His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  Mochi turned very quickly, saw Bonifacio, and greeted him extravagantly.

  Everyone in the box was filled with envy, even the brigadier general; they envied still more the smile with which the lady in the bonnet accompanied Mochi’s greeting, for she seemed very pleased to have pointed out this oversight on his part.

  Bonifacio found his gaze met by that of Serafina Gorgheggi—for it was she—and often, very often, when, later on, he recalled that solemn moment of his life, he had to acknowledge that, in the whole of his youth, he had never experienced such a sweet, strong, romantic feeling inside.

  “Such a look,” he said to himself then, “could only come from a foreigner and an artist. Such modest boldness, such chaste effrontery! Such innocent impudence, such candid coquetry!”

  It did not take long for those smiles and bows to become words: Bonifacio and the other gentlemen in his box were laughing discreetly at the way Mochi was privately making fun of the orchestra composed of local musicians who played horribly out of tune; a young dandy, who had a reputation for making many a valuable conquest among the ladies backstage, offered himself as interpreter between the tenor and a horn player to whom the tenor had addressed a courteous reprimand in Italian. The dandy may not have had much knowledge of Dante’s language, but enough to know that when Mochi spoke of missure, he meant compases—bars; the horn player’s linguistic knowledge, however, did not even go that far. Shortly afterward, Bonifacio himself, blushing deeply, ventured to translate another humble remark—this time from La Gorgheggi—into the language of the stubborn horn player, whose musical ear was as bad as his temper; the soprano had spoken in Spanish, had pronounced the word compases rather as a canary might, but still the brass player did not understand; Bonifacio’s translation consisted in repeating the singer’s words very loudly as he leaned out from the box above the musician’s bald head.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you so much!” the soprano said, her looks and smiles sending sparks of glory into Bonifacio’s heart; indeed, he was seeing stars for a whole fifteen minutes afterward. His ears buzzed, and if, at that moment, she had proposed running away together to the ends of the earth, he would, he thought, have set off with no luggage or anything, without even taking his slippers; and he was someone who could not imagine how any man could get out of bed in the morning and simply pull on his boots. Whenever he read adventure stories describing journeys to distant places, the terrible hardships endured by shipwreck victims, missionaries, explorers, and so on, what he pitied most was the probable absence of any slippers.

  Never missing a single rehearsal and going to the theater every night whenever he could steal a few hours from his domestic chores, Bonifacio came to know the singers so well that his friends in the box even supposed he was having an affair with La Gorgheggi.

  “I tell you he’s courting her,” the clerk of the court assured them.

  “Well, I say he isn’t,” said the envious dandy.

  The truth is that between Mochi and Bonifacio there had sprung up such a natural sympathy—which quickly became the most cordial of friendships—that after they had taken coffee together one afternoon, the tenor had no hesitation in asking al suo nuovo ma gia carissimo amico, duecente lire, or in Bonifacio’s language, eight hundred reales. The Italian asked for the money with such simplicity and naturalness, having just recounted a Neapolitan adventure that had cost him nearly two thousand duros, that Bonifacio could only think, “For this man, eight hundred reales is what a cigarette paper is for me; he’s asked me for it as if he were asking me for a light; he clearly has plenty of money, but not here, not at this moment; the trouble is I don’t have it either. But there are no two ways about it, I’ll have to find it quickly. If I give it to him, he’ll be grateful, although heaven knows where I’ll find it; but what does he care? What are eight hundred reales to him? On the other hand, if I don’t get them immediately, he’ll despise me, he’ll think me a poor wretch. And I’d rather die than have him think that!”

  His face red as a tomato, he declared that, regrettably, as luck would have it, he did not have such a trifling sum of money on his person, but he would run home, which was very near, and return with the necessary amount.

  And he set off at a run, not noticing that Mochi, not wishing to trouble him, was already withdrawing his request for a loan.

  Emma’s house was indeed not far away, but reaching it and entering it was a much easier enterprise than returning with the eight hundred reales to the theater and to the tenor’s dressing room. Where was he, his wife’s poor, unfortunate slave, going to find that amount of money? And for the first time, he bitterly contemplated his sad dependence, his utter poverty. He did not even own the trousers he was wearing, and yet so well did they fit him that they appeared to have been born for his legs and his alone. He did not have so much as two reales to call his own. What could he do? Renounce “the ideal” forever? Mochi was waiting for him with his piercing, smiling, mischievous eyes; he could not return without the money; behind Mochi he saw La Gorgheggi, his protégée and pupil. Since he did not have the necessary money and no means of getting it, unless he were to steal the silver candlestick standing there on the desk in the office (Don Diego’s office continued to be “the office,” although it now belonged to no one in particular, but to Don Juan Nepomuceno, to Emma, to everyone), yes, since he did not have that amount of money or the means to get it, he would renounce his happiness; he would not go back to see his dear Italian friends, those sublime artists, he would sacrifice himself in silence; anything was better than returning there empty-handed.

