The Good Conscience

by Carlos Fuentes

  With the face of a crying child, Jaime lowered his head. Who was Obregón to talk to him like this? Cassocked eunuch who had castrated himself voluntarily, who did not know true male passions. As he flushed with shame before the priest’s accusations, the image of a woman’s naked body in his arms filled his eyes. Abruptly he got up and ran out of the sacristy.

  Father Obregón covered his face with his hands.

  “My God, have I done good or evil? No one ever brings me real problems, the sins of my poor flock are so monotonous and simple that I have lost the habit of facing real problems. Have I helped this boy by telling him the truth? Or have I hurt him? Have I strengthened his faith, or broken it, my God?”

  But when he sat to supper, his hot chocolate persuaded him that he had spoken well, very well. He had never before had the opportunity to do so, to show that his studies in the Seminary had not been in vain. Good. Good …

  * * *

  Jaime’s troubled spirit welcomed the quiet of the novena. He kneeled beside Aunt Asunción and closed his eyes. Immediately he forgot the presence of Father Lanzagorta grasping the pulpit like a lion pawing the bars of its cage. He ceased to hear the singsong chant of the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria, the Requiem Aeternam and the Ora pro nobis. With a shamed look, Balcárcel slipped into the pew, but Jaime did not notice. He withdrew from his aunt and uncle, from the friends who had come to pray for the eternal rest of his father. He was alone with the black-skinned Christ of his adolescence, the twisted tortured image that tonight was speaking to him as during the Holy Week four years ago when he had awakened from boyhood:

  “Do I have a destiny of my own, Lord?”

  “You are not alone in the world, my son.”

  “Lord, I do not want to continue to deceive myself. I believed that I could be a good Christian, obeying your teachings … yes, alone in the world.”

  “But you are not alone and my teachings can be obeyed only beside others.”

  “Lord, I confess to you in secret that I will not be brave enough to stoop down to my mother. She and her life fill me with horror. I won’t know what to say to her. And I cannot stand her words to me, her filth, her cheapness. Nor the way these people here tonight will talk about me…”

  “Your best friend is an humble peasant boy.”

  “Lord, I confess in secret that I am Juan Manuel’s friend only because it eases my conscience, just as I felt better that night I pretended to go work beside him at Irapuato.”

  “You feel that you are doing him a favor. You do not really love him.”

  “No…”

  “You feel he is far beneath you, yet you can stretch your hand down to him with dignity. But to humiliate yourself by going to your mother would be too much, for then you would really belong to those beneath you. You would be one of them yourself. And you can love only from above.”

  The silver eyes of Christ nailed themselves to Jaime’s.

  “Lord, what must I do?”

  “Whosoever wants to save his life, must lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake shall save it.”

  The voice of Christ faded, drowned by the Ora pro nobis:

  Arc of David,

  Arc of the Covenant,

  Health of the sick,

  Morning star …

  His eyes opened. He looked at his aunt on his right. She bent her head and chanted the litany. Uncle Balcárcel’s gaze was fixed on the pulpit. Jaime did not lie to himself: to have seen Balcárcel in the whorehouse last night had been a pleasant victory. He would never reproach him again. He would accept him as he was, a hypocrite, weak, a Pharisee, a human.

  * * *

  Returning home, Jaime walked slowly to let the silent figures of his aunt and uncle draw ahead. Self-satisfaction and disgust battled within him. He felt a tense uneasiness which refused to be overcome. The Balcárcels were distant now. He did not want to be like them; nevertheless, what secure calm he felt when he thought of himself as part of them. He saw himself taller, stretching a long shadow below the street lamps. He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders in a peculiar way, walked with a step that although slow was confident. He did not know it, but he was assuming now new attitudes which would accompany him the rest of his life. His face imitated characteristic expressions of his uncle and of Don Maximino Mateos. His smile was very like that of presidential candidate Alemán, whose placard picture covered the alley walls.

