His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  9

  BONIFACIO slept like a log but not for long. Like a man raised from the dead, he returned to life, blinking in the crude light from the ray of midday sun slipping in through the shutters onto the very tip of his nose, dazzling his eyes.

  He was reminded of those pictures in pious books that showed mystical rays falling upon the heads of saints in prison cells or even out in the fields, rays very similar to the one troubling him now. Had he been an idolater, which he was not, he might have seen in that the hand of Providence; not being an idolater, he believed in the Creator and in His justice, whose chief judge was the individual conscience. Bonifacio’s situation had clearly grown more complicated since last night. “You smell of rice powder,” his deceived wife had said—three times!—but rather than growing angry or poisoning or hanging him . . . she had. . . .

  And at this point, he remembered his wife’s body glimpsed out of the corner of his eye as he fled the marital bed. What he thought he had seen in his drunken delirium or exaltation was not the same as the reality presented to him that morning, yet that reality nevertheless far exceeded his previous image of what he termed his wife’s hidden and doubtless faded charms. Bonifacio had to apply various ointments to his wife’s body on a daily basis, and yet, given his wife’s prudery, he saw little of her nakedness; he never saw what, in his own poetic anatomical topography, corresponded to the various zones that contained her “hidden charms.” And it was those zones that had most surprised him with unexpected flowerings, a kind of harvest home of muscular attractions of which not even the most optimistic of men would have dreamed. How was that possible? Bonifacio could not understand it; for although he was something of a philosopher, who loved to ponder slowly and carefully all of life’s events, important and unimportant alike, he was one of those thinkers, of which there are so many, who merely ponder old ideas and make them unnecessarily complicated; but he neither discovered nor penetrated new areas of knowledge; in short, his ability to uncover the reason for any natural or sociological phenomena was as limited as that of many famous philosophers who, to put it bluntly, failed to coax from teasing reality a single one of its vital secrets. Bonifacio thought and thought, but could not fathom the mysterious essence of his wife, who, despite claiming to be half dead, had those not inconsiderable hidden treasures, albeit somewhat pale and so soft that her velvety skin was somehow not quite like that of a living being. It was as if the combination of cotton wool, ointments, and the warm touch of perfumed sheets had managed to produce an artificial robustness . . . a false flesh. Bonifacio grew lost in conjectures and wild imaginings and ended up rejecting all these hypotheses, which went against all the secondary-school primers he had read some years ago with the aim (inspired by a newspaper, which spoke of progress and the wisdom of the middle classes) of becoming a worthy son of his century and transforming himself through science. No, it was impossible; all the laws of physics and mathematics rebelled against the idea that cotton wool could be assimilated and changed into fibrin and the other necessary ingredients of base, mutable, human flesh.

  There is no point in pursuing Bonifacio further in his conjecturings, rather we should go straight to the truth of the matter. And the truth was that Emma really had seemed on the point of ruination, her flesh had been diminished by various disorders that had their origin in her misfortunes as frustrated mother: nervous afflictions, irascibility, fears, pseudohygienic treatments, and ill-founded beliefs, as well as a lack of light and fresh air; but it was also true that the body electric of that particular Eumenide or goddess of vengeance did not lack vigor, for her nerves clung furiously to life, coiling about it, and, in the end, her stomach, under the healthy influence of good food and good wine, had seen a rebirth of her appetite, and health was flooding back into that organism, still intact despite all it had suffered.

  However, even though she, too, saw her own rebirth in those pale green shoots, Emma still thought of herself as a delicate hothouse plant, and feared that, as soon as that rebirth became apparent, her fool of a husband and all the other household fools would want to remove her from her hothouse and plant her out in the open air. Her main obsession—for she had more than one—was that this new life, in which she took such voluptuous pleasure, would only be hers for as long as she remained safe in her hothouse, being treated like an invalid, even though she no longer was one. Besides, along with that new strength came new desires of a recondite, complex, sensual nature, insalubrious and unruly, for which she sought satisfaction in inanimate objects, in touch and smell and taste, which, far better than any living creature, could provide her with such suitable objects of desire as cambric sheets, downy feathers, the air trapped among silken folds, the sprung floor, the cracks in the otherwise hermetically sealed doors, the hay, apples, and citrons placed among her clothes, the scent of camphor and the hundred other perfumes that would have been familiar all those years before to Celestina, the Spanish Bawd.

