No, he would never have a son! A wretch such as he did not deserve a son and so he abandoned all hope.
But if he could not have happiness, surely he could still repent?
Why not aspire to moral perfection and see how far along that path he could go?
Of all the great things he had thought of being—a great writer, a great captain (although not often and only as a child), a great musician, and, above all, a great artist—never in his wildest dreams had he considered sainthood. Once he had thought that since he could not invent great passions, dramas, and novels, he should simply live them out in real life, with himself as the hero. Why, then, should he not aspire to a different sort of heroism? Why should he not become a saint?
He lacked the necessary skill and talent to be an artist or a writer, but he would not need those qualities to be a saint.
And poor Bonifacio, who sometimes wandered like a madman about the house, the streets, and the empty avenues, sought out a copy of The Golden Legend in his father-in-law’s library and saw that there had, indeed, been many rather unintelligent saints, who had nonetheless been visited by grace.
Yes, that was the answer, he could be a simple saint, or even a simpleton saint.
Since he could not have a son, he could leave everything and follow . . . but follow whom? What was he thinking? He did not have enough faith, far from it! He had so many doubts, doubts that could never be dispelled by his disorderly ideas, that he would never be able to rid himself of them and become a firm believer again! The great fat tomes he had read so avidly, hoping to acquire as much wisdom as possible in order to prepare for his son’s education, had created a kind of intellectual indigestion of negations. He was neither a believer nor an unbeliever. There were things in the Bible he could not accept. When he read that, even according to orthodox thinkers, the six days of the Creation in Genesis were not days but epochs, he felt an enormous sense of relief, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders, as if he had been the one to invent that story about the world being created in six days. But there was still the story about the ark containing all the animals; there was still the Tower of Babel; there was still original sin that passed from fathers to sons; and there was still Joshua stopping the sun instead of stopping the earth. No, it was impossible; he could not take up his cross because he was not a simple soul like those found in the Middle Ages but a modern, educated, café-frequenting simple soul. He certainly had a genuine desire for sacrifice, self-denial, and charity! Performing extravagant deeds for the greater glory of whatever or whoever was there up above seemed to him perfectly reasonable, rather like listening to an inner music. One night in bed, he read a book that spoke of a half-crazed Italian mystic from the Middle Ages, whom people called God’s Juggler; he certainly seemed to have been Heaven’s clown; though full of love for Jesus, he laughed at the church and took it for granted that he would be damned, but would carry down to Hell with him his divine passion, which no one could take away. This Jacopone da Todi, as he was called by ordinary folk, who both mocked and admired him, did the most absurd things that would garner him not praise but ridicule; and to that end he would walk down the street on his hands or slather his naked body with oil and then roll around in a heap of feathers before appearing in the streets for the children to chase.
Bonifacio wept tender tears when he read about the exploits of this mystic clown, the composer of what later became the famous laude. Bonifacio was no poet, but he felt he could say many things with his flute and even convert infidels. The difficulty lay in beginning. The idea of escaping and setting off into the world, leaving everything behind him and—since he had no son—becoming a mad village saint somewhere seemed perfectly reasonable, but his conscience told him that he would never dare to leave so much as his slippers behind in order to take up his cross; he would never even leave his wife, still less his mistress.
14
THEN GREAT events occurred to drag Bonifacio away from this intermittent, mystical whimsy, which, in his moments of rationalist, moderate sensualism, he himself rejected as unhealthy. When the moment came to say goodbye to Serafina Gorgheggi—who, after the company once again broke up, was leaving with Mochi to perform at a theater in La Coruña—poor Bonifacio could not help but remember those familiar lines from Bellini’s La Sonnambula: “Ah, del tutto ancor non sei cancellata dal mio cor. . . . Ah, you have not yet been entirely driven from my heart!”
