His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  He knew instinctively that to refuse Mochi this new loan would also, in a way, mean refusing Serafina: A nagging suspicion, which he preferred to ignore, kept telling him that a mysterious bond united the interests of Serafina and those of her maestro. “Refusing him this money would mean refusing her as well,” he kept telling himself, “and in the current circumstances, I can deny her nothing, not even what I don’t have.”

  He thought about Don Juan, and even returned home one night intending to ask him for the five thousand reales. That would have been the very height of heroism. “I promised to return the thousand reales to you within twenty-four hours of having received it, didn’t I? Well, here I am again, a week later, not to return that money but to ask you for a sum five times greater.” Absurd! Heroic, yes, but absurd!

  And he went to bed and turned out the light, giving himself over to feelings of remorse, which had now become an almost necessary way of getting to sleep. Before falling asleep, however, he made a decision: Whatever happened, he, Bonifacio Reyes, would not ask for a penny more from his wife’s uncle, but since he had promised to take the five thousand reales to the theater the next day and had offered this amount with such unhesitating, unforgivable bravado, as if he were positively swimming in reales, he had at least to go in search of them; he therefore got up early and went straight to the Plaza de la Constitución, where all the porters and errand boys in town used to gather.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked himself. “None of these lads here is going to lend me five thousand reales simply because they like the look of my face.” The road sweepers were raising clouds of dust that an orange sun tinged with the same color as the mist lingering on the rooftops.

  “I don’t think any of these gentlemen wielding a broom is going to give me what I need either. So what am I doing here?”

  And then he noticed Don Benito Major walking up one of the narrow streets, Calle de Santiago to be precise. Don Benito was a thin, very slightly built man, who worked as a notary; he was walking along blowing on his hands and carrying a roll of paper under his left arm. People called him Don Benito Major so as to distinguish him from Don Benito Minor, who was also a notary, but a strapping lad with whom he happened to share the same two surnames, García y García. People referred to the smaller Don Benito as Major either because he was older or because he was richer. He loaned money to distinguished people, was none too strict about interest rates and repayment terms, and was known throughout the province for his discretion and secrecy.

  As soon as Bonifacio spotted Don Benito Major, he felt the sudden rush of joy he always felt when he had made some irrevocable decision, not, it must be said, a very common occurrence. “He’s my man,” he said to himself. “It was Providence itself that got me out of bed early today; he’s the reason I came down to the square.”

  Half an hour later, in Don Benito’s office, Don Benito was placing six thousand reales in Bonifacio’s hand, with, as witnesses to the act, only the protocol books that had always filled Bonifacio with such superstitious fear.

  Don Benito Major was in the habit of tugging the ears of his parishioners and clients as soon as he got to know them a bit.

  “Let’s see,” he said, squeezing the lobe of Bonifacio’s left ear, “now that you have the money, with only a receipt as guarantee . . . now that you can no longer suspect that I’m saying this in order to deny you such a minor favor, allow me to say—no offense intended—that it rather fills me with foreboding to see the head of the Valcárcel household coming to ask me for a loan of six thousand reales.”

  “I’m not the head of the Valcárcel household—”

  “You’re the husband of the heiress to the Valcárcel fortune, and only four days ago I handed over the deeds of sale for the famous Valdiniello windmill, and you, of course, signed all the documents brought to me by Don Juan, your uncle—”

  “Don Juan isn’t my uncle, either.”

  “Well, your wife’s uncle then, your uncle by marriage.”

  Bonifacio was about to say that he hadn’t signed anything but stopped himself, remembering that he had indeed signed something, but, as usual, had done so without bothering to read what he was signing or asking any questions, and he wasn’t going to confess such humiliation to Don Benito.

  Leaving the sentence unfinished, and without offering any further explanations, he left—feeling as ashamed and troubled as if he had just stolen that money from Don Benito—and went straight to the theater.

