He suddenly clapped one hand to his head. These classical recollections had reminded him of the passage in which Odysseus is recognized by his wet nurse, Eurycleia. Bonifacio’s only Eurycleia had been his mother, and she was dead; but Antonio, his son, needed a wet nurse and he had completely forgotten that finding one had been part of his reason for coming to Cabruñana. “But this is a far better place. I won’t leave Raíces until I’ve found a wet nurse for my son. It must be fate! Who knows, perhaps he’ll be nourished with the milk of his own race, blood of his blood. . . .”
And having resolved to be more active and less of a dreamer, a practical man like other men who earn their own living—and to do so out of love for his Antonio—he tore himself from his lucubrations, got to his feet, mounted his horse, and set off through those courtyards and down those alleyways, going from door to door in search of what he needed, a wet nurse born and bred in Raíces, home of the Reyes family. Fortunately, Raíces was a place famed throughout the province for its wet nurses; and in such a small neighborhood, he only had to widen his search a little to find two fine human milch cows, because the service he required had become, in that area, a kind of immoral industry and export. He was confident that the following morning, bright and early, Rosa and Pepa, for those were the names of the two candidates for the honor of suckling Antonio Reyes, would be ready and waiting to get into the coach in which he would whisk them off to town, where they could be examined by the doctor, with the most suitable candidate receiving the medical exequatur and Emma’s seal of approval.
Pleased with the speedy and satisfactory way in which he had dealt with the matter, Bonifacio paused as he was leaving the village, on a bend in a solitary road, next to a wooden bridge that crossed the Raíces river, a small, poetic, meandering stream that, overshadowed by the infinite trees, flowed unhurriedly to the nearby ocean, certain that it would arrive before nightfall, even though the sun had already sunk below the waves that roared and crashed in the distance. Knowing that he was quite alone on that road, Reyes turned in his saddle and looked back at that melancholy village, as if he had left behind something of himself.
Nothing concrete or tangible spoke to him or could speak to him of his family’s links with that peaceful, humble, poetic place, and yet he felt bound to it by subtle, spiritual chains of the kind that become invisible to the soul itself as soon as you test their strength.
“I don’t even know when the Reyes family left here, nor what they did or how and where they lived. What I know about my great-great-grandfather, to go no further back than that, is almost nonexistent and very vague. I know only that a long time ago we were a noble family and came from Raíces. Ah, if only I had kept that book of coats of arms of which my mother so often used to talk, and which my father, it would seem, despised! Being a rather timid type, I feel a certain sympathy for this place, this calm, this silence, this greenness, this resigned and somehow bearable poverty, even for the music of the sea, roaring away behind the dunes . . . all this seems part of me, seems to suit my heart, my way of thinking, my own father’s nature. The Reyes family should never have left here; they weren’t made for the world, that much is clear. And I, the last member of the family, what good am I? A poor, ignorant wretch, who has never earned a penny in his life, whose only talent lies in spending other people’s money. A dreamer, who imagined that one day he would become something useful simply by thinking hard about strange, inexplicable things. A fine end for a once-noble family!”
He finished his soliloquy, as if hoping to hear what the silence of Raíces was saying to him in the twilight.
Despite his rather dubious orthodoxy, Bonifacio removed his hat. And he remembered the words with which his mother used to begin the evening prayer: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. . . .”
The angel of the Lord had declared unto him as well that he was going to be a father, and his heart was equally full of love for that son, for Antonio, about whom he was already thinking as one thinks of an absent lover, sending looks and desires flying over the horizon where our beloved lies hidden! His soul was filled with an infinite feeling of tenderness. It seemed to him that even his thoughtful, motionless horse understood and respected his feelings. Raíces! His son! Faith! His faith was now his son.
Death, corruption, abdication, error, all that lay in the past, forgotten. His own pointless, bankrupt life had been nothing but a fiasco, but his son could be everything he had failed to be; what in Bonifacio had been only aspiration, mere sentimental potential, would, in his son, be action, energy, actual deeds.
