His Only Son

by Leopoldo Alas

  3

  FOR A LONG time, the good husband took no notice of such insults. Deep down, and despite the elegant suits in English cloth he had been given to wear, he still considered himself to be Don Diego’s erstwhile clerk and felt that he had repaid the kindness of his former employer with black ingratitude.

  For him, all the members of the Valcárcel family were señoritos, the upper classes. In those distant, long-gone days, on their very brief honeymoon, whose brevity had been dictated by Emma, she, as loving spouse, had urged him in vain to show more dignity and more backbone when dealing with her cousins and uncles. Bonifacio, however, could not help but think of them as far superior to him in blood and the social privileges in which he vaguely believed. He was terrified of Don Juan Nepomuceno with his magnificent graying side-whiskers, his cold, pale chocolate-brown eyes, and his double chin shaved to a perfection that would not have shamed a high-court judge; he terrified him, above all, with his complicated accounts, which seemed to Bonifacio the very essence of wisdom. Whenever Don Juan reported back to his dazed niece on her shrinking funds, he demanded that Bonifacio should be present too; Emma and Bonifacio both tried in vain to excuse themselves from this ceremony. “Certainly not,” boomed the uncle, “I want you to be a witness to everything, so that tomorrow ‘he’ ” (meaning Bonifacio) “cannot say that I ruined you all out of ineptitude or worse.” The “everything” that “he” had to witness was, in fact, nothing, for it was impossible to see anything clearly, and even if it were, Bonifacio would still not have seen it because he wasn’t looking. If Emma found it disagreeable to listen to her uncle’s accounts—without actually listening and without understanding anything beyond “things are going very badly”—for her husband it was sheer torture. Instead of thinking about numbers, he was struggling to fathom what the administrator’s eyes were trying to tell him. He thought they were saying, “Who are you to come demanding explanations from me, to oversee my keeping of the accounts? What are you doing in this family, you miserable pleb?” Yes, he was a pleb, thought poor Bonifacio, because although he knew—without quite being able to pin down the details—that his ancestors had been from “a good family,” he had almost forgotten this, and realized that other people, the Valcárcel tribe in particular, did not want to remember or even believe such a thing.

  So upsetting did these pointless interviews become that, for the first time in his life, he decided to stand up for himself and, as he put it, dig in his heels, by refusing to be present at any further such scenes. Much to his surprise and even greater pleasure he found he was victorious on this point and met with no great resistance from the uncle. As for Emma, she made no real attempt to thwart her husband’s wishes either, and this was because it occurred to her that her own emancipation would soon follow. Indeed, three months after Bonifacio’s presence had been dispensed with, she managed to persuade her uncle to dispense with hers as well. And only she and her uncle knew that, from then on, Nepomuceno ceased to give any account of expenditure and income to another living soul. She and Bonifacio signed whatever had to be signed, without reading a line or a figure, and nothing more was said of the matter.

  Two anxieties then fell upon Bonifacio’s shrunken spirit: one was a great sadness, the other a constant nagging worry, and both were born of his wife’s miscarriage. The sadness consisted largely of his disappointment at having no child; the perpetual, invasive, all- pervading worry came from his wife’s ailments. Emma had, so to speak, lost her stomach and Bonifacio his peace of mind, his muse. Emma’s capricious, volatile nature took on certain precise characteristics and a hitherto unknown fixity of purpose; her mind ceased to be endlessly fickle, her domineering but inconstant will no longer flitted about among a hundred different possibilities. With unwonted seriousness, Emma decided that, from then on, she would be an unbearable wife, a torment to her husband. She became surly and abrupt with everyone but reserved her finest fury for the privacy of the boudoir. She pestered her poor husband as if in obedience to a commandment from on high, and there was, indeed, an element of religious zeal in her incessant persecution of him. Everything that was happening to her: The loss of her once-voluptuous curves, the onset of wrinkles and her increasingly prominent cheekbones—which horrified her with the thought of the skull beneath her pale, dull skin—her persistent lack of appetite, her insomnia, her dizzy spells, the terrifying irregularity of the periodic phenomena proper to her sex, all these were crimes that should have filled the wretched Bonifacio’s conscience with terrible remorse. But did he see it like that? No. His imagination did not go as far as his wife might have wished. He went no further than confessing that he had been ungrateful to Don Diego in allowing himself to be carried off by his daughter. He was not to blame for anything else, the fault lying entirely with Emma or the Devil, both of whom were pleased that he had no children and that his ailing wife was in no condition to be like other women. As soon as they were alone in her bedroom, she would slam the door shut and unleash a shrill, strident tirade of undoubted eloquence and fluency, which exhausted the little strength she had. This speech, if such diatribes merit the name, usually began with a consultation on medical matters, with her setting out her symptoms and detailing her private irregularities.

  “What do you think it can be?” she would say. “What should I do? Should I continue taking the medicine or stop?”

