The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  When it came to housework, each helped according to his needs and as desired, and repairs, painting, and the orchard and gardening, along with maintenance of the farmyard (which lay outside the building past the three large acacia trees that gave the place its name), and kitchen tasks as I have already mentioned, were shared as necessity arose among whatever volunteers turned up, Dr. Weiss included. More than once, I saw him tend to a patient as he worked in the garden or painted the adobe walls, the preservation of whose immaculate whiteness, along with the scrupulously clean rooms and corridors and the care of the farmyard and tree-lined courtyards, occupied most of the day’s labor. With regard to these communal chores, I ought to note they did not result from disciplinary impositions, but rather from the whim of the patients volunteering; this labor system that Dr. Weiss so carefully devised yet again proved his inimitable realism and unerring shrewdness. If madness is defined by the very delusions it manifests, and if in many cases the patients are free from physical pain, it is clear that its other consistent feature is unruliness: Reason, though capable of imposing its discipline even onto lightning that drops from the sky, is not enough to tame delusion. He who wishes to deal with the lunatic is wiser to appeal to his caprice rather than to his obedience. Our mad did not often follow externally dictated standards, but rather what their own delusion required, sometimes with the foreseeable consequence that the outer world, hitherto unquestionable, yielded to them. I recall an incident in 1811, when a Revolutionary official whom I would have numbered among our enemies, charged with inspecting our establishment, took an unexpected tumble from his horse during the first days of his visit—though it failed to shuffle him loose the mortal coil, as they say. He commented at the end of his stay, not inappropriately, that during his recovery at the Casa he had spent all his time trying to distinguish the madmen from the sane, to which my esteemed teacher responded—the usual twinkle in his bright blue eyes, but without receiving even the slightest smile of complicity in return—that when he passed through the streets or halls of Buenos Aires, he was frequently assaulted by the same bewilderment.

  The object of this memoir is not a detailed relation of life in Casa de Salud, but our voyage of 1804, whose scant hundred leagues were multiplied by obstacles, foreseen or unforeseen, that delayed our advance, and by natural phenomena that upset our plans, and by certain unusual episodes that led us more than once to the brink of disaster. But before I tell the story, I want to remark upon the circumstances that led to the Casa’s fall.

  In Madrid, we obtained the necessary authorizations to settle with ease, which can be explained by the fact that the Crown believed each new institution founded in the colonies helped to solidify its presence there. It is also explained by the ignorance of nearly all the Court officials regarding our area of expertise and the manner in which we thought to exercise it, even though Dr. Weiss had been partly inspired by the example of some doctors in Valencia who had practiced a more humane treatment of madness during the previous century. To this I might add the fact that we had to pay a tax because, in truth, taking into account the financial state of practically every European monarchy, it always sped proceedings along. Besides, convinced of the nonexistence of anything outside their purview, the dignitaries believed there were no madmen in America with families able to pay for someone to look after them, so in their private counsel they doubtless thought that Dr. Weiss and I were two naïfs, ready and willing to squander his fortune on a half-cocked undertaking destined for failure. But when the long white rectangle opened its doors at the feet of the three acacia trees and the patients began to flock in, local dignitaries began to take us seriously and, when word of our novel methods spread, public opinion split over their seriousness, their efficacy, and even their decency. The Church for example, which granted itself power in the colonies of which it would never dare dream in the motherland, sought to judge how patients should be treated, requiring Dr. Weiss’s inexhaustible patience and cleverness, ever-ready to overcome any difficulties. During our private deliberations, the doctor told me that, for the moment, a direct confrontation with the clergy would be unproductive and not without danger, and that the best way to fight them was to proceed with our scientific work without making concessions; but, at the same time, even when we ought to have avoided provocation, he was unwilling to renounce his ideas. When the Revolution came years later, we hoped it would also come for us and that our work would finally be recognized, but many of its supporters were no different from its enemies in terms of political, scientific, and religious views. The wars that followed did little more than exacerbate the situation: The civil war was already brewing in the wars for independence, and one might even say that the first battles of the war for independence were in fact a sort of civil war, for those killing each other were the same as those who, five or six years earlier, had been fighting together against the English. Though in truth the region had never really been calm, during wartime we often saw companies of soldiers passing through by land or water, sometimes branching off from their route to come knock at our door out of curiosity or to see a doctor, or sometimes to beg a little water or even something to eat. Most often, when they realized they had found a hospital, and especially when they discovered what kind of patients we treated, they rushed off, leaving us in peace: It is already known that madness often provokes unease, if not laughter, and, more often than not, consternation and fear.

