The Good Conscience Page 10

  “We better be starting back to Guanajuato,” Jaime said. But Juan Manuel, smiling, indicated that he still had half a bottle left. A locomotive and cars passing outside drowned their voices.

  “The crew for Ciudad Juarez!” someone shouted from the door. Several men in overalls departed, wiping their mouths with their sleeves. The sounds of the yard grew louder or fainter. They were deep-toned noises, a rumble in the earth, and the little bar seemed to tremble.

  “This Fina,” Lupita said to the man behind the counter, “gives herself airs because she says she was a real society lady in Guanajuato once. Claims she had a rich husband.”

  “What, didn’t he leave you anything?” Gómez of the long face asked with complete seriousness.

  “How much?” asked Juan Manuel.

  “Lies, all lies,” laughed Lupita as she adjusted her brassiere and hummed: … I left my spring years in saloons …

  “One peso.”

  Fina’s yellow face burned red and she pushed it near Lupita’s blue lips and in an intense muted voice spat out: “Adelina López lived in the biggest house in Guanajuato, with servants and chandeliers and silver knives, and received all the aristocrats, people that in your whole life you have never even seen!”

  “Four pesos change,” said Gomitos.

  Adelina’s words came to Jaime’s hearing suffocated by the racket of cars and engines outside. They arrived long after they were pronounced, when Lupita had already replied something and was saying to the man behind the counter:

  “Gomitos, what are you going to be doing after work?”

  Jaime raised his face and his eyes devoured the profile of transparent bones, the sad defensive eyes, the pale untinted lips, the dark and gray hair of the woman who had said that she was his mother. He stared at his beer bottle and discovered his own face, sweaty, smeared by labor, distorted by the curvature of the glass. He went outside without waiting for Lorenzo. Even there he could hear Adelina’s last words:

  “I don’t do this because I need to. I come to save you, all of you.”

  As Jaime stepped off across the ties between rails shining in torchlight, he felt the cold night on his damp back, and he tried to pull together the fragments of a body that seemed to have come apart, while Adelina shook her finger under the nose of laughing Lupita and went on:

  “I’m bored, that’s why I’m here, because I’m so bored.”

  * * *

  “Rebel! Obstinate rebel! You shall spend one week in your room on bread and water, and we’ll see who lasts longer. My father used to say that discipline begins with a good caning. Decidedly, you are straining my patience. Nevertheless, I shall be generous this time.”

  But Jaime did not hear his uncle. On his stomach on the bed, with his arms hanging, wearing the same grease-stained shirt and pants, he felt that the lead weight that had hung so long in his throat had finally come loose and was moving boiling through his veins. He could no longer resist his pain, his hatred, his sense of strangeness. He dug his fingers into the bed-springs and sobbed, thinking of Ezequiel Zuno and Adelina López. No, the words of the Bible did not explain faith, but those two names, those two living people who had suffered hurt at the hands of the living people who formed his family. Weekly communion, daily prayers, novenas and Mass and processions: Rodolfo, Asunción, Uncle Balcárcel, all in black with their eyes full of pious self-satisfaction, kneeling in the church with mouths open to receive the Host; and Ezequiel, and Adelina.

  But you aren’t alone, and that’s the problem, that no one is alone.

  I don’t do this because I need to. I come to save you, all of you.

  The walls repeated it. The compact view from his window, when he rose and stood there, repeated it. Steps passing along the alley repeated it. And those words were the only words in the world that meant anything to him.

  He fell on the bed again. The servant came with his bread and water and a bit of sugar candy, Asunción’s gift, hidden in the napkin. Balcárcel had forbidden his wife and Rodolfo to visit Jaime. Jaime dampened the bread and swallowed it without chewing. He buried his face in the bedspread.

