The Good Conscience (6 page)

Then it was morning: Holy Saturday. He woke with the memory of his dream, to the bang of exploding rockets. He knew what the day would be like. The whole family would attend religious ceremonies. The purple garments would fall from the images. The Virgin would smile again, the saints blaze in cloth-of-gold. Incense would fill the naves. When he got up and went into the bathroom for his bath, he thought happily about the promised spectacle. He passed the washcloth over his shoulders and felt them stronger and broader than they had been even yesterday. The tub was brim-full of rust-colored hot water. He stirred his legs and stretched his feet until he touched the gold taps; not long ago, he had not been able to do that. Water splashed his armpits with a good feeling. He soaped himself and went on thinking about this day of celebration. Already rockets were soaring and boys were running carrying papier-maché bullsheads. Already glory was clanging from all the bell-towers in the city. Judas dolls with red noses and black mustaches would explode. They would all walk to church: his father, his aunt, himself—not Uncle Balcárcel, who would be absent from Guanajuato today. They would join the crowd to celebrate the Resurrection; they would kneel in front of the confessionals, they would open their lips to receive the Host, while the chorus raised the Easter halleluja. Then again outside the church, walking slowly, surrounded by noise and happiness. The soap slipped away and Jaime, looking for it, ran his hands down his legs, which had begun to be hairy. When he got out of the tub, he stood before the mirror for a long time, wrapped in a towel, studying his face.

There was faith in the city of noble stone that Saturday. Peasants came down from the barren hills. Shepherds walked in from San Miguel with jingling bells on their ankles and wrists. Old folks crowded balconies. Children ran through the mass of
rebozos
and straw hats. On every corner in Guanajuato there was a water-vendor's stand or a fruit-stand or a flower-stand. From the rococco distance of the Valenciana the smell of exploding firecrackers came. The city smelled of gunpowder, but also of manure, of damp paving stones, of trees. Many odors rose from the earth, others from vendors, others from sideboards and cupboards behind whose white doors were fresh cheeses, rice with milk, sticky candies, bunches of cherries, eggnog, fruit wine, guava and marchpane. All these scents were in the air that Holy Saturday, for this was a provincial city of pastries and cordials more interested in the elaborate adornment of a nougat or an altar than in the efficiency of a liquidizer. And surrounded by these scents the people of Guanajuato gathered in the wide plazas to celebrate the great Christian holiday.

A holiday greater, perhaps, than Bethlehem night. For it was now that the reward promised by Christmas would be collected. The Savior had died for all, and upon rising from that common death, had promised all salvation from pain and solitude saying that to live for one's brothers, as He had died, is to secure eternal life. He who knew how to love his brothers could live in them forever, and in their children, and their children's children. Because this had been promised, Asunción Balcárcel walked down the hill to the church of the Compañía, holding Jaime, still a child to her, by the hand. Because of the promise, the merchant Rodolfo Ceballos trod heavily behind his sister and his son, in his black suit, with his hands piously folded over his chest. And because of the promise, the chorus of boys was singing Handel's Halleluja when the family entered the church and took their usual seats among the gentry, and the voices that sang Mass were joyful, and Easter candles were blessed, and at the end the
Exsultet
was cried.

Jaime remained on his knees. He was wearing his blue Sunday suit and it had become too small for him, and the seams of the trousers had split when he knelt. Beside him his aunt was reading her missal. Rodolfo's mouth was half open and his gaze was lost in the baroque foliage of the altar. Jaime had eyes for only the enormous candle. He was reflecting, with surprise, that he had attended Holy Saturday ceremonies all his life without ever realizing that that candle was the center of everything, and the whole object was to light it. He understood now and felt full of happiness as he watched big drops of wax melt down and the high flame slowly flatten. The candle was sacrificing itself giving off rejoicing light. Asunción's voice repeated beside him: “… and in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, Amen.”

