The Clouds. Juan José Saer
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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.
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.