The Clouds (8 page)

Before leading me to his son's room, Señor Parra, answering a query of mine, told me of the treatments prescribed by the previous doctors who had examined Prudencio, none of which yielded the slightest result. The two doctors, chapter-certified for ongoing practice in the city, had treated him in the typical fashion, but barely saw him on their visits now, declaring him incurable. Another two or three doctors who were passing through the city were consulted, and one of them had recommended baths in the Salado River, declaring the quality of its water and especially of its clay most advisable in the treatment of melancholia. Señor Parra told me that although Prudencio was terrified to plunge into the river, he readily consented to being thoroughly coated with the banks' reddish mud and would sprawl in the sun to dry, to the point that it was almost always a struggle to remove the layer of crusted clay that covered him. The previous summer, however, his stupor had become so serious that it had been impossible to take him from his room and bring him to the riverbank.

Señor Parra led me to his son's room. A smell of enclosure, of strange substances mixed and marinated—of abandonment—pervaded despite the order that reigned within the soberly furnished bedroom, overheated by the brazier installed by the window to be burnt all night. Young Prudencio was propped up in bed, under blankets, sunk into the shadows, and his head, topped with a white nightcap, lolled on a heap of pillows. Although its occupant's eyes were closed, the bed looked as though it had just been made, but Señor Parra explained to me that the young man remained completely immobile as he slept, so in the morning the bed always gave the impression of being untouched. Prudencio's face had a jaundiced appearance, especially striking beneath the sparse beard
that covered his chin and jaw, and also because of his severely narrow features. A sort of vertical crease that ran from cheekbone almost to jaw cut his left cheek in two, while the right cheek sunk into an enormous cleft that took it up entirely, like the remains of a territory following a landslide. Despite his youth, his skin was wrinkled like worn leather, stretched across his cheekbones so the contours took on a cartilaginous sheen. But his forehead in particular drew the attention, crisscrossed with deep horizontal folds, and on his brow a horseshoe-shaped crease, as if a tiny brand had been embedded in his flesh, joined the two eyebrows with a deep furrow. Beneath the nightcap, tufts of hair bunched long and stiff against the pillow, further accentuating the thinness of his face. For some mysterious reason, the points of two white bits of cloth emerged from his ears, stuffed in the openings. Though his eyes were closed, the suffering was plain on his face, from the deep wrinkles of course, but also from his heavy eyelids and gaping mouth. It was a bottomless pain and, truthfully, rather a theatrical one, as though his expressions were exaggerated to make it plainer, with the effect of adding decades of dejection, adversity, and affliction to his mere twenty-three years. Despite his half-closed eyes, it was hard to know if he was sleeping or pretending to sleep, but he lay so still that it seemed genuine and, along with his yellowed pallor, gave him the look of a cadaver. But when I leaned down to draw back the blankets and examine the rest of his body, he slowly drew his eyelids up, in stages, one might say, and let his gaze slip indifferently over me, landing on some unknown spot between the bed and door. I was surprised to discover he was not as thin as I had expected, at least if the knee-length white nightgown did not mislead me, but his torso seemed fleshier than his face, and his calves—ending in enormous feet, gently resting one beside the other, with plump, widely-spaced toes—did not seem thin or fragile. His right arm, open-handed, lay along the length of his body,
but the left fist, resting on his abdomen, was closed so tightly that the effort further whitened the yellowish skin of his protuberant knuckles. The general softness of his body; his ravaged face; the cottony neglect of his limbs; the passivity of his great, motionless feet; his lost gaze and suffering expression—it all contrasted with the determination of the closed fist where all the body's energies seemed to gather, and thus it was plain to see that this gesture, which, to many, represented nothing more than an irrational and chimeric stubbornness, was to me a matter of life or death that I, in that moment, would have been crazy to ignore. I know, too, that only insanity dares to render those limits of thought that good sense, for the sake of remaining sensible, often prefers to ignore—that it drives the mad to be detached, stubborn, beyond recovery. Something horrifyingly serious seemed to depend on that hand, and the painful determination of his gesture made me believe that in the event that his concentration waned and his tension slackened, letting the hand relax, weak once more, an apocalyptic wind would start to blow, dragging all the universe in its wake. I studied his body for a few seconds without perceiving the slightest movement; once open, his eyes did not close, once more demonstrating my teacher's frequent observation, namely that the mentally ill are able to do things with their bodies that are forbidden to the sane; to verify more thoroughly, I concentrated on detecting external signs of respiratory activity, such as the soft sound of exhalation and inhalation or thoracic expansion and contraction, but after several seconds I was forced to admit that utter silence reigned in the room and his body stayed perfectly motionless. Paradoxically, from that immobility emanated not a sense of death, but rather an impression of struggle, of adversarial forces in perpetual conflict that had chosen that boy's body and soul as their battlefield. His fixed and slitted eyes, his body's utter stillness, and the fist held tight against his abdomen gave the impression that all his interest
concentrated on some remote, internal region where said decisive battle was taking place, to capture even the tiniest details of that faraway tumult.

