208 achatados, 333 los pómulos cubiertos de granulaciones [...] ponían una máscara de antipatía sobre las siempre interesantes facciones de la niñez‖ (desheredada 149). Galdós presents the social fraternity of Mariano (Pecado) marked with the stigmata of inherited disease, a life of moral degeneration ahead of them and, perhaps, even worse, ―cansados de jugar a los toros, jugamos a la guerra civil‖ (desheredada 151), ―un plantel del que saldrán quizá hombres de provecho y, sin duda, vagos y criminales‖ (desheredada 150). Into a dispute in this fraternity arrives Mariano apparently anxious to maintain his position as top dog. A fight with the outsider Zarapicos ensues and ends with the latter‘s death when Mariano knifes him. By the time Mariano is released from prison on account of his youth, his barely articulate oafishness has become worse and his exchanges with Isidora at Christmas are reduced to the level of, ―y el pavo. Yo quiero pavo‖ (desheredada 147) and, ―Si no me das dinero, no te quiero‖ (desheredada 254). As Galdós‘s narrator observes, ―todavìa quedaba en él algo de niño‖ (desheredada 254); he has the emotional maturity of a child.
Isidora‘s attempt to civilize Mariano by sending him off to school is an unmitigated disaster as he becomes proverbial in class for his stupidity and prefers to play truant in order to, ―incorporarse a las turbas más compatibles con su fiereza y condición picaresca‖ (desheredada 258). Mariano is sent off, instead, to Juan Bou‘s Los cráneos achatados: the criminal anthropology studies of Cesare Lombroso of the 1870s, which correlated skull shape with criminal behavior, were beginning to be known in Spain before the Spanish translations appeared. Ángel Pulido addressing the Ateneo in 1883 was able to say that the work of Lombroso was already ―bastante conocida‖ (see chapter 2). Labanyi notes that, ―Cesare Lombroso, whose work on ‗degenerate types‘ was first aired publicly in Spain at the 1881 trial of Garayo, el Sacamantecas, giving rise to a public debate on the detection and classification of deviants that would peak in 1887-1895‖ (Labanyi, Gender 79). In addition, I have found a reference by José García Viñas in 1877 to Lombroso of Turin in relation to prison populations, ―opiniones que están de acuerdo con la del profesor Torinese.‖ (Garcìa Viñas 155). 333