  No: he was Jaime Ceballos, a youth walking home from church, from his father’s novena to dinner, with his forehead creased by a very recent frowning line, with his head moving in an alert decisive way which concealed his hidden fears, with eyes that had lost their ability to be astonished and were ready to accept now without questioning, surprised only that there was no longer any mystery.

  A moment of decision had passed. He had lifted his head in feeble challenge, only to give up challenges and become another conforming youth obedient to the unwritten law according to which youth must look about itself callously, indifferent to good and evil in the world.

  The moment passed unnoticed. He felt only the silent struggle, in the secret depth of his conscience, between disgust and self-satisfaction.

  As he climbed the interlaced alleys, his thighs beginning to ache, he thought: how different everything has turned out to be. On the one hand the complex theorems of love and sin, man’s fall and salvation; on the other life’s vulgar plain reality: to fornicate, to conform to class and breeding, to die. He told himself that he had been stupid. Once that was what Pepe Mateos had called him: stupid asshole! as they were leaving school; and he had stood there, convulsed but silent, his fists tight, his face red, trembling, unable to reply, unable to give voice to what was inside him, the mystery of his adolescence and his adolescent ideas. Now he reflected that Pepe Mateos had been right. Yes: he had been the stupid asshole baby who had believed that every moment of life waited for you, to be enjoyed for itself alone and to offer every act a final value. And life was not like that. Life hurried, it never waited; today you were thrown into the transient arms of a whore, tomorrow you watched a man led off by the police, the next day you were drunk in a bar, and the last day you lay in your coffin. Pepe Mateos was right; Uncle Balcárcel was right: you come to the world only to fill up the time that is given you with quick words and thoughtless action.

  He was within a block of the house. He slowed down. Unconsciously he had already decided to adopt a new attitude during the evening meal. He wanted to think of himself as already grown old, old as Balcárcel, or his own father, Jaime Ceballos, age fifty, standing behind a store counter or seated at a desk heaped with papers. Himself, but still the hero of his own adventure, which had not after all abandoned him: still the man who wished to lose himself in identification with the poor and humble and with the greatest words of the Christian spirit.

  A chasm of solitude down the stone street. His aunt and uncle had left the high front gate open, and through it suddenly appeared Doña Asunción’s gray cat. A hot lump formed in Jaime’s stomach. As on Easter Sunday four years ago, he sat down to let the cat press warm and sensual against his legs. The small soft body rubbed back and forth, its closed eyes showing blind pleasure in the friction and the affection.

  He could never have explained why with abrupt decision and with actions so sure of themselves, he picked up the stone that held the gate open, raised it and smashed it down on the cat’s head. There was a dry moan. The round silvery eyes filled with terror and supplication. With the heel of his shoe Jaime suffocated the sound; he forced down until the legs of the cat raised rigidly and a slight tremor bristled its soft gray hair. And so they remained for a long time, the standing boy, the dying cat, joined by open eyes and flowing blood.

  Instinctively he moved toward the house. He walked backwards, his eyes hypnotized by the dead animal. To whom could he tell what he had done? With whom could he free his conscience? He sucked his finger and told himself that it was only a cat, that to kill a cat is not serious. H
e wanted to justify himself, to believe that he had been free to kill the cat. That his freedom was the reward that had been won by the youth who had flagellated himself and taken upon his own conscience the sins of others and made his soul Christ’s abode.

  He would have liked to be able to vanish into the solid stone wall. He slunk along the shadows of the corridor. His head danced as his thoughts unwrapped like the layers of skin of an onion, endlessly.

  He ran in a circle and banged the gate shut. There, with his head pushed against the green wood, he prayed to be like everyone, anyone. He prayed to a new God far different from the God of his first youth, to be saved from the extremities of love and pride, sacrifice and crime, which joined in a single word of terror spoken in front of a dead cat.

  He opened his eyes.