When we left the bedroom, Señor Parra looked at me searchingly, trying to ascertain my opinion of his son's condition, and I responded in all sincerity: As experience had shown that fits of stupor never lasted overly long, and as at first glance young Prudencio's physical condition did not appear to have deteriorated, he might hope to improve somewhat in the coming months. (In fact, it happened that he recovered when we embarked on the journey to Casa de Salud; almost in the very moment we left the city, our patient came out of his stupor. Later on, I will record his strange evolution in detail.)

Señor Parra showed me his house, as he had not been able to the previous night owing to the lateness of my arrival, and I, out of discretion, had refrained from roaming that morning while the masters slept. The classical rows of rooms that opened out onto galleries, forming square courtyards—the slaves slept in the back rooms—held not a single surprise for me, but out behind them was a well-tended, if cold-ravaged, garden and a fine nursery of fruit trees, laden with mandarins, oranges, lemons. As we talked, we ate a few mandarins, sweet and icy cold, at the foot of the tree, and when we went back inside, I was surprised by something that the house's conventional construction had been unable to give me: I stepped into one of the rooms next to the dining room, tastefully furnished and endowed with an abundant library. Several local landscapes, executed by an able but uninspired hand, adorned the walls, and a bust of Voltaire observed us from a shelf. I suddenly realized that I was lucky to be staying at the house of a fashionable and illustrious family, a most rare situation in those remote provinces at that time. (
The situation has not, in fact, improved
. Note, M. Soldi.) Señor Parra's discretion, not to mention his shyness,
prevented him from revealing too much (and perhaps also my reputation as Dr. Weiss's collaborator and having studied in Europe), but over the weeks I was forced to tarry, I was able to learn of his lively and sensible ideas and the agreeable tenor that prevailed within his family, who were truly saddened by young Prudencio's illness. The paintings in the library were by Señor Parra, which, when I found out, caused me to judge them more favorably—I do not know if this was because they had been executed by an amateur who had never undertaken to study painting, or out of affection for the artist and his family. Señor Parra's numerous businesses, which had allowed him to amass a considerable fortune, did not prevent him from cultivating himself as well as his orchard and garden, and his genuine modesty was unjustified if one takes into account the soundness of his general opinions—a rare trait in a man of means—as it had already been made possible for me to note more than once, by observing frequently on two continents, that the rich hold a high opinion of themselves and are, by a mysterious transposition, convinced that their skill at winning money allows them to hold forth topics of which they are ignorant, whether artistic, political, or philosophical.

