His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  Everyone stared first at Bonifacio and then at Nepomuceno, who was the person best fitted to respond.

  Nepomuceno, who was, by nature, an extremely slow, calm man, had changed greatly under Marta’s tutelage. Moreover, he knew he could trust in the weakness and ignorance of the enemy. He did not beat about the bush but came straight to the point, with no recourse to euphemisms; although there was just a touch of leniency in his serene voice.

  “As regards thieving, I hope you don’t mean me?”

  If Bonifacio’s words were a glove thrown down, the challenge had been very proudly taken up. Before Bonifacio could answer, Nepomuceno looked smugly at his fiancée, who shot him an approving glance.

  Bonifacio, who had not been expecting a decisive battle, a duel to the death, suddenly remembered with horror the anonymous letter he had received two days ago, and which, in the face of recent grave events, he had completely forgotten.

  “This is what purgatory is like,” he thought. “I have sinned. I have squandered money, I have stolen my son’s inheritance, and now I’m in purgatory, which consists of logic and ethics, nothing but logic and ethics.”

  “Good heavens, Uncle!” he said slowly, trying to speak in firm, measured tones. “How could I possibly say such things of you, Uncle! I meant Lobato, of course, who is an out-and-out thief.”

  “A thief whom I have allowed to continue to thieve for years and years, and if we are to believe what Pepe de Pepa José has to say, he being our accuser, it would seem that Lobato and I have made a pact to ruin the Valcárcel family and to embezzle whatever wealth you have in Cabruñana.”

  “No one is saying that, Uncle, no one—”

  “What I am saying, Señor Reyes”—and here Señor Don Juan Nepomuceno brought his fist down, fairly lightly, on the table—“is that you are not a practical man and therefore ill-suited to the role you are trying out now as a brand-new paterfamilias.”

  Marta emitted a brief, strident guffaw, like a series of slaps about the face, which echoed around the dining room, to the astonishment even of her allies. They all looked at one another in surprise. Marta, with an expression on her face like that of a snake poised to strike, gave another loud guffaw and stared mockingly at Bonifacio, who looked back at Marta, his good friend, unable to understand the meaning of that inopportune laugh.

  Nepomuceno went on: “A practical man, one who has some experience of business, is never overly zealous or overly suspicious either, he is never taken in by mere gossip. It would be a fine thing if I, verbi gratia, were to believe what I read in an anonymous letter delivered to me a few days ago, assuring me that you were the recipient of two thousand duros, money that was restored—under the seal of the confessional—to your father-in-law’s estate.”

  “That money belonged to me!” exclaimed Bonifacio in a loud, positively energetic voice as he sprang to his feet, although without thumping the table with his fist.

  Then everyone stood up.

  “Nothing belongs to you!” retorted cousin Sebastián, who took a step toward Bonifacio, offering up for the consideration of those present his strong muscles, his hefty, fortresslike body. Impulsively, Marta placed one hand on his shoulder, as if urging him into battle. She clearly had more confidence in Sebastián’s physical strength than in that of Nepomuceno, her future husband.

  Bonifacio found himself unwittingly, unreasonably, and clumsily embroiled in the very “scene” he had wanted to postpone.

  “Please, ladies and gentlemen, let us not make any unnecessary noise. I swear to God that I will not allow any unseemly commotion at this time. My main concern is for my wife, and were she to find out about this, some misfortune might occur, and woe betide anyone who causes such a misfortune!”

  They all shrank back. Bonifacio seemed like another man entirely.

  Even Sebastián, who was very fierce and strong and perfectly capable of hurling his uncle’s clerk over the balcony, even he was slightly intimidated by what he described as the moral force of those words, that attitude, and that voice.

  They could all see that poor Bonifacio was ready to fight tooth and nail to safeguard Emma’s health.

  “We can discuss the whole matter quietly,” said Nepomuceno, who wanted to get the imbecile talking so that he could see just what he was after and with what laws that shiny new young lawyer had been stuffing his head.

  “Yes, quietly and dispassionately,” put in respectable, chubby-cheeked Körner, who felt it incumbent upon himself to intervene in a conciliatory manner.

