Read The Good Conscience for Free Online Page B

tendency in you. It must be rooted out. Although Christian morality serves life, an unbalanced excess has no purpose whatsoever except to set you apart from the rest of mankind, endangering social relations which I assure you are just as important as good moral habits. I will not permit my nephew to make a fool of himself and be laughed at and pointed out as an idiot.
    â€œWhen you go to your room, you will take down those ridiculous pictures of Virgins and saints with which you have plastered your walls. Out with them! Hereafter when you feel yourself full of piety, you will cross the plaza to the church and kneel in front of a real altar. And from tomorrow on, I forbid you to waste your leisure hours praying and reading Lives of Saints. Rather you will go out of doors and engage in physical exercise. Do I make myself clear?”
    â€œYes, Uncle.”
    â€œThen go, and let there be no more absurd talk about a religious vocation for you.”
    The boy leaves the library with bowed head. He approaches Asunción to be comforted, but she merely repeats, in soft words disguised as advice, the same cold orders.
    Jaime obeys with a sense of injustice and resentment. The pictures tacked to the walls of his room come down. He no longer plays Mass. Dutifully he goes into the patio in the afternoon after school, and runs back and forth chasing a rubber ball. He obeys because that is his duty and he is a very dutiful child. But he feels that he has been hurt and misunderstood. Something that was really only a childhood game was given by his aunt and uncle a strange adult importance and implication which he does not understand. He feels confused. Apparently it is wrong to make God your companion. Apparently God is not for children but only for grown-ups. And you must not try to go to God directly and alone; you must cross the plaza and look for God in the Church. Those are the conclusions that he draws, but in his heart he refuses to accept them.
    His feeling that his aunt and uncle have been unkind and unloving to him transforms itself into hostility that is expressed by withdrawing his affection from them. But he is a child and he wants to love and be loved. He turns toward the one person close to him who was not part of the injustice, who has never made him feel guilty or confused, the man who is as childlike as Jaime himself, his father.

Chapter 4
    R ODOLFO HAD CONTINUED to attend the store on San Diego. He made certain changes, chiefly the sale of ready-made suits. No longer did he offer the rich fabrics that had been featured in the old times when the social life of the city had been more select and the gap between the classes more accentuated. In those days the monk had been known by his habit; today, who could tell a gentleman from a chauffeur, when both dressed alike? Rodolfo made a speciality of cheap serge, gabardine, and cotton prints. He stopped importing cloth from Europe; that from Orizaba was cheaper and no one seemed to notice or care about the difference.
    He tried to recover the lost ways of his careless youth, but under the sober respectability imposed by the Balcárcels, what had been open and pleasant became hidden and shameful. Dominoes, beer, the bordel, his pastimes were ruled by Asunción’s rigid time-tables and the fear of meeting Balcárcel. Nor could he, with Adelina gone, adopt the pose of a serious man of family. He was trapped in an uncomfortable middle-ground between simplicity and inhibition, his plight sharpened by the Balcárcels’ arid self-assurance.
    Sometimes he thought about Adelina:
    â€œAsunción, do you suppose she needs anything?”
    â€œShe’s all right, don’t worry about her. And for God’s sake don’t mention her in front of Jaime.”
    One morning in church he saw his wife at a distance and he felt ashamed and guilty. She had been thin before; now she was skeletal. More than once he would have willingly taken the boy to see her. But