The Good Conscience

  In the beginning the Revolution did not frighten Doña Guillermina. It spread down from the north, and in 1914 Guanajuato began to fill with refugee families, many of them old friends, from Coahuila, San Luis, and Chihuahua. Relatives, former business associates of Don Pepe, and friends of friends poured in. Social life quickened, and Guillermina found this pleasant. There were balls and parties, and everyone attended the usual religious festivities. From time to time someone spoke of violence and killing: Guillermina would reply placidly that this was not the first revolution they had known: “Guanajuato has always been the richest state in the Republic, the granary and the treasury of Mexico, as my husband used to say, and no one will dare to disturb us here.”

  Events turned out otherwise. A band of revolutionists took over, the next year, Don Pepe’s land. They emptied the corn bins and barns, and Rodolfo, who was living at the hacienda by now, informed his mother that the situation was grave. For the first time Guillermina felt afraid. The worst was still to come. In 1916 Villa approached Guanajuato with nine thousand men. Young Asunción, only fifteen years of age but already married, fled with her husband, and the stone mansion was empty except for Guillermina and Pánfilo. The elderly merchant closed his store to keep from accepting the paper money printed by the different factions. Then Obregón arrived and forced the store to be opened again. He also required salaries to be raised. Uncle Pánfilo believed he was going to go bankrupt. Doña Guillermina hid her gold pesos under the floor of her bedroom. Suddenly all of this seemed unimportant. The gentility died of fear when Obregón abandoned the city. Guillermina and Pánfilo shut themselves in and piled mattresses against the windows. General Natera was about to appear with Villa’s troops. Then both sides went away to join in battle at Celaya, and the city was left in the hands of the bandit Palomó. There was continuous sacking, gunfire at all hours. For the Ceballos, it was like the end of the world.

  Doña Guillermina did not completely lose her head. She relieved Rodolfo of his duties at the hacienda and took its administration into her own hands, arranging for thirty armed men to guard the burned buildings. Her religious activity multiplied. She did not miss a single procession in favor of peace. She lit candles in every church in favor of peace; she wept in her bedroom in favor of peace, she recited Salve Reginas in favor of peace. At the same time, her hunger to look back lovingly on the past was fed by the terrible events of the present. Although she wailed, in public, because the ringing of church bells during the fiestas of the Holy Virgin had been prohibited, privately she doted sweetly upon the memory of how those bells had echoed in better times. Openly she wept the expulsion of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd; alone she recalled with pleasure the generosity which the Ceballos had always heaped upon the nuns. She was scandalized that deceitful Siurob had dared to take the portraits of President Díaz and Governor Obregón Gonzales down from the walls of the governor’s palace; but what delight she felt remembering Don Porfirio with Pepe at the opera, and Don Joaquin witnessing Asunción’s wedding!

  Under the governorship of Siurob, the unrest settled. Almost without being aware of it, Rodolfo Ceballos found himself going to the store every day. Uncle Pánfilo rarely visited it now. The wrinkled, lisping old man, who was about to reach his eightieth birthday, let Rodolfo handle everything, and Rodolfo found his true road in life, his heriditary role, which was to preside, with bonhommie, behind a counter.

  Few servants were left in the mansion in 1917, when Pánfilo died. Almost all the bedrooms were closed in 1920, when Guillermina followed him. Asunción and her husband, Jorge Balcárcel, were living in England. Rodolfo, all alone, closed more doors. The new Agrarian Reform Law resulted in the loss of a good part of the 78,000 hectares which Pepe Ceballos had acquired so cheaply. Rodolfo was indisposed to struggle; he crossed his arms and let the land go. With the store and with the gold pesos his mother had left, the last Ceballos could live very comfortably. His tendency to obesity, inherited from his grandmother, was accentuated by his sedentary life, and at twenty-nine he was a rotund young man, drowsy and pleasant, who made friends with everyone except the descendents of the old families who had used to gather in the stone mansion. These ruined aristocrats filled him with disgust. All they could do was talk about the good old days. They had all suffered bitterly from the Revolution, they all lamented it; many of them departed to live in Mexico City. Rodolfo much preferred to discuss the price of cotton or the magnificent sardines which Don Chepepón López sold, or memorable games of dominoes played with other merchants in the bar of the Jardín del Unión park. It was to the Jardín that he went when he closed the store at six each afternoon. In a short time, unrestrained by family, the only inhabitant of the mansion, he began to invite his rather surprised Jardín companions home. It would be hard to imagine what Doña Guillermina would have said if she could have seen those gatherings of men in their shirt-sleeves beneath her French chandeliers. They smoked cigars. They drank beer. They talked about market prices and played dominoes.