  “Quite right,” said Bonifacio. “Passion never got anyone anywhere.”

  “Precisely,” said Körner. “And it’s plain for all to see that this is a fuss about nothing. Bonifacio does not distrust Nepomuceno, and Nepomuceno does not distrust Bonifacio, and no one is questioning his legitimate rights either.”

  “There are rights on both sides,” objected Nepomuceno.

  Bonifacio grew bold again: “Indeed, but there’s no reason to talk about that now, when, ultimately, someone else will judge which should have been our respective roles.”

  This veiled allusion to the courts of justice could not have been clearer. Nepomuceno felt his face flush with anger. But he took solace in his supreme revenge, namely, holding his tongue and swearing privately that the wretch would pay for this later. Having mentally slapped Bonifacio’s face and thus vented his rage, which was assuaged by the thought of future cruelties, he was able to smile and say calmly, “You’re quite right, Bonifacio. We’ll sort things out when Emma is better and we can take a proper look at the figures, which you’ll have to try and understand, mind. What you two have spent, and what I have saved, and who owes whom. What I can tell you is that if you continue spending as you have up until now, then ruin is certain. In fact, you are already ruined. Emma has been spending like a mad thing, and, well, you can hardly deny it, she was merely following your example; you lured her into this impossible way of life. And we all know why.”

  “Indeed we do,” said Sebastián in solemn tones, for he had pursued Serafina in vain, and was still chasing her.

  Bonifacio, who, that night, had energy enough to do battle with any man, quailed before hard facts, and the facts were terrible: They were ruined! He had initiated that decline, and he was to blame for whatever Nepomuceno had stolen too, because he had let him do it. And he himself had stolen in order to pay off the debts of his mistress!

  He turned pale and had to sit down, his legs giving way beneath him. Seeing the old Bonifacio reappear, Nepomuceno grew more confident but concealed his arrogance beneath a conciliatory veneer.

  “Do you still want to go and see the situation in Cabruñana for yourself? Fine, the coach leaves tomorrow at eight o’clock in the morning. Come to my office and I’ll show you all the relevant books and papers . . . then you can see for yourself. Take whatever you need and try to grasp exactly what has been going on, because I don’t want you going to see Lobato and accusing him of being a thief when you don’t have all the facts at your fingertips.”

  All his strength gone now, Bonifacio mechanically followed Nepomuceno, and with them went Körner. Marta and Sebastián were left alone in the dining room.

  Körner, ever faithful to his role as right-hand man, went along as adviser. And Bonifacio had great need of one, for awaiting him in Nepomuceno’s office was the expected humiliation. Very astutely and with almost feline cunning, Nepomuceno painstakingly explained to him everything to do with the property in Cabruñana and in the most rigorously technical legal terminology.

  Bonifacio had no very clear idea what a lease was. The word “emphyteusis,” for example, might as well have been Greek, as could “alienation,” “burgage,” and “ejectment,” along with a hundred other common-law terms, as well as words from the local juridical dialect that flew vainly past his ears. He understood nothing, or only that he was being hoodwinked and that Nepomuceno wanted to confuse and humiliate him. He contradicted himself over and over, made endless blunders as he tried t
o explain what had been explained to him and attempted to express his own opinions. Körner only succeeded in further emphasizing Bonifacio’s ignorance and stupidity.

  “Good heavens, man, I’m a foreigner and yet I know more about the customs of the country and the laws of Spain than you do!”

  When it came to numbers, Körner was genuinely shocked by Bonifacio’s ignorance, for he could barely do multiplication, let alone division.

  In order to clamber out of this mire, a humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed, and remorseful Bonifacio tried to tackle other more important matters that did not involve all that horrible, obscure, numerical detail, quite incomprehensible to him, poor flautist that he was, and so he dragged the discussion around to the subject of the factories.

  He was upset, his pride wounded, and casting prudence to the winds, with no preparation and at that very late hour of the night, he broached the delicate matter of the two industries. It was three o’clock in the morning when Körner and Nepomuceno, cut to the quick, demanded that he hear the whole sorry tale of that disastrous piece of speculation; they wanted to be entirely frank with him, and since he had asked, they were more than ready to respond.

