The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  Our escort was made up of sixteen soldiers, with Sergeant Lucero to command them, and the Indian, Sirirí, a docile Mocoví whose two primary traits, I would say, were prudishness and hatred for Chief Josesito; the mere mention of him in Sirirí’s presence darkened his face. The more unreasonable demands of the Catholic Church, which at that time were not taken seriously even in Rome, seemed to have found in Sirirí the proper soil to take root and flourish to the point of caricature. He did not drink, smoke, curse, nor swear in vain, and it suited him to cross himself on any pretext and kiss a little gold medallion that hung around his neck. Sergeant Lucero, who valued him because he was in fact a trusty guide as well as an interpreter, said—when Sirirí was not around, of course—that as a boy he had swallowed a catechism and had yet to finish digesting it. When he spoke of Chief Josesito, Sirirí’s hateful expression became so disturbing that one began to feel kind toward the musical murderer, who, by contrast, at least displayed a certain humanity when he was drunk or set to playing the violin. Sirirí’s principles, strict as they were, suffered many grueling tests over the trip, during which there was not only prostitution, alcohol, and violence to weaken his moral foundations, but also the addition of madness to dash the walls of the doorless, windowless building in which religion had caged his wild and fateful soul. Osuna, who was like two different people depending on whether he was drunk or sober, respected him by day for of his knowledge of the desert and loathed him by night.

  We were a diverse and colorful convoy: One part of the escort went before us and the other brought up the rear. My carriage came at the head, and those of the five patients followed behind, then the Basque’s warehouse, and finally the women’s wagon. Of the carrt-dwellers, only Troncoso and I traveled by horse, he on his tall and skittish blue roan, so tense and lively it was nearly always reined in and ready to break into a gallop at any moment. It seemed also to have contracted its rider’s strange ailment, held in a state of exaggerated activity, morbid and unceasing. The escort soldiers did not wear uniforms, but dressed more capriciously, and though several tattered, faded military garments had made it into that ragged assemblage, the diversity of the rest ultimately caused it to lose all unity. From that haphazard motley, diametrically opposed to the careful design implied by the uniform, which seeks repetition, order, and symmetry, no doubt gave off an equally lively effect, especially from the colors and designs on the ponchos—solid, striped, dark or light, fringed or unfringed—that, in the desert’s empty space, seemed to take on additional clarity, especially in those early days, when they swelled in the icy southerly wind or fluttered over the backs of their owners. The wagons shone dimly at first, too, as they had been cleaned, oiled, and partially repainted with the company colors by their own cart-men on their arrival from Paraguay. Following the last of the soldiers, a herd of fresh horses went meekly, driven by the horsemen who would take turns at the task. And, finally, ten or twelve stray dogs followed us with the same stubbornness, need, and eagerness as seagulls trailing a ship’s wake in search of sustenance.

  As a doctor, my primary responsibility was, of course, to busy myself with my patients, but as Osuna hinted, and I came to understand, the posture of a leader or master was expected of me, so I locked myself in my carriage to ponder how I might display that posture more clearly, concluding that the best way was to underline the fact that it was I who paid the expenses for our expedition, though I later realized that those ragged mercenaries we called our escort—some of whom barely understood a word of Castilian because they came from Corrientes and Asunción and their mother tongue was the native language, Guaraní—expected me to make the necessary decisions about the direction of our unusual caravan. As it was impossible for me to carry out that duty without Osuna and the sergeant, I decided to adopt a distant and thoughtful attitude, delaying my response to their proposals and pretending rather to weigh the pro and contra of each before making a firm decision. I must say my farce yielded a far better result than expected, since the one who seemed to have the most doubts about my abilities, which is to say Osuna himself, turned out to be the most gullible of all. Many years later, he would still speak of me as a man of the plains, though never in my presence. In reality, I do not know if my authority prevailed because the wages were paid in the promised amounts and terms, or thanks to my professional reputation, for I was able to treat all the maladies those rustics endured over the long month of our trip with my little valet case of medical instruments and emergency remedies. Colds, diarrhea, scrapes, boils, insect stings, fever, back pain or hemorrhoids, or else old complaints, already bound to the bodies of their victims, flared up with the bustle of the trip, and not a single day went by in which one of those gauchos—thirty years later I use this word cautiously, although I know it has lost the somewhat insulting sense it had in those days—did not come to my carriage, embarrassed but helpless, to consult me.

  We had barely left the city when, as I have prematurely mentioned, the evolution of young Prudencio Parra took an unexpected turn: I had found him completely prostrate in his bed, fist gripped tightly, gaze fixed upon the void, deep creases on his forehead and between the brows to give him that suffering and lifeless expression, and this gave way to a certain animation—as I dare call it only in comparison to the months-long, total stillness—whose singular feature was the series of movements he made with his hands, repeating them incessantly, even at meals, which he absorbed meekly and indifferently. He would sit up in his bunk, and, unbothered by the jostling, would begin his movements, which he could replicate for hours like a machine, every so often casting a slow and serious glance at his hands, followed by the faintest of sad smiles.

