The Clouds (2 page)

Rivers swollen to excess, an unexpected summer, and that
most-peculiar cargo: With the perspective of time and distance, these three things could sum up our hundred leagues of troubles, explaining the paradoxical difficulty of crossing the flatlands.

That arduous, protracted voyage took place, as if I could forget, in the August of 1804. On the first of that month, we set out for Buenos Aires during a terrible freeze, horseshoes cracking at blades of hoarfrost, a blue-tinged pink in the dawn, but within a few short days we found ourselves embroiled in a summer as squalid as it was cruel.

We made progress ten times faster on the trek from Buenos Aires to the city, Santa Fé, than we did on the return journey, though there were just four of us on horseback that time, and despite countless obstacles and the cold always tormenting us, even in full sunlight. And so this sudden onset of sweltering heat was doubly
confounding, both for its great intensity and for its unseasonable arrival, contradicting the laws of nature and the order of the seasons. How little nature takes our plans into account; she proved insolent, opposing the laws that contain her, with that strange heat in the depths of one of the bleakest winters the region, according to numerous testimonials, had suffered. That unwholesome “summer,” which blossomed into a sham spring only to be obliterated a few days later, unleashed an anomalous chain of seasons marching in hurried disarray, all in the space of a month. But Osuna, the man who guided us to the city and who took us, in a large convoy this time, back to Buenos Aires, kept saying that every so often a mid-August dry spell like this would set in, preceding the Santa Rosa storms on the thirtieth. Suffice it to say, he was right as always, and on the thirtieth precisely, some days before we reached our destination, the predicted storm descended to crown our parade of hardships—though it also helped to extricate us from a most precarious situation.

But I am getting ahead of the facts and, perhaps, out of consideration for the possible reader, decades from now, into whose hands this memoir might someday fall, it would behoove me to introduce myself: I am Dr. Real, specialist of those afflictions not of the body, but of the mind and soul. A native of the Bajada Grande of the Paraná, I was born and raised in those treacherous northern hills where the great river's ceaseless red current has its source. I learned my letters under the Franciscans, but when I reached the age for a young man to delve into his studies, my parents thought Madrid preferable to anywhere else as the capital of knowledge; this can be accounted for by the fact that they were Castilian, and hoped the tumult dividing France—a commotion which had shaken Europe for the past six or seven years—would not reach the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Unlike my parents, I was drawn to that commotion, and, given my growing interest in diseases of
the mind, when I caught wind that Salpetrière Hospital was allowing its madmen off their chains, I resolved to continue my studies amid the frays of Paris rather than the sleepy cloisters of Alcalá. As happens so often throughout history, the final decade of the last century had been tumultuous; like all parents, mine sought to educate me at the edges of that tumult, and, like all young people, I sensed it was within that very tumult where my life was to begin.

And I was not mistaken. I discovered a new science in the Parisian hospitals and, among its principle representatives, Dr. Weiss. A handful of doctors-thinkers asserted, like those ancient philosophers with whom they consorted, that even though there were decisive bodily factors, in true mental disease the cause should be sought not in the body, but in the mind itself. Dr. Weiss had come to Paris from Amsterdam in order to confirm that analysis; I, his junior, upon discovering the existence of the learned Dutchman and his teachings, might even have said the man and his hypothesis formed a single identity. At the time of my arrival, the idea had become a passionately discussed theory, and Dr. Weiss became my friend, teacher, and mentor. So, when he decided to settle in Buenos Aires to practice according to the principles of the new discipline, I naturally became his assistant. It should also be noted that before making his final decision, he questioned me at length about the region and its inhabitants, and as my intention in this memoir is to scrupulously respect the truth in all, I must admit that moving to the Americas had been his aim far longer than he had known me, and that his interest in my insignificant person only grew once he had learned from a third party that I came from Río de la Plata. The faraway Spanish colonies were already attracting scientists, traders, and adventurers; the motherland's stockade, in place to isolate the colonies, was riddled on all sides with holes; it was quite simple to slip in through the gaps, to the point that even those appointed by Madrid to prevent such things profited
from the situation. But Dr. Weiss was not the sort of man to involve himself in smuggling. Before crossing the ocean (and, might I add, with greater ease than it took me some years later to cross a sea of solid ground), we petitioned the Court and in a few months obtained the necessary authorization. So it was that in April of 1802, Dr. Weiss's Casa de Salud was unveiled two or three leagues north of Buenos Aires, in a place called Las Tres Acacias, not far from the river but on high terrain to prevent flooding, with the short-lived triple blessing of the prominent locals, the authorities of Río de la Plata, and the Crown. Dr. Weiss's intentions were not philanthropic—for him, growing rich was rather a means to further his investigations and, if possible, recoup part of his initial investment. He had sunk his entire family fortune into books, travel, measures to sway influential people to grant him any necessary authorizations, and, most of all, into the construction and upkeep of the aforementioned Casa de Salud, a vast, multi-winged edifice with thick, white walls and tiled floors on a hill overlooking the river.

