His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  And just as he was thinking this, he felt that he was about to fall and sat down in the doorway, where he fainted clear away. The shoemaker rushed to his aid, and when Bonifacio came to again, the shoemaker was sprinkling his face with cool water. Half delirious, Bonifacio said, “Thank you, just the water, please, but no sugar.”

  7

  AFTER giving his heartfelt thanks to the shoemaker, who even offered to accompany him home, Bonifacio left and, making a supreme effort, strode off down the street, with no idea where he was going. “I should just throw myself in the river,” he thought, then remembered that there was no river and that, besides, he really wasn’t the suicidal type. He passed the Café de la Oliva, where occasionally, on Sundays, he used to drink a little sherry and nibble a few biscuits after mass, and his soul was pierced by a desire for some place of asylum. He went up to the first floor, which was where they served the customers. He sat down in a dark corner. He was the only person there. The waiter, who was tuning a guitar, put down his instrument, came over, wiped Bonifacio’s table, and asked if he would like a sherry and some biscuits.

  “Oh, no, not biscuits, my friend! What I really fancy is an ice. My throat’s burning up.”

  The waiter smiled sympathetically at the gentleman’s ignorance.

  “We don’t serve ices at this hour, sir. . . .”

  “No, you’re right, it’s entirely the wrong time of day. Besides, it’s not good for one to eat cold things in the morning. Bring me a glass of water then . . . and add a drop of sarsaparilla.”

  One should say that when Bonifacio and the waiter spoke of “ices,” they were thinking of the strawberry ice cream made at the Café de la Oliva, which, in the opinion of everyone in town, could not have been made any better in Heaven.

  Once the waiter had brought Bonifacio his glass of water, he returned to tuning his guitar and having done so, launched into the funeral march of Louis XVI.

  At first, Bonifacio was too busy enjoying his innocent sarsaparilla to notice the music, but a vocation is a vocation, and his spirit soon identified with that of the guitar. Among musical instruments, the guitar was, for Bonifacio, what the cat is to other domestic animals. The cat was the gentlest, most discreet, and most idly affectionate of them all, and the guitar touched his soul with a caress as soft as the fur of a cat that allows you to scratch its back.

  The trumpets and drums evoked by the strings of the guitar, now tense, now slack, made Bonifacio put himself in the place of the martyr king, and he recalled the words of the king’s confessor: “Grandson of Saint Louis, rise up to Heaven.” He had read these in Miñano’s translation of Thiers’s The Monarch of 1830. He was relieved to find that he felt moved, for he knew that such a sentiment would give him sufficient energy, or just about, to cope with the terrible situation in which he found himself, face-to-face with “his family” or, rather, “his wife’s family.”

  Yes, he had to put on a brave front and go to his execution with the steadfastness of spirit of that unfortunate martyr king. His execution took the form of having to be in the same room as Emma and Don Juan Nepomuceno.

  The guitarist left Louis XVI in the pantheon and leapt into an Aragonese jota.

  Bonifacio was grateful to him because it was edifying music, a hymn to patriotic valor. He would summon up his valor too, albeit civic or familial rather than patriotic or whatever; he would be brave. Yes, why not? Indeed, he felt that his passion, his grand passion, was as worthy of respect and protection as the independence of a whole people. He would die fighting, he would die for his soprano, on the rubble of his passion, of his Zaragoza. . . .

  “Let’s not lose hope, let’s be positive,” he said to himself.

  Then, suddenly gripped by doubt, he plunged his hands in his pockets. Had he left the coins in that wretch’s house? No, there they were, in the inside pocket of his overcoat. Thank heavens for instinct! He couldn’t remember how or when he had picked the money up and put it back in its paper cone.

