The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  When we left the bedroom, Señor Parra looked at me searchingly, trying to ascertain my opinion of his son’s condition, and I responded in all sincerity: As experience had shown that fits of stupor never lasted overly long, and as at first glance young Prudencio’s physical condition did not appear to have deteriorated, he might hope to improve somewhat in the coming months. (In fact, it happened that he recovered when we embarked on the journey to Casa de Salud; almost in the very moment we left the city, our patient came out of his stupor. Later on, I will record his strange evolution in detail.)

  Señor Parra showed me his house, as he had not been able to the previous night owing to the lateness of my arrival, and I, out of discretion, had refrained from roaming that morning while the masters slept. The classical rows of rooms that opened out onto galleries, forming square courtyards—the slaves slept in the back rooms—held not a single surprise for me, but out behind them was a well-tended, if cold-ravaged, garden and a fine nursery of fruit trees, laden with mandarins, oranges, lemons. As we talked, we ate a few mandarins, sweet and icy cold, at the foot of the tree, and when we went back inside, I was surprised by something that the house’s conventional construction had been unable to give me: I stepped into one of the rooms next to the dining room, tastefully furnished and endowed with an abundant library. Several local landscapes, executed by an able but uninspired hand, adorned the walls, and a bust of Voltaire observed us from a shelf. I suddenly realized that I was lucky to be staying at the house of a fashionable and illustrious family, a most rare situation in those remote provinces at that time. (The situation has not, in fact, improved. Note, M. Soldi.) Señor Parra’s discretion, not to mention his shyness, prevented him from revealing too much (and perhaps also my reputation as Dr. Weiss’s collaborator and having studied in Europe), but over the weeks I was forced to tarry, I was able to learn of his lively and sensible ideas and the agreeable tenor that prevailed within his family, who were truly saddened by young Prudencio’s illness. The paintings in the library were by Señor Parra, which, when I found out, caused me to judge them more favorably—I do not know if this was because they had been executed by an amateur who had never undertaken to study painting, or out of affection for the artist and his family. Señor Parra’s numerous businesses, which had allowed him to amass a considerable fortune, did not prevent him from cultivating himself as well as his orchard and garden, and his genuine modesty was unjustified if one takes into account the soundness of his general opinions—a rare trait in a man of means—as it had already been made possible for me to note more than once, by observing frequently on two continents, that the rich hold a high opinion of themselves and are, by a mysterious transposition, convinced that their skill at winning money allows them to hold forth topics of which they are ignorant, whether artistic, political, or philosophical.

  While Señor Parra went to carry out his duties, I went to the barracks to see if my traveling companions had settled in. The soldiers, accustomed to military life, had already melted in with the rest of the troops—perhaps too lofty a name for that handful of men, poorly-armed and practically in rags—but Osuna was in a foul mood and claimed not to have slept all night from the racket and constant bustle that reigned in the block. What they called “the block” was an old brick-and-adobe building, in fairly poor repair but large enough to permit some forty men to spread out their nicked, scuffed equipment on the hard-packed floor and kip down at night. Special cases, like sick men or deserters, I would learn later, were dispatched to the hospital or the jail, which were located in a slightly larger building perhaps a hundred meters from the block. Osuna’s discontent seemed justified because the accommodations were of the worst sort, but, visiting it some time later, I saw that our guide’s rather special character might have caused him to exaggerate the reasons for his protest without realizing it. It ought to be clear to my future readers, should ever I have them, that this observation does not denigrate Osuna’s many and excellent qualities in any way, as his loyalty, matchless efficiency, intelligence, common sense, and self-denial overshadowed those others. And yet, I do not know whether due to professional bias or something else, it is impossible for me not to speculate about personality traits that motivate the opinions and actions of those I consort with beyond the reasons they themselves might offer, which are likely true enough. Osuna was thirty-five at the time and already knew the vast plain minutely, out to its farthest corners, and he had turned his irrefutable knowledge of everything related to it into a profitable but unsteady situation, perhaps familiar to the sage or the artist. Like Osuna or other desert-experts of his kind, the wise man or the artist must frequently deal with those who may benefit from their practice but are unable to properly appreciate it. Leaving aside the fact that the others did not stop to consider the sacrifices made to acquire that knowledge—and in Osuna’s