His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  Bonifacio moved away from the group and toward the sacristy, following the priest and his servers. This was to be another solemn act. He was about to sign the baptismal register and lay the foundations of his son’s legal existence. While Minghetti amused himself by performing still more prodigies on the organ, Bonifacio was thinking, “Who knows, perhaps one day wise men, scholars, and the curious will make a pilgrimage to study, with affection and respect, the very page in the register where I am about to record my son’s name, that of his parents and grandparents, place of birth, etc. Grandparents! My poor Antonio has no living grandparents; he will never know their love, but my love will be enough.”

  As he entered the sacristy, in the gloom of a side chapel, he saw a woman sitting on the steps, her head resting on the ornate altar.

  “Serafina!”

  “Bonifacio!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think? I’ve come here to pray. What are you doing here?”

  “My son has just been baptized and I’ve come to record his name in the baptismal register.”

  Serafina stood up. She smiled in a way that frightened Bonifacio, because he had never before seen the look of cold, malicious cruelty that accompanied that smile.

  “What do you mean ‘your son’?”

  “What’s wrong, Serafina? Why have you come here?”

  “I’ve come so as not to have to stay in my room and to escape from the landlord. I’m here because I’m becoming increasingly devout. No, I’m not joking. It’s a choice between devoting myself to prayer or killing myself by devouring the contents of a box of matches. Mochi isn’t coming back, you see. I’ve lost my singing voice, yes, completely. The day I wrote to you, and when you didn’t reply, when I asked you for the money to pay for my lodgings, well, that day, that night—because I had promised I would pay, but couldn’t because you didn’t reply—Don Carlos, the wretch, heaped abuse on me.”

  Serafina fell silent for a moment, overcome by emotion, by rage, grief, and shame. Two tears, which must have tasted of vinegar, welled up in her eyes.

  “The wretch had the nerve to insult me as if I were a woman of ill-repute; he threatened me with the courts, with putting me out in the gutter. I ran away, I escaped into the street just as I was, without a hat. But I had to go back, because I had left everything there, my luggage, everything I have in the world. I don’t know, but I must have caught something that night as I furiously paced the damp streets. Anyway, my voice, which was going anyway, vanished. And ever since, well, when I sing, I sound rather like your wife does when she sings. I can’t leave the inn because I can’t pay the rent. Don Carlos insults me sometimes and at others flirts with me. I don’t want any more lovers, high or low, simply because I don’t, because all that disgusts me now. . . . Mochi isn’t coming back. He hasn’t even replied to my last letters. Just like you. Such gentlemen! I ask you for a little money so as not to have to put up with the insults of a foul-mouthed landlord, and neither of you replies. I don’t know where to go; at my lodgings, my creditor spies on me and hopes to become my lover; in the street I get pursued by fools and I’m fed up with being stared at. I haven’t enough money to run away, and where would I run to? Instead, I come to the church, which is as much mine as everyone else’s. You taught me to feel this need for peace, to dream, to want impossible things. I can be quiet here, and I pray—after my own fashion. I have no faith, not what people usually mean by faith, but I would like to. All these saints, Saint Roch, Saint Sebastian with all those arrows in him, that bishop over there, Saint Isidore, they understand me. I have no real religion, but at the moment I hate even the idea of taking a lover, I don’t want a lover; I’ll wait until my voice comes back . . . or you do. Mochi is a bad man, a traitor, a wretch, but I knew that already, I’ve always known it. But you, I didn’t think you were a bad man too. Bonis, please don’t abandon me. I . . . I still love you, more than before, much more really. I must be ill. The world frightens me. . . . The theater terrifies me. . . . Flirting appalls me. . . . I want peace . . . I want rest . . . I want to live decently, not to continue this farce of a life. And to eat bread that I haven’t earned by hiring out my body to a complete stranger. I don’t even know who that would be. It could be yours, if you want, but no one else’s. Do you want it?”

  Bonifacio was no stickler when it came to religious matters, and even though Serafina’s words and tone and tears had touched him deeply, he nonetheless felt that they were, after all, in a church and that this was not the right place for such negotiations.

  Before answering, he glanced over at the baptistery to see if anyone had noticed his encounter with the singer. The baptismal cortege had disappeared. He was so insignificant that they hadn’t even noticed his absence. Minghetti, however, was still entranced by the harmonic games he was playing on the organ. Once he started to play, he did have a tendency to become something of a pest, albeit an amusing one.