  There were hours when his mind was empty, and other hours when words and faces passed at a gallop. Sometimes his eyes burned with wish for a cataclysm which would at one terrible blow annihilate all Guanajuato; a bolt of lightning which would leave the Ceballos mansion in ashes. Coward, Christian, coward, Christian, coward, Christian. And now daylight had made the closed curtains glow again. He woke from his brutal vigil repeating words senselessly. Would he ever really speak? Would he make anyone understand, would he communicate anything? “You are almost grown now,” Ezequiel Zuno had said. No one else knew or believed that. To be a man. To leave home, to love a woman, to discover buried treasure. To return and avenge himself. To be a man …

  The bedroom warms. The boy thinks of death, and decides that the death of those who have not been loved must be sweet and serene; he imagines his mother dead, sweet and serene in repose. Sounds of day begin. The bells of passing mules. Vendors’ cries. Distant autos. Words: Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, hypocrites, as it is written: This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and precepts of man. For leaving the commandments of God, you hold the traditions of men …

  The servant enters again and Jaime gives her the smelly chamberpot. He paces the room in his bare feet. He tries to close the curtains completely. Again words whirl: They offend you, Lord, they offend you when they betray a man or abandon a woman; they offend you when they sell or humiliate someone, in order not to be sold and humiliated themselves; they offend you because you promised that your sacrifice would not be in vain. They offend you, Lord. The silent afternoon. The whole city in siesta. He tries to sleep; his growling empty stomach will not let him. When night falls, he opens his curtains and stares out. A persistent hallucination forces him to seek in the dying horizon light for the voice that will have to answer him. Why doth this generation seek a sign? Amen, I say unto you, a sign shall not be given to this generation. No, Father: give me a sign that I may know I am not alone. Job waited and saw God.

  He urinates and returns to bed.

  When he wakes again, he discovers for the first time that he has a beard. Not only the few isolated hairs that he has trimmed with scissors. He stands in front of his mirror. How many times has he observed himself there since he was thirteen? How that glass face has fascinated him! What lay behind the sad eyes? Why did the thin neck tremble? Why did he feel so alone?

  “I trust you are benefitting from your lesson,” says Uncle Balcárcel, who is lazily observing the boy contemplating himself. Jaime’s startled hand picks up the scissors and his arm rises. His uncle remains impassive.

  “I have no doubt but that you’ll try to kill me. Every passing day reveals more of the perversity of your nature.”

  Jaime lets the scissors fall.

  His thin nervous figure contrasts with the complacent rhomboidal one of his uncle. They look at each other in silence. The air smells of dawn, light enters with full hands, the sun hangs in the middle of the window. Laurels stir in the plaza. Paving stones of the alleys are wet. The droning saw of a cabinet-maker, bells of mules, they cry of the knives-sharpener, steps descending to Mass in San Roque. At his back, Jaime hears the world.

  Balcárcel rubs his stomach, his index fingers hooked in the pockets of his vest. “Are you finally going to tell me where you were Saturday night?”

  “You know already. That busybody Señorita Pascualina told you.”

  “You can’t have spent the night walking with your peasant friend.”

  “No. I spent it learning who you are, and who my father is … My God, my father! How could he…”

  Balcárcel’s eyes do not question. His face will remain immobile, say what the boy may. “I have never found it pleasant to speak of unpleasant subjects, Jaime. Life is difficult enough for me to insist that in the home we avoid disagreeable co
nversations. But now that I find you so changed, it is well that we understand each other. And I am sure that what I have to say to you is decidedly more important than anything you have to say to me.”

  Jaime wants to raise his voice, but it sinks to a whisper:

  “You betrayed Ezequiel Zuno … you let my mother be thrown out on the street! All you do is talk about morality. You and everyone in this house, jabber, jabber about religion, while you do everything that is not religious…”

  “These recent days I have conversed first with Father Lan-zagorta and then with Father Obregón. Decidedly you are not the one to discuss morality and religion. Do I surprise you? Sit down, you’re a bundle of nerves.”

  The sun strikes the boy’s back as he sits on the bed. How quickly it has risen. Balcárcel paces back and forth in front of him stroking his belly while his patent leather shoes squeak.

  “I understand your attitude quite well. You are an impure boy, and because you were afraid to confess your sins, you stopped going to Father Lanzagorta.”

  Balcárcel turns and observes his nephew with satisfaction. He clasps his hands behind his back and lowers his face: “Father Obregón has told me that you have never confessed to him, not even once!”

  “Why do you worry so much about sin?” the boy’s voice struggles. “Why don’t you think sometimes about the good things in life?” He retreats to the corner of the bed.

  “Sins! Good things! Cynic! You have stained Christ’s body. You have taken communion without first confessing! You are a cowardly and sacrilegious boy! Yes, sacrilegious!”

  “And what is it called to betray a man, Uncle?”

  “We have nothing further to discuss.”

