When the time came to part, and she was smoothing her hair with an easy familiar gesture, her Junoesque arms raised like a statue’s above her head, she would smile placidly, allowing the curve of her smile to spread over lips and cheeks, like the ample, gentle, graceful wave of a sea after the storm; and looking at the pale face of her stunned lover, overwhelmed by emotion, she would think about Mochi and say to herself, “If only that wretch knew the joy this poor devil has just experienced! And all for the sake of vengeance! He thinks this fool must be contented with a few insipid caresses. He doesn’t know that I’m killing him with pleasure and that he will die of sheer delight!”
Bonifacio was also of the opinion that such a life was hardly conducive to a peaceful old age, but, despite a vague fear that he might become consumptive, he was very pleased with his exploits. He compared himself with the heroes of the novels he read while in bed or while he watched over Emma in her bedroom; and he was proud to think that he was now the equal of the authors who invented those marvelous adventures. He had always envied the “privileged” beings, who, as well as having a lively imagination, which he also had in abundance, were able to express their ideas and set those dreams down on paper in the form of picturesque words and interesting, well-constructed plots. Now, though, while he still might not know how to write novels, he could live them, and his life was as novelesque as the finest novel. And very hard work it was, because there were times when his precarious financial situation, his feelings of remorse, and especially his fears kept him teetering on the brink of what he judged to be madness. Not that it mattered; most of the time he felt very pleased with himself. His inability to express himself, which was, according to him, all that he lacked in order to become an artist, was compensated for now by reality; he felt like the hero of a novel; he had never been able to give expression to his feelings, but now, he and all his actions and adventures were the living incarnation of the boldest and most recondite of imaginations. Anyone who doubted this had only to review his life, notice the contrasts it offered, the dangers into which his passion led him, and the quality and quantity of that passion. Emma, ever-more fearful and irascible, demanding and capricious, had made the treatment of her real and imaginary illnesses so complicated that even Bonifacio, despite his retentive memory and long experience, had had to resort to a notebook in which he wrote down the names of the medicines, the dosages, and the times when they should be taken, along with many other duties with which he had been entrusted. Since the patient was not entirely sure that she had all the ailments of which she complained and often feared that the potions she was prescribed were potentially harmful to her stomach, she tended to favor their “external use,” which only increased her spouse-cum-nurse’s wearisome workload, because he was constantly having to anoint and rub the skinny, fragile, complaining, exhausted body of his better or, as he privately called her, worse half. For unlike his wife’s medicines, Bonifacio’s unburdenings were for “internal use” only. Bonifacio felt that he knew every inch of that well-trodden body, which, at the patient’s request, he massaged at once forcefully and delicately, spreading ointments evenly, lovingly, delicately, and gently; he had also been known to pass an iodine-soaked brush over chest, shoulders, and lower back. He imagined that miserable combination of skin and bones and importunate protuberances as a ruined building whose owner fends off the municipal pickax by slapping on more whitewash and paint and mending a few roof tiles. “I re-tile, anoint, rub, and paint her, all in vain; this wife of mine is letting in water everywhere, and the wind of wrath blows into her through a thousand cracks; this ramshackle machine, useless to me, her legitimate spouse, serves—and may serve for many more years—as home to the subtle spirit of discord and contradiction, a bad angel who needs little prompting to perch on her like a vulture on a gallows or an owl on a bare abandoned tower and from that wretched lair to wage cruel war on me.”
Bonifacio was exaggerating, both in the language he used and as regards his wife’s aches and pains. Emma, who had been close to death a few months earlier, was gradually recovering, and was now using her refound energy to invent new demands, new aches and pains and to acquire new ointments, which, while not committing her to being really ill, had become second nature to her; she only felt comfortable when coated in some kind of unguent or with cotton wool applied to one of her limbs; and the faint burning sensation as the iodine was applied with a tickly brush had become one of her favorite entertainments. All this meant more work for Bonifacio, more responsibility, and more patience. Indeed, her husband’s resigned attitude became so extreme that Emma began to see it as almost supernatural and rather repugnant. She did not know why she felt so suspicious of that absolute submissiveness; in times past—before she had imposed these latest humiliations on him—he used to protest timidly albeit respectfully, but now he didn’t even do that: He said nothing and just rubbed in the ointment. He would respond to an insult or a provocation with a charitable act that would have immortalized a saint; he had to sacrifice both heart and stomach, because he was sacrificing everything. He showed no evidence of pride or nausea; his sense of smell seemed to have vanished along with any sense of dignity. What was going on? What had previously been her husband’s one good quality now became, to that autocratic woman, a motive for suspicion and dark thoughts. Why was he so silent? Why did he obey so blindly? Does he despise me? Has he found compensation for these unpleasant tasks elsewhere? One day, Emma was on all fours on the bed, enjoying her husband’s soft, solicitous hand massaging ointment into her back, as if he were trying to restore that miserable torso by applying some varnish. “More! More!” she cried, frowning and pressing her lips together, experiencing—under the pretense that it was hurting—a strange voluptuousness that only she could understand.
