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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
The «cuckold» meaning is, however, richer than this might suggest. It will be remembered that when
Manso accompanied Irene and the children to the theater to see some Christmas plays, one of those
witnessed was a travesty entitled El Nacimiento del Hijo de Dios , of which the protagonist-narrator
says, « lo más repugnante de aquella farsa increíble era un pastor zafio y bestial, pretendiente a la
mano de María, y que en la escena del templo y en el resto de la obra se permitía groseras libertades
de lenguaje a propósito de la mansedumbre de San José. » 106
Five years after the publication of El amigo Manso , Galdós returned, with Fortunata y Jacinta ,
to the matter of the mansedumbre of San José in the naming and imagined cuckoldry of José Ido
del Sagrario 107 in a novel in which the triangle situation is echoed with variation after variation in
a series of trios. With his marriage to Fortunata, Maxi invites the cuckolding which soon follows,
resulting in a pregnancy he imagines to have a supernatural cause. The all but identical first names
of Manso and Rubín (Máximo/Maximiliano) is suggestive. Part of the novelist's interest in each case
-despite the differences between the two characters- is to satirize with the inflated first name and
then to portray men who, in important senses, live on the fringes of life and come to grief when
they enter into it without full understanding of their own natures and those of others. As their stories
begin Maximiliano and Máximo are living the «life of the mind» (pharmacy/philosophy), cared for
by a mother figure (Doña Lupe/Doña Javiera). They then enter the affective world through interest
of an amorous nature (although not fully understood as such because of their unworldliness) in an
inappropriate woman (Fortunata/Irene) whose natural affections turn to a man more suited to her
emotional needs (Juanito/Manuel). The competition is unequal and both Maximiliano and Máximo
are defeated, whereupon they withdraw once more from the world, the former into lofty, rationalistic
madness, the latter into death, i.e., the nonexistence with which the novel began. Maximiliano, in
his final wise madness, says: « No contamos con la Naturaleza... Protestamos contra sus lecciones
admirables, que no entendemos, y cuando queremos que nos obedezca, nos coge y nos estrella, como
el mar estrella a los que pretenden gobernarlo » 108 . Máximo begins his story with: « Yo no existo
» (9). In both characters Galdós is portraying the conflict between the natural and the rational and
the two men share both real and figurative mansedumbre . The similarity of names having led us to
106 Benito Pérez Galdós, El amigo Manso (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1955), p. 65. Future
references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text.
107 Shoemaker, p. 117.
108 Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta (Madrid: Ediciones Hernando, 1968), p. 1036.
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