The Good Conscience (2 page)

In 1903 when President Porfirio Díaz passed beneath the bronze capitals and statues of the Muses to inaugurate the Teatro Juárez, the Ceballos family occupied one of the principal boxes. There Pepe presided, rosy, paunchy, resplendent with a graying beard cut in the style of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Surrounding him were stiff and haughty Guillermina and the always cordial octogenarian
Doña
Margarita; the hunched silence of the merchant Pánfilo, the obsequious attentiveness of the Lemus family who were now converted into poor relations, and the chatter of the two children, Rodolfo and Asunción, who were being allowed to stay up late for the first time. It could be said that this moment was Pepe's zenith. At the second intermission, Governor Obregón González made a little gesture that Pepe should pass to the presidential box to converse with Don Porfirio. During the last act many of the audience divided their attention between the mournful arias of the Ethiopian-Egyptian couple, and the discreet murmurs from the box of honor.

“Your presence truly honors us. This is a night that will not be forgotten,” Pepe had said.

“Guanajuato is a bastion of Mexican progress,” responded
Don
Porfirio.

“Tomorrow you will see beautiful fiestas. The Mayor has arranged everything most elegantly,” went on Pepe, to whom the general remarks were incomprehensible.

“Good, good,” commented
Don
Porfirio. “Let us have everything. Peace has cost us such labor that every Mexican has a right to divert himself now and then.”

“Peace is wholly your accomplishment, Señor President,” Pepe concluded.

After this triumph, there were no more great events in the life of the family.
Doña
Margarita died in 1905. Pánfilo moved from the big house of cut stone to rooms above the store. Poor hard-working merchant, without his mother he could not anticipate changes of style: bustles were replaced by hobble skirts, dark fabrics by fanciful ones, but Pánfilo did not notice. Before expiring the old lady had instructed him: “Keep your eye on what is worn by King Edward the Seventh,” but Pánfilo did not understand, and his store was soon transformed into a solemn place to which customers came only in view of a funeral or some official occasion. With a certain ironical sadness he observed that his old clients now dealt at the shop which had been established on the opposite corner by another Spaniard recently arrived in Mexico,
Don
José Luis Régules.

The mansion at the foot of Jardín de Morelos was often the scene of large parties. Pepe Ceballos, true son of his mother, loved noise, the pop of wine corks, the whisper of violins and taffeta. Guillermina presented her exaggerated dignity as counterpoint, and for years these gatherings were the most talked about in Guanajuato. The city's gentility, families in government or in mining or business, others which had become affluent through cotton or flour or wool or leather, met again and again in the old colonial home. In the large salon on the second floor, where the old-fashioned decor had become French at the turn of the century, a quartet played the waltzes of Johann Strauss, Juventino Rosas, and Ricardo Castro, servants hurried with trays, and there were even political discussions. Two groups generally formed: one consisted of government functionaries and businessmen and mine-owners, and was the larger; these gentlemen applauded every aspect of the Díaz regime. In the other group were the new industrialists who asked for certain changes, greater freedom, new minds around the president. But all of them respected Díaz profoundly and considered him indispensable.

From time to time there would also be parties for the children. Rodolfo, the elder, in time would become a lawyer. Pepe had already confidently enrolled him in the Catholic Law School for the year 1912. Doña Guillermina expected to marry off Asunción, the daughter, at the age of eighteen, and with this in mind cultivated the little Balcárcel del Moral boy, who was the heir of another rich family.

One night in 1910, Guillermina received word that her husband—so ruddy, so healthy—had fallen with a terrible fever in a village near León. He had been three days traveling his estate on horseback. Night and a violent rain storm had descended upon him together. He was dying of pneumonia, and so delirious that it was impossible to move him from the dirty adobe hut where he lay. Proud Guillermina hurried to him, only to find, upon arrival, the peon's dead fires, the mourning neighing of horses, and Pepe's body. It would appear that the Ceballos patriarchs were accustomed to dying on historic dates, for this was a morning in the third week of November and soon afterward it was known throughout the region that on the same day Madero had risen in revolt in San Luis Potosí.

