The Good Conscience by Carlos Fuentes Page A

it?”
    â€œYes,” said Rodolfo, sighing. “ She sold it.”
    â€œIf we hadn’t come back from England, she would have sold the whole house. It’s a miracle anything was left.”
    â€œWell … she didn’t know how to play. And just then the victrola was the great novelty…”
    Asunción lifted her hands from the cold keys and with her head indicated that Jaime was listening. Languid as the sun, the boy stood with one hand on the curtain. She, she, she. He put the word away without thinking about it. With a sense of strangeness he reflected that today much was happening that he did not understand. Someday he would. “Someday I’ll understand everything,” he told himself, and he swiftly thought about the church, the ceremony of light and sacrifice, his aunt’s still young body pressed against his own. He released the curtain and with a slow step left the room.
    â€œThe point is, she wasn’t like us,” Asunción said louder. She began to play Chopin’s Impromptu, but she didn’t remember it well and had to open the score. Jaime drifted down the hall. “Are you trying to upset him?” she said as she narrowed her eyes to read the notes. “Remember what the Bible says.”
    â€œBut she’s his mother.”
    â€œNo, she isn’t, Rodolfo,” Asunción smiled acidly as her brother assumed the look of a victim. “The boy has no mother. I’m not going to let you corrupt him.”
    â€œHe will have to meet her sooner or later.”
    â€œHe will not! If you insist, I’m going to have my husband talk with you.”
    Rodolfo wanted to ignore the threat. He wanted to speak in general terms. He couldn’t go on.
    â€œAdelina is in Irapuato living very contentedly now,” said his sister. “She has the lowest sort of friends, people just like herself. She ought never to have tried to leave them. A woman who doesn’t know her place is…”
    â€œStop. Please don’t say anything else. Maybe you’re right. But try to understand me. I … I feel ashamed of myself. Yes. If I had let her see the boy just once … or if we had helped her somehow.”
    â€œDon’t be silly. She gave the child up quite willingly, didn’t she, so that her father could have a few more pesos.”
    â€œ Don Chepepón is dead now. She has a hard time.”
    â€œShe’s better off than ever.”
    â€œI don’t understand you. You talk as if she were evil. She was never evil, Asunción.”
    Night had fallen. The room filled with shadow. Rodolfo was thinking that his sister had known very well what had happened to the grand piano. She watched everything, she noticed everything, nothing could be hidden from her.
    Asunción closed the score of the Impromptu and returned to Für Elise, which she had by memory.
    â€œEnough. I advise you not to say anything about this to my husband, he will hardly be pleased to discuss it. And no more between you and me, either.”
    The gray cat came to Asunción’s feet and began to purr, arching with pleasure.
    *   *   *
    Easter Sunday. Jaime, just back from Mass, comes out the green gate and sits down on the steps with an orange in his hand. He stretches his legs along the hot stone, sucks warm juice, and watches the street. Churchgoers pass on their way to spend the day in the ecclesiastical darkness of San Roque. Servant girls with lettuce and celery wrapped in their rebozos. Girls with long hair and budding breasts who giggle and whisper hand-in-hand. Barefoot children who spread their ripe black avocado eyes and race along the street click-clacking window bars with a stick. Beggars, most of them old, some of them blind, a few crippled adolescents, who display an opaque eye, a bloody sore, a nervous spasm, a twisted foot, a paralyzed tongue: they move down the proud street with their faces turned up