His Only Son: With Dona Berta

  Yes, a substantial future now lay ahead of her and she realized that she had not hitherto been selfish enough. Humiliating others and amusing herself as much as possible in a thousand unknown ways, those were the two sources of pleasure she wanted to drain to the last drop; two sources that were, in fact, one and the same.

  With her newly restored health, Emma felt a mad desire to experience as yet unknown delights; and so strong did those desires grow that the secret pleasures of her self-imposed seclusion began to seem inadequate, incapable of quenching her thirst for strange emotions; and so, bursting out of the chrysalis of her isolation, she decided to sally forth into the world, albeit cautiously and craftily, in search of adventures of which her relatives would know nothing, adventures that would seem all the more delicious for being secret.

  One night, Eufemia was dozing off in her mistress’s study, her sleepy head now and then knocking against the wall, when she was woken abruptly by a blow on her shoulder; it was Emma’s hand shaking her awake; her mistress was still in her nightdress, looking even paler than usual and breathing hard, her nostrils opening and closing like bellows.

  “What time is it?” she asked her in a hoarse voice.

  “It must be ten o’clock, señora.”

  “And it’s raining.”

  Eufemia heard the noise of rain out in the street.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Be quiet and bring me one of your cotton dresses and one of your shawls and a scarf. We’ll both go dressed as artisans. We’re going to the theater, to sit up in the gods. They’re performing the . . . oh, I can’t remember now, but it’s a new opera and very good apparently, I saw it on the poster on my way back from mass, on the corner by the town hall. Come on, hurry, and bring me that gilt hairpin that cost you two reales. No one else is at home. We’re going out on the town, so get a move on!”

  10

  ONE MORNING, very early, Eufemia burst into Bonifacio’s bedroom and woke him, saying, “The mistress wants you to go and fetch Don Basilio, sir.”

  “The doctor?” cried Bonifacio, sitting bolt upright in bed and rubbing his eyes still puffy with sleep. “The doctor, at this time in the morning! What is it now?”

  It didn’t even occur to him that the doctor might be needed to cure some ill; experience had made him skeptical on that point; he had already guessed that his wife was not really ill; but who knew what new caprice this might be; why would anyone want a doctor at that hour; and what fresh misfortune would almost certainly befall him, Bonifacio, as a consequence of this new, impromptu, early-morning piece of mischief on his wife’s part?

  “What’s wrong with her? What does she want?” he asked anxiously, as if praying for light and help and strength, meanwhile feeling under the bed for his socks.

  Eufemia shrugged, then, remembering her modesty, withdrew from the room so that Bonifacio could get dressed.

  Two minutes later, he was gingerly approaching his wife’s bed, dragging his fake tiger-skin slippers and buttoning up to his chin the worn, gray, lightweight overcoat that served him as a dressing gown in the milder months. Bonifacio was trembling, not because of the cool dawn air but because he felt so uncertain, so afraid. Nothing made him tremble more than the anxiety of knowing that some unnamed evil was about to occur, the kind of thing that appears very suddenly and of which one had no suspicion even moments before, especially if that bad thing occurred when he was not yet dressed, at an unearthly hour, thus ruining his sleep, his digestion, and the pleasure of listening to music or simply letting his mind wander: “Given that all dangers loom large in my cowardly imagination, I prefer a size-eight problem, which I know is exactly a size-eight to a problem that might only be a size four, but which in my imagination balloons into a size forty.”

  For some time now, his relationship with Emma and with Don Juan had been a constant source of potential shocks or surprises. From both he expected and feared terrible discoveries, complaints, accusations, cruel recriminations, especially from his wife. What did she know? What didn’t she know? What unholy truce was this, because it certainly wasn’t God-given, and why was she allowing such a truce and how long would it last?

  Having caught him in flagrante smelling of rice powder (albeit innocently on that occasion), why had she not drawn the logical conclusion? She must be preparing some dire punishment for him! He was terrified at the thought of having to give an “explanation,” as he liked to call the much-feared scene; but he would prefer that, or so he thought, to the state of perpetual dread, of leporine nervousness, in which he lived day and night. Whenever Emma spoke to him, looked at him, or summoned him, he felt that the moment had arrived.