  The important thing was to hide the body. He edged the gate open and peeped to see if the street was empty. He stretched his hand and caught the cat’s tail. As the animal was dragged over the stone, it left a red streak. Jaime took out his handkerchief and wrapped it around the crushed head. He picked the cat up in his arms and ran to the patio and let it fall into the fountain. He washed his hands while the soggy body slowly disappeared.

  He wadded his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. It was time for dinner. He climbed the stairs with confident steps.

  * * *

  Balcárcel made no moral pronouncements during the meal that night. Jaime’s lips maintained a faint smile. His uncle was conquered. He had freedom now, he could speak at the table as he pleased, he could go and come when he chose; Balcárcel would never again oppose him. Asunción looked strangely at her husband, then at Jaime. The meal passed in silence. Jaime felt the sodden wad of the handkerchief in his pocket.

  “I’ve decided to enter Law School next year,” he announced when the dessert was served.

  “Jaime, how wonderful!” cried Asunción, leaning over to kiss his forehead.

  “Don Eusebio Martínez,” Balcárcel coughed, covering his mouth with his napkin, “insists that you join the Youth Front. The elections will be over next month, but the Front will go on collaborating with the Party, and…”

  “Yes. If you want, I’ll go see Señor Eusebio in a few days.”

  “Ay, Jaime, it so good to hear you talking like that!” said Doña Asunción. “You don’t know how I’ve prayed. Listen! Presentatión’s nephews are giving a party Saturday, and although we are in mourning, it will be all right for you to go if you just eat and don’t dance. You’re old enough now to meet señoritas of your own class and to have a sweetheart…”

  “Now that you are going to enter Law School, you can begin to work in the office,” the uncle coughed again, always with the napkin over his mouth and his eyes avoiding Jaime’s. “Some day it will fall upon you to head this house and my businesses. You will learn how pleasant it is to have money earned by your own effort.”

  “A young man has many obligations,” Asunción said, placing her pale hand on Jaime’s shoulder. “He must be careful and choose his way well. But don’t worry about anything. Though you have lost your father, you still have us and we will take care of you.”

  “I’m going out for a while,” Jaime said, and excused himself. Balcárcel made no comment, and Asunción gave thanks for the new attitudes of the two men.

  He slowly went down the stone stairs. No, he would never lie to himself again. He renounced everything and asked for peace. “Now I have no problems, others will do my worrying for me, take care of me, work my life out for me.” He came to the door of the stable where he had used to dream, where he had read the books of his adolescence, where he had shut himself up in solitude to gnaw the bones of his visions and thoughts, where he had invented his lies about charity and penance and Christian rebellion. He wanted to say farewell to the dusty beloved old room. But his aunt had locked the door the night before.

  He heard Juan Manuel’s whistle and went out on the street.

  “I took my time last night, Ceballos,” Juan Manuel smiled. “When I finished, you were gone.”

  “Let’s walk, Lorenzo.”

  Would this be the last time they walked the winding narrow alleys together? Jaime felt a profound sense of sadness.

  He remembered the ideas they had exchanged when each of them in the middle of adolescence had dared to state without doubt his faith and his decision to act what he believed. Proud owner, each, of a new body, of a new head thinking what had never been thought before. Confident owner, each, of a new will capable of transforming the world. Solitude together, shared loneliness that today would end.

  No, he told himself silently as they climbed toward Los Cantaritos, I have loved Juan Manuel, it is not a lie. I never knew my mother, I couldn’t really love her. But Juan Manuel he had loved. That was no treason. Juan Manuel was his friend forever, against his aunt and uncle, against the Thursday sewing circle, the priests, the Daughters of Mary.

  “I’m leaving Guanajuato, Ceballos … I’ve been offered a better job, with the railroad, in Mexico City. I’m going to join the union. I’ll go on studying … if I can.”

  “Juan Manuel.”

  “Will you look me up, if you are there someday?”

