The Good Conscience Read Free Page B

would be hard to imagine what Doña Guillermina would have said if she could have seen those gatherings of men in their shirt-sleeves beneath her French chandeliers. They smoked cigars. They drank beer. They talked about market prices and played dominoes.
    But it was thanks to these friends, in particular to the aforementioned Don Chepepón López, provendor of wines and canned goods, that Rodolfo met the woman who was to become his wife and the mother of his son. Adelina López was a tall, shy, simple young girl, much given to attending novenas, to receiving communion on First Fridays, and to shutting herself up in seclusion during Lent. Rodolfo had seen her various times at the serenade which was presented three times a week in the Jardín del Unión. The young men would promenade in one direction around the park, the young women in the other. Rodolfo merely sat on a bench with a toothpick between his lips, and observed. In reality the girl neither pleased nor displeased him. What with his work, his friends, and an occasional visit to a bordel, he lived quite contented. If it had not been for Don Chepepón’s ambition to see his daughter installed as mistress of the mansion at the foot of Jardín Morelos, Jaime Ceballos would never have been born.
    Señorita López began to appear frequently in Rodolfo’s store. He loved to talk, so he enjoyed her ponderous conversations about the sanctity of the home, and the importance, in a mother, of good Christian training. Soon the plump merchant found himself invited on shabby picnics and excursions, to the lakes behind Guanajuato’s dams, to the old mining center, now a ghost town. Adelina murmured an alarmed repulse, but soon allowed the nervous and drowsy young man to hold her hand. When at last their friends observed them entering the church of the Compañia together one First Friday, all were sure that Don Chepepón had gained his victory.
    Not without setbacks, however. The future groom wrote to his sister in England. Asunción replied stating that she did not know who the López family were but that Balcárcel, her husband, believed that Chepepón was of very dubious ancestry. When that failed to dissuade Rodolfo, she wrote again announcing that the daughter of a Don Nobody was not going to sleep in her mother’s bed. The truth was that Chepepón López had in his youth been a humble apprentice in the shop of that very Don José Luis Regules who had given Uncle Pánfilo such ruinous competition. Young Chepepón had sired a natural daughter, who he legitimized, and this was Adelina.
    â€œBut Grandfather Higinio began as an apprentice too,” Rodolfo told himself.
    In December of 1926 the marriage took place in the stone mansion, to the merry-making of Rodolfo’s Jardín companions. Almost immediately after the wedding, Rodolfo decided that he ought to maintain, insofar as was possible, the familiar appearance of a Ceballos. Marriage imposed a moral change upon him, and the only change possible was to give up the friendly, lazy, unworried life he had until this time enjoyed, and to become—how did he say it himself?—more thoughtful, more serious. No one had ever had faith in him. He had not been permitted to study law. His mother had taken the hacienda away from him just as he was learning to manage it. Now he would prove that he could be just as good a head of a family as his father. The transformation was not very difficult, for if he was the grandson of Margarita the jolly, he was also the son of Guillermina the stiff.
    And in truth, Adelina did what she could to push him in this direction, an action which on her part was suicidal. The moment Rodolfo assumed a stricter social standard, he was inevitably going to be displeased and eventually disgusted by her vulgarity. Her chance for happiness, though she did not understand it, lay precisely in keeping him lazy and easy-going: she was the ideal wife