  He would extend the fingers of his right hand and then slowly contract them, until it gave his hand the look of a claw, though soft and never threatening; after a brief pause he’d continue the same movement until he closed his fist completely. And finally, when his fist had been closed for several seconds, his left hand would cover it and squeeze it hard. All day long, whenever anyone was present (since, mad or sane, it is difficult to know how a person acts when he is alone) he would make those gestures. While they surprised me at first, I came to think of them before falling asleep, and I realized that they were familiar to me, and, though I did not know why, this brought to mind the arcades of Alcalá de Henares one sunny spring noontime, giving rise to an agreeable sensation in me. When I woke the next morning and my mind, locked at night by the keys of sleep, opened to wakefulness, the first thing that awaited me was the answer to that mysterious sense of familiarity: In philosophy, we had studied Cicero’s Academica, and as the exam period drew near, I went strolling down Alcalá’s main street with a friend, memorizing that page where Cicero describes how Zeno the Stoic showed his disciples the four stages of knowledge: Fingers extended signified Conception (visum); when he folded them in a bit was Assent (assensus), by which Conception becomes patent in our spirit; then, with closed fist, Zeno tried to show how, by way of Assent, one arrives at Firm Conviction (comprehensio) of said Conceptions. And, in the end, raising his left hand to his fist, enveloping it and squeezing forcefully, he showed that motion to his students and told them that it was Knowledge (scientia). On remembering this, I leapt out of bed, and having dressed myself summarily, barreled down to young Prudencio’s wagon where he, in that early hour, was asleep and peaceful-looking. His open hands rested palms-down on the gray poncho that covered him. The Paraguayan soldier who had been an army nurse, and as such was entrusted with the care of the Verde brothers, and whose duty it was to look after the patients with another of his comrades, had ably tidied up the bunk. Again I noticed, as I had already several times in his home that, judging by the state of his bed each morning, young Prudencio’s nights must have been restful indeed. I stayed, hoping he would rouse himself, for I was keen to observe him pass from sleep to waking, to see how the strange machinery of his hands would set itself in motion. After a long time, he rasied his eyelids, as was his custom, and if my
presence startled him he made no sign of it. He sat up slowly in bed, eyes hooded, and, resting his back against the carriage wallboard, began to stretch out the fingers of his right hand, preparing his left in the air so that, when the first three movements of the cycle had been completed, the fourth, in which he covered his right fist with his left hand and pressed forcefully, might be performed. The points of the two ever-present bits of white cloth stuck out from his ears, for whenever anyone tried to take them Prudencio would howl piteously, forcing me to order his release. But the impressively sunken area from cheekbone to jaw, the recessed cheek, had filled out somewhat, and his face, still so pale, looked unquestionably rounder and healthier. As was customary, he made as if to ignore me, but something told me that, from the remote location where he had been inwardly secluded for several months to escape the tumult within himself and in the world, the remnants of his self, abandoned perhaps in the blackest corner of the universe, were broadcasting signs of life. That his movements were completely identical with the gestures that served Zeno the Stoic to enact the phases of knowledge for his disciples (according to Cicero), I had not attributed a priori to some inconceivable coincidence between the ravings of a sick boy and the imagery wrought by the father of the Stoics at the height of his faculties, as if logic and madness might arrive at the same symbols by different roads—which can happen more often than one might think—but rather attributed it to the more easily explainable fact that in his period of avid and haphazard reading, young Parra might have one day encountered in a paragraph of Cicero, immediately making it his own, the explication of that inextricable world in whose disorder his fragile mind, astonished and terrified, had been awakened without knowing why.

  But there was something yet more curious in young Parra’s sudden, if slow and limited, activity. It continued to hold my attention, and I took note of it in light of that golden rule which Dr. Weiss had instilled in me: According to him, all of a madman’s actions, as trivial or absurd as they seem, are significant. The fist that Prudencio held closed stubbornly and forcefully for so many months, which he only deigned to open from time to time so that his nails might be cut (and not before snatching up an invisible breeze with his other hand using the same gesture, though a little gentler, as we make to trap a fly in the air), that fist that had taken the strength of several men to open after so much time, had relaxed for some mysterious reason once our convoy left the city, and his two hands had begun to effect the precise but unhurried movements I have just described. As I believe has also been said, because of the flood we had to go north for two days until we met a bend in the river shallow enough to let us cross, so that, once on the opposite shore, we could journey in the other direction along the river’s western bank, returning, so to speak, to our point of departure. That situation gave me the opportunity to confirm the most surprising detail in Prudencio’s behavior: Since his fist relaxed as we left the city, once we started to approach our original point of departure before veering west to trek through the desert, would his hand-movements cease and his fist close up once more, its strength apparently renewed? While we kept to the outskirts of his native city, as we had plotted our route, his fist tightened obstinately, but the moment we began to seek dry land to the west, his fist relaxed, his body straightened in the bunk, and the hand movements, which had been so familiar to the students of Zeno beneath the Athenian arcades two thousand years ago, brought to light by unexpected means, promptly returned. A single explanation seemed possible to me: Every unique but fragmentary place in the world is embodied in its totality, so for young Parra, his birthplace contained the universe in all the enigmatic complexity he had tried to decipher with the help of frenetic and chaotic reading, until one day he lost his mind. So, as we moved away from the scene of that destructive experience, the terror diminished, but when we drew near it again, proximity to the city, steeped with such a painful past, caused it to worsen. (To this philosophical explanation of Doctor Real’s, let us offer a simpler and, more importantly, likelier counter: that what moved away and came closer with the trip’s ups and downs, and what had driven that poor young man mad, was not the enigmatic universe or anything of that sort, but, as is patently obvious, his own family. Note, M. Soldi.)