  Emma savored the delights of these three newly discovered senses, to which she had never before given much importance as sources of pleasure. In her self-imposed seclusion, neither eyes nor ears could bring her much joy, but she relished the new sensations provided by her refined sense of taste and smell, and even the contact of her feline body with her soft bed linen, in which she tossed and turned like a flesh-and-blood screw.

  During the days when her fears, along with her very real nervous illness, had taken her to the brink of death, her weak condition had brought with it a feeling of terrible loneliness, as experienced by any egotist who senses that the end is nigh; everything and everyone were simply allowing her to bid farewell to the world and to die alone; and with the double vision of the gravely ill, she saw both the depths of that general indifference and the proximity of danger.

  “We die alone, completely alone, while the others stay behind smug and safe in the world; they don’t even, out of mere politeness, offer to die with you!” Bonifacio and Sebastián—who claimed to have loved her so much—and Uncle Nepomuceno would all remain where they were; no one was lifting a finger to help her die, no one was saying, “Come on, I’ll go with you.”

  Emma was a complete atheist. She had never given God a thought, not even in order to deny his existence; she neither believed nor had ceased to believe in religion; she fulfilled her duties to the church minimally and mechanically. At the time, people in the town did not tend to discuss religious matters; those who were not devout Catholics were happily tolerated; and as long as they were not outright unbelievers and did not neglect church customs and kept up the necessary appearances, no one bothered them.

  “I’m not the pious kind,” Emma used to say, and thought no more about it. The church and the priests were fine; it was all fine; she wasn’t keen on novenas, but it was all within the normal order of things, along with kings and taxes and the civil guard. Not that anyone thought or talked about these matters. Why would you? “I’m not the pious kind,” she would say. And yet she was a complete atheist, because she lived entirely in the material world. She had never pondered what might happen beyond the grave; she imagined Hell as a great oven, but what did that have to do with her? Hell was for real villains who had killed their father or their mother or a priest, or who had trampled on the Host or refused to go to confession. . . . Besides, no one could be sure what might happen. But dying was horrible, not because of the prospect of Hell but because of the pain of dying and grief at the thought of one’s own life ending.

  Yes, ending; oblivious to the contradiction between her private thoughts and the dogma of Heaven and Hell, Emma viewed the painful annihilation of the tomb with great seriousness, with deep conviction, with an awareness of her own horror; and being little given to making fine distinctions, she did not bother to separate the rational from the imagined; and so she also sensed the presence of death in the shovelfuls of lime, the damp earth, the closed coffin, the empty cemetery, and dark eternity.

  Equally oblivious to that contradiction, she was deeply trou
bled by the idea of her own annihilation and by the image of the tomb. She thought of death as existing side by side with life, ordinary life, her day-to-day existence, and the contrast between the two only increased her horror.

  It never once occurred to her to commend herself to a saint or make an offering to the Virgin Mary or to Jesus in order to be healed; the first impulse she had when she recovered was to smile, the terrifying smile of one brought back from the dead, at the thought of her steadfast and diabolical plan; for with the convalescent’s vast egotism—worldly, prosaic, and low—she clung to her unshakable resolve to take her revenge on the wretched relatives who had been prepared to let her die alone.

  Like most of her fellow creatures, Emma only applied what intellectual vigor and willpower she had to the mean, immediate interests of the ordinary prose of life; all else was poetry, and the only thing she took seriously, and was prepared to put will and thought into, was low, everyday egotism. Had she been capable of comparing the depths of her mean-spirited heart with the dreams she had nurtured in the springtime of her life, such an attitude was more compatible than she might have thought with the false romanticism and fantastical extravagances of her youth.

