The Good Conscience Read Free Page A

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