  Don Benito watched him leave and, on second thought, regretted having handed that money over to such a fool. He knew something, and a bit more, about Bonifacio’s “position” in his household, but what he had just heard and what he suspected made it all as clear as day; and that sudden bout of clear-sightedness made him fear for his money. However, he immediately reassured himself with the thought that he would demand serious guarantees from Don Juan, who, it would seem, was the real head of the household.

  What happened subsequently made Bonifacio soon forget his doubts. He gave Mochi the five thousand reales, keeping back the remaining one thousand reales with the presentiment that other unexpected expenses would be sure to crop up, and, as he put it later, he allowed himself to be morally suffocated by the “incense” with which the tenor immediately greeted his chivalrous generosity.

  That night they performed a much-shortened version of Don Giovanni, and at midnight, after receiving an ovation from the audience, the tenor continued to express his gratitude and enthusiasm and shut himself up in his dressing room with his “dear, dear friend Bonifacio Reyes,” and there, in his shirtsleeves and socks and a pair of very tight lilac silk breeches, he clutched his “savior” to his heart, covering his face and hair with rice powder in the process—not that either of them noticed.

  At half past midnight, by the light of the moon, in the middle of the square outside the theater, Serafina, Mochi, and Bonifacio were talking together in mysterious, intimate, interesting tones. Mochi swore that Bonifacio had the soul of an artist and that, had life turned out differently, he would doubtless have decided to live by his art and would by now be a famous musician, composer, or instrumentalist, who knows?

  “Non é vero, mia figlia? Con quel cuore ch’a questo uomo . . . chi sa cosa sarebbe diventato!”

  Serafina responded with suppressed enthusiasm, “Ma si babbo, ma si!”

  And she pressed down hard on Bonifacio’s foot.

  “Babbo, figlia,” thought Bonifacio; yes, this man and this woman treated each other in filial and paternal fashion. Spiritually, art had made them father and daughter. And he already began to think of Mochi as a kind of artistic and adulterous father-in-law!

  This was happiness! There he was, a poor provincial former clerk, treated as no better than a floor cloth in his wife’s house, the least-significant citizen in the most backward town in the world, there he was in intimate conversation, late at night, discussing high artistic emotions with two stars of the stage, with two people who had both just received ovations from the audience . . . and she, the diva, loved him; yes, she had shown him this in a thousand ways; and the tenor also admired him and had sworn him eternal gratitude.

  Mochi suddenly decided that he needed to go back to the box office, where he had left some money, and since he didn’t have much faith in the lock. . . . “You go ahead,” he said and hurried off. The inn where Serafina and Mochi were staying was some way off; to reach it they had to walk the whole length of the Paseo de los Álamos. Serafina and Bonifacio started walking. They had not gone three paces when, beneath the dark shadow of a tower, without saying a word, she took his arm. He allowed himself to be taken, just as he had when Emma eloped with him. Serafina was talking about Italy, about how wonderful it would be to live there with a loving, spiritual man, capable of understanding the soul of an artist, there, in some green corner of Lombardy, a place she knew and loved.

  There was a moment of silence. They were standing in the middle of the Paseo de los Álamos, deserted
at that hour. Behind the thin clouds being driven along by the wind, the moon was racing.

  “Serafina,” said Bonifacio tremulously, yet in a hard, energetic tone entirely new to him. “Serafina, you must think me a complete fool.”

  “Why, Bonifacio?”