That separation had been hanging over them like a constant threat, lending a bitter taste to their happiness during the days and months of blind passion; it would be a necessary grief, even deserved and salutary, thought Bonifacio, filled with remorse and good moral intentions. But when the time actually came, the pain was such that Bonifacio felt as if he were undergoing a major operation without the benefit of anesthetic. Finding a satisfactory explanation for his feelings in a tangled web of sophistry, Bonifacio frankly acknowledged that natural, purely human feelings were the strongest and truest of feelings, and that he was a true romantic and devotee, not a sham mystic. Despite the rather lukewarm way in which he had been thinking of her lately, separation from Serafina caused him the kind of terrible, unbearable pain of which he had such a horror. It was so exhausting to be under constant mental tension and to have to use all his strength to withstand that very real pain! And yet he had no choice. It was absurd to try and keep the opera company there any longer. They had used every possible ploy to keep Mochi and Serafina in town. Not even in the days of La Tiplona, when she was still performing, had it been known for the principal singers of an opera company to remain for a whole year, whether working or resting. The occasional member of the chorus had stayed on, marrying a local man or taking up a trade; a conductor had settled there and become the director of the municipal band; but never before had sopranos and tenors stayed for so many months; normally, once all the corn was eaten, off they flew. The continuing presence of Serafina, Mochi, and Minghetti was as remarkable a phenomenon as if the swallows were to stay on to spend the winter among the snows. Except that the swallows would never have made themselves the talk of the town by allowing themselves to be fed by the sparrows, for example. And all kinds of things were said about the singers’ long sojourn, some of which was paid, some not. However, the problem was not the gossip—which no one, apart from Bonifacio, was bothered about anyway—but the impossibility of finding an elegant or even semi-elegant way to continue keeping up appearances or providing the necessary resources to cover the enormous expenses incurred by the few remaining members of the company, and thus it became clear that this “state of affairs,” as Bonifacio referred to it, had to end. The company had made significant losses, and the principal singers, Mochi, Serafina, and Minghetti, continued to be a burden on the company, or, rather, on the much-reduced Valcárcel fortune. An opportunity had arisen to earn their living by working, and they had to take it, however painful it would be for all of them to say goodbye. The one person who refused to accept this was Emma. She closeted herself with her uncle-cum-administrator, who had recently been appointed vice president of the Academy of Fine Arts, part of the local Commercial and Amicable Society, and out of those discussions came an agreement—or, rather, an exchange of services—by which Minghetti would remain in the town as the director of music at the aforementioned academy. The salary they were offering was fairly modest but enough to satisfy Minghetti, who could, he thought, supplement it by giving piano and singing lessons, and what with this and that (especially “that,” murmured the gossips) he could manage, until he wearied of that sedentary life and decided to accept one of the many contracts, which, according to him, he was constantly being offered in other countries.
Serafina was sad to leave the town, where she had almost managed to forget that she was a mere singer and a fortune hunter and come to believe she was a respectable lady who mixed with the best society in that provincial capital, and who had acquired a mild, faithful, gentle, handsome lover. She had grown genuinely fond of Bonifacio,
for whom she felt an almost sisterly affection, an affection that could mutate into lust and even jealous passion whenever she suspected that foolish Bonifacio might weary of her and love another. For some time now, she had noticed a certain coolness and indifference in her beloved dimwit, a tendency to avoid intimate contact. At first, she put this down to the strange matrimonial Walpurgis Nights that had, for a while, so worried Bonifacio; then, following the trail of her lover’s preoccupations and distractions, she realized that there was no other love interest, only certain obsessive ideas. He might end up becoming a complete and utter dimwit, and she would rather regret that. “He’s going soft in the head, and it’s all my fault.”
Often, during one of their minor quarrels, the kind of quarrel indulged in by old, faithful, but weary lovers, she had heard Bonifacio talk about morality as an obstacle to their happiness, but she could never have suspected Bonifacio’s all-consuming idea, that of having a son, which was his real reason for distancing himself from his lover and from sin.
However, on the night when the carriage set off for Galicia, Bonifacio sprang onto the running board, gave Serafina one last, furtive kiss and felt that his passion had not been merely an artistic lie, because with that kiss he was bidding farewell to the last remnant of his youth and to the kind of intense, ineffable delights he would never again experience.
Standing among the crowd that had gathered to say goodbye to the singers, and once the carriage had vanished into the gloom, Bonifacio felt very alone and abandoned, relegated once more to his former despised and insignificant state.
Ahead of him, as he walked back along the dark street, alone among the crowd of friends, male and female, he could just make out two figures walking arm in arm, as was permitted at the time between young ladies and their suitors; it was Marta Körner and Nepomuceno, who had gone on ahead, escaping the vigilant eye of Marta’s father, who disapproved of such lax behavior. They had been at once touched and enlivened by that farewell scene, and the dark, mysterious, barely lit streets added to that sense of intimacy; one could hear in that whispered dialogue the breath of passion . . . carnal passion in Nepomuceno’s case and a passionate desire to have a husband in the case of Marta. Absorbed in conversation, they were quite oblivious to those walking behind them, as if there were no one else around for miles; they occasionally raised their voices, especially Marta; and Bonifacio, unintentionally at first, then with great interest, heard some very interesting things.
Nepomuceno was saying that he would have to talk to Emma as soon as possible and tell her the couple’s great secret, that they were going to be married before the month was out. They had to settle accounts, separate their respective monies, although he would continue as his niece’s administrator until, that is, there was nothing left worth administering. She was a hopeless case, he said, and had done nothing but spend and spend, not realizing that she was heading for utter ruin. Talking to her about mortgages was like speaking to her in Greek. “Go ahead and mortgage, then,” she would say, for the only thing she knew about mortgages was that it was a quick way of getting more money to pay for her extravagant whims.
“You see,” Nepomuceno was saying to Marta (he still addressed her formally as usted, leaving the more familiar tú until after the wedding), “she hasn’t the faintest idea about percentages, and high interest rates and low interest rates are all the same to her; she just wants to get the money as quickly as possible; she seems to think she’s robbing the moneylenders who lend out money at goodness knows how high a rate. To save her from such evils, I’ve made myself her personal ‘Jew,’ and all unbeknown to her, because she never even asks, I’m the one who provides her with money at a very modest interest rate.”
Marta was listening to Nepomuceno as raptly as if he were reciting Goethe’s “Early Spring” to her.
“So they’re on the road to ruin, then?”
