The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  My stroll had been too early, for it was not yet eight-thirty when I returned to the Parra house, and the family had just awoken. We arranged ourselves, Señor Parra and I, in a large room next to the kitchen, which doubtless served as a dining room on ordinary days, and a negro youth prepared us mate and brought us warm cakes from the kitchen. The night before, we had eaten in a slightly more luxurious dining room, reserved for special occasions, but in the modest room where we took breakfast, proximity to the kitchen made the air warmer and more agreeable, as the adjoining stoves were nearly always lit in the wintertime. We had barely touched on the subject of his son, Prudencio, when Señor Parra openly and meekly offered himself up to my questions.

  Young Prudencio Parra, just turned twenty-three, had fallen into a deep stupor for some months, a state that, in truth, was the culmination of a series of attacks, each one proving graver over time. Young Prudencio had acted strangely since puberty, but only in the last two or three years might his behavior be considered a state of derangement. What had been mere peculiarities at first were degenerating little by little into madness. At thirteen or fourteen, he spent whole days shut away in his bedroom filling notebook after notebook with “moral reflections” (as he called them) only to build an enormous bonfire in the basement of the house a few months later, using those and other papers blackened with his near-illegible handwriting, declaring that from that day forth he would wholeheartedly dedicate himself to good works; but those changes in humor, however, had not unsettled the family, as they attributed them to the sudden but short-lived excesses of passion that are unique to youth. The tendency toward shifting moods seemed, for its part, inherent to his temperament; since early childhood, these abrupt changes had been observed not only by the family, but also by the nurses—who, slaves or not, were practically part of the family—and nobody took it seriously, to the point that the young man’s instabilities had become part of the household’s tradition of comic anecdotes. But since eighteen or so, things had grown more serious, and the gravity of the situation was evident. His bouts of melancholy were becoming more frequent and more acute. Several doctors, from the city or passing through, had examined him and prescribed him treatment, with no visible result. Señor Parra was a sensible enough man not to believe the rumors of demonic possession or witchcraft that raced through the city, and, not exactly among the less affluent strata of the population, but he had scruple enough not to hide them and even conveyed all the details to me, allowing me to prove once more how the powers of science might save mankind—not just those living in faraway regions of the planet, but also in supposedly enlightened European empires—from the ignorance and pain, for superstition and obscurantism had added defamation and slander to the case of young Prudencio, as if his grievous illness was not enough. According to Señor Parra, Prudencio was seized by such a frenzy for philosophical study that he read day and night, and when he’d exhausted the local libraries, which were few and sparse, he would order books from Córdoba, Buenos Aires, or Europe, so desirous of receiving them that, while he waited, he would go to the port every day to ask at the arriving ships if they had his books. But after a time a sort of despondency overtook him, and what once had been sheer enthusiasm, energy, and jubilation, turned to reluctance, dejection, sighs. He began to grumble that nature had not granted him the faculties required to study science and philosophy, and that only a foolish and overweening pride had made him err, comparing himself to the great geniuses, humanity’s benefactors like Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Voltaire. As I inferred from Señor Parra’s tale, the subject of his ineptitude for study tormented Prudencio for many months, and bit by bit he attributed to this supposed ineptitude a series of irreparable wrongs he believed he had committed, such that after a time he began to think himself responsible for great troubles—or mere mishaps—in the city, as well as those he learned of from the gazettes arriving from Buenos Aires or the Court. When that undue sense of duty did not reduce him to a weeks-long prostration, during which he would not leave his room, or even his bed, for anything, it would cause him spells of fever, during which it seemed by all means necessary that he act immediately to prevent certain catastrophes, though it was always impossible to get a further explanation. Several times, according to Señor Parra, he’d searched for ragged and dirty garments, preferring those that had belonged to slaves but were in such a state that even the slaves no longer used them, and, bare-headed and barefoot, had taken to the streets to read on the corners some supposedly philosophical tract that he himself had incomprehensibly drawn up. According to Señor Parra, Prudencio’s handwriting had changed completely and his minute and firmly-applied adolescent script—unreadable even then—had transformed into a monumental, disjointed one, so loose, overblown, and shaky that no more than twenty or thirty words fit into a notebook. People generally took pity on him and brought him back to the house, but once a few ill-favored sorts, vagrants who roamed the outskirts, had taken him to amuse themselves at his expense. They abandoned him afterward in the middle of a field where he had wandered all night; the search party just managed to find him the following day. Señor Parra told me that when they found him, Prudencio hadn’t seemed at all upset by the humiliations visited upon him; rather, it was the vagabonds’ lot that troubled him, and he was insistent, exciting himself almost to tears, about the poverty that had forced them to the margins of society. A week later, when the police captured two members of the band who had returned to the city thinking they would not be recognized by more than a few residents, they got a few good lashes and were tied to stakes in a little field near the edge of town, where Prudencio went to see them and begged the authorities to release them. With time, those fits would pass, and a sadness overtook him, heavier each time. (Señor Parra explained to me that during that period Prudencio’s handwriting would change back, shrinking once more, but so exaggeratedly that it became illegible. What’s more, from then on he left off writing altogether. So said Señor Parra.)

