Woman Triumphant | Page 2

offensive to
his moral sense. Morality is not to be found in words but in deeds and
in the lessons which these deeds teach.
The difficulty of adequately translating the word maja into English led
to the adoption of "Woman Triumphant" as the title of the present

version. I believe it is a happy selection; it interprets the spirit of the
novel. But it must be borne in mind that the woman here is the wife of
the protagonist. It is the wife who triumphs, resurrecting in spirit to
exert an overwhelming influence over the life of a man who had wished
to live without her.
Renovales, the hero, is simply the personification of human desire, this
poor desire which, in reality, does not know what it wants, eternally
fickle and unsatisfied. When we finally obtain what we desire, it does
not seem enough. "More: I want more," we say. If we lose something
that made life unbearable, we immediately wish it back as
indispensable to our happiness. Such are we: poor deluded children
who cried yesterday for what we scorn to-day and shall want again
to-morrow; poor deluded beings plunging across the span of life on the
Icarian wings of caprice.
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ.
New York, January, 1920.

WOMAN TRIUMPHANT


PART I
I
It was eleven o'clock in the morning when Mariano Renovales reached
the Museo del Prado. Several years had passed since the famous painter
had entered it. The dead did not attract him; very interesting they were,
very worthy of respect, under the glorious shroud of the centuries, but
art was moving along new paths and he could not study there under the
false glare of the skylights, where he saw reality only through the
temperaments of other men. A bit of sea, a mountainside, a group of

ragged people, an expressive head attracted him more than that palace,
with its broad staircases, its white columns and its statues of bronze and
alabaster--a solemn pantheon of art, where the neophytes vacillated in
fruitless confusion, without knowing what course to follow.
The master Renovales stopped for a few moments at the foot of the
stairway. He contemplated the valley through which you approach the
palace--with its slopes of fresh turf, dotted at intervals with the sickly
little trees--with a certain emotion, as men are wont to contemplate,
after a long absence, the places familiar to their youth. Above the
scattered growth the ancient church of Los Jerónimos, with its gothic
masonry, outlined against the blue sky its twin towers and ruined
arcades. The wintry foliage of the Retiro served as a background for the
white mass of the Casón. Renovales thought of the frescos of Giordano
that decorated its ceilings. Afterwards, he fixed his attention on a
building with red walls and a stone portal, which pretentiously
obstructed the space in the foreground, at the edge of the green slope.
Bah! The Academy! And the artist's sneer included in the same
loathing the Academy of Language and the other Academies--painting,
literature, every manifestation of human thought, dried, smoked, and
swathed, with the immortality of a mummy, in the bandages of
tradition, rules, and respect for precedent.
A gust of icy wind shook the skirts of his overcoat, his long beard
tinged with gray and his wide felt hat, beneath the brim of which
protruded the heavy locks of his hair, that had excited so much
comment in his youth, but which had gradually grown shorter with
prudent trimming, as the master rose in the world, winning fame and
money.
Renovales felt cold in the damp valley. It was one of those bright,
freezing days that are so frequent in the winter in Madrid. The sun was
shining; the sky was blue; but from the mountains, covered with snow,
came an icy wind, that hardened the ground, making it as brittle as
glass. In the corners, where the warmth of the sun did not reach, the
morning frost still glistened like a coating of sugar. On the mossy
carpet, the sparrows, thin with the privations of winter, trotted back and

forth like children, shaking their bedraggled feathers.
The stairway of the Museo recalled to the master his early youth, when
at sixteen he had climbed those steps many a time with his stomach
faint from the wretched meal at the boarding-house. How many
mornings he had spent in that old building copying Velásquez! The
place brought to his memory his dead hopes, a host of illusions that
now made his smile; recollections of hunger and humiliating
bargaining to make his first money by the sale of copies. His large,
stern face, his brow that filled his pupils and admirers with terror
lighted up with a merry smile. He recalled how he used to go into the
Museo with halting