After Marta’s second refusal, which was accompanied by a knowing look and a smile directed at Nepomuceno alone, he finally understood and was deeply grateful to her for the sacrifice she was making for his sake; and he would have melted with sheer pleasure, had he not done so already, thanks to Marta’s dizzying nearness and the spiritual and non-spiritual things that she was saying to him; and above all, thanks to the way their knees happened occasionally, or, rather, quite often, to brush against each other.
“What eloquence, what natural warmth she gives off!” Don Juan was thinking, applying the same verb to both warmth and eloquence.
Marta was speaking to Nepomuceno about the ideal and about ideals, but somehow managed to slip in accounts of incidents and autobiographical descriptions that almost always referred to the solemn act of her dressing or undressing or lying half asleep or sleepless in bed. For example, that night, Nepomuceno learned that Marta had read something called Hamburg Dramaturgy by Lessing, and that she shared with the author of Laocoön a liking for very close-fitting pearl-gray stockings fastened above the knee. Most touching of all was the story of Goethe’s lovers, a subject that had preoccupied Marta for many years. Marta spoke of the nobility and pride of Friederike Brion, who preferred never to marry because no other man was worthy of a woman who had been loved by Goethe, and Marta did this with a warmth matched only by that “given off” by her knees. Nepomuceno, mixing everything up together, including the faculties of the soul, ended up thinking that those German geniuses must have been veritable satraps, who spent their lives scorning ordinary beings and fondling the finer examples of the eternal feminine. When talk turned to “the realm of the Mothers” in Goethe’s Faust, Nepomuceno could only imagine those “Mothers” to have been exceptionally fertile wet nurses. Besides, regardless of Heine and Young Germany, he was burning up with passion and, after so much science and poetry and so much rubbing of knees, all he could think of to say was, unbeknown to him, what a character in a play once said—the title of the play being Men Beware Women—that is, the only thing that came into Nepomuceno’s mouth was a solemn promise of imminent marriage.
Following the example of some other married women, who were also dancing, Emma accepted an invitation from the president of the club to dance in the lancers and, shortly afterward, she danced an intimate polka with Minghetti, a form of brazenness that was becoming fashionable at the time and not without some moral cost.
That intimate polka with Minghetti was a revelation. The baritone had noticed the interest shown in him by that lady who, while out walking and at mass and in the street, had frequently shot him incendiary glances, and that night, realizing that her intentions were serious, he came up with a plan of seduction, which suited him from many points of view. From the piano and during the concert, he began to besiege her with looks and flattering remarks and, by inviting her to dance that particular kind of polka, he was staking his all. Once she had accepted his invitation, he knew what he had to do; and while their knees spoke the same language as Marta’s had, although without the intervention of any German classics, he privately gave himself over to plans and arithmetical calculations. Half serious, half joking, he declared himself to Emma while they were dancing around the room; and she, laughing uproariously and feeling very happy and not in the least shocked, told him he was mad and allowed him to hold her still closer, as if she had not noticed, as if her honor were above all suspicion and she need pay no attention to those purely fortuitous squeezings. Yes, she called him mad and a liar and a joker, but when they sat down together after the polka was over, rather than feeling put out by the singer’s insistence, she grew rather serious, sighed a couple of times, like a misunderstood house-maid, and ended up saying that all she could offer Minghetti was her friendship, a loyal, steadfast friendship. The baritone, who never missed a trick, continued to speak of his burning passion, but, very discreetly, along with variations on the same theme, he told her the tale of his economic woes and those of his colleagues. Minghetti, who was a bohemian—not that he would have known the word—was unembarrassed to speak of his poverty and of the picaresque tricks he had often resorted to in order to get himself out of trouble. He knew that part of his charm—which many women found irresistible—lay in the disorderly life he led, the life of a pleasant, generous, cheerful, almost childlike, but rather unscrupulous adventurer, except when it came to affairs of the heart or of honor. He sensed at once that, with Emma, seduction was the most effective approach; she herself confessed that she had first noticed him on the famous night when he’d had to sing The Barber of Seville and had thought then that “he had something about him,” as people say.
“Ah yes,” he exclaimed, smiling, “that was when the civil guard were after me!”
And using that incident as his excuse—an incident that had set the whole town talking some months back—he began recounting his story and his various trials and tribulations, always very much after his own fashion, as if making fun of his own difficulties. He kept quiet about a lot of things that seemed unlikely to show him in an interesting light, but he did not conceal other rather improper actions, and he did so not out of a love of truth but because according to his own moral sense, he was not saying anything either repugnant or unworthy; fortunately, Emma was equally insensitive to such delicate matters, and whenever some trick proved successful, she always admired the skill of the trickster and forgot about the poor fool who had been tricked.