  “I wanted so much for us to grow up together.”

  “We have already grown up together.”

  “Will we be the same, when we’re men?”

  “No, Jaime. Our roads are different. Why deceive ourselves?”

  “Why do we grow up, Lorenzo? Why? I wish we could always be children. I wish we could always be waiting, holding our secrets inside. Then we would never betray ourselves.”

  Jaime stopped and faced Juan Manuel.

  “I’ve failed, Lorenzo.”

  The small brown-skinned youth felt his eyes fill with tears. He was moved by compassion and affection for Jaime, but at the same time he was indignantly angry.

  “I’m going to do everything exactly opposite to what I wanted,” Jaime went on. “I’m going to conform, be one in the crowd.”

  “You won’t find anyone that way,” Juan Manuel said at last. “Your sorrow isn’t serious. Others … there are others who really suffer, Ceballos. You don’t. Some day you will no longer have the right to set yourself apart from us with the pretext of your own salvation. A great wave of revolution will sweep over your kind and you too. You will find yourself analyzing yourself hopelessly. And the wave will have no respect for you.”

  “I like you, Lorenzo. You are my friend.”

  “And I you, Ceballos. Look, I’ll give you my address. It’s on this paper. Goodbye.”

  Juan Manuel slipped the paper into Jaime’s shirt pocket. The two young friends embraced.

  As Juan Manuel walked away, Jaime leaned against the blue wall. His adolescence had ended. For the last time he stared at his small friend’s silhouette. Then he turned the corner, repeating softly: “I have come to spread fire over the earth.”

  He read the address Juan Manuel had given him. My rooming house: Señora Lola Villegas. Caille de la Espalda de Soto. Number 21, near Avenida Hidalgo.

  He stayed on in the dark alley. What would Juan Manuel have said if he had told him everything? Surely he had understood, there had been no need for words.

  “I haven’t had the courage. I couldn’t be what I wanted to be. I couldn’t be a Christian. And I was too weak to stay alone with my failure, I had to find some kind of support, and the only one I have is my aunt and uncle, the life they have prepared for me, the life I inherit. I shall submit myself to established order, in order not to fall into desperation. Forgive me, Ezequiel. Forgive me, Adelina. Forgive me, Juan Manuel.”

  He realized now that he would be a brilliant law student. He would pronounce official speeches. He would be the spoiled child of the Party of the Revolution in Guanajuato. He would receive his degree. The city’s mighty would consider him a shining example. He would marry a rich girl and found a family. He would live with a good conscience.

  A good conscience. This night, in a dark G
uanajuato alley, the words crossed his tongue painfully. He was going to be a righteous man. But Christ had not come for the righteous, but for sinners.

  For the first time in his life, he denied the idea. No, it wasn’t true. He had to become a man now, to give up his childhood illusions. Christ loved the righteous, lived in good consciences, belonged to the just, to the wealthy, to those of fine reputation. Let Satan have the poor and humble, the sinners, the abandoned and miserable, the rebels, everyone who was beyond the pale of gentility.

  He walked back to the home of his ancestors. The moon had come out, and Guanajuato’s domes and walls and paving stones reflected it not serenely but violently. The great green portal of the Ceballos mansion opened, and Jaime entered.

  BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES

  Aura

  Distant Relations

  Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  Terra Nostra

  The Campaign

  The Old Gringo

  Where the Air Is Clear

  The Death of Artemio Cruz

  The Good Conscience

  Burnt Water

  The Hydra Head

  A Change of Skin

  Christopher Unborn

  Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone

  The Orange Tree

  Myself with Others

  The Buried Mirror

  A New Time for Mexico

  The Crystal Frontier

  Copyright © 1961 by Carlos Fuentes

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Spanish under the title Las buenas conciencias, copyright © 1959 by Fondo de Cultura Económica

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 87-36600

  First Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 1968

  eISBN 9781466840126

  First eBook edition: February 2013