The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  Four days later, the wagons arrived from Paraguay. Though expected for weeks, their appearance produced a great commotion in the city; they had been joined by several merchants and even a troupe of actors, so for several days a sort of fair took place on the edge of town where the caravan had settled, as the mud kept it from reaching the city center. The wealthy families traveled to the outskirts to do their shopping; two or three carts were down from Asunción, and one even from the Brazilian coast carrying goods that were commonly used, but terribly scarce in the cities of the Viceroyalty, owing to Madrid’s trade monopoly over the colonies. In those years, one had to resort to contraband to access such goods; even the city merchants would come to shop and supply their own businesses. Ladies and gentlemen from town came to get a taste of the poor neighborhoods, accompanied by slaves bearing packages or holding up large umbrellas, black as the hands that clutched stoically at curved handles to keep them aloft over their masters’ heads to protect them from the rain. A troupe of actors tried to enliven the atmosphere, but the weather was so bad that it became impossible to act outdoors, so they were finally invited to give a show at the Casa de Gobierno, where they performed a coarse and disjointed farce that, for some mysterious reason, garnered enthusiasm among the city elites and dominated conversation for days.

  While it lasted, one of the main attractions amid the bustle was Troncoso himself, who found in that impromptu fair the ideal venue for his irresistible taste for performance, playing the role of an elegant, witty man, chatting with one and all, and so ostentatious he could not be missed. He had grown calmer shortly after our first meeting, perhaps when he realized, as the days passed, that I had no intention of being either his enemy or his assassin, and if his behavior was indeed rather striking, it did not seem to stray too far from the usual, and people regarded him as an entertaining and slightly extravagant man, whose strong accent told of his Córdoban origins. It was known that he suffered some vague infirmity, though his ceaseless activity must have convinced more than one that it was an unfounded rumor. He lived lavishly, which enhanced (obviously) the number of his admirers in the city’s only inn. I called on him daily and we spoke amiably, barely touching on—and not without innuendo—the edges of his eccentricity, but when he saw me arrive at the fair, where he was having almost more success than the smugglers and actors, he would vanish discreetly, perhaps out of fear that I would assert my medical authority and humiliate him in public. By revealing that connection to reality, he eased my concern, though only to an extent; experience has generally proven that, beneath that deceptive meekness, frenzy often grows impatient.

  This brings me to my two new patients, who, along with the guard that accompanied them and the other members of the caravan, had to negotiate an incredible series of obstacles to arrive in the city. The patient we were expecting, about whom letters had been exchanged between Asunción and Las Tres Acacias, was a man some thirty years old called Juan Verde, a relative of the owner of the transport company that had rented the wagons to the patients’ families for such a reasonable price. The man would go from hesitant silence to overly-lively or impassioned conversation, which, oddly, tended to consist of a single sentence. He repeated it constantly, changing his intonation and adding such varied facial expressions and gestures that it was as if he were indeed holding a conversation with his interlocutor in which, as spoken sentences changed, so changed the feelings and passions that spurred them. To be clear, I should state that what Verde always said was not even a sentence, as it had no verb, but consisted of the expression morning, noon, and night, which he addressed to his interlocutor, and sometimes even to himself in the course of the conversation, always repeating it and changing only the intonation, which at each exchange would suggest such distinct things as greeting, courtesy, astonishment, joy, anger, disagreement, concentration, interest, et cetera. That curious form of speech, which ultimately wore on his interlocutors, as one might guess, alternated, as I have said before, with many hours of hesitant silence each day. As for the unexpected patient, I must admit that all his papers were in order when they entrusted him to me on arriving in the city. He was Verde’s middle brother, son of the same father but not the same mother, and as he was much younger (he would have been fifteen or sixteen at most), all members of the caravan, to distinguish between them, and with certain affectionate familiarity, began to call him Verdecito, or “little Verde.”

  Since antiquity, many causes of madness have been posited, varying by the type of illness under discussion, and so, when multiple cases appear in the same family, not only in parents and children but even over generations—or as they seemed to occur in the Verde family, in the same generation—the suspicion that hereditary factors exist in certain cases of insanity seems more than justified. Without being quite identical, the Verde brothers’ symptoms displayed many similarities, particularly in a sort of perversion of speech; it did not manifest the same way, but still drew attention. (Dr. Weiss noticed the phenomenon immediately, and he tried to make an inventory of the two brothers’ shared symptoms, as well as their divergent traits, in order to establish a classification principle for both. I will not rest on these details too long because, as the reader will recall, the object of this memoir is not to enter into scientific minutiae.)