  But it was thanks to these friends, in particular to the aforementioned Don Chepepón López, provendor of wines and canned goods, that Rodolfo met the woman who was to become his wife and the mother of his son. Adelina López was a tall, shy, simple young girl, much given to attending novenas, to receiving communion on First Fridays, and to shutting herself up in seclusion during Lent. Rodolfo had seen her various times at the serenade which was presented three times a week in the Jardín del Unión. The young men would promenade in one direction around the park, the young women in the other. Rodolfo merely sat on a bench with a toothpick between his lips, and observed. In reality the girl neither pleased nor displeased him. What with his work, his friends, and an occasional visit to a bordel, he lived quite contented. If it had not been for Don Chepepón’s ambition to see his daughter installed as mistress of the mansion at the foot of Jardín Morelos, Jaime Ceballos would never have been born.

  Señorita López began to appear frequently in Rodolfo’s store. He loved to talk, so he enjoyed her ponderous conversations about the sanctity of the home, and the importance, in a mother, of good Christian training. Soon the plump merchant found himself invited on shabby picnics and excursions, to the lakes behind Guanajuato’s dams, to the old mining center, now a ghost town. Adelina murmured an alarmed repulse, but soon allowed the nervous and drowsy young man to hold her hand. When at last their friends observed them entering the church of the Compañia together one First Friday, all were sure that Don Chepepón had gained his victory.

  Not without setbacks, however. The future groom wrote to his sister in England. Asunción replied stating that she did not know who the López family were but that Balcárcel, her husband, believed that Chepepón was of very dubious ancestry. When that failed to dissuade Rodolfo, she wrote again announcing that the daughter of a Don Nobody was not going to sleep in her mother’s bed. The truth was that Chepepón López had in his youth been a humble apprentice in the shop of that very Don José Luis Regules who had given Uncle Pánfilo such ruinous competition. Young Chepepón had sired a natural daughter, who he legitimized, and this was Adelina.

  “But Grandfather Higinio began as an apprentice too,” Rodolfo told himself.

  In December of 1926 the marriage took place in the stone mansion, to the merry-making of Rodolfo’s Jardín companions. Almost immediately after the wedding, Rodolfo decided that he ought to maintain, insofar as was possible, the familiar appearance of a Ceballos. Marriage imposed a moral change upon him, and the only change possible was to give up the friendly, lazy, unworried life he had until this time enjoyed, and to become—how did he say it himself?—more thoughtful, more serious. No one had ever had faith in him. He had not been permitted to study law. His mother had taken the hacienda away from him just as he was learning to manage it. Now he would prove that he could be just as good a head of a family as his father. The transformation was not very difficult, for if he was the grandson of Margarita the jolly, he was also the son of Guillermina the stiff.
>
  And in truth, Adelina did what she could to push him in this direction, an action which on her part was suicidal. The moment Rodolfo assumed a stricter social standard, he was inevitably going to be displeased and eventually disgusted by her vulgarity. Her chance for happiness, though she did not understand it, lay precisely in keeping him lazy and easy-going: she was the ideal wife for a beer-drinking dominoes player. Nevertheless, it was she who persuaded him to close the house to his old friends. It was she who ruled that Don Chepepón could visit only on Sundays. It was she who insisted they must open the enormous French drawing room again, and it was she who prepared the select guest list for their frequent entertainments. She suggested that Rodolfo hire a clerk to stand behind the counter in the store, so that he might retire to a lonely upstairs office. It was Adelina, in short, who took the eternal smile from her husband’s lips.

