Peñas arriba by José María de Pereda

• FIRST PUBLISHED: 1895
• TYPE OF WORK: Novel
• TYPE OF PLOT: Regional romance
• TIME OF WORK: Late nineteenth century
• LOCALE: Santander, Spain

The Story:

Marcelo, an epicure of Madrid, received eight or ten letters from his eighty-year-old uncle, Celso, who lived in the mountains of Santander. Celso was alone in the world, and his thirty-two-year-old nephew Marcelo was his nearest relative; he wanted the young man to come to live with him. More out of pity for the older man than anything else, Marcelo took the train for the heart of the Pyrenees one October day. He was met by Chisco, a servant who explained in dialect that old Celso was the mayorazgo and a kind of benevolent patriarch of the mountain region.

Celso lodged Marcelo in a room the Bishops of Santander and Leon used. On the first evening, Marcelo met the rather unintelligent village priest, Sabas Penas, who had three different personalities: one for the Church, another for the mountains, and the third for the kitchen of the Celso manor house. Pedro Nolasco, a huge mountaineer, was another of the group. They talked about the simple pleasures of the region, none of which appealed to Marcelo, who, having sowed his wild oats in various parts of Europe, preferred the theaters and cafes of big cities. He foresaw monotony. The Tablanca house provided bread baked twice a week and one kind of meat, with occasional fresh milk. However, he could return to Madrid only if he deserted his relative and his obligation to carry on the family estate or the older man died.

Marcelo’s first taste of rural wholesomeness was exhausting. He climbed to the loftiest peak in company with two hardy older citizens. However, the community's cordiality was more agreeable, which was evident after he met Dr. Neluco and other villagers who idolized Celso and worried about his wasting cough and worsening condition.

In the evening tertulias at the Big House and during his excursions through the town, Marcelo expressed and listened to the philosophy of general helpfulness in a community of kindred spirits. Facing his new situation, he realized how unprofitable his soulless life had been to the needy world. As time passed, his surroundings' moral and physical grandeur began to influence his thinking. He began to be part of them.

When Pito Salces took him on a bear hunt, he saw the daring of the mountaineers. Chisco discussed his rivalry with Pepazos for Tanasia, Topero's daughter. Also, Facia came to him for advice. Despite objections by Celso and others, she had married a good-for-nothing who robbed a church, knifed a priest, and then disappeared, abandoning her and their daughter Tona. That was what the town knew, but to Marcelo, she confessed that hidden in the mountains, he was blackmailing her.

During one period when Celso could be left alone, Dr. Neluco rode with Marcelo to the town of Promisiones to meet others of the Ruiz family who had lost their family home through drink. One stormy day, Celso showed his nephew the gold he had accumulated. It was all for Marcelo, his heir. Marcelo tried in vain to persuade him to have one of the other branches of the family put in charge of restoring the decaying ancestral home.

Winter came. Marcelo had seen snow in flat places in Madrid, Paris, and St. Petersburg, but in Celso’s domain, there was no flat place outside the house. The drifts piled on the peaks and in the valleys. When one of the servants disappeared, the villagers risked death to find him. The doctor came through dangerous drifts, and even the priest made the trip up the snowbound mountain as Celso lay dying.

At the funeral, attended by villagers from leagues around, one visitor told of finding several dead people in the snow, and Marcelo realized that Facia’s problem had been solved. Nevertheless, he found no solution for his own difficulties. At last, he decided to confide in Dr. Neluco. The older man advised him to marry Lita, the granddaughter of Nolasco. Marcelo had not considered that possibility, but he approved. After a brief trip to Madrid for material to renovate the manor house, he invited the three generations of the Nolasco family to view the results. His proposal to Lita was interrupted, but he went to her house the next day and formally requested her hand. He was accepted.

Years later, Marcelo could say that he had lived so happily in the old house that he dreaded leaving it even for short trips.

Critical Evaluation:

José María de Pereda never left his ancestral country home in mountainous northern Spain, except for one stint as a Carlist artillery officer; he loved his hilly native countryside and its old folkways, and like Marcelo at the end of his novel Peñas Arriba, he could hardly bear to leave it even for short trips. He appreciated open air, honest toil, and healthy country people devoted to God, but he was disgusted by large cities, their corrupt politicians, and their affectation of foreign manners. His writings reflect his respect for peasants and his admiration of patriarchal, rural society based on individual talent contributions and the noblesse oblige code.

After 1876, Pereda became a champion of conservatism and the literary flag bearer of defeated Carlism; for a time, he was considered Spain’s best modern novelist of the Realist school. His works can be classified into two groups: those set in his beloved mountains and the coastal zone near Santander, which glorifies regional beauty, and those set in Madrid, which attacks city life, materialism, and alien-inspired radicalism. Peñas Arriba belongs to the first group; this novel of his native north sings the grandeur of the majestic mountains whose presence dominates the story. The snow episodes and descriptions are particularly memorable and are symbolically important; they are crucial to the novel's theme, which is in many ways a polemic on the superiority of country people over city people.

The plot shows how blasé young Marcelo has been debauched by city life and how he is gradually rescued from venality by contact with rural living and his wise uncle Celso, the patriarch of his ancestral mountain village. Peñas Arriba is also a regionalist novel of characters, an art gallery of people and landscapes. The classic style reflects Pereda’s sensitivity and literary zeal, as well as his mystic love of nature, which has been compared to William Wordsworth’s. His vast vocabulary and ability to paint scenes in vivid word pictures are impressive. The uncomplicated plot is developed through a steady chain of movingly written scenes and passages of great descriptive beauty.

Some critics have compared Pereda to Leo Tolstoy in his ability to probe the human soul, reproduce human feelings, and set down moral scruples, self-sacrifice, and heroism. Among Pereda’s novels, Peñas Arriba is equaled in craftsmanship only by his Sotileza (1884). The first deals with the mountainous region of northern Spain, and the other deals with the seacoast at the foot of the mountains. Both reveal the author’s artistry in describing nature and its moods. Published eleven years after the story of the Santander fisherman, Peñas Arriba marks the height of Pereda’s technical development. It is also outstanding for the author’s statement of his social philosophy and ethical convictions, the doctrine of the simple life.

When Pereda died in 1906, he was still convinced that Spain’s taproot was in its north. There, he believed, family faith went back to the Reconquest against the Moors, and, in times of national danger, red-bereted Carlist Requetes still appeared everywhere “as thickly as cherries on the trees.” Although not widely read outside Spain today, Peñas Arriba is still a lyrical celebration of the beauties of the little-known mountain regions of northern Spain.

Principal Characters:

• Marceloa young man from Madrid
• Celso Ruiz de Bejoshis eighty-year-old uncle
• ChiscoCelso’s faithful servant
• Doctor Neluco
• Pedro Nolascoa mountaineer
• Mari Pepahis daughter
• Margarita (Lita)his granddaughter

Bibliography

Herzberger, David K. "Narrative Self-Awareness in Pereda's Peñas Arriba." Hispania, vol. 68, Mar. 1985, pp. 22-28. EBSCOhost, doi.org/10.2307/341590. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.

"José María de Pereda." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed., Mar. 2021, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=134487369&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.

"Reterritorialization and Peninsular Space in Eça De Queirós's A Cidade E as Serras and Pereda's Peñas Arriba." Hispanófila, no. 140, Jan. 2004, pp. 139-48. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=19443982&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Oct. 2024.