  Verdecito, as we called him, might have been the finest young man in the world, but, owing to his symptoms, his company could grow exasperating after a time. This explains why, despite his docility, the family had rid themselves of him, sending him to Casa de Salud. In the letter they sent from Asunción, justifying the lad’s unexpected delivery, they offered the explanation that the two brothers were joined so intimately and by such a deep affection that it would have been cruel to separate them—that perhaps neither one would survive. Accustomed to the oft-criticized rhetoric that families usually resort to in order to justify admission of any of its members seized by madness, I made haste to uncover the true source of Verde and his younger brother’s continuous verbal, oral barrage—whatever you might call it—to which they submitted their interlocutors. The pretext of a cruel separation that neither would survive did not bear up, for I could show even the most incurious bystander how clearly the two brothers barely knew each other, speaking—or not speaking, to be more precise—to one another with the vaguest and most apathetic indifference. Verdecito, contrary to what transpired with his older brother, was able to maintain a fairly ordinary conversation, and his repertoire of phrases was varied enough, although their concepts and themes always proved a little childish for his age and, as if he were slightly deaf—though he was not, and reacted immediately to other stimuli outside the conversation—showed a tendency, which could become exasperating, to repeat the phrases spoken to him several times. What hampered his verbal exchanges was his custom of continually making all manner of noises with his mouth: screams, grunts, sneezes, hiccups, coughs, stammers, belches, and, in moments of great excitement, profanities, and even howling and yelling, though directed at no one in particular. It was impossible for him to pass by a horse without neighing to make fun of it, or any other animal without imitating its cry. He did so with ease, and was sometimes given to copying even the other noises he heard around him, from a spoon’s metallic clink against a tin plate to the murmur of water passing from one vessel to another. So it was that Verdecito’s presence was always accompanied by an endless string of buccal sounds that were strewn throughout his sentences and, more importantly, filled the silences between them; perhaps the simplest explanation for that tendency to repeat the sentences uttered to him stemmed not from an alleged deafness, but from the fact that the constant din from his mouth simply blotted out the conversation. Leaving aside the exasperating aspects, it is worth pointing out that neither brother was able to maintain a normal conversation with people, in one case owing to his emitting too great a variety of sounds and, in the other, too poor; there was this paradox, that, in the one capable of offering such a gamut of sounds, his conversation seemed more apa
thetic, while the one who repeated his four paltry words ad infinitum seemed more emphatic. There was something poignant about those two brothers, separated from the world by the same impenetrable wall of madness; two different mothers had brought them into the world, so if it was hereditary, their insanity could only have stemmed from the paternal branch. Perhaps what they inherited was not madness but a shared fragility before the harshness of things, or perhaps, by unfathomable coincidence, the secret vagaries of fate had made each, though different from the other, traverse the same hidden corridor where, without brutality or compassion, madness lay waiting.

  With my five patients, I felt like one of those circus jugglers spinning five plates by their rims on a table at once, dashing about from one plate to the next to keep them all spinning upright and at the same speed, never dropping or breaking a thing. All the while, the time of our departure drew near. We had yet to repair the carriages that had suffered damage on the rough roads, to assemble a few more troops to serve as our escort, and to see an improvement in the weather, so that a storm would not force us out into the desert, which was inhospitable even on clear days. By then, we stood at July’s end, the dead of winter: not a leaf on the trees as they rose gray in a dark and shining filigree against the flattened sky, itself a gray that was ever so slightly brighter. The freezing downpours had given way to a steady drizzle, which, after two or three days, turned to a sort of mist that seemed always to float, motionless, between earth and sky. It seeped into things, icy cold, leaving them soaked to the marrow. Getting into bed, the damp, chilly sheets stuck to the skin, and no matter how the braziers burned day and night, not to merely heat the rooms but to speed evaporation of the damp, nothing was ever completely dry. Those milky, suspended water droplets filled every available space. The water was everywhere, falling not just down from the sky, but also creeping up from the region’s many and powerful rivers as they overflowed; from the city center to the outer districts, it imprisoned the town in a watery ring that narrowed by the hour. Many houses built too far down in the lowlands had already flooded, and some riverside streets could only be traversed by canoe. The five or six thousand inhabitants of that forgotten desert village, which the official papers called with certain hyperbolic pomposity a city, kept watch on the water’s height from the moment they rose each morning; the rest of the day, trapped in that air of imminent disaster, they spoke of nothing else. In those final days, the delay weighed on me too heavily: Little tied me to that place, though it was, in a way, the site of my childhood. Returning to that city after so many years, it was there that I first learned how the world that endures in the places and things we have left behind does not belong to us, and what we abusively name the past is no more than the bright but gauzy present of our memories.