  The blood would drain from Bonifacio’s face, his saliva would turn to glue. How should he know? He felt sorry for his wife (but not, of course, as sorry as he felt for himself), but he did not and could not know what she should do; more than that, he wasn’t clear what exactly was wrong with her; he knew it was fairly serious and that her problems in that respect were the origin of his own despair, closing off as they did all hope of him ever becoming a father, of having any legitimate offspring, but he knew nothing of medicines or prognoses, and trembled at the obscure pathological phenomena of which she spoke, sensing the storm that would accompany his inevitable admission of ignorance.

  “I really don’t know, my dear . . . I don’t understand these things. . . . We should call the doctor—”

  “Ah, yes, the doctor! That’s right, let’s call the doctor. Since you clearly have no shame, I must have enough for both of us. These are private matters between a husband and wife. One should only go to a doctor as a last resort. You should know these things, you should take the trouble to find out what I need to know, if not out of love, then out of modesty, out of shame, and if you have no shame, out of a sense of remorse, out of. . . .”

  As we said earlier, Emma’s eloquence knew no bounds.

  One day when she fancied that her liver—or was it her spleen?—was inflamed, she went looking for her husband only to find him in his room playing the flute. She could not find words to express her outrage; the most eloquent expression of her indignation was silence . . . and the blatant facts. There she was dying of a liver crisis and what was he doing? Playing the flute! The situation required witnesses, and she found them. Don Juan Nepomuceno, Sebastián, and another two cousins rushed to the scene. All were equally indignant. The facts could not be clearer: There was the flute on the table, and there was Emma’s liver in its proper place but in terrible distress. Bonifacio, who, despite everything, loved his wife more than all her uncles and cousins did, temporarily set aside his own “crime” and asked the victim of the crisis to describe her symptoms; he managed, with great difficulty, to get Emma, who, by now, was lying on a sofa, barely able to speak for sobbing, to point to the spot that was troubling her, on her left side, where her spleen was.

  “But, my dear,” he made so bold as to say, “that isn’t where your liver is. The liver’s on the other side.”

  “You wretch!” cried his wife. “How dare you say such a thing? Aren’t you always telling me that you’re not a doctor. So what do you know about it? How dare you contradict me!”

  Don Juan Nepomuceno was a lover of truth, as long as it did not involve any arithmetical truths, an area he
preferred to view from the heights of fantasy, and he declared, hand on heart, that on this occasion—O rara avis (that’s what he said)—Bonifacio was quite right: The liver was indeed on the other side.

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Sebastián, “it could be referred pain.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know, but I believe such things do exist.”

  It was not “referred pain” but a slight rheumatic ache that wandered from place to place. A few moments later, Emma could feel it in her back. It turned out to be nothing, but one thing was certain: Bonifacio had been playing the flute at the very moment when his wife thought she was at death’s door.

  They did not sleep together but in rooms distant from each other; however, the husband, as soon as he got up, which was never very late, had a duty to rush to his wife’s bedroom to tend to her, to cater to her every need, because the maid was terribly clumsy; and in that regard, Emma did acknowledge that Bonifacio showed great skill and had very nimble fingers. He was always breaking china and glassware, for which he was roundly told off, but he had a real talent as nurse and chambermaid. She was also happy to acknowledge—whenever she thought of her lost illusions—that her husband, despite being so skilled as a nurse, was in no way effeminate in appearance or manner; he was gentle, somewhat feline, almost one might say unctuous, but always in a manly way. His willingness to submit to all the intimate tasks of the bedroom, to his patient’s many complicated whims, to the sad, tender voluptuousness of convalescence, seemed in Bonifacio, viewed from outside, not the natural aptitude of some saintly, fussy hermaphrodite but the romantic excesses of a Quixotic love applied to the minutiae of married life.

  Emma still felt proud of her Bonis’s physique—Bonis being her pet name for him—and watching him coming and going in her bedroom, always with the same pleasing, noble appearance, despite the humble offices he had to fulfill, gave her the deep pleasure of a vanity satisfied. She would rather have been torn to shreds, however, than reveal such feelings, and the more handsome he was, the more slavish she wanted him to be, the more humbled, the more elegant in his humiliation. Telling Bonifacio off became her one consolation; she could not do without his attentions nor, equally, without rewarding him with shrill, rough words. What doubt could there be that her Bonifacio was born to put up with and to care for her?

  Emma spent her few moments of relative good humor savoring the memory of past flirtations; she still wanted to be well-thought-of by the relatives she had once despised; a touch of purely fantastical, affected, unhealthy romanticism was the one thing—and then only in the presence of other members of the Valcárcel tribe—that revealed the existence of a soul inside that pale, wrinkled, scrawny creature: The rest of the time, nearly all day, she seemed like a rabid beast, whose instinct was always to bite the same spot, her gentle spouse’s slow, timid spirit.

  Bonifacio was not a coward, but he loved peace above all else; what bothered him most about his wife’s unjust vituperations, born of a bilious nature, was the noise.

  “If she said all that in writing, as Don Diego did when, on official paper, he would insult a third party or an inferior, I would happily sign it.” It was the shouting, the yelling, that wounded his soul, not, as he described them, the “concepts.”

