The Good Conscience Page 4

  By the time he is eleven, he has decided that when he grows up, he will be a priest. He confides his ambition to Asunción, expecting her to be pleased, but she at once looks troubled. A Ceballos a priest? There is something profoundly self-contradictory about that. Religion is an essential element in the life of a Ceballos, yes, just as is wealth. But Ceballos men are gentlemen and men of business, not Fathers. “You are just a little boy still,” she tells Jaime. “You don’t need to be thinking about what you will do when you grow up.” Later she speaks with Balcárcel—the head of the family, the authority to whom problems must be brought for solution—and confesses that she is afraid the boy has taken his faith more seriously than is quite proper. Balcárcel grimly agrees, and one evening after dinner, summons him into the library.

  Jaime sits in the armchair. He is sure that he has done something wrong and he trembles as he tries to think what it could be. Balcárcel paces back and forth tugging at his lapels. For a long time he says nothing, but his face is grave with displeasure. At last he speaks:

  “You have a decidedly mistaken idea about religion. Religious training is certainly of the highest importance in life. Indeed it is indispensable: there is no other road to righteousness. But there can be too much of a good thing. Religious feeling carried to the extreme of mysticism is an absurdity.” He stops and turns the full power of his cold stare upon the boy. “I observe such a tendency in you. It must be rooted out. Although Christian morality serves life, an unbalanced excess has no purpose whatsoever except to set you apart from the rest of mankind, endangering social relations which I assure you are just as important as good moral habits. I will not permit my nephew to make a fool of himself and be laughed at and pointed out as an idiot.

  “When you go to your room, you will take down those ridiculous pictures of Virgins and saints with which you have plastered your walls. Out with them! Hereafter when you feel yourself full of piety, you will cross the plaza to the church and kneel in front of a real altar. And from tomorrow on, I forbid you to waste your leisure hours praying and reading Lives of Saints. Rather you will go out of doors and engage in physical exercise. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Then go, and let there be no more absurd talk about a religious vocation for you.”

  The boy leaves the library with bowed head. He approaches Asunción to be comforted, but she merely repeats, in soft words disguised as advice, the same cold orders.

  Jaime obeys with a sense of injustice and resentment. The pictures tacked to the walls of his room come down. He no longer plays Mass. Dutifully he goes into the patio in the afternoon after school, and runs back and forth chasing a rubber ball. He obeys because that is his duty and he is a very dutiful child. But he feels that he has been hurt and misunderstood. Something that was really only a childhood game was given by his aunt and uncle a strange adult importance and implication which he does not understand. He feels confused. Apparently it is wrong to make God your companion. Apparently God is not for children but only for grown-ups. And you must not try to go to God directly and alone; you must cross the plaza and look for God in the Church. Those are the conclusions that he draws, but in his heart he refuses to accept them.

  His feeling that his aunt and uncle have been unkind and unloving to him transforms itself into hostility that is expressed by withdrawing his affection from them. But he is a child and he wants to love and be loved. He turns toward the one person close to him who was not part of the injustice, who has never made him feel guilty or confused, the man who is as childlike as Jaime himself, his father.

  Chapter 4

  RODOLFO HAD CONTINUED to attend the store on San Diego. He made certain changes, chiefly the sale of ready-made suits. No longer did he offer the rich fabrics that had been featured in the old times when the social life of the city had been more select and the gap between the classes more accentuated. In those days the monk had been known by his habit; today, who could tell a gentleman from a chauffeur, when both dressed alike? Rodolfo made a speciality of cheap serge, gabardine, and cotton prints. He stopped importing cloth from Europe; that from Orizaba was cheaper and no one seemed to notice or care about the difference.

  He tried to recover the lost ways of his careless youth, but under the sober respectability imposed by the Balcárcels, what had been open and pleasant became hidden and shameful. Dominoes, beer, the bordel, his pastimes were ruled by Asunción’s rigid time-tables and the fear of meeting Balcárcel. Nor could he, with Adelina gone, adopt the pose of a serious man of family. He was trapped in an uncomfortable middle-ground between simplicity and inhibition, his plight sharpened by the Balcárcels’ arid self-assurance.

