His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  From there they could hear occasional muted screams from Emma.

  Marta was studying Minghetti with mischievous curiosity. “What a strange thing life is,” she was thinking, for, deep down, she was even more of a skeptic than Sebastián. “Here’s Minghetti apparently not giving a damn about what happens, and there’s Bonifacio distraught!” Minghetti continued dipping sponge cakes and sipping his wine. He finally noticed Marta’s insistent, highly expressive gaze, and entirely misunderstanding her intentions, went over to that very striking German woman, and just when she thought he was about to reveal some secret or confide in her, he grasped her around the waist and gave her a smacking kiss.

  Marta’s scream coincided with a distant cry emanating from the woman in labor.

  16

  HE WAS going to be a father! At this prospect, Bonifacio’s brain positively exploded with clichés like so many repeating fireworks. With great remorse, he noticed that his heart was less involved in this solemn event than his head and mere rhetoric. Why did this new dignity, his first experience of such a thing, a dignity to which he felt called, leave him slightly cold? More than that, why did he not yet love the child of his loins as a child rather than as a concept? Would it be a son or a daughter? “A mystery,” thought Bonifacio, who, at that moment, doubted as to how far one can trust presentiments. It might well be a daughter, although, please God, no! No, it was all a mystery.

  And he turned down the sheet on his bed and got in.

  Going to bed, even for only a few hours, seemed to him an abdication. The role of the husband, when the birth was about to take place, was too passive, too insignificant. Bonifacio longed to intervene directly and usefully in a process that was for him of such grave importance.

  Indeed, although reason told him that no husband had much of a role to play at this point, that it was down to the wife and the doctor, he nonetheless felt that he was being even more useless than other fathers in the same situation, that he was being left out in the cold, rebuffed.

  And yet Don Venancio had been quite clear: “You, my friend, should go to bed and sleep for a few hours, because this whole thing could take quite a while, and we need everyone’s support. And if you don’t rest now, you’ll be no use when we call on you as the relief troops.”

  This seemed reasonable enough, which is why he was going to bed, because he always bowed to reason and to common sense, and he was thinking of bowing to those things even more now that he was going to be a father and had to set a good example. However, what was far from rational was the indifference of everyone else, including Emma, and the bewildered looks with which they received his demonstrations of paternal and marital solicitude: Doña Celestina, the registered midwife, whose presence had been requested by Don Venancio; her husband, Don Alberto, who was also there; Nepomuceno, Marta, Sebastián, and even the usually genial Minghetti, who did at least occasionally look at him with a respect bordering on astonishment.

  On reflection, and putting two and two together, Bonifacio recalled that Serafina herself had intimated some time ago that he should not take the birth of his son too much to heart; Mochi, in a letter written months before from La Coruña, had mentioned the subject and Bonifacio’s fatherly enthusiasm in a remarkably offhand manner, in words behind which Bonifacio thought he could see a rather pitying, even mocking smile. Of course, their responses might be motivated by jealousy and a fear of losing his friendship and protection. Serafina doubtless saw in the child-to-be a rival, who would steal the heart of her ex-lover and good friend. “Poor Serafina!” But there was nothing to fear. He had heart enough for all of them. Charity and fraternity were perfectly compatible with the strictest morality. And, frankly, paternal love was not the intense, powerful thing he had thought when he had viewed it from afar. It was nothing like a grand passion. Where was that private, egotistical satisfaction that always accompanies the pleasures of love and of flattered vanity? Where was that smile from life, which was like the frame around the most sublime moments of passion?

  This was something different: an austere, rather cold, but poetic feeling, because of the mystery surrounding it, but it was more a sense of solemnity than anything else. It was like an investiture, like becoming a bishop; in short, it was neither a joy nor a passion.

  Bonifacio tossed and turned impatiently in his bed, as if he were lying on the rack, and he contained himself only in order to obey Don Venancio’s very rational advice.