  He did not wash or dress, and sometimes did not even get out of bed, and a sort of apathy took hold of him; despite his peculiarities, he’d been very affectionate since boyhood, not only with family members, but also with neighbors, the slaves, and even strangers, to the point that sometimes his demonstrations proved too much and annoyed certain people who were only passing through the house—but that affection had gone, as if the real world where he had lived until that time was being replaced by another where everything was gray and strange. Troubles, illnesses, and even the deaths of those who had previously been very dear to him yielded not a single sentiment or emotion, and if from time to time his breathing and occasional moans betrayed his undeniable suffering, it was impossible to know what caused it. It became clear, though, that the causes were not external, but lay rather in a few small, painful thoughts that seemed to be unchanging and constantly pondered. Señor Parra had to begin forcing Prudencio out of bed, to dress, to eat, to take a walk, or at least go out to the gallery or the courtyard, especially when the weather was fair, and though he protested at first, in the end, meekly, he would let himself be led away. His eloquence, which he employed during bouts of fever to try to convince his fellow men that a hazy but imminent catastrophe was brewing, began to wane, and his impassioned speeches became more incoherent and lacked conviction. Gestures and signs once accompanied them for emphasis and to suggest, especially, a secret that he tried in his passion to pass on to his fellows without revealing it completely, but little by little his rants broke down, and exclamations were replaced by halting and unfinished sentences, joining the stiffness of his expression and the feeble immobility of his limbs. In the end, he would only open his mouth to answer, and only in monosyllables, a question he had been asked. When from time to time he made an effort to give a slightly more detailed response, he would form two or three confused and faltering sentences, uttered weakly as if all energy had abandoned him. And in recent months, his prostration had been total, but a curious detail of his behavior, stra
nge as it was to say the least, had come to light: He had closed his left hand in a fist and held it clenched tightly ever since. When asked the reason for his gesture, he would turn his head and press his lips together to make it clear that he was unwilling to answer, and the few times several family members tried to make him open his fist to see what would happen, at times even just for sport, he had resisted so frantically that his relatives had stopped out of pity and left him in peace. One day, Señor Parra noticed that Prudencio’s hand was bleeding; it dawned on him that all that time, his son’s fingernails had continued to grow, digging into the soft flesh of his palm, so he really did have to make him open the fist to cut his nails and care for his wounds. According to Señor Parra, young Prudencio had begun to howl and thrash about on the floor, trying to stop them from opening his fist, making such a racket that the neighbors came running, believing a crime had been committed in the house. Despite young Prudencio’s extreme weakness from his prostration and loss of appetite, his resistance was so great that they needed three or four strong men to hold him down, open his fist, and keep the hand open while they clipped his nails and tended to his cuts, which had become infected. For the length of the operation, Prudencio howled or whimpered with such a look of terror that the men pitied him, but many of those present noticed Prudencio peering nervously up at the room’s ceiling and walls as if he feared they would come down on him. The whole scene had reminded Señor Parra of a time when he (Señor Parra) was a boy, awoken from a hideous nightmare screaming and crying, and as the faces of his family inclined solicitously over him and tried to calm him with words, caresses, and meaningless gestures, he had sensed that, despite how close their bodies seemed, they were in two different worlds: they, in the unreal world of appearances and he, in the true, real one that he saw in his nightmare. According to Señor Parra, his son finally seemed to quiet somewhat, and though his sobs came further and further apart, the whimpering continued, broken by an occasional breath. Lying on the bed, his father and two slaves pinning him firmly while the doctor tended to his wounds, Prudencio signaled for them to free his right hand. When he got what he wanted, he drew it near, a little shyly, to the injury in such a way that when he was almost close enough to obstruct the doctor’s work, he motioned over the wounded hand with the healthy one as if snatching an insect from flight, and closed his right fist around it, which seemed to calm him completely. While the bandages on his left hand remained, according to Señor Parra, Prudencio kept the right fist closed, but when they were removed few days later, he changed back to the left hand. Since then, he agreed to open the fist every ten to fifteen days for his nails to be cut, but before he opened it, he would carry out the strange operation with the other hand, snatching something from flight that he apparently would not allow to escape for anything in the world. Señor Parra explained to me that his son undertook this curious procedure with the absolute and utmost care, and that every time he watched him do so confirmed that it was carried out with the devotion of a ritual.