  “And to put my mother out on the street, to force her to go around with whores and…”

  “Shut up, you idiot! I’m losing my patience! It was a mistake for us to take you into this home, to think that we could make anything out of you. Criminals, peasants, whores, these are your great loves!”

  “One doesn’t choose the people one loves, and I love them and hate you.”

  Balcárcel’s red hand slaps the boy’s chin. Jaime defends himself with his legs. Finally, he kicks his uncle in the groin and doubles him over.

  All morning, lying in bed, Jaime remembers that moment: his uncle holding his belly, himself trembling, begging forgiveness. He remembers how Balcárcel left the bedroom, mute, threatening with an open palm.

  Then it all seems far away. The boy rests. He feels calm. Evening bells ring. A musty odor rises from the alley: the night of sleeping dogs and cold stones has begun to gather there. In the evening silence the figures of Ezequiel Zuno and Adelina López draws near again. The words of people alone and mistreated may be heard again. Jaime’s anger is spent. His argument with his uncle blurs in memory and takes on the grotesque unreality of a pantomime. A ray of light opens in his mind. He no longer needs to ask others to do anything. He ought not to blame even his uncle. He must ask of himself alone; himself alone must act and do something for Ezequiel’s sake, for Adelina’s sake, in the name of Asunción, in the names of Rodolfo and Balcárcel.

  He sleeps deep, certain that tomorrow he will write his name across the firmament. He sleeps embracing his pillow. The voice which wakes him is the voice that has persisted, chanting, through his dream: For I am not come to call the just …

  Chapter 7

  … but sinners …

  His shoes leave the hardness of the pavement and with surprise stop upon soft earth. The countryside opens before him. A yellow road winds between fields of pale wheat and high corn. The deep narrow valley rises, slowly flattening, until it reaches a stream.

  Jaime descends with his feet buried to the ankle in black loam. He waits for a moment beside the stream; beyond it a straw-colored plain undulates in the early wind, stretches all the way to the line of mountains, hazy in dawn. Behind him the morning bells of Guanajuato’s churches are ringing. He leaves the path and slips off his shoes and lifts his eyes to a sun rising through shreds of vapor. The air is cool, but the earth is already warm. Guanajuato grows small and toy-like behind him. A hill stands high on the plain. Beyond it the boy can see the plain sweeping on, crossed by dark briary gulleys. He is surrounded by the living earth. Newborn thrushes chirp. Buzzards circle overhead.

  Once past the hill his way becomes harder. Brambles and briars catch at his legs, stones bruise the soft soles of his feet, the air cuts his skin, sweat glues his shirt to his back. There is a different vegetation along the sides of the ravine now, gray and brown, spiny, for the lake has not extended its fingers of water this far. This is untilled land, where a few goats tinkle their bells. Then the bald mountain, a castle of rock and briars. The arid stone tumult of the Mexican desert. Stone and dust and flapping black wings. Ravines and cliffs, solitude, the mountain’s closed fist. The land original, obstinate, beyond salvation, which refuses to accept man; autonomous nature, a kingdom that will not be divided.

  He takes off his shirt. His face is not calm, it reflects his profound anxiety. The palms of his hands are wet. He picks up the broken shell of a wild egg. Was it a bird’s womb, or a lizard’s? The sun burns his shoulders. His erect body is almost lost in the vast panorama. He stoops and begins to collect long sharp cactus spines, which he laces and plaits into a whip. Air is a hot lung in which the sun can be heard panting.

  His hand holds the whip and rises. Ezequiel, bound, is led before him again. Adelina sucks her glass of beer. The whip of thorns and cactus needles lashes down upon his bare back. He bites to hold in the cry of pain. Again the whip falls cuttingly. Thorns stick into the flesh of his back and he must jerk to free the whip. He waits a little before the next blow. A needle-sharp briar digs into his chest just below the nipple; as he pulls it loose, he feels his flesh tear. And the sun looks on, his only witness. He falls on his knees. His eyes cloud as they see his dripping blood. Why has pain made him happy? He was not searching for happiness. Kneeling on the hard earth he raises the whip again and again, and lashes himself without pity. The hot sun mixes with the blood clotting on his back. A cactus spine catches him in the genitals and for the first time he screams.

