The Clouds. Juan José SaerЧитать онлайн книгу.
copy, so now I won’t have to be evasive or lie to her about the contents of these papers; as their owner has no heirs, I have deposited them in the Provincial Archive where they can be consulted now that I’ve finished the copies. We are terribly interested in your opinion because, contrary to what I think, Tomatis asserts that the document is not an authentic historical text but a work of fiction. But I say—and I’ve thought about this carefully—what else are the Annals, Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, the Napoleonic Code, the crowds and cities, suns and universe, but fiction?” And, at the end: “The manuscript the old woman gave me was untitled, but if I understood certain passages correctly, I believe the author would not have found it unsuitable if we called it THE CLOUDS.”
The envelope arrives in June, the twenty-first, to be exact, at summer’s door.
As Pichón is still finishing out the year at the university, between reunions, exams, and colloquia, he’s had no time to investigate the contents of the mysterious dìsket, by now covered in dust, abandoned somewhere among the books, notepads, and papers on his desk. On July second, his wife and boys leave for the seaside, and he has remained in Paris, delayed by a couple appointments, and because Tomatis has announced he’ll arrive in Madrid at seven that night. The two men have decided to spend two or three days together in Paris where they will be able to speak more freely, and plan to travel together afterward, meeting up with Babette and the children in Brittany.
That morning, around 9:30, Pichón attends a faculty meeting and remains in his office afterward, working until 2:30, when he goes out for ice cream, then heads home for a siesta. Many city-dwellers have already left and, as the tourists (for some reason) have yet to arrive, perhaps preferring the ocean or the mountains in the excessive heat, the city is deserted; because of his family’s trip, so too is Pichón’s flat, hereby establishing a curious parallel between home and city. As the windows are always open to capture stray currents of air, there exists between the city and house a sort of continuity; for a moment, he can’t tell which contains the other. There is a silence, older and grander than usual, and it expands with the coming of hot, sticky night after the interminable day. Pichón leans out the second-story window in his shorts with all the lights off, surveying the quiet, empty street, and smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking in the night as through a stethoscope—not so much the external details as the sensations those details arouse within him, taking him back to the past, to his childhood most of all, to moments so bright and intense that time seems to stop; to the point where he’s forced to consider that many sensations he’s always believed unique to a place in fact belong to summer.
Around 7:00, a little dazed from the heat and his overly long nap, he leaves to do some shopping in the neighborhood, but after dallying in a wine shop, selecting bottles of white for the coming days, he finds himself feeling refreshed, clean, and perfectly content, passing back through the blue evening air down stifling, deserted streets, and returns to his empty house. As soon as he enters, he goes to shower, dries himself gently, patting the towel on his skin, as one dabs blotting paper over lines of fresh ink, never rubbing; then he puts on only a clean pair of shorts. He has a light dinner—a slice of ham, a few tomatoes, a nugget of cheese, and mineral water—but when he sits down at the computer, starting it up and inserting the dìsket to read out its contents on the screen, he thinks the better of it and makes his way to the refrigerator. He returns with a big, white crockery mug of cherries, sets it on his desk within reach of his left hand, amid the mess of pens, pencils, lighters, and cigarette packs, and an ashtray of heavy, dark green glass. He begins to read the text marching down the screen, and though he lifts the cherries to his mouth, one by one, without looking, the taste, at once sweet and tart, conjures vivid little red globes in his mind as if the flavor and feeling they’re about to produce on his tongue make a detour through his eyes, or through memory, before arriving in his brain. Large, meaty, cold, gloriously firm and red, by chance the first he’s gotten, the reality is that although they’ve been flourishing, the month of July is flying by, and, as much as he hopes otherwise, they are the last cherries of summer. And nothing reassures Pichón that once this black, interminable summer has passed, they’ll return again with that same capricious grace, emerging from nothing into the light of day.
Rivers swollen to excess, an unexpected summer, and that most-peculiar cargo: With the perspective of time and distance, these three things could sum up our hundred leagues of troubles, explaining the paradoxical difficulty of crossing the flatlands.
That arduous, protracted voyage took place, as if I could forget, in the August of 1804. On the first of that month, we set out for Buenos Aires during a terrible freeze, horseshoes cracking at blades of hoarfrost, a blue-tinged pink in the dawn, but within a few short days we found ourselves embroiled in a summer as squalid as it was cruel.
We made progress ten times faster on the trek from Buenos Aires to the city, Santa Fé, than we did on the return journey, though there were just four of us on horseback that time, and despite countless obstacles and the cold always tormenting us, even in full sunlight. And so this sudden onset of sweltering heat was doubly confounding, both for its great intensity and for its unseasonable arrival, contradicting the laws of nature and the order of the seasons. How little nature takes our plans into account; she proved insolent, opposing the laws that contain her, with that strange heat in the depths of one of the bleakest winters the region, according to numerous testimonials, had suffered. That unwholesome “summer,” which blossomed into a sham spring only to be obliterated a few days later, unleashed an anomalous chain of seasons marching in hurried disarray, all in the space of a month. But Osuna, the man who guided us to the city and who took us, in a large convoy this time, back to Buenos Aires, kept saying that every so often a mid-August dry spell like this would set in, preceding the Santa Rosa storms on the thirtieth. Suffice it to say, he was right as always, and on the thirtieth precisely, some days before we reached our destination, the predicted storm descended to crown our parade of hardships—though it also helped to extricate us from a most precarious situation.
But I am getting ahead of the facts and, perhaps, out of consideration for the possible reader, decades from now, into whose hands this memoir might someday fall, it would behoove me to introduce myself: I am Dr. Real, specialist of those afflictions not of the body, but of the mind and soul. A native of the Bajada Grande of the Paraná, I was born and raised in those treacherous northern hills where the great river’s ceaseless red current has its source. I learned my letters under the Franciscans, but when I reached the age for a young man to delve into his studies, my parents thought Madrid preferable to anywhere else as the capital of knowledge; this can be accounted for by the fact that they were Castilian, and hoped the tumult dividing France—a commotion which had shaken Europe for the past six or seven years—would not reach the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Unlike my parents, I was drawn to that commotion, and, given my growing interest in diseases of the mind, when I caught wind that Salpetrière Hospital was allowing its madmen off their chains, I resolved to continue my studies amid the frays of Paris rather than the sleepy cloisters of Alcalá. As happens so often throughout history, the final decade of the last century had been tumultuous; like all parents, mine sought to educate me at the edges of that tumult, and, like all young people, I sensed it was within that very tumult where my life was to begin.
And I was not mistaken. I discovered a new science in the Parisian hospitals and, among its principle representatives, Dr. Weiss. A handful of doctors-thinkers asserted, like those ancient philosophers with whom they consorted, that even though there were decisive bodily factors, in true mental disease the cause should be sought not in the body, but in the mind itself. Dr. Weiss had come to Paris from Amsterdam in order to confirm that analysis; I, his junior, upon discovering the existence of the learned Dutchman and his teachings, might even have said the man and his hypothesis formed a single identity. At the time of my arrival, the idea had become a passionately discussed theory, and Dr. Weiss became my friend, teacher, and mentor. So, when he decided to settle in Buenos Aires to practice according to the principles of the new discipline, I naturally became his assistant. It should also be noted that before making his final decision, he questioned me at length about the region and its inhabitants, and as my intention in this memoir is to scrupulously respect