His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  “Minghetti?”

  “That’s right, Minghetti, you are Minghetti and I am Serafina. Dear beloved Minghetti, here is the queen of your heart, your little queen; take her, love her, spoil her, my beloved Minghetti, my Bonifacio, love of my life. . . . But listen here, Mr. Moorslayer, if you want your lady queen of the new shoes to be yours forever, snuff out those candles on the dressing table and tiptoe over here, because Eufemia sleeps next door and she might hear you.”

  11

  BONIFACIO admired art in all its forms, music being his favorite because it touched his soul so deeply and with an enchanting vagueness that required no previous study of those many concrete ideas doubtless contained in books read at “the university,” and because, as a flautist himself, music was the art he knew best. He had also, at some stage in his life—as a mere amateur of course, with no pretensions beyond that—dabbled in other human ways of giving expression to beauty. Poetry seemed to him a highly respectable art, and he knew many poems by heart, however, the difficulties of consonance and assonance had always made him shy away from cultivating the poetic muses; as a true man of feeling and belief, he despised trite words and easy rhymes; and so, on the few occasions when he had tried his hand at le gai savoir, he had wandered straight into danger, into difficult rhymes; he even recalled that the last time he had thrown down his pen in disgust, intending never to write another poem, had been when he wanted to write a sonnet to a certain Señor Menéndez, who had set up a religious foundation. As he chewed his nails in frustration, Bonifacio had said to himself, “According to the books I’ve read on rhetoric and poetry, the most important word should come at the end of the line; obviously the most important word here is the name of the founder and of his foundation; well, there are plenty of rhymes for ‘foundation,’ but I can’t find a single rhyme for Menéndez. So rather than relegate Menéndez to a place in the poem unworthy of his philanthropy, I prefer to abandon the sonnet.”

  That lack of poetic inspiration and of words rhyming with Menéndez did not discourage or crush his artist’s pride, which was not that great; after all, when one thought about it, music was really concentrated poetry.

  The art of drawing was another matter, and the elegant penman considered that while he might not be able to produce prodigies with his pen, he could produce some very agreeable arabesques, the arabesque being his favorite thing to draw because it related to his abilities as a scribe and, in its vagueness and indeterminacy, bore some resemblance to music. The arabesque was close to allegory and imaginative drawing on the one hand and, on the other, to the art of the famous calligrapher Iturzaeta.

  Bonifacio was thinking these thoughts late one afternoon, toward dusk, in the rather cramped, bare room that Serafina Gorgheggi occupied on the third floor of the inn above the Café de la Oliva. Mochi and his protégée had changed inns, which in that town meant merely a change of discomforts; but they had lost all credibility at the Hotel Principal, at the far end of the Alameda Vieja, because they paid their rent so irregularly; the opera company had just broken up for reasons of money and incompatibility of temperament, and Mochi, Serafina, and Minghetti, the baritone, had stayed on in town, according to some, because they had no immediate contract and nowhere better to go and, according to others, because they wanted to form the nucleus of a new company, which Mochi was in the process of creating. Meanwhile, they had to save money, and while Minghetti remained at the Hotel Principal, where, for some mysterious reason, he was tolerated despite being no more regular in paying his rent than Serafina and Mochi, they were reduced to moving themselves and their luggage into the rather mediocre hostelry known as the Fonda de la Oliva, which was owned and rather meagerly managed by the owner of the ancient café of the same name.

  That evening, Bonifacio was watching over a sleeping Serafina, the victim of an acute toothache, which, as it eased, had allowed her to slip into a quiet, somewhat feverish, and not unpleasant slumber.

  Bonifacio was watching. He had gone there for a very different purpose, but the sighs of his Italian Englishwoman and the smell of the antispasmodic medicine she had taken, plus the gradual onset of evening, had suddenly changed his mind, inclining him to poetic, reflective melancholy, to a mood of pious, spiritual selflessness.

  Since watching over his beloved’s sleep provided no occupation for his hands, Bonifacio was leaning on the bedside table—which was inlaid with a blue-and-pink Venetian scene and stained with coffee and silver nitrate—and drawing with a quill on a piece of rough paper. He was, as usual, drawing calligraphic arabesques adorned with fantastical creatures and flowers. After the abrupt change to his desires wrought by his new circumstances, his soul seemed to be full of music, and though his ears were not singing, his heart was.