  At that moment, Don Juan Nepomuceno entered the office carrying a small bag of money; he greeted Bonifacio gravely and started counting out the money; it was the rent earned from La Comuña, a hamlet that brought in four thousand reales each year in rent. While Don Juan, ignoring Bonifacio’s importunate presence, made neat piles of coins on the desk—which reminded that poor dilettante of the ruins of a Greek temple—Bonifacio was thinking, “I should be the one piling up those coins; I should be the person managing my wife’s money!”

  A wave of retrospective indignation swept over him and filled him with enough courage to say, “Don Juan, I need a thousand reales.”

  Years later, remembering this bold act, for which only love could have given him the strength he needed, what most surprised him about his rash enterprise was that he asked not for eight hundred reales but for a thousand, which exceeded his needs by two hundred reales. Why had he done that? He never could come up with a convincing explanation.

  Don Juan Nepomuceno observed his relative by marriage but did not answer. A thousand reales! The fool had gone mad.

  “Yes, sir, a thousand reales, and there’s no reason why my wife should know. I’ll return them to you tomorrow. A childhood friend of mine finds himself in dire straits and . . . he’s sure to pay me back.”

  “A childhood friend . . . sure to pay you back. I don’t understand.”

  That is all Don Juan said. How could a childhood friend of that nonentity be trusted to pay back anything? That is what he wished to imply, and Bonifacio, when he realized this, added, “No, not a childhood friend exactly, but one of my friends at Widow Cascos’s shop. . . .”

  And again he blushed deeply.

  Don Juan fixed Bonifacio’s pale, troubled eyes with a piercing gaze. He sensed something was afoot, immediately did his sums, and taking two piles of silver, placed them in the astonished Bonifacio’s hand, saying only, “Here you are: That’s one thousand reales exactly.”

  “Thank you. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

  “That’s your affair.”

  “And you won’t tell Emma.”

  “There’s no reason for her to know anything—for the moment.”

  “For the moment?”

  “And if you put the money back in the till quickly enough”—that is the expression Don Juan used—“she need never know anything.”

  “Yes, yes, tomorrow then.”

&
nbsp; He did not return the money tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. Mochi received his two hundred lire, as he called them, with an even more extravagant display of gratitude than his nuovo amico was expecting; as for repaying it, however, he said not a word. Such was the tumult of emotion in the poor flautist’s breast that he often did not even think about the debt or his promise to “put the money back in the till,” or about the danger of Emma discovering everything, he even forgot that Don Juan existed!

  Bonifacio’s generosity coincided (sheer coincidence, of course) with a greater show of friendliness on the part of Serafina Gorgheggi. Bonifacio was granted a privilege allowed to very few, that of sitting in the wings during the performance. He would deliberately, but as if by chance, place himself at the entrances and exits which, from the rehearsals he had attended and from what the callboy told him, he knew were those used by Serafina. She always looked very nervous when she was about to go onstage; he would give her an encouraging smile, to which she responded with what he thought of as a grateful look, affectionate, motherly. When she came offstage, whether to loud or faint applause, she would always find Bonifacio applauding enthusiastically; she would smile, bow her head in greeting, and pass as close to poor, enamored Bonifacio as discretion would allow. Ah, the trail of perfume that woman left behind her! It was, he thought, a spiritual perfume, one that you breathed in with your soul rather than through anything as vulgar as your nostrils.

  The night following Bonifacio’s loan of money to Mochi, Serafina was given a long ovation at the end of the second act, and she came offstage through the side door of an enclosed piece of scenery that formed a kind of vestibule, where, as usual, Bonifacio was waiting. In order to leave that canvas cabin, one had to lift a heavy curtain, which was used elsewhere as a backdrop. Serafina and her adorer found themselves alone for a moment in that hiding place, and she, justifiably radiant with pleasure at the continuing applause, was slightly embarrassed as she fumbled clumsily and blindly for the way out of that “trap” and failed to find it.

  Bonifacio was not the kind of man to take advantage of such situations, but he began to tremble as if he were and as if having acted on his impulses, he now repented of his forwardness. And so he, too, began looking for the way out and, initially, was equally unable to lift the heavy canvas. In their mutual maneuverings, their fingers touched, but since, as she immediately realized, he did not know what to say, she blurted out, “Il Mochi m’a detto. . . . Ah! siete un galantuomo. . . .”

  And she made a vague, delicate allusion to the loan.

  Serafina was English, but always spoke Italian when a certain solemnity was called for, when she wished to emphasize the seriousness of her words; normally, she spoke a delicious broken Spanish, full of odd mistakes. Mochi was the only person with whom she conversed in English.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, señorita. . . . We’re friends after all. . . . You were absolutely sublime . . . as always. . . . You’re an angel, Serafina.”

  He felt touched by his own words; they sounded like a declaration; then, when he thought of his wife and how badly she treated him, two slow, transparent, plump tears welled up in his beautiful, pale eyes; he turned very white and his teeth began to chatter.

  “Oh amico caro!” she said in a tender, tremulous voice. “Come siete buono. . . .”

  She grasped the hand grappling with the curtain and squeezed it warmly.

  “Serafina . . . I really don’t know what I’m doing . . . you’ll think. . . .”

