The Good Conscience (3 page)

“But Grandfather Higinio began as an apprentice too,” Rodolfo told himself.

In December of 1926 the marriage took place in the stone mansion, to the merry-making of Rodolfo's Jardín companions. Almost immediately after the wedding, Rodolfo decided that he ought to maintain, insofar as was possible, the familiar appearance of a Ceballos. Marriage imposed a moral change upon him, and the only change possible was to give up the friendly, lazy, unworried life he had until this time enjoyed, and to become—how did he say it himself?—more thoughtful, more serious. No one had ever had faith in him. He had not been permitted to study law. His mother had taken the hacienda away from him just as he was learning to manage it. Now he would prove that he could be just as good a head of a family as his father. The transformation was not very difficult, for if he was the grandson of Margarita the jolly, he was also the son of Guillermina the stiff.

And in truth, Adelina did what she could to push him in this direction, an action which on her part was suicidal. The moment Rodolfo assumed a stricter social standard, he was inevitably going to be displeased and eventually disgusted by her vulgarity. Her chance for happiness, though she did not understand it, lay precisely in keeping him lazy and easy-going: she was the ideal wife for a beer-drinking dominoes player. Nevertheless, it was she who persuaded him to close the house to his old friends. It was she who ruled that
Don
Chepepón could visit only on Sundays. It was she who insisted they must open the enormous French drawing room again, and it was she who prepared the select guest list for their frequent entertainments. She suggested that Rodolfo hire a clerk to stand behind the counter in the store, so that he might retire to a lonely upstairs office. It was Adelina, in short, who took the eternal smile from her husband's lips.

The parties which Adelina and Rodolfo gave were too strained to be successful, and for Adelina personally they were catastrophes. Her husband was forced now to make comparisons. It was not that the breeding of their guests was so exemplary, but that Adelina's was so deficient. She fell far below even the standard of provincial mediocrity. All voices were coarse; hers was shrill. All of them were hypocrites; she was a super-hypocrite. All pretended piety; Adelina did so with bad taste. All of them possessed at least the minimal knowledge of established forms which was wholly lacking in her. Talk about her abounded: she was common, shallow, tactless, above all, ill-bred. And Rodolfo, holding now to the family's old traditions, had to agree. Adelina made her social splash, such as it was, but lost her husband's affection. Quarrels began, and weeping.

Chapter 2

I
N
1927
THE BALCARCELS RETURNED
from England. Rodolfo, caught between the rock of his new independence and the unhappy sea of his alienation from Adelina, suggested that they make their home in the big house for a few weeks at least, and when Asunción saw what the situation was, she agreed. Immediately she began to discover alarming defects in Adelina. The floors were dusty, the silver was not polished, there were cockroaches in the pantry.

Jorge Balcárcel del Moral, the young man who at twenty had fled Guanajuato in terror upon hearing the hooves of the revolutionary cavalry, had studied for years at the London School of Economics, and was back in Mexico now with a cloud of degrees and scholarly honors. President Calles was just beginning to reorganize the finances of the nation; he found Balcárcel prepared to help, and entrusted him with a detailed economic study of the State of Guanajuato. One day, wearing his narrow trousers and his Scotch-plaid cap, the inexperienced economist asked the plump merchant to give up his home.

“Decidedly, the nature of your obligations allows you to live in very comfortable rooms above the store, as Uncle Pánfilo did, while the nature of ours requires the family residence. My duties force me to make the highest possible social presentation. While yours…” And from that moment Barcárcel's voice was stiff with authority.

Adelina dared to oppose him at first. “No,
señor.
What you don't realize is that Fito and I also have social obligations with the best people in Guanajuato. We receive them here, just as in the time of Guillermina.
Sí, señor.”

But Rodolfo, significantly, said nothing, and two months later, overwhelmed by Asunción's peculiar helpfulness—“Come, my dear, it will be better if I arrange the dinner party this time. Everyone laughs at you, you know. It's just that there are certain things you didn't learn when you were small.”—and by her own sense of inferiority and helplessness, Adelina announced that she was going to visit her father for a while. Rodolfo did not detain her. When the next month
Don
Chepepón came to the store and informed him that Adelina was expecting a child, Rodolfo felt repentant and wanted to see her. But his sister immediately made it plain that the course of wisdom would be to take the child but let the mother go, to annul a marriage so contrary to good sense, so that some day he might take a second wife worthy of his name and situation.

