The Good Conscience Read online

  He declined: “Decidedly, I cannot abandon my little native state and its many problems,” he declared officially. Inwardly he was thinking about the uneasy parades of ghosts from the time of Díaz he would meet in the national capital; that the presence in the Federal Legislature of an ex-mine owner and landlord might create trouble. He suspected that in a great city he would encounter the danger of living unknown as merely another ruined aristocrat. In Guanajuato, on the other hand, he could become powerful. He contented himself with juicy commissions on contracts for public works, and a little later with the directorship of the bank. Advised in advance of the successive currency devaluations, intermediary in many of the state’s contracts and fiscal operations, a careful money-lender, in fifteen years Balcárcel accumulated a tidy fortune. From his ancestors he inherited the habit of safeguarding a large part of his wealth in foreign banks; from the Revolutionary oligarchy he learned to invest in urban real estate. Between interest and rental income, he had very easily enough to live in the highest luxury.

  See him thus: height average, hair curly and thinning, lips thin and compressed, complexion bilious, cheeks hanging from jutting cheekbones; small sharp eyes, an air of solemn intellectuality, always scrupulously clean-shaven. He is sententious, given to invoking moral maxims at every moment, and to hooking his hand in his vest in an imperial gesture. Suits very conservative, almost old fashioned; false teeth, bifocals. If for a long time he has had to sacrifice his religious piety to political expediency, now that he can publically declare himself a believer he does so over and over, and the words “Catholic” and “the upper classes” are synonyms to him. Religious rhetoric he uses to justify his worldly interests: “Decidedly, private property is a postulate of Divine Reason.” “In Mexico, we of the upper class have the obligation to take charge of the morals, the education, and the economic activity of a people who are decidedly backward.” “A man’s treasures are his family and his faith.” Such are his more frequent and felicitous sayings. He is a man of exact hours, and will not tolerate unpunctuality or the slightest change in established habits any more than he will condone frivolity of speech. At seven-thirty in the morning he must have his hot bath and at eight an egg boiled for exactly one hundred and eighty seconds. His laundry for the week must be laid out on the bed so that he may count it personally and inspect the amount of starch in the collars. In his presence, conversation must always be steered toward those familiar topics upon which he can make a pronouncement. In his home, Rosary must be exactly at six in the evening, and on Sundays everyone must wear black. But above all, he may not be contradicted and he must always be respected. And he is respected. His raised index finger is a symbol of confident authority. Every night he can go to bed with his magazines—his only reading—and an infinite sense of righteousness, tranquility, and power.

  Like all bourgeois Catholics, Balcárcel was really a Protestant. If in the first instance the wide world was divided into good beings who thought as he did and sinners who thought otherwise, in the second, the local world of Guanajuato was divided into decent folk who possessed wealth and evil beggars who did not. Carrying this Manichaean attitude into the bosom of his family, Balcárcel became the strict head of the house who understood righteousness, while all others in the mansion were more or less suspects whom it was necessary to watch closely and prod toward good behavior. His brother-in-law Rodolfo was wholly a lost case. For a man like Balcárcel, who made a devotion of labor and an idol of wealth, the easy-going merchant who could accumulate nothing was an object of scorn. If to this were added Rodolfo’s social errors, he became the perfect target for Balcárcel’s sermons, a kind of living text. The boy Jaime, as the son of such a father, offered his uncle a double opportunity: on the one hand, to make clear to him just how infirm were his father’s ethics, and on the other, to conduct him to better ways. Balcárcel did not love the boy, of course. He loved only Jorge Balcárcel. But although the child irritated him, he also interested him as a kind of moral raw material. And he needed the boy to make it possible for him to live in peace with his wife.

