The Clouds (19 page)

The following day, after the celebration, it was laborious setting off, for at midmorning the soldiers were still asleep in the shade of the carts, as they had calculated the shadow's morning path before turning in at dawn. No calculation of that sort had been allowed to the horses, and they lacked even a lone tree in that vast, empty space to seek protection in the shade. In the region, it is said that the San Juan summer reaches its peak intensity during those days. It had arrived gradually, in the early days surreptitiously melting the built-up frost from the first icy week after the rain and, as it warmed the earth and air, had evicted the impatient plant-life, a fleeting simulacrum of spring. From the gray ground, hardened with cold, the new grass began to sprout, greening the flatlands,
but after just two days, almost within hours, the heat grew and so the tiny leaves began to flag, and the fields dried up again almost at once, transformed into a vast, yellowed expanse. For days we saw not a single cloud in the sky—a deep and troubled blue—nothing but the blistering sun, leaving earth, air, and everything exhausted and hot, and because no wind stirred, and the nights were as hot as the days, nothing had time to refresh itself. We crossed that great furnace in the coldest month of the year, a huge yellow circle we trekked through at such pains, locked beneath its blue dome with only the sun's arid stain to travel it by day, blackened by night and filled with shining points, and for days it was the only scenery, so identical in every one of its interchangeable parts, that sometimes we were fooled into thinking that it had us bound, completely immobile. Movement seemed impossible past a certain time of day, but, as Osuna said, it was just as unfavorable to wait for dusk to travel when it was cool, first because to remain in the middle of the countryside, where we had no shade beyond what the wagons provided, was more grueling than travel, as our displacement might procure us some gust of air, laughable as it was, and in the second place because it did not cool sufficiently by night, but if we camped, the darkness, placing us under protection from the glaring sun for several hours, helped us to rest. With the heat, the silence of the empty countryside seemed to grow, as if all the species that populated it, unable to move, lay spent and lethargic. We too, who claimed to reign over them all, went about as if in sleep, men and women, civilians and soldiers, believers and agnostics, erudite and unlettered, mad and sane, made equal by that crushing light and the burning, brutal air that rubbed out our differences, reducing us to our equally feeble sensations. Shut in their wagons, the patients dozed all day and barely peeked out at night, save the little nun, who was always surrounded by her guard of soldiers, many of them almost completely naked, scarcely a pair
of tight and tattered breeches to cover them from the waist to just above the knees, and which left visible through their holes certain parts of the body that would have been more prudent to keep hidden, giving them an indecent appearance—though no one took notice, and it even seemed respectable compared to the women, who, when it was hot enough, walked about with their breasts bared and sometimes completely nude. When we passed by a river, almost everyone undressed without even waiting for darkness, and went to frolic with animal pleasure in the lukewarm, cloudy water. The unusually prolonged trip had forced us, imperceptibly, to set our own standards of living, and the whims of the climate, which made the untimely seasons follow one another with the speed of days and hours, added to the singular composition of our caravan; we had had to create a peculiar universe, as time passed, stranger and stranger than our way of life before departure. Although authority was relaxed, it was plain to see it was no longer necessary: In the fever of those unreal days, ordinary interests seemed to have disappeared. Only a few grudges remained: Sirirí bitterly disapproved of our growing distance from the rules that had been instilled in him and which were his only reference for any possible world, and Suárez El Ñato, who did not stray from his master's wagon, like a faithful but slightly addled dog, signaled with his resentful gaze that, in his opinion, it was I, and not insanity, who was responsible for Troncoso's terrible collapse. But even his hatred, in that flat and yellow infinity, had lost its reins.

As Osuna announced the Santa Rosa storm for the thirtieth, we all kept watch for the saving clouds, eager but skeptical, to see if they were approaching our assembly from the southeast, laden less with water than with hope. But not a single cloud appeared in the first days of waiting. As we watched, the empty sky changed color with the passing light and lost its aura of familiarity, a consequence of our certainty that it had always been there; it became strange,
and with it the yellow earth and all that spanned the visible horizon, including ourselves. The burnt and sweaty faces, in which the eyes were almost shrunken, mouth always open and brows always furrowed, expressed a constant questioning. At times we spoke little, exchanging shy monosyllables, and at others, usually in an aside among two or three, we exchanged long, fragmentary monologues, hurried and confused, as if in the plain's monotony we had lost the instinct or notion that separates the inner from the outer, as if the language provided in this world had also been uprooted from us and would have spoken for itself, doing without the thought and will with which we had learned to employ it on first entering this world.

