The Good Conscience (14 page)

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 insects. 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.

“He can't talk,” she replied. She kept her eyes down, and her fingers slowly twisted a fold of the curtain. “He's delirious, he says things that don't make sense. He's hurt, Jorge, his feet are bleeding … ay!” She suffocated a sudden sob that was born more of her words than of the unhappy condition of her nephew.

From the moment the servant had discovered Jaime outside the entrance and had run in crying that the boy had been killed, Balcárcel had decided to take advantage of this crisis to reaffirm his authority in the family. He did not really care about the boy's hurts. His wife's reaction affected him little more.

“No one needs to know anything about it,” he said. “There has already been so much talk about the boy that people call him half crazy.”

“Crazy? But he was attacked…!”

“Bah! His injuries are self-inflicted, that's obvious.”

“Jorge … don't you think we ought at least to try to understand why? I mean, the child must be suffering in some way. We should try to understand and help him.”

“There is nothing to understand. We simply have to watch him closer and prescribe stricter rules for his conduct. Did you know that he has been deceiving us? He has merely been pretending to go to confession. I asked Father Lanagorta and Father Obregón. He has not knelt in the confessional in over a year.”

“But we take communion together every Friday!”

Balcárcel compressed his lips and tapped his belly. His face, ironical and at the same time outraged, waited for Asunción to grasp the full gravity of the boy's misbehavior. She dropped the curtains and walked to the center of the room.

“Satan has entered him,” she said softly.

“I forbid you to make a drama of it,” said her husband with self-satisfaction. “Neither you nor Rodolfo will see the boy until he is better and I have taken him personally to Father Obregón. Afterward, I shall have a very clear talk with him. Decidedly it is not with wishes that we will save him, but with sternness and energy. Understand me well, Asunción. The savings which I have accumulated with such effort will enable me to retire next year. Once we own the block of buildings along the Olla lake, we will have a fortune of more than a million pesos and a monthly income of ten thousand pesos. Your brother will leave us this house when he dies, and the store can be modernized and its profit multiplied. What I am saying is that Jaime, as our only heir, will someday, if he knows how to handle his means, be able to live very comfortably indeed. We are the best in Guanajuato, Asunción. We cannot permit our line to be extinguished and our fortune squandered by the foolish behavior of this youth. He is quite capable of giving everything away to beggars.”

Asunción did not hear her husband clearly. Of his words she retained only those that seemed to tell of his sterility, and it was these that raced back and forth across her eyes—the retinas drenched in Jaime's blood—until suddenly she lost her physical balance-and reached an arm toward Balcárcel. He went on talking. She moved toward him blindly. His words came from far away, from a leaden quagmire. She embraced him, but could not silence him …

“And
Don
Chema Naranjo has well observed that if not Jaime, then who is going to inherit my business? Do you remember when we came home from London? Our life then was very different from today. We have had to rebuild our fortune from the bottom up. Now Jaime, thanks to our labor, will have every opportunity. Hasn't Eusebio Martínez asked and asked for him to lead the Youth Front? The boy can go decidedly far, if we can just clear the cobwebs out of his mind in time.”

… She embraced as she would have liked to embrace Jaime: she put her hands to his genitals and squeezed hard, struggling against his infamous sterility, trying to find the juices of his life. Balcárcel cried out in pain. She moved away and fell on her back on the bed and began to mutter prayers while she felt that an enormous black triangle was covering her mouth, and the tongue of her delirium reached humid and pink toward the lips of a blank face. She cried the Confiteor and broke the seal of the story that had been locked in so many years of a cold bed waiting for insemination, counting their love-making on the fingers of both hands, smelling the heavy and aging slumber of the tranquil man who all those years had laid so dully beside her, so rarely upon her. But it was not her husband but Jaime that she was seeing now. The two figures mixed, the blood of the youth flowed into the body of the man, and Asunción muttered her prayer without understanding it, while her soul lost itself in the whirling and diffuse visions of her hysteria.

“Decidedly, the condition of our nephew has affected her,” Balcárcel said to the doctor when Asunción freed her arms from the bed clothes and woke, her skin as pale as the sheets.

“The sedative has worked well,” said the physician before departing.

Balcárcel pulled his armchair near the head of the bed. Asunción did not dare to open her eyes. Her husband closed his as he prepared to spend the night sitting up beside her.

“Put your arms around me.”

“Why have these disagreeable things happened, dear God? I am a good man. I could have been a brilliant man. I contented myself laboring to the end that nothing would be wanting in this home. Perhaps I have been a little severe at times. But I had to counterbalance Asunción and Rodolfo's softness. Every family must have a head.”