  “What’s wrong, my dear?” he asked his wife gently as, teeth chattering, he bent over her where she lay in the marital bed.

  “I want you to go and fetch Don Basilio now, this instant, before he goes out on his calls. I want to see him immediately.”

  “Are you feeling ill? You’ve been so well lately!”

  “Exactly. I know what I’m doing. So go on, run and fetch Don Basilio for me.”

  Bonifacio did not argue. Best not to annoy her; she might mention the rice powder at any moment. He went back to his room, hurriedly washed and dressed, and went out into the street, feeling a little braver, thanks to the cold water he had splashed on the back of his neck. He had discovered that cold water applied to the back of the neck always filled him with courage and reconciled him with life; he hated to acknowledge that dependence of mind on matter, but he could not deny it.

  Fortunately, the doctor lived quite near, and so Bonifacio’s fear had little opportunity to come up with too many painful hypotheses on what Don Basilio’s visit might have to do with the “conjugal drama” going on in his house, a drama whose plot was now reaching its climax, for Bonifacio was too familiar with the household theater and his wife’s tricks to think otherwise. What role would that unexpected latecomer, Don Basilio, play? He had no idea.

  The “unexpected latecomer” was a man in his forties, who tried to appear ten years younger; although somewhat on the short side, he cut a slim and, in his own way, graceful figure in his long, close-fitting, cream-colored overcoat and broad-brimmed top hat; his face was anemically pale; he had darting deep blue eyes, which, when at rest, were very piercing; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and sported long side-whiskers, which he possibly dyed black; and he had thin lips, fine hands, and small, well-shod feet. He was a homeopath and very sentimental; despite practicing homeopathy—doubtless because it was fashionable and well-suited to the ordinary run of women—he, in fact, specialized in births and diseases of the womb and in treating women, young and old, for the fears, superstitions, and caprices imbued in them by their limited education. He preached the therapeutic efficacy of faith and of lamps burning on the altar; on the other hand, he demanded that they should give due credit to the mysteries of their blood cells. He believed, or claimed to believe, in the influence of the purely moral over the organic, and in order to convince pretty women of this belief, he would bestow on them a particular melancholy smile, at once resigned and intelligent.

  Don Basilio Aguado divided his “parishioners” into two tribes: those who called him Don Basilio and those who called him Aguado. The latter understood him; the former were either stupid or wicked. Emma never got it wrong; she always called him by his surname. Bonifacio always called him Don Basilio; despite all his efforts not to, habit prevailed, because everyone in the town called the doctor Don Basilio behind his back. Being called Don Basilio was a permanent reminder to the doctor of his bad luck, of his father’s shortcomings, of the wretched, prosaic reality that bound him to his fate as an obscure, provincial doctor; whereas the name Aguado represented his ambitious dreams, his delicate instincts, his success with the ladies, homeopathy, and all kinds of other pretty ideals that we will not go into here.

  The homeopath always got up with the lark and began his home vi
sits very early. Bonifacio found him already impeccably dressed, as if he were about to visit an ambassador rather than his bedbound patients.

  While still buttoning up his gloves, he listened to Bonifacio’s stammered explanation, making it clear—by much intelligent, affirmative nodding—that he was giving great importance to everything Bonifacio said, even though the latter had very little to tell him; this hardly seemed to matter, because Don Basilio seemed to find all that he said very interesting as, grave-faced but smiling politely, he followed the anxious husband down the street. Gesturing and ushering each other forward, they argued for a moment over who should walk on the pavement; in the end, Bonifacio won, because he was more insistent and his humility far more genuine than the doctor’s. Along the way, Don Basilio continued to ask questions, as he believed was his duty, and Bonifacio continued to say nothing of any significance. Besides, Aguado knew Doña Emma Valcárcel inside out. He was her preferred doctor, although only intermittently because she never consulted just one doctor. She changed doctors as she might have changed court favorites had she been Christina of Sweden or Catherine the Great of Russia, and she always had a whole ministry of doctors on the go. Aguado was the one who had remained in favor the longest because he was a specialist in diseases of the womb, hysteria, flatulence, and baseless fears, or flatulence by any other name.