  “I really do need to rest. She might give birth tonight or not until tomorrow morning or the day after. All that screaming could be a false alarm. I know what she’s like. If Don Venancio had not felt the child move inside her, I might still have my suspicions. Even so, Emma is perfectly capable of complaining of birth pains a whole month earlier than necessary. Yes, I must sleep, if these intrusive thoughts will let me. This might go on for a good while yet and involve many more hours of waiting and watching. The odd thing is that Emma, who has always treated me like her nurse and, very nearly, like her bedside table, doesn’t summon me now. What a strange woman! And I would take such pleasure in helping her too!”

  The warmth of the sheets, which was beginning to coax him into sleep, inclining him to vague visions, to the soporific contemplation of tender images and sweet memories, made him sigh and think, “Ah, if only Serafina were my wife and this child was hers and I was a little younger!”

  As though thinking and desiring such a thing was a knife thrust into some part of his body, Bonifacio felt an intense spiritual pain like a protest, and in his ears he thought he heard some little bubbles of noise far off, coming from his wife’s room, something like a child’s first cry.

  Ah, dear God, that’s exactly what it was! Without wishing to admit it, he felt a pang of remorse for what he had just thought, and it occurred to him superstitiously that his son was being born at the very instant when his father was, in a way, denying both him and his mother.

  “Oh my soul!” cried Bonifacio, jumping out of bed. “That would be tantamount to being born without a father. My son! Emma, my dear little wife!”

  The door opened, and immediately Bonifacio heard, distinctly, clearly, the sibylline cry of a newborn child. His own flesh was being reborn weeping!

  “A boy, sir, it’s a boy!” shouted Eufemia, who rushed right up him like a whirlwind, not even noticing that he was standing in his nightshirt in the middle of the room. Neither of them noticed; she was excited, moved; and Bonifacio felt deeply grateful to her as he pulled on his trousers the wrong way around, then quickly had to undo the error, trembling, panting, and wondering if he should simply throw convention to the winds and race through the house in his underpants. Instead, he managed to get half dressed and, colliding with walls and doors and furniture and people, finally reached his wife’s bedside.

  In Doña Celestina’s arms he saw a small bruised creature making frog-like movements; rather like a troglodyte animal surprised in its den and plucked unceremoniously out into the light and the dangers of life; Bonifacio momentarily remembered having read about some poor sea creatures which, in order to flee their most powerful enemies, resign themselves to living under the sand, renouncing light in order to survive, imprisoned eternally by their fear of the world. That is how his son seemed to him. He had taken so long to be born, as if he had been forced to do so and as if they were doing violence to him by opening the doors of life.

  “He was the wrong way around, Bonis!” said a feeble, affectionate, excited voice from the bed.

  Uncomprehending, Bonifacio went over to Emma and embraced her, crying.

  Emma was crying too, from nerves and debility, and looking suddenly gaunt and old. She clung to her husband as tightly as if she were clinging to life itself, and in a complaining voice, although not the sour voice of former days, she kept repeating, “He was the wrong way around, Bonis, imagine that!”

  “Yes, but he was born headfirst in the end,” cried Don Venancio, who was standing opposite Bonifacio, his sleeves rolled up, a few drop
s of blood on his shirt and frock coat, and sweating like a slaughterman.

  “But he was the wrong way around for a very long time, Bonis!”

  “Indeed!” said the doctor.

  “We didn’t tell you, we told you to leave the room, but it was quite dangerous, wasn’t it, Don Venancio?”

  “I’m sure it was, my dear,” said Bonifacio, “I’d just lain down and—”

  “Yes, the baby was ready to come out, but he was the wrong way around, you see, and we didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to frighten you. But it was touch and go for a while.”

  And Emma wept, still rather bitter about that past danger, but pleased and relieved to be alive, to have been saved, her soul filled with a feeling that should have been gratitude to God but wasn’t, because she was thinking not of God but of herself.

  “Come now, enough chatter,” boomed Don Venancio, and pulled the sheets up over Emma’s shoulders. “Try and get some sleep!”

  “No, my dear, please don’t sleep, that really would be dangerous,” exclaimed Bonifacio with a shudder. The idea of his wife dying raced through his imagination like a real threat. If she were to die, he, his son, would be left without a mother. And then he turned to his son, who was wailing now like an Old Testament prophet.

