The Good Conscience by Carlos Fuentes

scent has been with him continuously since the afternoon his son spoke of her, and made his skin remember her.
    The master bedroom. A yellow moth flutters and Asunción wakes with her mouth open and her hands pressed to her almost virginal nipples. Very cautiously, for she does not want to make any noise, she opens the mosquito netting and tiptoes to the full-length mirror. There she observes herself in the moonlight, drowsy but erect, with her hair falling to her waist and her cheeks flushed by her hot dreams. She tells herself that she is still young and pretty. She unbuttons her gown and displays the round firm breasts which have hardly been touched by a man. No baby has ever sucked there. She does not know why she crosses her arms inside the gown and swells out her stomach and squeezes it. She turns her back on the mirror and looks at the sleeping body of Jorge Balcárcel. No one hears her soft moan. No one sees the hopeless caresses she gives her breasts and belly. She remembers the boy sleeping in the next room. Suddenly she burns with desire to run and see him.
    Gray dawn rises from the stones of the patio. The boy, wet from maturbation, forces his chin down into the mattress and with all his strength closes his painful eyes, squeezes his fists, and repeats again and again: And lead me not into temptation. Shame and guilt rise up through him from the soles of his feet. He feels that his body is black sand. He sits, then kneels and spreads his arms cross-like. But the words will not come now, and after a moment his dramatic posture seems ridiculous. He gets up and drags the bed away from the wall out into the middle of the room.
    The noise of Jaime’s bed moving awakens Uncle Balcárcel with a grunt. The mosquito net lies across his face; he removes it and opens his eyes and looks at sleeping Asunción. What the devil racket is his nephew making at this hour of the morning? He sighs and rubs his unshaven face. He thinks about Jaime’s future. Various people have warned him about the peasant schoolmate who has become Jaime’s inseparable companion. Boys must be protected against their inexperience, Balcárcel tells himself. Life nowadays is full of dangers. He looks for the copper cuspidor beside the bed to spit out the thick morning phlegm. The boy must be specially safeguarded because he is necessary for tranquility in the home; he is everything that he himself—Balcárcel—had not been able to give Asunción. Now he rubs his hair and feels the roughness of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Yes: the son who because he is not really theirs must be watched over and chained to them more forcefully than if he had sprung from Asunción’s barren womb.
    But when Balcárcel lets his head fall back against the pillow and disposes himself to sleep placidly again, he does not deceive himself, he freely confesses that the idea of an adolescent, a boy coming to be a man, fills him with disgust. A new sexuality. He cannot support that thought, nor the idea of young love. He is caught suddenly, this most upright man of business, with a series of indecent visions which he wishes and does not wish to disrupt. Then Asunción moves on the bed beside him, opens her eyes and closes her mouth.
    â€œAre you awake?” she says presently.
    â€œIt’s almost six,” her husband responds, rubbing his palm over his stubbled chin.
    The woman sits on the edge of the bed and feels her feet into her red slippers. Blue light begins to sift across the room. She covers herself with a shawl and smells the stuffy odors of the night. She goes out onto the corridor that circles the patio, and descends the stone stairs, breathing in the morning. She raps on the windows of the servants’ rooms. Her hands rise and she hastily buttons her gown to the throat.
    *   *   *
    Aunt and nephew have returned from morning Mass at San Roque. The first half of the pews were almost empty,