*   *   *

The funeral procession, headed by the widow and the two black-clad children, had just dissolved when Pánfilo drew near his sister-in-law and informed her that she could count upon him as the man of the family. Guillermina paused at the exit to the Municipal Cemetery, facing the compact panorama—brown, green, and black—of mountains, glens, and churches. She reflected that she would not go far relying upon the judgment of the aged clothier. She would have to trust her own good sense to resolve the problems caused by her husband's death. She was sad and a little troubled, but at the same time felt lighter, for sadness was the feeling she most enjoyed. Taking Rodolfo and Asunción by the hand, she boarded the black carriage and rode home.

Shortly thereafter, she sold the mines to Pepe's British associates at a very good price indeed, and entrusted the vast hacienda to an administrator. She decided to wed Asunción three years earlier than planned before, at fifteen, and to prepare Rodolfo to take his father's place. She was glad to rid herself of the mines, in whose exploitation, sweaty, tyrannous, often criminal, the first wealth of her ancestors had been founded … lords of the manor but not of the manner, men of rough words and quick whips. She was going to limit herself to landowning; it was like stepping from a muddy street to the sidewalk. Rodolfo's projected law career was abandoned. It would be enough for him to handle the hacienda. But if the unlinked events of the already busy revolution were incomprehensible to her, even more so was her son's character. It seemed that the Andalusan
Doña
Margarita had been resusitated to infuse, in a disagreeable and accentuated way, the boy's physical appearance and spirit. No one was less worried about anything than Rodolfo Ceballos. No one was less suited for the management and discipline of large landholdings.

In the beginning the Revolution did not frighten
Doña
Guillermina. It spread down from the north, and in 1914 Guanajuato began to fill with refugee families, many of them old friends, from Coahuila, San Luis, and Chihuahua. Relatives, former business associates of
Don
Pepe, and friends of friends poured in. Social life quickened, and Guillermina found this pleasant. There were balls and parties, and everyone attended the usual religious festivities. From time to time someone spoke of violence and killing: Guillermina would reply placidly that this was not the first revolution they had known: “Guanajuato has always been the richest state in the Republic, the granary and the treasury of Mexico, as my husband used to say, and no one will dare to disturb us here.”

Events turned out otherwise. A band of revolutionists took over, the next year, Don Pepe's land. They emptied the corn bins and barns, and Rodolfo, who was living at the hacienda by now, informed his mother that the situation was grave. For the first time Guillermina felt afraid. The worst was still to come. In 1916 Villa approached Guanajuato with nine thousand men. Young Asunción, only fifteen years of age but already married, fled with her husband, and the stone mansion was empty except for Guillermina and Pánfilo. The elderly merchant closed his store to keep from accepting the paper money printed by the different factions. Then Obregón arrived and forced the store to be opened again. He also required salaries to be raised. Uncle Pánfilo believed he was going to go bankrupt.
Doña
Guillermina hid her gold pesos under the floor of her bedroom. Suddenly all of this seemed unimportant. The gentility died of fear when Obregón abandoned the city. Guillermina and Pánfilo shut themselves in and piled mattresses against the windows. General Natera was about to appear with Villa's troops. Then both sides went away to join in battle at Celaya, and the city was left in the hands of the bandit Palomó. There was continuous sacking, gunfire at all hours. For the Ceballos, it was like the end of the world.

Doña
Guillermina did not completely lose her head. She relieved Rodolfo of his duties at the hacienda and took its administration into her own hands, arranging for thirty armed men to guard the burned buildings. Her religious activity multiplied. She did not miss a single procession in favor of peace. She lit candles in every church in favor of peace; she wept in her bedroom in favor of peace, she recited Salve Reginas in favor of peace. At the same time, her hunger to look back lovingly on the past was fed by the terrible events of the present. Although she wailed, in public, because the ringing of church bells during the fiestas of the Holy Virgin had been prohibited, privately she doted sweetly upon the memory of how those bells had echoed in better times. Openly she wept the expulsion of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd; alone she recalled with pleasure the generosity which the Ceballos had always heaped upon the nuns. She was scandalized that deceitful Siurob had dared to take the portraits of President Díaz and Governor Obregón Gonzales down from the walls of the governor's palace; but what delight she felt remembering
Don
Porfirio with Pepe at the opera, and
Don
Joaquin witnessing Asunción's wedding!

