His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  Emma understood all this and was under no illusion as to the reasons for that curiosity bordering on stupefaction; the result, however, was that she was much looked at and observed, and her presence much commented upon, and people were ignoring the onstage action in order to see her; and regardless of their reasons, this aroused in her one of the deepest, most intense feelings that a woman of her type could experience. What she savored most was the evident envy not only of the poorer women, who could never have afforded those diamonds or that dress, but also of the few very wealthy women, who could, without bankrupting themselves, have appeared that same night equally well and possibly even better turned out. And yet despite this, they still envied her, because such people are very like animals, in that they live only in the present moment; and there in the theater, at that particular moment, Emma was the most richly dressed and adorned woman in the audience, and the other women were not about to open a debate on who could or could not compete with her. After all, actions speak louder than words. The woman who possibly envied her most was the wife of Sariegos—he had made his fortune in the Americas and was the richest man in the province—for she could have outdone all the Emmas in the world by wrapping herself in annuities and share certificates and other such evidence of wealth; but although Sariegos could easily have afforded this, he would not allow such extravagances, and so his wife had to content herself with a very middling form of luxury, which is why she was so furious. As for Sariegos, who was also present, sitting behind his wife, he suddenly hated Emma as well, because she would be another reason for his wife to curse and loathe him for being such a miser; and odd though it might seem, he, too, viewed the lawyer’s daughter with a certain degree of envy. Then he immediately rose above such humiliating feelings and, raising himself up to higher spheres through his financial or plutocratic philosophy, he thought and finally murmured out loud, from the heights of his very genuine contempt, “You wait, in a few years’ time, that girl won’t have a penny to her name.”

  He knew, and could plainly see, that Emma was no longer a girl, but he did not care; he felt that saying “girl” or “the lawyer’s daughter” emphasized his scorn for her.

  Emma heard none of these somewhat bitter comments and others in the same vein; she saw their envy rather than heard it; she saw the glinting eyes, the sad smiles, the sincere and melancholy looks on the faces of the incautious, who sat like Saint Teresas in an ecstasy of contemplation and envy of someone else’s good fortune.

  Some girls—and they really were girls—who, only minutes before, had been contentedly flirting, smug in their few poor fripperies, now languished, oblivious to their admirers in the stalls; and, as if turning their attentions to a far more serious matter, all grace and poetry and idealism vanished from their faces, and they devoted themselves to the envious worship of someone else’s wealth, venerating the jewels and the silks and concealing their feelings of rancor from the priestess, who had the privilege of being able to display on her body the splendors of their idol-cum-god.

  A rustle of starched skirts onstage drew Emma out of her swooning state of sated pride.

  From a door at the back of the stage emerged a very elegant lady, who walked lightly over the boards, her long train dragging behind her and her whole body glittering, dressed as she was in fake brocade and fake jewels, even a diadem.

  “Who’s she?” Emma asked.

  Seeing that Nepomuceno seemed to assume the question was directed at him, Bonifacio swallowed hard and said, “She’s the queen, who rushes onstage when she learns that the Infante—”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” his wife broke in, turning to look at Bonifacio, who was sitting behind her in the darkness. “I mean, is she the soprano?”

  “Yes, I believe so. She’s the protagonist.”

  “The one with the shoes? Do you think she’s wearing them now?” Bonifacio said nothing.

  “Tell me, man, do you think she’s wearing them now?”

  “They would perhaps be somewhat anachronistic.”

  “Shh, she’s sitting down on the throne . . . let’s see, no, I couldn’t see her feet. Perhaps when she gets up. . . .”

  Emma fixed her opera glasses on the soprano’s lower regions, and when Serafina remained seated on her throne, Emma raised her glasses to study her face.

  “She’s certainly pretty,” she said. “I’ve seen that face before. What’s her name? La something-or-other, isn’t it?”

  “Serafina Gorgheggi, I think—”

  “You think? Don’t you know?”

  “You might be confusing her with the contralto.”

  “Possibly.”

  “No, she is the soprano.”

