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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 story of Manso's gradual approach to the life of action and the emotions, but his failure withdraws him from life once more -again in the double sense. When Manso's story is told, when Galdós has finished with him, he meekly accepts his creator's dictum (unlike his literary descendent, Unamuno's Augusto Pérez) and dies without sufficient natural cause and without resistance. Rather than autonomous, he is its opposite: dependent -the passive agent of Galdós' creative act. Máximo tells Doña Javiera: « He dado mi fruto y estoy de más » (222). When she claims not to recognize his «fruit», he makes his only positive statement, but without clarifying its meaning: « Invisible es todo lo grande, toda ley, toda causa, todo elemento activo » (222). Later he claims -in passages most of which we have already quoted- to have left little behind him in others, while memory of him has faded rapidly away. The passivity/ failed activity/return to passivity structure of his story is complete, and he goes back -so willed by his creator- to what he had called at the beginning the « frío aburrimiento de estos espacios de la idea » (10), or to what is now seen as sosiego (223) as opposed to the dolor (11) of human life. The ambiguities of the novel largely evolve from Galdós' capacity for combining opposites and his related talent for creating dichotomous characters. The latter include those with whose ideas or way of life Galdós disagrees, but for whom he expresses compassion (Torquemada), and those who are made ridiculous as people, but whose ideas are close to those of the author (Bailón). Such ambiguity is found in El amigo Manso , but more problematic still is the question of Manso as narrator (and therefore interested party) of his own life. Early statements such as « Adquirí cierta presunción pedantesca y un airecillo de autoridad del que posteriormente, a Dios gracias, me he curado por completo » (15) are disproved by the remainder of the work and reveal the narrator's unreliability. Clarification of the matter is of no less importance for El amigo Manso than it is for that other great experiment in first person narrative voice, Lo prohibido . The temporal perspective of the narrator is also a puzzle in relation to the above. Manso tells us that he is thirty-five and that the major action he will describe occurs in the space of a year (11), yet he dies «naturally» at the end. If the entire novel is narrated after the fact -as it would seems to be- rather than in medias res , interpretative difficulties multiply. On the night that Manuel had persuaded Manso to accompany him to the buñolería , Máximo's claim that the education being given his pupil was obviously not taking root is followed by « -¡Oh!, no -exclamó Peña con vehemencia, dándose una puñada sobre el corazón y un palmetazo en la frente-. Algo queda. Mucho hay aquí y aquí, maestro, que permanecerá por tiempo infinito. Esta luz no se extinguirá jamás, y mientras haya espacio, mientras haya tiempo... » (92). Manuel is not speaking seriously, of course. The setting, the gestures, and the hyperbole make that clear, but Manso's story makes even clearer that he was occasionally unrealistic enough to believe that the man of thought 86
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 could remain, could permanently change the world. Galdós knows better, as does Manso -from time to time: « La Humanidad es como la han hecho, o como se ha hecho ella misma. No hay nada que la tuerza » (214). Perhaps the ultimate ambiguity of the work -whether intended or not- is after all in that word manso , from the Latin manere : permanecer . University of Massachusetts-Amherst 87
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