The Clouds

by Juan José Saer

  Regarding Troncoso, the complications that brought about a change in his condition proved much more serious, even endangering the life and property of the members of our caravan, demonstrating once again, though such redundancy is needless, that delusion, whether the philosophers like it or not, is as qualified—if not more so—as the will to direct the order of events according to one’s whim. Even before departure I saw Troncoso’s agitation grow, almost imperceptibly at first, manifesting in an unspoken grudge against me that drove him to compete with me, especially for the organization and command of the caravan, a responsibility which, as I believe I have said, I shared with Osuna and Sergeant Lucero. Ever since I had to display my authority before him and his men during our first encounter at Señor Parra’s house, Troncoso’s feelings toward me had vacillated between dread and spite, prudence and mockery, respect and resentment, forecasting the difficulties that often follow the aggravation of hostility, and which were to multiply on a journey like the one we were about to attempt. But despite his ill-concealed disdain, a disdain to which I doubt I dissuaded him from adding both sarcasm and slander, he was my patient, nothing more, and as I was his doctor, his health and his person were my responsibility, all of which would come to naught unless I could incite him to more moderate feelings. When we were still in the city, Troncoso always assumed, in a manner perhaps vaguely deliberate, an attitude that bordered on the limits of my tolerance, for I, as his doctor, instructed him in our daily conversations in what he was allowed to do as far as his comings and goings, his public conduct, his meals, hygiene, and daily routine, though, as I have already said, he was always on the verge of disobedience. The moment we began our journey, his fiery temperament grew rather more flammable, and I feared (and not without reason) an explosion at any moment. His remarkable animation, which lacked an object in the monotony of the plains, kept him from staying at rest in the wagon as the other patients did and, no matter the hour I went out into the morning after rising and getting dressed, he was already mounted on his blue roan, trotting about nearby, talking loudly with the soldiers or cart-men, who did not always seem to quite understand the meaning of his sarcastic remarks, or his shouts and orders. He was a gifted rider who went about as though he had forgotten he was on horseback, but he never committed a single fault; the beast he rode seemed indifferent to its rider, as well, and all they did together—walk, trot, gallop, race, halt, reverse, or prance—seemed the result, not of an undetectable order given by man to beast, but of a spontaneous and almost magical coincidence that, by extended chance, externally harmonized the casual movements of two wills, each focused on itself and ignorant of the other. His expertise as a horseman overcame the soldiers’ reservations, and, despite his eccentricity, they grudgingly respected him, which, along with El Ñato’s obsequious loyalty, complicated my monitoring duties. A sure sign of his worsening state was that he not only engaged in frenetic activity without any practical purpose all day and night, since he barely slept and gave no sign of weariness, but also the fact that his external appearance—his clothing, beard, and mane of hair—was deteriorating, for he hardly changed clothes or shaved anymore, let alone bathe. As a result, his trousers and jacket were riddled with stains and even holes, and his flounced white shirt, so clean on his arrival in the city, was all wrinkled and of an uncertain color. There were always a few little bubbles of saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth; if anything contrasted with his body’s restless fever, it was the steadiness of his gaze, shot through with veins that clouded and reddened his eyes. Sometimes at dusk, he got down from his horse and walked stiffly among the motionless coaches with great, energetic strides, chest puffed, head erect, hair disheveled and skin browned by the sun—a sun which burned a little brighter each day. He might have a book in his hand, poring over it without breaking his stride or, if he left off reading (or pretending to read), he did not deny his thoughts externalization with shouts, hoots of laughter, or condescending and garbled observations that he would direct to whatever member of the caravan he encountered, not stopping as he passed. A few times, he visited me to demand I modify the trajectory which, according to him, would help speed the journey, but mostly he complained about the three prostitutes and the nun—whom he dubbed, with a caustic smirk, the Strumpet Superior—present in the convoy, claiming the contract his family signed to stipulate the conditions of his treatment would feature prominently within the clauses that the patient was not to mingle with persons of low estate or dubious morals. He sent El Ñato to me daily with a dispatch, which I, obviously, never answered. Sometimes his nonsensical proclamation went on for several pages and sometimes was limited to a single sentence that might have seemed to be gibberish at first glance, or to have many different meanings upon successive readings, or, if one remembered later and thought the better of it, a precise but enigmatic meaning which, though the reader had divined it himself, was impossible to unravel. Troncoso saw those continuous ravings as a grand political program destined to change the foundations not only of society, but of the universe. According to those proclamations, he was to depose the King, disown the Viceroyalty, guillotine the Roman authorities, and also—I transcribe this last claim word for word—to abolish, once and for all, having no other basis beyond custom and the spiritual enslavement of the peoples, the hereditary and unwritten privileges of the Sun and the other stars in the sky. The construction phase of his program consisted of federating the indigenous tribes on the continent and, to avoid giving offense, bestowing them with a ruler from outside their ranks and who was also to play the role of supreme representative of a new religion, a kind of king-priest to impose legislation on social and religious life, at once military commander and spiritual father of the new community. Needless to say, for anyone able to decipher his bulletins’ tangled prose, the traits of this eminent personage had more than one point in common with the author, borne increasingly along by his delirium to envision himself as the legitimate master of the universe. He was beside himself when I left his messages unanswered, but it would have been a mistake on my part to grant him the slightest sign that his ravings could be taken seriously. In his defense, I must admit that in my long life, in Europe just as in America, in recent years, I have seen the same insanity as Troncoso’s succeed many times. Thanks to the reading of Tacitus or Suetonius in the painful centuries that came before, such insanity prospers now until it reaches its foolish objectives, which are none other than crushing, on pure whim and overweening pride, with bloodied heel, the hopes of the world.

