The Clouds (7 page)

Shortly thereafter, we laid down to sleep as close as possible to the brazier in makeshift beds on the well-swept floor of the mess hall, where the intense, dry cold set in and, as I found in the morning, froze the ground a glossy blue. Before I lay down, I stepped out into the crisp night air to rid myself of the effects of the liquor that, out of politeness, I had been unable to reject. The moon was round and bright, whiting out the plain, creating a perfect illusion of continuity between earth and sky; pale and abundant light produced a shadow both gray and luminous and the few things set in place by human hands—a tree, a well, the horizontal logs, irregular and parallel to the corral, things that disturbed the empty space—seemed to take on a different consistency than usual in that illusion of continuity, as if the atoms that composed things, according to the illustrious Greek scholar and the meticulous Latin poet, my teacher's teachers and therefore mine, had lost cohesion, betraying the conditional nature not only of their properties, but also of all
my notions about them and even about my own self. Sharp as their outlines might appear in the light of day, well shaped and solid in the clear air, they now became porous and unstable, disturbed by a pale, tingling unease that seemed to expose the irresistible force that dispersed substance and mixed it, reducing it to its barest expression, with that gray and intangible flux that mingled earth and sky. A commotion drew me out of my reverie: The horses were stirring in the corral, perhaps alarmed by my presence, but when I took a few steps to block the cold air blowing in their direction I saw I was of no importance to them, for the brief murmur they had made not only failed to increase, but seemed to subside as I drew closer. I remained motionless near them for a time, trying to keep silent so as not to alarm them, examining the silver shadow to which my eyes adjusted bit by bit, and I could see that what had made them shift from time to time, lightly blowing and causing a muted shuffling of indecisive hooves, was their attempt to press against one another for warmth, forming a dark and anonymous mass of breath, flesh, and heartbeat, not so different in the end from how the horsemen had massed around the brazier earlier, joined by the same injustice that forced us to exist without cause, fragile and mortal, under the icy and inexplicable moon.

The following day at dusk, we finally arrived in the city. Not a cloud accompanied us in the sky's pale blue on our last day of travel, but as we arrived, a few slender wisps to the east, motionless against the enormous red disc of the sun as it sunk into the horizon, began to change color: yellow at first, orange, red, violet, and blue, until, having crossed the fork where the Salado river divides and churns into the Paraná, we reached the first miserable hovels on the outskirts, and the air was black from the unrisen moon; under the eaves or within the hovels, the first lanterns began to glow. After coming along with me to the house where I would be staying, which we found without difficulty as its masters were
one of the city's leading families, Osuna and the soldiers went off to the barracks where room and board had been arranged for them for the duration of our stay. The Parra family expected me without knowing the exact day of my arrival, and I must say that the welcome they gave me, though they knew I would remain in their house for some weeks, was of the most pleasant sort, perhaps due to the relief of knowing that I came to take their eldest child, who had fallen into a stupor months ago, for treatment at Las Tres Acacias. As it was already nighttime when I arrived, the young man was asleep, and I postponed the examination until the next day; after dinner and a thorough questioning by the others about the news I might have brought from Buenos Aires and even the Court, they took me at last to a clean, orderly room where they had prepared a comfortable bed. Before I went to sleep, I meditated on what undemanding and effusive hospitality they offered me, which was to make my entire stay most agreeable, and I realized that the tedium of life in a country house, lost at the world's edge, must be one of the principal causes.

The next morning, I rose quite early, happy to know that hours of riding did not await me and, as the masters of the house seemed to still be sleeping, I went out walking in the city. I had visited it three or four times in the company of my father ten or fifteen years prior, crossing the great river over several hours of sailing from the Bajada Grande of the Paraná, beyond the troubled network of islands and creeks that separated the two main banks by several leagues. As my birthplace was a meager country house stacked atop the canyon that overlooked the river, the city always seemed enormous upon each visit: frenetic and brightly-colored, its inhabitants distinguished people well established in the world and engrossed in important business at all times. But now that I was returning after so many years, having detoured through Madrid, London, Paris, and even Buenos Aires, it was reduced to
its actual proportions in my eyes, before which such true cities had passed; as is often the case for most people, the city that remained an unchanging image in my memory had shrunk in reality, as if external things existed in several dimensions at once. The city proper stretched out for a few blocks around the plaza in straight, sandy streets, largely unpaved, running parallel or perpendicular to the river, with a couple of churches; a council building, a long structure that was also the customs-house, jail, hospital, and police station; single-story houses with tiled roofs and barred windows so low they seemed to come out of the ground; and fruit trees, too: oranges, tangerines, and lemon trees laden with fruit, fig and peach trees bare in the cold, loquats, little fields of prickly pear, enormous acacias, jacarandas, medicinal
lapacho
trees, silk floss, and red-flowered
ceibos
, and weeping willows that abounded near the water. Orchards and farmyards opened onto back courtyards. In the outer districts, brick or tile-and-adobe houses were less common, and the hovels were spaced farther apart, were dirtier and more wretched, but downtown, a number of businesses had opened in the area immediately surrounding the plaza, and the streets bordering it had been paved. In the old church of Saint Francis, which the Indian converts had helped construct and decorate, was a convent and, five or six blocks from the council building, a house that sheltered several nuns. Of the five or six thousand city-dwellers, very few seemed to have left their houses that morning, perhaps on account of the cold, but I knew that all the city's riches—cattle, timber, cotton, tobacco, leathers—came from the countryside, and it was clear at that early hour that there was next to nothing to do in the frigid and deserted streets. All the shops were still closed around the plaza. I went walking by the riverside, and I saw a few men fishing on horseback: The two riders entered the water with a net suspended between them to dredge the bottom and then, with a vigorous folding motion, cast the net onto the bank where fish
fell twitching on the sand. One of the fish managed such a violent and desperate contortion that, leaping up to a considerable height, it fell back into the water and did not show itself again, which seemed quite comical to the fishermen, who guffawed on and on in noisy celebration.

