His Only Son

by Leopoldo Alas

  “Yes,” she said, “there is a slight resemblance, but one can see how our race has deteriorated. He was far more handsome and robust than you. The Valcárcel men are so puny now; you, for example, would look ridiculous in all that armor.”

  Sebastián continued to love her secretly and hopelessly, and the warrior of the Alpujarras rebellion continued to watch over the honor of his race.

  Bonifacio suspected neither the cousin nor the ancestor. When his wife made it clear that the honeymoon was over—which was quite early on—and he found himself with too much time on his hands, because, at Emma’s express command, her guardian-cum-administrator still ran the household, Bonifacio, as he put it, “set about looking for someone to love, for something to fill his life.” It is important to note that while Bonifacio—for all his physical beauty—was a simple man in speech and manners, and rather aloof, obscure, and prosaic in his gestures, actions, and words, inside, he was a dreamer, a somewhat drowsy dreamer, who couched his own thoughts quite unwittingly in a language that was, at once, lofty and sentimental. In his search for something with which to fill his life, he found a flute, an ebony flute with silver keys, which turned up among his father-in-law’s papers. When alone, that illustrious lawyer had also been something of a romantic, a rather elderly one, who used to play the flute with great feeling, but never in public. After giving the matter some thought, Emma concluded that there was nothing wrong with passing on her father’s flute to her husband. And having oiled the instrument well and made certain repairs and adjustments to restore it to its original pristine condition, Bonifacio dedicated himself heart and soul to his great love—music. He discovered that he was of more than average ability, had a reasonable embouchure, and, above all, had a great deal of feeling. The cloying, monotonous, meek, almost nasal timbre of that melancholy instrument—which, like Bonifacio’s hair, smelled of almond oil—was completely in harmony with his character; even the slight tilt of the head as he played, an attitude Bonifacio tended to exaggerate, made him look like one of God’s chosen ones. When he was playing the flute, he resembled a saintly musician in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Sometimes, beneath his silky brown mustache, one would glimpse the tip of his healthy, pink tongue, and his large, gentle, pale blue eyes were cast Heavenward like those of a mystic; however, he wasn’t looking up at Heaven but at the wall in front of him, because he had his head down like a bull about to charge. He kept time by tapping his foot, and when he played some particularly expressive passage, his whole body would sway from the waist up. During the allegros, he would move with great energy and animation, which was strange in someone usually so listless; his naturally dull eyes, intent only on the music, as if they were an integral part of the flute or depended on it as though on a hidden spring, would fill with life and warmth and light, and take on a beseeching quality, like those of an intelligent animal pleading for help. At such moments, Bonifacio was like a drowning man, vainly floundering about for a plank of wood to cling to. He believed that his tense facial muscles, flushed cheeks, and eager eyes expressed the intensity of his feelings, his great love of melody, his music lover’s beautiful heart, as simple as a dove; in fact, he looked more as if he were being asphyxiated or experiencing an attack of apoplexy or some other terrible physiological crisis.

  In order not to bother anyone and, having no money of his own, not wishing to raid his wife’s purse to buy music, he would borrow the scores for polkas and the Italian operas he loved so much, and would himself copy out those torrents of harmony and melody represented by the beloved symbols of the musical stave. Emma never asked him about his interests nor about the time they filled, which was most of the day. She demanded only that he be smartly dressed when they went out walking or visiting. “Her” Bonifacio was merely an adornment, entirely hollow and empty inside, but useful as a way of provoking the envy of many of the town’s society ladies. She showed off her husband, for whom she bought fine clothes, which he wore well, and reserved the right to present him as a good, simple soul. Initially, he seemed contented with his lot. He had nothing to do with the management of the household; he spent no more on his person than might an impoverished student, for, strictly speaking, those elegant clothes were bought not for him but to satisfy his wife’s vanity; he liked to be smartly dressed but would happily have done without those luxurious outfits; indeed, he thought it a vain, futile expense to order trousers and jackets from Madrid—an excess of dandyism hitherto unknown in the town. He knew a modest tailor—also a flautist—who, for very little money, would have done as fine a job as those wily artists in the capital. He thought all this but never spoke of it. He allowed himself to be clothed, his one resolution being to weigh as lightly as possible on the Valcárcel household—and to complain of nothing.

