His Only Son: With Dona Berta

by Leopoldo Alas

  Sabelona, however, was not brave enough to accept. Unlike her mistress, she had not gone mad and could see all the dangers. Far too many misfortunes were already raining down on her without seeking out another still graver one that would bring certain death. Go to Madrid! She had always had only the very vaguest idea of what those far-off places might be like, as if they existed in the next life; she wasn’t even convinced that there were places that far from Susacasa. . . . Madrid! The train . . . all those people . . . all roads. . . . Impossible! Her mistress must forgive her, but her love and loyalty did not extend that far. She was being asked to perform an act of heroism, and she was not up to it. Just as Saint Peter denied Jesus, so Sabelona denied her mistress and, at the foot of the cross, she abandoned her to her mad ideal and to danger. Sabelona would feel infinite grief if Doña Berta were dying, but she would not go with her into the tomb, and thus she left her at the side of the road leading to Madrid. She had some distant relatives who lived in a nearby parish and she would, most reluctantly, go to live with them during her mistress’s absence, given that Señor Pumariega—contrary to all human and divine laws, according to Sabelona—insisted on taking the keys of Posadorio.

  “But are you not still the owner? What right has he to lay down the law here?”

  “Don’t be silly, Sabelona. He can do what he likes because he’s the one giving me the money, so the house is as good as his already.”

  Doña Berta was deeply wounded by Sabelona’s decision to abandon her just as she was about to undertake this perilous journey, coming as that decision did from her lifetime companion, but she forgave Sabelona her weakness, because she herself needed every ounce of courage and unswerving determination to leave her house and enter that labyrinth of roads, towns, noises, strangers, and enemies. The poor lady sighed and said to herself, “If Sabelona won’t come with me, then I’ll take the cat.” When Sabelona learned that the cat was leaving too, she looked at the animal in alarm, as if asking his opinion. If truth be told, it did not seem to her fair to abuse a poor creature who, unlike her, did not have the option to refuse; and if the cat had even an inkling of what lay ahead, she was sure he would not choose to go with his mistress either. Sabelona, however, did not dare to oppose her mistress in this, even though she had been the one to bring the cat into the house, and so the cat was, strictly speaking, hers. And she could not possibly take the cat with her to the house of her distant relatives: Two more mouths to feed would be too much. And he could not stay in Posadorio alone, still less with Señor Pumariega in charge, for he would starve the cat to death. Thus it was decided that the cat would go to Madrid with Doña Berta.

  7

  ONE MORNING, Sabelona rose from her chaste bed, gazed out of the kitchen window and up at the sky, one hand shielding her eyes, and with a sour look and in a still-sourer voice, she most untypically exclaimed to herself, “A fine day for traveling!” Then she thought, but did not say, “The last day!” She lit the fire, did a little sweeping, fetched some fresh water, made coffee for herself and some hot chocolate for her mistress, and, as if nothing out of the ordinary were about to happen, knocked, as usual, at Doña Berta’s bedroom door to indicate that breakfast was ready, and then, as if this were not the morning when everything would end, as if what would happen in the next hour would not be a kind of end of the world, she embarked on her routine domestic tasks, which were now rather pointless, since no one would be sleeping in Posadorio that night.

  She busied herself with washing out a pitcher, and just then, in through the garden gate—just opposite the kitchen window—came the cat, covered in dew, the mist of that damp, leaden morning clinging to his sleek, white body. Sabelona looked at him fondly, enviously, pityingly.

  And she said to herself, “Poor creature! He has no idea what awaits him!” The cat had clearly made no preparations for the journey; the life he led, and which, as far as he was concerned, he had been leading since time immemorial, doubtless seemed to him eternal. The possibility of change did not enter into his metaphysics. And so, like any good epicurean, he set about licking clean last night’s supper plates.

  Doña Berta entered silently; she saw her cup of chocolate standing, as it always did, in the kneading trough and began to drink it. All the preparations for their departure had been made many days ago, down to the last detail. Now it was simply a matter of leaving and, before that, of saying goodbye. Mistress and maid barely spoke during this final scene of their life spent in common. An hour passed, and Señor Pumariega arrived, for he had arranged everything with a willingness no one could bring themselves to thank him for. He would take Doña Berta to the nearest station, register her luggage, and put her in a second-class carriage (Doña Berta had chosen not to travel first-class, so as to save money) and then off she would go. In Madrid, the landlord of a cheap boardinghouse would be waiting for her. Señor Pumariega had arranged this in order to ingratiate himself with the landlord by sending him another guest, because, for all his wealth, this was where he stayed whenever he went to Madrid.

  Along with Señor Pumariega came the boy from whom he had hired the donkey on which Doña Berta would have to ride to the station, two leagues from Posadorio. Mistress and maid had spoken so little that morning they seemed almost angry with each other, as if they were each mutually, silently blaming the other for this separation, but with the arrival of those who had come to take Doña Berta away, they were both overwhelmed by feelings of infinite tenderness; they both burst into tears and fell into each other’s arms and wept for a long time.

