The Clouds (13 page)

It became clear to me that I had to immediately impose my authority on the band of horsemen, their dark eyes scrutinizing me, undecided, from the shadow of the military cloaks that protected them from the rain; with a firm but friendly voice I asked who led the group, to which a man dismounted in silence and removed his hat, but didn't uncover his head, which was wrapped in a sort of red handkerchief tied at the nape of his neck, and made as if to hand me a leather pouch, but I ignored the gesture and asked him to come inside. Without inviting him to sit down, I had him spread the contents of the pouch onto a wicker table that stood in the hall, which consisted of several letters addressed to me from Dr. Weiss and some medical and financial documents. In the letter addressed to me, I was informed that the bearer of the same, which is to say the man with the red handkerchief, was a reliable servant of the Troncoso family, who desired that I allow him to accompany us to Casa de Salud as the patient's personal guard. Although it seemed an excellent idea to me (later events would prove my error), I pretended to think for a moment before accepting, and even permitted myself to explain to him, with exaggerated seriousness, the state of his master's health, advising him that, if he wanted to be part of our caravan, he must keep in mind
that I was speaking of a mobile hospital and not a company of soldiers or ranch hands, and that in hospitals it was generally doctors who gave the orders. The man listened, unblinking. He must have shaved that morning, and he had the dark skin common to those who live and work in the elements. His fealty to Troncoso seemed to tug at him, and so did the convincing tone that lent my speech professional authority. If some doubt remained about the state of the man he was supposed to protect, subsequent episodes in our travels would do away with it. The man was loyal and well intentioned toward his master, but a little lacking in spirit despite his fierce freebooter aspect. His name was Rosario Suárez, but since Troncoso called him El Ñato, or Pug-Nose, everyone called him by that nickname. He had a dog-like loyalty to Troncoso, despite the fact that Troncoso often treated him with indignity, not out of madness but because of his role as master.

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 apathetic, 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.