Yes, his heart was telling him that Antonio would be a fine person, the glory of the Reyes family. And perhaps, just perhaps, when Antonio was rich and already famous as a politician or a playwright, preferably the latter, or—the very height of contentment—a great composer of symphonies and operas, like Mozart or Meyerbeer, he, his father, in his dotage and still doting on his son, would plant in Antonio’s mind the idea of restoring the Reyes mansion in Raíces, and he, Bonifacio, would come there to die, in that sweet, twilight peace, among the murmurous branches of ancient trees, rocked by a scented, musical breeze, silhouetted against the violet sky, where the last breath of the lazy day was dissolving into night.
“It was true,” thought Bonifacio, “poetry was the only serious thing in the world! That’s what Antonio will be for me. He will be the great poet, musician, and genius, and I will be his father. I must, therefore, be practical and positive and earn money, I must prevent the Valcárcels from going bankrupt and restore the Reyes family. So farewell, Raíces, and until the next time. I am going to join my son now, but perhaps we will return together!”
Bonifacio shook his head and, once more taking up the reins in order to wrench his dreaming Rocinante out of her lethargy, he continued on his way, without looking back, fearful of his own mad dreams but more prepared than ever to sacrifice his own foolish, sentimental, hesitant self for the sake of his son’s future.
He slept in the nearest large village, and as soon as it was daylight, boarded the coach that traveled daily to the provincial capital, in the company of the two Eurycleias he had found in Raíces.
When he reached home, he found the house full of a hurly-burly of people, servants, and friends.
Doña Celestina, wearing a black satin dress and a fine lace mantilla, was standing in the middle of the room holding something in her arms, a bundle of embroidered white cloth, lace, and blue ribbons.
“What’s going on?” asked Bonifacio when he arrived, flanked by the chosen wet nurses.
“We’re about to make a Christian out of this Jew of a son of yours,” answered the midwife.
This was, indeed, what Emma had decreed. She herself had said the day before that they would only arrange the baptism once the child had recovered from an inflammation of the eyes; however, when she woke that morning to be told that Bonifacio—without her permission and when she was still ill in bed with a fever—had set off to right wrongs she did not even consider needed righting, she was so enraged that, partly as revenge and partly because the weather was milder now, she had decided, quick as you like, and issuing orders from her bed as was her wont, that the child should be baptized that very afternoon, so as to annoy Bonifacio, who would return to find the ceremony over and done with.
Bonifacio was not annoyed. It was too solemn a moment for such base emotions. Instead, with some difficulty, he embraced his wife.
Emma’s temperature was almost normal now and, although the fever had not quite passed, she was no longer afraid that she might die. She had, therefore, decided to decorate her bed and herself.
She plundered the treasures of her linen chest, and her friends were treated to a veritable sea of the finest snowy, creamy linen, made still finer by the most delicate lacework. Emma’s gaunt, sallow face bobbed about among that foam like that of a shipwreck victim, for she had once more crumbled into a ruin that would now defy all attempts at restoration.
“She’s an old woman,??
? thought Bonifacio calmly and soberly, although he felt sad for his son’s sake.
She did, however, approve of the two competing wet nurses; but he could not understand why Nepomuceno, Körner, Marta, Sebastián, the Ferraz girls, and the Silva sisters, as well as other friends, both male and female, either laughed out loud or tittered at his idea of bringing with him from Raíces those two sturdy village girls, Pepa and Rosa.
Whenever Sebastián and Marta remembered Bonifacio’s triumphal entry flanked by those two large-uddered village girls, they split their sides laughing.
According to Marta, it was simply too much, and she could not conceal her amusement. You just had to laugh out loud. And they did.
Bonifacio did not understand their merriment, nor did he attempt to. What did he care about the idiotic laughter of that rabble, who had taken the bread from his son’s mouth and whom he was preparing to eject from his house?
