Marianela Book

"A veces me digo: si al darle la vista le convertiremos de ángel en hombre..."

"Still, I say to myself'supposing that by giving him sight we should make him a man instead of an angel..."

It took me so long to rough out some coherent thought about this book for various reasons. The first of which being my despicable tendency to read first with my heart, then with my mind.

Marianela is a really good book. The story is nice (actually, Marianela's life and condition are kind of heartwrenching, but you know what I mean); the writing may not present any remarkable feature, at least for me, but it's fluid and pleasant to read, even though I would have spared the reader some of those long, so long descriptions of the mines and such; the characters are not buy any means exceptional, but each one of them is characterized just as much as the plot requires, so I am fine with that. Galdós even made me care for their sake, namely Nela and Pablo's love story, which was doomed to end badly, of course, but you know me, I am a masochist.

So, as I said, I wound up caring. Thus, I hated Pablo with all my heart -I thought I liked him, but eventually to think of him the most horrible maggot sobre la faz del mundo. So, sentimentally, I am not happy with this book. No. Nope. I can't even. I don't want to have anything to do with it. Get it out of my sight.

But the thing is, plain and simple: that was not the point. The point was something else entirely. And I happened to like the point a lot.

This is a novel about what reality is and how men deal with and handle it. A novel about surviving strategies and adaptation mechanisms. Marianela is a dream-creature, a child-like little woman who lives off of superstitions and illusions; Pablo, on the other hand, is a natural thinker, a scientific mind, an observer, rational, pragmatic, matter-of-fact; in short, I am under the impression that Mr Gradgrind (hello, Dickens) would have been proud to have him in one of his classes.
If not for one thing: Pablo is blind.
His disability somehow abstracts him from reality. This closes the distance between Marianela and him, since his eyes can't be but Marianela's or other people's, or, better, the other way around. But when Dr. Golfín performs his miracle, the best and the worst thing happen -thing, singular, because they happen to be one and the same. Pablo can see -and the world, the shape of what's in front of his eyes, the beauty of all things beautiful and the hideousness of all things hideous, they ensnare him. He calls himself "lord of the visible world"; dreams? Illusions?
Imagination?

"I laugh now," he went on, "to think of my absurd blind man's vanity, of my foolish attempts to realize the true aspect of things without seeing them. I believe that as long as I live I shall never forget the surprise that the reality was to me. Reality! Oh, the man who knows it not is blind indeed. A perfect idiot! Florentina, I was an idiot."

Even if Marianela had been beautiful, I think that Pablo couldn't have loved her. She was so ethereal, ready to let the air lift her and carry her away, while he wanted no more than a ballast to keep him firmly on the ground and link him to reality once and for all.

So, you see, as much as I do now. It was not meant to be.

The fact that I can see what the author wanted to convey and that the core of the message is particularly appealing to me does not me, however, that Pablo isn't a douchebag.