The Clouds (11 page)

But the order of my story is being corrupted. The gardener's case clearly proves a fact observed many times: Nothing is more contagious than delirium. From the story of that simple man, more confused than frightened by the situation in which he found himself, it took little effort to infer that, if he had let himself slide down that slope of lust and sacrilege with incomprehensible resignation, it was less because of her voluptuous ways than his credulity. Augustín—that was the gardener's name—was dazed by the theological arguments, mystical enthusiasm, and—as I have had means to prove so many times—the communicative sympathy of Sister Teresita, and had sincerely believed in the religious necessity of his acts and had lent himself for months to all the little nun's voluptuous caprices. Bearing in mind the first act they had performed at the foot of the altar and that, according to the gardener, the little nun was in the habit of talking to Christ over his shoulder during the act, it is not hard to imagine that what followed from that first sacrilege could not have been much wilder or more absurd. Curious as it seems, even while Augustín was enumerating those ludicrous aberrations that were to bring him before the firing squad, he appeared to continue to believe in the religious
meaning of their acts, and seemed to doubt neither the sincerity nor the necessity that caused Sister Teresita to drive him to his execution. She also seemed to harbor a particular fondness for the gardener until she left Casa de Salud and returned to Spain, and when she referred to him it was always warmly. During the journey to Casa de Salud, the little nun told me one day, lowering her voice and adopting a confidential tone, that they had Augustín locked in jail and wanted to shoot him
because he had such a big . . .
and accompanied her declaration with an obscene gesture, placing the palms of her hands some thirty centimeters apart and bobbing them up and down together suggestively. It was clear that, following this months-long intimate relationship, each one had been convinced of the other's innocence, and they were trying to convince everyone of this. The gardener, with a circumstantial line of argument, pleaded for himself and for Sister Teresita, and though the nun seemed to be unshakably certain regarding the source of her mission's legitimacy, which exempted her from apology or explanation for her conduct, she adopted an attitude of total indifference, even a cheerful lewdness, before her accusers. In every word and gesture, she showed her clear confidence in Augustín, whom she always spoke of not as a lover but as a friend, which perhaps exposed the gardener to even greater animosity from his accusers, though it cast a new light on the relationship to impartial observers. After practicing for so long in a number of European hospitals, I have had contact with nuns and other members of the clergy rather frequently, and though I have often met selfless, intelligent, obliging persons of good faith among them, I must record here that if you had to name a common feature in all of them, that feature would be the evident lack of any religious element in their thoughts and actions, which—that said—happened to greatly ease our relationship. Such people—compassionate, useful, and sensible—thanks to their naturally resistant constitutions,
were impervious to all that is corrosive and devastating in religious feelings and ideas. Rather than mourn, we ought to be grateful that the religious temperament is such a rare phenomenon. Just as the world is full of good and bad poets, of thinkers both obvious and relevant, of ineffectual scientists, of false prophets and alleged men of God, so too have the truly religious been known to be greedy misers. I must state that, to my mind, the only truly religious person I have known in my life was Sister Teresita, and only briefly, for when she left Casa de Salud, lifeless and rotund, her little red button nose lost between ruddy cheeks, she was religious no longer. The love she felt for Christ had been intense and sincere, and it is pointless for me to speculate whether it manifested in a suitable form because, if that object of highest adoration truly exists, even if I were randomly set upon his appointed throne, it would be difficult to say which among all the different ways that his faithful have imagined to adore him is the proper one.

In Dr. López's study, the gardener's story announced, in closing, the catastrophe that soon followed: One day they were surprised in the sacrilegious act on the chapel floor before the altar, and the affair, once the Holy Office tribunal took up the matter, ended in the same place it had begun. After much deliberation and against Sister Teresita's obstinate contention that all acts committed had been ordained by Christ himself in Upper Peru in order to reestablish the unity of divine and human love that had been separated after the resurrection, the religious authorities ruled that Sister Teresita had lost her mind as the result of the violations and other repeated indignities the gardener had submitted her to; they put him in jail, where for several months he had been awaiting the trial that would surely condemn him to death. (Some time later, a letter from Dr. López informed me that, a few days before judgment took place, the gardener had managed to escape from prison, and, like so many others who, rightly or not, had accounts to settle with
Justice, disappeared into the plains. I received the news with relief and rushed to convey it to the little nun who, as her only comment, poked the tiny index finger of her right hand repeatedly into my stomach, a form of congratulation or recognition, as if Augustín's escape had been my work, and she approved with several slow nods.)

