His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  There was a whiff of smelling salts in the air, a smell that was a torment to his senses, which remembered it all too well. And added to this was another rather nauseating odor.

  He went closer to the bed, at the foot of which lay a pile of underwear, which Emma had removed, as was her custom, once she was between the sheets. His senses spoke to him of old miseries, and then, after a moment’s thought, he felt alarmed. Thinking all kinds of wild things and forgetting that his wife was sleeping, he asked rather too loudly, “But what happened?”

  “Don’t shout!” said Marta sternly.

  He put his face closer to his wife’s.

  “She’s sleeping,” said Körner.

  “Possibly,” thought Bonifacio.

  Looking pale, distraught, and disheveled, with the ten years she had managed to slough off weighing once more on her weary features, Emma suddenly opened her eyes, and the first thing she did was shoot a look first of hatred and then of horror at her much-afflicted husband.

  “What’s happened, my dear?” he asked.

  Emma wanted to speak and, it would seem, even give a speech, because she tried to sit up and stretch out her arms; however, that physical effort brought on a fit of nausea and Bonifacio, with no time to retreat, was drenched in the same squall of vomit that had required Nepomuceno to go and change his clothes.

  Körner discreetly took a step back. Marta rang the bell to summon help because there were certain sordid details she was not prepared to deal with. The stomach she used to say, is not our slave; rather, it enslaves us.

  The Ferraz girls hurried in, followed by Eufemia, who brought water, sand, a towel, and whatever else was needed. It was made clear to Bonifacio that he stank, and so he, too, rushed off to change.

  When he returned to his wife’s bedroom, he found Nepomuceno, Körner, Marta, the Ferraz girls, one of the Silva sisters, Minghetti, and Sebastián all waiting in the drawing room.

  “Is she better? Is she alone?”

  Sebastián deigned to say, “No, Don Basilio is with her.”

  Before going into the boudoir, Bonifacio looked around at their faces. He saw something strange there: They no longer seemed alarmed but as if filled with malicious curiosity. He saw surprise and uncertainty on their faces, not fear or the dread of some imminent danger.

  “Is something wrong? What is it?” he asked urgently, with the pleading look he always wore whenever he vainly asked his fellow creatures to show some tender feelings, some charity.

  “Go in,” said Körner, “after all, you are her husband.”

  Bonifacio entered the bedroom. Don Basilio was, as always, impeccably dressed in a cream-colored suit and a waisted overcoat. He was smiling and, with an amused expression on his face, weathering the storm of horror and outrage at nature’s fickleness emanating from his patient, who was clutching her already disheveled head and addressing her maker in familiar and insulting terms.

  “Good heavens, whatever’s wrong?” asked a horrified Bonifacio.

  “Nothing. It’s just that your wife is extremely upset and has taken very badly some news I had assumed would fill her with satisfaction and understandable pride.”

  “Shut up, Aguado! Don’t make fun of me! I’m in no mood for jokes. Oh God, what will become of me? This is awful! Terrible. And why now, of all moments? I’ll die, I know it, my heart tells me so. I can’t bear it and I won’t!”

  “Is she delirious?” cried Bonifacio in alarm.

  “No, why?”

  “Why is she saying she can’t bear it? Bear what?”

  “What she means,” and here Don Basilio broke off to give a hearty laugh, “what she means is that she doesn’t want to bear a child, but you’ll see, on that as yet distant day, we’ll bring a healthy, bouncing child into the world.”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Bonifacio, suddenly understanding, not so much because of the evidence before him, as because of the voice of conscience screaming in his head: “She has gone and he has come; he didn’t want to come until your heart was free so that he could fill it entirely. Passion has departed and my son is about to arrive.”

  He tried to throw his arms about his wife, but she beat him off with her fists so fiercely that he almost lost his balance and fell backward onto Don Basilio.

  “Yes, she’s certainly upset, very upset indeed”’ said Don Basilio, wincing from the pain of a corn that the nitwit husband had stepped on.

  He began to explain.