  Bonifacio was reluctant to speak of such matters while in church, and feeling, on the one hand, deeply touched and, on the other, determined not to give up his role as paterfamilias free from the stain of secret relationships or moral backsliding, he said in a voice that he hoped would sound firm and affectionate, but which sounded instead tremulous, stammering, and weak, “Serafina . . . you deserve to be told the whole truth. . . . From now on, I want to live solely for my son. . . . Our love was . . . an illicit love. I owe God a great good, a great blessing, that of having a son. I have sacrificed my passion for Antonio’s happiness. Besides, I’m completely ruined. As regards material matters, I will help you insofar as I can. I’ll sort things out with that miser Don Carlos, but I’m ruined, you see. The voice . . . your voice will come back. . . .”

  And when he mentioned the voice he had so adored, Bonifacio was almost on the brink of tears too.

  However, the look on Serafina’s face again frightened him. That beautiful woman, who, for Bonifacio, had been the kindly face of beauty, suddenly looked more like a snake. She fixed him with piercing, steely eyes; he saw the corners of her mouth lift in a way that signaled infinite cruelty; he saw her run the slender tip of a moist, very sharp tongue over her red lips, and in the expectation of receiving a venomous bite, he waited for her to speak, that woman who had once sent him almost mad with pleasure.

  She said, “You always were an idiot, Bonifacio. Your son . . . is not your son.”

  “Serafina!”

  And Bonifacio could say no more. He, too, was losing his voice. In order not to fall, he leaned against the altar in that dark chapel.

  When he said nothing more, Serafina went on: “For heaven’s sake, everyone else knows. Do you really not know who the father of your son is?”

  “My son! Who is the father of my son?”

  Serafina extended one arm and pointed up at the choir stalls. “Why, the organist!”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Bonifacio, as if he had felt his beloved inject poison into his mouth when she kissed him.

  He moved away from the altar; he steadied himself on his feet; he smiled just as the nearby image of Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows, was smiling.

  “I forgive you, Serafina . . . because that is my duty. My son is my son. I have the thing you do not have and are seeking. I have faith, faith in my son. I would not be able to live without that faith. And I am sure, Serafina, that my son . . . is my son. He is! He is my son! But what you have said is a terrible blow. If anyone else had said it, I would not have believed them, I would not even have felt the blow. But you said it . . . and still I do not believe you. I haven’t had time to explain to you what is happening to me, what it means to be a father. I forgive you, but you have wounded me deeply. When, tomorrow, you regret having spoken those words, remember this: Bonifacio Reyes believes absolutely that Antonio Reyes y Valcárcel is his son. His only son, you understand, his only son!”

  DOÑA BERTA

  1

  THERE is a place in northern Spain where the Romans and the Moors n
ever penetrated; and if Doña Berta de Rondaliego, the owner of this green and silent hideaway, knew a little more history, she would swear that neither Agrippa nor Augustus nor Tariq nor Musa had ever planted their bold feet in that little corner of hers with its thick, fresh grass, so dark, glossy, velvety, and luxuriant, and which, as well as being hers, all hers, is as deaf as she is to the noises of the world, and as snugly wrapped up in the dense green of its infinite trees and lush fields as she is in the yellow flannel undergarments she wears to ward off her various ailments.

  Doña Berta’s hideaway of leaves and grass belongs to the parish of Pie del Oro, in the municipality of Carreño, under the jurisdiction of Gijón; and the place where Doña Berta lives goes by the name of Zaornín, and within Zaornín lies the leafy hollow called Susacasa, in the middle of which is a large meadow known as Aren. Along the far northeastern border of the meadow flows a stream edged with tall poplars, birches, and conical alder trees, whose dark leaves spiral up the trunk from ground level, where they mingle with the grass and the flowers on the banks of the stream.