  At last, the day arrived. The rain ceased one afternoon, and the next morning the sun appeared in a clean, cold blue sky. The puddles froze over and, as the sun remained chilly, the ice stayed solid on the journey, changing color in time to the day’s shifting hue. Everything had been ready for a week, and we awaited only that change in the weather; despite the frosty air lashing our ears and faces, we men and the horses were impatient to leave and pit ourselves against the plains. Even the mad, who always give the impression of being enclosed within their own order, apart from the outer world, seemed agitated by the prospect of the voyage. In Sister Teresita’s eyes, the sparks of a malicious glee grew brighter and more frequent as the time for departure approached, and young Parra, prostrate and all that implies, seemed to have slipped from the stubborn rigidity that imprisoned him, and within just a few hours of setting off on our trip, a most curious phenomenon took place, which I will refer to in detail a little later. The Verde brothers’ unusual traits intensified: The older one could always be heard shouting his unavoidable morning, noon, and night, punctuating it with endless outlandish gesticulations. But surely it was Troncoso who was most altered by the situation. He had hoped to lead the operation himself, and though most of the soldiers and cart-men already knew him, a few who didn’t believed him to be the head of the caravan; I had to gather everyone two or three days before departure and explain, firmly, that only Osuna and I were qualified to give orders, and that Sergeant Lucero, who commanded the small escort, would join the two of us to make decisions once we were underway. That meeting cost me an indignant missive from Troncoso, who had summoned me the same day via his doting aide, Suárez El Ñato. I myself, as I mentioned earlier, was impatient to go. I had nothing to show from the slow and frozen weeks spent in the city, save the lasting friendship of the Parra family, who I took the opportunity to visit several times in later years due to young Prudencio’s admission to Las Tres Acacias, and the pleasant evenings of inspired conversation with Dr. López, taken up almost entirely by professional matters.

  We left, then, at dawn on the first of August, 1804. If anything, of the many incidents, difficulties, anomalies—or however you’d like to call them—that made up our travels—if anything, as I said, could sum up what was to come, perhaps the absurd fact that inaugurated our journey would be enough: Namely, while our destination lay to the south, our caravan started off north, and we had to travel that way for a few days before veering west to seek our true course. The party from Asunción had been forced to backtrack across the Salado River a bit farther northward, as it splits into two branches near the mouth, and both were equally flooded, turning the entire region into an expanse of water two or three leagues wide, rendering it impossible to make out the riverbed. When he came across the flood, Osuna had explored the field upstream to find a relatively dry patch, narrow and sandy enough for canoes to pass through. For that reason we had to first head north past the fork in the river, farther up the floodplain, to the winding places that stalled the current, and, after a less-than-easy crossing, bear west for a stretch, only then to return south, swinging parallel to the water several leagues inland. There, according to Osuna and others who knew the region well (though not quite as well as the usual post-road), without too much difficulty we would cross the endless line of streams, brooks, and rivers that cut across the plain from west to east and flow into the currents of the Paraná.

