The Good Conscience Read Online Free Page B

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, successively, 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.
    He declined: “Decidedly, I cannot abandon my little native state and its many problems,” he declared officially. Inwardly he was thinking about the uneasy parades of ghosts from the time of Díaz he would meet in the national capital; that the presence in the Federal Legislature of an ex-mine owner and landlord might create trouble. He suspected that in a great city he would encounter the danger of living unknown as merely another ruined aristocrat. In Guanajuato, on the other hand, he could become powerful. He contented himself with juicy commissions on contracts for public works, and a little later with the directorship of the bank. Advised in advance of the successive currency devaluations, intermediary in many of the state’s contracts and fiscal operations, a careful money-lender, in fifteen years Balcárcel accumulated a tidy fortune. From his ancestors he inherited the habit of safeguarding a large part of his wealth in foreign banks; from the Revolutionary oligarchy he learned to invest in urban real estate. Between interest and rental income, he had very easily enough to live in the highest luxury.
    See him thus: height average, hair curly and thinning, lips thin and compressed, complexion bilious, cheeks hanging from jutting cheekbones; small sharp eyes, an air of solemn intellectuality, always scrupulously clean-shaven. He is sententious, given to invoking moral maxims at every moment, and to hooking his hand in his vest in an imperial gesture. Suits very conservative, almost old fashioned; false teeth, bifocals. If for a long time he has had to sacrifice his religious piety to political expediency, now that he can publically