His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

“We will, in all probability, emerge from this much richer, but it is my duty to tell you, my dear niece, that our money, or, rather, your money, is potentially exposed to grave dangers, which I do not expect to occur but which are, nonetheless, possible. . . .”

  When her uncle spoke to her of this, Emma was in a state of semi-madness, with no interest in anything other than her passions, her pleasures, and the disorderly, noisy life into which she had dived as if into a pool of delights. So happy was she in her corruption that it seemed to her she had stopped the very wheel of fortune. Körner, who had become a close friend, had convinced her, by dint of talking to her about things she did not understand, that the “small advance” of thousands of duros would result in real wealth of the kind enjoyed by great men in other lands, where they did not count their millions in reales, as they did in Spain, but in pesos and other such coinage. She, too, wanted to be a duro millionairess, and her heart, Körner, and Minghetti all told her that she would be. It was a kind of miracle of knowledge and skill. If the Germans couldn’t work scientific miracles, who could? It was simply a matter of extracting from the seaweed—which the sea cast up on the province’s coastline in such abundance—a devilish substance much in demand in all kinds of industries. She found it hard to believe that all that promised money could possibly come from something so disgusting and evil-smelling even horses were repelled by it; but since the experts . . . and Minghetti . . . told her it was true, it must be. Onward. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. And what if they did ruin her? So what! One day, who knows, she might elope with the baritone.

  It seemed to her equally impossible, as impossible as that business with the seaweed, that Minghetti could really be as in love with her as he said, because although she was convinced that she had greatly improved and that she was, in the autumn of her years, very “interesting” and her “flesh” both succulent and sweet, he was, nevertheless, much younger, and she, to put no finer point on it, was a little timeworn.

  A kind of pact had grown between the Germans and Italians, tacitly at first and then quite explicitly, to provide each other with mutual protection. Those at the factory, Körner and his daughter, helped those from the theater; those from the theater, Mochi, Minghetti, and Serafina, helped those from the factory. Nepomuceno, whose interests lay with the Germans, encouraged Emma to invest in the opera company, because Marta and her father asked him to; Serafina and Mochi discouraged Bonifacio from any attempt to dispel his wife’s wild fantasies about the vast future profits that the chemical industry was sure to produce—or so Körner and her uncle told her.

