This idea made him sit up in bed, where he had already lain down fully clothed. Since Bonifacio was not a believer, in the strict sense of the word, and his doubts had often led him to ask exegetical questions—insofar as he could understand them—it seemed to him that history had, albeit with the best of intentions, served Joseph very poorly. He felt suddenly intensely sorry for him. What if he and no one else had been the father of his putative son; setting aside all the mysterious, sublime, supernatural, but quite unmiraculous relations that might exist between the Divinity and the Son of Man, let us suppose, just for a moment, that Joseph really was the father. How dreadful! To take from Joseph both the glory and the love of his son and give it all to the mother! What about the father? What about him? Lost in these wild thoughts, his eyes brimmed with tears. He must be mad. Why, when he should be so contented, was he crying, filled with infinite pity for Joseph? What about truth and history? But history knew nothing of fatherhood.
“Nor do I. When I have the child beside me, lying in a cradle, I won’t be thinking about Saint Joseph or about theology.”
At that moment, the thought occurred to him: “The boy should be called Pedro, like my father. Ah, my poor dear father and mother!” He sobbed, burying his face in the pillows, which he soaked with his tears.
There lay the source, the fountainhead of all true love, the chain that joins fathers and sons; yes, the chain that, link by link, leads us back to the past would be all love and selflessness, the honest, charitable chain that binds together the poor human race; but that chain ran from the past into the present and on into the future, and death broke each and every link, bringing forgetting and indifference. He felt suddenly alone in the world, with no bond of love that might protect him, and yet, he realized, he was the product of other people’s selflessness, of a long line of loving sacrifice. Ah, what infinite consolation! The origin of life must also have been an act of love; there was no rational reason to imagine a moment when his ancestors loved their sons less than he did his. Bonifacio had turned slightly to face the wall; the lamp on his bedside table cast the shadow of his profile onto the white stucco. On other occasions, he had taken a kind of melancholy consolation in the fact that his silhouetted profile resembled that of his father, as he still saw him in distant memory. That night, the resemblance was much clearer, much sharper. “How strange! I didn’t look very much like my father at all, and yet our silhouettes are so similar: the mustache, the way I move my mouth, the outline of the forehead, and the way my chest lifts when I sigh, things I saw a thousand times when lying on my father’s bed at night, while he read or meditated, and I lay, snuggled up against him, contentedly savoring the feeling of warmth and protection, as if wrapped around by the wings of love, a feeling I thought to be of infinite worth. Ah, my dear father, how you must have loved me!”
Bonifacio forgot that he had not yet had supper and had allowed weakness to overwhelm him. Without even realizing it, he began to feel ill. His legs were trembling, and his mind was filling with childhood memories that took on an almost hallucinatory energy and vigor. He felt himself fading and dissolving into a kind of geological map of his existence, in which various scenes from his early life were laid out before him; he saw himself in his father’s arms and then in his mother’s; he could taste on his palate flavors from his childhood; he could smell odors which, in his earliest years, had made as much of an impression on him as a poem. He began to feel afraid: He jumped out of bed and tiptoed into Emma’s bedroom. She was sleeping deeply, her mouth slightly open. She was sleeping the sleep of the weary, the threatening frown line on her forehead grown still deeper. On behalf of all his relatives, Bonifacio felt pity, then, with a burst of racial pride, the voice of struggle and resistance rang out, family name calling to family name, something that had never happened once in his long years of resigned domestic captivity. The Reyes in him were rising up against the Valcárcels. What he would have given then to have seen or read that book of family coats of arms, of which not so much his father but his mother used to speak, proud of her husband’s lineage. She had seen the book and had told him that the Reyes were a very good family from a small village on the coast called Raíces. Bonifacio had passed through there once in a carriage but not given a thought to his ancestors. Who could have taken that book? A relative, an uncle? His father, Don Pedro Reyes, a public prosecutor with little luck and little talent for the job, rarely spoke of the former grandeur of the Reyes