The Good Conscience

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Compose yourself, my son. You tear my heart. Don’t cry. Listen to me.” A thick dampness was seeping through the boy’s shirt, staining the priest’s hands, but Father Obregón did not notice. “I’ve spent fifteen years in my ministry. I am forty. Take my handkerchief, blow your nose, go on … In those fifteen years I have heard thousands of confessions. I admit it: sin is monotonous and unchanging. It is the same in everyone. Sometimes I think that my poor sinners hardly deserve absolution, for they don’t sin seriously, and they don’t merit a serious penance…”

  “Punish me, Father! I want to know how much I can stand!”

  “Jaime, compose yourself.” He still did not feel the dampness on his hands from the boy’s back. “We are merely humans, the best of us is mediocre. And it is for those who have confessed to me, ordinary people, it is for them that Christianity lives, not for exceptional beings. The saint is an exception. But religion is an everyday affair, for men and women of whom it cannot be asked, if we are charitable, anything fiery. How can we demand that they assume the sins of everyone?”

  Jaime drew back. “You compromise! Christ doesn’t love those who go halfway!”

  The priest rose and a deep sigh escaped him. He walked to the big chest and lifted his cassock to look for the matches in his trousers. He lit two faint candles. “Saint Francis of Sales said that he served God in a human way and in accordance with his times, in the hope that some day he would be able to serve him in a divine way and in accordance with eternity.”

  The boy’s weak voice, still strained from sobs: “And what is the human way?” In spite of the candles, his figure was invisible. Father Obregón blew out the match and a gray twist of smoke ascended nervously toward the ceiling.

  “God wants us to be faithful in the little ways that His Providence has put within our reach. We are mortal, feeble, and we can do no more than fulfill the daily duties of our condition. There are great things which do not depend upon us. The sublime is far above us. We must content ourselves.” The priest’s voice, low and pious, sounded cavernous in the sacristy. “Your father, Jaime, is one of the little men God loves. You must not offend him, but must love him too.”

  “How do you know?” said Jaime, turning.

  “I know. You must understand that you are no better or worse than all the rest, and that each of us in his own way fulfills the divine law. You call that compromise. I call it charity. Now go, it is late, and come back tomorrow and confess properly. It is late and I am tired.”

  Jaime kissed Obregón’s hand and walked away. It was only then that the priest saw his full figure, the blue trousers and the white shirt, and realized that the boy was walking painfully, almost stumbling. Jaime reached the gate of the wooden grill and suddenly stopped and doubled over.

  “I feel very sick, Father.”

  And only then did Obregón discover his own hands covered with blood. The boy was now walking slowly down the central aisle. Father Obregón suddenly understood and ran after him. He collapsed on his knees at the boy’s feet. Lifting his face, he cried:

  “Pray for me!”

  Balcárcel observed the scene from the last pew in the church. When the priest fell to his knees, Balcárcel stopped playing with his watch-chain and started to step forward and make his presence known. But confusion paralyzed him.

  Jaime reached the church door. His uncle tried to take his arm. The boy repulsed him and walked in front of him home along narrow dark blue streets where lampposts were just lighting, and the burned scent of spring rose from the paving stones.

  Chapter 8

  JAIME HAD NOT SEEN Juan Manuel since the night at Irapuato. Now spring vacation had begun and Jaime had fallen sick again, of fever. His convalescence was prolonged several weeks. He read novels, drank lemonade, and received long visits from his aunt. They did not speak of what had happened. Asunción knitted, with her bust very straight and her shoulders not touching the back of the chair.

  “How time runs!” she commented. “Only yesterday Pascualina Barona’s nephews were little boys, and this year they are going to graduate. Have you thought about what you will do when you finish preparatory? I hope you’ll study law. Law was your father’s golden dream, but the Revolution…”

  Señorita Pascualina and Doña Presentatión would drop by every afternoon. Jaime would close his book and his eyes.

  “Is he sleeping?”

  “Poor child! A boy that age is the Calvary of parents!”

  “Don’t worry, Asunción, we haven’t told anyone. We’ve said that he has diphtheria.”