My stroll had been too early, for it was not yet eight-thirty when I returned to the Parra house, and the family had just awoken. We arranged ourselves, Señor Parra and I, in a large room next to the kitchen, which doubtless served as a dining room on ordinary days, and a negro youth prepared us
mate
and brought us warm cakes from the kitchen. The night before, we had eaten in a slightly more luxurious dining room, reserved for special occasions, but in the modest room where we took breakfast, proximity to the kitchen made the air warmer and more agreeable, as the adjoining stoves were nearly always lit in the wintertime. We had barely touched on the subject of his son, Prudencio, when Señor Parra openly and meekly offered himself up to my questions.

Young Prudencio Parra, just turned twenty-three, had fallen into a deep stupor for some months, a state that, in truth, was the culmination of a series of attacks, each one proving graver over time. Young Prudencio had acted strangely since puberty, but only in the last two or three years might his behavior be considered a state of derangement. What had been mere peculiarities at first were degenerating little by little into madness. At thirteen or fourteen, he spent whole days shut away in his bedroom filling notebook after notebook with “moral reflections” (as he called them) only to build an enormous bonfire in the basement of the house a few months later, using those and other papers blackened with his near-illegible handwriting, declaring that from that day forth he would wholeheartedly dedicate himself to good works; but those changes in humor, however, had not unsettled the family, as they attributed them to the sudden but short-lived excesses of passion
that are unique to youth. The tendency toward shifting moods seemed, for its part, inherent to his temperament; since early childhood, these abrupt changes had been observed not only by the family, but also by the nurses—who, slaves or not, were practically part of the family—and nobody took it seriously, to the point that the young man's instabilities had become part of the household's tradition of comic anecdotes. But since eighteen or so, things had grown more serious, and the gravity of the situation was evident. His bouts of melancholy were becoming more frequent and more acute. Several doctors, from the city or passing through, had examined him and prescribed him treatment, with no visible result. Señor Parra was a sensible enough man not to believe the rumors of demonic possession or witchcraft that raced through the city, and, not exactly among the less affluent strata of the population, but he had scruple enough not to hide them and even conveyed all the details to me, allowing me to prove once more how the powers of science might save mankind—not just those living in faraway regions of the planet, but also in supposedly enlightened European empires—from the ignorance and pain, for superstition and obscurantism had added defamation and slander to the case of young Prudencio, as if his grievous illness was not enough. According to Señor Parra, Prudencio was seized by such a frenzy for philosophical study that he read day and night, and when he'd exhausted the local libraries, which were few and sparse, he would order books from Córdoba, Buenos Aires, or Europe, so desirous of receiving them that, while he waited, he would go to the port every day to ask at the arriving ships if they had his books. But after a time a sort of despondency overtook him, and what once had been sheer enthusiasm, energy, and jubilation, turned to reluctance, dejection, sighs. He began to grumble that nature had not granted him the faculties required to study science and philosophy, and that only a foolish and overweening pride had made him err,
comparing himself to the great geniuses, humanity's benefactors like Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Voltaire. As I inferred from Señor Parra's tale, the subject of his ineptitude for study tormented Prudencio for many months, and bit by bit he attributed to this supposed ineptitude a series of irreparable wrongs he believed he had committed, such that after a time he began to think himself responsible for great troubles—or mere mishaps—in the city, as well as those he learned of from the gazettes arriving from Buenos Aires or the Court. When that undue sense of duty did not reduce him to a weeks-long prostration, during which he would not leave his room, or even his bed, for anything, it would cause him spells of fever, during which it seemed by all means necessary that he act immediately to prevent certain catastrophes, though it was always impossible to get a further explanation. Several times, according to Señor Parra, he'd searched for ragged and dirty garments, preferring those that had belonged to slaves but were in such a state that even the slaves no longer used them, and, bare-headed and barefoot, had taken to the streets to read on the corners some supposedly philosophical tract that he himself had incomprehensibly drawn up. According to Señor Parra, Prudencio's handwriting had changed completely and his minute and firmly-applied adolescent script—unreadable even then—had transformed into a monumental, disjointed one, so loose, overblown, and shaky that no more than twenty or thirty words fit into a notebook. People generally took pity on him and brought him back to the house, but once a few ill-favored sorts, vagrants who roamed the outskirts, had taken him to amuse themselves at his expense. They abandoned him afterward in the middle of a field where he had wandered all night; the search party just managed to find him the following day. Señor Parra told me that when they found him, Prudencio hadn't seemed at all upset by the humiliations visited upon him; rather, it was the vagabonds' lot that troubled him, and he was insistent, exciting
himself almost to tears, about the poverty that had forced them to the margins of society. A week later, when the police captured two members of the band who had returned to the city thinking they would not be recognized by more than a few residents, they got a few good lashes and were tied to stakes in a little field near the edge of town, where Prudencio went to see them and begged the authorities to release them. With time, those fits would pass, and a sadness overtook him, heavier each time. (Señor Parra explained to me that during that period Prudencio's handwriting would change back, shrinking once more, but so exaggeratedly that it became illegible. What's more, from then on he left off writing altogether. So said Señor Parra.)

