The Good Conscience

by Carlos Fuentes

  Now Juan Manuel, dressed in tan cotton pants, a white shirt, and yellow shoes, was standing in the alley beside the Ceballos mansion with his eyes raised to the stable skylight. He had just whistled to signal Jaime that he was waiting. Against his side he held a notebook and several books. He lent Jaime books often; the last was Stendhal’s novel. It was more difficult for the rich boy to buy books than for the poor one, for Juan Manuel possessed an independence that was completely lacking in Jaime. The Balcárcels, moreover, exercised strict censorship, and Jaime had to smuggle in the books—always an annotated volume, underlined, of the cheapest edition, quick to lose its cardboard covers.

  Jaime appeared at length and the two friends greeted each other and walked off across the plaza, Jaime’s hand on Juan Manuel’s shoulder.

  “Have you read … The Red and the Black yet?” Juan Manuel asked presently.

  “They took it away from me. They say it’s prohibited.”

  They took a well-known route, the Callejón de los Cantaritos. Juan Manuel walked in silence, with his face sad. Jaime, though he had the impulse, did not dare to offer to buy a new copy of the lost book.

  “Your aunt and uncle, Ceballos…” Juan Manuel hesitated, as he did habitually; his speech was all starts and stops, though it was also precise. “Do they understand the book so clearly?”

  To use surnames was one of their tacit conventions. It was one of their ways—a little eccentric, perhaps a little ridiculous—of showing their mutual respect. To Ceballos in the beginning it had been hard to call Lorenzo by a name that so little resembled a surname. Nevertheless, Juan Manuel did not pronounce “Lorenzo” as if it were a given name; he prolonged and accented the second syllable, letting the last syllable die almost soundlessly: “Lo-rennn-zo.” Jaime learned to pronounce it that way too, and the young Indian showed his pleasure by his shining eyes.

  “What part of the book … most impressed you?”

  “You know, Lorenzo…” Jaime crossed his arms on his chest and frowned. “There is one place where he says that all great actions should be extremist when a great man does them. And then he points out that it is only when it is all over that the action appears great to ordinary people.”

  “By extremist you mean a … a radical action.”

  The friends also showed their respect for each other by their very careful way of expressing their ideas. Jaime wrinkled his nose. “It seems a sound rule to me. That is how Christians should act. It is how Christ acted. And they treated him as a crazy man, a radical, as you say, and today everyone is his disciple. Disciples of a maniac.”

  “I fear,” said Lorenzo with his habitual pause, “that faith based upon the example of one single individual, by repetition must become caricature. Christianity has been caricatured … by the clergy, by aristocracies, by rich people … Am I explicit?”

  “If it were only caricature!” Jaime smiled. “It is even less, Lorenzo. I always think of caricature as somehow rebellious. Your Goya drawings, for example. My aunt Asunción found them in my room and yelled to high heaven. She said how could I have those indecent and horrifying apes that made her skin crawl. Wasn’t that just what Goya wanted … that people like my aunt should feel offended and shocked?”

  “Sometimes it is the only weapon against … an unjust and hostile world.”

  Now, at the intersection with Los Positos, the long narrow street of dull yellow and blue became level, and the air was sweet with the scent of many bakeries.

  “Smell!” said Lorenzo.

  “So for you the most valuable action is not an individual one?”

  “The most valuable? Isolated … no. What is important is to be part of a general action, a movement. I want to tell you something, Ceballos…”

  Jaime walked ahead and bought two sugar-covered cream puffs. He gave one to Juan Manuel, who bit into it with great delicacy. A mustache of sugar dust formed on his upper lip. He went on:

  “The government gave my father a little plot of land … to farm. That was good, very good. It was generous. Just the same, the plot is very small … large enough for a few cabbages and turnip greens, and that’s all. Corn won’t grow there.… So my father has to look for work again. He gets into debt again with a patrón. But all we eat is cabbage and turnip greens. Our condition … really isn’t changed, it is really just what it was before. My father can’t do anything about it … alone. Everyone must unite. Before … centuries ago … the land belonged to everyone. Every farmer had his share … and moreover had a share in what everyone produced. Now, instead of that, everyone has his own plot today … but none of the plots is large enough, and there is no sharing. Because we are so poor … and unlucky … no one can accomplish anything. But all together … that’s what they have to understand … all together.”