The cortege set off. Emma had decreed, and there was no gainsaying this, that Sebastián would be the godfather and Marta the godmother.
Orders had been given that everything about the ceremony would be absolutely first-class. The baptistery of the parish church was draped with crimson satin flecked with gold; the font, too, glowed like a golden ember, lit by large candles.
Bonifacio followed close behind Doña Celestina, taking care that the handkerchief covering the sleeping Antonio’s face did not slip off, and thus he had no time, as he walked through the streets, to feel the grave, poetic, tender emotions appropriate to the occasion; what he mostly remembered afterward was a faint embarrassment at the cold, curious, almost insolent, even mocking gaze of the indifferent, distracted passersby. However, when he crossed the threshold of that house of God, paused between the door and the chancel, and saw before him the baptistery lights, he was so overwhelmed by a sweet, religious feeling—imbued with a mystery that was not without a vague, fleeting sense of terror in the face of the uncertain future—that he completely forgot about the wretches surrounding him. He saw only God and his son. On other such occasions, when he had watched other people’s children being baptized, he had found it ridiculous, that business of exorcising the demons—or whatever—from the innocent little angels about to receive the baptismal waters. Now, though, he saw nothing ridiculous about it at all. How wise the church was! It understood the human heart and knew which were the truly important, solemn moments in our lives. This was one such moment: giving a child a name in this dangerous comedy called life. Bonifacio did not himself believe in any dogmas, and certainly not in the miracles described in the Bible, but he had to admit that, at such times, the church was like a mother.
With no feelings of repugnance and despite those inevitable intellectual reservations, he placed the child of his loins in the lap of the church. His son, his Antonio: There he was, flesh of his flesh, sleeping, swathed in lace, a blush-red stain among all that whiteness.
Antonio no longer resembled him, but the resemblance to his lawyer father was still there; the sorrowful expression, the pursing of the lips, the frown line, they all came from his father. Like tender tears flowing inward not outward, how it rushed into his soul, his love for that child, that frail being, abandoned by the angels among men; but this was no abstract, metaphysical love; it was a wordless, unrhetorical love, an ineffable love that satisfied the conscience and allowed him to make a silent oath of constant sacrifice, to live through him and for him. “This is what I was born for, to be a father.” Standing at the door of the church, waiting for the chaplain to make Antonio a Christian, Bonifacio experienced the grace of God in the form of that clear, distinct vocation: to be a father. “Yes,” he was thinking, “now I am something.”
Then he saw a chubby, smiling priest coming toward him, as heavily gilded as the altar in the baptistery, accompanied by all the sacred pomp and ceremony of servers bearing candles and crosses. He did not object to any of this, which all seemed quite appropriate. However sure he was that his Antonio, that innocent child with the sad face, had no demons or devils in his body and harbored no personal resentment against the church, Bonifacio acknowledged the church’s right to take certain precautions before admitting the newborn into its bosom. He found it perfectly reasonable that his son should not be allowed to enter the church without first fulfilling the sacramental requirements, although he did think that the clergy should take better care of catechumens, or whatever they were called, of tender years, because a cold draft could prove fatal and kill that Christian in the making.
“Doña Celestina,” he said in honeyed, humble, barely audible tones, hoping that the priest and his companions would not misinterpret his words, “Doña Celestina, would you mind moving a little, there’s a terrible draft where you’re standing.”
“I’ll do what’s right, Don Bonifacio, don’t you worry.”
The priest began spouting the usual Latin phrases, which Bonifacio only half understood.
He did understand that his son would definitely be called Antonio something-or-other Sebastián, although why Sebastián? Oh, it didn’t really matter.
The Ferraz girls were staring openmouthed at the child and at the priest, like spectators at a highly amusing farce; they were believers, like everyone else there, but for those silly young women, everything was “a laugh,” a joke, a source of merriment.