At last, one afternoon, the clouds began to come. As it was still early, the first ones were large and very white, festooned with rippling edges, and when they passed too low, their own shadow would obscure their underside, as seen from the ground. We hoped before long to see them go black and part from the horizon in an endless slate-gray mass, to blot out all the sky and spill forth with rain. But for two days they paraded past in the sky, frayed and mute, coming from the southeast as I think I have said, and disappeared behind us to some point at our backs on an already-traveled horizon. They changed shape and color with the hours of the day and, above all, they floated at different speeds, as if the wind, whose absence we suffered on the ground, abounded there above. Sometimes they were yellow, orange, red, lilac, violet, but also green, gold, and even blue. Although they were all similar, there did not exist, nor had there ever existed since the origins of the world, nor would there exist either until the inconceivable end of time, two that were identical. With their varied forms and the recognizable shapes they portrayed, which dissolved little by little until they no longer looked like anything, or even assumed a shape contradictory to the one they had taken a moment before, they
made me feel like a spirit of history, one that would persist through time to change along with the clouds, with the same strange similarity of such things that vanish, in the very instant they arise, to that place we call the past, where no one ever goes.

It will sound like fiction to my readers, but we awaited the water eagerly for days, and in place of water came fire. It was the twenty-ninth of August, 1804. If this precision awakens the suspicions of my potential reader, suggesting that I employ it to increase the illusion of truthfulness, I would like it to remain quite clear that this date is unforgettable for me, as it marks the most extraordinary day of my life.

For many hours, a strong smell of burning, which had grown stronger and more unmistakable, prompted comments in the caravan, but as no breeze was blowing and there were no visible signs of fire along the horizon, it proved difficult to identify the source of the smell. Osuna's concern, and his secret meetings with Sergeant Lucero and with Sirirí, were the only tangible proof to me that the invisible yet pervasive fire was very real, so when Sirirí left to explore southward and Osuna suggested we alter the course to the east a bit, I realized that the situation appeared far more serious to our experts than I had imagined. Osuna explained to me that if there was a fire, it might be coming from the south, which was why Sirirí had ridden that way—to determine at what distance it was coming up against us—and that the caravan was going east because the fire had less chance of spreading on the wetlands near the river. According to Osuna, if there was a fire, which was all but certain, the origin was likely some thunderbolt in one of those dry storms that sometimes advance a few days before the torrential rains that sweep down on the region. With regard to the fire, and always according to Osuna, it could be a small matter or, to the contrary, form a front for many leagues; the heat and dry grass would help it spread slowly in the absence of wind, but if
by chance the southeaster that came to accompany the Santa Rosa storms began to blow, the speed of propagation would multiply in no time. Thus, Osuna and Lucero had taken the precaution of altering our route toward the river.

Osuna, glancing frequently and nervously to the south, meant for us to hurry, but, if I haven't said it before now, I believe that now is the time to point out that, though drawn by four horses and faster than ox-drawn freight wagons, even without considering the patients we were transporting, our carts moved quite slowly. Our trip had dragged on, not just because of the natural obstacles and incidents that delayed it, but also because of the slowness of the vehicles that made up the caravan, whose rhythm the horsemen escorting us had to adapt to. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, a few black clouds, thick and motionless, began to appear at our right, to the south, as we marched east. For a time, I thought it was the long-awaited storm brewing, but when Osuna and Lucero started badgering the cart-men to increase their pace, anxiously searching the black skeins that walled the horizon, I realized they were not clouds. As it darkened, the last ruddy gleam that always lingered on the plain after the sun disappeared kept burning through the night, taking up the entire southern horizon. In the very black, even darkness, the yellow points of distant stars seemed kindlier and more familiar than the fluctuating, reddened stripe that sketched the southeastern arc of the horizon with its broad strokes. For the first time since our departure, we did not halt that night save to change the spent horses. When dawn broke, sunlight blotted out the fire, but the masses of black smoke seemed taller and appeared to rise up like stones beyond the horizon, ominously close. The sergeant scrutinized them for a moment and said that if we continued east the fire would leave us no time to reach the river, and that we had to change direction again, retreating to the north. So we began to retrace our steps with the fire at our
heels, and as I checked my horse from straying too far from my patients' wagons, the memory came to me of that enigmatic saying of the oriental sages:
He who draws near, is far
. It could have meant, in effect, that in some way we too were approaching our goal, backtracking a good part of the journey.