  He falls forward on his face. Air is heavy, motionless over his exhausted body. To breathe in is cold, to breathe out hot. A small curious lizard, dirt-colored, approaches his tired mouth. The boy watches the lizard slowly roll over, and it is as if the earth has rolled over and he is now hanging upside down in empty space. He tightens his eyes and feels the terror of a universe of wandering stars contained within another greater universe which is contained within another still greater, where the vastest worlds are scarcely dust, particles in an endless sidereal ocean. The tiny lizard scurries back under a stone.

  Time stops. There is an hour when he feels only his body’s heaviness. The sun is burning directly overhead. There is no wind now and the boy’s body buries itself against the trembling earth. Tired dust dances beyond his nostrils. The sun licks his wounds with a burning tongue. His stomach shivers.

  Then the hour of new wind, when brush begins to sigh again and the cicadas wake from their siestas. The hour of his first spoken prayer, pronounced slowly by a voice that has never stopped praying silently since it first learned words.

  A buzzard slowly, avidly descends, ready to pounce. Jaime smells it before he feels the talons on his back. With a guttural gasp he beats away the black wings and he shrieks until the ravine echoes: “Let me be … like you … not the lie…”

  The sun hangs over its red lake rimmed by mountains. His words are overpowered by that splendor. But, one with the earth, he would like to speak to the earth, saying: I did it for them. For all of them and for each of them, because nothing is gained cheaply, because all evil must be punished. Because someone must step forward and accept what others are afraid of.

  He rises painfully and puts on his discarded shirt. The cloth scratches like sharkskin. His legs will hardly support him. Night has awakened with a thousand voices of luminous insec
ts. A vague glow indicates his path. He walks back feeling something good in every stone and brush he stumbles against. Suddenly his lips encounter the wispy fingers of wheat. He has returned. Wheat stubble bends beneath his bare feet and he hurries toward a path soft with watercress. A forest of trees tells him that he is near the city again.

  There he stops, with his eyes whirling crazily. A sweaty horse crosses through the shadows and its tail whips his face. This nearness of a living being draws the first tears of pain; the slime of consciousness stirs and the waters begin to flow. He sees men galloping across fields with raised rifles and copper eyes and singing spurs. Sounds, so strange after the silence of the long day, begin to come together. A trembling in his throat and he has reached the city, its high domes, its towers and its stone and painted walls. Guanajuato of the honorable merchant Don Higinio Ceballos. Guanajuato where Grandfather Pepe made the family fortune and filled drawing rooms with French chandeliers. Guanajuato where Uncle Pánfilo guarded the safe full of gold pesos. Guanajuato where Papá Rodolfo wasted his youth. Guanajuato, lorded over by Uncle Balcárcel’s green face and sententious tongue. City of the righteous, of the family of those who have never done evil. Home of the exalted.

  A dark woman carrying a jar on her head passes. The first pavement stones. Little lights of tanneries and blacksmiths’ shops. The swinging doors of beer-smelling bars. Surprised brown burros. The plaza. The huge mansion. Jaime’s face squeezes with pain; his wounds, blood mixed with dirt, burn; he falls on stones that glisten beneath the streetlight, and his hands claw at the green gate.

  * * *

  “I cannot understand the boy. Decidedly, I cannot understand him.” Balcárcel crossed his hands behind his back in a way that inflated his chest and spread the lapels of his coat. “What did he tell you?”

  In spite of the swift evening air the bedroom held a closed-in stale smell. The velvet curtains preserved among their stiff pleats the low voices of the past: this had been the bedroom of the Spanish grandparents who had made love here with tenderness and grace, then that of Pepe and rigid Guillermina, then that of the brief incomprehension between Adelina and Rodolfo. A century of garments had hung in the mahogany wardrobe: bustles, greatcoats, white leggings, Manila cloaks, silk hats, Prince Alberts, bright boas, tuxedos, ostrich feathers, straw hats, canes with incrusted handles, umbrellas and whips, and during the ‘Twenties, rose stockings and beaded and fringed skirts. Now the contents of the wardrobe had ceased to change: the Balcárcel’s used, forever, the clothing of the ‘Thirties. A double-breasted suit for him, with wide lapels and vest and a Scotch plaid tie. For her, dresses with long narrow skirts, high throats, pleats over the bust. Asunción’s hair also reflected the style of the first years of her marriage, for it was undulating and drawn back.