Emma listened, entranced, to this picaresque tale, in which the pranks could be explained or excused by the intensity of the passions aroused and the repeated blows of adverse fortune.
The baritone’s story, blurred and distorted by him whenever it suited his ends, could be summed up as follows: Cayetano Domínguez was born in Valencia. In his youth, he had witnessed the kind of poverty that aspired in vain to make an industry out of idleness and always ended up in prison and in constant conflict with the law and its agents. Prison, his father’s all too frequent abode, had prepared him, as if through repeated rehearsals, for the sad life of the orphan; and when, at last, the author of his days left home never to return—because on one occasion, when released from jail, he found not home but death in some mysterious affair on the outskirts of Valencia—and when poor Minguillo, as he was known by the local ne’er-do-wells, was left alone in the world, for his mother had died giving birth to him, he served a very useful apprenticeship in mistakes, hardship, and homelessness; and by the time he was twelve, he was a proper man and very, very nearly a complete rogue, thanks to his innate cleverness and hard work when there was honest work to be had, as well as to his knowledge of the tricks of the trade, the sheer force of his cynicism, the strength of his muscles, and his scorn for all laws and moral and legal restraints, which, in his opinion, had been made only for the rich; the poor could not possibly abide by those laws, because if they did, they would die of hunger, which was the worst crime there was.
He escaped from the hands of a distant relative—who beat him to within an inch of his life and called him a son of this and that—and went to serve the church in the role of choirboy, and he even sang in the cathedral choir as a boy soprano; and that, he said, was the happiest time of his life, although still not perfect. He did not play tricks on people for the sake of it but to earn money; and so while his voice was useful in the choir, he sang like an angel in the cathedral and was never scolded for laziness or ineptitude, because he was always an assiduous worker and took great pains to perfect any skill he undertook to learn. He was thrown out onto the street again because his voice broke, which was, in the circumstances, tantamount to losing it; and at an age when the passions are just beginning to stir, he was poorer than he had ever been and it was hardly surprising, or so it seemed to him, that none of the ways he could find to earn money—and other things necessary to a young lad with no home and no scruples—were compatible with the rigors of civil and criminal law; not that he ever sank so low as to steal, still less to commit violence; instea
d, recalling family traditions, he came up with cheerful, eye-catching fairground games, for example, which were always slightly rigged, innocent traps, a fair punishment for avaricious fools and trusting idiots, in which any profit Minghetti managed to get his hands on was merely a just reward for all his work, a tiny reward given the risks he ran and the care and wit involved in creating those tricks. For a long time, he forgot all about his voice, that treacherous voice, apart from singing in taverns or on night walks to solace his fellow rogues or to seduce some young woman, who would demand payment of another kind.
His interrupted but not entirely broken links with the priest-hood presented him with the opportunity to enter the seminary as a servant, without, needless to say, telling them the whole truth about his past; and since he had moments not of repentance exactly—what did he have to repent of?—but of weariness and a certain guarded mysticism, he was attracted to the solitude of the monastic life and to the long hours spent in grave immobility with a candle in his hand or safe in the darkness of the choir, and drawn as well, of course, to the absence of bad company and the guarantee of food earned without having to indulge in any trickery; for all those reasons he became the most elegant, helpful, and efficient servant at the seminary, where, although he did not know it at the time, he would end up collaborating in some truly horrific acts. Many years later, when he was a free man and an artist, he considered himself to be “advanced,” a “freethinker,” and so on, and would use his experiences at the seminary as an argument against all religious institutions. “Don’t talk to me about priests!” he would exclaim; and if there were no ladies present, his story, doubtless exaggerated, was guaranteed to shock his listeners, describing as it did certain violations of our natural instincts.
Naturally, he did not mention such incidents to Emma on that first night; it was only later on, when they became more intimate, that she found out about the other torments he had suffered during his picturesque youth.
He left the seminary via a window and carrying a blunderbuss, such was his haste to rush to the defense of the “people” in a revolutionary uprising in which he found himself embroiled thanks to certain dubious friendships made during his frequent escapes at night with other colleagues and even the occasional fellow seminarian in order to visit the theater and other more obvious places of corruption. For days and days he tramped the fields as a rebel, until his shoes gave out and he ran away with some other dreamers, as the captain general of Valencia called them. And he did not stop running until he reached Italy, where he somehow scraped a living in Turin, in Rome, and in Naples; and from there he returned to Spain as a member of the chorus in an opera company, speaking Italian, with a vast experience of the world, and convinced that while music was his vocation, his specialty was seducing women of easy virtue and trying his luck with women in general, whether easy or difficult.