  It was not all misunderstandings and threats in the surrounding world, and I must recall that in the fourteen years of Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud, a group of friends and advocates, hailing from all social classes and political factions—including dignitaries of the successive governments, scientists, and even members of the clergy—backed our expertise in every way. A good part of our madmen’s families, if only so they would not have them reappear suddenly in their houses one day if our institution closed, always paid on time, as each without exception formed part of the moneyed classes that, whatever faction they belonged to, were the only ones who granted themselves the right to govern, using their influence however they could to ensure we were not bothered. But on several occasions, grudges, rivalries, and conflicts of interest nearly brought us to ruin. When the wars of independence began, the revolutionaries accused us of being royalists, and the royalists, of being revolutionaries. As the Crown had authorized our settlement, the criollo revolutionaries accused us of espionage, and a few even expected us only to admit foreign patients to the Casa from families supporting the Revolutionary cause. The most ridiculous thing about that situation was that Dr. Weiss and I had always been avowed revolutionaries—he had been in the streets of Paris in ninety-three—but as we were forced to conceal this during the Spanish Viceroyalty in order to survive, the revolutionaries claimed we chose to defend their cause out of opportunism or, even worse, in order to more effectively carry out our supposed duty as spies. What followed was what follows in all revolutions, really, which is to say, the leaders were in one small group made up of die-hard revolutionaries, who always lose in the end, while the rest was comprised of one part influential men from the previous government, changing sides as they went along, and one part those neither with nor against them, who simply seek to gain advantage from the unforeseen circumstances that brought them to power. Aside from the families who had entrusted one of their own to us and from certain scientists who were genuinely interested in our work, no one understood what it was we were doing, and so we suffered the eternal scourge that threatens those who think, or those who mistrust a man who denies what he does not understand.

  I have been told that these days (Roughly 1835 by my calculations. Note, M. Soldi) they go slitting throats all across the land; in my day it was the firing squad that seemed to be the fashion. An unforeseen ally saved us from this painful and, in short, all-too degrading end: the English consul, who considered us—you will pardon me for taking the liberty in my account of attributing to a diplomat, and an Englishman no less, the faculty of thought—a co
uple of charlatans, even suspected, with just cause on his part, that in reality Dr. Weiss and I, who were often in the habit of crossing him at social gatherings, were having our fill of laughs at his expense. Shortly after resettling in Amsterdam, the doctor wrote to me: I have arrived here safe and sound again in Europe, and all thanks to Mister Dickson. The poor man, torn between his hatred of Spain (for commercial reasons) and his hatred of all that is revolutionary (his national idiosyncrasy), he finds himself ever the servant of two masters, lacking sympathy for either. And all the same, his sense of honor, lacking any hold on reality, has saved our lives. I trust I do not offend anyone by explaining, twenty years later, the allusions contained in the doctor’s letter.

  For several months, a Chilean youth had been interned in the Casa, sick with melancholia, his father having been executed on the charge of high treason in Valparaíso for taking up the Spanish cause. A government spy informed a military officer in Buenos Aires about the Chilean youth’s presence at Las Tres Acacias, and the officer held that the doctor and I kept the young man at the Casa on the pretext of his illness to protect him, and that he was not actually sick but was rather a fugitive, which proved, according to the officer, that we were spies for the King of Spain, as some suspected. The young man was seriously ill, seized with the deepest melancholy, and naturally we refused to surrender him. But when the military emissaries withdrew, Dr. Weiss, looking concerned, explained to me that he, like the officer, knew the Chilean youth was no more than a pretext and that the real reason was the officer’s unspoken suspicion that his wife was cuckolding him with the doctor: A libelous suspicion, sighed the doctor, for Mercedes and I haven’t seen each other for six months. So it went that my dear teacher’s inexplicable taste for married women nearly brought us before the firing squad.

  Two or three days later, they arrested us and threatened the staff into departing for their homes. A couple of men, nobly concerned for the patients, who returned secretly to the Casa, were flogged, staked, and forcibly conscripted into the army. The building was brutally and deliberately looted and smashed as the patients fled in terror. The doctor and I were imprisoned in the jealous officer’s camp for three weeks until they came for us one day at dawn and, joking and saying they were going to shoot us, brought us out to the countryside; having given us a beating, they mounted us bareback, half-dressed, on a single horse—I had the reins—and set us free.

  In Buenos Aires, the doctor sought redress from the government for the officer’s unforgivable conduct, and that was how we uncovered a fact more horrible than our adventure: Despite his illness, the Chilean youth had been arrested on the soldier’s orders, and was shot the next day on the charge, no less ignominious than it was false, of treason. We were heaved about by anger and pain, staggering between anxiety and revenge, but the most important thing was to search for the patients the marauders had set loose. So with the help of our protectors, we formed a party and went out into the vastness of the plains to find them. Faithful Osuna, untouched by the years, guided us through that featureless expanse—like him, ever the same—in which he alone was able to perceive the details and nuances. But though we searched day and night for weeks, we did not see a single trace of the patients. Many years later, until the day of his death, in fact, the doctor and I continued to speculate in our letters about possible explanations for this complete and sudden disappearance.