  She kept secret the rebirth of her flesh; she became a healthy hypocrite and continued to feign bodily aches and pains as if having them were a virtue. When alone with her maid, Eufemia, who was partly privy to her deceptions, Emma would ponder the details of that deceit, as if she were setting a trap for all her relatives. She was engaged in stealing from herself, dispatching Eufemia secretly to the shops and markets to bring her the finest tidbits and the most expensive gewgaws in the form of underwear, perfumes, and tasty morsels. Emma ran up enormous bills in all the main shops and food stores. Neither Uncle Nepomuceno, Bonifacio, or Sebastián would so much as suspect the existence of the hole she was digging with her fingernails in the great fortune that they had perhaps thought they might inherit at any moment.

  She reveled in thinking about the unpleasant surprises the future held for her relatives. Eating the finest partridge and the finest lamprey from the marketplace, dressing from head to toe in the finest cambric, twirling the finest lace about her fingers, lavishing money, to Eufemia’s great amazement, on sheets, shirts, corsets, stockings, and pantaloons, on the most expensive of perfumes was a delight made all the more intense by the thought of the nasty trick she was playing on her relatives, especially on Bonifacio and her uncle.

  “Go on, Don Nepo,” she would say to herself, smiling mischievously, “rob me all you like. I’m doing my part too.”

  Although devoted entirely to the material life, she felt no need to conserve her fortune, never having considered the origin of that money; she had a vague belief that the capital she lived on was an inexhaustible fountain that existed in some mysterious place, which there was no point in locating precisely: There, among her uncle’s papers, lay the gold mine; he would be left with most of the seam, but what did that matter? Why bother doing the sums and managing her own financial affairs? That would be absurd because there seemed to be quite enough to go around; he stole and so did she; she was swindling him and, one fine day, certain bills would arrive that would leave good Don Nepo speechless because, obviously, he would have to pay them.

  Those bills had already arrived and some had been paid. Don Juan Nepomuceno was dealing with Emma exactly as he had with Bonifacio, now that each had taken the plunge into extravagance, as he put it. Emma’s behavior was truly extravagant, although it might not seem so. Her laziness in not doing the sums herself and not keeping Don Nepo on a tight rein was something in which she almost wallowed as if it were another great, expensive luxury. She knew he was feathering his own nest with her wealth, that a large part of her capital was being transferred to him as her administrator, because Don Juan spoke every day of how, by some miracle of luck or thanks to kindly Providence, his own income was growing, and every day he spoke, too, about the countless misfortunes befalling the various Valcárcel estates and the part of their capital he had placed in the industrious hands of both Spain and other countries.

  The iron and coal mines that were beginning to be worked in that province suffered problem after problem, proving prejudicial to the shares bought for Emma by Nepomuceno, always so diligent in managing the wealth of his former ward.

  However, by some extraordinary coincidence or by a whim of obstinate fate, the mines in which Don Juan had invested his miserable little savings prospered and produced a constant, healthy profit. Emma knew perfectly well that this was a firm indication that her uncle was robbing her, but she seemed to luxuriate in that fact. She let him get on with it, she let him rob her, preferring not to worry her little head about it, blithely conscious of the high price involved in not demanding an explanation or telling him off over a mere matter of money, she who would have a screaming fit if her soup was too hot.