Rodolfo passed several miserable nights trying to decide what to do. One moment he felt himself the unworried and good-natured young man of old; the next, he was the serious minded gentleman. One moment his heart was full of tenderness for his wife; the next, he was sure that Asunción was right. He grew sad thinking of Adelina giving birth alone. Then he remembered her horrible mismanagement of the house, her vulgarity, her love of mere appearances. And as he struggled first one way and then the other, it was Asunción who was always present to help him to do nothing at all, and it was Asunción who finally introduced him to the blond little baby who was as rosy as Grandfather Pepe. She said nothing about the mother, and Rodolfo did not dare to ask. Only he and the Balcárcels attended the baptism. The infant soon learned to cry “mama” to Asunción.

Rodolfo had given up the master bedroom when Adelina left and had moved to the bedroom adjacent. Now Asunción wanted the baby there. She pointed out to her brother that his bachelor habits made it convenient for him to live in a more isolated part of the house. The servants' quarters were on the patio floor. An spiral iron stairs, open to the weather, corkscrewed up one wall to the high
azotea
where, on the roof, Rodolfo now had his room. Only the clatter of the flimsy stairs announced every night his slow climb. He puffed and panted. Sometimes his head whirled and he was afraid he would fall. But his effort had recompenses: how lovely Guanajuato was at night, what forgotten lights flickered from the soft colored villages, from the mountains, from country fires. And the isolation of his room made it easy for him to escape
Doña
Asunción's guests. Rodolfo soon grew accustomed to his position far from the domestic center of gravity. He returned to the bar of the Jardín del Unión, to his Saturday night visits to the bordel, to his Sunday beer.

Uncle Balcárcel, in order to prepare his famous economic study, established relations with the city and state politicians, whom he shocked by his expositions of English economic doctrines. If armed revolt had filled him with terror in 1915, in 1929 the Official Revolution found him an energetic supporter. “Build” was the Revolutionary slogan now, and President Calles was carrying it out. There was a great contrast between Balcárcel's rabidly anti-clerical attitude in public, and his domestic piety. Asunción's virtues, in this latter respect, exceeded those of all her ancestors. She was the first in the city to arrange a private chapel in her home during the years of religious persecution. It was interesting to observe Balcárcel orating in the Jardín del Unión against the conspiracy of the priesthood, and to see Asunción, the following day, carrying images of the Virgin into the great stone mansion. The truth was that
Señor
Balcárcel always took part in the evening religious devotions which his wife, following the example of her mother, held for the household. Heiress to so many Christian virtues, Asunción recalled with horror the way her grandmother, the Andalusan Margarita, had scoffed about these ceremonies and had declared that God is honored in one's heart, not by external show. She had been in her dotage, poor old woman! The contradiction between her husband's public and private attitudes about religion, on the other hand, disturbed Asunción not at all. That was, she understood, a male matter in which a wife ought not to interfere. Moreover she knew that good political connections had always been the family's economic salvation, and she was not so foolish as to suggest that a concrete and present good be sacrificed for a moral and theoretical one, especially when both could so easily be retained. Did not the Ceballos owe their fortune and their position to the friendship of Governors Muñoz Ledo and Antillón? Had not their wealth been augmented and their social status assured thanks to the good will of President Díaz? Why should they now alienate themselves from President Calles? Or from President Avila Camacho, during whose administration Jorge Balcárcel finally permitted himself the luxury of synchronizing his private faith with his public declarations. “I always said,” he would then explain, “that like wine, the Revolution would improve with age. Decidedly we have passed the period of excesses.” In this way, and thanks to this philosophy, he was able to be, successively, a local legislator, a director of a bank, and from 1942 on, a prosperous money-lender. In the old days the big house had possessed twenty bedrooms. Balcárcel chained the doors that led to the right wing, opened a narrow entrance from the alley of San Roque, and rented rooms. Thus began his career as a landlord, which, along with his political activity and his money-lending, was to be the principal source of his provincial fortune.