  The parties which Adelina and Rodolfo gave were too strained to be successful, and for Adelina personally they were catastrophes. Her husband was forced now to make comparisons. It was not that the breeding of their guests was so exemplary, but that Adelina’s was so deficient. She fell far below even the standard of provincial mediocrity. All voices were coarse; hers was shrill. All of them were hypocrites; she was a super-hypocrite. All pretended piety; Adelina did so with bad taste. All of them possessed at least the minimal knowledge of established forms which was wholly lacking in her. Talk about her abounded: she was common, shallow, tactless, above all, ill-bred. And Rodolfo, holding now to the family’s old traditions, had to agree. Adelina made her social splash, such as it was, but lost her husband’s affection. Quarrels began, and weeping.

  Chapter 2

  IN 1927 THE BALCARCELS RETURNED from England. Rodolfo, caught between the rock of his new independence and the unhappy sea of his alienation from Adelina, suggested that they make their home in the big house for a few weeks at least, and when Asunción saw what the situation was, she agreed. Immediately she began to discover alarming defects in Adelina. The floors were dusty, the silver was not polished, there were cockroaches in the pantry.

  Jorge Balcárcel del Moral, the young man who at twenty had fled Guanajuato in terror upon hearing the hooves of the revolutionary cavalry, had studied for years at the London School of Economics, and was back in Mexico now with a cloud of degrees and scholarly honors. President Calles was just beginning to reorganize the finances of the nation; he found Balcárcel prepared to help, and entrusted him with a detailed economic study of the State of Guanajuato. One day, wearing his narrow trousers and his Scotch-plaid cap, the inexperienced economist asked the plump merchant to give up his home.

  “Decidedly, the nature of your obligations allows you to live in very comfortable rooms above the store, as Uncle Pánfilo did, while the nature of ours requires the family residence. My duties force me to make the highest possible social presentation. While yours…” And from that moment Barcárcel’s voice was stiff with authority.

  Adelina dared to oppose him at first. “No, señor. What you don’t realize is that Fito and I also have social obligations with the best people in Guanajuato. We receive them here, just as in the time of Guillermina. Sí, señor.”

  But Rodolfo, significantly, said nothing, and two months later, overwhelmed by Asunción’s peculiar helpfulness—“Come, my dear, it will be better if I arrange the dinner party this time. Everyone laughs at you, you know. It’s just that there are certain things you didn’t learn when you were small.”—and by her own sense of inferiority and helplessness, Adelina announced that she was going to visit her father for a while. Rodolfo did not detain her. When the next month Don Chepepón came to the store and informed him that Adelina was expecting a child, Rodolfo felt repentant and wanted to see her. But his sister immediately made it plain that the course of wisdom would be to take the child but let the mother go, to annul a marriage so contrary to good sense, so that some day he might take a second wife worthy of his name and situation.

  Rodolfo passed several miserable nights trying to decide what to do. One moment he felt himself the unworried and good-natured young man of old; the next, he was the serious minded gentleman. One moment his heart was full of tenderness for his wife; the next, he was sure that Asunción was right. He grew sad thinking of Adelina giving birth alone. Then he remembered her horrible mismanagement of the house, her vulgarity, her love of mere appearances. And as he struggled first one way and then the other, it was Asunción who was always present to help him to do nothing at all, and it was Asunción who finally introduced him to the blond little baby who was as rosy as Grandfather Pepe. She said nothing about the mother, and Rodolfo did not dare to ask. Only he and the Balcárcels attended the baptism. The infant soon learned to cry “mama” to Asunción.