  In a state of real panic, Emma, like a drowning man to a piece of wreckage, was clinging to the hope that all this was quite simply impossible.

  Don Basilio needed to look no further than his own clientele to prove that “impossibles” of that nature had kept him up on many a night. He cited various women who had suddenly fallen pregnant after years and years of apparent sterility. “The mysteries of nature!”

  But hadn’t she been told, all those years ago, when she miscarried and nearly died, with her inner workings left in a terrible state, that she would never again give birth, that it was all over for her, that something or other had happened to her womb?

  “You may have been told that, señora, but in illo tempore I did not have the honor of counting you among my patients. Some doctors may be very skilled at bringing children into the world but know nothing about obstetrics or tocology or any other ‘ologies,’ be they divine or human.”

  While Emma continued her laments, shouts, and protests, swearing over and over that she was in no state to bear children, that it was a death sentence in disguise, that she was too old and it was too late, and so on in the same vein, Don Basilio turned to Bonifacio to explain what had happened.

  As soon as he saw his patient, he noticed symptoms that had nothing to do with her usual nervous crises; he managed to obtain from her certain intimate details, although not without difficulty, given Emma’s horror, not just of her uncle’s accounts but of anything that involved calculations or forecasts or in any way smacked of arithmetic, and thanks to that information, as well as to other closer examinations, he had concluded that the lady, like many others before her, had, after some years, returned to the maternal fold long ago abandoned. He spoke a great deal of wombs and placentas, and much more about the mysterious paths taken by nature à travers—“if you’ll pardon the gallicism,” said Don Basilio, who was, within his limitations, something of a purist—à travers all kinds of physiological phenomena. Needless to say, and he did not mean to boast when he said this, he had expected no less from the healthy, homeopathic regimen he had prescribed for his patient: Without those drops and, more particularly, the physical and mental influence of good food, walks, and, above all, amusing distractions, her body would have continued to live a valetudinarian existence, without the remotest hope of ever dredging up sufficient energy to create a new life, an alter ego. Don Basilio was clearly intent on impressing Bonifacio, but he was not usually quite so pedantically affected.

  Despite this, Bonifacio had to restrain himself from embracing the doctor; he felt, absurdly, that his wife’s pregnancy depended on that discussion between the doctor and Emma; if Emma won the argument, he could say goodbye to his son; however, if the doctor had the final word, then the birth was guaranteed.

  Since there was no reason to hide the facts, no one bothered to do so; Don Basilio made no attempt to conceal his prognosis from the people waiting in the drawing room. There were shouts of joy, heavily tinged with surprise, as well as some mischievous comments; and the jokes and laughter provided ample reason to continue having fun and making a racket. Emma, meanwhile, continued to protest; she did, it was true, feel better after having been sick, but her alarm, albeit of a different kind now, had grown worse; she wasn’t ill, as she had feared, but she was “in an interesting condition,” and that was simply appalling. And when they took no notice of her and laughed at her and even left her alone and went racing around the house, drinking and playing the piano and singing and generally mocking the pregnant lady whenever she admitted she was
no longer in pain, she insulted her friends, half joking, half serious, by calling them her executioners and telling them that they could give birth for her if they wanted and see how they liked that. . . .

  She continued to deny her state, as if it were a matter of honor, just as Marta might have denied it had she found herself in a similar situation; but Emma denied it not out of conviction but in order to deceive herself. Besides, having listened to Don Basilio and answered his wise questions, she realized now how blind she had been and that she should have seen what was happening weeks ago, when she first began to notice certain changes in her personal hygiene.

  Bonifacio had wanted to stay with his wife when the others, dismissed by Don Basilio, raced off to the dining room where food and drink awaited them, but Emma soon sent him packing too. He disappeared, and the guests became the masters and mistresses of the house, for Nepomuceno had left along with the doctor.