They rose, crossed themselves before turning away from the altar, and with difficulty pushed out into the jam-packed aisle. Asunción's body squeezed against him. The little bells of the acolytes tinkled. It was impossible to advance, almost impossible to breathe. And Asunción's body pressed against him harder and harder until his goose-pimpling flesh could feel the round softness of her breasts and belly. He turned his head. She lowered hers. At last they reached the noisy exit, the cry of vendors, the chirping of birds, the warm mild scents of the provincial city, the dance of flute-players and Indian feathers that pranced around the plaza.

That evening the three of them were alone in the house: Balcárcel had departed in the morning for Mexico City to—as he said—attend to some business that had been postponed because of Holy Week. The forty days of silence had ended, and Asunción, recalling how
Don
Pepe used to have a little chamber orchestra come play Holy Saturdays after dinner, said that she wanted to hear music. Rodolfo and Jaime accompanied her to the bedroom of red velvet curtains and she seated herself before the piano that had been given her as a child. She played, with occasional indecisions.
Für Elise.
Rodolfo sat on a cane chair with his fat body slumped and his head hanging forward, absorbed in memories. The last of afternoon filtered through the window. Jaime stood near it, his profile silhouetted and his hair fired by the low sun.

“Mamá's favorite piece,” said Asunción, repeating the opening of the work.

Rodolfo nodded.

“Papá gave me this piano. Do you remember?”

“Yes. When you were ten.”

“We used to have a grand piano, too. It was in the drawing room. You know, I'd forgotten about it. Whatever happened to it?”

“Yes,” said Rodolfo, sighing. “
She
sold it.”

“If we hadn't come back from England, she would have sold the whole house. It's a miracle anything was left.”

“Well … she didn't know how to play. And just then the victrola was the great novelty…”

Asunción lifted her hands from the cold keys and with her head indicated that Jaime was listening. Languid as the sun, the boy stood with one hand on the curtain.
She, she, she.
He put the word away without thinking about it. With a sense of strangeness he reflected that today much was happening that he did not understand. Someday he would. “Someday I'll understand everything,” he told himself, and he swiftly thought about the church, the ceremony of light and sacrifice, his aunt's still young body pressed against his own. He released the curtain and with a slow step left the room.

“The point is, she wasn't like us,” Asunción said louder. She began to play Chopin's
Impromptu,
but she didn't remember it well and had to open the score. Jaime drifted down the hall. “Are you trying to upset him?” she said as she narrowed her eyes to read the notes. “Remember what the Bible says.”

“But she's his mother.”

“No, she isn't, Rodolfo,” Asunción smiled acidly as her brother assumed the look of a victim. “The boy has no mother. I'm not going to let you corrupt him.”

“He will have to meet her sooner or later.”

“He will
not!
If you insist, I'm going to have my husband talk with you.”

Rodolfo wanted to ignore the threat. He wanted to speak in general terms. He couldn't go on.

“Adelina is in Irapuato living very contentedly now,” said his sister. “She has the lowest sort of friends, people just like herself. She ought never to have tried to leave them. A woman who doesn't know her place is…”

“Stop. Please don't say anything else. Maybe you're right. But try to understand me. I … I feel ashamed of myself. Yes. If I had let her see the boy just once … or if we had helped her somehow.”

“Don't be silly. She gave the child up quite willingly, didn't she, so that her father could have a few more pesos.”

“
Don
Chepepón is dead now. She has a hard time.”

“She's better off than ever.”

“I don't understand you. You talk as if she were evil. She was never evil, Asunción.”

Night had fallen. The room filled with shadow. Rodolfo was thinking that his sister had known very well what had happened to the grand piano. She watched everything, she noticed everything, nothing could be hidden from her.

Asunción closed the score of the
Impromptu
and returned to
Für Elise,
which she had by memory.

“Enough. I advise you not to say anything about this to my husband, he will hardly be pleased to discuss it. And no more between you and me, either.”

The gray cat came to Asunción's feet and began to purr, arching with pleasure.

