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