family, which his wife tended to exaggerate; he was a sad, simple, hardworking, but unambitious man, a man of unimpeachable honesty, a virtue that had been put to the test hundreds of times, but Don Pedro was modest even in his heroic incorruptibility, and so he never mentioned this either. He was so tolerant and so willing to forgive other people’s misdemeanors that one sometimes doubted his moral criteria. He loved silence, peace, and Bonifacio and his siblings, all of whom were dead. Yes, he could see his father’s hidden merits with such clarity now, with a perspicacity he did not know he had. His romanticism, his disparate, random readings, had prevented him from admiring that noble figure, evoked earlier by his own shadow cast on the bedroom wall. He stood at Emma’s bedside like a pagan worshiping at the altar of paternal spirits. He could see it so clearly now; all kinds of apparently insignificant aspects of his father’s life suddenly took on new meaning! On occasions in the past, he had found himself thinking, “I’m a nobody, a nonentity, like my father: a simple, ordinary soul.” And now his soul was crying out to him: Ordinary? And why not? Imitate your father’s ordinariness, you fool, and remember what that man most longed for. To flee from business, commerce, and the lies of the world; to shut himself up at home with his children, in order not to recall his noble ancestors but to love his offspring in peace and tranquillity. He was a kind of undramatic anchorite of the family, and his home was his desert. He was obliged to go out into the world, but only his home spoke to him—silently and with the sweetness of domestic peace—of all the idealism of which his humble, loving spirit was capable. His father’s smile when he was speaking to strangers on worldly matters was one of profound but discreet sadness; it was clear that he expected nothing of the world outside his own house; he did not believe in friendship; he feared the all-pervading evil of the streets; he talked a great deal to his older sons of the need to prepare themselves for the traps laid for them by their undoubted enemy, the world. Yes, his father used to tell them about what lay outside, as a prehistoric man might have spoken in his cave, safe from the wild beasts, to the other members of his family, warning them about the creatures they would have to do battle with whenever they left the cave. Bonifacio remembered, too, that his father, although he tried to hide it, could not help but reveal to them that he was one of the defeated, a coward, afraid of the terrible struggle for existence; resigned to his poverty, with his impotent honesty besieged by the treachery, evil, cruelty, and tyranny of the world, he sought refuge in his home, an island of love cut off from the universe with which he was completely at odds. For these conjectures on what his father might have thought and felt, Bonifacio plundered a whole multitude of now meaningful memories, but what he could not glean from those historical hypotheses, from his reconstruction of family sociology, was how his father must have struggled to keep a balance between his disenchantment with and fear of the world, his hatred of those external battles, and his need to protect his children and arm them for the war to which life, once he was dead, would condemn them. Don Pedro had died before any of his children had found a position in life. He had died just as the family had been forced to give up the last remnants of middle-class life as regards their social and domestic dealings, when poverty had lent a distinctly plebeian tinge to the decadent Reyes dynasty. And his mother, who must have been deeply wounded by this, had died shortly afterward, just two years later.
And now a new member of the Reyes clan was on its way, a child with something of the blood and spirit of Bonifacio’s father, for Bonifacio was convinced that children are more likely to re
semble their grandparents than their parents. The word “metempsychosis” burst upon his ears. The sheer exoticism of the word had pleased him when he first read it years ago, but now what pleased him was its meaning. “It won’t,” he thought, “be metempsychosis exactly, but something along those lines. Perhaps that’s what the immortality of the soul means, a kind of rebirth. Yes, my heart, my intuition is telling me that my son will have something of my father about him. And now that the Reyes family are rich, they can return to their former glory. . . .”
When he thought this, though, a cold sweat broke out along his spine. He remembered snatches of the conversation he had overheard that very night between Nepomuceno and Marta. Was that the Reyes family’s fate? Another Reyes child was about to be born and would he, too, be born into poverty? They were ruined or soon would be; that is what Nepomuceno had said, and he must know!