  There were times when, after he had carried out his usual bedroom duties, for which he was irreplaceable, Emma would say that she could not stand to see him there in front of her and that the greatest favor he could do her was to leave and not come back until it was time for him to perform some other task, a task for which only Bonifacio was suited. Then he would seize his chance and head straight for the street door.

  4

  BONIFACIO would visit certain shops. He had a few favorite places where he and other men would sit around the counter and chat, spending his free time either at the pharmacy in the square, in the Librería Nueva, which loaned books, or in the draper’s shop in Los Porches, which was owned by Widow Cascos. It was in this last establishment that his spirit found the most consolation, a veritable balm in the form of idle silence and tender memories. The whole of provincial romanticism from 1840 to 1850 had passed through that shop. One should point out that in Bonifacio’s town, as in other small towns, romanticism was taken to mean reading a lot of novels, regardless of who had written them, reciting verses by Zorrilla and the Duque de Rivas, by Larrañaga and Don Heriberto García de Quevedo (if I’m not mistaken), and putting on dramas such as The Troubadour and the Page or Zoraída, which usually featured a lyrical, lovesick Moor, who spoke in tear-filled hendecasyllables:

  Is it true, Almanzor, will my tender arms

  once more enfold you? Ah, dear God, make it so!

  That is the kind of thing Bonifacio and all the young men of his day would recite in fond, syrupy tones, as if they were nursemaids singing a lullaby. They would also recite, rather more energetically: “Boabdil, Boabdil, rise up, awake!” This was the best and healthiest side of what they understood as romanticism. Its other side consisted in applying what one read to one’s own behavior, in particular, to the display of strong passions capable of leading to the most extreme of actions. All those passions could be boiled down to just one: love—because the other passions, such as unbridled ambition, nebulous aspirations, profound misanthropy, were too vague and, ultimately, too dull, besides, there was little scope for the application of such passions in a provincial town; thus practical romanticism could be summed up as love with a guitar accompaniment and copies of handwritten journals full of sentimental verses for domestic and local consumption only. Unfortunately, any genuine lyricism was, more often than not, accompanied by base satires in which poets criticized each other’s choice of language, demonstrating that envy can be compatible with the most lofty idealism! As for romantic love, while it began in its purest, most mannered form, it usually degenerated into something rather more classical, because, to tell the truth, the imagination of these dreamers was weaker and less constant than their naturally robust, mostly red-blooded temperaments; and blind Cupid, who never was a romantic, went back to his old tricks, as he would have done during the Renaissance or the classical period or, indeed, at any other time; in short, as all the members of the gatherings at Widow Cascos’s establishment argued, public morality had never left more to be desired than during the days of romanticism, when adultery was rampant and the somewhat broken- down Don Juans who were around at the time had a field day; and, as for young women from “good families,” many were known to have escaped with their lovers from a balcony or through a door or, having failed to escape, found themselves pregnant and without the benefit of the marriage sacrament. The gathering at Widow Cascos’s shop and the shop itself had been both the occasion and the scene of such piquant and mysterious adventures and went on to become the subject of much equally mysterious and piquant gossip. While in the name of religion and morality, such excesses were roundly condemned, it cannot be denied that one sensed among those censorious gossips (who were, out of a love of art, possible accomplices to such extremes) a certain covert admiration, similar to that inspired by fashionable poets or good actors or Italian singers—whether good or bad—or excellent guitarists. The romanticism one found in the society of the time (the fashion for realism having not yet arrived) was accorded a high value in the commonly held aesthetic. On the other hand, while those denizens of the draper’s shop and former supporters of that somewhat clair de lune romanticism had no alternative but to admit the moral inferiority of those times—at least as regards the seventh commandment—they could at least claim for them the merit of keeping up appearances and the clever use of euphemism; and so everything was said in an opaque, roundabout way; thus when speaking of a love affair with illicit consequences, one would say, “I understand Señor So-and-so has given Señorita So-and-so a present.” Life, at any rate, was much more fun then; the young had more fire in them and the women were more sensitive. And whenever the regulars at Widow Cascos’s shop thought such thoughts, the
y would sigh. Cascos had died leaving the shop to his widow, his customers, and the other hangers-on, all of whom were former romantics and now far too advanced in years and troubles—and many of them far too fat—to bother their heads with such transcendental sentimental claptrap. Not that this mattered; they continued to sigh, and many of the prolonged silences that lent a somber air to the already imposing darkness of that cave-like shop, and which Reyes found so pleasing, were devoted to memories of 1840 or thereabouts. The widow, a respectable lady of some fifty Novembers, may perhaps have loved and been loved by one of those assiduous denizens, a certain Don Críspulo Crespo, a clerk of the court and an honest, active, intelligent functionary with a terrible temper; yes, they had loved each other, but without ever causing Cascos any great offense; and in the view of their friends, they still loved each other, but everyone respected that secret, inveterate passion; though rarely alluded to, it was held to be the last living relic of the good old days; and their one means of showing their respect for that posthumous proof of defunct romanticism was always to allow Don Críspulo a privileged place behind the counter.