The Clouds (3 page)

Illnesses—and not just mental, but physical, which he was capable of treating with equal skill, though which he refrained from so as not to alienate other medical practitioners in the city, unwilling to draw away their clients—were not my teacher's only area of interest: All the most varied manifestations of the natural world aroused the same curiosity in him, stimulating his gifts of reason and observation, from the regular turning of the stars to the tiniest prairie flowers, which he collected in a detailed herbarium. An insect, a mild October breeze, the behavior of horses, or the phases of the moon held equal value for him as objects of reflection, and more than once I heard him say that contrary to what man had made, there was no hierarchy in nature, and the laws that dictate the entire universe are present in every natural phenomenon. So by accurately explaining, for example, a flea-jump—he always liked trivial examples—one might comprehend the operation of the solar system. He also noted that the correct interpretation of a natural fact was in any event impossible, for as knowledge of the world increased, so too did its mysterious dark side.

He was a pleasant, helpful man, or perhaps more than pleasant and helpful: He was given to compassion. That feature of his character was much more commendable in him than in any other. Indeed, it kept him in check, as, in religious matters, I never saw a more avowed atheist. In one of his letters from Amsterdam, he told me:
As God does not exist, it falls to us men to correct the world's flaws. How I would have liked to leave him to that task—at the end of days, if he exists, evil would be his responsibility—and to be able to dedicate all my time to the one perfect thing he is known to have created: the female sex!
His atheism sometimes left me perplexed; he always appeared to think the nonexistence of God an exhilarating condition. Although I shared his beliefs, I must confess that often, in
my innermost thoughts, it all seemed rather discouraging, less for the infinite nothingness it attributed to my own being than for the incredible waste, supposing the existence of such a vast universe, varied and colorful, burst open at some time, some fine day, and generously left in our charge, all so it might suddenly collapse and disappear. Such an eventuality left Dr. Weiss unmoved; on the contrary, it seemed to encourage him. I believe that if he were to stand at the mouth of an erupting volcano—a speculation, in any case, though I think he lived in Naples a few years before we met—he would not have fled, but rather rubbed his hands together, preparing to study the igneous material about to consume him. This is an adequate comparison to describe our fourteen years at Casa de Salud. Seething lava threatened us from all sides: Indians, bandits, the English, and the Spanish royalists we called
godos
(in order of increasing ferocity), not to mention storms, floods, droughts, locusts, accusations, lawsuits, wars, and revolutions. Our hospital-laboratory, as the doctor called it, conceived as peaceful and white, ended as a miserable ruin, which, a friend has informed me, still exists today among the weeds. It seems, after the tragic scattering of our boarders—we searched for them for weeks without success—two of them returned the following year and settled in the ruins with no family to claim them. (Until their death, the Indians worshiped them and brought them food each day. Later, my friend learned the Indians were Christian converts from Areco who, in secret, were practicing a sort of cult around the two madmen, whom the Indians treated well so as to gain protection from the forces of evil.)

Politics and money are useful, no doubt, but they distract from what matters: Also distracting were the successive wars and greed of certain families, who paid the first year's costs to cast off their sick and, having entrusted them to the Casa, forgot to continue payment, bringing an end to our venture. As for the authorities,
while some enlightened persons encouraged us, many leaders, mostly businessmen, petty lawyers, ranchers, churchmen, and soldiers, nearly all of them eager, obscurantist, and uneducated, watched us constantly and created all manners of interference to our growth. Only those who dealt with Dr. Weiss directly supported us, having experienced his goodness, sincerity, and efficiency in their exchanges. And perhaps because they depended on him and because he had been known to ease their suffering on more than one occasion, the patients idolized him. I can tell you, he was able to speak with even the most violent of patients who thought he held them prisoner without cause and was torturing them, even patients who thought him their enemy and never stopped trying to hurt or threaten him. Despite this, those very men clearly respected him, though perhaps they never realized it, and when they feigned the belief that the doctor was the cause of all their ills, I could see in their words and carriage that they did not truly believe their claims. One way or another, they seemed to want him to give a sign that they were mistaken, or maybe extra attention or special interest, trying to goad him with libelous insults that the doctor bore with his impassive little smile, sometimes coming to nod his head affirmatively as though he approved of them. The workers in the Casa, those he was likewise mentoring—they, too, were devoted to him. For the most part, the doctor dealt with fairly uneducated people, but he believed the attributes his work required—intelligence, gentleness, physical strength, and patience—did not depend on schooling. Some ladies from the city tried to work with the Casa as an act of charity, but, with diplomatic cleverness, the doctor convinced them that it was dangerous work, at least in certain cases, terribly rare, to be sure, and once he managed to rid himself of them, he remarked to me confidentially, with his habitual little smile and a twinkle in his eye,
Though I must say, I wouldn't mind requesting a certain service from the younger ones.