  Rodolfo had given up the master bedroom when Adelina left and had moved to the bedroom adjacent. Now Asunción wanted the baby there. She pointed out to her brother that his bachelor habits made it convenient for him to live in a more isolated part of the house. The servants’ quarters were on the patio floor. An spiral iron stairs, open to the weather, corkscrewed up one wall to the high azotea where, on the roof, Rodolfo now had his room. Only the clatter of the flimsy stairs announced every night his slow climb. He puffed and panted. Sometimes his head whirled and he was afraid he would fall. But his effort had recompenses: how lovely Guanajuato was at night, what forgotten lights flickered from the soft colored villages, from the mountains, from country fires. And the isolation of his room made it easy for him to escape Doña Asunción’s guests. Rodolfo soon grew accustomed to his position far from the domestic center of gravity. He returned to the bar of the Jardín del Unión, to his Saturday night visits to the bordel, to his Sunday beer.

  Uncle Balcárcel, in order to prepare his famous economic study, established relations with the city and state politicians, whom he shocked by his expositions of English economic doctrines. If armed revolt had filled him with terror in 1915, in 1929 the Official Revolution found him an energetic supporter. “Build” was the Revolutionary slogan now, and President Calles was carrying it out. There was a great contrast between Balcárcel’s rabidly anti-clerical attitude in public, and his domestic piety. Asunción’s virtues, in this latter respect, exceeded those of all her ancestors. She was the first in the city to arrange a private chapel in her home during the years of religious persecution. It was interesting to observe Balcárcel orating in the Jardín del Unión against the conspiracy of the priesthood, and to see Asunción, the following day, carrying images of the Virgin into the great stone mansion. The truth was that Señor Balcárcel always took part in the evening religious devotions which his wife, following the example of her mother, held for the household. Heiress to so many Christian virtues, Asunción recalled with horror the way her grandmother, the Andalusan Margarita, had scoffed about these ceremonies and had declared that God is honored in one’s heart, not by external show. She had been in her dotage, poor old woman! The contradiction between her husband’s public and private attitudes about religion, on the other hand, disturbed Asunción not at all. That was, she understood, a male matter in which a wife ought not to interfere. Moreover she knew that good political connections had always been the family’s economic salvation, and she was not so foolish as to suggest that a concrete and present good be sacrificed for a moral and theoretical one, especially when both could so easily be retained. Did not the Ceballos owe their fortune and their position to the friendship of Governors Muñoz Ledo and Antillón? Had not their wealth been augmented and their social status assured thanks to the good will of President Díaz? Why should they now alienate themselves from President Calles? Or from President Avila Camacho, during whose administration Jorge Balcárcel finally permitted himself the luxury of synchronizing his private faith with his public declarations. “I always said,” he would then explain, “that like wine, the Revolution would improve with age. Decidedly we have passed the period of excesses.” In this way, and thanks to this philosophy, he was able to be, succe
ssively, a local legislator, a director of a bank, and from 1942 on, a prosperous money-lender. In the old days the big house had possessed twenty bedrooms. Balcárcel chained the doors that led to the right wing, opened a narrow entrance from the alley of San Roque, and rented rooms. Thus began his career as a landlord, which, along with his political activity and his money-lending, was to be the principal source of his provincial fortune.

  For Balcárcel’s family had consumed their wealth—relative wealth, measured by the time, 1910, and the place, a Mexican province—in supporting with decorum the English migration and studies of the only son. Many tons of ore had been converted into steamship tickets, London apartments, suits and dresses, economics textbooks, for Jorge Balcárcel and his young wife Asunción Ceballos. Forced land sales did not allow the best price. When Jorge returned to Guanajuato, his impoverished state obliged him to forget past glory and struggle to re-attain the wealth and power expected of a Balcárcel. Upon completing the study for Calles, he gave up all serious interest in the science of economics. There was no one with whom to discuss those esoteric topics—cartels, coefficients of income, public debt. He forgot his English degrees and dedicated himself to the assiduous cultivation of the new revolutionary regency. He opened the doors of the Ceballos mansion to people who a decade earlier could not have dreamed of entering there. He was a deputy in the State Legislature and although his performance was unremarkable—or perhaps precisely for this reason—he was offered the opportunity to go to the Federal Chamber of Deputies.