In Barcelona, a teacher noticed his fine singing voice and suggested that he teach him music, real music; he applied himself to his studies with a will and abandoned the theater for some years, living off who knows what, possibly off some doting female, and moving from inn to inn and from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, often waking up the other guests with the baritone garglings he needed to perform in order to train his voice and keep the muscles of his powerful throat in trim. His cheerful, gracious, amiable presence meant that people always forgave him those gobblings, which sounded rather like a turkey in heat. He was an infant Don Juan, a man-boy, childlike even in his lovemaking, for women always spoiled him, and he seemed to awaken the mother that all women carry within, so that even when they made love with him, their caresses had something maternal about them.
He would lie in bed with his lovers and sing whole operas to them, as if embracing them with his breath, which seemed to emerge from his mouth perfumed with melody. One of his lovers said of that slender young man with the fine body and fresh complexion that he gave off a seductive scent redolent of Italian music. Since his first performance in Barcelona, he had been known either as Minghetti or Gaetano, and when he returned from his second trip to Italy, which lasted two years, even he felt like a foreigner in his own country. As for his instincts as trickster, which had no obvious application in his new profession, they found a natural outlet in his dealings with other singers and their wives, with impresarios, and with the guests at the inns where he stayed. The episode to which Emma referred was one such prank, of which Mochi had been the victim. Mochi and Minghetti had fallen out over money, about whether the latter had been paid or not and had or had not signed a receipt. Minghetti escaped one night on foot; Mochi reported him to the authorities because the baritone had run off with an advance on his wages and leaving the company in the lurch. The civil guard tried to reconcile the musicians, and Minghetti, smiling and resigned, as if it had all been a joke, reappeared before the public in the role of a very mischievous Figaro, which won him an ovation for his delightful naughtiness and for his breezy, charming self-confidence. That was the night Emma first laid eyes on him, from a seat up in the gods, where she heard about the escapade, which was commented on enthusiastically by the audience, who were always ready to forgive handsome, witty tricksters.
A few days after that solemn ball and after hearing Minghetti’s account of his adventures, Emma had another close encounter with him, during which he sang most of his repertoire into her ear—although he was only there, of course, in the guise of a good friend. Indeed, he went on to become her piano teacher, although their lessons were soon a mere matter of form, an excuse for the singer to sing romanzas, accompanying himself on the piano, while his pupil, sitting beside him, gazed at him admiringly and turned the pages whenever he nodded his head. Emma did, however, learn to massacre a few polkas and fumble her way through a waltz she particularly liked. And Bonifacio could do nothing to stop this, because the lessons were given with his approval and, besides, he could see that his wife really did spend several hours a day studying sol-fa and hammering the keys.
What was going full steam ahead was the chemical factory and the reconstitution of the opera company with the trio of Serafina, Mochi, and Minghetti as the basis.
The two enterprises became confused in Bonifacio’s head, because the interested parties in both often lunched together at Emma’s house and gathered each night at her “salons,” which is how she wanted her rooms to be called from then on, once the furniture had been smartened up, a partition wall or two knocked down, and a few other changes made, all of which cost quite a respectable sum—which went quite unrespected by Nepomuceno, who performed some amazing sleight of hand with the figures. There was something else too, the principal thing in fact, that linked both the theatrical and the manufacturing enterprises, namely, the person providing the capital: Emma. A few other amateurs had bought shares in the theatrical enterprise, but these were as nothing compared to Emma’s contribution; and so she became the one true capitalist, represented, of course, by Nepomuceno on the financial side and by Bonifacio in any dealings with musicians and singers. Bonifacio in turn delegated to Mochi the role of director and all other powers; this meant that the new company had the same impresario and director as the old bankrupt company, the only difference being that Mochi would not be risking so much as a penny of his own and would be the only one to take any profits, however small; that, after all, was what he was there for. Not since the days of La Tiplona had a theater company, for better or worse, stayed so long in the town. They were almost treated as natives, and Mochi and Minghetti both now held forth at the local gentlemen’s club about the town’s burning issues, although always in fairly discreet and measured tones. As for Serafina, she had only to walk down the street for the inhabitants to point her out to any strangers as one of the indigenous marvels.
The Körner family had also settled in and put down even deeper roots, wanting to establish themselves in that town and taking care to link their name to the cause of industry so hotly defended by those newspapers with a moral and material stake in the enterpris
e. On behalf of the new business, Körner traveled to Germany to bring back news and to order all the material necessary for the factory, given that he would be in charge of its construction and operation. As for who was paying for all these expenses, needless to say, Emma’s shrinking fortune paid for everything, or almost everything, because to conceal this fact shares in the business were also offered to a few friends and relatives. The truth was that Emma’s capital was so seriously compromised by what Körner would call this “químico-industrial adventure” that Nepomuceno, who was behind the whole insane affair, felt obliged, in all conscience—what little of it remained—to explain the situation more or less simply to his niece and make it quite clear to her the risk she was running.