  Having assured himself that his treasure was still there, he became aware of its weight, a weight that pressed very gently against his chest. Hard though it might be to believe of such a romantic soul, that pressure warmed him. “Seven thousand reales!” he was thinking, and he found in that fact some consolation for all his tribulations and was cheered, above all, by an awareness of the “civic value” that came with that pressure. The professor of economics and commercial geography at Widow Cascos’s shop was absolutely right when he said, “Wealth is a guarantee of the independence of nations.” “Yes,” he thought, “if those seven thousand reales were really mine, I would face the terrible situation I find myself in with much less trepidation. I would flee abroad, yes, I would escape. . . . And if she came with me, ah, what happiness! The two of us together in that corner of Tuscany or Lombardy that she knows so well!” Alas, seven thousand reales was a paltry sum to be shared with such a sweet companion, but then he had been so poor all his life! He had lived on charity . . . and here he was wanting to be the lover of a great artist who would have all sorts of luxurious needs and desires. He was a poor wretch! He blushed to remember his envious friends’ mischievous remarks and allusions—as veiled as they were venomous. The day before, at Widow Cascos’s shop, the dandy, who had courted Serafina in vain, had said, “These gentlemen think you have an understanding with the soprano, Señor Reyes, but I spoke up for your virtue and will help you in your campaign to refute such a calumny. My argument was this: ‘Señor Reyes knows how expensive such a woman would be and would never ruin himself or his wife for a mere actress.’ For without gifts of the most expensive kind you could not possibly court such an artist. No, you’re far too sensible for that.”

  The truth was that, up until then, he had not needed any more money, beyond what he had loaned to Mochi, but what if, in the future, his relationship with Serafina became “serious”? Yes, he would need a bit of money then. However disinterested Serafina might be, and he believed her to be as disinterested as “the ideal woman” was supposed to be, it was inevitable that if they continued to meet and to grow in intimacy, there would be occasions when one of them would have to pay for something, to spend money, and le bel idéal did not go so far as to demand that the woman should pay. No, he would have to pay, but with what? “With the money you have in your pocket.” So said the voice of temptation, but the rather unwelcome voice of honesty answered, “But that money isn’t yours!” The guitar, which continued to speak to Bonifacio’s soul, inclined him to favor the voice of temptation. The music was giving him energy, and that energy stirred in him ideas of rebellion, an ardent desire to emancipate himself. From what? From whom? From everything and everyone; from his wife, from Nepomuceno, from “everyday morality,” yes, from anything that might prove to be an obstacle to his passion, which must mean that he wasn’t quite such a milksop, or not as much of one as he had always thought he was.

  He got up and left the café, filled by a need for activity provoked by that recent burst of energy, and he set off home ready to face the situation, but not prepared as yet to return the money—not yet. He would, of course, put it back in the till at some point, but when? There was no hurry.

  Out in the street, where he could no longer hear the waiter’s guitar, his spirits began to flag, and without realizing, he ended up in the foyer of the theater rather than back at his own house. It was rehearsal time. Serafina was sure to be there. That instinctive change of direction did not entirely displease him. It was further proof that he was in love. He had read that, in similar circumstances, true lovers did exactly as he had done and allowed themselves to be drawn by the mysterious magnet of love. And he needed to be absolutely sure now that he was under the influence of a fatal, invincible passion. Once that was established, he would deem any consequences, whether fatal or not, as wholly legitimate.

  A week later, Bonifacio barely recognized himself, and he was glad; more than that, he did not even want to recognize himself.

  Serafina was his, and he,
of course, was Serafina’s, insofar as such a thing were possible, given that he was still his wife’s poor, miserable slave. He had never even dreamed of such caresses as those bestowed on him by that Italian Englishwoman. “I never thought physical pleasure could reach such extremes!” he thought, savoring and ruminating upon the extraordinary delights of the singer’s love-making. She had assured him that this was what the love of artists was like, vehement and madly voluptuous; it climbed up the sweet slope of an ideal, almost mystical rapture until it reached a summit of wild sensuality. . . .

  Ah, what delicious, exquisite visions it conjured up for him! He had to admit that the animal in him, the coarse, rough beast, was far more developed than he had ever imagined. Bonifacio would never have thought that he, an inoffensive flautist smelling of almond oil, carried within him that voluptuous Turk who so gladly succumbed to being loved in that artistic, oriental fashion. And yet his soul, his pure spirit, was watching, yes, watching, and Serafina was the first to keep alive the sacred flame of poetry. “Kisses set to music! Only those who have experienced them can speak of it. I do not think there is a moralist alive who would have the right to scold me for my passion unless he himself had tasted the delights of kisses set to music!” The greatest pleasure for him, the height of happiness, however, lay elsewhere—in the inner joy of satisfied pride.

