The Good Conscience (12 page)

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
Señorita
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.

“Mechel” 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.”

“We better be starting back to Guanajuato,” Jaime said. But Juan Manuel, smiling, indicated that he still had half a bottle left. A locomotive and cars passing outside drowned their voices.

“The crew for Ciudad Juarez!” someone shouted from the door. Several men in overalls departed, wiping their mouths with their sleeves. The sounds of the yard grew louder or fainter. They were deep-toned noises, a rumble in the earth, and the little bar seemed to tremble.

“This Fina,” Lupita said to the man behind the counter, “gives herself airs because she says she was a real society lady in Guanajuato once. Claims she had a rich husband.”

“What, didn't he leave you anything?” Gómez of the long face asked with complete seriousness.

“How much?” asked Juan Manuel.

“Lies, all lies,” laughed Lupita as she adjusted her brassiere and hummed: …
I left my spring years in saloons …

“One peso.”

Fina's yellow face burned red and she pushed it near Lupita's blue lips and in an intense muted voice spat out: “Adelina López lived in the biggest house in Guanajuato, with servants and chandeliers and silver knives, and received all the aristocrats, people that in your whole life you have never even seen!”

“Four pesos change,” said Gomitos.

Adelina's words came to Jaime's hearing suffocated by the racket of cars and engines outside. They arrived long after they were pronounced, when Lupita had already replied something and was saying to the man behind the counter:

“Gomitos, what are you going to be doing after work?”