  Sometimes he thought about Adelina:

  “Asunción, do you suppose she needs anything?”

  “She’s all right, don’t worry about her. And for God’s sake don’t mention her in front of Jaime.”

  One morning in church he saw his wife at a distance and he felt ashamed and guilty. She had been thin before; now she was skeletal. More than once he would have willingly taken the boy to see her. But opportunities passed, he sought excuses, and he never had courage to steal Jaime away from Asunción’s strict vigilance, much less enough to talk with him about his mother. Later he heard that Don Chepepón had died, and Adelina had left Guanajuato.

  He was so accustomed to his son’s distance from him that he received the boy’s first advances toward intimacy hesitantly. He advised him, in a whisper, that the aunt and uncle had best not be told what they talked about together. He went secretly to the Oliveros house to bring Jaime home from school, so that they might have at least twenty minutes unobserved. Rodolfo’s life took on clarity: he told himself that he must by all means gain Jaime’s love. With unexpected imagination he made up stories, appealed to the child’s curiosity, and absorbed his attention. Never in his life did Rodolfo know such happiness as that quick year, Jaime’s twelfth. A new spirit came into his plump lazy body. With simple, natural eloquence he would relate events that he scarcely remembered, brightening their usual walk down Zapote to the foot of Jardín Morelos with a patina of anecdotes:

  “Just imagine this very street jammed with carriages like the one in the stable. Your Great-grandmother Margarita surrounded by her children, saying hello to all the families that came to Mass on Sunday, and afterward taking chocolate with the Señor Bishop. It must have been beautiful, don’t you think? And imagine, imagine, we had a little machine, something like a bike, to ride back into the past and to meet … even Pipila! Who was Pipila? Why, he was a little boy just like you, and it was thanks to him that the rebels took the Fort. Wouldn’t you like to have known him? Some day we’ll go to the Fort together, and I’ll tell you…”

  He was recompensed: the boy squeezed his hand, showered laughter and smiles upon him, gazed at him with clear eyes.

  Father and son walked surrounded by crowds in the pilgrimage the Day of the Cave. They pushed forward through laughter and flowers on Friday of Sorrows. Hurrying, merry, impatient, they attended the gay ceremony of the opening of San Renovato Dam. Jaime devoured candy and shouted with glee when the gates were opened and the water rushed down while the band played “Over the Waves.” He watched youths try to climb greased poles. He watched dancing, balloons, ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds. The crudely, brightly-painted world of fiesta made his eyes tremble and glow.

  On one of their walks together, Jaime asked: “Tell me about the Revolution.”

  “It began in 1915,” Rodolfo said. “I was at the hacienda and one fine day a gang of armed men rode up and emptied all the barns and burned some of the buildings. That same year the Carrancistas occupied Guanajuato and right away they made their headquarters in our house. Think of it: all those soldiers and their horses milling around in the patio, and your grandmother trembling with fear … and with good reason, too.”

  “And Mamá Asunción and Uncle Jorge?”

  Rodolfo hesitated: “They had left Mexico.” />
  “They left Grandmother Guillermina alone?”

  “Yes, with Uncle Pánfilo, but … Well, they had just married, they were very young, life was so dangerous…”

  “They left Grandmother alone?”

  “She told them to go. They were so young and they felt they had a right to see something besides massacre and sacking. They … I don’t know.”

  “I would like to have known Grandmother Guillermina.”

  “And of course they couldn’t take her with them. Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged her away from her home!” He smiled.

  “They left her. I would have stayed with her. Why didn’t they?”

  “Eh! How you ask questions! Today you’re not even looking where you’re walking, all you can do is ask questions. That’s enough now. We’ll go to the lake, and…”

  “If we have another Revolution, I won’t leave you alone.”

