The Good Conscience Read Online Free PDF

appetites and broken hopes. She never discussed this with anyone. Only in dreams or in moments of solitude did she feed her visions of fecundity, and she would wake fatigued and hurry about her housework with drums echoing in her head and loins. Activity could distract her from her preoccupation, but she always returned to it.
    When the Balcárcels came back to Guanajuato, Asunción observed her brother’s marriage situation and formed her scheme. She urged Rodolfo to have a child. “It will bring true love into your life.” She informed Adelina that her brother had indicated his displeasure at not having a son and heir, and then she suspected this was the cause of their present marital difficulties. Then, when Adelina confided that she was pregnant, Asunción made life so impossible for her that she fled the house. The last step was to arrange to separate the baby from the mother: a thousand pesos in Don Chepepón’s hands, and it was done.
    Her tormented dreams calmed. She filled her eyes, her lips, her hands with the infant’s skin and soft smells and warmth. Her days were busy with maternal attentions, concern about his bath and diet and successive childhood illnesses. Her heart was alive with unforgettable hours: the boy’s ABC’s, their first lisped prayer together, Christmas mornings, his first tricycle, his first day at school, his first communion. She attended him with monomaniac love, and she sighed profoundly when she thought of the empty first years of her marriage. None of this escaped Balcárcel. He, like Asunción, understood that a great problem had been solved. The sterility which could have led to a permanent rancor between husband and wife, Jaime rendered harmless.
    The first rule in this family was that life’s real and important dramas should be concealed. Asunción had secretly plotted to gain a child, Rodolfo had secretly felt guilt for abandoning Adelina, but everything was hidden; the brother would never know that his sister had suffered in her sterility, the sister would never know that the brother accused himself—and her—of cruelty. Jorge Balcárcel was careless about the feelings of both. He gave, over and over, spoken rules and examples as to what in this or that situation should be done by people of good family, but his sayings were always abstract and the situations far from real. In their hearts all three of them understood and accepted that if one is not to be contradicted, one must not contradict, that if violence toward oneself is to be avoided, violence toward others must be eschewed. In a counterpoint of opaque silence and vague words, all clung to Jaime as the key to their contentment. Asunción’s substitute son, the pretext for Balcárcel’s authority, Rodolfo’s link with the past, the child grew surrounded by love that had secret purposes and by standards that were Pharisaical.
    â€œMay he always be small, may he never grow up,” the aunt would pray wordlessly every night. Then she would go to her nephew’s room and observe him for several seconds, sleeping. She would draw near him and kiss his forehead, and close the curtains.

Chapter 3
    H IS MAMÁ SLEEPS in the adjoining bedroom, the big room where prayers are held each evening and where there stands a beautiful piano that she sometimes—not often—plays. But his papá is not there with her. His papá lives far away on the roof, at the top of the winding iron outdoor stairs. That confuses the boy. Why don’t his mamá and his papá live together? Why is his uncle where his father should be? And to which of them should he be more obedient: to stern Uncle Balcárcel, or to fat and drowsy Papá Rodolfo? Very early he learns the answer to that question: it is his uncle he must obey.
    In his cloistered childhood solitude he explores the old mansion. The entrance is a green gate, very high and wide, that opens on the narrow street