  For this head of a family could not sire a family of his own, and this was the crack in his imposing facade of manhood. The year of their marriage, the young couple had gone to a doctor in London. “There is nothing wrong with you,” the doctor said to Asunción. “You may have as many children as you want.” Jorge never told her the result of his own consultation. For several days he was strangely lost in thought. Then he buried himself in his studies and never mentioned the matter again. The months, the first years passed, and she never became pregnant. Her breeding did not allow her to discuss the matter with her husband, while he, on her menstrual days, affected silence and raised a wall of sternness that in time became one of his characteristics. Asunción’s innocence, which in a normal relationship would have bloomed into normal sexuality, contracted and withdrew, and transformed itself into a concentrated, primitive internal violence. Sexual relations with her husband were purely mechanical. She lived in a world of unsatisfied appetites and broken hopes. She never discussed this with anyone. Only in dreams or in moments of solitude did she feed her visions of fecundity, and she would wake fatigued and hurry about her housework with drums echoing in her head and loins. Activity could distract her from her preoccupation, but she always returned to it.

  When the Balcárcels came back to Guanajuato, Asunción observed her brother’s marriage situation and formed her scheme. She urged Rodolfo to have a child. “It will bring true love into your life.” She informed Adelina that her brother had indicated his displeasure at not having a son and heir, and then she suspected this was the cause of their present marital difficulties. Then, when Adelina confided that she was pregnant, Asunción made life so impossible for her that she fled the house. The last step was to arrange to separate the baby from the mother: a thousand pesos in Don Chepepón’s hands, and it was done.

  Her tormented dreams calmed. She filled her eyes, her lips, her hands with the infant’s skin and soft smells and warmth. Her days were busy with maternal attentions, concern about his bath and diet and successive childhood illnesses. Her heart was alive with unforgettable hours: the boy’s ABC’s, their first lisped prayer together, Christmas mornings, his first tricycle, his first day at school, his first communion. She attended him with monomaniac love, and she sighed profoundly when she thought of the empty first years of her marriage. None of this escaped Balcárcel. He, like Asunción, understood that a great problem had been solved. The sterility which could have led to a permanent rancor between husband and wife, Jaime rendered harmless.

  The first rule in this family was that life’s real and important dramas should be concealed. Asunción had secretly plotted to gain a child, Rodolfo had secretly felt guilt for abandoning Adelina, but everything was hidden; the brother would never know that his sister had suffered in her sterility, the sister would never know that the brother accused himself—and her—of cruelty. Jorge Balcárcel was careless about the feelings of both. He gave, over and over, spoken rules and examples as to what in this or that situation should be done by people of good family, but his sayings were always abstract and the situations far from real. In their hearts all three of them understood and accepted that if one is not to be contradicted, one must not contradict, that if violence toward oneself is to be avoided, violence toward others must be eschewed. In a counterpoint of opaque silence and vague words, all clung to Jaime as the key to their contentment. Asunción’s substitute son, the pretext for Balcárcel’s authority, Rodolfo’s link with the past, the child grew surrounded by love that had secret purposes and by standards that were Pharisaical.

  “May he always be small, may he never grow up,” the aunt would pray wordlessly every night. Then she would go to her nephew’s room and observe him for several seconds, sleeping. She would draw near him and kiss his forehead, and close the curtains.

  Chapter 3

  HIS MAMÁ SLEEPS in the adjoining bedroom, the big room where prayers are
held each evening and where there stands a beautiful piano that she sometimes—not often—plays. But his papá is not there with her. His papá lives far away on the roof, at the top of the winding iron outdoor stairs. That confuses the boy. Why don’t his mamá and his papá live together? Why is his uncle where his father should be? And to which of them should he be more obedient: to stern Uncle Balcárcel, or to fat and drowsy Papá Rodolfo? Very early he learns the answer to that question: it is his uncle he must obey.

  In his cloistered childhood solitude he explores the old mansion. The entrance is a green gate, very high and wide, that opens on the narrow street called Jardín Morelos. The corridor is broad, and ends at the patio, where there is a fountain. A palatial stone stairs rises on the right. On the wall above it, coats of arms are carved. A faded painting of the Crucifixion hangs on the landing, and when he is small, he stares up at the painting and crosses himself as if he were standing before the Virgin in Mamá Asunción’s bedroom. Then the long drawing room, which in other times, when Mamá Asunción and Papá Rodolfo were themselves children, was white and cheerful, with a floor of warm volcanic stone, and blonde walnut furniture. It was Grandfather Pepe who gave it its present thick drapes, maroon silk sofas, imitation marble columns, parquet floor, ornate chandeliers and green wallpaper. The drawing room has four balconies that look out upon the plaza of San Roque. A door of opaque glass with elaborate tracery leads to the musty closed dining room, beyond which, at the end of the wing, is the kitchen. A similar door hides the library, room of large black leather armchairs; and from the library he walks out onto the corridor that goes around and looks down upon the patio, green with plants and lichen.