case that knowledge constituted a true mastery of the unseen—it could leave him in fairly tight situations. These included dealing with superiors who might fail to give him the respect he deserved, merely taking advantage of his knowledge, or, might instead form an excessive regard for him, giving him special treatment that cut him off from the soldiers and men of similar means. Because of the many travails that gave rise to his knowledge, Osuna had acquired a particular character that made him feel darkly different from the rest, separating himself from them and concentrating, like a great ascetic, on the many details of the outer world. Over the years I dealt with him, I noticed that he was at ease only in the desert. What astonished me about him was seeing, when we made camp at some outpost and he was tempted by liquor, how the impassive façade began to crack on his sharp, dark face, how his small, slanting eyes sparkled, rapid and ever-changing, betraying the passions he hid so well during the day: vanity, arrogance even, regarding his position; jealousy that kept him from admitting to himself that there might be some other worthy guide on the plain; his efforts, otherwise so clumsy, to always be the center of attention; his air of superiority as he listened to and observed the other gauchos, soldiers, et cetera, who shared a bit of roast with the travelers in the plain’s empty night. But much more astonishing to me was to see him decisively mount his horse the next morning, fresh and ready; laconic, energetic, forbidding his face from revealing a single emotion, a single sentiment—as opposed to some hours earlier—as if it was not his will to pick up the road again, proceeding thanks to the thousand messages only he could read that reality sent to him at every step. So every time Osuna complained of something to me and I proposed to rectify the situation, he would respond that it wasn’t worth it. My hearing his complaints, it seemed, was enough.

  The length of our stay in the city depended on two patients, one who hailed from Asunción in Paraguay and the other from Córdoba, joining the other two in the city, young Prudencio Parra and a nun who, as the Mother Superior informed us by letter, had fallen into madness after being violated in the convent garden. The man was in jail and the nun remained in the convent, but her constant agitation convinced the local religious authorities to appeal to Dr. Weiss to resolve the problem. In recent months, a copious exchange of letters had flown between Las Tres Acacias and the four patients’ families to arrive at an agreement about the conditions of transport, admission, treatment, fees, et cetera, and those lengthy negotiations had prompted our arrival in the city where, once the four patients had been gathered along with the guards and all that was necessary for the voyage, the caravan would depart. At first we had planned to undertake the voyage by water, but the special cargo we had to transport dissuaded the few Italian sailors whose ships provided the accommodations necessary to do so. Besides, we were reluctant about transferring the mad on the waterways because, unless we kept them locked in the hold the entire time, the wild river might prove a danger to the patients. Finally, with the families’ explicit consent, and as the result of negotiations carried out personally by Dr. Weiss, we adopted the solution of a land voyage, never thinking for an instant that, after weeks of swelling hour by
hour, the river whose company we rejected would come for us, rising up of its own accord to impose its harsh rule.

  For the patients’ comfort, we had rented five covered wagons of the sort travelers use to pass over the dangerous roads of that vast territory, the trade routes from Buenos Aires to Chile, on the other side of the mountains. Those carriages were pulled not by a pair of oxen like cargo wagons but rather by horses, and even boasted a door and windows, fixed up inside like little enclosures that were at once bedroom and living room, of the most cramped and rudimentary sort, of course, but with the necessary comforts to endure the interminable desert crossing, and above all to allow for (more or less) reasonable sleep at every stop on the way. Four of the wagons were intended for the patients and the fifth went to me, although I would have made do with a tent to share in the luck of the troops who would accompany us. The wagons all belonged to the same owner, a tradesman from Buenos Aires who did business in the Tucumán province, Córdoba, and Mendoza; in various Chilean cities; and with everyone in the littoral, where he had to compete with river transport; to Asunción in Paraguay, where his family had originated. The rental conditions were quite favorable because one of the patients belonged to the owner’s family. Part of the escort would leave from the city, Santa Fé, meeting us halfway down the road between Asunción and Buenos Aires, and as the road from Córdoba also passed close by, that city was the logical meeting point. We calculated that the trip to Casa de Salud would take some fifteen days, already trying not to force the march too much so as not to overtire our patients, but the various obstacles that arose and the grave circumstances that turned us from our course, that blocked our way and even forced a retreat, multiplied the duration nearly threefold.