They could not possibly laugh in church, but they were sorely tempted. Marta, the godmother, was watching tight-lipped, thinking how far superior her ideas were when compared with the vulgar understanding shown by those frivolous little friends of hers.
Suddenly, the words being spoken by the priest in that suave, discreet tone, in that pleasant, evocative, ecclesiastical rhythm, took on a real musical quality, like a recitation, because, inside, someone had started playing the organ and was filling the empty church with sound, with streams of bright, playful notes.
The new Christian crossed the chancel and went into the church preceded by the priest and borne along in the arms of a majestic Sebastián. They reached the baptistery. Their friends formed a circle around the godparents; old ladies, the poor, and a few small boys formed an outer ring, peering in, hoping for alms. Bonifacio had followed his son to the shores of that marble river Jordan, and for him everything took on new life, a more intense, harmonious, poetic meaning. The music was helping him to understand, to penetrate the deep significance of things. The organ was telling him what he could not comprehend. “The church, of course, has very sharp eyes; it can see a long way; it knows how to be a mother.”
The notes from the organ swooped down low to tickle that newborn boy fresh from the mysteries of Heaven, skimming over the soft flesh that Doña Celestina’s discreet, expert fingers revealed as she uncovered the baby’s back; those unruly, wingèd notes were like tiny angels frolicking with their human companion, who, while not quite as happy as them, was no less pure, no less innocent.
Bonifacio felt that even the faces of the most indifferent onlookers, even those of the urchins hoping that some small change might come their way, took on an expression of almost tender interest. The lights also seemed to sing and glow redder as the rhythm varied; the gilding on the priest’s vestments and in the baptistery became more intense, more lordly; and the stiff, solemn servers lent undoubted respectability to the act. Only the organ continued to laugh and play, but quite legitimately because it represented celestial joy, the beauty of innocence. But behind the sacred, poetic jokiness of that church music, Bonifacio suddenly fancied he saw a kind of mocking, ironic challenge. Let’s see, said the organ, what does the future hold? What will become of your son? What is life for? Does life matter or does it not? Is it all a game? Is it all a dream? Is there anything beyond appearances? And the music began taking him off in another illogical, unpredictable direction; it began saying one thing and ended up suggesting something else. Then Bonifacio realized that the organist was playing variations from La Traviata, an opera much in vogue at the time. Bonifacio had read La Dame aux camélias and remembered Armand
o, whose love had made him forget suo vecchio genitor, as it says in the libretto, and, in effect, the organ was playing just that phrase: “Tu non sai quanto sofri!”
“Poor me!” thought Bonifacio. “My son might turn out to be just as ungrateful. He will certainly love some woman more than he loves me. I was clearly born never to be loved as I would like to be loved. But it doesn’t matter, that’s the law of life. We devote ourselves to our children, and they to their own loves or to the vanities of the world.” How strange, though, that La Traviata did not sound out of place in the church. It should have been a profanation, but it wasn’t, because La Traviata contained good and evil, love and pain, love and death, that is, all of religion and all of life. Ah, how the organ spoke of the mysteries of fate! Then it was back to those mocking, ironic questions: What will become of him? What will become of you? What will become of everything?
“Who’s playing the organ?” Marta asked Sebastián very softly.
“Minghetti.”
Godfather and godmother smiled and exchanged a look.
“Ridiculous man,” said Marta rather affectionately.
Bonifacio had heard the question and the answer.
So it was Minghetti playing! He knew that a real artist was up there! How kind of him. But then artists are, of course, poets too, it’s just a shame that they are also such rascals. Given the choice between morality and art—on the assumption that the two are incompatible—he would, from now on, choose morality. For his son’s sake.
Antonio Diego Sebastián was now a Christian. Doña Celestina had taken him from his godfather’s arms and, sitting on the seat in a confessional box, next to a chapel, and surrounded by all those friends and onlookers, she skillfully readjusted ribbons and lace in order to reinter the child’s feeble little body beneath that jumble of linen.