  When Juan Manuel spoke like this, Jaime was always surprised. To him Lorenzo was not a peasant but an intellectual boy fed and consumed in a fever of study. Juan Manuel’s single light bulb burned until dawn; night after night his face grew thin over his books. His big disheveled head between his hands, his elbows resting on his little table, he devoured page after page, took notes, debated with himself, refused to admit a single statement by the invisible author without first putting it in doubt and seeking its reasoning. The cautious difficulty with which he spoke to others was converted, in these interior monologues, into implacable eloquence. Nietzsche, Stendhal, the Andreiev of Sachka Yegulev, Dostoievsky, Dickens, Balzac, Max Beer, Michelet, these were his nightly interlocutors, and Calderón, Tirso, Berceo. But although the boy could lose himself in intellectual labor, he could never forget his humble origin and the problems of his people. Precisely to the degree that his thought deepened during those long warm or cold hours in his tiny room, in the Mediterranean of his sixteen years, he resolved with greater ardor to unite the lessons of his reading with the conditions of the life he had known. He began in those days to investigate the whole literature of the Mexican Revolution.

  Jaime Ceballos read and labored less than his friend, but dreamed more, and grasped deeper the two or three ideas which he believed important. Like Lorenzo, like any adolescent, he felt safer talking to himself with closed eyes than he would have speaking to those persons he would really have liked to address, his father and uncle and aunt. In solitude he could tell them what he thought; facing them, he could not overcome his uncle’s cold air of authority, his aunt’s sentimental lack of comprehension, his father’s simple weak confusion. How could he possibly have suggested to humble timorous Rodolfo that he ought to have the manhood and the rectitude to assume his responsibility toward Adelina? How could he have informed his pious aunt that the sin is not to be a woman but to be hypocritically a woman? How could he, finally, have asserted that he himslf, Jaime Ceballos, was a living person, and thus oblige his uncle to respect him as he was and for what he was? How could he have made clear to Balcárcel that it is more important to love virtue than to fear vice? And how could he have pointed out to all three of them that insofar as they called themselves Catholics, they ought to behave as Christians; that they should either really practice Christianity or give up naming themselves followers of a faith to which they gave only lip-service? No, when Uncle Balcárcel’s finger raised and his thin lips moved, Jaime’s own voice was paralyzed. And this lack of response to his never asked questions had given the boy conviction that he could alone, without communication with anyone, prove that everything he asked of others was really possible.

  Not even to Juan Manuel did he fully disclose this decision, hugged close and repeated in the solitude of his adolescence as the only treasure of a dawning manhood continuously attacked by his own doubts and self-pity and by the doubts and self-pity of the three adults close to him.

  “Diego Rivera, magnificent painter, was born in this house December 13, 1886.” So read a plaque on the ocre yellow wall of a house on Los Positos. The two boys walked in silence. Jaime put his arm around Juan Manuel’s shoulder.

  At that moment Señorit
a Pascualina passed stiffly. Her pince nez framed eyes opened wide. With a haughty and angry air she adjusted her black bonnet above her yellow face. “A Ceballos!” she hissed at Jaime.

  Lorenzo spoke again:

  “Do you remember the part where the author says … that Julien had a marvelous eloquence? I think he spoke well because…”

  “Because he didn’t have to act like a man of the time of Napoleon,” Jaime interrupted. He was angry about his meeting with Señorita Pascualina, who would certainly go tell Aunt Asunción, this very afternoon, that he and Juan Manuel had been walking arm-in-arm.