  If he had brought his flute and if Serafina had not been sleeping, he would have accompanied, with that sweet instrument, those interior melodies, languid and vaporous, full of a gentle, crepuscular sadness, part resignation and part the “ultra-telluric” hopes of which youth knows nothing; a sadness peculiar to those of maturer years, who savor the memory of their lost illusions, which they can still taste on their lips.

  Instead of the flute, he had a quill, which made only the faintest of noises as it traced those bold, energetic shapes and lines, in evocative chiaroscuro, the equivalent of a string plucked or a metal disc struck.

  Yes, gradually Bonifacio could feel the music of his soul moving down into his fingers; the curves of his arabesques grew more graceful, his curlicues and symmetrical ornaments more elegant and expressive, and that vague tracery slowly began to turn into concrete, representational shapes; and, finally, as if born out of the union of black and white, there burst into a gray sky the image of the moon in its last quarter, surrounded by sinister clouds, half devils or witches mounted on broomsticks, semi-fantastical beehives, but hives nonetheless, out of which emerged a multitude of creatures, dots joined to other dots with the bodies of bees and with the legs, tails, and talons of Furies out of Hell. Those diabolical bees and wasps were flying around the moon, some of them obscuring its face, which, seen in profile, was that of Satan himself, eyebrows arched, eyes and mouth spewing fire. Above this confusion of crazy shapes, Bonifacio drew some symmetrical lines that skillfully evoked the surface of a calm sea, and above the top line—the horizon—he drew another image of the night, a serene night this time, and in the middle of the sky, sailing through five threads of tenuous mist, the lines of the musical stave, there rose a gentle full moon, majestic and poetic, on whose face elegant, sinuous curves traced the name: Serafina.

  It took more than half an hour for the dreamer to complete his symbolic composition, but the satisfied artist’s inspiration and effort were rewarded with a sense of pride, a feeling that immediately became mingled with an austere tenderness, and that voluptuous austerity made him bow his head and rest his forehead on his hands. Sobbing, and with tears in his eyes, he thought, “How strange life is! What things there are in a poor wretch’s heart!”

  The allegory, which had flowed unwittingly from his quill, could not have been clearer, it was the synthesis of his present life. In the sky of his love, in the serene upper air, above the ocean of his calm passions, shone the full moon, the satisfied, poetic, ideal love of his Serafina. The days of sensual storms had passed, those days when physical love, mingled with platonic love, succumbed to the arabesque of wild, chaotic passion; the soul had won through now and given way to affection, which, as it took root and became habitual, had grown spiritual. Then suddenly, only a short while ago, from the mysterious ocean depths inhabited by the enemy, from which emerged subterranean voices threatening punishment, there appeared, like a treacherous reflection, another sky with another moon, a stormy sky full of hellish spirits dressed as large clouds, with the Devil himself disguised as a waning moon . . . the Satanic, Walpurgis Night honeymoon that his wife, Emma Valcárcel, had decreed would shine forth in the depths of those outrageous, unexpected, and almost desperate nights of love.

>   Bonifacio got to his feet and stood looking down at the sleeping Serafina.

  “This dear woman doesn’t know I’ve been unfaithful to her, that there are times at night when I’m given a philter to drink, made up of terrors, force majeure, memories, physical habit, the taste of former pleasures, the smell of faded rose petals, pity, and, yes, even dark philosophies.

  “She doesn’t know that I allow myself to be kissed and to kiss, like someone giving alms to death itself, to mad, ailing death; that I bestow kisses that are like bites with which I try to hold back galloping time, which gallops and gallops out of my mouth. Yes, Serafina, at such moments, I feel sorry for my wife, whose slave I am; her wild caresses—mere reflections of the caresses I learned from you in our first frenzied, shameless encounters—her caresses, entirely innocent in her and criminal in me, infect me and carry me off with her to a gloomy witches’ coven, where amid dreams and sighs of love that soon turn into the senile groans and creakings of a collapsing body, I experience all kinds of black madnesses, stifling and seductive, full of fear and fancy. I am the lover of a lascivious madwoman, of an invalid who has a right to my caresses, but not the kind of right you have: No, that right, however subtle and invisible, might go unrecognized by society, but it seems to me far stronger. Your right . . . and mine. That of my weary soul.”

