The Good Conscience (11 page)

“And now I miss the boy so much, Asunción. He is all I have.”

In his bedroom, Jaime feeds and caresses silence. He mutters the mute words of wounded adolescence. He thinks of rebellion, of running away.

Breakfast has ended.
Don
Jorge Balcárcel is now seated in his leather chair in his office, affirming his power over the weak and his servility toward the mighty. Rodolfo Ceballos has now opened the store across the street from the church of San Diego and is unrolling a bolt of cloth. And Asunción is standing outside Jaime's door. Her knuckles lightly rap the glass pane. She raps again and enters. Her face is white and anxious, her hair is up in a knot, her dress is black. She has come to have Jaime love her. She has come to ask him to offer up to her, and to no one else, his solitary youth. And the boy knows it. He remains seated on his bed. Asunción touches his hand.

“Don't be sad, dearest. Your uncle was a little severe. But he thinks only of your own good.” The boy does not know how to reply. She continues softly: “We want you to be an upright clean gentleman, like all your ancestors. For you are almost a man now, did you know that? And men … are exposed to many dangers. Your uncle and I want to protect you with our experience.”

She sighs and crosses her hands.

“Very soon now you are going to … to feel desires … to know women. I beg you to have patience and to wait until you can marry and have a Christian home of your own. Six or seven years isn't so long, is it? Your uncle and I will help you to find a good girl. Think about the mistake your own father made…”

“What mistake?” asks the boy, with sudden pain.

“Dearest, your mother was not a woman of our class.”

“And of what class am I?” Jaime's face shows disgust.

His aunt straightens herself. She is suddenly the daughter of proud Guillermina. “You are a Ceballos! Ceballos men have always been paradigms of gentility!”

She has faced him now and she sees pained mockery in his eyes.

“A good woman,” she goes on slowly, “is harder to find than a needle in a haystack. Because she is rare, you must be faithful to her. Your uncle and I will help you choose when the time comes. Until then, keep your purity as a treasure for the mother of your sons. Other women…” She grows pale and hesitates. “Other women can infect you with incurable diseases, or they will want only your money, like your…”

She stops again, agitated, and swiftly embraces the boy. “No, I didn't mean to say that. Try to understand me, it is for your own good.” Her voice is indistinct as she caresses his hands. “We want you to avoid the pitfalls of youth. You're very good, you know. And other people aren't good at all, so you need to be careful. You'll always have me to advise you! No one will ever love you like your mamá Asunción.”

And Jaime, caressed by her hands, says for the first time in his life, without even thinking about it, “Yes, aunt…” Aunt instead of mamá. He feels her tremble: she has received the word with both pain and happiness. And in the purity of his untouched love he suddenly sees that she loves him not as a mother loves a son but as a woman loves a man. The intuition is unexpected and he could never put it into words. But he knows that she suspects that he understands now, that he has told her by the way he has drawn smoothly away from her and gone to the flowery wash-basin to dash water across his face. He is surprised and confused. Yet at the same time he feels a little compassion toward a woman who must ask, in this way, a little of love which no man has ever given her.

Asunción suspects, yes, but immediately rejects suspicion. She touches her creamy cheeks and her dark eyelids. Nothing must hint her secret desires; they must remain so secret that she does not know them herself, covered, in the silence of dreams, by vague imagination and over that a black hood of suppression; buried deep in her belly, in the most silent and unknown declivity of her flesh. The voice of truth retreats abruptly into the background of unconsciousness, and her lips speak automatically as she takes out her handkerchief and touches her nostrils:

“Your uncle is quite right. You must not go around any more with that Lorenzo boy. People notice and talk about it. It isn't natural for boys of such different classes to be friends. Promise me that you will not see him again.”

*   *   *

Juan Manuel Lorenzo was a pure-blood Indian of small stature and cautious movements. His clear dark eyes looked out at the world with a certain air of surprise, as if he were seeing everything for the first time. It seemed that those eyes understood not by thought, but wholly by intuition.