  “I know you won’t. Don’t think any more about it. Your grandmother was a very strong-willed woman, and your aunt and uncle … that is, Don Jorge and your Mamá Asunción … well, they were young and they had a right to a better life than was possible here then. And…”

  The boy squeezed his father’s hand and was silent.

  * * *

  Holy Friday. He was thirteen now. They were watching the Three Falls at the Compañía Church. Tiny below the great high dome, squeezed against the rose-colored wall by the press of the crowd, the boy nailed his eyes on the figure of Christ, the wild bristly black hair, the thorn scratched forehead. Suddenly he found himself understanding for the first time that what his Uncle Balcárcel said was not true. He was sure that the Man represented by that sad image had never been unbalanced; but Uncle Balcárcel, if he had known Him, would certainly have called Him so.

  His feeling deepened. He could not have expressed it in words, it was too fluid, too warm, too overpowering. The Cross advanced slowly and irresistibly carried upon the powerful arms of brown ragged Indians. Hands stretched trying to touch it: concentrated life enamated like heat. It was as if the Indians were trying to lose themselves in touching the image. It was as if they wanted their faith not to give them something, but to lead them to renunciation. Their piety was not a way of life but a road out of life. They wanted to lose themselves in the anonymity of this moment, giving up everything past and future.

  Carried high, the black-skinned Jesus was Lord of them all, but not with hope. The Indian’s peasant faces showed a secret desire to go back and seize what had once been possessed and then lost. There was also a challenge. Only Indians held the image; Creoles and meztizos remained on the sidewalks, on balconies, looking on with an air of condescension, as if they were receiving what had been specially brought for them. And this in a mysterious way exalted the faith and confidence of the men whose arms carried the Cross. This was really their fiesta; today they were the protagonists and, united with the venerated image, the center of the ceremony. Silently they clamored their triumph.

  Jaime watched and felt something new. The intense pigments of the fiesta clouded his thought, but suddenly, behind the glitter and the crowd, something formed that joined him to the image on the Cross. The people and the noise went away and he and Christ were facing each other, alone together.

  Then his uncle’s words echoed saying that mortality was identical for everyone, that the rules of Christian conduct were the same for all, for women as for men, for children as for adults, for the poor as for the rich; it made no difference what a man was himself and alone. And now Christ and Jaime Ceballos were no longer soul to soul; Christ had returned to the multitude. Squeezed against the wall by the crowd, Jaime burned to recapture that look that had been only for him, that no one else could see or understand.

  A purple cowl fell over the dark image. The crowd dispersed.

  Jaime went to the church every day the following week to see if the cowl had been removed. He felt deeply that the figure of Christ held a secret reserved only for him. His prayers that week were an effort to learn the secret.

  * * *

  Good Friday he walked with his father in the procession. He realized later that it was then, staring again at the image of the victimized God, that he had for the first time felt himself a person, an individual, different not only from everyone in his family but from everyone in the world. During the frugal dinner that evening—evening of mourning underlined by the dark clothing his father and aunt and uncle wore—he observed his father flush when Balcárcel intoned his customary words about the family and good breeding. Jaime did not listen to the conversation. He thought only of Christ; he raised his eyes to the lamp and imagined that he saw the bleeding Body there, the crown of thorns. That night he dreamed of death, for the first time with terror. With the bed-covers pulled up to his ears, he dreamed about his dead ancestors: Higinio Ceballos with open mouth and hands crossed upon his still chest; Margarita Machado with a lace coif; Pepe Ceballos like a wax doll, and Grandmother Guillermina with a handkerchief tied around her jaw. His dead ancestors smiled at him; they were like him or they were part of him, they were friendly and comforting. Then, unexpectedly, from the vague background, appeared a strange figure who shattered all tranquility, the corpse who had died in pain and blood, a horrible corpse who between his nail-pierced hands bore a mysterious offering that in the dream could neither be seen nor understood. The figure grew larger and larger with a bellowing sound and crushed Jaime’s ancestors; their bodies fell broken and grotesquely smiling at his feet; a storm of lights whirled and everything dissolved, and Jaime woke screaming. He raised his hands to his mouth. His aunt ran in, barefoot and wrapped in a shawl, to calm him and make the sign of the cross over him.