For all our speed, the wall of smoke always seemed the same distance away, and even, at times, appeared to come closer, as though it traveled more lightly than we did. In broad daylight, we could see we were not the only ones who fled: Wild animals, whose presence we constantly sensed but who rarely showed themselves, forgot age-old cautions and fled northward—and often, faster than the fire and us. There was a cloud of birds in the air above our heads, ringing continually with cries, caws, screeches, et cetera, but when I observed them for a moment I could tell that though many flew in the same direction as us, some seemed to be going to meet the fire. I thought they erred, disoriented by the blaze, but when the fire reached us a few hours later, I realized, and Osuna later confirmed, that certain birds would fly above the blaze to feed on the insects it dispersed in all directions, especially those crisped in the heat, doing so with such insistence, recklessness, and gluttony, that many of them fell, trapped in the flames.

At dusk we arrived at a large lake, which was situated a bit farther northeast of the northwest-to-southeast trajectory we had been following and thus had not had the opportunity to see in the preceding days. We worked our way around it, bringing it between the fire and ourselves and, exhausted, stopped to rest. The lake was vaguely oval-shaped, some three hundred meters long, and it extended parallel to the line of dark smoke that blocked out most of the horizon. Toward the center, the distance between the two banks must have come to approximately half its length. Neither men nor horses were inclined to press on, and many wild animals seemed to have made the same decision. Lapwings, rhea birds,
hares, herons, guanacos, partridges, and even a couple of pumas patrolled the area surrounding the water. Although our presence disturbed them, they did not dare leave the lake; they kept their distance, and with what we might deem excellent logic (for I see no other way), they reasoned that we were less dangerous an enemy than the fire. The pumas upset the women, so two soldiers ran at them laughing, and though the pumas postured ferociously at first, when the soldiers came too close, waving their bolas, they ran off and stopped after a distance, spitting and shaking.

Rarely have I beheld a more beautiful evening, and on the plain such evenings abounded, with endless sunsets during which, without a single obstacle to interfere with the sight, even the faintest embers of light linger in the all-effacing darkness. When the sun's enormous disc met the eastern horizon, the yellow grass began to shimmer, seeming all the brighter in contrast to the wall of smoke to the south, while the red plate of the lake, reflecting the shifting light and undisturbed by the slightest vibration, went blue and finally black, as if it were cooling along with the light and the air, the sky, and such; only the crimson line on the southeast horizon introduced a certain variety in the night's uniform blackness.

If someone believes the travail we were undergoing could have left me time to admire the sunset, he would be wrong, for it was amid the general hustle and bustle, in which everyone, apart from the patients, had something to do, that such indifferent and superhuman twilit beauty took shape, reached perfection, and foundered in the night. Most judiciously, Osuna and the sergeant decided that since the men and animals were camped on the shore, the carts ought to be set up as far into the lake as possible, and this took a long while because we had to seek out the parts of the lake-bed where the weight would not bog down the wagons when the danger had passed and we wanted to remove them from the water. Indeed, a site far enough from the bank but not so deep that
the water would penetrate the wagons was a contradictory goal, difficult to meet. It was pitch-dark when we finished. The smell of burning filled the air, and, at a distance difficult to gauge, beyond the sunken carts out near the center of the lake, the red band of the blaze shone, flickering and faint.