Still, it is not a fairy-tale, for all that the heroine is a tiny elfine creature, her dreams almost create a wonderful parallel reality, and the plot teases with tantalising promises. Will she be released from her torments, not unlike Hugo's Cosette?
Will the heroine be another Cinderella? Will her prince be able to see? When the development of the storyline puts that under question, there is still a possibility that kind-hearted people will help Nela find her rightful place in the world. It may also seem a story with a simple solution: Pablo (a boy from a well-to-do family) loves Nela so much that he is ready to marry her and save her from poverty. The book is small (about 200 pages in my copy) and very simple in language and plot. Pablo is full of hope, Nela, of anguish: what will her friend say when he sees how ugly she is? The traveller whom they helped to find his way turns out to be a famous doctor, invited by Pablo's father to try and cure the young man's blindness. Now the harmony of their friendship is under threat.
The blind boy is convinced that Nela is the most beautiful girl in the world, as he 'sees' into her soul and knows her sensitivity and powerful imagination. Marianela - an orphan adopted by a family of callous, indifferent people, who convinced her of her total uselessness - lives only for Pablo.
Their relationship is that of friendship and tender love. The singing fairy turns out to be Marianela, or just Nela ('a dog's name'): a little creature with an underdeveloped body, plain, poor and neglected, who serves as a guide for the blind boy Pablo. The traveller hopes to be led out - and discovers that the boy is blind.Ī marvellous introduction to the story, in my opinion! Soon the almost phantasmagorical set resolves itself into a picture of realism (and so we are into the two conflicting worlds of the novel). Nearing the abandoned mines, he hears a voice of celestial purity in the darkness, and it seems to him that it is an elf, some gnome creature singing from the depths of the earth. One of the most profoundly moving, poetic and truthful books by Benito Pérez Galdós is Marianela.įrom the very first chapter, the reader is immersed at once in the peculiar atmosphere of the novel: the growing dusk, a lonely road and a traveller who is lost as he is trying to find his way to a little miners' village.
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