  And all the parties involved were seduced, corrupted, and bound together in a kind of lewd solidarity by the life they were leading, “kicking over the traces,” to use Emma’s favorite phrase, and generally living a life of fun, an endless round of concerts, picnics, and private banquets. Emma’s taciturn, parasitical relatives from the mountains, in their capes and stiff felt hats, who had once sucked the lifeblood out of the Valcárcel household, had been shooed away and replaced by this motley crew of bivouacking foreigners, who, to the amazement and even envy of the town’s inhabitants, lived the sort of life rarely lived in that boring little place, and did so with a shameless, rather attractive bravado, which outsiders observed from afar, muttering darkly and wishing they could join in. Many young people from the “best families,” who had, to begin with, talked about Emma, Bonifacio, and Marta behind their backs, now fell silent and even sprang to the defense of the Reyes family and their friends, swiftly converted by Serafina’s smiles, Marta’s provocative, witty remarks, and, above all, by Emma’s invitations to soirees and banquets. Indeed, in order to silence the many—and prompted by Bonifacio, who was becoming a terrible bore with his moral quibbles and fears of what people might say—Emma somehow managed to persuade a few of the town’s most distinguished families to attend some of her parties, although not the more intimate ones. One of those families was that of an Andalusian judge, whose two daughters resembled nothing so much as cheap, faded watercolors; their father was the life and soul of the civil court, and his motherless offspring spent their lives innocently applauding their father’s humorous sallies. They were deeply bored in that damp, cold, grubby town, and Emma and company’s friendship was like manna from heaven. The judge, who was, moreover, an inveterate liar and frequently boasted of his great wealth “back home,” also became secretly involved in the proposed factory to the sum of 10,000 reales, to which he added a number of naughts whenever he spoke to friends and colleagues about his part in the business. However, Ferraz and his daughters were not Emma’s finest acquisition, although they were instrumental in giving her the opportunity, which she seized with both hands, to be able to do a real service to the Silva girls, three young women well provided with documents, debts, and fashion plates. The documents and the debts belonged to their father, but the fashion plates were theirs. They were the most elegant girls in town, and when the three of them strolled along the street together, striking poses like a permanent moving group of sculptures, they resembled the full-page pictures in the fashion magazines. They could make seven dresses out of one, and it was quite astonishing to see how they were able to make the top of an outfit into the bottom, cause a hat to grow or shrink, and make repeated use on brooches and hats of the same ears of corn, the same gherkins, and other fake vegetables. Regardless of this, it was they who dictated the fashion in the town and, given their skill and the arrogant figure they cut, they were besieged by flocks of ephemeral suitors. While their father did his utmost to stop the wheel of fortune in the gaming room attached to the Café de la Oliva, they were to be seen everywhere, like hawkers, hawking their own beauty around squares, churches, streets, and the theater, until a family bereavement put a stop to it. The old Coliseum was about to be reopened with the newly patched-together opera company, and the Silva girls would be unable to attend on Thursdays and Sundays to show off their charms, sitting very erect in their box on their cushioned chairs, like stiff, melancholy cranes at the water’s edge. The dead relative may only have been a distant uncle, but he was a marquis. Had he been anything less, the Silva girls would have continued to wear red and to be as ubiquitous as ever, but one could not ignore the death of a marquis without defiling one’s own reputation. There would be no more boxes at the theater for them. It was then that Emma was able to win the friendship of those elegant aristocrats, doing them a favor and killing two birds with one stone. Since she was to be the impresario, and the singers were her close friends and thoroughly decent people, there was no reason why the girls could not watch the performances from the wings. The Ferraz girls put the proposal to the Silva girls, who gleefully accepted, without even consulting their father, whom they never consulted about anything anyway. They could not flaunt their clothes in the wings, but they would definitely have fun; they would see new and interesting things and could even flirt with the singers, some of whom, like Minghetti, for example, were exceedingly handsome and charming. Emma felt she could not possibly allow those young women to go backstage unaccompanied and, from the very first night, also without consulting anyone, she went along too and introduced them to Serafina, who offered the use of her dressing room so that they could spend the intervals in pleasant conversation. Marta and the Ferraz girls also occasionally watched the performance from the wings, running and skipping along those sordid, narrow corridors and passageways, past backdrops and trapdoors; generally, though, they preferred to display themselves in the main box, where Emma, the presidenta, sat.

  Obviously, when people found out that the Silva girls were, at Emma’s invitation, watching the operas from the wings, there was a great deal of talk as well as many expressions of sympathy for those poor girls who, given the father they had, were now doubly orphaned. What the poor things needed was a mother! After that brief charitable moment, however, those same people would immediately verbally tear them to shreds. Not that the girls cared. Knowing Serafina filled them with pride, as it did Emma
, and they were deeply flattered by the respect with which they were treated by everyone both backstage and in the singer’s dressing room. Serafina was in seventh heaven, feeling herself admired and respected by those young aristocrats, whose refined manners and even the strict mourning they were wearing brought dignity and nobility to her interval conversations.

  “I’m happy, Bonifacio, so very happy, and I owe it all to you,” said Serafina, catching her lover by the wrists and clutching him to her bosom and kissing him with an enthusiasm and a gratitude much appreciated by Bonifacio.