He did not wash or dress, and sometimes did not even get out of bed, and a sort of apathy took hold of him; despite his peculiarities, he'd been very affectionate since boyhood, not only with family members, but also with neighbors, the slaves, and even strangers, to the point that sometimes his demonstrations proved too much and annoyed certain people who were only passing through the house—but that affection had gone, as if the real world where he had lived until that time was being replaced by another where everything was gray and strange. Troubles, illnesses, and even the deaths of those who had previously been very dear to him yielded not a single sentiment or emotion, and if from time to time his breathing and occasional moans betrayed his undeniable suffering, it was impossible to know what caused it. It became clear, though, that the causes were not external, but lay rather in a few small, painful thoughts that seemed to be unchanging and constantly pondered. Señor Parra had to begin forcing Prudencio out of bed, to dress, to eat, to take a walk, or at least go out to the gallery or the courtyard, especially when the weather was fair, and though he protested at first, in the end, meekly, he would let himself be led away. His eloquence, which he employed during
bouts of fever to try to convince his fellow men that a hazy but imminent catastrophe was brewing, began to wane, and his impassioned speeches became more incoherent and lacked conviction. Gestures and signs once accompanied them for emphasis and to suggest, especially, a secret that he tried in his passion to pass on to his fellows without revealing it completely, but little by little his rants broke down, and exclamations were replaced by halting and unfinished sentences, joining the stiffness of his expression and the feeble immobility of his limbs. In the end, he would only open his mouth to answer, and only in monosyllables, a question he had been asked. When from time to time he made an effort to give a slightly more detailed response, he would form two or three confused and faltering sentences, uttered weakly as if all energy had abandoned him. And in recent months, his prostration had been total, but a curious detail of his behavior, strange as it was to say the least, had come to light: He had closed his left hand in a fist and held it clenched tightly ever since. When asked the reason for his gesture, he would turn his head and press his lips together to make it clear that he was unwilling to answer, and the few times several family members tried to make him open his fist to see what would happen, at times even just for sport, he had resisted so frantically that his relatives had stopped out of pity and left him in peace. One day, Señor Parra noticed that Prudencio's hand was bleeding; it dawned on him that all that time, his son's fingernails had continued to grow, digging into the soft flesh of his palm, so he really did have to make him open the fist to cut his nails and care for his wounds. According to Señor Parra, young Prudencio had begun to howl and thrash about on the floor, trying to stop them from opening his fist, making such a racket that the neighbors came running, believing a crime had been committed in the house. Despite young Prudencio's extreme weakness from his prostration and loss of appetite, his resistance was so great that
they needed three or four strong men to hold him down, open his fist, and keep the hand open while they clipped his nails and tended to his cuts, which had become infected. For the length of the operation, Prudencio howled or whimpered with such a look of terror that the men pitied him, but many of those present noticed Prudencio peering nervously up at the room's ceiling and walls as if he feared they would come down on him. The whole scene had reminded Señor Parra of a time when he (Señor Parra) was a boy, awoken from a hideous nightmare screaming and crying, and as the faces of his family inclined solicitously over him and tried to calm him with words, caresses, and meaningless gestures, he had sensed that, despite how close their bodies seemed, they were in two different worlds: they, in the unreal world of appearances and he, in the true, real one that he saw in his nightmare. According to Señor Parra, his son finally seemed to quiet somewhat, and though his sobs came further and further apart, the whimpering continued, broken by an occasional breath. Lying on the bed, his father and two slaves pinning him firmly while the doctor tended to his wounds, Prudencio signaled for them to free his right hand. When he got what he wanted, he drew it near, a little shyly, to the injury in such a way that when he was almost close enough to obstruct the doctor's work, he motioned over the wounded hand with the healthy one as if snatching an insect from flight, and closed his right fist around it, which seemed to calm him completely. While the bandages on his left hand remained, according to Señor Parra, Prudencio kept the right fist closed, but when they were removed few days later, he changed back to the left hand. Since then, he agreed to open the fist every ten to fifteen days for his nails to be cut, but before he opened it, he would carry out the strange operation with the other hand, snatching something from flight that he apparently would not allow to escape for anything in the world. Señor Parra explained to me that his son undertook this curious
procedure with the absolute and utmost care, and that every time he watched him do so confirmed that it was carried out with the devotion of a ritual.