His Only Son

by Leopoldo Alas

  Bonifacio, who had been one of the most distinguished disciples of that retail romanticism now on its last legs, felt well-loved by this particular circle of fellow romantics and sought refuge there as if in the warmth of a maternal bosom.

  One evening, Emma threw him out of her bedroom for having put the wrong ingredients in a poultice—a rare event!—and Bonifacio entered the draper’s shop more disposed than ever to be plunged into voluptuous memories. Don Críspulo was, as usual, seated behind the counter, with the widow opposite him, knitting. Both were silent. In between the bouts of throat-clearing and long silences that seemed to form part of the ceremonial of that mysterious, drowsy ritual, the other ex-romantics were talking in the gray gloom on the other side of the counter and revisiting their mutual memories. Who used to live in the square in 1840? The church treasurer, a man of prodigious memory, listed one by one the tenants of those large, sad, grubby two-story mansions. The Gumía women had died in Havana, where, in 1846, the older daughter’s husband was a magistrate; the second floor of the Gumía house had been home to the provincial governor’s secretary, whose name was Escandón, a Galician and a fine poet, but who, years later, committed suicide in Zamora because, in his role as treasurer, he had been held responsible for an embezzlement carried out by the accounts clerk. The Castrillo family, five brothers and five sisters, lived at number five, where they used to hold soirees and put on plays; indeed, the Castrillo household was one of the centers of romanticism in the town; that’s where the anonymous, clandestine journal used to be written, then slipped under people’s doors. Perico Castrillo was enormously talented, but, ruined by women and drink, he died a madman in the hospital in Valladolid. Antonio Castrillo had been the best ombre player in the province, then he moved to Madrid, where he got on so well, still playing ombre all the time, that he made a name for himself in politics and was appointed undersecretary in Istúriz’s government. But he and the other Castrillo brothers all died of consumption. Three of his sisters made unfortunate marriages and moved away, one became a nun and the other was ruined by a seducer from the militia in Logroño, a certain Captain Suero.

  When he reached house number nine, he gave a dramatic sigh.

  “Ah, well, you’ll all remember who lived there in 1840.”

  “La Tiplona,” said some.

  “La Merlatti,” exclaimed others.

  La Tiplona, or La Merlatti as she was also known, had been the focus of the town’s musical romanticism. She was an Italian soprano whom the locals thought finer than La Grissi or La Malibrán, neither of whom they had ever heard or seen. Those earnest men would not allow that there could be a finer voice than La Merlatti’s in the whole wide world. And what a figure and what a way she had with her! She was taller than any man there, with skin as white as snow and as soft as butter, and she was as strong as she was shapely; she rode sidesaddle, could fire a pistol, and, once, right in the middle of the street, she had delivered a slap around the face to her rival La Volpucci, who also had her followers. La Volpucci was slender and as supple as a willow branch and far more skilled than La Tiplona when it came to singing fioriture; but, otherwise, as regards voice, body, and presence, there was no comparison. La Tiplona had won and had returned to the town for several seasons, finally marrying a retired colonel, Colonel Cerecedo, the owner of that house in the theater square. And there, for years and years, she gave concerts at home and was very popular among the town’s music-loving population, who were both grateful for and enamored of the ex-soprano’s ever-more ostentatious charms. But, who would have thought it, she died of consumption after suffering a miscarriage. La Tiplona! They had all loved her, either secretly or publicly, and even Bonifacio, who was very young at the time, had to confess that his liking for serious opera had grown while watching that splendid woman with her milk-white bosom, her small, exquisitely shod feet, and her pearly teeth.

  The treasurer continued his review of the square’s tenants in 1840, and his melancholy enumeration of deaths and absences had more than a whiff of ruination and cemeteries about it; listening to him one seemed simultaneously to taste the dust of debris and hear the bones stirring in the common grave. Suicide, consumption, bankruptcy, elopements, women who never left the house: All these issued forth from between the old man’s sparse, rotten teeth, which spoke of death with all the chilling indifference of a gravedigger or a torturer. When he concluded his brief history, his eyes were bright with pride. “What a memory!” he was thinking. “What a dreadful world!” thought the others.