  For the first time I saw the doctor’s features reflect a passion previously unknown in him: hatred, and a feeling that saddened me all the more: remorse. Some days, he wandered, somber and silent, amid the wild disorder that the marauding soldiers had left in the Casa: the trampled orchard and garden, plants torn up by the roots, broken glass, furniture hacked into pieces, scorched books with the pages ripped out, papers everywhere. The most fruitful years of our lives had just been senselessly laid to waste by the savagery that, to hide its unspeakable instincts, thought to call itself law and order. Of the boarders we took in at the white Casa of Dr. Weiss, it must also be noted that, even when their own families had disowned them, none of the patients, abandoned by reason and all as they were, took part in these shameful acts. Perhaps this proves an argument I had heard the doctor make to himself many times: Reason does not always express the best of humanity.

  We slept in the ruins that night, and the following day we resettled in Buenos Aires with what we were able to salvage from the disaster: some books, five or six pages of an herbarium, the bust of Galen which by some miracle had remained intact. But the doctor’s bottomless sorrow, though it seemed to intensify, did not last for long; three or four days later a new determination, so intense it inspired a little dread in me, appeared on his face. When he decided to put this determination into practice, a grim but solemn spark of satisfaction arose in his gaze. In the back of a tavern one night, inspired by the wine, he explained his plan to me: He would challenge the officer to a duel. The doctor explained his crazy idea, which was essentially a suicide mission, with his customary logical clarity, and was so pleased with the rational evidence that he seemed to have forgotten his many years of medical practice, during which his principal task had been to patiently and insightfully dismantle the hallucinatory fallacies of the patients—patients who were, just as the doctor was now, incapable of seeing for themselves their preposterous concatenations. According to the doctor, the officer would not pursue us, which no doubt was true, and we had no alternatives but flight or confrontation. Yet it was clear we could not go searching for him in his encampment, where his troops’ superior numbers were an insurmountable obstacle, nor could we kill him in the street, nor report him to the authorities, which he was a part of and over whom he held considerable sway. Nor were we able to lay an ambush (I am merely listing the options, each one more absurd than the last, that the doctor was proposing). According to him, offending the officer before witnesses and forcing him to fight a duel provided two fundamental advantages: First, the incident would spread word of the officer’s barbarity, the Casa’s destruction, the shooting of the Chilean youth, and dispersal of the patients, to the public and even to the entire civilized world, and, second (this he voiced with the slightly childish pride of one who has just constructed a flawless syllogism), dueling was the only option that allowed a distant hope of escaping the venture with our lives. At the same time, the provocation would set all responsibility on his shoulders, leaving me free from reprisal. (This gentle concern for my safety was of course a tacit confession of the entire conflict’s wanton origins.)

  The suicidal plan he had just revealed seemed so unassailable to the doctor that, rubbing his hands together, he told me with his usual lack of hypocrisy that a stroll to the brothel would ease his mind, and he left me in the dark and muddy street, terrified of what was to come. Flight seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the most sensible of solutions. It is true that the doctor was not one of those who, on the pretext of study, neglected to maintain his body, but he was not a young man either, and further, his adversary, as an officer, was a true instrument of death. There was no mistaking the outcome of that unequal match. But the satisfied glint in Dr. Weiss’s gaze robbed me of any inclination to dissuade him.

  Ideas as wild as his began to hound me. Nothing stimulates delirium more than being faced with a situation for which one is unprepared; unfathomable as the minuet for the savage or waste for the miser, so were tyrannical power and violence for us, men of libraries and lecture halls. It occurred to me that I could run ahead of the doctor and goad the officer into a duel myself, where my youth might accord me a greater prospect of victory; even if it were to cost me my life, to this very day I am certain that no one would have been able to prevent my teacher, in turn, from provoking that source of all our woes, and that my sacrifice would have been in vain. Convincing him to flee would surely have been an exhausting endeavor, but, more importantly, a useless one: Only one such as me, who knows the elegant adaptability of the doctor’s mind, might distinguish his determination from mere pighead
edness. Once he made a decision it was unlikely, if not impossible, for anyone or anything to stop him from setting it in motion. Feeling my way through the muddy streets of Buenos Aires, many solutions, just as half-formed and impossible, struck me and seemed workable for a few seconds until they revealed their absurdity and, with the same fervor that my mind had fleetingly built them, they crumbled. Only when I retired to the peace of my room and, more importantly, to a horizontal position, and the weariness of the day began to fade, did my ideas become clearer, allowing me to conceive of the solution that, as the least fantastical, was the most sensible: going to talk to the officer’s wife.