  It has already been noted that, to reach a latitude nearly equivalent to our starting point, we had to travel four days, which under normal circumstances would have been a quarter of our journey. And so, as the fifth day dawned, we started westward, determined, searching for the dry land that would allow us to go south. Within hours, we advanced into the flattest, emptiest, most wretched part of the plain. A southerly wind, frigid and persistent despite the limpid sky—not a single cloud in sight—pummeled us across our left flank as we made our way inland, shaking the dried grasses along the ground, winter-thinned and gray. We traveled all day, bearing away from the water into high desert, and when we camped at dusk under a low sun—enormous, round, and red, almost touching the horizon’s edge, accentuating contours with a brilliant red halo—I had the impression, more sad than terrifying, that we had arrived at the very heart of isolation. Above the lowlands slipping quickly into the night, it seemed to me, for a few moments, that we were the only living things to writhe beneath that crushing and disdainful alien sun. I probed all along the circular horizon with my gaze, detecting no other motion but the trembling inclinations of the wind-whipped grass, no sound but the whistling of that icy blast from the south. And though I knew the desert swarmed with life, not just animal but solitary, nomadic human life, it was the inhuman wind in that landscape that made me shudder. Never, not before or after that journey, have I received, as if I were ruler of the barren land, the enormous red sun and, some hours later, the overwhelming stars, such clear tidings about the true state of all things growing, creeping, fluttering, pulsating, and bleeding, twitching in grotesque contortions, within the fiery engine that, for some reason, chance had placed in motion. We lit a modest fire, as brush was scarce in those parts, and, after we ate, I got into bed partly-dressed to ward off the cold and, before falling asleep, read a few pages of Virgil by candlelight.

  For leagues and leagues, in every one of its parts, the desert remains identical. Only the light changes: The sun recurs, rising in the east, climbs slow and regular to its zenith and then, with the same ritual precision with which it has reached the apex of the sky, descends to the west and, finally, having grown enormous and red, gradually fading and cooling, flaring with a brightness perhaps familiar in infinite space but foreign here below, then sinks to the horizon and disappears, covering everything with night’s viscous blackness until, a few hours later, it reappears in the east. Were it not for the changing light and color of that perpetual turning, a rider crossing the plain would think himself to be always riding in the same point in space, in a futile, slightly oneiric sham of motion. (On cloudy days, that illusion is perfect and a little unsettling.) The rhythmic sounds of displacement—in cart, in carriage, on postal coach or horse, repeating and identical for long stretches, despite the regularity, if not the absence, of the terrain’s features—seem also to infinitely repeat the same moment, as if time’s colorless ribbon, stuck in the groove of the wheel (or the who-knows-what that displaces it) shimmers motionless in place, suspended and unable to rest because of its essence of pure change. Such monotony numbs. As a rider moves forward, things might often happen that are specific to a place, but they come to adapt themselves to that illusion of repetition; if at first they succeed in attracting the traveler’s gaze and even his curiosity, past a certain point they become more than familiar and float, phantomlike, far outside experience, and, at times, even beyond knowledge. The life that swarms among the tall, even grasses, for example, pulled out of their quiet by the passing of a cart or horseman, that diverse and vibrant life that could occupy a naturalist’s whole existence—the traveler with no other concern but to leave behind those poor, abandoned fields as soon as possible might find his interest awakened at its first appearance, but after a
few hours it blends into the most uniform monotony. If a hare leaps into his path, his eye will always capture the same image of the jump, and he will always see the short-tailed hindquarters a little more sharply than the rest, springing up, while he will just make out the tips of the ears in a flash as the head dives into the grass. In the case of partridges, it will always be a pair, plumage neither gray nor green nor blue, and with a metallic sheen, that comes flying side by side, male and female, almost level with the grasses, to disappear into them again and take up their short, slow flight on a light breeze a few meters away. League after league, the same caracara will appear, wheeling over the same skeleton, and the same wild horses on the same winter migration will graze in herds of fifteen or twenty, tiny and docile, along the horizon. A peculiarity in the scenery that suddenly appears, introducing diversity, repeats itself over the leagues and ultimately there is nothing but the same field as in the beginning, a field whose novelty fades almost at once. Like the sea, the plain varies only at its edge; its interior is like an undifferentiated nucleus. Barren and measureless, when it produces some imperfection in itself, that imperfection always gives the illusion (or the perhaps the true impression) that it is the same one, again and again. When something out of the ordinary happens, its passing is so intense and vivid that, whether brief or lasting, its evidence will always seem too much, and will trouble us.