Bonifacio had to sit down on a chair, because he did not dare to sit on his wife’s bed.
“Is happiness simply not possible in this world? I imagined that tonight would be filled with joyful images and feelings of inner bliss, but instead it brings me only torment! My son ruined! And it’s all my fault, yes, the rot set in with me, with my ineptitude, my ignorance of the truly important things in life—numbers, money, accounts—which I dismissed as mere prose. Art and passion were poetry, I thought. And now my son will be born already ruined.”
Emma stirred slightly and gave a sigh that sounded more like a growl.
At this point, Bonifacio determined that he must wake her. There was no time to lose. He wanted to reveal the terrible secret to her as soon as possible, that very night. From tomorrow on they would have to change their way of life, they must shore up the household finances, and this was something that could not wait. . . .
“From now on, there will have to be less thinking and more action. My son’s life is at stake. I will become the master and administrator of our wealth. But what about that factory, about which I know nothing, not even what it makes? We’ll sort that out too. Oh, there’ll be a scene all right, my dear Nepomuceno, but I’m ready for it. All of that, though, must wait until tomorrow. What I must do now—the manly act worthy of a father, as befits the occasion—is to wake Emma up and tell her everything.”
Emma, however, woke of her own accord, and Bonifacio did not even have time to broach the matter of the secret he had uncovered. His wife hurled insults at him, as she had in the worst days of his servitude, and told him to stop daydreaming. She roared at him and kicked him out of the bedroom, first having summoned Eufemia, who, on her mistress’s orders, slammed the door in his face.
That kind of thing would have to stop too, but not until after the birth. He didn’t want Emma to have a miscarriage; she mustn’t be upset in any way. Once the child had been born and she was nursing him herself, as he hoped she would, then they would talk about everything. Then they would see if a member of the Reyes family could or should be the slave of a Valcárcel.
“I should still go back in there and warn her as gently as I can about the impending danger. . . .”
He placed one hand on the handle of the door that had just slammed in his face, then stopped.
He felt very weak. He had eaten no supper. Tiny red specks danced before his eyes. He should go and get something to eat and leave everything else for the morning. It really was very late. The problem, though, was that he had no appetite, which was very rare in him.
He ate two boiled eggs and went to bed. He took a long time to fall asleep, and when he did, he dreamed, weeping, of Serafina, who had died and was calling to him from beneath the earth where she lay, clutching a bottle to her breast. The bottle contained a human fetus preserved in spirits.
1. Anne “Ninon” de Lenclos (1620–1705) was a French author, courtesan, freethinker, and patron of the arts.
15
IN HER efforts to cling for as long as possible to her hope that the doctor was mistaken, Emma resorted to endless ingenious ruses. To explain certain undeniable intimate changes to which she was obliged to confess—and which were, as a general rule, deemed to provide absolute proof—she cited her own strange, exceptional nature, inimical to the standard rhythms of ordinary physiological phenomena. However, her main argument consisted in standing sideways on to people and saying, “You see? There’s nothing there,” and each day she would lace her corset a little tighter, fearlessly ignoring all advice to the contrary. She behaved like a poor young virgin desperate to conceal the proof of her ignominy and for whom ceasing to be a virgin would be a source of great shame.
Her gossiping friends were quite wrong in thinking that Emma’s stubborn opposition to her fate was in any way feigned; she really did not want to be a mother; the fear of dying, uppermost in her mind, did not leave room for any such vanities. She saw only illness and death. “I won’t be able to give birth, I know it. I won’t,” she thought with a shudder, when, alone in her room, she began to submit to the evidence. “Giving birth to a first child at my age! It’s dreadful, just dreadful! My body’s too old!”