The Casa was patterned after a model already existing in Europe, particularily in Paris, where several institutions of this type had been founded in recent years, but the architecture was inspired by the convent or
béguinage
, the philosopher's retreat, vaguely reminiscent of the Academy and the Garden of Epicurus, rejecting the otherwise typical chains, jail, and dungeon: The result was an ideal hospital for the provision of rest and care which, unfortunately, by its very nature, only the ailing rich would be able to enjoy. But Dr. Weiss intended to look after the poor as well, elsewhere and by other means, for even if the poor proved indifferent (which of course was not the case), his scientific interests demanded it. For him, mental illness was sometimes due to concomitant causes from different parts of the body, but the better part of the illnesses began in the mind itself, along with other external causes
from the surrounding world: climate, family, status, race, strain. That the rich alone were able to afford treatment offers a sense of its meticulous complexity: Each patient was considered a unique case, treated gently and appropriately over the course of a lengthy regime that required not just time but space, labor, and expertise. Sensible of the fact that rich families did not know what to do with the mad, and that, to protect their reputations, they desired a place to take in their madmen, as they refused to let them wander the streets like the poor did with their own, the doctor had the idea to open his Casa de Salud, providing a surrogate home for what the sick had lost: It was perhaps the first of its kind in all the American territories.

Before its inauguration, the number of applicant families was surprisingly high, and though they were all from Buenos Aires, pleading letters began to arrive from the provinces within a few months of operation—from Paraguay, Peru, and Brazil, each one underscoring the great need in America for a place to treat phrenitis, mania, melancholia, and other more or less familiar mental ailments with the very latest scientific advances. To tell the truth, it was almost as though such diseases did not exist in the American upper classes until Dr. Weiss and I arrived to treat them; one might infer from the silence prevailing across the continent that those infirmities, at least without the existence of a science able to identify them, had been taken to be standard personality traits, which might explain all those incomprehensible deeds in our history. What
is
known is that the Casa was nearly full shortly after opening, and in the following year the doctor began to draw up plans for the construction of a supplementary wing.

This warm reception is easily explained: For those who do not know how to manage them, the mad rarely prove dangerous, but are always tiring. Even when families endure them with goodwill and, above all, lots of patience, at a certain point they exhaust
themselves. Trying to make a madman behave like everyone else is like turning the course of a river: I do not mean that it is impossible, but rather that only a good engineer, lacking any prior assurance of his success, can try to set the water running the other way. For the general populace, the madman's outlandish behavior is stubbornness, pure and simple, or even a fabrication. Impervious to common sense and reason, those who insist too much on trying to redeem the mad are the very persons who find their own minds disturbed. Take into account, also, that the stricter the principles of their environment, the more the lunatics' peculiarities will stand out and the more ridiculous their eccentricities will seem. Among the poor, bound by survival to display more tolerant principles, madness seems more natural, as if it contrasts less with the senselessness of their misery. But one of the oldest wishes of the mighty, precisely the one upon which they would base their power, is to embody reason; madness in their midst, then, poses a real problem. A madman endangers a house of rank from ceiling to cellar, costing the occupants their respectability, and so they almost always hide mental illness like a scandal.
There must be many families over there, too, that do not know what to do with their mad
, Dr. Weiss said to me one day in Madrid, as we waited for the Court's authorization to open our house in the Viceroyalty. For the science that makes them its object, the mad are an enigma, but for the families who keep them in their homes, they are nuisances. Obviously, complications arise when the external signs of insanity become too obvious. In the cases that go unnoticed, though, which are far more frequent than one might believe, that same insanity can rise through the ranks by general consensus, to hold the world on a string.