  In the dining room, the jokes being made about the unexpected event took on an increasingly burlesque flavor. Calculations were made as to precisely when the birth would take place, always assuming that things progressed sedately toward a happy conclusion. Hypotheses abounded as to the probable cause of this extraordinary occurrence, and these intermingled, combined, and reached absurd extremes, with examples being dredged up of similar or even more extraordinary cases. Körner proved particularly erudite, but the best and most credible testimony was deemed to be found in recent local events. Emma would not have been in the least amused to hear herself being compared to ladies who had fallen pregnant at the age of sixty, and to have Ninon de Lenclos[1] cited as an example of miraculously preserved beauty, not that Señorita de Silva had even heard of her. The things Marta knew! For Marta had been the one to divert the conversation from obstetrics to aesthetics, in order to show off her knowledge without detriment to her decorum and her prerogatives as a modest virgin ignorant of all things obstetrical. However, she, who was usually so sharp, proved so inept at feigning innocence that she overstepped the mark; indeed, hoping to rival the Ferraz girls in their innocence, she went so far, on first learning of the happy future event, to declare that she had always been told that babies came from Paris; the younger of the Silva sisters, who was genuinely innocent, then went on to reveal everything she knew about the subject, which, it turned out, was quite a lot; and Marta was then able rapidly to retreat and refrain from regaling them with still more ridiculous myths of a phylogenetic or ontogenetic nature, as she would doubtless have put it had she not feared that such terms would be frowned upon by her companions.

  They all agreed on one thing: As the doctor had already said, the main reason why Emma’s inner workings and maternal capabilities had been restored to health was to be found in the new life Emma had been leading, full of distractions and fun. When Minghetti was consulted on the subject, he nodded sagely and continued eating cakes. The other guests eyed him on the sly, and the more perspicacious among them noticed that he looked un peu gêné, as Körner whispered to Sebastián in French, although Sebastián had no idea what he meant.

  Nepomuceno returned when they were just getting up from the table. Still joking, they said goodbye to Emma, with Körner and even Sebastián advising her to take certain precautions, which left the Ferraz girls wondering how an inveterate bachelor like Sebastián could possibly know such things; and all the virgins present, Marta included, offered to do whatever they could to help their friend in her interesting new state of health, as long, of course, as this was compatible with the virginal state in which they still found themselves.

  Emma raged and struck the air, and her anger only grew more vehement because she could give the girls no decorous explanation as to why she was so furious at the sentence imposed on her. As they went down the stairs, some expressed the view that Emma’s fury was entirely put on, and that she was, in fact, really very pleased with the doctor’s diagnosis; others, more accurately, felt that while Emma might take some pleasure in the news, it was greatly outweighed by her terror of giving birth, and by her feelings of disgust and repugnance at the thought of her subsequent maternal duties.

  “Besides,” said one of the Ferraz girls to Señorita de Silva, “didn’t you see the fear on her face at the mere thought of it?”

  “She looked like a corpse.”

  “Or like a fifty-year-old.”

  “Well, she’s not far off.”

  “Nonsense, don’t exaggerate. It was just that her makeup had smudged.”

  “Well, it put ten years on her.”

  “It did indeed.”

  And then, out in the street, they suddenly fell silent, all thinking about Minghetti and the sour expression on his face when he went into Emma’s room. Sebastián accompanied Marta and her father home. Nepomuceno had been obliged to stay behind because, now that the wedding was fast approaching, Körner had grown very touchy about what people might say and did not want his daughter to be seen out in the dark streets with her fiancé, even if her father was with them. He said that, in Germany, it was fine for an engaged couple to wander around wherever they liked, but in southern countries one could not be too careful. He was apparently afraid that Nepomuceno’s ardor might get the better of him.

  Only as they parted did the friends ask where Bonifacio had got to. He certainly hadn’t stayed behind in Emma’s room.

  After his wife had so vigorously rejected his expressions of delight at the approach of fatherhood, Bonifacio had withdrawn to his bedroom, although his dearest wish would have been to share with his wife in holy love the joy of the unexpected and very welcome news that Don Basilio had just given them.