*   *   *

Easter Sunday. Jaime, just back from Mass, comes out the green gate and sits down on the steps with an orange in his hand. He stretches his legs along the hot stone, sucks warm juice, and watches the street. Churchgoers pass on their way to spend the day in the ecclesiastical darkness of San Roque. Servant girls with lettuce and celery wrapped in their
rebozos.
Girls with long hair and budding breasts who giggle and whisper hand-in-hand. Barefoot children who spread their ripe black avocado eyes and race along the street click-clacking window bars with a stick. Beggars, most of them old, some of them blind, a few crippled adolescents, who display an opaque eye, a bloody sore, a nervous spasm, a twisted foot, a paralyzed tongue: they move down the proud street with their faces turned up to the sky, some of them crawling on hands and knees, others pushing themselves along on little wooden platforms with roller-skate wheels.

Humanity. It squeezes through the narrow alleys and spreads out into the plaza, swirls for a moment, and sweeps on, squeezed compact again, through new alleys. There are few Indians. Faces are burned leather Meztizo, deep with wrinkles, eyes green and greasy in olive flesh. Hair is black and lustrous, or white-blue like a dawn volcano.

An Indian woman with hips high under her heavy skirt stops at the corner, opens her mouth of narrow teeth, stretches a scrap of canvas shadow upon three wooden staffs. She spreads her wares on the paving stones: pineapple and slices of watermelon, perfumed quinces, opened pomegranates, mamey fruit, little lemons,
jícama,
green oranges, limes,
zapotes,
mulberries and pancake-like cactus leaves.

A strawberry vendor chants.

Long candles hang their reposing virility beneath the tarp of the vendor of lithographs of the Virgin and silver hearts.

Baskets of flowers that go by making their carriers humpbacked: daisies and jasmine, roses and blue dahlias, lilies, drowsy poppies, solemn canna lilies and playful carnations; they leave the brief wake of their scents the length of the street.

The gray cat comes out the gate rolling like a ball of yarn, and Jaime smiles. Boy and cat rub each other. The yellow eyes open and the cat returns to hide in the shadow of the house.

A scissors-sharpener rests his wheeled shop and pumps his foot-pedal and makes knives and scissors and razors glitter in the powerful sun.

A damp-flanked mule laden with cut sugar cane moves from door to door.

A
charro
rides erect in his saddle leading a group of pinto horses. One of the horses stops and rises on its hind feet and tries to mount the cane vendor's mule. The
charro
dismounts and quirts the flanks of the stallion until it finally rejoins the group of pintos. A hoof knocks over the Indian woman's tower of oranges and she silently rebuilds it while beggars from the church scramble after the oranges that roll away, like tiny suns, across the cobblestones.

Jaime touches the single hair that has sprouted on his chin and watches the horses grow distant and the shouting of the
charro
become faint. He spits out seeds. Humming, he enters the
zaguan
and turns into the old stable. He wipes his hands on his thighs and climbs up on the dusty driver's seat of the black carriage. He clucks his tongue and snaps an invisible whip over an imaginary team. The air in the stable is dusty and dry, but the boy's nostrils are full of the smells of horses' sweat, horses' excrement, the hot sexuality of the stallion when it drew near the quiet croup and red anus of the mule. His eyes are closed, but they still see the street and bathe in its colors. His clenched hands, stretched toward make-believe, almost touch the flesh of the crippled beggars, the melting wax of the white candles, the high buttocks of the Indian woman, the little breasts of the young girls: the world that is born soon, lives soon, dies soon.

He drops the imaginary reins and unbuttons the fly of his pants and puts his hands to his genitals, feels the downy hair that has recently appeared there. He does not know how to say it, as he trembles high on the coachman's seat with his pants open and his hand curled around his stiffening penis; he does not know how to say how much he loves everything, the rich flowing life he has just watched, the fruit and the flowers and the animals and the people. But now it is all gone. The horses have clattered out of sight. The Indian woman has gathered up her fruit and taken down her scrap of canvas and departed. The flowers have gone, shunning him like the girls who would not look toward him. And he wanted so much for everything to stay that he could love it, touch it, hold it close. He sees himself with his thin face and his blond hair, his shirt open and his sleeves rolled, his feet extended beside the hot street; he has not moved, but the whole world has: it has fled from his eyes and hands and escaped him. “What doesn't go away?” he asks himself. “What never goes away but waits forever still and full of love?” He buttons his pants with difficulty and jumps down from the carriage feeling a sharp pain in his testicles.