LEOPOLDO ALAS (1852–1901) was the son of a government official, born in Zamora, Spain. He attended the University of Oviedo and the University of Madrid, receiving a doctorate in law. A novelist and writer of short stories who adopted the pseudonym Clarín (Bugle), Alas was one of Spain’s most influential literary critics. He became a professor of law at the University of Oviedo in 1883 and published his first and best-known novel, La Regenta, in 1884; his second novel, Su único hijo (His Only Son), was published in 1890. He died in Oviedo at the age of forty-nine.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiróz, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2015 Marsh Award for Children’s Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga’s The Adventures of Shola. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to literature. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leeds.
HIS ONLY SON
with Doña Berta
LEOPOLDO ALAS
Translated from the Spanish and with an introduction by
MARGARET JULL COSTA
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Translation copyright © 2016 by Margaret Jull Costa
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Medardo Rosso, Laughing Baby, 1892, photograph by Rosso, c. 1900, private collection, 2016
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Alas, Leopoldo, 1852–1901, author. | Costa, Margaret Jull, translator, writer of introduction. | Alas, Leopoldo, 1852–1901, author. Doña Berta. English.
Title: His only son : with Doña Berta / Leopoldo Alas ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ; introduction by Margaret Jull Costa.
Other titles: Su único hijo. English | Doña Berta | Doña Berta.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012597 (print) | LCCN 2016024059 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370187 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681370194 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Spouses—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Satire. | FICTION / Psychological. | LCGFT: Satire, Spanish.
Classification: LCC PQ6503.A4 S813 2016 (print) | LCC PQ6503.A4 (ebook) | DDC 863/.5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012597
ISBN 978-1-68137-019-4
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
HIS ONLY SON
DOÑA BERTA
INTRODUCTION
LEOPOLDO Alas is known almost exclusively as the author of La Regenta, and what prompted me to read his other work was curiosity as to why nothing more of his writing had been translated into English. When I read his only other novel, Su único hijo (His Only Son), and his novella, Doña Berta, I was bowled over by the audacity of the plots, by the diverse cast of characters, and by Alas’s ability, particularly in Doña Berta, to be entirely engaged by his characters and yet to have the necessary sliver of ice in the heart to allow them to meet their usually cruel fate.
A word first about Alas himself. A friend and contemporary of that other great nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, Alas was born in 1852 in Zamora and died in Oviedo in 1901 at the age of only forty-nine. After studying law at the University of Oviedo, he moved to Madrid in 1871, where he immediately became caught up in the philosophical and literary debates of the age and began a career as a literary critic and journalist, writing under the pen name Clarín (Bugle), and thereby making as many enemies as he made friends. In 1883, he returned to Oviedo, where he taught law at the local university and began writing his first novel, La Regenta, which was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885. La Regenta is both a tale of adultery and a scathing satire on the church and on provincial life in Spain, the setting being a thinly disguised version of Oviedo. The novel caused an enormous scandal at the time and was later even banned under Franco, until, in 1962, the government censor finally relented and gave permission for it to be reprinted.
His Only Son was published only six years after La Regenta, and yet it met with barely a murmur of disapproval, although the Spanish essayist and critic Azorín wrote (approvingly): “[His Only Son] is the most intense, the most refined, the most intellectual, and the most sensual novel that nineteenth-century Spanish literature has produced. . . .”
He might also have added “the most subversive.” The title, for example, immediately sets up echoes of God’s only Son, except that this entirely secular son is the fruit of an adulterous relationship, and his real father wants nothing to do with him. Then there are the female characters, who all appear to have the upper hand in sexual relationships. Emma treats her much-put-upon husband, Bonifacio (who is just that, a pretty face), as slave and nurse, and, far from being jealous when he has an affair with Serafina, the soprano in the visiting opera company, she is eager to benefit from his sexual experiences. Serafina takes the initiative when seducing Bonifacio, introducing him to hitherto unknown pleasures. Marta, Emma’s German friend, brazenly courts Don Juan Nepomuceno, Emma’s uncle and administrator. As I suggested, though, the power these women wield is entirely illusory, for however sexually forward and transgressive they may be, it is always the men who hold the purse strings. Emma, bored to tears by the household accounts, hands control of the family finances to her uncle Nepomuceno, who, unbeknown to her, is quietly plotting her financial ruin; as a rather mediocre soprano, Serafina’s only future is as some rich man’s mistress; even the seemingly liberated Marta knows that she must marry for money.
One of the criticisms aimed at La Regenta was that Alas had stolen the plot from Madame Bovary, and it can be no accident that he chose to call His Only Son’s main female character “Emma.” Emma Valcárcel (cárcel, by the way, means prison) is no Emma Bovary, however; she has no interest in literature of any kind and is entirely self-willed and self-centered, choosing her own husband (only to reject him) and, as heir to her father’s fortune, is accustomed to being kowtowed to by the other members of her useless but proliferating family. As Alas comments wryly, the Valcárcel motto should be “Go forth and multiply, but avoid all work.”