For Balcárcel's family had consumed their wealth—relative wealth, measured by the time, 1910, and the place, a Mexican province—in supporting with decorum the English migration and studies of the only son. Many tons of ore had been converted into steamship tickets, London apartments, suits and dresses, economics textbooks, for Jorge Balcárcel and his young wife Asunción Ceballos. Forced land sales did not allow the best price. When Jorge returned to Guanajuato, his impoverished state obliged him to forget past glory and struggle to re-attain the wealth and power expected of a Balcárcel. Upon completing the study for Calles, he gave up all serious interest in the science of economics. There was no one with whom to discuss those esoteric topics—cartels, coefficients of income, public debt. He forgot his English degrees and dedicated himself to the assiduous cultivation of the new revolutionary regency. He opened the doors of the Ceballos mansion to people who a decade earlier could not have dreamed of entering there. He was a deputy in the State Legislature and although his performance was unremarkable—or perhaps precisely for this reason—he was offered the opportunity to go to the Federal Chamber of Deputies.

He declined: “Decidedly, I cannot abandon my little native state and its many problems,” he declared officially. Inwardly he was thinking about the uneasy parades of ghosts from the time of Díaz he would meet in the national capital; that the presence in the Federal Legislature of an ex-mine owner and landlord might create trouble. He suspected that in a great city he would encounter the danger of living unknown as merely another ruined aristocrat. In Guanajuato, on the other hand, he could become powerful. He contented himself with juicy commissions on contracts for public works, and a little later with the directorship of the bank. Advised in advance of the successive currency devaluations, intermediary in many of the state's contracts and fiscal operations, a careful money-lender, in fifteen years Balcárcel accumulated a tidy fortune. From his ancestors he inherited the habit of safeguarding a large part of his wealth in foreign banks; from the Revolutionary oligarchy he learned to invest in urban real estate. Between interest and rental income, he had very easily enough to live in the highest luxury.

See him thus: height average, hair curly and thinning, lips thin and compressed, complexion bilious, cheeks hanging from jutting cheekbones; small sharp eyes, an air of solemn intellectuality, always scrupulously clean-shaven. He is sententious, given to invoking moral maxims at every moment, and to hooking his hand in his vest in an imperial gesture. Suits very conservative, almost old fashioned; false teeth, bifocals. If for a long time he has had to sacrifice his religious piety to political expediency, now that he can publically declare himself a believer he does so over and over, and the words “Catholic” and “the upper classes” are synonyms to him. Religious rhetoric he uses to justify his worldly interests: “Decidedly, private property is a postulate of Divine Reason.” “In Mexico, we of the upper class have the obligation to take charge of the morals, the education, and the economic activity of a people who are decidedly backward.” “A man's treasures are his family and his faith.” Such are his more frequent and felicitous sayings. He is a man of exact hours, and will not tolerate unpunctuality or the slightest change in established habits any more than he will condone frivolity of speech. At seven-thirty in the morning he must have his hot bath and at eight an egg boiled for exactly one hundred and eighty seconds. His laundry for the week must be laid out on the bed so that he may count it personally and inspect the amount of starch in the collars. In his presence, conversation must always be steered toward those familiar topics upon which he can make a pronouncement. In his home, Rosary must be exactly at six in the evening, and on Sundays everyone must wear black. But above all, he may not be contradicted and he must always be respected. And he is respected. His raised index finger is a symbol of confident authority. Every night he can go to bed with his magazines—his only reading—and an infinite sense of righteousness, tranquility, and power.

Like all bourgeois Catholics, Balcárcel was really a Protestant. If in the first instance the wide world was divided into good beings who thought as he did and sinners who thought otherwise, in the second, the local world of Guanajuato was divided into decent folk who possessed wealth and evil beggars who did not. Carrying this Manichaean attitude into the bosom of his family, Balcárcel became the strict head of the house who understood righteousness, while all others in the mansion were more or less suspects whom it was necessary to watch closely and prod toward good behavior. His brother-in-law Rodolfo was wholly a lost case. For a man like Balcárcel, who made a devotion of labor and an idol of wealth, the easy-going merchant who could accumulate nothing was an object of scorn. If to this were added Rodolfo's social errors, he became the perfect target for Balcárcel's sermons, a kind of living text. The boy Jaime, as the son of such a father, offered his uncle a double opportunity: on the one hand, to make clear to him just how infirm were his father's ethics, and on the other, to conduct him to better ways. Balcárcel did not love the boy, of course. He loved only Jorge Balcárcel. But although the child irritated him, he also interested him as a kind of moral raw material. And he needed the boy to make it possible for him to live in peace with his wife.