Four years ago the local government had searched the rural schools for a bright young boy to be given a scholarship for secondary and preparatory studies in Guanajuato city. Juan Manuel had been chosen, and had abandoned his childhood world of goats and adobe huts to move to the state capital. He lived in a boardinghouse, in a little six-by-nine cubbyhole of a room, and in the afternoons and evenings supported himself by working in the railroad shops in Irapuato. His tiny room was hardly large enough for the piles of books he had there. Every month he bought a volume of a Spanish classic and devoured it in two nights, reading in the light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. His Spanish possessed a certain cautious quality: it was a learned language, learned with deliberation. Like his slow physical movements, his speech made him appear—at school, at work, in the rooming-house—as neither dull nor brilliant, but merely different. He evoked a sense of strangeness. His private tenacity and concentration were converted publicly into a certain rudeness that was wholly inoffensive, an essential and vigorous simplicity which the soft manners of an Indian peasant boy transplanted to the city were not enough to conceal. If his body was tiny, his head was enormous, and jar after jar of gummy goo were not enough to dominate his stiff hair, which bristled like a prickly pear. In spite of this, no one could call Juan Manuel ugly. Those dark eyes, wide open to the world and iluminated by an inner happiness, were lights in a face full of energy and strength of will. His simple gestures possessed a real elegance. His defenseless naturalness inspired respect, and saved him from the treatment which the boys of his school reserved for one of his low station in life.

Juan Manuel thought of Guanajuato as a room no larger than its occupant, as a paradise closed to many, magic in its stone labyrinths and its changing colors. Every Saturday afternoon he and Jaime Ceballos would walk together through the winding alleys and across the little plazas. The city itself was the academy for their wakening intellects. And what, indeed, is the first and truest school of personal discovery? Long slow strolls, almost wordless, with a trusted friend our own age, the first who treats us as a man, the first who listens to us, who shares a passage from a book with us, a germinating idea, a new dream. That was what Juan Manuel and Jaime gave each other on their Saturday walks. A city of open windows was stimulus to their curiosity. In the narrowness of the rising and falling, twisting old 17th-Century streets, a honeycomb of life was exposed. Behind this barred window sits a yellow skinned old woman counting her rosary into the air; behind that one, five bibbed children grip the bars and sing childhood songs; in the next, a blushing girl lowers her eyes and reaches her hand through to her sweetheart on the street. Beds are made, socks are darned, the pleasant air is taken, gossip is exchanged and commented upon, eyes stare at what passes, someone waits in a rocker for death to come, new life gestates to the rhythm of knitting, floors are swept and vigil is held over the dead, and all before open windows, in clear view; but at the same time strangely silent, strangely still. A dark solitude oppresses this so-open life. What in another latitude, among different people, would be fiesta and riotous communication, in Guanajuato is mute, tense, life's silent flow between the cradle and the grave.

Now Juan Manuel, dressed in tan cotton pants, a white shirt, and yellow shoes, was standing in the alley beside the Ceballos mansion with his eyes raised to the stable skylight. He had just whistled to signal Jaime that he was waiting. Against his side he held a notebook and several books. He lent Jaime books often; the last was Stendhal's novel. It was more difficult for the rich boy to buy books than for the poor one, for Juan Manuel possessed an independence that was completely lacking in Jaime. The Balcárcels, moreover, exercised strict censorship, and Jaime had to smuggle in the books—always an annotated volume, underlined, of the cheapest edition, quick to lose its cardboard covers.

Jaime appeared at length and the two friends greeted each other and walked off across the plaza, Jaime's hand on Juan Manuel's shoulder.

“Have you read …
The Red and the Black
yet?” Juan Manuel asked presently.

“They took it away from me. They say it's prohibited.”

They took a well-known route, the Callejón de los Cantaritos. Juan Manuel walked in silence, with his face sad. Jaime, though he had the impulse, did not dare to offer to buy a new copy of the lost book.

“Your aunt and uncle, Ceballos…” Juan Manuel hesitated, as he did habitually; his speech was all starts and stops, though it was also precise. “Do they understand the book so clearly?”

