200 alma, huye o se eclipsa‖ (desheredada 239). The picture of an open, public madhouse becomes even more sinister,
la gente de mal vivir, hembras inclusive, alardea de sus desvergüenza; los borrachos se multiplican. Tabernas, lupanares y garitos revientan de gente, y con las palabras obscenas y chabacanas que se pronuncian estos días habría bastante ponzoña para inficionar una generación entera.325 (desheredada 239)
This is not the sentimental Christmas of Charle Dickens but a frightening, repulsive mass satiation of appetites, el delirio de la gula. Galdós‘s narrator is here using Zola‘s Naturalistic rhetoric of La bête humaine, to describe the madness of a community in which vicios sociales degenerativos can have consequences that can destroy a generation. The walls that separate the mad of Leganés from the commonality of Madrid are indeed, as the narrator predicted in the first chapter, too porous to be closely defined. Madness is abroad in Madrid and Isidora is part of it.
Isidora‘s recurrent habit of imagining the characters of others, rather than appraising them realistically is shown time after time as she vainly tries to improve her mentally and emotionally retarded brother, Mariano, after the latter‘s release from prison for his part in a murderous fight. She appears incapable of understanding the reality of his brutality, ―más compatible con su fiereza y condición picaresca‖ no matter how often he absconds with money only to return in rags when it has been spent. Galdós quotes Miquis, his intradiegetic alter ego, on Isidora‘s inability to ponzoña para inficionar una generación entera: poison to infect an entire generation. This is pure degenerationist thinking in which an environmental poison can exert a blight upon a generation. In the context of tabernas, lupanares y garitos, Galdós would appear to be referring to venereal disease. In this context, he sounds much like Philiph Hauser. 325