The Good Conscience by Carlos Fuentes Read Free Book Online Page A

questions. That’s enough now. We’ll go to the lake, and…”
    â€œIf we have another Revolution, I won’t leave you alone.”
    â€œI know you won’t. Don’t think any more about it. Your grandmother was a very strong-willed woman, and your aunt and uncle … that is, Don Jorge and your Mamá Asunción … well, they were young and they had a right to a better life than was possible here then. And…”
    The boy squeezed his father’s hand and was silent.
    *   *   *
    Holy Friday. He was thirteen now. They were watching the Three Falls at the Compañía Church. Tiny below the great high dome, squeezed against the rose-colored wall by the press of the crowd, the boy nailed his eyes on the figure of Christ, the wild bristly black hair, the thorn scratched forehead. Suddenly he found himself understanding for the first time that what his Uncle Balcárcel said was not true. He was sure that the Man represented by that sad image had never been unbalanced; but Uncle Balcárcel, if he had known Him, would certainly have called Him so.
    His feeling deepened. He could not have expressed it in words, it was too fluid, too warm, too overpowering. The Cross advanced slowly and irresistibly carried upon the powerful arms of brown ragged Indians. Hands stretched trying to touch it: concentrated life enamated like heat. It was as if the Indians were trying to lose themselves in touching the image. It was as if they wanted their faith not to give them something, but to lead them to renunciation. Their piety was not a way of life but a road out of life. They wanted to lose themselves in the anonymity of this moment, giving up everything past and future.
    Carried high, the black-skinned Jesus was Lord of them all, but not with hope. The Indian’s peasant faces showed a secret desire to go back and seize what had once been possessed and then lost. There was also a challenge. Only Indians held the image; Creoles and meztizos remained on the sidewalks, on balconies, looking on with an air of condescension, as if they were receiving what had been specially brought for them. And this in a mysterious way exalted the faith and confidence of the men whose arms carried the Cross. This was really their fiesta; today they were the protagonists and, united with the venerated image, the center of the ceremony. Silently they clamored their triumph.
    Jaime watched and felt something new. The intense pigments of the fiesta clouded his thought, but suddenly, behind the glitter and the crowd, something formed that joined him to the image on the Cross. The people and the noise went away and he and Christ were facing each other, alone together.
    Then his uncle’s words echoed saying that mortality was identical for everyone, that the rules of Christian conduct were the same for all, for women as for men, for children as for adults, for the poor as for the rich; it made no difference what a man was himself and alone. And now Christ and Jaime Ceballos were no longer soul to soul; Christ had returned to the multitude. Squeezed against the wall by the crowd, Jaime burned to recapture that look that had been only for him, that no one else could see or understand.
    A purple cowl fell over the dark image. The crowd dispersed.
    Jaime went to the church every day the following week to see if the cowl had been removed. He felt deeply that the figure of Christ held a secret reserved only for him. His prayers that week were an effort to learn the secret.
    *   *   *
    Good Friday he walked with his father in the procession. He realized later that it was then, staring again at the image of the victimized God, that he had for the first time felt himself a person, an individual, different not only from everyone in his family but from everyone in the world. During the frugal dinner that evening—evening of mourning underlined by the dark clothing his father and aunt