His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  No sooner said than done. There was a revolution in the household. The members of the Valcárcel family, both those who lived locally and those who inhabited the farthest-flung mountain regions, learned that, on doctor’s orders, Emma had changed her way of life and resolved, most reluctantly, to go out a great deal, to frequent processions and pilgrimages and even solemn occasions at church, and possibly the theater too.

  Don Juan Nepomuceno simply let her do as she pleased.

  Emma presented him with her dressmaker’s bills, which went up by leaps and bounds, and he paid them without a murmur. Bonifacio also had to have new clothes, for, in that respect, Emma was quite clear about a husband’s dignity. He would ordinarily be the person accompanying her, and there was no point in her sporting the finest fabrics and the most expensive hats if her husband ruined the effect with mediocre outfits roughly stitched together by some local tailor. She employed instead good English cloth and the famous “artists” of Madrid. And this time Bonifacio took more pleasure in allowing himself to be smartly dressed because Serafina noticed the change and found it very much to her taste. Alas, their “illicit relationship” met with far greater difficulties now that he had so little spare time, and he had to be extra careful when they were out walking or in a public place, where they could easily be spotted by his wife, who, however, seemed not to care—but who knows?

  Bonifacio, with, as he put it, his back exposed, lived in constant fear that the need for an “explanation” would arrive at any moment; but Emma never again raised the subject of rice powder. Nor did she ever allude to what had happened on that strange night, nor had she taken any further initiatives in that vein. What she did do was to talk a great deal about the theater and ask if he knew the tenor, the baritone, and the soprano; and she would ask him for more details of their lives, which he admitted he knew a little about, although, obviously, only through third parties. . . .

  One afternoon, after dining à la française—a great novelty in the town, where, between twelve and two, stew was served in almost every household—Emma, who now always drank a postprandial glass of sherry (brought at her insistence from the bodegas in Jerez), sat looking at her husband with amused, questioning, mocking eyes, while she savored on lips and palate a mouthful of that Andalusian wine, which she rolled voluptuously around on her tongue. She shifted her chair a little away from the table, swiveled around in her seat, and stretched out one leg to reveal her small, perfectly shod, and, it must be said, graceful foot; then, as if rinsing her mouth with sherry and thus unable to speak, she addressed her husband with gestures, pointing first to her foot and then, wagging her finger and nodding her head, to some far distant place.

  The couple were dining alone, apart, that is, from Don Juan Nepomuceno, because by some rare accident, no other relative was staying at the house just then; Don Juan, of course, lived there all the time. At first, Bonifacio understood none of his wife’s signs and deemed them unimportant.

  “What are you trying to say, my dear? Explain yourself.”

  “Mmm, mmm!” she said, continuing her pantomime, only this time her gestures became still wilder. Nepomuceno was also sipping his glass of sherry, which was full of crumbs from the biscuit he had dipped in it, but he said nothing, as if it were not one of his duties to take any notice of the foolish behavior of his niece, who, ever since she had declared herself well, had been determinedly playing the giddy goat and making some very alarming jokes and allusions, which he preferred to ignore, at least for the moment.

  “For heaven’s sake, speak!” said Bonifacio. “What is it you’re trying to tell me about your foot?”

  Emma swallowed her mouthful of sherry, but instead of speaking, took another sip and resumed her pantomime and her wild gesturing.

  Bonifacio studied her: First, she pointed to her foot, that much he understood; but then with her finger and her head she seemed to be trying to indicate something else that was not in the room.

  He didn’t understand. Suddenly, though, his heart began to thump and a cold sweat to run down his back; his legs played their usual trick on him whenever he found himself in difficult circumstances and went on strike, as if they had fled from the scene. The “physical,” “material” side of him was warning him of a danger that his obtuse understanding had not yet picked up. Something very serious was going on here, but what?