  “Oh, for a thousand reasons . . . what I feel for you, you see . . . is respect . . . love. I’m married as you know, and whenever I approach you in order to ask you to return my feelings, I fear I may offend you, that you will misunderstand me. I’m no good with words, I never have been, but I am mad for you, yes, truly mad . . . but I would hate to offend you. I never dreamed I would dare to do what I have done for you. . . . You’ve no idea, and never will have, because I would be too ashamed to tell you. . . . I’m a most unfortunate man; no one has ever loved me, and the only thing in the whole world that has any substance for me, any real substance, is love. . . . The reason I like music so much is because it’s gentle, it caresses my soul; and as I’ve said to you before, your voice isn’t like other voices; I’ve never heard a voice like yours—and that’s a lot of nevers; there may be better ones, but they would never get inside my soul the way yours does; other people describe your voice as mellow . . . but I don’t know what they mean by that, except that I think it must be what I call a motherly voice, a voice that lulls and consoles, that gives me hope and encouragement and speaks to me of my childhood memories. Oh, I don’t know, Serafina, I don’t know. I’ve always been very drawn to memories, especially my most distant ones, those of my childhood; whenever I’m weighed down by sorrow, which I often am, I distract myself by thinking of my early years, and then I feel very sad, but it’s a sweet sadness; I remember when I was vaccinated . . . now you’ll say what does that have to do with anything? I know, but I did warn you that I’m no good with words. Anyway, Serafina, I adore you, because regardless of whether I’m married or not, I shouldn’t be. I swear to God I should not be married. I’ve never before rebelled against fate, but you’re to blame, because you felt sorry for me and looked at me and smiled at me and sang to me. . . . Ah, if you could see what’s going on inside my heart now. . . . I’ve heard people talk about passion, and this is passion . . . a terrible thing! What will become of me when you leave? But no matter, passion frightens and terrifies me; and yet, whatever may happen afterward, I would not have wanted to die without feeling this. Ah, my dearest Serafina, please love me, because I’m so alone in the world and so despised by everyone, and because I’m dying of love for you!”

  And then he could go no further, because tears and sobs drowned his voice. He was almost unconscious, standing there in the middle of the street; he was raving; the moon and Serafina seemed to him at that moment one and the same thing, or at least two things closely bound together. As he had on the night when he gave that first loan to Mochi, he had the feeling that his legs were giving way beneath him; in short, he felt very bad, in need of help, love, a lap to lie in, a firm assurance that he was not dying. He was going to drown in emotion, he thought, that much was certain.

  Serafina looked around to make sure there were no witnesses; her eyes were filled with the fire of a complex, spiritual lust, and taking between her slender white hands the handsome head of that kindly, romantic Apollo, somewhat aged by the vicissitudes of a prosaic life and by humiliating torments, she vehemently pressed her poor, earnest lover’s forehead to her breast; then her trembling lips sought his.

  “Un baccio, un baccio,” she murmured in an intense, low, passionate voice. And Bonifacio, almost fainting, saw her as if in a blind, wild, voluptuous dream; then he neither heard nor felt anything, because he fell to the ground in convulsions.

  When he came to, he was lying on a wooden bench, and beside him were three shadows, three ghosts, and out of the belly of one of them shone the light of a sun that blinded him with its reddish flames. The sun was the night watchman’s lamp, the two other shadows were Serafina and Mochi, who were sprinkling their friend’s face with water from the basin of a nearby fountain.

  6

  THE FOLLOWING morning, at eight o’clock, Bonifacio was woken to be told that a priest wished to see him.

  “A priest to see me? Show him in.”

  He leapt out of bed and went into the office next to his bedroom, although it could not be said to be “his” office because it was used by everyone. Still tying the belt of his dressing gown, he greeted the little old man, who entered doffing a very large, very grimy top hat. He was a poor priest from a mountain village, and he looked humble, even impoverished.

  He kept glancing nervously from side to side, and after they had exchanged the usual greetings—for neither man showed great originality in this respect—the priest, accepting Bonifacio’s invitation to sit down, perched on the edge of an armchair.

  “Well,” he said, “given that you are the legitimate husband of Doña Emma Valcárcel, sole heiress to Don Diego, may he rest in peace, you are clearly the person who should hear what I was charged with telling you in the secrecy of the confessional. Yes, I was told to speak to her or to her husband, but the truth is I prefer, where possible, to deal with my fellow man, so to speak, although had you not been here, I would not, I assure you, sir, have hesitated to approach, if I had to, Doña Emma Valcárcel herself, Don Juan’s sole—”

  “Father, will you please tell me what this is all about,” said Bonifacio rather impatiently, for he had woken that morning feeling full of remorse, which only exacerbated his superstitious habit of fearing the worst whenever any news appeared in mysterious, unexpected form.