  The truth is that even to the most careless observer, Troncoso’s mental state was worsening day by day, hour by hour. He was barely sleeping, and it was useless to try to lock him in the wagon—it only enraged him—so I chose to release him under the watch of the nurses and myself. On his own, he needed ten times the attention of the other four patients combined. He had adopted the custom of apostrophizing the rising sun each morning, pacing back and forth on a short imaginary line, always in profile against the red disc as it rose slowly from the horizon, and addressing it, shaking raised arms in its direction without looking at it directly (he tried it several times, but always at the noon hour, so it was impossible to gaze for long—he would grimace, face darkened and flooded with winding trails of sweat that soaked his shirt at the neck and back). When the convoy set out in the morning, he would mount his roan and spring ahead in a gallop until he almost disappeared on the horizon, but immediately we would see him return, the horse’s slate-colored coat crackling with sweat, veins bulging and body throbbing. His agitation seemed to increase with the heat, which, in those days—it had been more than fifteen since our departure—could drive one to distraction. On one hand, everyone marveled at Troncoso’s wild ways and, on the other, at the horse’s tolerance, forced, in that harsh and unbearable climate, to submit to its rider’s every nervous start. There are many who think madness contagious: If so, it is less because those who surround a madman take on those same symptoms in his presence than it is b
ecause madness is so corrosive as to alter those who must coexist with it, bringing out their own symptoms which would have lain dormant in ordinary times; as that alteration results from neural pathways, but without the intervention of the will or reason of those afflicted, it would not be so strange if Troncoso’s horse had gone mad just from living with him. The truth is, an event took place in this already-delicate situation that, though we had feared it since before departure, we would rather not have had transpire: Some travelers had come across the followers of Josesito, or whomever he was, and the tragic circumstance of discovering their remains fell to us.

  It was a fresh massacre, four or five days old at most, but almost nothing was left of the six bodies that lay strewn across the camp. Chimango caracaras and crested ones, and black and red-headed vultures pecked at wild dogs in dispute over the abandoned remains; the big cats, already sated, had stripped them almost completely, leaving bones and bits of hair and fingernails, and now swarms of black and red ants were busying themselves with ungainly and stubborn speed, with the dried filaments that the packs of stronger, faster animals had deigned to leave, having come out of nowhere and then vanished once more. The Indians had left whatever they could not carry to a beast fiercer than all the others: fire. A great circle of ash interrupted the unending pastureland, marking the place where the bonfire had burned. Digging about in the ash, we found several warped pieces of iron and a few chunks of wood, all blackened along one side, where the embers had formed, and thus crumbled easily in the fingers. The bones were already bleached by the morning sun, save for those parts near the joints where strands of flesh still remained and where, accordingly, the ants were seething. In three or four days the bodies had reached, from the net of tissue and blood where they once struggled, from the constant pull and throbbing of doubt and passion gnawing at them, a freedom from the grueling chicanery of the particular and reached the immutability of universals through the white simplicity of their bones, passing first from subject to object and now, rediscovered by human eyes, from object to symbol. As we buried them, though several soldiers did cross themselves, it occurred only to the Indian Sirirí to pray, but his eyes were blazing as he did. Doubtless, the god he addressed must have been a double entity able to receive both his humble prayers and his raging thoughts; Josesito’s crimes seemed to reach a part of Sirirí deeper than compassion or morality, home to a humiliation opposite to the chief’s; if Josesito could not endure the Christians’ arrogant superiority, perhaps what Sirirí could not support was feeling that he could not truly be one of them. That symmetry contained an irreconcilable antinomy, and I am sure that Josesito would have met Sirirí’s hatred with the most violent disdain.