  “What would people say if they knew he had gone out into the mountains to flagellate himself!”

  “Hell soon grow up now. It will all pass.”

  Then the two women would relate the week’s religious happenings to Asunción, who because of her attendance upon Jaime was unable to go out, and tell of conversations with Father Lanzagorta and comment upon last Sunday’s sermon.

  Balcárcel never entered Jaime’s room. Rodolfo did, however, and his presence irritated Jaime more than anyone’s. He would recognize his father’s slow step in the corridor and immediately close his eyes. Rodolfo would draw near the bed and grip its gilded rungs, and although he knew the boy was pretending, stand there for a long time. Behind his closed eyes, Jaime was cold and hostile; he wanted Rodolfo to feel that he was now being paid in his own coin for his rejection of Adelina. Against this bitterness was opposed the hope that his father would go find her and help her, the wonderful act of manhood and honesty that would allow Jaime to love him again.

  Rodolfo understood well enough that he had lost his son’s affection. He did not know why. He thought again and again, sadly now, of their happy times together a few years ago. Rodolfo’s life had become rutted and empty. Weekdays he attended the clothing store, where business was always a little worse today than it had been yesterday. Boredom took him to double-feature Mexican motion pictures in the evenings. Sunday mornings he drank beer in the Jardín del Unión with his old friends. Saturday nights he crept out of the house and went to a bordel, where a short brown-skinned girl with a mole on her forehead expected him at ten exactly. His visits with her were quick and silent, only the essential words were spoken, they had never exchanged names. He always noticed how she looked away when he laboriously unhooked his suspenders and dropped his trousers. When he left her, the next man would already be waiting in the hall. Then he would walk slowly home, at eleven in the evening, to the stone mansion.

  Jaime improved and one day dared to ask Asunción if his friend Juan Manuel had been to see him. His aunt said no.

  “Haven’t you learned your lesson yet? You have to begin to think about what lies ahead of you. Dedicate yourself to your studies and forget your peasant friend and your crazy ideas. You see how I’ve managed to calm down your uncle; he even lets you read anything you want to now.”

  “Hasn’t Father Obregón come either?”

  “Yes, he came. He said that you are to wait a while before you go to see him again, and that you must remember well what he told you. I don’t know … sometimes I think there must be something strange, something soft about Father Obregón. All the schoolboys like him so much, there must be some reason. Don’t you want to go back to Father Lanzagorta?”

  “No … no.”

  “As you wish. We’ll see what your uncle says.”

  “I would like to see Juan Manuel.”

  “Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”

  * * *

  The first days of May, Rodolfo Ceballos began to decline. First he felt a growing weariness as he climbed to his room. He would have to stop and rest at least four times. The servants of the house, accustomed to the iron clatter, were frightened listening to how slowly he moved. Four, five steps, his hands gripping the circular steel railing; it seemed that the feeble structure could not support the weight of his heavy body. Then he would climb a little higher and rest again while looking about him with an expression of alarm.

 
; Next he began to find it hard to sleep. He could be heard pacing the roof at night. “You’ll get pneumonia,” said Asunción. One of the small rewards for his insomnia, however, was the pleasure of watching dawn rise. The thin air made him cough. Then a pale white feather would rise on an horizon that a moment before had been opaque and glassy. At six in the morning he would go back to bed and sleep half an hour. A strange dream troubled him: he felt that the bedroom was full of enemies and that he was at the bottom of a well, and the harder he struggled to escape, the more helpless, defenseless, and groggier he became. He woke a little before seven and went down to breakfast: a sweet roll and a cup of tea. His lower belly tightened with pain. He excused himself and in the bathroom urinated, painfully and with difficulty. He urinated frequently, so often that the chamberpot in his bedroom was insufficient and he would have to stand over the roof drainpipe.

