The Regent

La Regenta is the first novel by Leopoldo Alas “Clarín”. It was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885 and, in the words of its author, “was written as loose articles” that “as I was writing I was sending” to the publisher.
It is one of the best Spanish novels of the nineteenth century, due to the psychological complexity of its protagonists, and their social and personal conflicts. Its central theme is the adultery of Ana Ozores. This conflict develops in opposition to the customs, history and values of Vetusta, an imaginary city.

The heroic city napped. The south wind, hot and lazy, pushed the whitish clouds that were torn as they ran north. In the streets there was no noise other than the shrill murmur of the swirls of dust, rags, straws and papers that went from stream to stream, from sidewalk to sidewalk, from corner to corner fluttering and chasing, like butterflies that seek and flee and that the air envelops in their invisible folds. Like mobs of pilluelos, those crumbs of garbage, those leftovers of everything gathered in a heap, stood as if asleep for a moment and jumped again startled, scattering, climbing some along the walls to the trembling windows of the lanterns, others to the paper posters badly stuck to the corners, and there was a pen that reached a third floor, and grit that was embedded for days, or years, in the window of a shop window, clinging to a lead.
Vetusta, the very noble and loyal city, court in a distant century, made the digestion of the stew and the rotten pot, and rested listening between dreams to the monotonous and familiar hum of the choir bell, which resounded there at the top of the slender tower in the Holy Basilica. The tower of the cathedral, romantic poem of stone, delicate hymn, of sweet lines of mute and perennial beauty, was the work of the sixteenth century, although before begun, of Gothic style, but, it should be said, moderated by an instinct of prudence and harmony that modified the vulgar exaggerations of this architecture. The eyes did not fatigue contemplating hours and hours that stone index that pointed to the sky; it was not one of those towers whose spire breaks subtly, more skinny than slender, mannered, like cheesy ladies who tighten their corsets too much; It was massive without losing any of its spiritual grandeur, and even its second runners, elegant balustrade, climbed like a strong castle, launching itself from there in a pyramid of graceful angle, inimitable in its measures and proportions.

Fragment of the work

Reference edition: Madrid, Librería de Fernando Fe, 1900.