  Despite his instinctive repugnance for the exact sciences and the physical sciences, which spoke only of matter, Bonifacio admired science in general and believed in medicine for the very good reason that if you did not turn to doctors when you were ill, who could you turn to? You had to believe in something; in times of trouble, his feeble spirit would not allow him to remain without any hope, without some piece of wreckage to hold on to. He remembered that whenever his now dead parents and siblings were ill, he had always thought of the doctor as Providence; when everyone was well at home, he shared the general skepticism felt even by doctors themselves; but once a loved one fell ill, Bonifacio immediately believed again in medicine. He had read a little about our internal workings and intended to read much more if ever he had a family, so that he could bring up his son properly, and even if he never had a son, which given the ruined state of his wife’s womb looked likely, he would read more on the subject in order to become a philosopher for the times when he fell out with Serafina and when he began to feel old (for he planned to become a philosopher in his solitary old age). Despite all those readings past and future, he imagined the human organism as a kind of consciousness inhabiting each finger and each organ and each humor; and the expression “pleasing to the stomach” when applied, for example, to medicines, he took quite literally. As far as Bonifacio was concerned, the relationship between medicines and illnesses was a magical one, and poisons and elixirs formed the basis of a whole miraculous, infinitesimal mythology; by which he meant that one drop more or less of a liquid, however anodyne, could, according to him, either kill the patient or cure him in an instant. He had learned this from his wife, who had torn him to shreds on a multitude of occasions because he, hand shaking, had poured a drop too much or too little into a coffee spoon.

  In short, what he respected was the occult knowledge possessed by Señor Aguado, who was not just his wife’s favorite but the homeopath and man-midwife he had dreamed of when he still nursed hopes of having a son.

  Together they went into Emma’s bedroom. Don Basilio drew his thin lips into a smile.

  Had Sagasta or Cánovas been summoned by the queen at daybreak to form a ministry, it would not have occurred to either of them to ask her why so early, they would simply have done as they were told and formed a ministry; and so it was that Don Basilio, whom Emma had been ignoring for months, did not even bother to ask what this new emergency was, he merely tackled the matter at hand. He wanted facts, a full report.

  What had been happening since the last time he visited? She had been seen by Don Venancio, who was also an allopath as well as being the town’s mayor and a specialist in childbirth. Why had he come? No particular reason, but he had recommended that she go on a diet. Honestly! Don Venancio was himself a glutton, who suffered from indigestion much as a fully loaded cannon might, and he cured this by going on diets worthy of the anchorites living in the deserts of Egypt. He then prescribed equally extreme diets to his patients as the best cure-all in the world. Don Basilio, whose own stomach was so ruined that he did not need to eat, was opposed to strict diets in such delicate patients as Doña Emma and ascribed all the ailments of which she had not yet complained to a lack of food, to the diet proposed by that other doctor. Emma said nothing; she did not dare to tell him how well and how much she had been eating of late.

  Finally, Don Basilio allowed her to get a word in edgeways, and she explained that she had no pain, not what you could call pain, but that she suffered from terrible insomnia and occasional bouts of great melancholy and sudden bottomless anxieties, about what she did not know, and a feeling as of being suffocated; the room she was in, the very house itself seemed too narrow for her, like a tomb, like a cave whose walls were hung with iron shackles, and she longed to leap off the balcony and fly far away, to drink in the air and soak up the light. Sometimes her melancholy seemed to derive from having always lived in the same town, seeing always the same horizon; she said she felt a nostalgia—although she didn’t use that word, of course—for countries she had never seen or even imagined. This wild itch sometimes reached the absurd extreme of wanting to be in several places at once, in many different towns, both by the sea and deep in the interior, in the light and in the dark, in a landscape similar to her own, abounding in green fields, but also in some desert place, with diaphanous, cloudless skies and no rain. What she needed above all was not to suffocate, not to feel oppressed by roofs and walls. And so on and so on.