  “You’re sure of that now?”

  “Yes, quite sure.”

  Bonifacio was amazed at how well he was facing up to danger! Now he understood; his wife was toying with him. She knew about his affair, and that “unexpected” visit to the theater was a way of confronting him with it, of bringing the criminal face-to-face with his crime. Because he was a criminal. It didn’t matter though; whatever happened, he would fight tooth and nail. Then he had to sit down again, because his legs were trembling, as they always did in such situations (not that he had ever found himself in that precise situation before), but he was prepared to pretend, to lie “like a hero” if necessary, since the Lord had seen fit to bestow on him that gift for dissembling, of which he would never have believed himself capable. “It’s amazing what the preservation instinct can do!” he was thinking.

  “Aha!” Emma cried, muffling the cry before it left her lips, for she had just caught a glimpse of Serafina’s foot as the soprano stepped “majestically” down from her brightly colored wooden throne. Anachronistic or not, Her Majesty’s shoes were identical to the ones Emma had bought that afternoon. Fuejos had not lied.

  “Look, they’re the same as mine. He’s an honest man, that fellow Fuejos. Do you see, Bonifacio? That lady’s wearing the other pair, just as the shoemaker said. Why did you say he was lying? Why did you deny you’d seen that woman’s foot this morning? What would I care anyway? You don’t think I’m jealous, do you, my unfaithful husband?”

  Bonifacio said nothing. However brave he felt, and he did feel brave, he knew it couldn’t last. How far would his wife go?

  “Does Doña Serafina have a lover? If she has, he’ll be the one who paid for the shoes.”

  This somewhat free language did not surprise Nepomuceno, who, as soon as he had noticed his niece putting on a little weight and color, had expected her to commit some verbal or actual folly.

  As for Bonifacio, he saw in her brazenness only the terrible sarcasm of the outraged wife. It seemed to him perfectly natural that the deceived spouse should linger over those ironic overtures before exacting her terrible revenge. That is what happened in tragedies, and even operas.

  So sunk in terror was Bonifacio, his face turned to the rear of the box, that he did not see why it was that Emma ceased her jocular comments, if that was what those apparently captious questions were. If he had turned first scarlet then deathly pale when Serafina came onstage, now it was Emma who turned cherry-red as she fixed her opera glasses on another character—the conquering hero—who had just arrived from the land of the Moors to discover that, in order to rid herself of a rival, the queen had married off his betrothed to the King of France. That vanquisher of the infidel was the baritone Minghetti, who was wearing spurs that shone like suns, and who had a tremendously deep voice, energetic and rather fine. Having first cleared the room of vile courtiers, namely the chorus, the queen hung about his neck and begged in vain for his forgiveness. The baritone would not give way, rejecting the queen’s embraces and crying out for his one true love.

  “He looks very handsome in the role,” Emma was thinking, “but I preferred him as a barber.”