  Bonifacio glanced anxiously at Nepomuceno to see if he could identify any connivance between uncle and niece, but he saw nothing. It was as if Don Juan was not there.

  “Emma, please!” he cried.

  Emma spat her mouthful of sherry onto the floor and stretching her foot in her husband’s direction and thus revealing part of her calf, she said very loudly, as if talking to a deaf man, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, it’s easy enough to understand, isn’t it? What I’m trying to say, fool, is this: What do you think of this foot I’m showing you?”

  “Exquisite, my dear.”

  “I don’t mean the foot itself, you mule, I know my foot’s exquisite, I mean the shoe. Do you happen to know who has a pair just like them?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, only two pairs have been sold. Fuejos, the shoemaker, your friend Fuejos, told me so himself. The only pairs he has sold have been this pair and the pair worn by the soprano. That’s why I was asking you, idiot. Honestly, you have a memory like a sieve. Now do you remember? Are these or are these not the same shoes worn by the soprano? They’re the same, the very same! Look at them, go on, look!”

  Emma raised her foot and placed it on her husband’s knees. Don Juan was sitting on the other side of the table and so could not see her raised foot, nor did he attempt to.

  Bonifacio instinctively reached for a glass of water on the table, raised it to his lips, and sat there, initially drinking the water, then only pretending to do so.

  And in the midst of his anguish—unimaginable or indescribable to those of us who have never experienced it—he thought to himself, “This is what, in tragedies, they call ‘catastrophe.’ ” And then, despite the critical situation he was in, he thought, “There are catastrophes in operas too.” And he thought of Norma, with Norma as his wife, Adalgisa as the soprano, and Pollione as him; and then there was Nepomuceno as the priest, who had doubtless been charged with arranging his, that is, Pollione’s, execution.

  “Come on, nitwit, say something. Are they or are they not the same shoes the soprano wears or was the fellow lying to me?”

  Dredging up strength from somewhere, Bonifacio finally spoke in a tiny voice that emerged from so deep in his body it sounded like a ventriloquist’s. “But Emma, how could I possibly know the shoes that lady wears?”

  Then it was Don Juan Nepomuceno’s turn to speak, but first he stood up, fastened his gaze on his niece, and just when she was thinking he was about to take out a dagger and stab her, he said very slowly, “Bonifacio is right. Why should he know what kind of shoes the soprano buys? He’s not the one who pays for them.”

  “I’m sorry, uncle, but that’s nonsense. The kind of person who buys shoes for these ladies doesn’t usually ‘know’ those shoes, as this nincompoop puts it. If Serafina has a lover who pays for her shoes, he’ll certainly know some other part of her but not her shoes, and certainly not the ones I’m talking about, which she only bought this morning. But this simpleton has definitely seen them, which is why I asked him about them; but he’s as dense as they come and forgets everything. Let’s see: Were you or were you not in Fuejos’s shop when the soprano arrived there at midday, looking for the latest style in shoes, and did Fuejos not show her a pair like this? And did the soprano not ask you your opinion and did you not tell her they were beautiful? And did she not put them on in front of you and the moneylender, Salmón the Cripple? That’s what the shoemaker told me, and that’s why I bought them, because he’d only sold one other pair, which was to the soprano, who dresses so very well!”

  “That whole story, as regards myself, is completely false,” Bonifac
io retorted in an almost normal voice as he, too, sprang to his feet. “I haven’t visited Fuejos’s shop today and I can prove it; at midday I was . . . I was elsewhere.”

  At midday, he had been at Serafina’s house, and everything Emma had said was a lie; the soprano had not bought a pair of shoes like hers and nothing of what she described was true. It was all a wretched bit of speculation on the part of Fuejos the shoemaker in order to tempt Emma; but how had Fuejos allowed himself to sink so low, Fuejos who was his friend and an altogether excellent person? Didn’t Fuejos know that people in town were gossiping about whether he was or wasn’t having an affair with the soprano? And if he knew that—as he must—why would he tell Bonifacio’s wife that? No, it was impossible! The lie came not from the shoemaker but from Emma, in which case the situation really was as grave as his cold sweat had told him! Emma was preparing some horrible revenge and, in the interim, was playing with him like a cat with a mouse. Perhaps she despised him so much—thought poor Bonifacio—that she wasn’t even going to do him the honor of feeling jealous; but even if she wasn’t jealous, she would still want to exact her revenge.

