothing is anything... unless we ourselves convert that nothing
into something. Would to God we could see everything, always, with the slight but sad emotion
produced in us by the fall of this foliage on the sand.”
The sickly flush of her cheeks depened, and then I realized that she had probably been very beautiful,
although her beauty was effaced and gone, like the colors of a fine picture over which is passed
cotton saturated with alcohol. Her blond, silky hair showed traces of ash, premature gray hair. Her
features had withered away; her complexion especially revealed those disturbances of the blood
which are slow poisonings, decompositions of the organism. Her soft blue eyes, veined with black,
must have once been attractive, but now they were disfigured by something worse than age, a kind of
aberration, which at certain moments lent them the glitter of blindness.
We grew silent, but my way of contemplating her expressed my pity so plainly that she, sighing for a
chance to unburden her heavy heart, made up her mind, and stopping from time to time to breathe and
regain her strength, she told me the strange story.
“When I was married, I was very much in love... My husband was, compared to me, advanced in
years; he was bordering on forty, and I was only nineteen. My temperament was gay and lively; I
retained a childlike disposition, and when he was not home I would devote my time to singing,
playing the piano, chatting and laughing with girl-friends who came to see me and envied me my
happiness, my brilliant marriage, my devoted husband, and my brilliant social position.
“This lasted a year- the wonderful year of the honeymoon. The following spring, on our wedding
anniversary, I began to notice that Reinaldo's disposition was changing. He was often in a gloomy
mood, and, without my knowing the cause, he spoke to me harshly, and had outbursts of anger. But It
was not long before I understood the origins of his transformation. Reinaldo had conceived a violent,
irrational jealousy, a jealousy without objection or cause, which, for that very reason, was doubly
cruel and difficult to cure.
“If we went out together, he was watchful lest people stare at me or tell me, in passing, one of those
silly things people say to young women; if he went out alone, he was suspicious of what I was doing
in the house, and of the people who came to see me; if I went out alone, his suspicions and
suppositions were even more defamatory...
“If I proposed, pleadingly, that we stay home together, he was watchful of my saddened expression,
of my supposed boredom, of my work, of an instant when, passing in front of the window, I happened
to look outside... He was watchful, above all, when he noticed that my birdlike disposition, my good,
childlike humor, had disappeared, and that on many afternoons, when I turned on the lights, he found
my skin shining with the damp, ardent traces of tears. Deprived of my innocent amusement, now
separated from my friends and relatives, and from my own family, because Reinaldo interpreted as
treacherous artifices the desire to communicate and look at faces other than his, I often wept, and did
not respond to Reinaldo's transports of passion with the sweet abandonment of earlier times.
“One day, after one of the usual bitter scenes, my husband said:
“ 'Flora, I may be a madman, but I am not a fool. I have alienated your love, and although perhaps
you would not have thought of deceiving me, in the future, without being able to remedy it, you
would. Now I shall never again be your beloved. The swallows that have left do not return. But
because, unfortunately, I love you more each day, and love you without peace, with eagerness and
fever, I wish to point out that I have thought of a way which will prevent questions, quarrels, or tears
between us-- and once and for all you will know what our future will be.'
“Speaking thus, he took me by the arm and led me toward the bedroom.
“I went trembling; cruel presentiments froze me. Reinaldo opened the drawer of the small inlaid
cabinet where he kept tobacco, a watch, and handkerchiefs and showed me a large revolver, a sinister
weapon.
“ 'Here,' he said, 'is your guarantee that in the future your life will be peaceful and pleasant. I shall
never again demand an accounting of how you spend your time, or of your friends, or of your
amusements. You are free, free as the air. But the day I see something that wounds me to the quick...
that day, I swear by my mother! Without complaints or scenes, or the slightest sign that I am
displeased, oh no, not that! I will get up quietly at night, take the weapon, put it to your temple and
you will wake up in eternity. Now you have been warned...'
“As for me, I was in a daze, unconscious. It was necessary to send for the doctor, in as much as the
fainting spell lasted. When I recovered consciousness and remembered, the convulsion took place. I
must point out that I have a mortal fear of firearms; a young brother of mine died of an accidental
shot. My eyes, staring wildly, would not leave the drawer of the cabinet that held the revolver.
“I could not doubt, from Reinaldo's tone and the look on his face, that he was prepared to carry out
his threat, and knowing also how easily his imagination grew confused, I began to consider myself as
dead. As a matter of fact, Reinaldo kept his promise, and left me complete mistress of myself, without
directing the slightest censure my way, or showing, even by a look, that he was opposed to anything
of my wishes or disapproved of my actions; but that itself frightened me, because it indicated the
strength and tyranny of a resolute will... and, victim of a terror which everyday grew more profound,
I remained motionless, not daring to take a step I would always see the steely reflection of the gun
barrel.
“At night, insomnia kept my eyes open, and I imagined I felt the metallic cold of a steel circle on my
temple; or if I got to sleep, I woke up startled with palpitations that made my heart seem to leap from
my breast, because I dreamed that an awful report was ripping apart the bones of my skull and
blowing my brains out, dashing them against the wall... and this lasted four years, four years without
a single peaceful moment, when I never took a step without fearing that that step might give rise to
tragedy.”
“And how did that horrible situation end?” I asked, in odrer to bring her story to a close, because I
saw her gasping for breath.
“It ended... with Reinaldo, who was thrown by a horse, and had some internal injury, being killed on
the spot.
“Then, and only then, I knew that I still loved him, and I mourned him quite sincerely, although he
was my executioner, and a systematic one at that!”
“And did you pick up the revolver to throw it out the window?”
“You'll see,” she murmured. “Something rather extraordinary happened. I sent Reinaldo's manservant
to remove the revolver from my room, because in my dreams I continued to see the shot and feel the
chill on my temple... and after he carried out the order, the manservant came to tell me: 'Senora, there
was no cause for alarm... this revolver wasn't loaded.'
“ 'No, Senora, and it looks to me as though it never was... As a matter of fact, the poor master never
got around to buying the cartridges. Why, I would even ask him at times if he wanted me to go to the
gunsmith's and get them, but he didn't answer, and then he never spoke of the matter again.'”
“And so,” added the sufferer from heart disease, “an unloaded revolver shot me, not in the head, but
in the center of my heart, and believe me when I tell you that, in spite of digitalis and baths and all the
remedies, the bullet is unsparing...”
[1895]
Translated by
ANGEL FLORES