  How strange! At that very instant, he saw in the face of his newborn child, wrinkled, graceless, pitiful, the living image of his own face as he had seen it sometimes in the mirror, at night, when he was alone and weeping out his humiliation, his misfortune. He remembered the night when his mother had died, and how, feeling utterly distraught, he went to his room and distractedly, out of habit, looked in his shaving mirror to see if he had dark shadows under his eyes or a furred tongue, and he had noticed then that same tragicomic expression, that crumpled monkey face, so very different from the one he thought he was wearing in response to all that pure, poetic emotion. Although Bonifacio had very regular features, when he cried he became ugly and ridiculous, with an expression similar to the one he wore when he played sentimental music on his father-in-law’s flute. His son, his poor son, was crying just like that and was equally ugly, risible, and pitiful. But he looked just like him! Yes the same expression of suffocating grief. Then, when his son had calmed down a little, thanks to a sip of sugared water, which must have seemed to him like a most agreeable flood, he made a gesture with mouth and nostrils that immediately made Bonifacio think of his grandfather. “Or my father, with me behind him in the shadows!”

  And just as he was feeling a kind of spiritual repose and a primitive male pride, he also felt the first pains of paternity in the form of a piercing sense of remorse at having engendered a child in the first place, because the holy charity that is the love we bear our children consists precisely of that accumulation of anxieties and strange sorrows that wound us as deeply as if they were our own.

  His conscience was telling him, “I will never again be happy and carefree, but I will never again be entirely unhappy either . . . if my son lives.” The world was suddenly taking on a more solid, positive meaning; he felt more like a creature of the earth and less a creature of ideals, daydreams, and celestial longings; life was becoming more serious, but serious in a new way.

  The child was still crying, even though he was now swaddled in spotless, embroidered shawls, which, to Bonifacio, seemed out of keeping with the solemnity of the moment and most uncomfortable. Yes, he resembled him in both his facial expression and in the way he was bewailing life! The others might not see the resemblance, but he was sure of it, as though it were a secret mark. This was the child of his loins, and perhaps also of his deepest thoughts and most sentimental ideas, of which the world and possibly even Serafina knew nothing.

  Some hours later, when Don Venancio and all trace of the slaughterhouse had vanished, or at least the somewhat sordid aspect that such great events always have when seen from close to, Bonifacio finally allowed Emma to speak at length, and her relatives and friends also joined in the conversation.

  What memories of the past Emma summoned up, all of them matrilineal! Her previous mania for family names and origins revived.

  “Uncle! Sebastián! Who do you think Antonio looks like?”

  “Who’s Antonio?” asked Marta.

  “Why, the master of the house: my son. I’ve been calling him Antonio to myself ever since I could think of anything apart from the danger and the pain.”

  “He looks,” Sebastián said, “just like the hero of the Alpujarras, like his namesake Don Antonio Diego Valcárcel y Merás, the founder of the noble house of Valcárcel.”

  “You may jest, but bring the portrait here and then you’ll see.”

  They did as they were told. Two servants and Sebastián had to take down the portrait of that illustrious, carefully restored ancestor and compare him with Bonifacio’s son, whom the mother lifted up out of the warmth of her bed. Some claimed to see a certain faint resemblance; others pooh-poohed the idea and even laughed. Antonio cried, and Bonifacio could still see the resemblance to himself, to his face in the mirror on the night his mother died; but as time passed, what he saw most clearly was the resemblance to his own grandfather, Don Pedro Reyes, especially a particular frown line, the shape of his nose, and that characteristic movement of the lips.

  For no real reason, Marta was feeling most put out and wore the sour-as-vinegar expression that occasionally crept over her face, making her look older and uglier, an expression that usually occurred when she felt envious or excluded. She saw in the forthcoming christening an event that would overshadow her wedding.

  “Frankly,” she said, “little Antonio doesn’t look like anyone from either the Valcárcel or the Reyes family. He looks like a foreigner. You must have been dreaming of some Russian prince.”