While Señor Parra went to carry out his duties, I went to the barracks to see if my traveling companions had settled in. The soldiers, accustomed to military life, had already melted in with the rest of the troops—perhaps too lofty a name for that handful of men, poorly-armed and practically in rags—but Osuna was in a foul mood and claimed not to have slept all night from the racket and constant bustle that reigned in the block. What they called “the block” was an old brick-and-adobe building, in fairly poor repair but large enough to permit some forty men to spread out their nicked, scuffed equipment on the hard-packed floor and kip down at night. Special cases, like sick men or deserters, I would learn later, were dispatched to the hospital or the jail, which were
located in a slightly larger building perhaps a hundred meters from the block. Osuna's discontent seemed justified because the accommodations were of the worst sort, but, visiting it some time later, I saw that our guide's rather special character might have caused him to exaggerate the reasons for his protest without realizing it. It ought to be clear to my future readers, should ever I have them, that this observation does not denigrate Osuna's many and excellent qualities in any way, as his loyalty, matchless efficiency, intelligence, common sense, and self-denial overshadowed those others. And yet, I do not know whether due to professional bias or something else, it is impossible for me not to speculate about personality traits that motivate the opinions and actions of those I consort with beyond the reasons they themselves might offer, which are likely true enough. Osuna was thirty-five at the time and already knew the vast plain minutely, out to its farthest corners, and he had turned his irrefutable knowledge of everything related to it into a profitable but unsteady situation, perhaps familiar to the sage or the artist. Like Osuna or other desert-experts of his kind, the wise man or the artist must frequently deal with those who may benefit from their practice but are unable to properly appreciate it. Leaving aside the fact that the others did not stop to consider the sacrifices made to acquire that knowledge—and in Osuna's case that knowledge constituted a true mastery of the unseen—it could leave him in fairly tight situations. These included dealing with superiors who might fail to give him the respect he deserved, merely taking advantage of his knowledge, or, might instead form an excessive regard for him, giving him special treatment that cut him off from the soldiers and men of similar means. Because of the many travails that gave rise to his knowledge, Osuna had acquired a particular character that made him feel darkly different from the rest, separating himself from them and concentrating, like a great ascetic, on the many details of the outer world. Over the years I
dealt with him, I noticed that he was at ease only in the desert. What astonished me about him was seeing, when we made camp at some outpost and he was tempted by liquor, how the impassive façade began to crack on his sharp, dark face, how his small, slanting eyes sparkled, rapid and ever-changing, betraying the passions he hid so well during the day: vanity, arrogance even, regarding his position; jealousy that kept him from admitting to himself that there might be some other worthy guide on the plain; his efforts, otherwise so clumsy, to always be the center of attention; his air of superiority as he listened to and observed the other gauchos, soldiers, et cetera, who shared a bit of roast with the travelers in the plain's empty night. But much more astonishing to me was to see him decisively mount his horse the next morning, fresh and ready; laconic, energetic, forbidding his face from revealing a single emotion, a single sentiment—as opposed to some hours earlier—as if it was not his will to pick up the road again, proceeding thanks to the thousand messages only he could read that reality sent to him at every step. So every time Osuna complained of something to me and I proposed to rectify the situation, he would respond that it wasn't worth it. My hearing his complaints, it seemed, was enough.

The length of our stay in the city depended on two patients, one who hailed from Asunción in Paraguay and the other from Córdoba, joining the other two in the city, young Prudencio Parra and a nun who, as the Mother Superior informed us by letter, had fallen into madness after being violated in the convent garden. The man was in jail and the nun remained in the convent, but her constant agitation convinced the local religious authorities to appeal to Dr. Weiss to resolve the problem. In recent months, a copious exchange of letters had flown between Las Tres Acacias and the four patients' families to arrive at an agreement about the conditions of transport, admission, treatment, fees, et cetera, and those lengthy negotiations had prompted our arrival in the
city where, once the four patients had been gathered along with the guards and all that was necessary for the voyage, the caravan would depart. At first we had planned to undertake the voyage by water, but the special cargo we had to transport dissuaded the few Italian sailors whose ships provided the accommodations necessary to do so. Besides, we were reluctant about transferring the mad on the waterways because, unless we kept them locked in the hold the entire time, the wild river might prove a danger to the patients. Finally, with the families' explicit consent, and as the result of negotiations carried out personally by Dr. Weiss, we adopted the solution of a land voyage, never thinking for an instant that, after weeks of swelling hour by hour, the river whose company we rejected would come for us, rising up of its own accord to impose its harsh rule.