  Taking a strange delight and a certain pride in what she considered to be her unusual, not to say unique character, Emma got a kind of satisfaction—rather like an itch so unbearable it almost hurt—out of tolerating and even provoking other people’s weakness, even if it was to her disadvantage. Uncovering the evil in others enchanted her, made her proud, and encouraged her to indulge still further in her capricious perversions. Her senses and her tastes were now so finely honed that she could properly savor and appreciate the beauty to be found in the energy and skill of evil; a sly, witty villain, skilled and adept in his villainy, seemed to her heroic: The bandit Luis Candelas, as he appeared in the popular imagination and in books, was her dream hero. She was an avid reader of notorious crimes and reserved all her compassion for criminals awaiting execution. Her leniency toward crimes of love was infinite. During her illness, which had so prostrated her that she had been almost physically aware of her spent desires and exhausted sexual faculties, she had viewed with scorn and repugnance and even rage anything that set out to respect, affirm, or propagate love, but when she found herself being reborn inside her pale, smooth, flaccid skin, her mind was once more filled with a limitless compassion for any amorous weaknesses and with admiration for any bold acts of romantic bravado, especially if it was women who carried out these exploits.

  From what Sebastián and Eufemia had told her, she knew that her uncle nursed a long-standing passion for a young German woman, the daughter of an industrial engineer, Herr Körner, a notable chemist who had come to the area to carry out metallurgical research.

  “My uncle probably wants to get rich at all costs and quickly too, in order to seduce the German’s daughter, given that his gray side-whiskers won’t do the job.”

  And Emma took an almost physical, gustatorial delight—as if she were reading a rather risqué novel—in imagining that fine, fifty-something gentleman head over heels like an adolescent, his heart cut to the quick by the demon of love.

  She spent long hours pondering the possibilities of that amusing love affair and even went so far as to imagine their wedding day and, given that her uncle was a widower, the possibility of secretly organizing a shivaree, a rowdy serenade with much banging of kettles, saucepans, and tea trays, having herself previously presented the bride with a magnificent set of jewelry.

  And afterward, she and the bride would become great friends and go for walks together and even make fun of that ridiculous side-whiskered gentleman, who was, respectively, debtor and spouse. She even imagined how her new aunt would cuckold her unfaithful administrator, but with whom? Sebastián perhaps. The skein of her imagination grew so tangled that she, Emma, became partly to blame for her uncle’s misfortune. . . . Well, all the better. Hadn’t he deceived her? Hadn’t he robbed her? Hers, then, would be a just revenge.

  For Emma also reserved the right to avenge herself on her uncle’s previous plunderings, which she had hitherto put up with, planning, in the midst of all his conjugal misfortunes, to rub Don Nepo’s nose in his misdeeds. What larks! What a golden opportunity to land him in trouble! With this, as with any other transgressions that m
ight injure her personally—and which she tolerated for the moment out of her love for villains and villainy—she vaguely reserved the right to exact a highly refined and cruel revenge later on, who knows how or when, but one day . . . and savoring those postponed acts of retaliation, those vengeful punishments and torments, which she summoned up out of the murk of her will and her thoughts, she felt the kind of joy and excitement one might feel at the prospect of being happy.

  To explain her conduct toward her uncle and toward Bonifacio, we should add to this examination of her perverse feelings, her longing for the strange, the original, and the unexpected. It irritated her to think that someone else might be able to predict her rages and tantrums, her hatreds and revenges; she preferred to get annoyed or furious for reasons that no one could possibly expect and to confuse the most expert observer by remaining cool, calm, and collected in the face of insults and injuries that others might think would infuriate her.

  With Eufemia, her confidante, she often gave in to that urge, either with Eufemia herself or as regards a third party.

  Nothing that her uncle or Bonifacio might do to harm her could provoke more rancor in her than the fact of their having left her at death’s door and not even offered to accompany her into the next world; that is what she could not forgive, but how well she concealed her feelings! What a trick she was going to play on them! What fun when her uncle discovered that she, too, was spending as if there were no tomorrow, and that the wealth he was holding in reserve, in order to steal it from her later on (when, for example, his wife, the German, presented him with one of Sebastián’s tiny tots), now belonged, in the eyes of the law, to her creditors, to the shopkeeper on the corner, or to a stallholder in the marketplace.