  His account reminded Bonifacio of the house where he had been born, long since fallen into ruin; he had seen the yellow paint and sprigged wallpaper peeling from the walls; he had seen the crumbling fireplace, at whose hearth his mother had lulled him to sleep with marvelous stories; up there, on the third floor, which no longer had a floor, all that remained of that homely warmth was the gap left by a stove in a dirty, cracked party wall. Open to the air and to the indifferent gaze of the public lay the bedroom in which his father had died. Yes, he had seen all that remained of that room, the wall still stained with the dying man’s expectorations and the marks made by his humble iron bedstead on that same greasy wall. What was left of that house, of that poor but happy, loving household? Only him, amateur flautist and slave to Emma, who was—why deny it—a Fury. The house had disappeared; his ruined home had been the talk of the town gazette. “When will the vile, disgusting façade of that building on the corner of Calle del Mercado be demolished?” The local press had been clamoring for its destruction for months and months, and Doña Urbana, as the paper referred to the town council, had finally taken a pickax to the last remnants of those many sacred memories. And what about himself, thought Bonifacio, what was he but a run-down street corner, a hideous ruin causing great distress to a whole illustrious family with his insistence on staying alive and being, by a most regrettable mistake, the husband of his wife? All those sad, humiliating ideas had been prompted by that wretched treasurer’s retrospective view of 1840. History! Ah, history in operas was a far more amusing, magnificent affair . . . Semiramide, Nabucco, Rinaldo, Attila . . . but the history of the Gumía or the Castrillo family—all that death, shame, dispersal, and poverty wounded his soul. Fortunately, the conversation then turned back to La Tiplona, and they began comparing operas then and now. The fact is that operas were no longer performed in the town; indeed, it had been nearly eight years since a rather mediocre string quartet had played there. The treasurer, who had so saddened the gathering, then abandoned the habit of a lifetime and gave them a piece of up-to-date news. For it was his “habit” loftily to despise all events, whether in the recent past or the near future, that did not call for any great “retentive powers,” which was how he described his own memory.

  He remarked dismissively, “Well, you’re going to get some opera soon, and good opera at that, because the mayor just told me that the theater has invited the famous singers Mochi and La Gorgheggi to travel here from León.”

  “La Gorgheggi!” the other men cried as one.

  And from his chair in the gloom behind the counter even the clerk of the court made a gesture of surprise, prompting Widow Cascos to look at him and sigh discreetly.

  A week later, the tenor Mochi—famed in all the provincial theaters round about—and his protégée and pupil, La Gorgheggi, arrived in town. On the first night, they sang La Straniera, and although the town’s most musical newspapers “did not dare to judge them on just one performance,” the audience, less circumspect (and, it is true, with less of a responsibility to the history of the art), were, of course, thrilled and swore, en masse, that they had never heard such a prodigy since La Tiplona’s day, that La Gorgheggi was a veritable nightingale, and so pretty and charming, so attentive to the audience, so grateful for their applause. She was certainly pretty, an Englishwoman translated into Italian by her friend Mochi; she was graceful, but strongly built and very white-complexioned, with pale, serene eyes; and she had a remarkably smooth forehead
, which she modestly showed off by arranging her fair, wavy locks to form a frame for those pale features, about which, even by day, or so thought Bonifacio, there was a hint of moonlight. Bonifacio saw two acts of La Straniera on the first night and, making a supreme effort of will, dragged himself from the talons of temptation and returned to his wife, Emma, who, sallow and gaunt and hair all awry, was in her bedroom screaming that her husband had abandoned her for the night and returned home late, very late, half an hour after the appointed time for him to give her a massage, without which she was convinced she would die in a matter of minutes. Bonifacio arrived and diligently, silently gave her a massage, listening, resignedly, to his wife’s cries and insults, and thinking about La Gorgheggi’s white brow and her voice and about the final act of La Straniera, which they would be singing at that very moment.