  But it was Troncoso in whom our tragic find seemed to produce the strongest effect. Possessing a conscience apparently confused by its inconsistencies even as they perceive their interlocutors’ skepticism, oftentimes the mentally ill try to put on an appearance of normality, only contriving to give their observers an impression of pretending, even theatricality. Though common to many patients, that impression was considerable in Troncoso’s case, and the corpses of the poor, murdered travelers intensified it further. Though he avoided the burial, he tried to enact his mounting agitation by any means, as if warning us that our terrible find obviously confirmed all his absurd beliefs. He kept his distance but did not refrain from aiming reproachful, if not disdainful, glances at us, to which he added a determined expression that figured exaggeratedly in his features, as if to send us a message. On the plain’s boundless stage, mounted sweaty and gesticulating on his roan, skin darkened on the parts of his face that went uncovered by his disheveled, white-streaked hair and beard, he looked like one of those bloodthirsty romantic heroes who, exaggerated by the artificial means of stage machinery, might shock an overly-credulous public in the theaters of Milan or Paris. And as he was not unaware that the word delirium is derived from the Latin verb for to leave the groove or track, that same night, supported by El Ñato’s conspiratorial coddling, Troncoso put that etymology into action.

  The very next morning, on his master’s orders, the obedient Ñato came to give me Troncoso’s last message. His irregular and ostentatious script had filled two whole pages at full tilt with incoherent stupidity, outlining his absurd ambition to go out to meet Josesito and talk him into unconditional surrender, thus helping federate the tribes of South America into a single independent State. When I finished reading these febrile insanities and looked up, indignant, I could sense El Ñato watching me with a malevolent and satisfied air, and by his expression understood that he and Troncoso had managed to evade my tyrannical watchfulness at last. For a few seconds, I lost control of myself in a fury and, forgetting my obligations as a civilized man, I seized El Ñato by the shoulders and shook him so violently that his red neckerchief, perhaps poorly secured due to the early hour and his rush to bring me Troncoso’s bulletin, slipped back and fell to the ground, leaving bare El Ñato’s completely bald head. The surprise disoriented me for a few moments, and as my shouts had begun to attract sleeping folk to my wagon and because it was El Ñato’s baldness, more than my rage, that drew stares from the newcomers, there was a comic reprieve in the tragedy, and in the expressions of several I thought I glimpsed the brief thought that it was his baldness that had caused such a scandal. (Dr. Weiss asserted that pure tragedy exists only in the domain of art, and that in reality, even in its most appalling aspects, one always finds it tempered by some comic element, grotesque or even ridiculous.)

  Consider my situation: A family had entrusted us with one of its members, a patient, for whom Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud represented the last hope for recovery and I, having kept him in my care for a few weeks, had let him escape my watch in open country to go meet with a band of savage Indians. As he had twelve hours’ lead on us and we knew that he and his horse were impervious to fatigue, it did not seem overly pessimistic to think he had already caught up with Josesito and his men, or that the Indians, with the same instinct as animals who unerringly surprise their prey, had already sensed the presence of a stranger in the barren land and had pounced upon him. Guarded by a ten-soldier escort, Osuna and I went in search of him across the endless plain, where a hint of spring had greened the grasses over the past two or three days, but an unseasonably scorching summer was already beginning to yellow them. During the days of our search, it was not Troncoso and his roan that we expected to find, but the rider’s bones, already bare and sun-bleached in the lonely countryside. When, for all his expertise, Osuna lost the trail, it was through his patience that he picked it up once more, several hours later. But Troncoso’s crazed energy, transmitted down into his mount, seemed to multiply the hours of our disadvantage. While we were condemned to rest, borne as we were upon poor human bones, they seemed to travel on the magical wings of delusion, which no obstacle of space or time can resist, and which would impose its outlandish and stubborn laws before crashing against the rocky indifference of the outer world. As the hours and days of search continued to accrue, my fear of not seeing Troncoso alive again grew stronger each time the traces of his movements dropped away, though they always reappeared; at last, now convinced that there could be no other possible ending, it took all my effort, as we galloped, dreary, across the soporific desert, not to let apathy defeat me: Such is the force with which that deserted land, once traversed, destroys all that we had accepted as familiar in ourselves before entering.