  “Serafina loves me, she loves me, I’m sure of it. She weeps with pleasure in my arms, and she’s not pretending. She doesn’t even pretend that well when she’s onstage, no, she really does love me. I please her physically and, so to speak, morally as well.”

  And what greater glory could there be than to please her, his dream woman, whom he loved as lover, mother, and muse all in one?

  The truth is that Serafina, corrupted in early youth by Mochi, her maestro and protector, was taking her revenge on her tyrant and on fickle fate, and who knows what else, and flung herself lasciviously and with brazen licentiousness into that casual love affair, which her odious corruptor encouraged, favored, and exploited.

  Mochi had seduced his pupil in order to have her under his control; for a long time, he thought he possessed in her a future glory and an income of many thousands of lire, which would soon come flooding in. He corrupted her in order to bind her to his fate, then, when disenchantment set in, the cold lessons of reality showed him that he had been mistaken; his beautiful pupil lacked and always would lack that certain something necessary to become a real star; she had neither the voice nor the necessary flexibility of throat. She had excellent taste, immense feeling, and there was in her timbre a strange voluptuous mellowness, what Bonifacio described as a motherly quality; yes, that timbre spoke of health, honesty, feminine discretion, domestic sweetness, but it was too slight a voice for the big theaters. Besides, her throat was not mobile enough: Just as an overly plump virgin looks matronly, so Serafina’s voice, when she was still very young, had what Mochi called embonpoint, which took away all agility, all grace. In short, despite his initial certainty that she had the heart and talent of a great artist with a seductive, highly original timbre, she was not, in fact, a star of the first magnitude. Mochi realized this early on, and that knowledge finally seeped into Serafina as well; it remained, however, a shared secret, if such a thing can be said to exist, about which they never spoke. This common sadness bound them together more tightly than their relationship as lovers or their mutual interests; but it was also both the origin and a permanent source of hidden resentments and base humiliations. Out of pride, out of his businessman’s vanity, Mochi did not wish to appear weak or to confess that he had made a mistake in taking up with Serafina in order to exploit her. She may not have been a great artist, but she was a very beautiful woman, no, more than beautiful, she was seductive. As if it were some kind of test of his abilities—in which he prided himself on not having married her and thus being free to exclude her from his business as soon as she became burdensome—he went so far as to use her beauty and he himself placed temptation in her path. The first time Serafina succumbed to that temptation, she did so, like many before her, seduced by vanity, by the exalted lust of a woman of the theater, by self-interest. Her first lover, whom she did actually love a little, and of whom she was very proud, was a French general, a duke, and a millionaire. Mochi took his revenge for that spontaneous infidelity—which he had provoked but which nonetheless wounded him—by making it clear that he knew everything and that the duke was his best friend and protector. The gifts that Serafina kept for herself represented only a tiny part of the benefits garnered by the company from that relationship. Mochi’s serene and ever-smiling surface concealed his basically fierce and cruel self, and he let Serafina know that not only would he continue to tolerate such behavior; it was, in fact, essential if they were ever to balance the books. There was no need to set this out explicitly—such an overt pact would, according to Mochi, have been repugnant. Besides, he and his pupil were still lovers, and he did occasionally feel genuine love for her, a love she was obliged to reciprocate or at least pretend to. First things first, though, and whenever a suitor appeared, Mochi immediately assumed the role of oblivious husband, as far as Serafina was concerned; to the new gallant, he was exactly as he appeared to the public, the maestro, her adopted babbo.

  Serafina’s second flirtation, in Milan, was not at all spontaneous. She accepted it as she might accept a role in the theater, because he, Mochi, demanded it of her. She also thought it good form to keep up appearances and pretend to be deceiving her lover and artistic director. And she did deceive him in a way, by exacting her own revenge on the wretched commerce to which he condemned her, allowing Mochi to believe that she engaged in these profitable flirtations purely out of greed and a desire to obey, and that, deep down, she loved only her maestro.