Under the governorship of Siurob, the unrest settled. Almost without being aware of it, Rodolfo Ceballos found himself going to the store every day. Uncle Pánfilo rarely visited it now. The wrinkled, lisping old man, who was about to reach his eightieth birthday, let Rodolfo handle everything, and Rodolfo found his true road in life, his heriditary role, which was to preside, with bonhommie, behind a counter.

Few servants were left in the mansion in 1917, when Pánfilo died. Almost all the bedrooms were closed in 1920, when Guillermina followed him. Asunción and her husband, Jorge Balcárcel, were living in England. Rodolfo, all alone, closed more doors. The new Agrarian Reform Law resulted in the loss of a good part of the 78,000 hectares which Pepe Ceballos had acquired so cheaply. Rodolfo was indisposed to struggle; he crossed his arms and let the land go. With the store and with the gold pesos his mother had left, the last Ceballos could live very comfortably. His tendency to obesity, inherited from his grandmother, was accentuated by his sedentary life, and at twenty-nine he was a rotund young man, drowsy and pleasant, who made friends with everyone except the descendents of the old families who had used to gather in the stone mansion. These ruined aristocrats filled him with disgust. All they could do was talk about the good old days. They had all suffered bitterly from the Revolution, they all lamented it; many of them departed to live in Mexico City. Rodolfo much preferred to discuss the price of cotton or the magnificent sardines which
Don
Chepepón López sold, or memorable games of dominoes played with other merchants in the bar of the Jardín del Unión park. It was to the Jardín that he went when he closed the store at six each afternoon. In a short time, unrestrained by family, the only inhabitant of the mansion, he began to invite his rather surprised Jardín companions home. It would be hard to imagine what
Doña
Guillermina would have said if she could have seen those gatherings of men in their shirt-sleeves beneath her French chandeliers. They smoked cigars. They drank beer. They talked about market prices and played dominoes.

But it was thanks to these friends, in particular to the aforementioned
Don
Chepepón López, provendor of wines and canned goods, that Rodolfo met the woman who was to become his wife and the mother of his son. Adelina López was a tall, shy, simple young girl, much given to attending novenas, to receiving communion on First Fridays, and to shutting herself up in seclusion during Lent. Rodolfo had seen her various times at the serenade which was presented three times a week in the Jardín del Unión. The young men would promenade in one direction around the park, the young women in the other. Rodolfo merely sat on a bench with a toothpick between his lips, and observed. In reality the girl neither pleased nor displeased him. What with his work, his friends, and an occasional visit to a bordel, he lived quite contented. If it had not been for
Don
Chepepón's ambition to see his daughter installed as mistress of the mansion at the foot of Jardín Morelos, Jaime Ceballos would never have been born.

Señorita
López began to appear frequently in Rodolfo's store. He loved to talk, so he enjoyed her ponderous conversations about the sanctity of the home, and the importance, in a mother, of good Christian training. Soon the plump merchant found himself invited on shabby picnics and excursions, to the lakes behind Guanajuato's dams, to the old mining center, now a ghost town. Adelina murmured an alarmed repulse, but soon allowed the nervous and drowsy young man to hold her hand. When at last their friends observed them entering the church of the Compañia together one First Friday, all were sure that
Don
Chepepón had gained his victory.

Not without setbacks, however. The future groom wrote to his sister in England. Asunción replied stating that she did not know who the López family were but that Balcárcel, her husband, believed that Chepepón was of very dubious ancestry. When that failed to dissuade Rodolfo, she wrote again announcing that the daughter of a
Don
Nobody was not going to sleep in her mother's bed. The truth was that Chepepón López had in his youth been a humble apprentice in the shop of that very
Don
José Luis Regules who had given Uncle Pánfilo such ruinous competition. Young Chepepón had sired a natural daughter, who he legitimized, and this was Adelina.