  That very afternoon I sent a message to the convent announcing my arrival for the following day. The Mother Superior, a severe-looking woman in her fifties, received me at eleven in the morning in a clean and frigid room, and from the first sentences we exchanged I realized that my profession caused her deep discomfort, but that the case of Sister Teresita, the nun Dr. Weiss was to look after, appeared even worse than before, and would doubtless bring them no few problems, as they would not otherwise deign to resort to us. In the course of the conversation, however, I learned that the order to engage Dr. Weiss’s services had come from Buenos Aires. During my interview with the Mother Superior, I was unable to stop smiling to myself, in the face of further proof that madness, simply by its presence, disrupts and even destroys the endeavors, hierarchies, and principles of the people we deem sane. The Mother wanted to extract an absurd, explicit promise of discretion on my part, and to her barely pertinent and almost offensive insistence, I said coldly that an explicit promise in that particular case would be superfluous, as discretion, since Hippocrates, had been the founding principle of our science. Without reacting to the firmness of my response, but lowering her eyes so our gazes did not meet for the length of her tale, the Mother Superior told me, with many insinuations and roundabout phrases, struggling mightily with her understandable modesty about the terrible nature of the facts she was relating, the story of Sister Teresita. The nun, who had first come to Peru from Spain, and who by the will of her order, the Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament, had been transferred to the city, was, according to the Mother Superior, a rather naïve person and terribly devoted, given even to certain mystical excesses that had earned her several reprimands and calls to order. Despite her humble birth and lack of education beyond the essentials required for her religious training, she had a strong literary inclination that she used to express, according to the Mother Superior, her devotion to Christ and the Blessed Sacrament. One of the order’s principle tasks was to look after women of ill repute who, unfortunately, according to the Mother Superior (and, I thought to myself, to the approval of my teacher) abounded in America. It was a ministry the young sister had dedicated herself to with unbridled passion, just as with all she undertook, visiting them too frequently and familiarly, which gave rise to certain misunderstandings. The young sister’s intensity, which always manifested itself far too spontaneously, had fueled town gossip, as the inhabitants’ perpetual idleness, according to the Mother Superior, engendered a fatal tendency to meddle in the lives of others. But according to the Mother Superior, that was no great thing relative to the real drama that had taken place at the end of last year. A man they had hired to tend the garden, orchard, and farmyard—according to the Mother Superior, there were so many unemployed in the city that it was safer to hire them for something, for otherwise they’d turn into vagabonds and criminals—who had been working for the convent for several months, began to abuse the young sister in secret, submitting her to every type of bestial humiliation, and threatened to kill her if she dared tell anyone. Naturally, the Mother Superior omitted the details that were too painful, but it did not take much to understand, from the red spots burning on her cheeks, that the memory of those details provoked strong emotions. One day, during the siesta hour, she, the Mother Superior, had come upon them in the little chapel, sprawled at the foot of the altar, engaging in, according to her, the sacrilege of animalistic satisfaction of carnal instincts. The gardener had been arrested straightaway and remained in jail, but the consequences had been devastating for Sister Teresita, to the point that she had lost her mind. The young sister was fragile by nature, and in the months leading up to what happened, she, the Mother Superior, had observed the signs of a stronger disturbance than usual in Sister Teresita, never imagining at any point, however, that those minor agitations, that attenuated but constant instability, the sudden shift from laughter to tears, and her excessive devotion to the Crucified One, once exacerbated by the sordid drama that would touch her life, would precipitate into madness. While lulls passed in the midst of her unrest, and one might not detect the presence of madness by looking at