The Clouds. Juan José Saer
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to eat. Most often, when they realized they had found a hospital, and especially when they discovered what kind of patients we treated, they rushed off, leaving us in peace: It is already known that madness often provokes unease, if not laughter, and, more often than not, consternation and fear.
It was not all misunderstandings and threats in the surrounding world, and I must recall that in the fourteen years of Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud, a group of friends and advocates, hailing from all social classes and political factions—including dignitaries of the successive governments, scientists, and even members of the clergy—backed our expertise in every way. A good part of our madmen’s families, if only so they would not have them reappear suddenly in their houses one day if our institution closed, always paid on time, as each without exception formed part of the moneyed classes that, whatever faction they belonged to, were the only ones who granted themselves the right to govern, using their influence however they could to ensure we were not bothered. But on several occasions, grudges, rivalries, and conflicts of interest nearly brought us to ruin. When the wars of independence began, the revolutionaries accused us of being royalists, and the royalists, of being revolutionaries. As the Crown had authorized our settlement, the criollo revolutionaries accused us of espionage, and a few even expected us only to admit foreign patients to the Casa from families supporting the Revolutionary cause. The most ridiculous thing about that situation was that Dr. Weiss and I had always been avowed revolutionaries—he had been in the streets of Paris in ninety-three—but as we were forced to conceal this during the Spanish Viceroyalty in order to survive, the revolutionaries claimed we chose to defend their cause out of opportunism or, even worse, in order to more effectively carry out our supposed duty as spies. What followed was what follows in all revolutions, really, which is to say, the leaders were in one small group made up of die-hard revolutionaries, who always lose in the end, while the rest was comprised of one part influential men from the previous government, changing sides as they went along, and one part those neither with nor against them, who simply seek to gain advantage from the unforeseen circumstances that brought them to power. Aside from the families who had entrusted one of their own to us and from certain scientists who were genuinely interested in our work, no one understood what it was we were doing, and so we suffered the eternal scourge that threatens those who think, or those who mistrust a man who denies what he does not understand.
I have been told that these days (Roughly 1835 by my calculations. Note, M. Soldi) they go slitting throats all across the land; in my day it was the firing squad that seemed to be the fashion. An unforeseen ally saved us from this painful and, in short, all-too degrading end: the English consul, who considered us—you will pardon me for taking the liberty in my account of attributing to a diplomat, and an Englishman no less, the faculty of thought—a couple of charlatans, even suspected, with just cause on his part, that in reality Dr. Weiss and I, who were often in the habit of crossing him at social gatherings, were having our fill of laughs at his expense. Shortly after resettling in Amsterdam, the doctor wrote to me: I have arrived here safe and sound again in Europe, and all thanks to Mister Dickson. The poor man, torn between his hatred of Spain (for commercial reasons) and his hatred of all that is revolutionary (his national idiosyncrasy), he finds himself ever the servant of two masters, lacking sympathy for either. And all the same, his sense of honor, lacking any hold on reality, has saved our lives. I trust I do not offend anyone by explaining, twenty years later, the allusions contained in the doctor’s letter.
For several months, a Chilean youth had been interned in the Casa, sick with melancholia, his father having been executed on the charge of high treason in Valparaíso for taking up the Spanish cause. A government spy informed a military officer in Buenos Aires about the Chilean youth’s presence at Las Tres Acacias, and the officer held that the doctor and I kept the young man at the Casa on the pretext of his illness to protect him, and that he was not actually sick but was rather a fugitive, which proved, according to the officer, that we were spies for the King of Spain, as some suspected. The young man was seriously ill, seized with the deepest melancholy, and naturally we refused to surrender him. But when the military emissaries withdrew, Dr. Weiss, looking concerned, explained to me that he, like the officer, knew the Chilean youth was no more than a pretext and that the real reason was the officer’s unspoken suspicion that his wife was cuckolding him with the doctor: A libelous suspicion, sighed the doctor, for Mercedes and I haven’t seen each other for six months. So it went that my dear teacher’s inexplicable taste for married women nearly brought us before the firing squad.
Two or three days later, they arrested us and threatened the staff into departing for their homes. A couple of men, nobly concerned for the patients, who returned secretly to the Casa, were flogged, staked, and forcibly conscripted into the army. The building was brutally and deliberately looted and smashed as the patients fled in terror. The doctor and I were imprisoned in the jealous officer’s camp for three weeks until they came for us one day at dawn and, joking and saying they were going to shoot us, brought us out to the countryside; having given us a beating, they mounted us bareback, half-dressed, on a single horse—I had the reins—and set us free.
In Buenos Aires, the doctor sought redress from the government for the officer’s unforgivable conduct, and that was how we uncovered a fact more horrible than our adventure: Despite his illness, the Chilean youth had been arrested on the soldier’s orders, and was shot the next day on the charge, no less ignominious than it was false, of treason. We were heaved about by anger and pain, staggering between anxiety and revenge, but the most important thing was to search for the patients the marauders had set loose. So with the help of our protectors, we formed a party and went out into the vastness of the plains to find them. Faithful Osuna, untouched by the years, guided us through that featureless expanse—like him, ever the same—in which he alone was able to perceive the details and nuances. But though we searched day and night for weeks, we did not see a single trace of the patients. Many years later, until the day of his death, in fact, the doctor and I continued to speculate in our letters about possible explanations for this complete and sudden disappearance.
For the first time I saw the doctor’s features reflect a passion previously unknown in him: hatred, and a feeling that saddened me all the more: remorse. Some days, he wandered, somber and silent, amid the wild disorder that the marauding soldiers had left in the Casa: the trampled orchard and garden, plants torn up by the roots, broken glass, furniture hacked into pieces, scorched books with the pages ripped out, papers everywhere. The most fruitful years of our lives had just been senselessly laid to waste by the savagery that, to hide its unspeakable instincts, thought to call itself law and order. Of the boarders we took in at the white Casa of Dr. Weiss, it must also be noted that, even when their own families had disowned them, none of the patients, abandoned by reason and all as they were, took part in these shameful acts. Perhaps this proves an argument I had heard the doctor make to himself many times: Reason does not always express the best of humanity.
We slept in the ruins that night, and the following day we resettled in Buenos Aires with what we were able to salvage from the disaster: some books, five or six pages of an herbarium, the bust of Galen which by some miracle had remained intact. But the doctor’s bottomless sorrow, though it seemed to intensify, did not last for long; three or four days later a new determination, so intense it inspired a little dread in me, appeared on his face. When he decided to put this determination into practice, a grim but solemn spark of satisfaction arose in his gaze. In the back of a tavern one night, inspired by the wine, he explained his plan to me: He would challenge the officer to a duel. The doctor explained his crazy idea, which was essentially a suicide mission, with his customary logical clarity, and was so pleased with the rational evidence that he seemed to have forgotten his many years of medical practice, during which his principal task had been to patiently and insightfully dismantle the hallucinatory fallacies of the patients—patients who were, just as the doctor was now, incapable of seeing for themselves their preposterous concatenations. According to the doctor, the officer would not pursue us, which no doubt was true, and we had no alternatives but flight or confrontation. Yet it was clear we could not go searching for him in his encampment, where his troops’ superior numbers were an insurmountable obstacle, nor could we kill him in the street, nor report him to the authorities, which he was a part of and over whom he held considerable sway. Nor were we able to lay an ambush (I am merely listing the options, each one more absurd than the last,