  Before leading me to his son’s room, Señor Parra, answering a query of mine, told me of the treatments prescribed by the previous doctors who had examined Prudencio, none of which yielded the slightest result. The two doctors, chapter-certified for ongoing practice in the city, had treated him in the typical fashion, but barely saw him on their visits now, declaring him incurable. Another two or three doctors who were passing through the city were consulted, and one of them had recommended baths in the Salado River, declaring the quality of its water and especially of its clay most advisable in the treatment of melancholia. Señor Parra told me that although Prudencio was terrified to plunge into the river, he readily consented to being thoroughly coated with the banks’ reddish mud and would sprawl in the sun to dry, to the point that it was almost always a struggle to remove the layer of crusted clay that covered him. The previous summer, however, his stupor had become so serious that it had been impossible to take him from his room and bring him to the riverbank.

  Señor Parra led me to his son’s room. A smell of enclosure, of strange substances mixed and marinated—of abandonment—pervaded despite the order that reigned within the soberly furnished bedroom, overheated by the brazier installed by the window to be burnt all night. Young Prudencio was propped up in bed, under blankets, sunk into the shadows, and his head, topped with a white nightcap, lolled on a heap of pillows. Although its occupant’s eyes were closed, the bed looked as though it had just been made, but Señor Parra explained to me that the young man remained completely immobile as he slept, so in the morning the bed always gave the impression of being untouched. Prudencio’s face had a jaundiced appearance, especially striking beneath the sparse beard that covered his chin and jaw, and also because of his severely narrow features. A sort of vertical crease that ran from cheekbone almost to jaw cut his left cheek in two, while the right cheek sunk into an enormous cleft that took it up entirely, like the remains of a territory following a landslide. Despite his youth, his skin was wrinkled like worn leather, stretched across his cheekbones so the contours took on a cartilaginous sheen. But his forehead in particular drew the attention, crisscrossed with deep horizontal folds, and on his brow a horseshoe-shaped crease, as if a tiny brand had been embedded in his flesh, joined the two eyebrows with a deep furrow. Beneath the nightcap, tufts of hair bunched long and stiff against the pillow, further accentuating the thinness of his face. For some mysterious reason, the points of two white bits of cloth emerged from his ears, stuffed in the openings. Though his eyes were closed, the suffering was plain on his face, from the deep wrinkles of course, but also from his heavy eyelids and gaping mouth. It was a bottomless pain and, truthfully, rather a theatrical one, as though his expressions were exaggerated to make it plainer, with the effect of adding decades of dejection, adversity, and affliction to his mere twenty-three years. Despite his half-closed eyes, it was hard to know if he was sleeping or pretending to sleep, but he lay so still that it seemed genuine and, along with his yellowed pallor, gave him the look of a cadaver. But when I leaned down to draw back the blankets and examine the rest of his body, he slowly drew his eyelids up, in stages, one might say, and let his gaze slip indifferently over me, landing on some unknown spot between the bed and door. I was surprised to discover he was not as thin as I had expected, at least if the knee-length white nightgown did not mislead me, but his torso seemed fleshier than his face, and his calves—ending in enormous feet, gently resting one beside the other, with plump, widely-spaced toes—did not seem thin or fragile. His right arm, open-handed, lay along the length of his body, but the left fist, resting on his abdomen, was closed so tightly that the effort further whitened the yellowish skin of his protuberant knuckles. The general softness of his body; his ravaged face; the cottony neglect of his limbs; the passivity of his great, motionless feet; his lost gaze and suffering expression—it all contrasted with the determination of the closed fist where all the body’s energies seemed to gather, and thus it was plain to see that this gesture, which, to many, represented nothing more than an irrational and chimeric stubbornness, was to me a matter of life or death that I, in that moment, would have been crazy to ignore. I know, too, that only insanity dares to render those limits of thought that good sense, for the sake of remaining sensible, often prefers to ignore—that it drives the mad to be detached, stubborn, beyond recovery. Something horrifyingly serious seemed to depend on that hand, and the painful determination of his gesture made me believe that in the event that his concentration waned and his tension slackened, letting the hand relax, weak once more, an apocalyptic wind would start to blow, dragging all the universe in its wake. I studied his body for a few seconds without perceiving the slightest movement; once open, his eyes did not close, once more demonstrating my teacher’s frequent observation, namely that the mentally ill are able to do things with their bodies that are forbidden to the sane; to verify more thoroughly, I concentrated on detecting external signs of respiratory activity, such as the soft sound of exha
lation and inhalation or thoracic expansion and contraction, but after several seconds I was forced to admit that utter silence reigned in the room and his body stayed perfectly motionless. Paradoxically, from that immobility emanated not a sense of death, but rather an impression of struggle, of adversarial forces in perpetual conflict that had chosen that boy’s body and soul as their battlefield. His fixed and slitted eyes, his body’s utter stillness, and the fist held tight against his abdomen gave the impression that all his interest concentrated on some remote, internal region where said decisive battle was taking place, to capture even the tiniest details of that faraway tumult.