her, the Mother Superior went on to explain that her rapid changes in behavior were so very unexpected, the altered manners and language, that at first several members of the Church had believed themselves to be facing a case of demonic possession. They debated the possibility of sending her to the Inquisition, but the city’s priest and exorcist, taking into account the fact the young sister had been the victim of such humiliations, believed there was an exact, known cause for her actions and that matters ought to be placed in the hands of justice and medicine. The ecclesiastical authorities in Buenos Aires had ruled on the case in the same way. Among those the Mother Superior cited, I recognized two who, contrary to the fairly widespread opinion of influential clergymen, were favorably inclined to Dr. Weiss’s therapeutic methods. As I saw it, choosing the case’s gnoseological interpretation at the expense of the demonological interpretation was less a question of common sense on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities than a wish for discretion. I had spoken many times with Dr. Weiss about an undeniable fact, namely that, for the past two centuries in Europe, the dungeons of most mental hospitals had been discreetly filled with wretches unfortunate enough to have been too sensational to commit to the bonfires. But the prison’s tragic role, an embarrassing one many families believed we sought to perform, protected our specialty’s emergence in the Parisian hospitals and its necessary evolution, which was the constant reflection in the Casa under the enlightened direction of my teacher. For us, the rigorous practice of medical science was the only possible form of charity.

  The lengthy conversation was not without discomfort on both of our parts, as evidenced by our mutual reticence, and afterward I knew I could not gain an accurate idea of Sister Teresita’s condition if I did not take the opportunity to see her myself; I explained to the Mother Superior that my professional obligation required me to see the patient immediately, and despite her visible hesitation, she ultimately agreed. The patient was in a room in the basement of the house under lock and key. The first thing I noticed in that narrow room was that the grille-covered window looked onto the gallery and courtyard, not the street. As the shutters were closed, the room was all in shadow at tha
t moment, and we arrived dazzled by the clear, midday winter light, so for a few seconds I could not see much except a lively gray blot that emerged from a corner and came toward us, stopping in the center of the room. I stood blinking at the threshold, but the Mother Superior entered and went over to the window, prudently opening the shutters halfway. A ray of sun came in and lit up the girl with the intensity of a spotlight. She was rather petite and had very short hair, and, instead of the order’s habit, she wore a sort of gray blouse that covered her from the neck, where it buttoned tightly, to her ankles. Although the room was freezing, I saw that her feet were bare on the brick floor, but she seemed unbothered by the cold. Noting the disapproval in my gaze, the Mother Superior rushed to explain that the sister wouldn’t tolerate a brazier, as she had violent hot spells and declared that the cold had no effect on her. I searched for Sister Teresita’s gaze to confirm what I had just heard, but I found it impossible to meet; she had gone still, eyes closed and a shy smile on her lips, the hands that emerged from the gray shirt-cuffs of her blouse resting softly on her belly, one atop the other. That overly-obvious shyness was not unfamiliar to me: It was not difficult to identify an attitude of fakery, common in certain mental patients brought before a doctor for the first time, of adopting a theatrical pose to try to persuade him, that it would be an unjustified waste of time to bother with people so normal to the naked eye as they. In presenting herself so calmly and demurely, there was also an attempt at seduction, quite effective on her part and ultimately unnecessary, as I must confess that her lively and energetic presence captured my sympathies immediately, though I did not let myself forget the strong likelihood that I was addressing a sick person. It did not take me long to realize Sister Teresita was trying to establish some private bond with me, not just apart from the Mother Superior but perhaps also apart from the convent and even the world, maybe to prove to them, and also to herself, that she and her actions could once and for all be properly interpreted.