A private project during that professional trip had been, if my business allowed, to cross the Bajada Grande one day to visit the places where I had spent my childhood. As memories of my early years were no longer fresh, no emotional tie connected me to the far bank, for my family had returned to Spain upon my father's retirement from trade the year before Las Tres Acacias was founded. Yet it warmed my passions to anticipate the idea of crossing the great river and descrying the cliffs falling sheer into the red-hued water, as I had done so many times with my father when we returned from sailing among the islands. Unfortunately, the very cause of my prolonged delay in the city expanded ad nauseam the labor required to set out on my excursion, spoiling my plan: That year, the usual winter rise in those southern-flowing rivers, normally substantial, was treacherous, barbaric, and enormous. Treacherous because from hour to hour, minute to minute, and for months, water levels rose continually, submerging the coastal lands imperceptibly, bit by bit, farther from the banks each time; barbaric because, despite their surreptitious growth, a sudden swell overflowing the limits of the floodplains would cover a vast territory all at once, destroying everything in its path, and disrupting the life native to what would have been dry land and displace it from the banks, upsetting the customs, the roots, and very livelihood of men, animals, and plants, torn violently up from their usual spot and scattered until they were deposited, with savage anachronism, in the most unexpected corners of the region; and enormous because, due to that long and steady rise, the water,
clouded with the new soil that fed into its path and taking on an uncertain hue that varied by location, perhaps sulfurous yellow, reddish-brown, or blackened and struck through with green filaments, won the westerly lands to the point of engulfing the plain, however far as an observer might travel on foot or by horse, across the entire visible horizon.

The flood at once detained the patients we awaited from Córdoba and Paraguay and confined us to the city. Everything was disrupted: the roads, the postal coach, the transport of goods. Departure and arrival times, already uncertain, became fickle and arbitrary, if not outrageous. Certain items not produced in the immediate surroundings, such as sugar, tea, and wine, began to run short. The prescient Señor Parra had gathered a little of everything in a room that served as larder and storehouse, whose key was in the hands of a slave charged with all matters related to questions of food and cooking. Señor Parra explained that in having so many people depend on him—relatives, employees, and slaves—it was his duty to anticipate possible events well in advance and down to the most trifling details, and to avoid setbacks as they arose. In those years, the isolated villages, many leagues distant from one another, scattered across that wild and endless desert, exposed their inhabitants to an array of dangers at every turn, requiring them to be ever vigilant. (Today, friends have informed me that threats come not from the desert, and that terror is unleashed not by the unchained elements, but rather by the government.)

Beyond the simplest daily tasks and regular visits to my two patients, I was left with no other occupation in that enforced idleness but observation, reflection, and reading. That I might partake of this last activity, Señor Parra placed his library at my disposal, a library which, as I believe I have mentioned, was most varied and abundant despite the city's isolation, and, as if this were not enough, and confirming the refinement of his character, he gifted
me with six volumes of a French translation of Virgil, a poet for whom we discovered a mutual admiration, so that my reading of it, when time permitted, lasted until we finally sighted the snub, white building at Las Tres Acacias. For me, every challenge on our road is tied to a verse of Virgil, and to this very day the harsh sensations of travel and the subtle music of the verses bleed together in my memory, in a unique mingling that is mine alone, which will vanish from the world when I do. More than once I saw myself traveling the plain like Aeneas did the strange and hostile sea, and a deep emotion would overcome me when I glimpsed a fate for myself in the desert like that of Palinurus the helmsman who, startled from sleep, falls into the ocean, and his
naked corpse is doom'd on shores unknown to lie
. More than once I saw, more vividly than the dense and weighty things that surrounded me, the untimely pile of my bones gleaming white in the sun in some remote corner of the plain. But it is the fourth Bucolic that, among his short poems, remains my favorite to this day: the declaration of a golden age when so many catastrophes fly in the face of its unlikely coming, dependent not on the hero's armed will, but on a child's smile to the mother who bore him in her womb for nine heavy months; for that cheerful recognition of life, the poet promises the table of Jupiter and company of the goddess. And it is not irrational hope that gives rise to the vision: The new golden age will not be a prize or a conquest, but an undeserved gift from destiny and will come, not because men have won it, but because the Fates, someday, sometime, purely on a whim, will decree it.