  And Bonifacio went to bed, saying to himself, “Yes, she is very beautiful, but her finest feature is her forehead; I can’t quite put my finger on what the sweet, gentle curve of her brow says to my heart. And her voice . . . there’s something maternal about her voice; she sings with the tenderness of a mother rocking her child to sleep in her arms. She seems to be singing us all to sleep; it may seem an odd thing to say, but it’s an honest voice, the voice of a housewife who sings very well: What the clerk of the court describes as ‘mellow’ must be what I interpret as kindness; that’s how hardworking women at home must sing as they sew or tend a convalescent . . . I don’t know, but that voice reminds me of my mother . . . and she never sang. What nonsense, yes, it’s nonsense if spoken but not if thought. Besides, what am I to her? Nothing. I doubt if Emma will even allow me to go to the theater again. . . .” And he fell asleep thinking about La Gorgheggi’s forehead and voice.

  The following day, there was a rehearsal at midday, and Bonifacio was there, terrified and already dreading the scene his wife would be sure to make on his return. He had escaped from the house. And he had to confess that the pleasure he felt at being there was all the greater because it represented an act of rebellion.

  He had always loved rehearsals. He couldn’t quite explain why he preferred them to the more solemn and magnificent final performances, but he justified it thus: Real theater, essential theater, was what happened at a rehearsal. He disliked any form of fiction, in life as in art; he felt that the tenors and sopranos should not be standing before the footlights, in front of a backdrop of painted trees and dressed in cheap costumes, singing to a distracted audience crammed into a narrow room where the air was poisonous; tenors and sopranos should, like nightingales and sirens, inhabit quiet, secluded forests or mysterious islands and release their trills and warbles into a bright moonlit night, with the melancholy sound of waves beating on the beach or the murmur of branches swaying in the breeze. However, since that was impossible, Bonifacio preferred to hear singers at a rehearsal. There one saw the artists as they really were and not as they pretended to be. With instinctive good taste, which he himself did not recognize as such, he hated the declamatory style, the falsity of the poses, costumes, and gestures of the actors who visited that poor provincial theater. At a rehearsal, you didn’t see a Nabucco dressed up like the king of clubs or an Attila who looked more like a goatherd, but an ordinary gentleman who sang well and was preoccupied with real things, for example, the bad pay, the bad weather that affected his voice or the bad news brought to him in a letter. Bonifacio loved the art through the artist; he admired those people who traveled the world never knowing where their next meal was coming from, and concerned only with their own and other people’s warblings. He used to think, “It really takes courage to trust your living to a bassoon or a cornet or a cello or to a basso profundo voice—which is the lowest voice there is—and all for twenty reales a day! I could be a passable flautist, but I wouldn’t dream of leaving home and traveling all the way to Russia, filling in vacancies in orchestras. Such a career could do wonders for my dignity and my independence, but I’d rather drown! Chance . . . the unforeseen . . . never knowing where your next meal was coming from, how terrifying!” And precisely because he felt himself incapable of being an “artist,” in the sense of setting off with only his flute, he admired those men more and more, for they were clearly made of sterner stuff than him.

  The idea of being a foreigner or, somewhat less extraordinarily, simply an outsider, appealed to Bonifacio greatly; to have been born elsewhere and not in that mean little town would be a great advantage; to have come from somewhere far away would be wonderful. The world, the rest of the world, must be so beautiful! What he had seen of it was so ugly, so insignificant, that the beauties he had dreamed of and read about in poetry and adventure stories must exist in those other unknown places. He had seen little of interest in Mexico, but then Mexico had been a Spanish colony and therefore contaminated by the smallness of Spain. The real “abroad” was something else. That was where artists and singers came from. Being Italian, being an artist, being a musician would be like having honey on your bread with nectar on top of the honey. And when the foreigner, the artist, the musician was female, then Bonifacio’s respect and admiration became religion, idolatry. For all those reasons, and for those previously mentioned, he preferred to see actors and singers as they were, rather than made up as kings or priestesses. It was at a rehearsal that one really got to know the artist.