“Yes, there’s nothing to be done.”
“And it’s her fault.”
“Yes, but he started it, and she followed, and soon everyone was at it. You’ve seen how it is: The house is like a refuge for the homeless; the singers have devoured the equivalent of a whole estate, and now that the factory’s doing so badly—”
“You won’t tell anyone else that, will you?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“Papa’s hoping to build up the business; he’s been offered new markets, guaranteed outlets—”
“Yes, yes, but that will come too late for them; what we do with our money, Marta, will get the factory back on its feet, but it will be too late for them. Our future lies in gunpowder. . . .”
Marta squeezed Nepomuceno’s arm, and Bonifacio heard no more of what they said.
He hung back and was the last to enter the house, to which many of those who had gone to say goodbye to Serafina and Mochi had returned, for it was from there that the “retinue” had set out. Serafina had taken her leave there because Emma was not feeling well enough to go out, and they had said their goodbyes in Emma’s boudoir.
Bonifacio paused at the street door, when everyone else had already gone upstairs. What a noise! What a racket! As usual. No one gave a thought now to those who had left, as if they were of no importance. Chairs were dragged across the floor, someone started playing the piano, and then came the click-clack of people dancing, yes, they were dancing!
“And I’m the one who brought them here! They’re dancing on the ruins of the Reyes fortune; the Valcárcel household is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the very last penny is being gaily thrown away on the scoundrels and libertines that I brought to the house! ‘He started it,’ that rascal said, and he’s right. I started it and I still haven’t paid back the money I stole. And everything else that followed—the theater company, the factory, the banquets, the picnics, the soirees, the loans made to those scroungers and spongers—are all my fault, the fault of my grand passion, which was already burning out because I was so afraid that my adultery would be revealed, yes, adultery, that’s what it was, I tolerated everything, I let all these things happen. It’s all my fault, yes, Nepomuceno was quite right when he said, ‘He started it.’ ”
And still standing in the ill-lit doorway, Bonifacio clutched his head.
He could not bring himself to go upstairs. With that rabble inside, his own house disgusted him.
“If only someone could sweep them out and me along with them, all of them. . . . How can I continue with this life, especially now, when neither pleasure nor sin require it of me? Egotistical hypocrite! Now that your lover has gone, you fulminate against the immorality of the others!
“And what about the threat of bankruptcy? If Nepomuceno says we’re heading for bankruptcy, then we are. We’ll be poor. I wouldn’t really mind for myself, but the awful thing is, it’s my fault.”
The dull, continuous buzz of revelry up above suddenly stopped; then came the sound of hurried footsteps all heading in one direction . . . toward Emma’s boudoir.
“Whatever can be wrong?” thought Bonifacio, frightened and reverting to his old way of thinking. “Emma must have been taken ill and she’s going to blame me.” He went over to the stairs, and the door above burst open. Bounding down in his direction came two shapes that turned out to be Sebastián and Minghetti, who both ran straight into him.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” he cried, picking his hat up from the floor, he who was supposed to be master of the house.
“Get upstairs this minute, man! Honestly, daydreaming as usual! There’s Emma ill and you hanging about down here. . . .”
Sebastián’s words sounded to Bonifacio like an archaeological treatise, the classic repertoire of insults heaped upon him in his role as domestic serf.
“But what’s wrong? What’s wrong with Emma?”
“She’s not well . . . some kind of fainting fit . . . a terrible headache,” said Minghetti. “We’re going to fetch Don Basilio. She’s been calling for him.”
“Go upstairs, man, quickly. She’s
calling for you too. I’ve never seen her like this before. It must be serious. Quickly, upstairs with you.”
And the two emissaries rushed out into the street, each rivaling the other in haste and zeal.
“You go to his club, and I’ll go to his house,” said Sebastián, and each of them raced off, one in one direction, the other in another.
Bonifacio entered the house, trembling, just as he used to. What could it be? Did this mean a return to the awful days of the caged and ailing beast? Compared with that, these days of lax morals seemed like a bed of roses. And what weapons would he have in the future to fight that battle? He no longer believed in passion, even though, that night, he could still feel what remained of its aching roots; he no longer believed in the ideal, in art, it was all an illusion, a temptation to sin. Yes, it would mean a return to being enslaved, insulted, tied like a dog to the bed of the madwoman; he would no longer have the strength to resist; as long as he had an ideal, a passion, he could survive anything; without that, though, he would die. And if she became an invalid again, and if poverty were no longer merely a possibility but a certainty, no, that would be too dreadful. He would run away.
He walked down the corridor. The house was in utter confusion. The Ferraz girls and one of the Silva sisters were rushing back and forth, giving contradictory orders to the servants; in Emma’s boudoir, Marta and Körner, standing by the bed, looked like statues on a mausoleum.
“She’s sleeping,” said Körner solemnly.
“Quiet!” said Marta, one finger on her lips.
“But what happened?”
“Shh! Be quiet.”
He drew nearer and asked, “But I need to know. And where’s her uncle? Where is he?”
“He’s getting changed,” answered Marta in a sibilant voice that seemed louder than a shout.
His Only Son: With Dona Berta Page 21