  When the conqueror could shout no more or was exhausted, the soprano began to bemoan her fate and to paint her passion with a multitude of trills, accompanied by the hunch
backed flautist. As tends to happen with scornful lovers, the baritone, far from listening to the queen’s laments, took the opportunity furtively to clear his throat and to spit, turning a bold eye on the boxes, where the grandest of ladies were displaying their beauty. His gaze fell on Emma, who felt Minghetti’s gentle blue eyes snake down the lenses of her opera glasses and smile at her, as if they had known her all her life and as if there were some understanding between them. Without even thinking, Emma smiled too, and the eagle-eyed baritone noticed and returned her smile, not just with his eyes now but with his whole face. Emma felt an even more intense emotion than when she had first become aware of the audience’s admiration for her luxurious garb. She said to herself, “This is more serious, a deeper, more substantial pleasure, one that satisfies more desires, one more relevant to my plan.” Her plan was to make out-and-out fools of her uncle and her husband, to play with them like a cat with a mouse, to discover new and, to her, amusing ways of deceiving and ruining them. She had known for a long time what weapons to use against her uncle, by spending money like water, especially on the embellishment of her own sweet self. As for Bonifacio, she did not hate him as much as she did her uncle and had not yet come up with a major punishment for him, her one idea being to keep him always on the rack, to treat him like a slave over whom there hung some permanently unspecified future torment; however, Minghetti’s look and smile illuminated Emma’s consciousness like a flash of lightning, for she suddenly saw the most appropriate way of punishing her unfaithful spouse. She had long assumed that he was unfaithful; and during her solitary bedroom meditations, taking hysteria as her oracle, she had come to see all men as egotistical creatures with cruel, base instincts and did not believe that any husband was completely faithful to his wife; indeed, she found such an idea ridiculous, and confessed to herself that, were she a married man, she would not be contented with just one wife either. As for women, she did not believe that, in normal circumstances, they had the right to commit adultery because “it looked bad” and because “women are different”; but should a wife discover that her husband had been unfaithful, that “was quite another matter”; there was also the right to reprisals, and it would be the same, say, if the husband were brutish enough to mistreat his wife. “Yes, if Bonifacio were to mistreat me as I do him, I would definitely be unfaithful to him. That goes without saying. And if he were to be unfaithful to me, if I were quite sure that he was. . . .” Here Emma hesitated and resorted to a third instance where a wife’s infidelity would be justifiable. “If he were to be unfaithful to me, then I would deceive him too, always assuming someone were to inspire in me a grand passion.” Emma’s moral meanderings had nothing to do with the decadent literary romanticism of her age and her town—she was naturally idiosyncratic and rarely read poetry or novels—but she had nevertheless been infected by certain of her neighbors’ phrases and preoccupations, and the vague, perfidious idea of the “grand passion” that justifies everything, was one of those highly contagious plagues. Otherwise, she needed no one’s permission to ride roughshod over a hundred decalogues and, at a whim, to ignore any rules of conduct that got in her way. But while this was all very well in the pure region of ideas, as Bonifacio would have said, Emma’s inner sense told her that saying is one thing, doing quite another, and that she would not be untrue to her Bonifacio unless pushed or unless she allowed herself, in a moment of madness, to be seduced by a Russian prince or some other personage of exceptional merit; and even then, she would have to become another woman entirely to betray herself. The truth is that her flesh was at peace, her tastes led her down sensual byways that were not in the least erotic, and Bonifacio was, after all, a very good-looking young man; no, she had no complaints about his physical appearance, but the baritone’s look and smile were quite a different kettle of fish. Suddenly Emma forgot everything in order to ponder the pleasure of discovering through the lenses of her opera glasses those eyes and that smiling mouth beneath the dark mustache. Whenever Minghetti returned to the stage, Emma attempted a repetition of that first very pleasing encounter, usually with great success; for, either by chance or because the singer was in the habit of looking up into the boxes and noticing any admirers and flirting with them regardless of his role or of what was happening onstage, the pleasure solicited by Emma’s opera glasses reoccurred during several serious, critical scenes, and yet the baritone, still in despair at the flight to France of his betrothed, did not cease to quarrel with the queen.

  Bonifacio could not get over the fact that, to his great delight, Emma was no longer talking about the soprano or her shoes—they really were an anachronism, he had been quite right about that—nor about anything remotely related to what he called “the rice- powder incident.”

  When the opera was over, the Valcárcel family returned to their house, or perhaps we should call them the Reyes family, although Valcárcel is more appropriate, given that Bonifacio could hardly be called the master of the house. Nepomuceno bade the couple good night and went to bed to reconsider his plans for the future, for unless he was very much mistaken, he could sense a major change about to take place, one that was not without its dangers. When Bonifacio was about to ask his wife’s permission to go to his room, Emma decided to make use of what, in that particular marriage, one might term the “royal prerogative.”

  “Look, Bonifacio, I’m not in the least bit tired; the noise of the music has left my head throbbing. I’m never going to get to sleep, and left alone and awake and in this nervous state, I’ll be afraid.”

  There was a moment of silence, then she added, “Stay.”