  None of this was new to Bonifacio, except in the form it took, for his wife had spent her whole life wishing for the moon. When he heard her talk about wanting to leap from the balcony and fly far away, however, he immediately thought of the witches in Seville, who go flying at night on Saturdays, mounted on broomsticks; and he felt a certain superstitious fear of that relatively and suspiciously new desire of hers. He blushed, ashamed of these evil thoughts. He didn’t even dare to think anything that might offend Emma, for fear she might guess what he was thinking.

  Don Basilio interrupted her, holding up one hand and gesturing to her to give him her wrist. He smiled and looked intelligent, as if to say that he had, in his wisdom, foreseen everything she had said and already studied it in the books he kept at home. Then, as he usually did at such moments, he ignored the various symptoms reported by his patient and focused on “the one cause,” saying, “Hysteria is like Proteus.”

  “Who?” asked Emma.

  “The one who stole fire from the gods,” said Bonifacio, showing off his classical knowledge.

  “That’s right,” said the doctor, whose entire knowledge of Proteus’s biography was contained in that single quotation. “Hysteria,” he added, “like Proteus, takes on myriad shapes—”

  “Oh, now I remember,” Bonifacio broke in innocently. “Forgive me, Don Basilio, but the one who stole fire from the gods was someone else, it was Prometheus. I got them muddled up.”

  The doctor blushed slightly and a look of annoyance flickered across his face, a double annoyance, first, at being addressed as Don Basilio and, second, for being revealed to have only a scant knowledge of the Ancient World.

  “What a fool this henpecked husband is!” he thought, then went on: “We have to get to the root of the problem. The problem lies within, in what we call the spirit, because I warn you both”—and at this, he turned to Bonifacio, in order to dazzle him and to avenge himself—“I am a vitalist, but not just a vitalist, I am a spiritualist too, even though that is not the current fashion.”

  This matter was less of a novelty to Bonifacio than the doctor might have thought. When not playing the flute and spending time with Serafina, and when his wife did not need h
im, and especially when lying in bed just before sleeping, he would spend a considerable amount of time pondering the great problem of what we are inside, deep inside; and he had very bold and, as he believed, original ideas about the nature of the soul. Oh yes, he, too, was a spiritualist, and a serious one!

  “The problem lies in your spirit, and the spirit cannot be cured with potions,” Don Basilio went on.

  “But didn’t you just say that what I have is hysteria?” asked Emma, smiling.

  “Indeed, señora, but there are mysterious links between body and soul, and I am not one of those who says”—and here he turned again to Bonifacio—“post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”

  He clearly wanted to impress Bonifacio and make him pay dearly for that mix-up about Proteus and Prometheus; because Don Basilio did not usually show off his erudition and, when attending his patients, seemed more like a rather elegant, well-turned-out moralist than a doctor of medicine.

  Bonifacio began translating the Latin to himself and stumbled only on propter, whose meaning he could not recall; he would look it up in the dictionary later on. It was, he thought, a preposition. Bonifacio had studied philosophy for a few years at the provincial high school but had never graduated; however, what knowledge he had did not come from there but, as we have already said, from a great urge, when he was older, to improve himself, and not just in order to complete his education but because having once dreamed of becoming a priest, the dignity he attributed to that priestly career seemed to him to require a plan, a serious, profound plan of study that might one day serve as spiritual nourishment for the son who would spring from his loins and from his wife’s womb.

  Emma, who understood nothing about triviums or quadriviums, was growing slightly impatient with the doctor, who still had not told her what she should do, and he, noticing her impatience, quickly summed matters up by saying that she did not need the syrups prescribed by that other doctor but should take the capsules he had brought her in this pretty little box; and, above all, she required long walks, plenty of exercise, distraction, diversions, fresh air, and plenty of meat cooked English-fashion. As regards meat, he discoursed on a subject almost unheard of—or at least very novel—in the town at the time. He abominated stews and blamed the lack of national vigor on stewed meat and on how little fried meat was eaten in “our poor, impoverished Spain.”