  A mania for collecting family pictures came over him. He searched trunks in the old stable, drawers of the roll-top desk Uncle Pánfilo had used; he even asked Asunción for photographs of herself, of Balcárcel, and of the boy. The yellow walls of his bedroom were covered with these pictures, some of them old and stained and dull, others glossy and new. They comforted and entertained him strangely. Secretly he believed that the familiar faces would frighten away the faceless enemies who surrounded him in his dream. At times he realized that something deeper and more elemental was happening in his life. He would sit for hours in his sagging armchair, staring at the family paraded across his walls. There, an engraving of Grandfather Higinio, with clear steady eyes. There, his mother Guillermina, her head twisted in the least comfortable of poses. In the oval of that daguerreotype she was the young Guillermina, with ringlets over her ears and a cluster of carnations at her bodice. Above the head of the bed Rodolfo hung a sepia photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day, both very wide-eyed, she in a long-trained gown, he with blond beard and a stiff shirt; behind them a painted curtain representing the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal in Venice. Other photographs were less elegant. The only one of Adelina showed a thin smiling girl seated on a garden bench. She wore a black sheath in the style of the ‘Twenties and her knees were exposed. A beaded ribbon encircled her forehead. In another photograph, Rodolfo himself smiled, one hand holding a fishing pole and the other touching the head of a little boy with a candy sucker.

  Rodolfo even went so far, without in the least knowing why, as to exhume the old lithograph of Don Porfirio Díaz. And when he seated himself in his armchair and contemplated the faces on his walls, he felt himself near something warm and unchanging.

  He lost weight. Garments that had been tight on a man of ninety-six kilos hung loosely about him; he had to begin using a belt to gather the folds of his trousers around his waist. His neck emerged wrinkled and skinny from his too-large collars. He vomited often, and then began to pass blood in his urine.

  “Decidedly, Rodolfo has gone on a diet in order to marry again,” Balcárcel remarked in a rare moment of humor. And Asunción said to Rodolfo as he finished breakfast one morning: “You! The servants know what you do at night … it runs down the drain into the patio!” Only Jaime did not speak to him. Nevertheless it was only to Jaime that Rodolfo directed his loving, pleading gaze.

  His attempts to establish closeness with his son intensified daily, as if he realized that he had very little time left in which to consummate the one love of his life. His sick smile was fixed upon the boy through every meal. Well might Balcárcel fume and raise his eyebrows about the peculiar behavior of certain members of the family at certain times, well might Asunción glance nervously; the elder Ceballos simply sat there staring mutely at his son. Jaime pretended not to notice, and kept his head down. But one night, while Balcárcel was orating as always—his subject was the treasonable Jacobism of the Juaristas—Jaime could not stand his father’s stare any longer and jumped to his feet, throwing his napkin down, and exclaimed:

  “Please, Aunt, tell him not to look at me this way!”

  “What’s this? What sort of behavior is this?” said Balcárcel, so rudely interrupted and suddenly suspicious that no one had been paying him the slightest attention. “Decidedly, this is going too far! Sit down and eat your dinner. I shall now repeat the essence of my remarks about Jacobism. And you, Rodolfo, who seem to be the cause of this scene, what do you have to say for yourself, sir? I trust you agree that someone must be in authority in this house, and I do not see how you…”

  Rodolfo’s paralyzed smile did not change. He continued staring intensely at the nervous boy.

  “I am addressing you, sir!”

  “Jorge, he’s sick,” said Asunción, excusing her brother with the truth that none of them had until this moment dared to utter. The truth: the thing that was forbidden among them. She realized her mistake and dropped her eyes.

  “Sick!” said Balcárcel between his teeth. “No one is sick here. We are a little tired and nervous, that’s all. We will have no more talk about sickness.” He sought, for a moment, some way to censure her, and finding none, rose and with his knuckles upon the tablecloth announced that he would take his coffee in the library.

  The opalescent light fell upon the three silent figures at the green table. Asunción and Jaime tried to avoid Rodolfo’s fixed eyes and unaltering smile. The father swallowed the boy with his stare. Jaime lowered his head and with a murmur excused himself and left the dining room.

  The brother and sister did not speak. They listened to Jaime’s steps on the stone of the hall. Then the rigid ticking of the old clock in the drawing room. They sat just outside the circle of light, with their heads bent slightly. Evening’s dampness began to descend from the beamed ceiling and the papered walls. Rodolfo extended a hand splotched with brown spots and veined with gray, and toyed with a spoon.