  Then it was morning: Holy Saturday. He woke with the memory of his dream, to the bang of exploding rockets. He knew what the day would be like. The whole family would attend religious ceremonies. The purple garments would fall from the images. The Virgin would smile again, the saints blaze in cloth-of-gold. Incense would fill the naves. When he got up and went into the bathroom for his bath, he thought happily about the promised spectacle. He passed the washcloth over his shoulders and felt them stronger and broader than they had been even yesterday. The tub was brim-full of rust-colored hot water. He stirred his legs and stretched his feet until he touched the gold taps; not long ago, he had not been able to do that. Water splashed his armpits with a good feeling. He soaped himself and went on thinking about this day of celebration. Already rockets were soaring and boys were running carrying papier-maché bullsheads. Already glory was clanging from all the bell-towers in the city. Judas dolls with red noses and black mustaches would explode. They would all walk to church: his father, his aunt, himself—not Uncle Balcárcel, who would be absent from Guanajuato today. They would join the crowd to celebrate the Resurrection; they would kneel in front of the confessionals, they would open their lips to receive the Host, while the chorus raised the Easter halleluja. Then again outside the church, walking slowly, surrounded by noise and happiness. The soap slipped away and Jaime, looking for it, ran his hands down his legs, which had begun to be hairy. When he got out of the tub, he stood before the mirror for a long time, wrapped in a towel, studying his face.

  There was faith in the city of noble stone that Saturday. Peasants came down from the barren hills. Shepherds walked in from San Miguel with jingling bells on their ankles and wrists. Old folks crowded balconies. Children ran through the mass of rebozos and straw hats. On every corner in Guanajuato there was a water-vendor’s stand or a fruit-stand or a flower-stand. From the rococco distance of the Valenciana the smell of exploding firecrackers came. The city smelled of gunpowder, but also of manure, of damp paving stones, of trees. Many odors rose from the earth, others from vendors, others from sideboards and cupboards behind whose white doors were fresh cheeses, rice with milk, sticky candies, bunches of cherries, eggnog, fruit wine, guava and marchpane. All these scents were in the air that Holy Saturday, for this was a provincial city of pastries and cordials more i
nterested in the elaborate adornment of a nougat or an altar than in the efficiency of a liquidizer. And surrounded by these scents the people of Guanajuato gathered in the wide plazas to celebrate the great Christian holiday.

  A holiday greater, perhaps, than Bethlehem night. For it was now that the reward promised by Christmas would be collected. The Savior had died for all, and upon rising from that common death, had promised all salvation from pain and solitude saying that to live for one’s brothers, as He had died, is to secure eternal life. He who knew how to love his brothers could live in them forever, and in their children, and their children’s children. Because this had been promised, Asunción Balcárcel walked down the hill to the church of the Compañía, holding Jaime, still a child to her, by the hand. Because of the promise, the merchant Rodolfo Ceballos trod heavily behind his sister and his son, in his black suit, with his hands piously folded over his chest. And because of the promise, the chorus of boys was singing Handel’s Halleluja when the family entered the church and took their usual seats among the gentry, and the voices that sang Mass were joyful, and Easter candles were blessed, and at the end the Exsultet was cried.

  Jaime remained on his knees. He was wearing his blue Sunday suit and it had become too small for him, and the seams of the trousers had split when he knelt. Beside him his aunt was reading her missal. Rodolfo’s mouth was half open and his gaze was lost in the baroque foliage of the altar. Jaime had eyes for only the enormous candle. He was reflecting, with surprise, that he had attended Holy Saturday ceremonies all his life without ever realizing that that candle was the center of everything, and the whole object was to light it. He understood now and felt full of happiness as he watched big drops of wax melt down and the high flame slowly flatten. The candle was sacrificing itself giving off rejoicing light. Asunción’s voice repeated beside him: “… and in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, Amen.”