  The stream has no name, nor does it deserve one, containing as it does barely enough water for a baptism; however, in their geographical vanity, the owners of Susacasa have for centuries called it “the river,” while their nearest neighbors, out of scorn for the Rondaliego domain, call that river regatu or “brook,” and humiliate it as often as they can by making frequent use of some entirely trumped-up rights-of-way to traverse that fleeting, crystalline visitor to Aren and the maize field; and they cross it—can you imagine?—without recourse to bridges, certainly not Roman ones, since, as we said, the Romans never came here, not even bridges made of hollow or half-rotten tree trunks that might revive on contact with the damp soil of the banks. Doña Berta complains bitterly about these tyrannical rights-of-way of unknown and highly suspect origin, these democratic victories sanctioned by time, and not only because the rabble show a complete lack of respect for the river by crossing it without a bridge (making use instead of a large stone placed in the middle, a small silica island worn smooth by the centuries-old friction of bare feet and hobnail boots) but also because they crush the lushest of the wildflowers and trample the fresh, new-sprouted grass of the fertile meadow, marking its immaculate green sward with scars that resemble a sash on some proud military chest, scars inflicted by heavy feet. But leaving aside these misfortunes, I will just say that farther on and farther up, for this is where the hill begins, and beyond that river crossed without bridges or fords, lies the llosa, which is the name given to the field of maize—of a certain type and quality that we need not go into here—and when the maize grows tall, and the leaves, like flexible spears, sway and bend gracefully on their stems, the llosa resembles a green sea ruffled by the wind. On the farther shore of that sea is the palacio, which is, in fact, a rather modest white house, the ancestral home of the Rondaliegos, and this, plus the farmyard, the lodge, and its outbuildings—a chapel attached to the house, a barn for the apple press (now a hayloft), a wooden granary raised up on stone pillars, and a square white dovecote—all of this, as well as a cabin that serves as a farmhouse, built on the very edge of the low ridge on which, just thirty paces away, stands the palacio, this whole area is called Posadorio.

  2

  DOÑA BERTA and Sabelona live alone in the white house, along with the cat, who, like the local stream, has no name because he is the only one of his kind. In the farmhouse lives the caretaker, now an old man, as deaf as Doña Berta, along with his near-imbecile daughter—who is, nevertheless, as strong as an ox and helps him in the daily chores—and an ever-changing but always uncouth servant, who is replaced every few days because the caretaker is an irascible fellow and dismisses servants for the slightest misdemeanor. He works the whole estate and keeps half the yield, not that the whole yield is worth very much, because however green and lush, the land is not particularly fertile and produces almost nothing. Doña Berta is poor but clean, and the dignity of her almost imaginary domain consists partly in that immaculateness born of the soul. In Doña Berta’s mind cleanliness is akin to solitude or isolation; she happily lives the life of a Jain hermit, doing all the spinning and the laundry, washing large quantities of household linen, and even kneading the bread. She does the baking every five or six days, and since the task of kneading demands stronger muscles than hers or indeed than those of the aging Sabelona, the caretaker’s imbecile daughter helps them out; but those two old ladies do all the spinning and the washing themselves, even carrying the laundry back from the river. The garden near the house turns white as snow when the laundry is laid out to dry, and when Doña Berta, deaf and silent, looks out from her modest house, with its view over the whole estate, she smilingly gives thanks to God for the spotless linen lying before her and for the green fields—which serve as a backdrop for the sheets and which also seem to have been newly washed—fields that extend as far down as the woodlands and as far as the maize field and the meadow of Aren, which appears to have been mown by a very particular barber and looks almost like a well-shaven, well-soaped, and highly scented gentleman. Yes, it’s just as if the grass had been trimmed with scissors and then soaped and polished; it’s not entirely flat but slightly convex, and plunges mysteriously down toward the alder trees where it meets the stream; and Doña Berta has often wished she had the hands of a giant, each one about a third of an acre broad, so that she could run them over the surface of that meadow, just as if she were stroking the cat’s back. On days when her spirits are rather low, her eyes are drawn to the two paths that cross Aren: vile stains, marks left by the plebs, the rabble, who, purely out of envy and malice and a desire to annoy, needlessly maintain those public rights-of-way, thus besmirching the honor of the Rondaliego family.

  The paths here lead nowhere; the world ends in Zaornín; no hunters, armies, bandits, or swindlers have ever passed through Susacasa; roads and railways are far away; even the local roads snake respectfully around the boundaries of that house set amid grass and foliage; the creaking of cart wheels is always a long way off, so far off that Doña Berta doesn’t even hear it . . . and yet those cursèd neighbors insist on disturbing that perfect peace, staining those green carpets with paths that seem to putrefy all that freshness, paths on which they leave the tracks of their great overshoes or their filthy bare feet, like a hideous seal set upon the unlawful usurpation of the Rondaliegos’ absolute dominion of the surrounding lands. How long have mere riffraff been allowed to walk across the meadow? “Since time immemorial,” say witnesses. “Lies!” retorts Doña Berta. “As if the Rondaliegos would ever have allowed that despicable rabble to trample the grass of Aren with their grimy feet!” The Rondaliegos wanted nothing to do with anyone; they married within the family and never mingled blood or inheritances; they allowed neither their lineage nor their lands to be soiled. She, Doña Berta, could not, of course, remember how long those public byways had been allowed to cross their lands, but in her heart she felt that the whole business must have begun with the fall of the old regime and the coming of liberals and other such things into the world.