Sweating like a pig, Bonifacio was tirelessly rubbing and rubbing, with an almost seraphic smile on his mild face; his very wide pale blue eyes were smiling too, as if at sweet images and delightful memories. In vain did Emma grumble and complain, insult and heap him with cruel words, because he did not even hear her; he simply did what he had to do and left.
She turned to look up at him and, seeing the beatific expression on his face, was astonished at such a show of patience and absolute humility.
“There’s something going on here, something very strange. He seems even more stupid than normal, and yet, at the same time, I’ve never seen quite that expression on his face before.”
“You seem very distracted, young man,” she said.
The words “young man” were spoken with the heavy irony of a woman who, seeing herself grown faded and sickly, wished to remind her tender spouse that he, too, was growing older, not just because of the passing years but because of the unrelenting unpleasantness of his conjugal servitude.
When the “young man” said nothing much in response, she looked at him hard and studied him from every angle to see if there was some chink through which she could peer into him and see the secret he was keeping locked inside. Then she sniffed him. Her instinct told her that any discoveries would begin with her sense of smell. What did he smell of? He smelled of her, of the ointments with which he had rubbed on her, of lavender and camphor. “I’ll have to see what he smells like when he comes in from the street.” And then, as she almost always did, she sent him packing.
Emma slept a great deal and, even when awake, needed to spend long hours alone, because, as well as the intimate business for which Bonifacio’s presence was required, there were other still more personal things that even her husband was not privy to; some were the deep secrets of the dressing table and others were mysterious obsessions that she preferred no one else to know about. Added to this, she had acquired the bad habit of spending hours and hours daydreaming in bed, and during those idle raptures and during her frequent bouts of melancholy, she could not bear anyone else to be near. For these reasons, despite his many duties as husband and nurse, Bonifacio had a lot of time on his hands; as long as he was there when neede
d, his tyrant never asked what else he did. All the hours that Bonifacio had once spent forgotten by everyone, without having to explain what he got up to, because he was of no significance, he now devoted, whenever he could, to his love. He would see Serafina at the theater, at the inn, and on the long walks they took to quiet areas far from the town.
That day, after washing himself well with large, fine sponges, something he had learned from watching Serafina in her boudoir, he came bounding down the stairs two at a time.
He was thinking, “What does it matter if at home I am a slave and smell like a pharmacy, if elsewhere I am lord of the most beautiful of empires, master of a will most worthy of being served, and if what awaits me is a bed of roses and aromas, which while not perhaps oriental, are truly intoxicating?”
Bonifacio was well aware that this way of life was like walking along the edge of the abyss and would clearly not end happily, but one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and, besides, in the romantic novels of which he became fonder by the day, he had learned that you can’t catch trout without getting wet, that a man of grand passions, as he surely was, involved in extraordinary adventures, would end up in Hell or, at the very least, in his wife’s talons or being called to account by Don Juan Nepomuceno. At the thought of Don Juan he shuddered, because he remembered that the seven thousand reales from that “providential restitution” was slowly evaporating and had already dwindled to a mere two thousand. The rest had ended up in Serafina’s hands, in the form of presents or cash, because there were some essential expenditures he had lacked the courage to make himself, fearing that the secret of their love affair might become known and spread abroad by the shopkeepers. How could he possibly go into a shop in his own town and ask for the finest rice powder, silk garters, embroidered stockings, and women’s pantaloons with scalloped hems?
As for Mochi, he had never mentioned money again, either to ask for more or to pay back what he owed. Bonifacio did not want to think about exact amounts; he felt as if the entire national debt were his alone and that he would be forced to repay it. First, a thousand reales, then six thousand, and now the seven thousand of that “restitution” . . . the whole world reduced to nothing but numbers! No, he simply did not think in numbers, in fixed quantities, far less in sum totals; he remembered that he had begun by lending what was not his, then a great deal more, and lastly, he had committed the great sacrilege of profaning a sacred amount of money, the product of a secret of the confessional, and spent it on a Regency corset, a pair of chinoiserie vases, on rings and flowers and ladies’ pantaloons. Terrible! Yes, but what could he do? He might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. . . . The very awfulness of having spent so much of someone else’s money simply demonstrated the irresistible force of his passion. So, onward. True, the most difficult part was yet to come. Don Juan Nepomuceno had him in his clutches and could do with him as he wished.
Gradually, the figure of Nepomuceno, the loathed and loathsome Nepomuceno, had grown in the eyes of Bonifacio’s horrified imagination, especially those gray side-whiskers, which, for poor Bonifacio, symbolized the detestable mathematics of property, material interests, business, forethought, and thrift and, if it came to it, deceit; those side-whiskers had ascended up into the clouds, and their gray hairs were reaching out into the vast abyss. To hell with them! Bonifacio loved words and hated numbers, and as for arithmetic, he always said that he understood everything except division; calculating how many times one number went into another had always been beyond him; when he got to so much into so much won’t go (or won’t fit as he used to say), he would break out in a sweat and become stupid and nauseous; well, the mere presence, the mere idea of Nepomuceno had the same effect, Nepomuceno wouldn’t “fit” either.