  They were silent. Jaime was imagining a world of freedom in which boys his age could run away from home and in a few months of an Egyptian campaign gain the golden insignia of full colonels. Every soldier would have a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Reading about the Napoleonic wars had always excited him: he imagined himself in the middle of the great battles, baptized by the great names which according to the encyclopedia were inscribed upon the Arch of Triumph in Paris. Wagram, Austerlitz, Jena, Smolensk, the Pyramids, Friedland. Uniforms, the stampede of cavalry, Moscow in flames, that strange snowy conflagration. And the mysterious women who trailed history’s pages: Josephine, Marie Walewska. And palaces: Fontainebleau, Marly, Versailles, Chantilly. And the tangle of intrigue and adventure behind the names of Fouché and Talleyrand.

  “Have you read War and Peace?” Jaime said.

  “No.”

  “It’s very long. For vacations.”

  Juan Manuel’s thoughts were also wandering slowly and silently. He was transferring the flaming actions of which Stendhal had written to other men upon other battlefields. Villa’s cavalry in the Bajío. The Yaqui Indians who had won at Celaya for Obregón. Zapata ambushed in Chinameca. Now all these heroes were dead, and in their place were Julien Sorels, who prattled so eloquently about the Revolution.

  “I’m going to lend you a book by Vasconcelos, Ceballos.”

  Juan Manuel passed his thin hand over his shock of rebellious hair. At times during the long hours he spent reading, he was stopped by a question that puzzled him: why was it that certain men in certain times spoke in one manner and others in other times in a style so different? On the one hand, Vasconcelos’ passionate tumult; on the other, the serene clarity of Guzmán. And why had both these men spoken in accents of truth, though in opposing styles, about the same subjects which in other lips were lies? He recalled speeches of farm agents in his village and of the union leaders at Irapuato, and newspaper editorials, and addresses by politicians. This was the other Mexican language: a language of lackeys.

  The two young friends walked suspended in thought, far from the quiet traffic of Guanajuato’s winding streets. Lampposts came on suddenly and an organ grinder began to crank out a march in front of a window of tiny immobile children who seemed to be staring at the world’s theatre for the first time and from the first row.

  There ought, Juan Manuel reflected, to be a language which would not only reflect but could also transform reality. He would have liked to explain this to his friend. But he did not have the right words for his intuition.

  They descended Juan Manuel’s street. The boardinghouse, an old mansion of whitewashed brick, smelled of fried beans. The landlady was in one of the front windows, a spinster who always wore white gloves, and she greeted Juan Manuel and Jaime with her peering head. When the two friends reached the patio, she was waiting there, abject, wrapped in a print shawl, the heels of her laced boots tapping the stones.

  “Young man!” her shrill voice cried. “The girl tells me that she can hardly get into your room now. Those books catch so much dust. After you leave, no one will want the room, and I am not disposed, listen to me well, to spend money for nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, señora. It’s my work.” Juan Manuel walked on toward the stairs.

  “Young man! You owe me for the month!”

  “I’ll be paid at the shop tomorrow, señora,” said Juan Manuel without turning.

  “Señorita! How many times do I…”

  They climbed the narrow worn stairs. Worm-gnawed ceiling beams dripped. Plaster had flaked from the walls, and black butterflies were concealed in the high shadows. At the end of the narrowest hall, Lorenzo opened a door of flowery curtains and they entered the tiny room full of books piled beneath and at the foot of the iron cot.

  “Here’s Vasconcelos’ book. I have to go to the shop now. Today I’m working overtime.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Jaime reflected that by now Señorita Pascualina had communicated her gossip to Aunt Asunción, who would be looking for him all over the house to protect him from a quarrel with Balcárcel … who would go straight to his—Jaime’s—bedroom to make sure that his obedient nephew had not left it all day. But the fear of new punishment was less imperious than the adventure of disobedience.

  “Yes, I’m going with you,” he repeated, excited by pale descending darkness.

  They went out on the street, brothers by a communication without words. They squared their shoulders, breathed deep the thin air, and marched half strutting to the corner where the Irapuato busses passed.

  * * *

  “If there is work tomorrow, I can come,” Juan Manuel told the foreman when they finished. He wiped his forehead, smeared his arm with a streak of grease. Jaime stood beside him with his jacket hanging from a hooked finger. Both boys’ shirts, like their faces, were spotted with soot and oil. Jaime felt a new happiness. He hugged himself, enjoying the soreness of his muscles.