“Put your arms around me.”

“I have not worked for myself, but for the boy. A few sick fools may criticize me for having been harsh in my lending, but I detest prodigality and I have a tranquil conscience. Too easy credit is dangerous. How many families have I saved from ruin! But why am I thinking these thoughts. Enough, enough.”

“It would cost you nothing to embrace me.”

“There is, decidedly, no reason for things to turn out badly. Everything in life must be paid for. Why am I repaid with unrest and rebellion? If I could only talk with you, Asunción, if you could only understand me. You may think that I have at times been cold with you. But that is my way of showing respect. I will not bring prostitution into my home. I'm not perfect, I have the desires of any man. But you I respect: when I fall into temptation, I go to León or Guadalajara or Mexico City. In my home I am clean, and I love you chastely. Would you understand that if I told you? I have wanted to be a good man.”

“I won't say anything to you. But let there happen, please, just one moment of tenderness.”

“When Jaime grows up, he will understand matters. How could we have let him be reared by his mother, a woman whose life has proved her natural tendencies? She has ended up a whore disguised as a mystic. And the fugitive the police were after, the criminal. Why does that worry the boy so much? I can understand that he should feel a natural affection for his mother, for he is too young to see her for what she is. But the criminal! I obeyed the law and my own conscience when I turned the man in. May the boy soon grow out of his damn adolescence! He is living a kind of sickness. But by and by he will become a man, and will be all right. I hope to see my pains with him recompensed some day … if these quarrels don't kill me first.”

“I'll never ask it of you again. Tomorrow will be like any other day, and I will ask you nothing. All I want is for you to come near and take me in your arms now. How long has it been since you told me that you love me?”

Balcárcel leaned toward her. Her cheeks were red, on a face that was usually pale. She did not open her eyes.

“Do you feel better?”

Asunción nodded.

“I have decided to take Jaime to the priest tomorrow. He can't go on as he is. It doesn't matter that he is sick. His real sickness is of the soul, and it is the soul that must be treated.”

Asunción nodded.

Balcárcel resumed his rigid posture. The velvet curtains, the mahogany wardrobe, the piano of inlaid wood, the portraits on the walls, the enormous bed and his mosquito curtains, all had more life than the man and woman in the room.

When dawn began to filter through the curtains, Asunción said:

“Why don't you lie down? I swear that I feel all right. You won't bother me.”

*   *   *

“Come, my son. It's a long time that you haven't confessed. The church is big and cold, we don't have to stay here. First we'll talk a little, in the sacristy. I'm glad to see you. Not since the Catechism, eh? My, how you've grown. Almost all your friends come to confess with me now.”

Father Obregón passed his arm over Jaime's shoulders and noticed the boy's slight tremble. Jaime remembered the priest, he had instructed him when he was preparing for his First Communion. Afterward he had heard his schoolmates speak of Obregón's gentleness, above all compared with the malice of Lanzagorta. But until now the priest had been only a large black figure without face. Now, as they walked down the central aisle, Jaime observed him. He felt the priest's hand heavy on his shoulder. Father Obregón's breathing gave off the smell of tobacco. His black hair was combed forward in a careless fringe. The small black eyes were lost in the vigorous drawing of the eyebrows, the lashes, the prominent cheekbones, the thick eyelids. A little fuzz that would never really be a beard but that was never cleanly shaven covered his chin. But what most caught the boy's attention, as he lowered his eyes, were the sturdy shoes of scratched leather; the thick double soles, many times repaired, had with use and the dampness of the church taken a gondola shape that seemed to Jaime both strange and saintly. When they arrived in front of the altar, the man and the boy stopped and crossed themselves and executed a brief reverence. Obregón's cough resounded across the empty nave. Their steps left marble echoes. The priest opened the gate in the wooden grill which separated the altar from the sacristy.

Dampness had encrusted the high-ceilinged timbers of the sacristy, but the sensation was of warmth and richness. A great chest of blue tile and wood occupied the end of the room. There the ecclesiastical garments were kept. A chasuble with a yellow fringe had been laid on top of the chest. At the other end of the room was a baroque altar flowering with wreathes of entwined laurel and walnut leaves and plump angels. The gilded columns rose to the ceiling and continued across it in a painting of blue laurel and olive leaves strung upon a cordon; the Grecian fret continued around the room. Three walls shone with ostentatious richness; the fourth was naked white plaster broken by a tiny barred window that looked out on a gray alley. Father Obregón seated himself in a high wooden chair and invited the boy to take the other, smaller one.