  He resumed his weeping after thinking these thoughts, although he thought them in other words, or in part without any words at all because he would not even have known some of the words he needed to use. For example “ultra-telluric.” Would Bonifacio have known what that meant? And yet he continued to think and mix up those thoughts with all his other ruminations and all the difficulties of his wretched, unbearable life. In Bonifacio’s day, people did not speak as they do now, certainly not in his town, where the styles of Larragaña and Don Heriberto García de Quevedo dominated when it came to expressing powerful, complex emotions. Besides, Bonifacio, who was even less educated than his chronicler, would never have come up with some of the expressions used above as approximate interpretations of his troubled mind.

  Serafina did not wake up despite all the psychological noise emanating from her beloved, who was walking on tiptoe, taking care not to bump into anything; without her noticing, he even managed to cover, with a sheet, one corner of a whiter-than-white shoulder so that she would not get cold. In Serafina’s room, he was the same courteous, delicate, gentle, adroit gentleman who cared for his wife and tyrant; in this he resembled the dark, disembodied hands to be found in enchanted palaces.

  He knew every corner of his lover’s room and of Mochi’s room too. He had been the one to seek out and find a new home for them; he was the one trying to introduce the notion of order and economy into the domestic life of these “artists,” bringing them a little of the healthy influence of his own home, which was still his home, although hardly a fitting model and becoming less so with each day that passed. Bonifacio felt that he had two homes, that of his wife and that of his lover; and just as he had, unwittingly and unintentionally, introduced into the Valcárcel mansion licentious ways and the seeds of corruption that had found such fertile ground in Emma’s soul, so, in the same unthinking, instinctive way, he had, little by little, sown the seeds of sedentary habits, provincial order, and domestic discipline into his life with the singers. It may be that what contributed to this influence, more than the example of his own household, were memories of long ago, the habits of peaceful family life and economic constraint that he still preserved, for it was not in vain that he had spent his childhood and early youth alongside his poor, honest, humble, resigned parents. Bonifacio’s ideal was to dream a lot and to enjoy grand passions, but without this in any way disturbing good domestic customs. He loved order in the home; whenever he looked at pictures in books, he would always be entranced by some portrait of a neat, grave-faced old lady sitting by the fireside, knitting, while at her feet, a cat, lying on a soft fur rug, played silently with a ball of strong, thick wool, symbolizing the bourgeoisie’s defense against winter. He envied the courage and lack of concern of those artists with no fixed abode, who blithely set up camp wherever they happened to be; but his admiration was born of the contrast with his own tastes, with his invincible liking for a quiet, sedentary, orderly material life. Even if he were to become a true romantic and give free rein to his imagination, it seemed to him vital to be able to satisfy all his physical needs, which were many and complex. As mentioned before, his slippers were the symbol of those feelings. In his youthful daydreams, whenever he had imagined a castle built on rocks, complete with a silken stairway, with a beautiful young penitent leaning out of the ogive window, and with a lute and a gallant—himself—intent on stealing the virgin from the castle, he always stumbled over the impossibility of fleeing to distant climes without his slippers. And slippers were clearly incompatible with a lute. And it wasn’t just the slippers or his longing for a sweet, serene, sober household, for a family. What he longed for was an honest family, untroubled and unsullied! Was such a family incompatible with passion, like the slippers and the lute? Possibly not. But he had yet to encounter the “conjunction” of those two beautiful ideals. His family was not a real family; God had not wanted it so. His wife was his tyrant, and when, like a woman bewitched, she was in one of her unpredictable amorous moods, fleshly and insalubrious, unaware that she had been corrupted by her own husband, she was a concubine, a mad odalisque; and worst of all, he still had no son. There was no domestic sanctity in Serafina’s house either, in the house of his grand passion, nor even the hope of a long-lasting union of souls. The singers would eventually have to leave. They were wandering Jews; what with canceled payments, ructions among the company, weeks without work, hopes dashed, advances on wages, abrupt changes in accommodation because of rent arrears and outstanding debts, it was a miracle that Mochi and Serafina had been able to spend so many months in the town. Any day now Bonifacio would walk into Serafina’s room and find her with her bags packed. “Time to leave,” Mochi would say, and Bonifacio would have no right to stop them. He had no money of his own, he could not offer them the material means to stay in the town; art and necessity were blowing like a wind that would carry off into the world his passion, the sole refuge of his suffering soul, so in need of affection and chaste caresses (as Serafina’s had now become), and of the personal dignity he lacked with his Emma, who only briefly humbled herself when she assumed the role of bitch in heat, only to revert, even during the act of love itself, to being the despot, seasoning her caresses with lewd words that aroused pangs of conscience in her troubled husband. He would be left all alone in Emma’s power, in the power of Nepomuceno’s cold, cutting glances and his account books, in the power of cousin Sebastián and all the other members of the Valcárcel family who intended to make mincemeat of him with their scorn.

