The Good Conscience Read Online Free

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
    I N 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.
    â€œDecidedly, 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