  “I need, or, rather, I would like . . . not on my own account, you understand, but given the need to respect the secrets of the confessional and given the delicate nature of my message. . . .”

  The priest did not seem to know how to continue, but kept glancing over at the door, which stood wide open.

  Since his wife would be sleeping at that hour, Bonifacio felt perfectly within his rights to get up and close the door, because, in Emma’s absence, no one would dare to ask him the reason for such secrecy.

  “That, I assume, is what you wanted,” he said triumphantly, like a proper head of the household who can, as he wishes, keep the doors of his office open or closed.

  “Exactly, sir, exactly. This must remain a secret between you and me. You can tell your lady wife about it afterward . . . or not, that’s your business, because I never meddle in people’s private affairs. Anyway, you are, of course, the administrator of your wife’s property, although I have no idea whether those are paraphernal goods, I am ignorant of such matters and, more important, I don’t care, but anyway, it’s usually the husband who takes care of these things, or so I understand, and since the law says—”

  “Father, I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying. Can you begin from the beginning?”

  The priest smiled and said, “Patience, sir, patience. The beginning comes later. I am saying all this for the ease of my own conscience. I consulted a young fellow in Bernueces, who is a pharmacist and a lawyer, not that I went into any details, of course, and so I have no qualms about handing the money over to you, since you, the husband, are the person legally and morally designated to receive the money—”

  “What money?”

  “Why, the seven thousand reales.”

  And the priest slipped one hand into the inside pocket of his large, grubby woolen frock coat and out of that tobacco-scented cave produced, along with a few bread crumbs and some cigarette ends, a twist of paper that clearly contained gold coins.

  Bonifacio stood up and, without even thinking, held out his hand to receive the twist of paper.

  The priest smiled and handed the package to him, unsurprised by the fact that Doña Emma’s husband should take the money without even asking why it was being given to him.

  Then, recovered from his shock, Bonifacio exclaimed, “But why on earth are you giving this to me?”

  “There’s seven thousand reales in there.”

  “Yes, but why? I’
m not the person—”

  He was about to say that Don Juan Nepomuceno took care of all such matters but stopped himself, because he tended to feel ashamed that outsiders should know to what extent he had abdicated his rights.

  “So is this some ancient debt?” he said at last.

  “No, sir . . . and yes . . . let me explain.”

  “Please do.”

  “These seven thousand reales are a kind of restoration, yes, that’s it, a restoration made in the secrecy of the confessional . . . in articulo mortis. . . . The person giving back these seven thousand reales to Don Diego Valcárcel’s heirs, or, rather, to his sole heir, that person, you understand, did not wish to pass into the next world with that money weighing on his conscience, money that he owed and didn’t owe, that is . . . but I really can’t say much more because a confession, you see, is a very delicate business—”

  “Indeed!” exclaimed Bonifacio, who had turned very pale and was thinking thoughts of which that rural priest could have no inkling.

  “Nevertheless, whatever else, I must not neglect to describe the circumstances which, to some extent, explain all this. That, I told myself, is essential if the heir or heiress, or whoever serves as such, is willing to accept such an amount of money and is clear that they are taking what is rightfully theirs, because, as you will see, it is. It happened that . . . and here I must omit certain facts that shed a rather poor light on the memory of. . . .”

  “Of the deceased?”

  “What deceased?”

  “The one restoring the money. . . .”

  “No, sir, another deceased gentleman. Please, don’t rush me.”

  “Heaven forbid. I presume that the Valcárcel family loaned him that money without any guarantees and now. . . .”

  The priest had started shaking his head as soon as Bonifacio mentioned the word “family.”

  “No, sir, it wasn’t a loan, it was a gift inter vivos.”