  Finally, on the fifth day, the trail was fresh; Osuna tracked the blue roan’s hoof-prints, and we began to search the surroundings. The tracks led us to a grove with some felled trees about a quarter of a league away, just at the western horizon, and so we concentrated our forces, refreshed by nightly rest, and cleared off in that direction, no longer at a gallop but a sprint, hoping, at least, that fatigued after riding almost five days straight, Troncoso had laid down to rest a while in the shady trees, protected from the blistering sun. When we entered the grove and had to slow our race to find a pa
th without injuring ourselves among the trees, we did not see Troncoso immediately, but a clamor from the other side of the grove signaled his presence. Trying to stay quiet so as not to frighten our quarry, we set off down the path, still taking care to stay within the grove so as not to expose ourselves to whatever might be waiting on the other side. Just as we caught sight of the land outside from the grove’s inner edge, we were able to attend the most unexpected exchange, and even I could say, the most surprising scene I have witnessed in my long life—and it is easy to imagine that due to my profession, there has been scarcely a single day that does not put me in the presence of something unusual.

  Troncoso stood haranguing a semicircle of mounted Indians who were listening to him, motionless and fascinated. As soon as we glimpsed them, I realized the scene must have been going on for hours. Not far from there, the blue roan, tied by the reins to a clump of grass, munched calmly as could be, apparently indifferent to its rider’s imperial designs; if, like Caligula, it ever occurred to Troncoso to appoint his horse minister, it seemed quite likely that the roan would have disdainfully refused that so-called honor. The horse’s indifference contrasted with the profound attention that the Indians paid Troncoso; he, however, did not even look at them, but paced back and forth in the same straight line parallel to the diameter of the semicircle, with an attitude similar to the one he would adopt each morning to apostrophize the rising sun. The Indian in the middle of the semicircle of riders carried a violin strapped across his back, and I recognized him immediately by the instrument of his hazy legend, and also because, of all those garish and ragged Indians, the attention reflected in their faces was profoundest in that of Josesito, who, as it happens, projected a rare intelligence and thoughtfulness, elbow resting on his horse’s neck, cheek in the palm of his hand. In the five days of his frenzied flight, Troncoso’s aspect had deteriorated further, and the only thing that still shone in his body, blackened by sun, dust, and grime, were his bright and bulging eyes, blazing enormously wide in a face almost entirely consumed by his dirty, matted hair and beard, which gave him the look of a wild animal, as if with the loss of his reason he was losing all his human attributes as well. From being put to immoderate use by its owner, his voice seemed to have gone hoarse, and as the meaning of his words did not reach us, from a distance it resembled barking or howling or the deep gutturals that preceded any known language. There was also a kind of alarm in the Indians’ attention, and I understood its significance almost immediately when Troncoso veered abruptly from his straight line, turned, and approached the half-circle of riders, stretching out his arms and running toward them; this caused a general stampede among the Indians, who galloped away in a frightened clamor. Having covered a few meters they stopped, and, observing Troncoso from a distance—he had also stopped but kept up his blustering—returned to form their half-circle with the chief in the middle. Troncoso recommenced his back-and-forth on an imaginary line, straight and parallel to the diameter of the Indians’ semicircle, causing them to stiffen up and begin again to listen to him with profound attention; the interest his words seemed to awaken in them had not yet erased all the terror Troncoso had etched upon their faces in the moment he had tried to approach them. They remained still once more, as Troncoso went back and forth, tracing the imaginary line with his steps in the grass, and his hoarse voice sounded in the silent morning air like the final dispatch from the world of incoherent creatures, hopeless and mortal, to the unfathomable and capricious law that had, one day, for whatever reason, set that world in motion.