  Serafina woke up smiling, her toothache gone; she thanked Bonifacio for watching over her sleep as if she were a child; and the pleasure of feeling well again, all pain vanished, made her tender and sentimental and led, ultimately, to caresses. These were, however, gentle caresses, interspersed with long, reasonable conversations; they were nothing like the ardent prisons that her embraces had once been. “This,” thought Bonifacio, “is what my wife’s caresses should be like.” Serafina had grown accustomed to her innocent Bonifacio and to the provincial life of a sedentary bourgeois lady to which he inclined her, and which suited her extended stay in that poor town and the prolonged lack of work. The few hopes she had of “shining at her art” were finally fading, and Serafina was now considering another kind of happiness. The lack of rehearsals and performances, the closure of the theater, seemed to her like a liberation, almost a moral regeneration. Much as wealthy courtesans of a certain age aspire to honesty as the ultimate luxury, Serafina dreamed of independence, of escaping from the audience, of forgetting about music and settling down in a small town to vegetate and become an influential lady, respected and important. She was getting to know the life of that town,
which, at first, she had despised; she took an interest now in all the local gossip; she made a point of knowing the life history of certain ladies, and was much put out because Bonifacio failed to get her invited on Maundy Thursday to sit at the charity stall in a particular parish. She sang in the cathedral one night, along with Mochi and Minghetti, and felt immensely proud. She had a plan to put on a big concert in aid of the hospital or the hospice. Mochi liked the idea but modified it slightly. He was all in favor of a big concert, not in aid of the poor, though, but of the singers, the company’s shipwrecked few. When Minghetti the baritone was told of the plan, he thought it wonderful. He suggested to Mochi that they use the concert to reignite the townsfolk’s musical passions; they may have tired of opera, but the theater had been closed for far too long; if Serafina were to appear in evening dress in certain society salons, singing a few choice pieces, without any melodramatic gestures, that would reawaken the musical appetite of their many admirers and open the way to the idea of a subscription season, starting off with just the three of them—soprano, tenor, and baritone—and later bringing in a contralto, a bass, and some chorus; they could then prepare a campaign that would bring in enough money to allow them to pay off bad debts and thus be under less pressure to find a new contract elsewhere. In order to put their plan into action, they needed someone local to take the initiative. Who better than Bonifacio? Serafina was charged with asking him to help them. No sooner said than done. That evening, in the quiet intimacy of her room, while exchanging tender caresses, Serafina begged her lover to embrace her idea with urgency and enthusiasm and charged him with arranging the concert and overcoming any obstacles that might arise. It was the least Bonifacio could do, given that he no longer had any money to give her, and the concert was something she really needed. He put the singers’ idea to the board of the social club, who formed a kind of society attached to the Café de la Oliva; on the first floor was the ballroom and the rooms where members could read or play cards and, occasionally, games of chance. The board, conscious of its duties, promised to study the matter. There were various discussions, a vote was taken, and, by a tiny majority, they approved the plan to hold a concert, which would be followed by a ball, but with no buffet supper.