  “How different…” he said softly.

  “What?” Her brother’s face had a look of finality, as if his features had come to their last definition and would never change again.

  “How different we are from what we could be.”

  Her posture rigid, a black statue of angular curves, she listened and heard. She wanted to understand Rodolfo, now that Jaime was becoming a man and was escaping both of them. But she knew, without daring to think it, that to understand was the same thing as to hurt: truth was cruel.

  “Why haven’t we been like papá and mamá?” Rodolfo’s phlegmed voice was saying. “Why haven’t we been as happy as they were? Did you ever know them to have a quarrel? We were so affectionate and loving with them, we were one family … And how papá used to play with us! What a fine old man he was, and how cheerful!”

  “Do you remember the puppets he gave me for my ninth birthday?”

  “Of course I do, of course I do!” Rodolfo’s fingers tapped the velvet tablecloth. “He liked to make others happy, that was why he was always so happy himself. But you and I…”

  “We have done what was possible for us, Rodolfo. Not everything has been so bad.”

  “But the point is that everything could have been so beautiful. If I could have found a woman like mamá, my son could have been mine … And if you could have had a child of your own, you wouldn’t have wanted to take him away from me. He would have been mine.”

  From the table rose an unpleasant scent of abandoned plates, congealing grease. Asunción stood beside her brother and put her arm around him. “You’re sick, Fito. You don’t really know what you’re saying.”

  “Oh, I know. I know that I was left by myself, that Adelina was taken away from me, everything that could make life warm and give me companionship now, and that all of you are going to let me die alone in my room…”

  “Rodolfo!” She had to support him or he would have toppled from the chair. “Rodolfo!” she repeated, embracing a figure that had lost its bone. His head fell forward on the table. “I warned you against that woman, didn’t I? I told you that she was unworthy of you and our family. Now, today, you know it yourself, for she has fou
nd her destiny. You were stupid, stupid. If I had been here, none of it would have happened! She was trash, just a glance at her was enough to tell you that. All she wanted was your name, your money, she didn’t love you.”

  “She didn’t love me?” said the voice suffocated upon the tablecloth. “I don’t know … Yes! Yes, she loved me! And at least I had someone I could love. We all need someone to love, even if we aren’t loved in return.”

  “She didn’t love you at all! You knew it was impossible for her to be Jaime’s mother. That was why I had to be the mother, because you had made a fool of yourself. It was all your own fault.”

  Her words spat out over an inert and wrinkled face. The flood of thoughts that for years had been held back gave her a sense of release and strength. But Rodolfo no longer wanted to listen. He wanted to sleep, to rest. With a movement of his hand he asked her to help him stand.

  “Take me upstairs. I feel sick.”

  Then they heard a sound from the drawing room. Jaime came in and helped his father up. Rodolfo pressed his head against the boy’s chest and with closed eyes moved his lips to kiss his shirt.

  * * *

  Only once more did Jaime see his father dressed and on his feet. He watched from a window as Rodolfo came down the street, and he thought, that is my father: that yellow figure, those hanging clothes, that shrunken face, those bulging bloodshot empty eyes. Rodolfo very slowly climbed to the drawing room, washed his hands in the ornate basin in the dining room, and before he sat at the table, said that he was short of breath. His plate of puréed vegetables—all that he could swallow without pain—grew cold. Asunción was rolling her husband’s napkin into its polished silver ring, and paid little attention. “Come now, something hot will be good for you.” Jaime watched his father and expected the sick eyes to stare imploringly at him again. But Rodolfo was too weak for that now. He slowly staggered across the room, and Jaime sat motionless and observed his physical collapse. Rodolfo stopped, holding to a lapis-lazuli column; he closed his eyes and breathed deep, and walked into the hall. Later they found him stretched on Jaime’s bed. He had not had strength enough to climb to the roof. The doctor ordered that he was not to be moved. Jaime slept on the leather sofa in the library, for the room on the roof filled him with disgust. “But if there’s nothing contagious…” said Doña Asunción. “And we can put your sheets on the bed.”