  Although horses, not oxen, drew the covered wagons, we inched forward: First of all, in the wake of those steady rains, the state of the roads—if the winding tracks we followed in open country could be called roads—hindered our progress; but at the outset, our convoy was to have consisted of a fleet little group of carts to advance along the line of outposts that hugged the river, a few leagues from one to the next, until at last we reached the white building at Las Tres Acacias ten or twelve days later. However, I must admit that our convoy instead became an unwieldy caravan, lagging and long, slowed by perpetual indecision like a clumsy, hesitant snake, whose belly and tail each fancy themselves as much in charge as the head. I do not mean to say that any one member of the convoy, sound of body and mind (if, under the circumstances of our crossing, such a phrase still held meaning), tried to replace the deliberative triumvirate formed by Sergeant Lucero, Osuna, and myself, to which we sometimes added an Indian who accompanied the troops. Rather, I mean that in such a large group of people, thirty-six altogether, everyone’s desires could not very well go hand in hand at every moment of a journey that announced itself from the start as lengthy and difficult.

  Apart from the six wagons, one for each patient plus my own, driven by cart-men from the transport company that would return them from Buenos Aires to Asunción with different cargo, there were two more carts designated for our needs en route. One was a sort of grocer, general store, and galley, whose proprietor, a Basque man who had spent years trekking across America, had actually made a living from his mobile warehouse. As he told me one night, he would accompany troops of soldiers, merchant caravans, or simple travelers to Brazil, Paraguay, or Santiago in Chile, from the other side of the mountains. He had all manner of wares in his cart, which had a raised side-panel supported by an iron rod that hooked around to the
opening’s lower edge, which could tilt over the outside almost like wings, leaving real shelving and a narrow counter in view, over which he sold yerba mate, sugar, sponge cake, brandy, wine, tobacco, thread, buttons, and much more, or if those wouldn’t do, on the counter were an assortment of drinks and bits of cheese or sliced meats. In one corner of the wagon he had his bunk, and a little mirror hung on the wall where he would take pains to shave every morning. Many in the region, and likely in the south of the continent, knew of him, and according to Osuna, he’d grown rich from usury. In the other cart traveled three women who first had me believe that they were the wives of three soldiers who always brought them along on deployments. Once the trip was underway, though, I realized they were prostitutes, and that the three soldiers who had been passing as their husbands were common pimps. Sergeant Lucero explained that such women following military companies on the plain were a common sight in the region, and that sometimes they might really be wives, or even both at once. Resigned to how easily I’d been duped, I thought how what perplexed me would have charmed Dr. Weiss, as that wife-harlot combination the sergeant spoke of was, in a way, the incarnation of his ideal woman. One of the three was French, and blonde to boot, and she stood out from the other two who had dark skin, high cheekbones, straight black hair, with aquiline features that made them look so much like serving girls or, if you prefer, like Egyptian queens and goddesses. Despite her fair hair and skin, it did not initially occur to me that such a woman might come from France, but she overheard me correcting Troncoso’s abysmal French one day and approached me with the unmistakable accent of the Parisian working-class. This was a curious experience for me, as the words she uttered felt out of tune with the countryside, even as they gave me the chance to practice the language of Rousseau and Buffon in the middle of the desert. She came to my cart several times to relay the wild adventures that had led to her current situation, but after two or three conversations the versions began to differ, so I doubted their truthfulness. Our bond was broken altogether when one day, on the fourth or fifth visit, she hinted that she was actually working, and that I ought to pay for the time we had spent in my cart as if such visits were professional ones. That shameful moment could have incensed me, but it became clear that, though outward circumstances do indeed shape our lives, there is always something within us that makes us lose sight of those circumstances and colors them with our perceptions—and our perceptions, though we never realize it, are tarnished by pure delirium. (Speaking of those three women, I must say that they were trounced on their own ground by Sister Teresita; she visited them often at first, but they came to spurn her for what we might term unfair competition. My French confidante came to tell me one day that she’d stumbled onto the little nun with two soldiers, lying among the grasses some distance from camp. She was aghast, shaking her head and repeating at every turn: Tous les deux, monsieur, tous les deux! Ce n’est pas malheureux? When I told the story one night back at the Casa de Salud, Dr. Weiss laughed, remarking: One of the most surprising aspects of theology is the prodigious work theologians do to elaborate a system that has at its foundation an unutterable experience. Saint Thomas suspended the composition of the Summa Theologica, after all that sweat, the day he finally had a genuine mystical experience. Such an important fact as the certainty of the existence of the divine can dispense with any commentary. Theology, which is essentially political, troubles no one. Mysticism, on the other hand, is empirical theology, and I’ve always thought its practical application capable of sowing panic in the Church, in the Court, and in the brothel.)