  “The paths here lead nowhere, this is where the world ends,” says Doña Berta, who has a rather fanciful notion of geography, an imaginary world map of Homeric proportions; and she thinks the world ends in a point, that point being Zaornín, along with Susacasa, Aren, and Posadorio.

  “Neither the Moors nor the Romans ever set foot on the grass of Aren,” she says over and over to her faithful Sabelona (as she affectionately calls her maid, Isabel), who has served the Rondaliegos since she was ten years old, and who is equally untouched by Moors or Christians, for she is as pure as when her mother bore her, and that was seventy winters ago.

  “Neither the Moors nor the Romans!” Doña Berta says each night, as they sit in the candlelight by the glowing embers of the kitchen fire; and Sabelona nods with the same blind credulity with which, not long afterward, she kneels and repeats after her mistress the “acts of faith.” Neither Berta nor Sabelon
a knows very much about the Romans or the Moors, apart from the negative fact that they never passed through Zaornín; they may not even be entirely sure about the downfall of the Western Roman Empire or about the taking of Granada, which Doña Berta, more versed in the human sciences, gets slightly muddled up with the glorious African war, in particular the capture of Tetuán: In any case, she doesn’t consider either of those events to be half as remote as the respective rules of the Muslims and the Romans; and in fact, the Romans and the Moors come to symbolize for both women everything strange and distant and hostile; and so when some rare visitor dared to tell them that the French had never been to Susacasa either, and had no reason to, Berta and Sabelona simply shrugged, as if to say, “They obviously mean the Moors and the Romans,” because this hereditary obsession comes to Doña Berta from a tradition that predates the French invasion.

  3

  AH, THE liberals! They had arrived in Posadorio. We have already mentioned Sabelona’s intact virginity. The reader will have assumed that Doña Berta was a widow, or that her virtue was not mentioned because it was simply taken for granted. She was, indeed, virtuous but not a virgin, although she was a spinster. But Sabelona took no high moral stance as regards her mistress, for she understood perfectly well that, in her mistress’s place, her own virtue would not have survived intact. It had all been most unfortunate, and Berta had paid very dearly for that misfortune and for everything else. The Rondaliegos consisted of four brothers and one sister, Berta, and they had been orphans since they were children. The eldest son, Don Claudio, took on the role of father. Among them, purity of blood was almost a religion. They were good, kind people, like Berta, who was a permanent walking smile, and all of them performed acts of charity, although always maintaining a safe distance. They feared the common people, whom they loved as their Christian brethren but not as if they were Rondaliegos; their aristocratic solitude had as much to do with a cheerful, resigned asceticism as it did with their concern about bloodlines. Their library was a symbol of those tendencies, for it contained only religious texts—full of a reclusive, clear-eyed devotion—and books on heraldry; everywhere one saw the sign of the cross and everywhere, too, painted on vellum, the gold, argent, and gules of their family coat of arms. Three or four generations earlier, a Rondaliego had been found dead in a wood, in Matiella, half a league from Posadorio, murdered by a local man, or so it was thought. Ever since then, the family had watched their backs even when giving alms. Their worst sin was thinking ill of the common folk whom they protected. For their part, the peasants, who may once have depended on Posadorio for work, received these gifts with a look of humble servility, then, in private, they mocked that tribe of decadent aristos, and as long as they could be sure that their actions would have no consequences, they took every opportunity to show their lack of respect. They were helped in this somewhat by a new government policy that favored the bourgeoisie. The locals’ growing contempt for the aristocratic Rondaliegos was symbolized by these new public freedoms (not that they called them that, of course) and by the legal sanctions that positively encouraged such contempt by reorganizing the way in which municipal taxes were levied, by increasing the number of compulsory community workdays, by withdrawing the rural police from along the boundaries of Zaornín and Susacasa, and so on, and the blame for all these tiny, disguised jabs was always laid at the door of the town council, the new law, the new customs, and the naughty times they lived in.