His only child

In His Only Son Leopoldo Alas Clarín describes the boring world of a provincial city. In it life is shaken by the arrival of an opera company. Bonifacio Reyes, a dreamy, ineffective and long-suffering husband, will maintain trivial relations with one of the singers; and his wife, Emma, with a baritone.
Then, disillusioned with his lover and deceived by his in-laws, he undergoes a profound moral evolution. At the end of the novel, he is ennobled by rejecting the justified insinuation that he is not the father of his wife’s child.
The central theme of the story is fatherhood as a means to redemption, very close to the Tolstoy of Resurrection.

Emma Valcárcel was an only spoiled child. At the age of fifteen she fell in love with her father’s scribe, a lawyer. The scribe, named Bonifacio Reyes, belonged to an honest family, distinguished a century ago, but, two or three generations ago, poor and unhappy. Boniface was a peaceful, soft, morose, very sentimental, very tender of heart, maniac of music and wonderful stories, good parishioner of the rental reading cabinet that was in the village. He was handsome to the romantic, of regular stature, pale oval face, of beautiful brown hair, fine and with loops, small foot, good leg, slender, thin, and dressed well, without affectation, his humble clothes, not entirely badly cut. It was not suitable for any kind of serious and constant work; He had beautiful handwriting, very delicate in profiles, but it took a long time to fill a sheet of paper, and his spelling was extremely capricious and fantastic; that is, it was not spelling. He wrote with a capital letter the words to which he gave great importance, such as: love, charity, sweetness, forgiveness, time, autumn, erudite, soft, music, girlfriend, appetite and several others. On the same day that Emma’s father, Don Diego Valcárcel, of noble lineage and famous lawyer, came up with the idea of saying goodbye to poor Reyes, because “in short he did not know how to write and made a fool of him before the Court and the Court”, it occurred to the girl to escape from home with her boyfriend. In vain Boniface, who had allowed himself to be loved, did not want to let himself be robbed; Emma dragged him by force, by force of love, and the Civil Guard, which was beginning to be benemérita, surprised the fugitives in their first stage. Emma was locked up in a convent and the scribe disappeared from the town, which was a melancholy and boring capital of the third order, without being heard from for a long time. Emma was in her religious prison for some years, and returned to the world, as if nothing had happened, on the death of her father; rich, arrogant, in the power of a curator, her uncle, who was like a butler.

Fragment of the work

Reference edition: Madrid, Librería de Fernando Fe, 1890.