  In the absence of his wife, Bonifacio had to make do with his humble bachelor’s bed, in the room that had been witness to so many thoughts, dreams, regrets, so many sorrows, humiliations, and tears. His bed—unlike the nuptial bed—was his confidant, his best friend; the poor walnut frame, the sheets with no lace border (because lace always set his teeth on edge), the blue-flowered bedspread, all spoke to him of sweet, sad, poetic things, in perfect harmony with his very deepest being. It seemed to him that having spent years and years looking at those flowers, while his thoughts strayed through the enchanted worlds of his hopes and sorrows, the bedspread had become covered with a kind of idealistic veneer, the blue moss of his daydreams. Indeed, that bedspread, and another of the same design but in pink, were rather like the close friends and confidants he lacked in the world of the living.

  This was something he often thought about: He had no real friends, nor any childhood friends, no selfless friends who would understand him, no older friends either, certainly not il suo caro Mochi, who had, briefly, pretended to be his friend. Mochi, may God forgive him, was a mere opportunist. No, Bonifacio’s friends were objects, things: the mountains on the horizon, the moon, the belfry of the local church, certain bits of furniture, the worn and faded clothes he wore about the house, his down-at-heel slippers, and, above all, his bed. Those inanimate beings, the children of industry, to which Plato denied all thought, were for Bonifacio like paralyzed souls who could hear, feel, and understand, but who could not answer, not even with gestures.

  And yet, on that solemn night, as he contemplated his blue- flowered bedspread, the brief, humble folds of his clean sheets, the soft, broad pillows, it seemed to him that their freshness and appearance of intimate familiarity were smiling at him as he took off his boots and put on his slippers. No happiness could be complete until his feet were safe inside those soft slippers.

  “Ah,” he said contentedly. And resting both hands on his bed, he allowed the sweetest of smiles to spread across his face, a reflection of the joy in his heart.

  Now was the time to meditate, to dream, on this most solemn of nights! He knew there were no miracles. If only there were. Miracles and the true God were incompatible. But there was Providence, a plan of the world that existed in preestablished harmony with the natural laws (not that he used these words, for he was not thinking in words). There were providential coincide
nces, which the pious man could use as salutary warnings emanating from God and brought to him by nature. It was no miracle that the doctors who had once condemned his wife to eternal sterility had been proved wrong; it was no miracle that Emma should give birth when she was nearly forty. Nor was it miraculous, although it was quite remarkable, that the announcement of the coming of his son should coincide with the night when passion had just departed. Serafina had left and Isaac had arrived. For he was quite certain that his son should be called Isaac, but that he would, in fact, be called who knows what, probably Diego, Antonio, or Sebastián, or whatever the child’s tyrannical mother decided. Isaac! What was strangest and most remarkable of all was the vision he’d had on that memorable night of the concert, the concert that had seen the birth of so many of the household’s misfortunes, along with its wholesale corruption. What had also been born at that concert was his growing longing for peace, for a pure and tranquil love and the vague hope, rejected and resuscitated by turns, of at last having a son, a legitimate son, an only son. The most extraordinary thing of all, although not miraculous, was the coming to pass of what he had foolishly called “the Annunciation.”

  He was so exalted, so filled with love, that he felt slightly afraid.

  “Ah, if this is madness, then long live madness!”

  He was so happy, so proud! There was no doubt about it, he and Providence understood each other. It had been like a contract between them: If she leaves, then he will come.

  But had she really left?

  “Yes,” said Bonifacio out loud, standing up and softly stamping his foot. “Yes, all that remains here is the paterfamilias. There is only room in this heart for a father’s love for his son.”

  A secret voice was telling him that this new love was rather abstract, somewhat metaphysical, but that it would change; when the boy was born, it would be quite different. It occurred to Bonifacio that not knowing what to call his son doubtless contributed to the lack of human affection he felt for his child. Isaac! No, he would not be called Isaac. Besides, Isaac had not been his father’s only son. Although it might appear irreverent, he should really call the child Manolín or Jesús. Not that he was comparing himself with God the Father, or even with Saint Joseph.