The ghost of Emma Bovary also haunts Doña Berta, whose eponymous heroine has always lived in the same house in rural Spain with her prim, deeply conservative brothers. These same prudish brothers subscribe to the various feuilletons that contain the kind of romantic fiction that had such a devastating effect on Emma Bovary; and while the brothers remain unaffected, the narrator comments that reading such romantic tripe causes “terrible inner damage” to their innocent sister, Berta. The literary ghost that haunts Madame Bovary, namely, Don Quixote, also haunts Doña Berta. For Spanish readers the opening line, “Hay un lugar en el Norte de España . . .” (“There is a place in northern Spain . . .”), inevitably recalls the opening line of Don Quixote, “En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . .” (“In a place in La Mancha, whose name I cannot recall . . .”
), and there is something supremely Quixotic about Doña Berta in her quest (for such it is) to honor her lost son’s debt and to buy the painting that may or may not depict him at the moment of his heroic death, a quest that leads her away from her beloved house in Asturias to the terrifying, tram-filled streets of Madrid.
Alas’s novels, novellas, and stories are very much grounded in the worlds he knew. His Only Son is set in an unnamed provincial Spanish town not unlike Oviedo, while Doña Berta is set, first, in the lush green countryside of Asturias in the north—a part of Spain of which Alas was deeply fond (his family had a house there), and where he first learned about nature and first read Cervantes—and, latterly, in the hurly-burly of Madrid, where he began his life as a writer.
In both books, the bringers of destruction are the outsiders who arrive, carrying with them the germ of change from the world beyond. In His Only Son, the corrupting influence takes the form of the members of a traveling opera company and the Körners, Marta and her father, who come from Germany, Marta being a particularly pernicious influence on the easily corruptible Emma. Doña Berta begins thus:
There is a place in northern Spain where the Romans and the Moors never penetrated; and if Doña Berta de Rondaliego, the owner of this green and silent hideaway, knew a little more history, she would swear that neither Agrippa nor Augustus nor Tariq nor Musa had ever planted their bold feet in that little corner of hers with its thick, fresh grass, so dark, glossy, velvety, and luxuriant . . .
In this pristine paradise, the “invaders” take the more benign forms of a charming soldier and an equally charming artist, both of whom, in very different ways, bring about her ruin. Like the women in His Only Son, Doña Berta is not the mistress of her own fate, not, at least, until her brothers die, but, however cut off she may be from the political and social changes taking place in the outside world, her life is nonetheless irrevocably changed by them, from the sentimental romances she reads, to her love affair with a soldier on the “wrong side” of a war; from her mortgaging of the family estate to the local moneylender, to her abandonment of her “green and silent hideaway” for the urban jungle of Madrid.
What I found particularly touching in both books is the study of innocence betrayed. Bonifacio is in many ways a figure of fun, easily gulled by Serafina’s apparent love for him and by her colleagues’ protestations of affection and friendship, but he is essentially a good person, and I defy any reader not to be touched by him or by the character of Doña Berta. Both have their obsessions and both, just when the prize is in sight, have it snatched from them. Both of them are essentially homebodies, with Bonifacio unable to imagine life without his slippers, and with Doña Berta having to wrench herself away from the joys of baking bread and hanging out the laundry, from the familiar beauty of her surroundings and from her lifelong servant and companion, Sabelona.
The worlds Alas describes are equally real: the narrow, gossip-ridden world of His Only Son and, in Doña Berta, the stark social divide between rich and poor, between new money and old, with the Rondaliego family convinced of their innate superiority and fiercely defensive of their near-feudal land rights, rights that are slowly being eroded by the unscrupulous nouveau-riche upstarts exemplified by Don Casto (Mr. Chaste!). When Doña Berta goes to Madrid, she and we are brought face-to-face with the changes wrought by increasing industrialization, with the gulf between the rural poor and the growing urban middle class, between village life, where everyone knows everyone, and the cruel anonymity of life in the big city, an anonymity embodied by the terrifying trams that rattle through the streets like bringers of death.
Novel and novella bring together the themes preoccupying many novelists at the time, the clash between romanticism and realism, as well as those very nineteenth-century topics adultery and debt. What sets them apart, for me, are the characters and the wonderfully evocative picture Alas paints of provincial life, Asturias, and clamorous, chaotic Madrid, and Doña Berta, in particular, provides a superb example of the opposition between those two literary schools of thought, realism and romanticism, with realism, in the form of a tram and a locked attic door, triumphing over romanticism.