  A hall leads off at right angles and takes him to his aunt and uncle’s room, then to his own. At the end of the hall is the bathroom. The tub is huge and the taps are of gold in the shape of lions’ heads. The white porcelin has been stained by Guanajuato’s rust-dyed brownish water.

  On the left downstairs, just inside the entry, is an enormous room that he knows better than any other. It used to be the stable; now it is a catch-all storeroom. It is full of dust and cobwebs, old trunks and suitcases, discarded paintings, rickety furniture. A case, its glass cover broken, contains the mouldering butterfly collection which Mamá Asunción made as a young girl. Straw, darkened mirrors, old books that have lost their covers, forgotten sewing machines. A Tilbury without wheels. The black carriage upon which chickens roost. A wardrobe of moth-eaten clothes. An engraving of President Porfirio Díaz framed in blackened silver. An ancient dress dummy. High above, a skylight allows dusty gray light to enter.

  This is his play place, the kingdom of his imagination. He opens boxes and trunks and makes games with their contents. He sits on the carriage seat and drives make-believe horses. He holds the old books between his hands and pretends to read even before he knows the alphabet. He visits the stable every day, clean and neat from his bath, and when he leaves it, he is covered with grime, which always earns him a scolding from Asunción.

  Life is slow. The rooms are vast and he is small. The air is damp. There is something ruinous, decaying about it; at night it becomes so still, settling dust between the pleats of curtains that he fingers, tugs, and sometimes opens. The house is full of curtains. Green velvet conceals the main balconies. There is stiff brocade in the drawing rooms. Velvet again, red and stained, in Mamá Asunción’s room. Cotton elsewhere. When the wind from the mountains comes, all these cloth arms lift and wave, topple over small tables, brush away bric-a-brac. It is as if heavy wings are trying to carry the house in flight. Then the wind ceases, the curtains are still, and the slow dust sifts again.

  Life is calm. If there is rancor, it is hidden by respect for appearances. He never witnesses a quarrel, he never hears nor suspects a word of recrimination. The hours of the house are exact, affection is swift. The past is alive and close. Each time they take their places under the lamp in the dark dining room, memories are called up: some happy anecdote from Asunción, a homely one from Rodolfo, a story with a moral point from Uncle Balcárcel. He listens to the tinkle of glass and silver, and it is as if he were seeing his departed ancestors with his own eyes. A wonderful coming-out ball. A vacation in the country. A funeral. Doña Guillermina’s profound prudence. Don Pepe’s energy and gaiety. When Balcárcel pronounces that life in the old days was better in every way, Rodolfo and Asunción respectfully agree, and obedient Jaime does too. Balcárcel raises a finger and his voice: “Today morality is not what it was. Our obligation, decidedly, is to maintain those good old customs and to preserve respect for family in the midst of a society that is in serious crisis.”

  Following this summarizing statement, Asunción rings the little silver bell and the servant comes in and takes away the plates. Rodolfo excuses himself and with slow steps leaves the dining room. They are all sleepy; it is siesta time. Their voices fade into silence. Doors are closed, curtains drawn. What silence those drowsy afternoons! The colonial city marks its hours with lost bells. From far-away fields comes the sound of grazing cattle. And in the silence of the siesta, just as at night, the boy is alone but does not feel alone. He is united with his family, both present and past, living and dead. He never wakes afraid of the dark.

  At six he begins primary school. Revolutionary religious persecution has closed the church schools, and in the public ones, socialism is the official doctrine. He studies in a private home, the Senores Oliveros, along with most of the children of Guanajuato’s rich Catholic gentry. At first a servant walks with him to the Oliveros, and comes for him in the afternoon when classes end. Soon he can go alone.