As I realize many of my words today still reflect the influence of my revered teacher, I believe it is advisable to evoke him in greater detail. Of his appearance, suffice to say that at first glance
he betrayed himself as a man of science: tall, a little heavy; a deeply receding hairline that left graying blond hair permanently disheveled around a reddened brow. This exposed the ongoing activity within his head, which was rather larger than normal and well situated atop strong shoulders. Bright blue eyes shone behind gold-rimmed glasses, which danced against his chest on a fine gold chain around his neck (when they were not creeping up his nose)—roving and perceptive eyes, slightly ironic, and, in moments of great concentration, they disappeared behind half-closed lids, betraying his mind's utmost occupation. His frank, ruddy face darkened slightly when he examined a patient, but at the dinner hour, after a day of hard work, wine and conversation were his chief pleasures. Nearly ten years after his death, I betray no secret in writing of his passion for the female sex; it was exaggerated even at his advanced age, and, as occurs often in northerners, his predilection was for the darker races. Brothels did not frighten him; on the contrary, they exercised too great a draw, and married women seemed to emanate further and unfathomable charm for his sensual appetites. As I was his principal interlocutor, his assistant, and his faithful disciple, and I found myself so often at his side as to be mistaken for his shadow, I became, for obvious reasons, his confidante. So I consider myself with all clarity of conscience to be the person who, at least in the final third of his life, knew him best. When Casa de Salud no longer stood and, for reasons beyond our control, we had to separate upon our return to Europe, he went back to Amsterdam while I began as an intern at the hospital in Rennes, of which I am currently the deputy director; until the day of his death we continued to write each other, mingling the scientific with the personal in our correspondence with fluency and good cheer. He was scrupulous about hygiene and, when the weather was hot, he liked to dress impeccably in white; on summer nights in Buenos Aires, when he left after dinner to pursue his
fondest pastime, it was not uncommon, on seeing him pass by from darkened thresholds, from half-lit bedrooms, through wide-open windows seeking to catch a phantom breeze, to hear a male voice murmur in the darkness, mocking yet understanding,
There goes the blond doctor, looking for whores
. I believe the best way to describe Dr. Weiss is by that capacity he possessed for practicing his vices freely, for all to see, without loss of respectability. This was likely because he never mixed business with pleasure and was a man of his word: I never heard him tell a lie nor promise something he was not prepared to carry out. His immoderate and mysterious love of married women forced him to perform the odd moral balancing act, and on two or three occasions, forced by circumstance into inevitable duplicity, I saw him give up, resignedly, the pleasures he had already been assured. From these proclivities he fashioned a way of life, a discipline of knowledge and of living, almost a metaphysics. In a letter from his final days, he wrote to me:
The moment, esteemed friend, is death, death alone. Sex, wine, and philosophy, they tear us from the moment, they keep us, temporary things, from death.
Although he seemed to make no distinction between healthy and diseased, he treated our patients with the greatest decency, as though he thought he owed them more respect than the sane. And in a way, he was correct: Abandoned by families who rarely came to visit, the madmen were entirely in our hands; to them we represented a last link to the world. Upon the opening of Casa de Salud, Dr. Weiss warned the other staff and me that it was foolishness to lie to the patients, and that the sick would have sniffed us out just as sane people discern when madmen do everything possible to conceal their insanity, not realizing that those very efforts betray them. According to Dr. Weiss, deception is pointless because madness, by mere fact of its existence, renders the truth problematic. A detail that intrigued me when I heard him talk with patients: Often, in the face of the madmen's wildest assertions, he
would flash a brief smile of approval, not in his tightened lips, but in his blue eyes.