  2

  EMMA WAS the head of the family, or, rather, as we said earlier, its tyrant. Uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces all obeyed her every order and respected her every whim. Her dominion over their souls could not be wholly explained by mere economics, but this doubtless had a considerable influence. All the members of the Valcárcel family were poor. They were famed throughout the province for their fecundity; the females of the race were extremely prolific, and the women whom their male counterparts brought into the family as their legitimate spouses did not lag far behind. Their motto seemed to be: Go forth and multiply, but avoid all work. The most hardworking of the Valcárcel stock had been Emma’s father, the lawyer, who had, on the other hand, been less prolific than his relatives. As we said, Emma was an only child and, therefore, the sole heir of that romantic, flute-playing lawyer. However, the savings of that industrious man of the law had somewhat dwindled by the time they reached his daughter. It seems that the lawyer’s chastity had not been quite as perfect as everyone thought; his real virtue had consisted largely in prudence and stealth; he knew that bad behavior and scandal are the worst and most formidable enemies of all well-organized societies, and since he was unable to live in chaste widowerhood and did not wish to begin seducing the servants and his daughter’s maids and even, possibly, as temptation had sometimes whispered in his ear, his respectable female clients, helpless ladies who came to his office hoping for what he termed juridical and moral enlightenment, he chose instead to take control of his vice—the inevitable wayward pleasures of weak human flesh—by organizing, with consummate skill, prudence, and secrecy, what he termed his worship at the altar of Aphrodite. And outside the town, in the neighboring villages, which he often had to visit on his own and other people’s business, he became, it has to be said, the irresponsible Abraham—Pater Orchamus—of a whole tribe of bastard children, many of them born of adulterous relationships. Neither his conscience nor that of the priest who regularly heard his confession and who had occasionally helped him avoid scandal, nor the threat of embarrassing confessions on the part of certain fallen ladies, allowed him, when the moment came somewhat hurriedly to make his will, entirely to forget his obligations to those of his own blood; and so, keeping as best he could within the bounds of discretion, he left legacies here, there, and everywhere, greatly diminishing Emma’s own rightful inheritance. This, however, was not the worst of it, for, in consultation with that same spiritual adviser, Don Diego had already surreptitiously made many transfers of property inter vivos, which he had been obliged to do, much to his chagrin, in order to avoid scandal, the avoidance of which was, as we have said, his one great virtue. In short, Emma found herself with a far smaller fortune than her father’s, not that she really noticed because paperwork gave her a headache, figures made her dizzy, and lawyers’ handwriting positively made her skin crawl. “Let my uncle deal with it,” she would say whenever any such matters arose. Her one talent was for spending money. Kindly Juan Nepomuceno, formerly Emma’s legal guardian and now her administrator, would happily have shooed away all the flies—in the form of her relatives—who buzzed around the rather shrunken honeycomb of her inheritance, but this simply wasn’t practicable because his niece had grow
n so fond of all the members of the Valcárcel family, past, present, and future, that she demanded they be treated with the utmost generosity. Don Juan had to content himself with being the sole administrator of that prodigality, but he was not influential enough to avoid all waste or even to ensure that his former ward’s excessive generosity benefited himself alone.

  Emma had a miscarriage and emerged from that crisis with her inner workings greatly damaged and with a very weak stomach; she also became rather scrawny and had to do what she could to conceal premature wrinkles. What she could not conceal was the nasty, cold, malicious glint in her eye, which, along with the repellent expression on her face, was all that had become of the mysterious glow once serenaded on the guitar by several of that sickly, nervy, irascible woman’s male relatives. Emma courted those same male relatives—most of whom had been secretly in love with her some time ago, each according to his own temperament—for she despised her husband more with each day that passed, considering him useful only as a handsome physical presence, while her affection for her own tribe grew ever keener.