  They were both in her boudoir. Lit by two pink candles, she was sitting at her dressing table, taking off her jewelry. Her husband saw her framed in the mirror against a mysterious backdrop of shifting shadows. Without realizing how or why, that word “Stay” made him look at his wife with the eyes of a judge of beauty. How strange! Up until then, he hadn’t noticed that Emma had, that night, somehow cast off the years and looked much younger, especially just then; she did not, of course, look like a beautiful young woman, her features were not perfect and lacked the freshness of youth, but they were very expressive; their very weariness a sort of elegy sung by the face of a nervous, passionate woman whose skin is beginning to lose its firmness and which seems to mourn alone the weight of the years; the complicated sentimental history that reveals the nascent lines on the forehead and around the eyes; the intensity of the sad, serious, profound expression in those eyes, in marked contrast to the tightness of certain other features, the inertia of the lips and the dryness of the cheeks; at that moment, these and other signs seemed to Bonifacio both romantic and attractive, and that imperative “Stay” flattered his pride and his senses, given the long time that had passed since Emma had made use of the royal prerogative.

  For the second time, Serafina’s lover felt a twinge of remorse at being unfaithful to his sin. In Bonifacio’s eyes, his “grand passion” excused his illicit relations with the singer, but the moment he was “untrue” to Serafina, allowing himself to be devilishly drawn to his legitimate wife’s faded, yet expressive, melancholy charms, full of concentrated fire, only proved that his supposed grand passion was not so very grand and, therefore, less excusable. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bonifacio began to take off his English-style suit; he stood there in his wife’s boudoir without jacket or waistcoat, revealing his silk braces and the front of his stiff, white shirt with its three coral buttons; and in that prosaic but familiar attire, he turned, smiling, to Emma, who was licking her dry lips, her eyes flashing, as, serious and silent, she studied her husband’s strong, milk-white neck. Bonifacio felt wanted, desired; in a sudden flash, he understood the night of the rice-powder incident; he saw in his wife’s face a periodic weakness, a feminine frailty, the temporary submission of female to male, as well as a strange, mysterious, nameless corruption, but he sensed all these things only in confused form; he was suddenly aware of a certain fleeting, interim superiority; and infl
amed by his own fancy, by the excitement aroused in him by the intriguingly decaying beauty or, rather, desire with which Emma was now alight, he committed an act of unprecedented boldness and fell to his knees before his wife, embraced her starched white petticoats, which crunched against his chest, and in a voice unsteady with emotion, muffled and stammering, he blurted out a thousand mad things, the fruit of an overtalkative passion that finds its first outlet in words, lascivious words couched in the amorous jargon, the many diminutives, learned by heart in his dealings with Serafina.

  Instead of raising her husband up from that kneeling position, Emma—after first giving a yelp, such as the yelp she gave whenever she stepped into her bath of warm water—bent lower and lower until her mouth was on a level with Bonifacio’s mouth; then with both hands she grabbed his beard, pushed back his head, and as if his lips were an ear, pressed her teeth to them and said in a low voice, like a suppressed scream, “Swear to me that you’re not unfaithful!”

  “I swear to you, light of my life, my darling, my sweetheart, I swear and swear again. Look into my eyes, into my soul’s eyes. I swear and swear over and over that I love you, I swear to you as I kneel before you. . . . But, please, you’ll break my neck if you’re not careful!”

  “So what? What does it matter? I’ll hurt you some more. You like it.”

  There was a silence during which they gazed into each other’s eyes, both of them savoring the pain of Bonifacio’s neck being bent back. Then Emma let go of him and stood up, saying, “Let’s pretend that I’m Serafina, the mistress of trills, the one who was singing just now, Queen Micomicona, yes, the one you like so much, and just to please you, look, no, here, here, you fool, here, you rascal. . . . I’m wearing the same shoes as her; go on, grasp the foot of your mistress of trills; my stockings are a different color but very pretty nonetheless; go on, sing, tell her that you love her, that you’ve forgotten about the other one who went off to France and that you’re going to marry her instead. And what shall we call you? What’s the name of the baritone?”