Emma shut herself up in her bedroom, stood in her underwear, sometimes even naked, and studied herself in the full-length mirror; she examined herself minutely, compared herself with other women, measured the width and length of her torso and whatever other parts of her body she believed to be important to the whole arduous process, basing this belief on her very vague and largely instinctive knowledge of obstetrics. Then slumping down in an armchair, naked and oblivious to the cold, she would burst into a kind of tearless sobbing, like a spoiled child, wailing, “I don’t want it, I can’t do it, I just can’t!”
Death was probable, illness certain, and excruciating pain inevitable, yes, whatever happened, pain was unavoidable. No, she would not have it! Besides, what was the point? She would find herself once more confined to bed, grown thin and pale, her skeleton visible beneath her yellowing skin; weakness, nervous debility, and sickness would ensue, and everyone would abandon her—Bonifacio, her uncle, Minghetti! Yes, Minghetti, like everyone else, would leave her to die, to suffer; he would certainly not suffer or die with her. Giving birth was just a pointless cruelty, a terrible danger, and all for nothing: How stupid! Happy women, superior women, women who surrendered themselves to pleasure and, it must be said, to baritones, did not give birth or only when it suited them. Giving birth! What stupidity! How could she not have foreseen this? She had allowed herself to be taken by surprise, caught out. But who would have thought it? As usual, Bonifacio bore the brunt of her anger. And he had to abandon his attempts at any display of shared tenderness motivated by the imminent happy event, because Emma would not allow anyone to refer to the risk she was running as a happy event, not even jokingly.
In the end, it became a futile, ridiculous affectation to deny the approaching catastrophe, which is how she thought of it. Emma stopped tightening her corset, stopped fighting off the truth, for while her pregnancy might not have been very apparent in the first few months, it became more than obvious as the birth approached. It wasn’t very obvious, said Marta encouragingly, but it was; there was the parvenu, as she referred to him with a mischievous laugh, confident that only Minghetti would understand her. And in his gossipy chats with Marta, Sebastián jokingly referred to the child as “the surprise package.”
Forced to accept defeat, Emma initially threw up her hands in horror; she could no longer deny it, but she could still protest. However, the situation gradually began to seem more bearable; she grew accustomed to the idea of this necessary evil and got over her fear, although she did, for a while, continue to complain purely out of habit and out of a lingering but increasingly faint sense of dread, as if the moment of crisis were moving farther off, rather than growing ever nearer. At first, she revealed herself to be proud not of becoming a mother but of her sheer physical bulk. Since she was now undeniably pregnant, she was determined to be very pregnant indeed. And in the end, she openly displayed, almost flaunted, the very state she had previously tried so ha
rd to conceal. She noticed, too, that her face had not aged; on the contrary, the ten years she had put on when she first heard the news had vanished; she had grown plumper, and her newly firm features and healthier color really suited her; it was clear that she was pregnant, but that was fine. It really was an interesting state to be in.
Alas, these consolations were not enough. Her “state” was still a perilous one, full of inconveniences, future ills—and present ills as well.
She never spoke to Minghetti about what was going to happen, and although they both carefully avoided the subject, he was clearly annoyed and not a little put out, and would often smile a cynical, bitter smile, feeling that he had become an object of ridicule. And were it not for the fact that he had no singing contracts—because the world of art had forgotten him—he might well have chosen to leave that easy life behind him, along with his salary as director of the Academy of Fine Arts, and what Mochi, before leaving, had called “his secretarial duties.” The friends of the household, even Marta and even the Ferraz girls, each in their own way, would talk to Minghetti about Emma’s condition in an insinuating, smirking manner, and Minghetti found it hard to disguise his irritation. “He’s so discreet!” everyone said. “That’s how it is with real Don Juans, the successful ones.” No one had yet seen in Minghetti the slightest inclination to boast, indeed, he seemed to regard Bonifacio with greater respect than ever. He could often be found studying Emma’s husband with great curiosity and with a singular look on his face, in which there was not the slightest hint of mockery. He was, as they all agreed, the very soul of discretion.
His Only Son: With Dona Berta Page 23