It was the doctor who conceived and executed plans for the Casa. It consisted of a single, rectangular floor with a series of corridors that enclosed three courtyards. The façade faced the river,
Just as the temple of Concordia faces the sea in the land of Empedocles
, he would joke. The stout adobe walls were always an immaculate white; the trellis beneath the windows suggested colonial mansions, but rows of rooms that opened onto impeccable courtyards evoked the convent, monastery, or a rustic Academy. Only in the last corridor of the last courtyard did the doors have a lock. In the others, including my teacher's, such protection was unnecessary. We lived alongside our mad. As for those working in the Casa, they kept only what they wished, which was very little, under lock and key. The rooms at the far end were reserved for patients who underwent periods of serious volatility. Certain madmen grew accustomed to their constant frenzy, or resigned themselves to it, but the sudden attacks of the silent, gloomy ones were often the most aggressive. In those cases, isolation became necessary, and we left them alone until their melancholia won out again. Strictly speaking, with our method, which is to say, Dr. Weiss's method, over those fourteen years, we rarely faced raving lunatics who might have endangered our community or any of its members. When violence tempted our patients, it was more often against themselves. One of them would sometimes go suddenly running with a
bang
against the wall, for no apparent reason, leaving himself dazed and bloodied. Another, without prior warning, thought to cut himself all over with a knife. But in fourteen years, we mourned only three suicides. A Brazilian boy, ever and irresistibly drawn to water, found his end by casting himself into the river; one old man hung himself from a tree in the second courtyard one winter morning; and one woman poisoned herself. (She had given herself six months to recover, and, as she explained in the letter she left behind, she had arrived at the Casa with the poison hidden
and had resolved to use it if the doctor's treatment, her last hope for a cure, should fail.)

The staff, intermingled with the patients, was distributed throughout the three sets of corridors; they actually formed three squares, each with two shared interior sides. Built in a row and all continuous, the three squares aligned to form a rectangle together. The middle square shared two transverse walls with the first square past the entrance and the one farthest off; in matters of architecture, the doctor was fond of geometry. The first of those transverse sides in the middle square was a long salon that served as a refectory with a kitchen at one end. The cook was an employee, but his helpers and serving boys were all mad. Per Dr. Weiss's instructions, when one of them wanted to cook, the chef placed the kitchen at his disposal. In fact, the cook once went to visit his family on the other side of Buenos Aires for two or three days, leaving the kitchen in the hands of a patient. In the lateral corridors opposite the lower square, just past the entrance, Dr. Weiss and I each had our rooms, which also served as our offices, his to the left and mine to the right.