  The Ferraz girls, who were also there, all laughed at the joke, pretending to find in it no hidden meaning.

  No one else said a word, taken aback by Marta’s audacity.

  Emma did not understand the joke, nor did Bonifacio.

  He was aware only that the talk was all of the Valcárcel family, about whether Antonio resembled his maternal grandfather, whether he would become a lawyer or a gambler, like so many other men in his family; there were endless anecdotes about various ancestors, good and bad. No one so much as mentioned the Reyes family tree.

  Antonio was still crying, and Bonifacio, too, was close to tears.

  If only his own father and mother had lived! If only they were there!

  Bonifacio fled the hullaballoo as soon as he could. Since the others were having so much fun, he left all the inevitable solemnities and chores to them. When the child was sleeping and could not be seen, and Emma, less excitable but wearier and slightly feverish, had reverted to her old, cold ways and dismissed him from her presence when she had no further use for him, Bonifacio withdrew to the solitude of his bedroom and thought about his son.

  “Yes, my son!” he said to himself, his face buried in his pillow. “It had to be a son. The voice of God told me so. A son. My only son.”

  During the first day, Emma was sentimental and excited; Bonifacio thought perhaps motherhood was having a transformative effect, but the following morning, she woke with quite a high fever and in a bad mood; when her feeble state allowed, she lashed out in her usual irritable way. She was warned about the possibility of puerperal fever and its dangers, and again terror gripped her. She almost forgot about the child lying in the same sheets as her, and did not want to let anyone look at him, not even his father, because she did not wish to be disturbed or to risk catching cold. Bonifacio could only see his son on the solemn occasions when Doña Celestina changed his diaper. The child altered from hour to hour, becoming more and more like any other newborn baby and rapidly and disconcertingly losing the family resemblance Bonifacio had noticed initially. Worse, he had to give up his plan to call him Bonifacio or Pedro, because Emma had insisted, from the start, on calling him Antonio, even before he was baptized. He would be called Antonio Diego Sebasti
án, because Sebastián was to be his godfather. Bonifacio agreed to everything. He did not want to cause any difficulties—not just yet; besides, any upset might harm Emma. No, not yet. He put off taking any action. Had he not determined to take a firm stance? Was he not resolved to guard his son’s interests, always assuming it was not too late, and provide him with an example in personal dignity? Yes, yes, but there was no need to rush anything. Nor did he wish to have words with Nepomuceno just then. There would be time enough for that. However, circumstances forced him to take action rather earlier. From Cabruñana—a coastal town where the Valcárcel family owned a few smallholdings, land bought from the state—came some bad news regarding a certain second-rank administrator, who had been playing fast and loose with Emma’s income, forgiving arrears on yearly payments or else postponing payment indefinitely, and charging interest that went straight into his pocket; he was, in short, exploiting his employers’ wealth to his own advantage. Nepomuceno felt the accusation to be of no importance. The subject came up at supper, and Nepomuceno and Sebastián had both agreed that it would be best to ignore the matter when, to the great surprise of everyone else present—namely Sebastián, Körner, and Marta—Bonifacio, looking terribly pale and banging discreetly on the table with the handle of his knife, declared in a shrill, tremulous, but determined voice, “Well, I see the matter quite differently, and tomorrow morning, now that the christening has been postponed because Emma doesn’t want the child to catch cold in this bad weather, tomorrow morning—not that I want to, mind—I will take the coach to Cabruñana and go to Pozas and to Sariegos and sort things out with this Señor Lobato. I want this thieving to stop right now.”

  There was a long, solemn silence. Bonifacio did not hesitate to compare it to the calm before the storm. It was certainly about to bring with it some great and terrible surprise. Bonifacio realized that he was utterly alone, that the Valcárcel family and their future relations, the Körners, would happily gobble him up. He was, of course, astonished, almost frightened by his own audacity, but he knew that any diligent paterfamilias has to be a hero. This was the first of many sacrifices, and though painful, he had to go on. Pain only confirmed the seriousness of this new struggle.