  Yes, he thought, she was happy, and that was good. Emma was happy too and treated him better than before, and at times even hinted that she was equally grateful to him for initiating her into this new life of art, as Emma referred to the hurly-burly in which they were immersed. Everyone was happy, except him. He wasn’t pleased with the others or with himself or with anyone. People should be good, yet no one was. There was not a single honest person left in the world, and that was terrible. There was no one he could talk to, not even himself, for he was in flight from himself, and felt frightened and repelled by those painstaking soliloquies, of which he had once been so proud and found so very pleasing that he would happily fall asleep as he carried out that examination of conscience. It was clear to him, in short, that he was a bad person. But what was the point of the self-disgust that caused him to wake each morning feeling slightly sick if—once he was up and had washed and splashed a great deal of cold water on the back of his neck—what revived in him, with all the vigor of life and all the strength of his healthy, virile, robust middle years, was an invincible carnal desire, a hunger for pleasure, the sheer indolence of sin become habit. Things were going wrong, very wrong; his house, his wife’s house, which used to be so boring and unbearable, a dungeon and a tyranny, was now something far worse, it had become a brothel, yes, a brothel, and he would say to himself, “They come here to have fun and to ruin us; we’re all of us singers, actors, adventurers, heretics, a promiscuous hotchpotch.” That phrase “promiscuous hotchpotch” took on a terrible significance in Bonifacio’s thoughts. It meant a blend of incompatible loves, scandalous pleasures, abominable entanglements. Sometimes it seemed to him that the exaggerated familiarity that existed among the Germans, the singers, and his wife resembled the promiscuous shared bed of poverty; it might be that no crime against decency was actually committed there, but the danger existed and appearances condemned them all. Marta, who was going to marry Uncle Nepomuceno, allowed the covert flirtations of cousin Sebastián, now a lecherous, well-preserved fifty-year-old, who had gone from being a romantic to a cynic, believing that this was what progress was all about. The once idealistic and poetic Sebastián could no longer pass a cook in the kitchen without pinching her bottom, and he attributed this to the fact that they were living in a “positivist century.” He, Bonifacio, had been forced to allow his mistress to enter his wife’s house, and for the two women to become friends and to dine together. Although Emma’s honesty was beyond doubt, she did allow Minghetti to stand too close and to speak to her in too low a voice. And yet Bonifacio was not concerned about that, but why wasn’t he? Perhaps because his own guilty conscience closed his eyes, and he felt he had no right to accuse anyone, because he had lost his “spiritual tact,” and because, among so much falsity, stupidity, and disorder, he no longer knew the difference between good and evil; what had become of decorum, honor, delicacy? When, with the connivance of Don Nepomuceno, he was blithely fleecing the Valcárcel estate and besmirching the honor of his own house with the kind of adultery all men indulge in, but which was, nonetheless, adultery, he could always find in the midst of his remorse some kind of excuse for his conduct: love, art, and genuine passion could explain everything. But now! For some time now he had been unfaithful to that “genuine” passion, had surrendered night after night to a different passion, unbridled, lewd, and purely sensual, and all the more repugnant because the marital bed was the stage for these extravagant adventures; this had opened his eyes and made him understand the spiritual poverty within and realize that his passion was clearly not as great as he had thought and was, therefore, illegitimate. And then, painful though it was to admit, art itself had its pluses and minuses, and, as he had discovered, not all that glitters is art. No, he could deceive himself no longer; his house had become a brothel, and he was just one of the many lost souls. There was nothing good in that house, apart from the peaceful, gentle, serious, silent tenderness that stirred in him from time to time, making everything around him seem hateful, making him yearn, not to die—because he was terrified of death, of the pain of death and the uncertainty of what lay beyond the grave—but, rather, to be transformed, regenerated. What he wanted was for a new man to be grafted onto the old trunk he had been dragging around the world for far too long. He was not old and yet he felt as if he had been alive for centuries; how far off they seemed now, his memories of childhood, those years full of hopeful illusions when he had just emerged into conscious life! How many emotions he had experienced since then! How often he had gone over and over the same ideas!

  And poor Bonifacio would furiously rub his head, feeling sorry for that poor seething, surging brain of his, calling out for peace and rest and renewed energy.

  One day, Bonifacio came across the word “avatar” in a book and an explanation as to its meaning, and he said to himself, “That’s what I need. For another soul to enter my body, a new life, with none of the obligations of the old life.”