  These thoughts, however, did not dispel the unfaithful husband’s confusion; he still clung, as if to a hope, to the idea that Fuejos was the liar. “As soon as we’ve had coffee,” he thought, “I’ll go and see him and find out what’s what.”

  However, while Bonifacio proposed, Emma disposed. As soon as they had drunk their coffee, Emma, who was in ebullient mood, got up from the table and said with comic solemnity, “You wait here now. I have a big surprise for you. What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock,” said Don Juan, who, for all his flippant comments—which horrified Bonifacio—was clearly rather shaken.

  “Eight o’clock? Splendid. You just have to wait for a quarter of an hour.”

  Emma disappeared, and uncle and nephew-in-law sat in dumb silence. As far as Bonifacio was concerned, a great gulf lay between them, or, rather, an ocean of silver and gold coins, which must come to . . . who knows how many thousands of reales. Such was Bonifacio’s terror regarding his debt to the Valcárcel family that he never dared to calculate exactly how much he had so far failed to restore to the till; if he included the seven thousand reales given him by the priest, it seemed to him an absolute fortune. So much so that, sometimes, when he read newspaper articles bemoaning the government’s debts, he felt slightly ashamed when he thought of his own and felt a similar twinge of guilt when he heard or read about major embezzlements, about treasurers who made off with the contents of the safe and so on.

  Emma returned a quarter of an hour later, and her fellow diners both exclaimed, “What are you up to?”

  And both leapt to their feet in astonishment, because the sight before them was enough to astonish anyone. Emma was wearing a magnificent dress, which neither of them had seen before; her face was heavily powdered; her hair had been carefully coiffed by a hair-dresser, something she had never done before because she would never allow anyone to touch her head; and she had on a diamond bracelet, necklace, and earrings—a matching set—all of which were clearly very expensive and all totally new to both husband and administrator.

  “This is what I’m up to,” she said, placing before her husband a small yellow ticket on which was printed: Teatro Principal—Box, no. 7. “We’re off to the theater, to sit in the brigadier general’s box. He has no family of his own and almost never uses it. So come along, uncle, on with your Sunday best, and as for you, Bonifacio, I’ll have you dressed in two ticks.”

  Emma did not allow her subordinates time to wonder at this extraordinary decision. She had always been a great one for short-lived enthusiasms, but had never shown any interest in the theater, still less in music; from her miscarriage onward—and a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then—she had been to the theater maybe four times: She hadn’t even been to see the present company, and the third subscription season was nearly at an end, and yet, out of the blue, without a word to anyone, she had taken a box, and suddenly everyone had to go to the opera. Or so it seemed to Bonifacio and, as we will see later on, he was wrong in only a few minor details; and Nepomuceno thought much the same. However, he, as usual, immediately drew up what he called “a mental inventory,” a scheme intended to help him use these strange novelties to his own best advantage; and so, without a peep of protest, he left the dining room and returned shortly afterward wearing a black frock coat and an overcoat that suited him perfectly.

  “My uncle looks very presentable,” thought Emma, “but that doesn’t mean I’ll let him off the hook. No, he’ll have to pay the price too.”

  Preparing Bonifacio for their visit to the theater was a more complicated affair and was directed by his wife, who asked him to shave himself in double-quick time, a process that resulted in only three superficial wounds, which she herself dressed with sticking plaster. She then had him put on a new dark suit cut according to the latest fashion and from English cloth, of course. Bonifacio felt as if he were being dressed to go to the scaffold and fancied that the extremely elegant suit taken from the box sent by the “artist” in Madrid was, in fact, the rough tunic, English-style, worn by a man about to be put to death.

