The Good Conscience Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    For this head of a family could not sire a family of his own, and this was the crack in his imposing facade of manhood. The year of their marriage, the young couple had gone to a doctor in London. “There is nothing wrong with you,” the doctor said to Asunción. “You may have as many children as you want.” Jorge never told her the result of his own consultation. For several days he was strangely lost in thought. Then he buried himself in his studies and never mentioned the matter again. The months, the first years passed, and she never became pregnant. Her breeding did not allow her to discuss the matter with her husband, while he, on her menstrual days, affected silence and raised a wall of sternness that in time became one of his characteristics. Asunción’s innocence, which in a normal relationship would have bloomed into normal sexuality, contracted and withdrew, and transformed itself into a concentrated, primitive internal violence. Sexual relations with her husband were purely mechanical. She lived in a world of unsatisfied