  The cat stopped licking the plates and stared at them in astonishment.

  This was something quite new in a household where no one expressed their feelings. They all loved each other but never showed this physically. The cat enjoyed a very good life, but was never kissed or cosseted. Just in case, he went and sat near the two old ladies and gave Señor Pumariega a hard look.

  Doña Berta asked Señor Pumariega to allow her a moment alone, and she went through the garden gate, climbed up the hill as far as she could go, and gazed out over her domain. The thick vegetation swayed gently, glittering in the damp air and apparently moaning softly. A few sparrows were chattering. Doña Berta did not even have the consolation of being able to poeticize this solemn scene of farewell. The dull, self-absorbed nature that lay before her lacked even the decency to chime with her emotions, the pathetic fallacy that brings such comfort to melancholy dreamers. Neither Aren, the llosa, the woods, nor even the house spoke a word to her. They lay there, indolent and unmoved by the coming absence; this selfish response was just like Sabelona’s, only more overt, the same selfish response the cat would have given had he been consulted about the journey. It didn’t matter. Doña Berta did not feel loved by her lands, but she loved them infinitely. Yes, in the world, one does not only love people, one loves things too. Aren, the llosa, the garden, Posadorio were all in themselves part of her soul, with no need to link them to memories of some human love. We must love nature as true lovers love, despite the beloved’s scorn. Loving the idol, loving the stone that cannot feel or reciprocate our feelings, that is the supreme love. The most faithful believer is the one who lies prostrate before the entirely godless altar. The sparrows continued to chatter. They seemed to be saying, “What do we care? You’re leaving and we’re staying, you’re mad and we’re not; you’re setting off in search of a portrait of your son, who you’re not even sure was your son. Good luck to you.” Doña Berta forgave the birds—they were only young after all, and she even forgave lush, verdant Aren, which, more cruelly still, said absolutely nothing. The woods were moaning, but only softly, like a child grown weary of crying but who continues to sob merely to keep up the rhythm and to amuse himself; and Doña Berta even noticed—with the clear-sightedness of those transcendent moments when one is alone with nature—that the woods were not sighing because she was leaving; they always sighed like that; the cold air of that damp, leaden morning was merely one of the thousand and one ways in which nat
ure reveals its boredom. The woods were sighing, as they always did, out of the tedium felt by everything that lives rooted in the earth or travels across its surface but is kept chained here by gravity. All the things she could see seemed to her like convicts bemoaning their imprisoned state and yet loving their prison. She, however, was free to break the chain and had broken it, but half her soul still clung on.

  “Goodbye, goodbye!” Doña Berta was saying, trying in vain to tear herself away. In her heart she bore the griefs of many generations of the Rondaliego family as they bade farewell to their land: Her father, her brothers, her grandparents . . . they were all there in her breast, in her throat, choking back their tears, just as she was.

  “At this rate, Doña Berta, we’ll miss the train,” cried Pumariega, and to her it was if he had said, “You’ll miss your own execution!”

  Señor Pumariega and the boy were waiting in the courtyard—the executioner and his assistant—as well as the donkey on which Doña Berta would have to ride to the gallows.

  The cat had been placed in a basket.

  8

  DAY WAS dawning, and snow, as treacherously silent as a prowling cat, was falling heavily, depositing layer upon layer on Puerta del Sol, whole trowelfuls of ermine that had long since erased all trace of any late-night passersby. All doors were closed. Only one stood ajar, that of the police headquarters; a stall selling fritters, which a stallholder had tried to set up in the street, had been carried into the Ministry of the Interior. Doña Berta, who was contemplating this spectacle from the corner of Calle del Carmen, could not understand why fritters were being fried, let alone sold in a ministry; but this was because the stall itself had vanished inside, carried in by two guards and another man who appeared to be from the telegraph office. And then the square was empty; Doña Berta was alone with the snow. She stood utterly still, her feet, in clogs, sunk in the softness; her open umbrella looked as if it were covered in a white cloth. “It’s just like back home,” she was thinking, “it will be exactly like this in Aren.” She was going to early-morning mass. The church was her refuge; only there could she find something similar to what she had left behind. Only the bond of religion could bring her close to her fellow men and women. “After all,” she told herself, “we are all Catholics, brothers and sisters.” And that thought slightly diminished the fear those strangers inspired in her when considered as a group, as a crowd, as people rather than as individuals. Mass was just as it was when she used to hear it in Zaornín, in the daughter church of Pie del Oro. The priest said the same words and made the same gestures, and this was always a source of consolation and the main reason why she heard mass every day. However, she had another reason for getting up so early, and this was because the sight of a deserted Madrid reconciled her in a way to the city. The streets seemed less hostile, more like quiet side streets; the trees looked more like real trees. She would have liked to visit the outskirts of the city, but they were so far away. Her legs were so weak and carriages so expensive and so dangerous. She did manage on one or two occasions to reach the outer limits of what seemed to her an endless sea of houses, but she gave up such journeys of discovery because the countryside she found there was not countryside at all but parched, brown desert. Her heart contracted, and she was filled with an infinite sadness. “I wish I had died without seeing that, without knowing that such desolation existed in the world; for a poor old lady from Susacasa, that corner of green contentment, it’s too painful to be so far away from the real world, to be separated from all that freshness, grass, and trees by these leagues and leagues of stones and dust.” Gazing out at that bleak panorama, she felt as if she were eating dust and touching dry earth, and her hands clenched shut at the thought. She felt so alienated from everything around her that, sometimes, standing marooned on the pavement edge, she had to suppress the urge to cry for help, to ask someone, please, out of charity, to take her back to Posadorio. Despite such sadnesses, though, she walked the streets with a smile on her face, hoping to please and flatter that fearsome multitude of city dwellers and thus assuage any harmful intentions they might have. She gave way to everyone. Because she was so deaf, she could only tell if any passersby she did happen to collide with were speaking to her by scrutinizing their faces, which is why she smiled and nodded so meaningfully and muttered so apologetically. The multitude presumably took a liking to that poor old lady, so lively and so neatly dressed in dark brown silk; many smiled back and let her pass; and no one had stolen from her or tried to cheat her, but still she felt afraid. And yet, seeing her pause and cross herself before leaving her house, no one would have suspected that simply going out into the street each day was an act of heroism.