  Eufemia, who was apparently under orders not to be surprised by anything, lighted their way down to the dark street and watched them leave the house, Emma on Bonifacio’s arm and Don Juan following behind, as if this were something they did every night.

  Eufemia, it must be said, had her reasons for not being as surprised as everyone else; first, because her mistress’s mad whims were part of her everyday life, as were other more intimate whims of which the others knew nothing; and, second, she knew that this was not the first time Emma had visited the theater. She had accompanied her mistress there only a few nights ago and the two of them had sat up in the gods, disguised as ordinary working women.

  Bonifacio, of course, knew nothing of this, nor of what his wife had seen and heard and sensed during that escapade and what she had afterward imagined and desired and plotted.

  They duly arrived at the theater, and Emma’s appearance in the box had a far greater effect than she could ever have imagined. Indeed, it had not even occurred to her, for she had not gone there in order to flaunt herself, but her unexpected delight at being the focus of all eyes added yet one more corruption to her soul: the pleasure of knowing that her clothes could arouse the envy of less attractive ladies. For some strange reason—or perhaps it was merely distraction on her part—she had not considered that entering the main box, the brigadier general’s box no less, in all her finery, she who never went to the theater, was a very different matter from sitting up in the gods, in disguise, concealed from the gaze of the public, who had not even dreamed or suspected she was there.

  She was in the mood to enjoy herself, but she had not expected that the strong emotions she was hoping to experience would come from the audience; her focus was the stage, an interest that was also bound up with domestic matters; now, however, to these complex, outlandish pleasures was added another sudden, sharp pleasure that took Emma quite unawares and revealed to her a world of intense and entirely novel delights, which she saw and felt very clearly from the moment she entered the box, handed her coat to her uncle, and turned before taking her seat; it was then that she felt people’s eyes fixed upon her, heard murmurings from the neighboring boxes, and sensed, in the air you might say, the general effect of her presence. The admiring glances continued once she was seated and she was able to take stock of what lay before her; in vain did the chorus shriek like creatures possessed, for they were alone on the stage at that point, ineptly led by a singer who played one of the minor roles and whose sole distinguishing marks were his fake suede boots and his ability to sing even more out of tune than everyone else. The “eminent” audience in the stalls and in the boxes was too distracted by the spectacle provided by Emma; the subscription holders in the smaller boxes, who had to lean over the balustrade in order to see the auditorium
, took it in turns to observe Emma; from their usual box, the gentlemen who frequented the meetings at Widow Cascos’s shop greeted Bonifacio and his lady wife; the brigadier general was among them and he, too, nodded a greeting. Emma emerged from her voluntary isolation as if from a prison; the emotions she had experienced when going for walks or on religious pilgrimages could not compare; this was truly glorious. What fun she was going to have, when all was said and done, because this present glory did not dampen her resolve. Her plan was still her plan and would unfold as intended.

  She knew it was not her beauty that was attracting so much attention; it was, primarily, her clothes, especially her dress, as well as, although less so, the novelty of seeing her at the theater. She imagined that many of the ladies devouring her with their eyes from stalls and boxes would be thinking, “So, she’s plunging back into the world again, is she?”

  “Indeed I am, and headfirst too,” she said to herself smugly, thrilled to have discovered a new source of pleasure that would obstruct her uncle’s plans, which apparently consisted in stealing everything that she and she alone possessed.

  For many of the ladies present who were either very young or not from town, Emma’s appearance in “the world,” if that could be called “the world,” was a real novelty, because they could not recall, as a few others still could, that years before, this same woman, now so lavishly dressed, so faded, strained, and sour of expression, had once been the talk of the town as a spoiled, eccentric little rich girl with her many whims and follies.