  Mochi was almost taken in. “Yes, she does still love me and only me; otherwise, she would leave. With those other men, she pretends purely out of self-interest and in order to obey me.”

  The truth is that Serafina did not love her tyrant and had been wholeheartedly unfaithful to him from the very first, but the knowledge that she was being sold wounded her pride; she had believed Mochi to be madly in love with her, and when she saw that he was an accomplice to her escapades—proof positive that he did not love her—she felt more alone in the world, more unfortunate, and was filled with the anger of the coquettish woman who, despite herself, yearns to be adored. That vile commerce wounded more than it repelled. In her theatrical life, which she entered having already been seduced and corrupted by vice, she had never had an opportunity to acquire any notion of dignity or pure love; that mixture of love and self-interest seemed to her simply a product of her profession; and she accepted that if she was to earn a living, beauty was the inevitable complement of art, especially once she realized that she would never become a prima donna assolutissima in the big theaters.

  However, the thing that pained what she called her heart was Mochi’s complicity. “Had I behaved in the same way but of my own accord, he would still merit my respect and friendship—and my caresses if and when he wanted them—and I would have shared with him any profits from those infidelities too. Why did he have to get mixed up in it? He never says a word to me about it, but he propels me into the arms of those he should consider to be his rivals. . . .”

  And that is what she wanted him to pay for. But how? Serafina assumed that although he was no longer in love with her, he still believed that she loved him, and her revenge consisted in deceiving him, in plunging eagerly into vice and lucrative love, and enjoying the kisses that she sold.

  And she did this, not realizing the part played in those apparently passionate, lubricious outbursts by her native lasciviousness and the corruption of her own strong, vehement nature and by the unseemly vigor with which she entered these affairs. She surrendered to her lovers with an ardent brazenness that soon became positively bacchanalian, an infernal frenzy evoking deliriums and hashish-inspired dreams played out among the dark mists of terrifying, mor
bid, near-epileptic ecstasies.

  When her firm, shapely body, soft and vibrant, fell into the arms of Bonifacio Reyes, Serafina was already wearying of that terrible campaign of revenge, but her erotic raptures were still strong stuff for a stomach accustomed only to lukewarm water, as was the case with Don Diego’s wretched clerk.

  He was stunned by it and lived in a state of perpetual intoxication, of almost permanent hallucination. He seemed to feel those nameless caresses (at least he had no name for them) at every moment, everywhere; he seemed to be bathed in Serafina’s kisses all day; he could see her, hear her, smell her, feel her, even in Emma’s bedroom, among the medicines and malodorous intimacies of his ailing and none too clean wife. He found it odd that his wife did not notice that this other woman was there between them, far closer to him than she was.

  “What a woman!” he would think, whenever and wherever he happened to be. “Who could imagine there could be such women! It must be art, only an artist could love in that deliciously exaggerated way!”

  What he found most piquant, what seemed to him to hammer home the nail of happiness, was the contrast of Serafina still and weary and pensive with Serafina in the throes of ecstasy; the latter was all fire and almost frightened him with her cries and grimaces when in the furious grip of love, and, even while she was caressing him, she spoke to him in a hoarse, guttural voice that seemed to emerge directly from her pharynx without passing through her mouth, and she said such strange things, such words, which, odd though it may seem, were even more exciting in the midst of the most extreme acts of passion; however, once that demon of love succumbed to inevitable, physical weariness, she lapsed into a silent calm, an inert repose, she took on the air, shape, postures, gestures, even the atmosphere of a sweet young mother falling asleep beside her small son’s cot. The final, sleepy caresses of those hours spent in frenzied transports seemed like the innocent murmurings of the gentle, holy affection that binds engenderer to engendered. That “she-devil” then reverted to being the woman with the voice of a mother, and Bonifacio’s voluptuous tears gave way to tears of tender, anaphroditic love. His mind filled up with memories of childhood, with a longing for his mother’s arms.