The Good Conscience Read Online Free Page A

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?