  And, whether he liked it or not, he had to listen, see, and touch. They placed before him the minutes of meetings, budgets, policies, plans, files, a whole dark jungle that made him lose all notion of time and space. He felt as if he were floating in the air, caught up in some witches’ coven. His ears buzzed. And while the other two men went into long explanations, speaking in what sounded to him like double Dutch, sleep, anger, and remorse filled his brain with wasps’ nests. He felt like kicking and screaming and biting. His eyes were closing, his ears burning, his knees buckling. He had fallen into their trap because he was weak and stupid. He had entered that room alone, when he should have taken with him a judge, a scribe, a lawyer, various experts, and a couple of civil guards.

  After two bewildering, agonizing hours, he only just had courage enough to open the door and leave, followed by those two monsters, who continued describing, point by point, the ruin of the Valcárcel factory and the ruin of Antonio Reyes, his only son. In the dining room—and by now it was nearly five o’clock in the morning—Marta and Sebastián were still waiting for them, half asleep and yawning. They launched in with their own arguments, as if wanting to gain the attention of Nepomuceno and Körner; and pursued by that terrible nightmare, Bonifacio, dropping with sleep, drunk on anger and fever and exhaustion, declared frankly that he could take no more of it and shut himself up in his room, still determined, though, to set off for Cabruñana at the break of day, accompanied by the documents Nepomuceno had placed before him. He would leave without saying goodbye to Emma and without seeing his son, so that his courage would not fail him and so that his wife would not have time to undercut his irrevocable resolve. “I know nothing of emphyteusis or alienation or shared ownership or numbers or factories, but from now on, I have to impose my will. I said I would go tomorrow and nothing will stop me. Emma’s fever is not so very bad, she’ll survive; and nothing untoward will happen to Antonio; I’m going to Cabruñana to tell that Lobato fellow a few home truths, and I’ll return the day after with a couple of wet nurses to choose from, because that’s an excellent place to find them. Emma won’t want to suckle the child and probably can’t. We’ll bring him up together, the nanny and me. The less Valcárcel blood in him, the better.”

  Bonifacio could not sleep; plagued by a thousand nightmarish visions, he kept turning over and over in his head his regret for past actions, his anger and shame at what had just happened, his energetic plans for the future, and his hopes as a father. Having to do things was just terrible; merely thinking and imagining was so much more pleasant. But a father had to be diligent, practical, and positive, and he would be all those things, for Antonio’s sake. Now, though, sheer bile and shame at his own ignorance of things about which everyone but him seemed to know, along with the low hum of base, vulgar, pedestrian passions, took all pleasure out of his present joy at becoming a father.

  When everyone was sleeping and the sun was already quite high in the sky, Bonifacio left the house, with all his documents in a night bag; he took the coach to Cabruñana and, by midday, he was already standing arguing with Lobato in the middle of a field, opposite some oak trees that Lobato had allowed a farmer to cut down because, according to the gossip, both stood to gain by it. Lobato, who had once headed a Carlist gang, was half wolf, half fox; he spoke with difficulty, could barely read, and wrote in such a way that, if it suited him, he could always deny that it was his writing; and yet, through politics, usury, and the tricks he employed to bring to heel justices of the peace and magistrates, he was absolute master of the region. Nepomuceno had chosen him because they had immediately understood each other, and because only a man like Lobato, the terror of the town council, was capable of collecting the rent from those farmers, who would greet the usual debt collectors, bailiffs, and administrators with stones and gunshots. Whenever Lobato traveled at night, he would ride, at a gallop, through any dark and leafy places, in which he risked being ambushed by the very villagers who, by the light of day, trembled in his presence. On one occasion, after taking a tenant to court to get three years of rent arrears out of him, he received such a blow with a stone while crossing a wood, that he reached his house unconscious but still clinging to his horse’s mane. And now here was this nobody, this foolish gentleman, of whom Señor Don Juan Nepomuceno had always spoken with such scorn! Feigning humility, Lobato mocked his master. By pretending that he was the fool, he made it clear that Bonifacio was the only complete ignoramus there. The tenants also laughed at him, but in such a way that it could not be deemed disrespectful. They scratched their heads, smiled, and determined to pay no more in rent than they had always paid.

