The Good Conscience

by Carlos Fuentes

  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. Hi
s 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.

  He runs out on the street and climbs the hill, sweating. The high dome of the Compañía church, lord of the landscape, is his guide. He runs so hard that his feet burn and his tendons ache. The church is empty, services have ended. Beside the central nave stands the knotted Cross of sacrifice upon which hangs the black Christ. He stops in front of it. It is not fear but love that holds him motionless, the same inexplicable love he felt in the stable remembering the morning. Christ’s earth-colored face looks down, furrowed with blood. The metal eyes shine beneath the brows of painted torment. The wounded body does not move, though the arms are alive crying pain and welcome. The brief skirt, bordered with jewels, hangs stiff over the belly and down to the knees, and below it descend the lacerated rivers of the legs to their meeting in the single nail that pierces the feet. Jaime is sure that the body of the Savior will not go away, will not escape him as the world did. He kneels. Slowly he opens his pants again, and begins to masturbate. The church is silent, there is only the whispering of candles that flicker on both sides of the image. A strange tingling that he has never known before rises from his hot loins. He grips the crucified feet.

  Silence overcomes silence. Something—the wax drippings of the candles—measures time again. The ecstasy of his orgasm passes and he lifts his eyes to the figure and does not know whether his body is Christ’s, or Christ’s is his. He turns and looks around the church. Then he stands and draws near the image and raises the stiff skirt. The reproduction of nature ends at the knees: the rest is a plain wooden cross which supports the wounded torso and the open arms.

  * * *

  “Not one word, kid, or I’ll break your back…”

  He had returned from the empty church along empty streets. It was afternoon. Everyone was sleeping, the meal ending Lent had been abundant, Guanajuato’s belly was heavy, even the domes of the churches seemed drowsy. He had walked home slowly. Where were the street vendors, the charro, the young girls? After his experience in front of the image of Christ, he would have liked to see them again: maybe—he thought—they would notice him now. The girls would look at him. The charro would ask him to help take the pintos to their stable. The Indian woman would offer him a slice of jicama. For now he was different. “I must be different. My face must be changed. They won’t see me the same. At dinner tonight I’ll watch how they stare at me. Am I a man now? But all the boys at school have done it and they look the same as before. Maybe no one will notice anything.” He observed, a little fearfully, his reflection in windows. “Everyone is sleeping. Sunday siesta. I must be the only person in the city who is awake.” The colonial town in its solitude was like a great gold coin.

  He did not want to go upstairs. “I don’t want a siesta. It’s that I don’t want to see them, that’s all. I’ll go and see what I can find in the trunk.” He pushed open the squeaky stable door and then a hand closed over his mouth and a knee was in his back.

  “Not one word, kid…”

  There was a stench of sweat that did not smell of filth nor of labor; it was a different kind of sweat. It wiped away the odors of the morning: flowers, fruit, candles, horses, leather, washed hair. The hand held his lips still and the knee pushed him toward the back of the room, between the trunks and the dress dummies, behind the old carriage.

  Then the hand released him and at the same time pressed the point of an iron bar against his chest. “Just take it easy.” Jaime was too confused to see clearly. He was aware of someone powerful and shadowy and threatening, and he thought of a thief, an escaped criminal. Then his eyes focused and he saw the man. Tall, strong, black hair falling over his forehead, eyes that were not those of a thief or a criminal.

  They stared at each other.

  Jaime panted and wiped his nose on his arm. The man was motionless except for his eyes, which moved from side to side not with fear but with dominating confidence. There was a pimple on his lip. His shoes, crude laborer’s brogans, were scarred and dusty. His blue shirt was dry but bore the stains of sweat. The cuffs of his pants were rolled up. If his chest and shoulders were powerful, his legs were as thin as wires.

  “Listen to me now. I’m hungry and very thirsty. You are going to go inside and bring me food and water. Do you understand? You aren’t going to tell anyone that I’m here. Stop looking so scared. Go on, now, and remember what happens to squealers. Hurry.”

  Now serene, now threatening, his voice seemed to come near and then drift far away.

  “Go on, do what I tell you.”

  Jaime was immobile in the corner.

  “Look, kid, I’m about to fall over from lack of sleep and hunger.”

  Jaime stepped forward and touched the man’s hand and ran out.

  A few minutes later he returned carrying a laden napkin, and the stranger smiled. He took the napkin and spread it open on the trunk. Slices of ham and cheese, chicken wings, a cube of quince candy.

  “Here is the pitcher, Señor.”

  “Call me Ezequiel.”

  “All right, Señor Ezequiel.”

  The man put down a chicken wing and laughed: “Just plain Ezequiel. How old are you?”

  “Thirteen. Going on fourteen.”

  “Do you work?”

  “No. I belong to the family. I go to school.”

  They seated themselves on the trunk of memories in which reposed Doña Guillermina’s veils and magazines of the last century. Ezequiel chewed furiously, smearing the droopy mustache with grease. Again and again he pounded Jaime’s knee; he could not hold in his happiness, as robust as his thick chest and the dark eyes that moved continually from the boy to the door to the skylight. You learn something in this god-damn fight and that’s how to tell who is for you and who isn’t. Who is this kid? Just a little sissy, I thought when I saw him. A servant in this rich home, when he went for the food. He has helped me. No, I don’t know. A lonely kid, that’s all.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jaime.”

  “Good. Take some of this candy, Jaime. Go on, don’t be bashful. Do I have to twist your arm?”

  “Thank you, Señor Ezequiel.”

  “None of that señor business, I told you.”

  “Ezequiel.”

  “Well, what did you think when I grabbed you? You thought I was a crook, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have many friends?”

  “No.”

  “I was sure of that! Here, take some water. You don’t know what it’s like to taste fresh water after three days walking across the desert and hiding in freight cars. Did you ever hear a
nyone talk about Ezequiel Zuno?”

  “No. But that’s you.”

  “Sure, it’s me.” Maybe he won’t understand me. I better keep my mouth shut. But I haven’t spoken to a living soul for days. Sometimes I even had hallucinations. There’s nothing worse than the high desert, you’re too close to the sun. And you get mad because you know it isn’t a real desert but just land that won’t hold water any more because it has been misused. When I dropped off the freight, the land was still like bone. “You don’t have any idea how good I felt when I slipped into Guanajuato last night and came to the lake.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I’m worn out. I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m going to lie down. Will anyone come in here?”

  “No. But if you want, I’ll stay.”

  “They won’t look for you?”

  “My uncle … Señor Balcárcel … is in Mexico City. They won’t look for me until dinner time.”

  “Good. Afterward, I’ll tell you a story. But now…” There’s no reason to tell him anything. He doesn’t have to know what it is when they beat you … he doesn’t have to know what names they call you, or what it’s like to have to hang on and take it, afraid that at any moment you’ll give in to them … he doesn’t have to know how you get to feeling that to give in would be so easy, while to hang on and spit back at them is hard.

  He fell asleep, his legs spread, his head against the trunk. He dreamed of men in long files. It was his recurring dream, but he never remembered it. When he woke, the boy was still there, sitting on the floor staring at a butterfly case with a shattered cover.

  Like a faithful pup. My little sentry.

  “Are you rested now, Ezequiel?”

  “Yes, mano. Thanks for staying.”

  Decaying light from the skylight fell on his oily eyelids.

  “What time is it, Jaime?”

  “About six.”