—MARGARET JULL COSTA
HIS ONLY SON
1
EMMA VALCÁRCEL was a spoiled only child. When she was fifteen, she fell in love with a clerk who worked for her lawyer father. The clerk, whose name was Bonifacio Reyes, belonged to an honorable or even—a century earlier—a distinguished family, but one that had been poor and unfortunate for two or three generations. Bonifacio was a peaceable, slow, gentle man, tenderhearted and very sentimental, mad about music and fantastical stories and, therefore, an assiduous visitor to the lending library in the village. He was of average height and handsome in a romantic way: a pale, oval face, beautiful, fine, curly brown hair, a neat foot, a well-turned leg; a slender, graceful fellow, who wore his humble but rather elegant clothes well and unaffectedly. He was, however, ill-equipped to do any kind of work requiring serious concentration; he had exquisite, very delicate handwriting, but he took an awfully long time to fill a page, and his spelling was capricious and fanciful in the extreme—well, it wasn’t really spelling at all. And he capitalized any words to which he gave particular importance: for example, love, charity, sweetness, forgiveness, epoch, autumn, erudite, gentle, music, fiancée, appetite, and various others. When Emma’s father, Don Diego Valcárcel, a famous lawyer of noble lineage, decided to dismiss poor Bonifacio, because “not only could he not write but he made him a laughingstock in the courts and in the assizes,” Emma chose that very day to elope with her beloved. Bonifacio had been prepared to allow himself to be loved, but he did not want to be kidnapped. Alas, all resistance was in vain. Emma carried him off by main force, the force of love; however, the civil guard, who were just beginning to gain some degree of respect at the time, caught up with the fugitives on the first leg of their journey. Emma was confined to a convent, and Bonifacio disappeared from that dull, melancholy, third-rate provincial capital, and for a long time, nothing more was heard of him. Emma remained for some years in her religious prison and only returned to the world, as if nothing had happened, when her father died: She was rich, arrogant, and under the guardianship of her uncle, who behaved more like an administrator. Confident of her physical purity, she poured all her efforts into proving herself to be without stain and convincing everyone else of her innocence. She wanted to marry at all costs, since marriage would be proof of her unsullied honor. However, no eligible suitors appeared. She was still in love, at least in her imagination, with the clerk she had loved when she was fifteen years old, but she made no attempt to find out where he was, because even if he had come to her himself, she would not have given him her hand, because that would seem to prove the gossips right. She wanted a different husband first. Yes, that—without her realizing it—was what Emma was thinking; she wanted “a different husband first.” The “afterward” that she vaguely hoped for and could even glimpse was not an adulterous relationship; it was perhaps the death of her first husband followed by the second marriage to which she felt entitled. The first husband turned up two years into Emma’s freedom. He was a wealthy returnee from Latin America, sickly, taciturn, very devout, and not exactly in the first flush of youth. He married Emma out of egotism, because she had soft hands with which to tend to him and his various ailments. Emma turned out to be an excellent nurse and even imagined herself transformed into a sister of charity. He lasted one year. A year later, Emma threw off her widow’s weeds; and her uncle—her guardian-cum-administrator—along with a multitude of Valcárcel cousins, most of whom were secretly in love with Emma, were dispatched, by diktat from the family tyrant, to search land and sea for the fugitive, poor Bonifacio Reyes. He turned up in Mexico, in Puebla, where he had gone to seek his fortune but failed to find it. He was earning his living as the rather inept editor of a newspaper, whose main purpose was to insult others, calling them bunglers and fools. His was a poor, sad life, but he lived quietly
and peacefully enough and was resigned to his fate. More important, he never gave Emma a thought. Through the colleague of a business friend of the Valcárcel family, the family managed to make contact with Bonifacio. But how to bring him back? How could they decently broach the subject? He was offered a post in a town in the province, three leagues from the capital, a humble post, but better than running a Mexican newspaper. Bonifacio accepted and returned to the place of his birth. When he tried to find out to whom he owed the favor, the trail led to a cousin of Emma’s, once his archrival. The following week, Emma and Bonifacio met again and, three months later, they were married. It took only a week for Emma to realize that he was not the Bonifacio she had dreamed of. However docile, he was even more irritating than her guardian-cum-administrator and far less poetic than her cousin Sebastián, who had been hopelessly in love with her ever since he was twenty.
After two months of marriage, Emma felt stirring within her an intense, overwhelming affection for all those of her own tribe, living and dead; she surrounded herself with relatives, spent a fortune on restoring a whole multitude of ancestral portraits, and fell secretly, hopelessly in love with Don Antonio Diego Valcárcel y Merás, the famous founder of the house of Valcárcel and an illustrious warrior who had done service in the Morisco revolt in the Alpujarras. Wizened, beetle-browed, and gimlet-eyed, and, thanks to the new coat of varnish, gleaming like the sun, this mysterious painted figure in full armor appeared to Emma’s dreaming eyes like the personification of a lost and irreplaceable grandeur. Being in love with one of her ancestors, who symbolized for her what she imagined to be a knightly existence, was a passion worthy of a woman who put all her efforts into setting herself apart from other people. This desire to be above the ordinary and everyday, to break all the rules, to defy gossip, to overcome the impossible, and to provoke scandals was not a calculated ambition, the pedantic vanity of a woman led astray by reading fanciful novels; it was a spontaneous perversion of the mind, an unhealthy itch. Her cousin Sebastián lost a lot of ground with the restoration of the family iconography. If Emma had come within an inch of tumbling into the abyss—something that was never confirmed—her secret and purely cerebral passion freed her from any real danger, for an old piece of canvas had stepped in between Sebastián and his cousin. One evening, when night was coming on, they were strolling together in the portrait gallery, and just as Sebastián was composing a brief sentence that would express how richly he deserved her favors having loved her silently and disinterestedly for so many years, Emma suddenly stepped forward and told him to light a lamp and hold it up to the portrait of their illustrious ancestor.