  Bonifacio realized that, through no fault of his own, he was becoming her relatives’ enemy, a vanquished, humiliated enemy, for his wife handed him over to them—defenseless and bound hand and foot—to do with as they wished.

  The Valcárcel family were originally a mountain people who had come down to the small towns in the valleys and the plains in search of an easier, softer life, and to that end their one strategy had been to make advantageous marriages, using their ancient pedigrees and the carved coats of arms on their vast mansions up in the rugged hills to impress the rich men of the town, and to seduce their innocent daughters with the handsome, arrogant vigor and lordly gentility of their abundant male progeny. The Valcárcel men were, on the whole, handsome, slender fellows, although compared to their heroic grandfather they were slow of speech, austere of expression, gruff-voiced, and overtly proud and aloof in their dealings with people; they were notable, too, for their love of the cape, which, for most of the year, was a rather unnecessary item of clothing in the mean, damp, temperate little towns where they usually went in search of brides. Some of the more audacious among them, still suavely wrapped in their capes, even carried their impoverished gentlemen’s raids as far as the gates of the provincial capital itself, and Don Diego—Emma’s father and, without a doubt, the family’s superior genius—finally strode fearlessly into that capital and became an enterprising, rather rakish student; then, having reached his majority and graduated, he changed completely and became as sober as a judge, opened a law practice, monopolized the clientele from the mountains, flattered the other lawyers—who were fond of an exquisitely turned phrase—married well, left poverty behind him, shone in the law courts like a towering lighthouse, and despite being a romantic at heart, despite writing poems in the privacy of his home and keeping a firm grip on all sentimental effluvia except when playing the flute, which he did with tears in his eyes, he was, nonetheless, a stickler for the letter of the law and a stern enemy of its spirit and of any risky and irreverent interpretations thereof. And there is no record of him ever having received even the mildest of rebukes when in court; his overly fastidious use of language drew nothing but praise from his peers in the judiciary, indeed, at times, Don Diego even verged on the unintelligibly learned, which is perfectly excusable given that he used his eloquence to emerge like the ermine from the muddy waters of private putrefaction, into which he was occasionally dragged by the needs of the bar. Once, much against his will, he had to accuse an unworthy priest of crimes against morality, and although he tried hard to be fearsome and implacable, he could not persuade his tongue to use any harsh, forceful, or even picturesque epithets, managing only, in the white heat of his attack, to describe him thus: “The ill-advised priest, if I may call him that.” “Ill-advised,” Don Diego explained later, “in the sense that I imagine the priest would not have fallen into such lewdness had he not been advised to do so by someone else, probably the Devil.” Valcárcel had to wrestle in his speeches with the coarse, bold, forward language of the area, and which threatened to impose itself in court as well; he, however, always triumphed, finding learned equivalents for even the most vulgar and tawdry of terms; and thus, on one occasion, when he was required to speak of the supporting feet of a granary, which were known locally as pegollos, rather than besmirch his lips with such an uncouth word, he preferred to say “the sustentacles supporting said artifact.” In addition to these qualities, which had won him the sympathy and respect of the entire magistracy, he had the not inconsiderable gift of being able to remember numbers with infallible exactitude, and so his head was as full of numbers as a logarithm table. Thanks to Don Diego, the name Valcárcel came to acquire a degree of splendor it had not enjoyed since the far-off centuries when it had won glory in battle. This illustrious man of law had achieved honor and wealth, and his relatives wanted to make the most of both, for, given the fecundity of its women and their daughters-in-law, the tribe was in danger of producing a whole unfortunate proletariat that threatened to fill the world with Valcárcels. Such excessive prolificacy meant that there were simply not enough advantageous marriages to quell the tribe’s very rational fear that they might slide into poverty. That movement outward in search of prosperity, in the form of traveling from the mountains down to the valley, began all over again, only this time heading off back into the mountains, to those far-flung mansions, to the numerous, endlessly prolific progeny of the Valcárcel tribe, all of whom were incapable of work, because you cannot really describe as work the predicaments Emma’s relatives repeatedly found themselves in, sitting around baize tables—for most were gamblers—many falling victim to their passion, which burst rather like an aneurysm. Once Don Diego was dead, the Valcárcel family lost their one support, and that desire to retreat to the mountains quickly spread throughout the family. Whenever they came back down to the plain, they had grown still surlier, still prouder, their loathing for etiquette, for the complicated social formulae of polite provincial society, still more marked. The poorer they became and the more filled with ancestral vanity, the more they despised small-town life on the plain. The only thing that the mountain- dwelling Valcárcels deemed worthy of respect “down there,” as they referred to the valleys, was the baize card table. One attended fiestas in order to gamble, lose, get deeper into debt, and then go home again.