  She did not answer. She had found the way out and lifted the curtain; then, with an intense look that mingled charity with a desire to protect, she told him to follow her. Bonifacio, however, did not follow, not daring to translate the meaning of that look. As soon as he was left alone in that hiding place, he felt his legs give way beneath him and, almost fainting, sat down hard on the bare boards, and, as if in dreams, he heard a whistle and shouts and curses from on high; a curtain had fallen, barely missing his head and taking with it a few canvas backdrops, and Bonifacio found himself surrounded by stagehands and young women screaming, “He’s injured . . . he’s injured! The curtain knocked this gentleman over!”

  “Señor Reyes!”

  “Señor Reyes has been hurt!”

  “Oh, this is dreadful!”

  Before he could deny the news, it had already reached the dressing rooms of both Mochi and Serafina.

  They rushed to see him, greatly alarmed. Serafina was the first in line, and because Bonifacio, still reeling from his earlier emotions and startled by the sight of all the people gathered around him, was too embarrassed to confess the truth, everyone assumed he must have been knocked over and then fainted, for he was terribly pale. Now a pair of very lovely hands, whose recent touch he could still feel on his skin, the hands of Serafina, were applying smelling salts to his nostrils and cold compresses to his brow. A minute later, he found himself sitting on the blue velvet love seat in the soprano’s dressing room. He allowed himself to be pitied, tended, even spoiled, and could not bring himself to deny that an accident had taken place. How could he say that he had fallen to the floor from sheer pleasure, from love, rather than after being knocked over by a piece of scenery depicting a dense forest?

  Serafina seemed to divine the truth in her admirer’s eyes. The other onlookers eventually left them alone; Mochi came and went, expressing his relief that nothing worse had happened, then he left too, summoned by the callboy. Serafina’s maid, who had a small singing part, was also needed onstage. Serafina would not be singing again until the end of the act.

  In order to elicit a further declaration from him, as the ardent Englishwoman was determined to do, she had first to chloroform him with electric looks and with emanations from her body, which she pressed very close to the patient. And in that semi-dream state, Bonifacio opened his heart and, still stunned and tearful, spoke without really knowing what he was saying. Had Serafina been more observant, she might have gleaned from her adorer’s confession who the Valcárcel tribe were and just where marriages between social unequals led. In his current state, Bonifacio was responsible for neither his words nor his deeds, and yet he could not betray the hand that fed him, and although he mentioned Emma, called her by her name and had good reason to complain about the way she treated him, he did not, despite his stunned, half-mad condition, insult his wife; he set out the facts as they were, but any comments he made were favorable to Emma; Serafina learned that Emma was very talented and imaginative, and as energetic as many men; she would have made a great leader or dictator, but, as luck would have it, she had no one to dictate to apart from him, Don Diego Valcárcel’s poor clerk.

  A week passed without Mochi asking Bonifacio for more money. During that week, Bonifacio thought himself the happiest man in the world, even though he had never before encountered so many and such serious difficulties, accompanied occasionally by terrible feelings of remorse. It was on one of those tumultuous days that he understood for the first time in his life that a strong passion really can sweep all before it, as he had read and heard a thousand times but without ever actually believing it. Sometimes he thought himself an utter wretch, the unhappiest of all normally docile husbands; and sometimes he felt like a hero, a man worthy of being the protagonist of a novel.

  Mochi had not subsequently mentioned the forty duros, and Bonifacio had not dared to ask for them back; but after a few days—days filled entirely by his love for that Englishwoman—when he returned home each night, trembling for various reasons, he would think about the thousand reales taken from the rent from La Comuña.

  But given that his “idol” had called him a galantuomo for having made that loan to Mochi, how could he possibly ask for the money back? It’s true that, when he was able to ponder the situation more calmly, Bonifacio found two things odd: First, that Serafina should have known about his favor to Mochi, and second, that she should have deemed such an insignificant favor so very valuable. Was that just an excuse to provoke him into declaring
his love? Probably. This, however, was as far as Bonifacio’s thinking went.

  A week after his “declaration,” when Mochi again asked Bonifacio for money, his love affair with Serafina had progressed no further than the delicious preliminaries which, given Bonifacio’s timid nature, threatened to continue indefinitely.

  As for the second loan, Bonifacio had to admit that it came as a real bombshell—that was the word he used to describe it to himself.

  Mochi asked him for five thousand reales to pay off the basso profundo whose relationship with the audience had soured after they applauded the basso cantante more loudly than they did him; he was said to be leaving the company out of pique, although the real reason was that the regular operagoers were calling for his departure. The amount Mochi had to pay the departing basso profundo did not come to five thousand reales or anything like that, but he also had to pay an advance on wages to the “remarkable” singer who was coming to replace him and, altogether, this came to five thousand reales. The company did not have that kind of money at the moment, but once the new subscriptions came in, they would be absolutely fine, no two ways about it. And he, Mochi, smiled, as serenely confident as a strong, healthy puppeteer manipulating from above a poor, ill-articulated boy, who is listed in the program as his son. “That smile,” thought Bonifacio, “is guarantee enough, but what I lack isn’t trust but money.”