  “You don’t have to come,” said the shop foreman. He smiled and rumpled Juan Manuel’s bristly black hair. “Take the weekend off. Does your friend want to begin next week too? There’s plenty of work.”

  “No,” said Juan Manuel.

  “Sure I do,” said Jaime.

  “Good. Juan Manuel can explain to you a little about gears and oils, and if you want to you can work together Monday.”

  They walked out of the shop onto the big yard, a landscape of steam and machines. From the high cabins of locomotives, engineers greeted Juan Manuel with their caps, as if thanking him because their engines were running well.

  “You worked hard, Ceballos. Since they didn’t pay you this time, let me invite you to have a beer.”

  “Did you see that?” Jaime exclaimed when a worker passed and said hello to them and slapped Jaime’s shoulder. “Now we’re the same!” He spoke with happiness, but immediately he was afraid that he had offended Juan Manuel. But Juan Manuel’s smile broadened. They did not speak again until they reached the little building, half a bar and half a grocery, which was hidden beneath a tarpaper roof on the edge of the yard.

  “Two Superiores,” Juan Manuel said to the goat-faced man who was uncapping bottles.

  They waited, hot and panting, with their arms on the fly-specked counter. They drank the opaque liquid eargerly. Juan Manuel leaned his head on one hand.

  “How are you going to get permission from your aunt and uncle?”

  “They can’t keep me from working, can they? I’m grown now. Hasn’t Uncle always said that I have to be a hard worker?”

  The bar began to fill with laborers who arrived thirsty and stained with grease. Some of them called to Juan Manuel by name, others raised a hand to their caps and nodded to both boys. Jaime sniffed the lip of his brimming glass. He filled his mouth with foam. He would have liked to tell Juan Manuel that this was the first complete day of his life as a man. But his sense of pleasure was followed by one of mockery as he thought of his aunt and uncle angry or uneasy or whatever they might be. The bar was heavy with smoke. A worker elbowed Juan Manuel. Three women had entered, harnessed for combat. Two of them were young, the other old and thin. The young woman leading was short and fat, and the girl beside her was tall and heavy-legged. Both of them were thickly made-up, in startling contrast to the third, who with her long straight hair and her scrubbed face looked more like a nun than a whore.

  “Meche
l” cried a voice from the back of the room, and the girl in front pushed her way toward it. The other two elbowed places for themselves at the counter. “What will it be, Fina?” said the tall girl to her yellow-skinned companion.

  “Do you have enough for a cognac?”

  “It’s not eleven yet, drink a beer. Easy to see why they call you Fina!”

  The tall girl lifted her arm and her glass while looking at Juan Manuel and Jaime. Juan tried to smile, Jaime lowered his eyes.

  “Come on, Fina, drink to the boys.”

  “They ought to be home in bed,” the skinny woman said. She shook a finger in front of her companion’s face. “And you better remember that tomorrow is Sunday and ask God to forgive you!”

  The tall girl laughed loudly and grabbed the passing arm of the man behind the counter: “Just listen to Fina, Gomitos. Always pretending to be so holy.”

  “I don’t pretend, I am.” The thin woman held her beer bottle between both hands.

  “I’m glad that we worked together today,” said Juan Manuel.

  “I had a friend once, Lorenzo. His name was Ezequiel.”

  “What you don’t understand, Gomitos, is that Fina don’t let any man touch her. She goes around with us trying to keep us on the straight and narrow.” She laughed again.

  “I’ve never told anyone about him, Lorenzo.”

  “With you and Meche, I’m sure wasting my time,” Fina grumbled.

  “He was a miner who hid in the stable because the police were after him. He had led a strike at the mines.”

  “Because you’re so silly. Instead of going around preaching, you ought to find some old man you can make happy,” tall Lupita answered, with great guffaws.

  “Who could have betrayed him, Lorenzo? Ever since, that’s what I’ve thought about. But from today on, thanks to my work with you, I think I’m going to do something for Ezequiel.”

  “Ingrate! But when something goes wrong, who do you come to, begging to be prayed for? To old Fina, who always listens to your troubles.”