The Clouds. Juan José Saer
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cutting across the floor, I had the strange impression that the house, its inhabitants and guests, and the shadowy city that surrounded them, were like a mere morsel in the jaws of an infinite mouth, the black, damp river and vast plains, the boundless firmament—a morsel nestled in a dark and eager cavity, ready to be devoured. That strange idea momentarily distracted me from the critical situation we found ourselves in, but seeing Dr. Weiss, I realized that no consideration, romantic as it was, could divert him from the object he had set upon, and it was hard to tell if it was vengeance or suicide.
Nothing important ever really happens—birth, death, and daily life are colorless and dull—but when something truly strange takes place, it seems less than a hallucination, passing fine and distant as a vague dream. As Dr. Weiss did not see our enemy in the garden, despite his scrutinizing the faces of everyone there with his lively, blue gaze, he headed for the house, my anxious and modest person at his heels. The officer was not in the anteroom, but when we passed through the doorway to the main hall, we discovered him opposite the entryway, beneath a great, gold-framed mirror that hung on the wall, where he conversed in a little group that also included Señora Mercedes. We stopped so suddenly that a few guests by the door looked at us with curiosity: The doctor’s blue eyes locked onto the officer’s, who, alerted by a fierce animal instinct of which men are deprived, had raised his head when we entered the hall and recognized us straight away. Despite the gravity of the moment, something small distracted me: At his side, Señora Mercedes continued speaking as if nothing had happened, smiling, worldly and fickle, not even lifting her head, though to this day I am convinced that of all the people at the event, she was the first to notice our presence. On the officer’s face, surprise gave way to a kind of savage joy, delighting at the thought of wicked deeds that, without his having actually desired them, we were giving him the opportunity to commit. I believe he grasped the situation at once and, seeing us walk decisively toward him, he prepared to receive us as he believed we deserved. As we approached him, I began to acquire the steely conviction that, at the other end of the hall, where the couples dancing made off to one side with astonishment and concern to let us pass, our haphazard lives would come to an end when, suddenly and again, with a funny, dreamlike unreality, the unexpected: Dickson, the English consul, intercepted us, obliging us to stop, and whispered that he had something urgent to tell us on behalf of Señora Mercedes, and when Dr. Weiss refused to listen, Dickson clutched at his jacket and said softly, but with uncharacteristic vehemence, that the message he carried would lead to a better realization of the doctor’s plot, and that if we intended to carry it out as planned, we were doomed to failure because we were being ambushed. I felt sweat run down my face, neck, and back, and seeing the large drops that broke out on Dickson’s forehead and ran down the creases of his reddened, prematurely wrinkled face, I could imagine, comparing it with the cause of my own sweat, what his frame of mind might be at that moment. The doctor hesitated for a moment, then accepted, and Dickson and I led him from the house. Before we left, I cast a fleeting glance in the officer’s direction and saw the disappointment on his face. But when I warily eyed Señora Mercedes, seeing her for the last time in my life before turning away, I confirmed that she had not for a single instant interrupted the cheerful conversation with her interlocutors who, I am sure, had not noticed a thing.