  On returning to the hills, the tribe tended to revert to the mentality of the primitive horde, to the atavism of a whole family line. For a while, Emma’s exalted view of them curbed that alarming tendency. The blood loyalty she so vehemently felt helped reconcile many of her relatives to civilization and the plains. Their visits to the capital became more frequent, perhaps because such visits were now cheaper and more comfortable. They knew that the house of the celebrated lawyer, the late Don Diego Valcárcel, was, as he would have said had he been alive, xenodoxeio xenon, or put more plainly, a haven for strangers. Emma had once rather coquettishly disdained her adoring cousins and uncles—for even some of her uncles were in love with her—but now that she had lost her youthful bloom and freshness following her miscarriage, she enjoyed recalling those once-despised would-be suitors and liked to linger over the delicious memories of that lost adoration. She took voluptuous delight in surrounding herself, as if in a warm, perfumed atmosphere, with the presence of those Valcárcel men who once would have dived head-first into the river just to win a smile from her.

  That love had, of course, long since faded; it would have seemed ridiculous otherwise: The years and the widening girths and the poor, prosaic, coarse existence up there in the mountains made any attempt at amorous constancy out of the question; but it didn’t matter, Emma enjoyed having around her those who still remembered that dead love with fondness and respect, who devoted to the former object of their worship all the gifts that the shy, brusque nature of that mountain race could muster. Those courtiers to a lost love, perhaps even as they paid homage to it, were thinking
above all about the present-day munificence of Don Diego’s heiress, the only person in the whole family who still had two pennies to rub together; but she, poor Bonifacio’s spouse, did not bother to ponder the motives that lay behind their willingness to bow to her sovereignty over them. It is unlikely that any of her relatives still saw in their cousin her now-vanished beauty, but some pretended, very delicately, to keep a fire burning in their heart beneath the ashes thrown upon it by duty and good manners. Emma, almost unwittingly, also enjoyed this fiction, indeed, she almost believed in it; she savored the glow of that bonfire of a problematic love as if it were a distant music that still plays, but whether in one’s mind or in one’s ear, who can say? The unchanging family dogma was this: Time did not pass for Emma; her digestive problems were of no importance; and, after her miscarriage, she was fresher and more blooming than ever. No one believed this because it was clearly not true, but they all said that it was. The courtiers of that capricious queen, with her fickle, violent character, took revenge for their inevitable humiliation by openly despising Bonifacio Reyes. Emma came to feel for her husband an affection analogous to that felt by Caligula for his senator horse. Another family dogma, a secret one, was: “The girl had brought about her own disgrace by marrying that man.” Sighing, cousin Sebastián confessed that the one act of which he truly repented (and this was a man who had gambled away his mother’s legacy on a single card) occurred during the period when he was madly in love with Emma, so in love that he had very weakly agreed to do all he could to seek out and find employment for Don Diego’s stupid clerk so that Emma could marry him. He would never forgive himself for such weakness, such blind passion. And then Sebastián would sigh, and the other relatives would sigh, and Emma would sometimes sigh too, wallowing in the melancholy role of the victim resigned to suffering all her life for the disastrous consequences of a moment of youthful folly.