He who has not seen, as I have, one of those lost cities of the plains on a rainy winter twilight when their first flickering lights begin to burn, with every visible object buried evenly beneath the double cloak of night and inclement weather—he does not know sorrow, though he might believe he has experienced it before. We were trapped by the flood, and the world's prison doubled,
reinforced by that steely ring of water. But for the Parra family's affection, for the impassioned conversations with Dr. López and, above all, with Señor Parra, not one true sympathy tied me to anyone apart from the banal phrases and banal greetings exchanged as I passed the city-dwellers who were already growing accustomed to my daily walks. That solitary feeling intensified further when on bright mornings, farther down the leagues of islands and water that separated me from them, I could make out the hills of Entre Ríos where I had spent my childhood. But most of all, I missed the lively and stimulating company of Dr. Weiss, the long conversations at the table punctuated by constant sparks of his genius and humor; he was my true family, not because I renounce my kin, but because through him I discovered a new relationship, one that unites all those who, distinguished by their own traits that render dull the impositions of blood ties, look for new affinities outside those ties to understand and enrich these traits. And I can say that the only two moments of personal happiness I had during my stay in the city were the two long letters from the doctor, brought to me by the laborious detours of a most irregular post. In the first one particularly, the doctor explained that moving the patients could have been organized another way, a way not requiring my participation on the trip, but that he had chosen to send me so I might spend some time away from his side because, according to him, I was huddled too deeply in his shadow, and he wished me, as I carried out the risky and difficult task entrusted to me, to spread my own wings. Reading these generous lines, I was filled with pride and happiness, and I knew at last that the true teacher is not one who wants to be imitated and obeyed, but is capable of entrusting to his student, unaware until that moment, the very task he needs.

Aside from those two letters, which are with me even today, the little news that managed to enter the city had a common feature:
All of it was bad. The north and west, from which my patients ought to have finally appeared, if they were to appear at all, suffered only two or three ills—the rain, the cold, and the flood—but in the south, that is, in the direction we would travel as soon as we were ready, there was an additional scourge: Chief Josesito. With each new messenger his band's latest outrages were relayed to us in painful detail—never leaving out the inevitable violin concert over the human remains and tortured corpses. Hearing these stories, Osuna would wrinkle his forehead and suck deeply and more frequently at his cigar, biting it harder than usual. A few days passed before he would explain, at my insistence, of course, the cause of his restlessness: Because of the flood, the whole line of outposts between Paraguay and Buenos Aires had vanished; not only the Paraná, but all its tributaries had overflowed, so the lands were flooded well out to the west, which would force us to make a sizable detour northwest across open country before bearing south—or perhaps we would need to travel through high desert where there were neither outposts nor roads, and precisely where Chief Josesito was ensconced with his band of savage Indians. The bravery and expertise to lead us through open country were left to Osuna, whose brow furrowed not in fear, but rather in a professional and anticipatory concern, simultaneously considering how possibly to negotiate the obstacles on the road, of which Chief Josesito seemed to be the foremost. So it was that one morning, two or three days after our conversation, he declared that he was leaving to explore the surrounding area to see what turned up, and disappeared for a week. When he returned, the outlook was certainly not reassuring, but was more accurate than before he had left.