When we left for the garden, not a breeze was stirring in the sultry night, but a feeling of coolness, probably imagined, came over me. Dickson asked that we accompany him to the harbor, where Señora Mercedes’s slave awaited us with a message from her lady. We traversed the deserted streets, feeling our way through the dark city amid clouds of buzzing mosquitoes. In a lighted window, behind the grillwork, a man stripped to the waist was eating a piece of watermelon shaped like a half moon. Looking up, he recognized us and, with a sarcasm both gentle and familiar, asked: Out to see the whores, Doctor? Whereupon, with his venerable bonhomie, my dear teacher stopped and burst into laughter, which seemed to perturb Dickson, and launched back this unforgettable response: Not necessarily. The man shook his head as he took a bite of the watermelon, as if we had lost his interest, and when we resumed our march, despite the gravity of the situation, the doctor’s suppressed chuckling echoed in the darkness, irresistibly contagious, so when we arrived at the harbor, our top hats shook against the faint evening light that seemed to diffuse the great open space of the river, whose unmistakable odor, rhythmic splashing on the banks, and genuine coolness in the air betrayed its proximity. Dickson, who retained his seriousness in spite of our certainly unjustified good mood, ordered us to wait and remain silent, and once we obeyed, he began to whistle to notify someone of our presence. Shortly, some thirty meters out, a light signaled and we walked in its direction. When we arrived, six or seven men began to converse in whispered English with Dickson; we were all crammed together around the lantern, studying one another with suspicion and curiosity until the consul, signaling to the doctor and me, moved a few steps away and withdrew into the night. Suddenly, utter darkness overwhelmed me; it took barely a fraction of a second to realize that a cloth had been thrown over my head—a sack, perhaps—and that two or three men had tied my hands. The muffled protests and gasps from the doctor indicated to me, in that total darkness in which I was plunged, that exactly the same thing had happened to him. I tried to struggle, but it was useless. Two powerful arms—Scottish, I discovered later—lifted me up, and it was in that precise moment that my feet ceased to tread the soil of my fatherland forever, or in any case, to this day.
In the letter he sent me from Amsterdam some time later, the doctor offered several additional explanations, since we had already been given the primary ones on the high seas, about what had happened, clarifying the exact motives of the English consul’s intervention: From the outcome of our adventure, one can judge, dear Dr. Real, Señora Mercedes’ subtlety and discretion, two attributes we must add to the undeniable charms she possesses and that you, I believe, have had some occasion to admire de visu. The explanation for the conduct of Dickson, to whom we were always so unkind, is the following: Some time after we parted, Mercedes, trying vainly, according to her, to forget me, began to visit the English consul, who, without elaborating on what she affirms in her letter, was of course never aware of our relations. Mercedes convinced Dickson that her husband, believing himself cuckolded, had the wrong target, and was going to avenge himself on us, believing I was his wife’s lover. Dickson then found himself obliged to intervene. So that’s how they saved our lives, the diplomatic service, secret agents, and naval forces of the great island nation that holds the undisputed mastery of the seas, propagating freedom of commerce, as others do the Black Death, wherever they go.
Hooded by sacks and suffocating, arms bound to our chests by ropes, we were placed on a vessel; the regular sound of its oars accompanied us for some twenty minutes, and then we were hoisted like bundles onto a ship’s deck; finally, they removed the sacks, but returned to bind us at the wrists and ankles with our arms behind us—a humiliating treatment that, I recognize, was effected firmly but not roughly—and left us alone in a silent cabin enveloped in the deepest darkness. Distant voices and sounds reached us, and at last we realized that the ship where we lay sequestered had weighed anchor and was sailing at a steady clip to destinations unknown. In the hours of our imprisonment, the doctor, who had not lost the habit or capacity of reasoning with methodical patience, elaborated a series of hypotheses about the remarkable events that had transpired, and when we heard the door open and a man’s calm, educated voice began to apologize in English for how they had been obliged to treat us, the doctor (a revealing detail if one takes into account that he had been tied hand and foot and hurled into darkness) responded with perfect tranquility in perfect English that we understood (also perfectly) what had happened, and that we were grateful how quickly the English government had acted to save our lives. When the lights came on we realized we were in the elegant guest cabin of an English frigate, whose captain, a tanned and affable Scotsman, was waiting for the two sailors who accompanied him to untie our bonds and help us to our feet before giving us a jovial welcome. A month later, penniless and still a little shaken, more by recent events than by the volatility of the rough, gray ocean, and the captain having conceded to Dr. Weiss every game of chess they played during the voyage, we disembarked one sad and rainy morning in Liverpool.
I have dwelt on the establishment of Casa de Salud and, in brief, I have noted the treatment methods of Dr. Weiss, his character and philosophy, as well as the ravages of the barbarity that in a few hours left the work not even of years, but of my teacher’s entire life, in ruins. It