To use surnames was one of their tacit conventions. It was one of their ways—a little eccentric, perhaps a little ridiculous—of showing their mutual respect. To Ceballos in the beginning it had been hard to call Lorenzo by a name that so little resembled a surname. Nevertheless, Juan Manuel did not pronounce “Lorenzo” as if it were a given name; he prolonged and accented the second syllable, letting the last syllable die almost soundlessly: “Lo-
rennn
-zo.” Jaime learned to pronounce it that way too, and the young Indian showed his pleasure by his shining eyes.

“What part of the book … most impressed you?”

“You know, Lorenzo…” Jaime crossed his arms on his chest and frowned. “There is one place where he says that all great actions should be extremist when a great man does them. And then he points out that it is only when it is all over that the action appears great to ordinary people.”

“By extremist you mean a … a radical action.”

The friends also showed their respect for each other by their very careful way of expressing their ideas. Jaime wrinkled his nose. “It seems a sound rule to me. That is how Christians should act. It is how Christ acted. And they treated him as a crazy man, a radical, as you say, and today everyone is his disciple. Disciples of a maniac.”

“I fear,” said Lorenzo with his habitual pause, “that faith based upon the example of one single individual, by repetition must become caricature. Christianity has been caricatured … by the clergy, by aristocracies, by rich people … Am I explicit?”

“If it were only caricature!” Jaime smiled. “It is even less, Lorenzo. I always think of caricature as somehow rebellious. Your Goya drawings, for example. My aunt Asunción found them in my room and yelled to high heaven. She said how could I have those indecent and horrifying apes that made her skin crawl. Wasn't that just what Goya wanted … that people like my aunt should feel offended and shocked?”

“Sometimes it is the only weapon against … an unjust and hostile world.”

Now, at the intersection with Los Positos, the long narrow street of dull yellow and blue became level, and the air was sweet with the scent of many bakeries.

“Smell!” said Lorenzo.

“So for you the most valuable action is not an individual one?”

“The most valuable? Isolated … no. What is important is to be part of a general action, a movement. I want to tell you something, Ceballos…”

Jaime walked ahead and bought two sugar-covered cream puffs. He gave one to Juan Manuel, who bit into it with great delicacy. A mustache of sugar dust formed on his upper lip. He went on:

“The government gave my father a little plot of land … to farm. That was good, very good. It was generous. Just the same, the plot is very small … large enough for a few cabbages and turnip greens, and that's all. Corn won't grow there.… So my father has to look for work again. He gets into debt again with a
patrón.
But all we eat is cabbage and turnip greens. Our condition … really isn't changed, it is really just what it was before. My father can't do anything about it … alone. Everyone must unite. Before … centuries ago … the land belonged to everyone. Every farmer had his share … and moreover had a share in what everyone produced. Now, instead of that, everyone has his own plot today … but none of the plots is large enough, and there is no sharing. Because we are so poor … and unlucky … no one can accomplish anything. But all together … that's what they have to understand … all together.”

When Juan Manuel spoke like this, Jaime was always surprised. To him Lorenzo was not a peasant but an intellectual boy fed and consumed in a fever of study. Juan Manuel's single light bulb burned until dawn; night after night his face grew thin over his books. His big disheveled head between his hands, his elbows resting on his little table, he devoured page after page, took notes, debated with himself, refused to admit a single statement by the invisible author without first putting it in doubt and seeking its reasoning. The cautious difficulty with which he spoke to others was converted, in these interior monologues, into implacable eloquence. Nietzsche, Stendhal, the Andreiev of
Sachka Yegulev,
Dostoievsky, Dickens, Balzac, Max Beer, Michelet, these were his nightly interlocutors, and Calderón, Tirso, Berceo. But although the boy could lose himself in intellectual labor, he could never forget his humble origin and the problems of his people. Precisely to the degree that his thought deepened during those long warm or cold hours in his tiny room, in the Mediterranean of his sixteen years, he resolved with greater ardor to unite the lessons of his reading with the conditions of the life he had known. He began in those days to investigate the whole literature of the Mexican Revolution.