201
«Por el camino, el hombre de medio cuerpo arriba aventuró algunas indicaciones críticas acerca del moro y de su conducta un tanto estrafalaria. Creía él que Almudena era en su tierra clérigo, quiere decirse, presbítero del Zancarrón, y en aquellos días hacía las penitencias de la Cuaresma maiometana, que consiste en dar zapatetas en el aire, comer sólo pan y agua y mojarse las palmas de la mano con saliva» (p. 1945).
202
Benina's ideas are an obvious reminiscence of Sancho's commentary in the Quixote that «el hambre es la mejor salsa del mundo».
203
It is significant that in contrast to the frequent use of the term «judío» in Gloria, Almudena is invariably referred to as an «hebreo». This choice is probably not accidental. It is undoubtedly due to Galdós' desire to eradicate stereotyped ideas and labels that isolate and separate men from each other, since the word «judío» has such negative connotations for the average Catholic. The elimination of the term is thus one more indication of the novelist's desire to minimize the nominal differences between men.
204
«-Nombre mío Mordejai -declaró el ciego» (p. 1905).
205
The Zionist renaissance that took place in the late nineteenth century must not have passed unnoticed by Galdós. The First Zionist Congress met in Basel in 1897, the same year that the novelist wrote Misericordia. It is interesting to conjecture whether Galdós read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) in which appears a convinced representative of Zionism in one of its central characters, whose name, by a striking coincidence, is Mordechai.
206
In the words of «La Casiana», Benina had been «[...] una sisona tremenda, y por ese vicio se ve ahora como se ve, teniendo que pedir para una rosca. De todas las casas en que estuvo la echaron por ser tan larga de uñas, y si ella hubia tenido conduta no le faltarían casas buenas en que acabar tranquila» (p. 1897). Galdós, more kind and understanding than «La Casiana», admits Benina's faults but at the same time, with a typical Galdosian sense of irony and insistence on the relativity of all values, questions whether her fault is not in reality a disguised virtue: «tenía el vicio del descuento, que, en cierto modo, por otro lado, era la virtud del ahorro. Difícil de expresar donde se empalmaban y confundían la virtud y el vicio» (p. 1888).
207
Almudena tells how at the age of fifteen he was sent by his father to a friend of the family, Rubén Toledano, to borrow two hundred duros. The young Mordejai, instead of taking the money back, decided to keep it himself and try his hand at business. He bought two donkeys and established his own little commerce, with the hope that be would make a great fortune for his father -«no los 200 duros sino, 2.000 o cientos de miles» (p. 1905). The young Mordejai was unable to fulfill his ambitions because one day, as a result of bathing in polluted waters, he became blind.
It is significant that the name Toledano should be mentioned in relation to a wealthy Moroccan Jewish family. First of all it alludes to the fact that the Toledanos were originally from Toledo and is, thus, clearly a reference to the past history of the Jews in Spain. It is also an important name in Moroccan Jewish history. In the late seventeenth century the Toledano family were trustworthy advisers and ambassadors to the Moroccan Sultan, Muley Ismael. The Toledano family lived in the town of Mequinez, a city not far from Almudena's hometown and one of the cities to which he transported goods during his shortlived financial enterprise («se puso a portear mercaderías y pasajeros entre Fez y Mequinez» [p. 1905]). This small detail serves to highlight Almudena's Sephardic background in North Africa. On the Toledanos, see The Jews in Africa by Sidney Mendelssohn (New York, 1920), pp. 154-155. It is perhaps also valuable to point out that before Almudena had begun his story, Diega had asked Benina if she came from Toledo (p. 1905). Benina does not come from that city but the association of Toledo, both with her and subsequently with Almudena, is not accidental. Galdós always associated Toledo with mysticism and religion (i.e. Ángel Guerra) and characters of his who are associated with it are somehow imbued with those qualities.
208
Joaquín Casalduero in Vida y obra de Galdós (Madrid, 1961), p. 159, sees the Don Romualdo episode as the ultimate fusion of the world of reality with that of the imagination. Leon Livingstone in «Interior Duplication in the Modern Spanish Novel», PMLA 73 (1958), 393-406, understands the sequence as proof of «Galdós' refusal to accept a unilateral, purely materialistic concept of reality» (p. 399), while Andrés Amorós in «La sombra: realidad e imaginación», Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 250-252 (1970-71), 523-536, explains the apparition of Don Romualdo as the «expresión de una realidad que excede lo puramente externo e incluye lo psicológico: las obsesiones, las ideas fijas, los sueños de los personajes» (p. 553). Most recently the entire novel, including Don Romualdo, has been analyzed as the reconciliation between philosophy and faith. See Donald W. Bleznick and Mario E. Ruiz, «La Benina Misericordiosa: Conciliación entre la filosofía y la fe», Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 259-252 (1970-71), 472-489.
209
Monroe Z. Hafter, briefly commenting on the Romualdo-Samdai relationship, says that «It is against the foil of Almudena's desire to conjure up the treasure of some Semitic lord of the underworld that Benina's creation of her benefactor, Romualdo, is realized in flesh and blood», in «Ironic Reprise in Galdós' Novels», PMLA 76 (1961), 239.
210
In this we also see Galdós' rejection of naturalism and its deterministic philosophy. As pointed out by Carlos Rovetta in «El naturalismo de Galdós: Misericordia», Nosotros, Series 2, n.º 77 (1942), 203-209, «El determinismo -la gran confabulación del medio y herencia- que explica las modificaciones del temperamento, no realiza su juego fatal en todos los personajes. Caen la Petra y la Diega, borrachas perdidas... Pero sobrevive la pureza de Benina; conserva su aquel de dignidad el moro Almudena allí donde sobran motivos de depravación...» (p. 207).