  He has, instead of a briefcase, a little leather knapsack that straps on his back. Asunción takes care of it for him, puts into it the books and notebooks he will need today, sharpens his pencils, replaces erasers. She attends him devotedly at breakfast. She offers him sugared bread, more fruit, a glass of milk. Balcárcel observes and one morning remarks:

  “You mama the child decidedly too much. Jaime, are you prepared for your arithmetic lesson?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “I was always the first in my class when I was your age, and I shall not tolerate my nephew to be second. Discipline in studies is the neccessary foundation for discipline in life. Are you afraid you will fail this year?”

  “No, Uncle.”

  “Well, you ought to be. You should study for your examinations with the fear of a zero hanging over you. There is no other way to prepare conscientiously. The teacher always knows far more than his scholars, and he can fail the most studious.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  At seven he makes his First Communion, and his aunt begins to offer him religious readings: devotionals, missals, stories about the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Lives of the Saints. He goes with her, very early every morning, to Mass in the church of San Roque. At six every afternoon there are Rosary prayers in the big bedroom. Every Feast Day in the Church Calendar is celebrated, every Day of Obligation rigorously observed. Religion surrounds him until it becomes the very air he breathes.

  The boy’s faith is concrete and childish. As he studies catechism with Father Obregón, preparing for his First Communion, there are many words he does not understand. “Mass is the bloodless sacrifice of the law of grace.” “The Church is Christ’s spouse.” He repeats and memorizes mechanically, these are mere words; for him Mass and the Church are the movements and gestures of the rich-robed priest before the golden altar, movements and gestures which he also memorizes and repeats in the secrecy of his bedroom. There, kneeling in front of the chair that is his improvised altar, he frowns and murmurs the prayers which begin Mass. He is afraid that he has forgotten some essential gesture or confused the order of the ritual: What comes next? Yes, the Introit and now the Kyrie Eleison. The Epistle. He does not speak aloud, he merely moves his mouth silently, for these words directed to everyone don’t matter much: what is important is what he says to himself alone as he listens to the sermon. But the Credo he does
say aloud: he knows it by heart. His hands fly about making the sign of the cross as he performs the Offertory of imaginary wine and bread. He washes his hands in his basin, kneels again; then the Canon and the Consecration; he lifts the cup of water high and whispers an Our Father. On his knees with his head bent he offers himself the ficticious communion. He remains there for several minutes with his eyes closed, and then gets up and empties the cup into the basin, and standing behind the chair, imparts benediction to his bed and dresser and washstand, while he pronounces the last words: “Ite, missa est.” He cries them loudly, trying to imitate Father Lanzagorta’s deep voice.

  Thus God becomes his playmate, and the Church’s sacred ritual a game. Usually he plays Mass in the afternoon. Sometimes, when he closes his curtains to make his room shadowy as San Roque, he sees children running down the alley. He knows them, they are his school-mates, they wave their arms to him, invite him to come out and play. The plaza fills with their shouts and laughter. And then Jaime feels sad. He cannot go out, it is forbidden. He shakes his head and tries to smile and stands at the window with his arms crossed on his chest. He feels lonely and isolated. And where is God? God has gone away. He bites his lips and asks himself why. Maybe he has failed to do something he ought to have done. Maybe, although he can’t remember it, he has sinned terribly. This makes him sadder. If he has sinned, he must atone for his error. He grips a fold of the skin over his ribs and pinches and twists until the pain is sharp. That makes him feel a little better. He decides that he will go without his supper, as a deeper penitence. But Mamá Asunción will not allow that and forces him to eat until his plate is clean. And when he goes to bed, as always she comes in and leaves him a glass of milk and a square of quince candy.

  As he lies there, he thinks of the Virgin, the Saints, the Holy Trinity, and God comes close to him again. But who is God? God is companionship and happiness. And Christ? He does not know Christ. He understands the Baby Jesus, yes, but the crucified Jesus, the figure who hangs upon a blood-smeared cross, is strange and terrible to him.