  He was not expecting miracles. He didn’t even like miracles. A miracle was an absurd thing that went against cold reason, no, he wanted method, order, rules—rules that brooked no exceptions. Miracles were romantic, revolutionary, violent, and he wanted no truck now with romanticism or violence, or even with the extraordinary or the passionate. Yes, there was such a thing as love, but a love that was more than just passion. There existed a sublime love that was more than mere sensual love, however distilled and platonic that might be. It always came down to a man’s love for a woman. No, there was something greater than that, the love of man for man, of father for son. “Yes, my own son. That is the kind of avatar I need. A being who is me, a me outside myself and starting again from zero, but nevertheless blood of my blood!”

  And weeping as he thought this, and leaning his head against the wall, Bonifacio was saying to himself, “Yes, yes, it’s always the same desire, what I’ve always longed for since I was old enough to understand—a son!”

  A hand filled with light seemed to pass over his mind, healing, by its mere touch, the wounds in his heart. He felt genuinely pleased with himself at the clear evidence that, despite his many errors, indeed, often running through them like a vein, there had been that latent but very real and vigorous desire to have a son, to experience that love devoid of all lust. Far more serious and far deeper than his love of art, than his yearning for passion for passion’s sake, had been that frustrated paternal love.

  Yes, that is what he had always wanted, and that desire had the fixed, physical, constant form of an intense memory—the desire to have a son, an only son.

  A daughter would not be a true continuation of himself; he could not imagine the being who would inherit his blood, his spirit, as feminine. The child had to be a boy, and an only child, because the love he would lavish on his son would be absolute, unrivaled. Loving several children seemed to Bonifacio an act of infidelity toward the firstborn. In his mind, loving many children was akin to polytheism. Having many children was like having many gods. No, he wanted just the one son, the one of whom his heart spoke, the one he could almost see there before him, in the air, in his imaginings as he lay unable to sleep.

  And where would that one son come from? Well, the law was the law and order was order; there was no room for clever sinful sophistry: His son would have to come from Emma’s womb.

  But he did not deserve a son! No, there would be no only son.

  After the night of the ball, which was the origin of that pro
miscuous social hotchpotch of singers, Germans, Emma, Uncle Nepomuceno, and himself—after that night in which, were he not entirely averse to the idea of the direct intervention in his affairs by the supernatural, he might have seen the hand of Providence, a revelation from Fate—had he really proved to be the equal of the great ideals he had dreamed of? No, not at all. He had reverted to his old hesitant self and allowed himself to be drawn, along with everyone else, into the easy, lazy life of vice, and had even come to delight in having his mistress there in the house, sitting at his wife’s table, and come to view such abominations as perfectly acceptable, applying to them the semi-drunk, postprandial philosophy that had once seemed to him so exceptional and deep, so imbued with poetic inspiration and artistic morality. He was the same person who, on hearing Serafina sing a song to the Virgin, had felt a divine love stirring inside him, the same person who, in the grip of an outlandish and entirely false mysticism, had bizarrely but sincerely compared himself with the Virgin Mother!

  And who often, afterward, had seen things quite differently and thought, “It’s all a question of geography! If I were a Turk, this situation would be perfectly legitimate, so let us simply imagine that we live on a different latitude . . . and longitude.” Even worse, did he feel any remorse when he was pondering these sad thoughts? No. He was sure, because his conscience told him so, that a few hours later, when his body was replete and his imagination excited by wine and coffee, and possibly by the music produced by Minghetti and Emma, he would once again be that same corrupt, complaisant Bonifacio, perfectly contented with the kind of free love that had installed itself in his house. Serafina would arrive, and while Minghetti and Emma continued their interminable music lessons, he and Serafina would—O misery! O shame and ignominy!—be making love in the arbor in the garden. They were lovers, habitual lovers, without the excuse, however feeble, but an excuse nonetheless, of being in the grip of blind passion, no, they were lovers out of habit, out of ease of access, out of pure sin. . . .