  In despair, Bonifacio abandoned those lovely, eternally green valleys, full of cool shade and an infinite variety of hills and meadows traversed by clear rivers. It was all so divinely beautiful, but what a rogue that man Lobato was and what thieves those farmers were! In different circumstances, free from all those cares and anxieties, how fine it would be to spend a few days in those dense forests, in which the murmur of the pine trees mingles with that of the sea, like an echo. Cabruñana was a coastal region, and the lush green slopes and marshy bottoms of its narrow, multifarious valleys resembled dried-up riverbeds. The twisting shapes of its high paths and tracks, hills and vales, the velvety, vertiginous banks and inclines, as steep as cliffs, made one think of the mysterious depths of the sea.

  His futile quest over, having done nothing but issue a few vain threats that impressed no one, Bonifacio decided, halfway through the afternoon, to go on horseback to the regional capital, two leagues distant. He hoped to arrive before dark in Raíces, which was on his way, and to spend half an hour there. Why? He didn’t quite know, except perhaps, after his usual fashion, he wanted to go there in order to dream and feel and imagine times long gone; to be alone and to think freely, far from Lobato, Nepomuceno, and Sebastián; and to reflect upon the Reyes family, those who had lived and died and those to come.

  Raíces consisted of twenty or thirty houses, scattered among the leafy places and the mud flats of a peninsular abandoned by the water; nearby were the sand dunes, the shape of whose yellow slopes was reminiscent of the hills surrounding Raíces; except that, for centuries upon centuries, those hills had been covered by the dark green velvet of moss and grass and by the flowers of the field, just like the hills to be found inland, far from the sea breezes. Raíces was a mysterious green hideaway that inspired feelings of melancholy and austerity, a poetic, unresisting desire to forget about the world. To the south, Raíces was dominated by a very high hill, so steep it was almost vertical, and clinging like ivy to its cyclopean face were pines, chestnut trees, and oaks, which climbed up the slope as if scaling the walls of a fortress; the sea and the dunes left it open to the winds from the north and northwest, and the remnants of a wood surrounded it on east and west.
The few houses scattered among the greenery were mostly humble cottages, while others were dark stone mansions, some with coats of arms above their gates.

  An hour before sunset, Bonifacio rode into a small square, which served as a courtyard to various of the more decrepit houses but also to some of a nobler cast; it was cluttered with carts resting on their shafts as if sleeping; dirty, ragged, half-naked children—on whose bodies there was nowhere one might safely plant a kiss, except on the eyelids of some and the tangled fair hair of still fewer—ran and gamboled through that common courtyard, which, for them, was doubtless the entire universe. Going gravely about their business were a few pigs rooting around in the dung, at which cockerels and hens alike were also scratching and pecking, while two dogs lay dozing, besieged by thousands of mosquitoes.

  “This is where the Reyes family came from,” thought Bonifacio, who, from a nearby alleyway, was contemplating the gentle peace and melancholy of that wretched scene, quite cut off from the empty grandeur of the world. A group of chestnut trees and a garden wall concealed him from the view of the children and dogs, who would have been alarmed had they noticed his presence. He dismounted, tethered his horse to a tree trunk, and sat down on the grass in order to be able to think more freely.

  He thought of Odysseus returning to Ithaca, but he was no Odysseus, merely the poor offspring of a distant generation. The Odysseus of Raíces, the first member of the Reyes family to leave, had never returned; no one would recognize him in the place from which he came. And having often read The Odyssey and pondered its various episodes and characters, Bonifacio thought, “There are the pigs and dogs that Odysseus found on returning to Ithaca, outside Eumaeus’s hut, but Eumaeus, the swineherd, is nowhere to be seen. As happened with Odysseus, those dogs would attack me if they saw me, but there would be no faithful Eumaeus to rush to my aid. Whatever happened to that first Reyes-cum-Odysseus? Why did he leave? Who knows? Perhaps those boys, who seem to be the children of dung, like earthworms, are my relatives, my tribe.”