  She feared the crowds, but, above all, she feared being run down, trodden on, trampled by horses or crushed by wheels. Every carriage, every cart was a wild beast waiting to pounce on her. She launched herself across Puerta del Sol like a Christian martyr entering the arena of a Roman circus. The tram seemed to her like a cunning monster, an insidious serpent. She imagined that the guillotine must have something akin to those hidden wheels gliding razor-sharp along their two iron tracks. The sound of wheels, footsteps, bells, whistles, and horns reached her fogged brain like a dark, mysterious, terrifying cloud of sound. When the tram approached from behind—and she sensed its presence more by a process of divination than anything else, by reading the signs of imminent danger in other people’s faces, by an inner trembling, a hesitant rumbling—Doña Berta would leap out of the way with an agility remarkable in a woman her age; she would let the beast pass, turning to look at it, even smiling, even making an involuntary bow; pure flattery, because deep down she loathed its treacherous, perfidious nature. With what refined, barbarous cruelty it leapt on the unwary! Many passersby had saved her from grave danger, snatching her from beneath the hooves of horses or the wheels of carriages, physically grabbing hold of her or pushing her out of the path of an accident. And she was so grateful! She would turn to her savior, showering him with gestures and words of praise and gratitude. “I owe you my life, sir. If I can ever. . . . Forgive me, I’m extremely deaf, but if I can ever. . . .” And those passing providences would move swiftly on, leaving her words still hanging on her lips. “Why am I so afraid of people when there are so many kind individuals prepared to snatch one from the jaws of death?” It would not have surprised her if the indifferent multitude had left her to be trampled by a horse or sliced in two by a carriage wheel, never offering a helping hand or uttering a word of warning. Why should those strangers care about her? Of what significance was she in the world outside of Zaornín, or even Susacasa? That was why she was so grateful to those who rescued her from the carriages and trams. She, too, wanted to help her fellow man. Life in the street was, she felt, like a battle being waged every day by all of Madrid’s blithe, brave inhabitants, a battle involving collisions and accidents; and in that unending daily tussle, she would have liked to help her brothers and sisters, which is what they were, even though they were complete strangers. And so she always kept her eyes peeled, watching out for herself and for others. At every junction, at every crosswalk, in every square there was what she thought of as a skirmish between passersby and carriages and horses, which presented the greatest dangers; and whenever the terrible moment came to cross the street, she would be even more attentive than usual and, despite her fear, would think as much of other people’s safety as of her own; and great was her satisfaction when she was able to save someone else from misfortune, be they a child, an old man, or a poor old lady like herself. One day, when the traffic was at its worst, she was standing on the pavement outside the Café Imperial and noticed a drunk zigzagging his way across Puerta del Sol, with many bodily circumlocutions and periphrases; and meanwhile, trams, carriages, and hackney cabs, omnibuses and carts, horses and heavily laden porters came and went like arrows crossing the sky. And the drunk proceeded, calmly and soberly (although he was anything but sober), performing every conceivable arc and loop and swerve, e
ntirely oblivious to the danger he was in, stumbling forward on a route strewn with multiple certain deaths. Doña Berta watched him advance and retreat and miraculously avoid all collisions, pursued in vain by the scornful shouts of drivers and riders, while she, on the pavement, hands pressed together, was praying to God to save that man, just as she might have stood on the shore, praying for the life of a shipwreck victim who was drowning before her very eyes.