And the crafty devil kept as silent as the grave. He hadn’t said a word to him since he had found out about and paid back Don Benito’s loan. True, Bonifacio had never brought the matter up; in that respect, he was like the condemned man who waits, with eyes blindfolded, for the executioner to strike, and to his great surprise and undiminished fear, feels time pass and still no ax falls. Bonifacio, who was always coming up with allegories and fantastic metaphors, imagined his situation slightly differently: He imagined that at his feet lay a mine whose fuse he was sure had been lit, so why did it not explode? Had the powder got wet? Had the fuse got wet? No, he was sure that Nepomuceno was perfectly dry; perhaps the fuse was longer than he thought; the spark was taking a circuitous route, but the explosion would come, it had to! He was, nevertheless, grateful to God for that delay, which allowed him to surrender himself to his grand passion without any economic complications, which would have ruined everything.
Bonifacio arrived at the rehearsal smelling of eau de cologne and looking as cheery and arrogant as he was capable of looking. There was great jubilation onstage. It was a sunny day, although very little light reached the stage and auditorium through the doors that opened onto the boxes and the ventilators in the roof; the sun that Bonifacio saw there was a “moral sun” (meaning that everyone was happy); Mochi had paid them and all quarrels were either over or had gone underground; the baritone was joking with the contralto, the conductor with the bass, Mochi with a lady in the chorus, and Serafina was walking back and forth distributing smiles and burbling greetings like a bird; she flirted innocently with everyone, voice and face exuding bonhomie for her fellow performers, the gentlemen in the boxes, even for a musician who had gone out of tune or missed a beat. A radiant Serafina forgave them with a few words or a nod and took full responsibility. When the conductor exclaimed “For heaven’s sake!” and stared with feigned annoyance at the horn player, she would shrug her shoulders and bite the tip of her tongue like a naughty schoolgirl, then say sorrowfully, “Maestro, maestro . . . sentie, non è colpevole, questo signore, sono io. It wasn’t this gentleman’s fault, it was mine.”
“What a musical voice! What a heart!” thought Bonifacio as he joined his friends in their usual box.
8
ONE NIGHT, in the Café de la Oliva, a supper for twelve was being held in the upstairs dining room, a dark room that the local rakes and the establishment’s owner deemed very “intimate” and mysterious and, as they put it, “perfect for orgies.”
The guitarist-waiter and another two colleagues took great pains in laying the table because the people from the opera were coming to dine and, even more exciting, the actresses were coming too: the soprano, the contralto, the latter’s sister, and Serafina’s maid, who was listed on the posters, somewhat questionably, as “another soprano.”
The only non-opera person invited was Bonifacio; he was very proud of this, but realizing that the hour appointed for supper was also the time when he would be giving his wife her final massage of the day, he announced he would be there in time for dessert and coffee, reserving the right to rush off if duty called. He was unaware that his role at supper was to pay the bill. He found this out later on, by which time, drunk on love and a little non sancta Benedictine, he was in the grip of the obscure pantheism into which his bodily enthusiasms led him—for his body was not as robust as appearances might lead one to think.
Bonifacio arrived as the musicians and singers were enjoying the punch a la romana that Mochi had ordered. He was received with applause, by the ladies as well. Still dizzy with the emotion provoked by that warm reception, he found himself sitting next to his “idol,” Serafina, who had eaten a lot and drunk proportionately. She was very flushed and her eyes darted fire. As soon as Bonifacio sat down next to her, she placed one shoeless, stockinged foot on his.
“Sweetheart,” she said into his ear, “you stink of cologne!”
And she kicked him on the ankle with her bare foot. Bonifacio blushed, not because of that but because of her mention of cologne—a remnant of his domestic enslavement.
“If I didn’t smell of cologne, what would I smell of?” he thought. However, he instantly forgot his embarrassment when he heard Serafina, grown suddenly serious, whisper
in his ear in the slightly hoarse voice familiar to him from their most intimate moments, “Come closer, no one will notice. They’re all drunk.”
And without waiting for an answer, and before Bonifacio could move, she quickly shifted her chair closer to his, so that their bodies were touching. The smell of cologne disappeared, as if overwhelmed by something more piquant and complex, the almost spiritual atmosphere that surrounded Serafina; it was that mixture of strong but fine perfumes mingled with the singer’s “natural aroma” that aroused in Bonifacio his most violently amorous moods. Stunned by the ardent, odorous nearness of his beloved, he lost all fear and, as if he were not drunk enough on that, he allowed himself to be seduced by Mochi too, who plied him constantly with drink. Bonifacio drank punch, champagne, then Benedictine, and with his conscience too numbed to reprove the excesses indulged in by the baritone and the contralto and a few other couples, he finally agreed to make a toast when, from every side of the table, voices entreated him to open his heart to his new artist friends, whose friendship, just because it was new, he thought, was no less firm and deep for that.
Bonifacio had never been completely drunk, slightly tipsy, yes, but not often; and when in that state, his tongue would loosen and he came very close to expressing the many feelings stirring in his bosom.
He consulted his beloved’s candid eyes to see what she thought. Serafina gave her approval with a surreptitious squeeze of his hand, and the would-be flautist got to his feet amid rapturous applause.