  He entered the stage box, which, from time immemorial, had been rented by his friends from Widow Cascos’s shop; it was the lowest of the boxes—what later became known as the orchestra stalls—and because of its angle to the stage, half hidden by a supporting wall, it was commonly referred to as “the pocket.” There was no one else in the box. He opened the door, trying to make as little noise as possible. For him, the theater was the temple of dramatic art and music a religion. He sat down like a slow, silent cat, leaned his elbows on the balustrade, and tried to make out the shapes crossing the dark stage. There were no gas lamps and no thin wires along which electricity could be carried, such as would be installed years later at that very theater; the humble footlights did their best to shine out from the stage, like fallen stars fueled by oil. To the right (from Bonifacio’s perspective), around a dimly lit table, stood a group of shadows whose identities he gradually began to decipher. They were the director, the prompter, the callboy, and a short, fat, very pale man with a vast paunch, impeccably dressed and with a distinguished manner; he was Signor Mochi, the impresario and the company’s principal and only tenor. Other taciturn groups wandering about at the back of the stage were the male chorus; the “ladies” were sitting in a circle to the left. Wherever those pallid, ill-dressed ladies gathered, they tended, out of habit, to form arcs, semicircles, and circles, depending on the circumstances.

  Bonifacio had read The Odyssey in Spanish and remembered Odysseus’s interesting visit to the underworld; seeing those sad, silent performers, idling across the stage like ghosts, reminded him of the opaque, subterranean life of Erebus, where the lost souls who ended up there must, he thought, have been royally bored. On other occasions, it had been much cheerier, and he knew that things would soon liven up, but at rehearsals there were always these rather drab moments. When an artist is not filled by the spiritual alcohol of aesthetic enthusiasm, he falls into the kind of swamp that overwhelms the unfortunate slaves of hashish or opium. Bonifacio had, in his own way, made a profound psychological study of those poor, once-notable tenors who washed up on the shore of his town like old ships in search of a place to die quietly on the sand; he also knew a lot about third-order sopranos who tried to pass themselves off as stars. He was still very young when he made these observations, but a certain aptitude for calm reflection had greatly helped. He observed the singers sympathetically and sympathized admiringly, and so his analysis reached to the very soul of things. What he did not see was the negative side of those artists. He poeticized everything about them. The piquant contrast of their dreams of glory and their life onstage with the mean prose of a difficult existence, frequently bumping up again
st necessity and poverty, seemed to Bonifacio all the more reason to feel a poetic pity for them and to lend his idols an aura of martyrdom.

  That day, as always, he tried to attract the attention of the solos (tenor, soprano, baritone, bass, and contralto), and this he achieved by smiling discreetly whenever one of the singers happened to glance up at him after boldly attacking a note or performing some particularly tricky passage or after making a joke.

  Mochi, the short, fat tenor, resembled a squirrel and jabbered away in heavily accented Spanish, but his manners were always perfect. He would talk to the conductor, who always responded with laughter, and Bonifacio, who could not understand what Mochi was saying but thought he could guess, would smile too. Since he was the only person watching the rehearsal as a mere spectator, the tenor soon noticed his presence and his smiles, and before long he was directing all his concetti at Bonifacio, who was so grateful that, when it came time for him to leave the box, he wondered whether he should acknowledge the tenor with a slight nod of the head. Mochi looked at Bonifacio, who blushed scarlet, shook his beautiful hair like a fashion mannequin, and went home . . . filled with thoughts of the ideal.

  5

  THAT NIGHT, Emma ejected him from the house for a few hours, and Bonifacio went back to the rehearsal. He was no longer the sole member of the audience; there were people in all the boxes now, and in the one hired by the group who met at Widow Cascos’s shop they were honored with the presence of no less a person than the brigadier general, who accepted a seat at the back. Bonifacio sat at the front, and when Mochi looked over at him, Bonifacio doffed his hat. The tenor did not respond immediately, which Bonifacio found somewhat disconcerting, mainly because of what his friends might think, but then—O glorious, deathless, unforgettable moment—standing beside Mochi, in front of the prompter’s box, was a woman, a lady, wearing a velvet bonnet, from beneath which tumbled waves of fine, fair hair; and that woman, who had noticed Bonifacio doffing his hat, familiarly tapped the tenor on the shoulder with one gloved hand and must have said something like, “Someone in that box just doffed his hat to you.”