In our Casa de Salud, truth be told, there were very few medicinal remedies. According to Dr. Weiss, of the various causes that might explain insanity, the most improbable were those that came from the body, and he posited that in matters of mental illness, the cause must be sought out in the mind. As the doctor told me in one of his first letters from Amsterdam:
But that mixture of sensations, passions, imagination and thought, truth and lies, good and evil, love and hate, crime and remorse, desire and renunciation that is the mind
,
does not make our work easier. In a sense, for men the body is a remote region of their very selves, and if they hold it responsible for all their evils, they resign those evils to the control of nature, which for them is synonymous with fate. In what they call the mind, however, they themselves are deeply implicated. In the vast majority of cases, exchange with
the outer world does not occur within the body, but in the mind. The body is a hidden land that few are privileged to tread or contemplate, while the mind is in constant exchange in the public square, and those who boast of maintaining a pure, hidden mind fail to see the point: That property they believe to be remote and ethereal, others can sully. For this reason, practically everyone prefers to find the cause of all wrongdoing in the body.

At any rate, Dr. Weiss's principal method consisted of maintaining identical relations with the patients as he did with the sane, and only in extreme cases did he try some sort of treatment, often temporarily: the prescription of certain medications, for example, or confinement, or hot or cold baths. On rare occasions we found ourselves obliged to use a straitjacket. As for the baths, they were part of our routine, and patients bathed in a separate structure near the river, as white and well kept as the main building. We treated physical ailments by the usual methods, and in more serious cases, the doctor did not hesitate to summon one of his colleagues from Buenos Aires for a consultation. But I must add, if I want to abide by the utmost truth, that the vast majority of the many patients under our care seemed to enjoy exceptional health, physically speaking. Ensconced in their own worlds created entirely by their delirious imaginations and often incomprehensible to the rest of us, they seemed protected from the natural condition endured by those who enjoy, as they say, their full faculties. Encased in their own illusory worlds, the patients seemed to take root, and so did not suffer the decay that befalls all physical substance, but rather an interminable drying-up, a slow calcination whose hardening was not measurable with known instruments. The parts of them that came dislodged—hairs; teeth; skin; the occasional eye that seemed to vanish into thin air from behind a sealed eyelid; a few fingers severed in an accident; a leg that seized up and refused to walk, obliging one to always drag it like an old piece of furniture—these
were like shreds of wrapping, torn in the bustle and commotion of a journey without the parcel they protect suffering the slightest damage.

When it came to housework, each helped according to his needs and as desired, and repairs, painting, and the orchard and gardening, along with maintenance of the farmyard (which lay outside the building past the three large acacia trees that gave the place its name), and kitchen tasks as I have already mentioned, were shared as necessity arose among whatever volunteers turned up, Dr. Weiss included. More than once, I saw him tend to a patient as he worked in the garden or painted the adobe walls, the preservation of whose immaculate whiteness, along with the scrupulously clean rooms and corridors and the care of the farmyard and tree-lined courtyards, occupied most of the day's labor. With regard to these communal chores, I ought to note they did not result from disciplinary impositions, but rather from the whim of the patients volunteering; this labor system that Dr. Weiss so carefully devised yet again proved his inimitable realism and unerring shrewdness. If madness is defined by the very delusions it manifests, and if in many cases the patients are free from physical pain, it is clear that its other consistent feature is unruliness: Reason, though capable of imposing its discipline even onto lightning that drops from the sky, is not enough to tame delusion. He who wishes to deal with the lunatic is wiser to appeal to his caprice rather than to his obedience. Our mad did not often follow externally dictated standards, but rather what their own delusion required, sometimes with the foreseeable consequence that the outer world, hitherto unquestionable, yielded to them. I recall an incident in 1811, when a Revolutionary official whom I would have numbered among our enemies, charged with inspecting our establishment, took an unexpected tumble from his horse during the first days of his visit—though it failed to shuffle him loose the mortal coil, as they say. He commented at
the end of his stay, not inappropriately, that during his recovery at the Casa he had spent all his time trying to distinguish the madmen from the sane, to which my esteemed teacher responded—the usual twinkle in his bright blue eyes, but without receiving even the slightest smile of complicity in return—that when he passed through the streets or halls of Buenos Aires, he was frequently assaulted by the same bewilderment.