The Clouds (9 page)

For the patients' comfort, we had rented five covered wagons of the sort travelers use to pass over the dangerous roads of that vast territory, the trade routes from Buenos Aires to Chile, on the other side of the mountains. Those carriages were pulled not by a pair of oxen like cargo wagons but rather by horses, and even boasted a door and windows, fixed up inside like little enclosures that were at once bedroom and living room, of the most cramped and rudimentary sort, of course, but with the necessary comforts to endure the interminable desert crossing, and above all to allow for (more or less) reasonable sleep at every stop on the way. Four of the wagons were intended for the patients and the fifth went to me, although I would have made do with a tent to share in the luck of the troops who would accompany us. The wagons all belonged to the same owner, a tradesman from Buenos Aires who did business in the Tucumán province, Córdoba, and Mendoza; in various Chilean cities; and with everyone in the littoral, where he had to compete with river transport; to Asunción in Paraguay, where his family had originated. The rental conditions were quite favorable
because one of the patients belonged to the owner's family. Part of the escort would leave from the city, Santa Fé, meeting us halfway down the road between Asunción and Buenos Aires, and as the road from Córdoba also passed close by, that city was the logical meeting point. We calculated that the trip to Casa de Salud would take some fifteen days, already trying not to force the march too much so as not to overtire our patients, but the various obstacles that arose and the grave circumstances that turned us from our course, that blocked our way and even forced a retreat, multiplied the duration nearly threefold.

That very afternoon I sent a message to the convent announcing my arrival for the following day. The Mother Superior, a severe-looking woman in her fifties, received me at eleven in the morning in a clean and frigid room, and from the first sentences we exchanged I realized that my profession caused her deep discomfort, but that the case of Sister Teresita, the nun Dr. Weiss was to look after, appeared even worse than before, and would doubtless bring them no few problems, as they would not otherwise deign to resort to us. In the course of the conversation, however, I learned that the order to engage Dr. Weiss's services had come from Buenos Aires. During my interview with the Mother Superior, I was unable to stop smiling to myself, in the face of further proof that madness, simply by its presence, disrupts and even destroys the endeavors, hierarchies, and principles of the people we deem sane. The Mother wanted to extract an absurd, explicit promise of discretion on my part, and to her barely pertinent and almost offensive insistence, I said coldly that an explicit promise in that particular case would be superfluous, as discretion, since Hippocrates, had been the founding principle of our science. Without reacting to the firmness of my response, but lowering her eyes so our gazes did not meet for the length of her tale, the Mother Superior told me, with many insinuations and roundabout phrases,
struggling mightily with her understandable modesty about the terrible nature of the facts she was relating, the story of Sister Teresita. The nun, who had first come to Peru from Spain, and who by the will of her order, the Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament, had been transferred to the city, was, according to the Mother Superior, a rather naïve person and terribly devoted, given even to certain mystical excesses that had earned her several reprimands and calls to order. Despite her humble birth and lack of education beyond the essentials required for her religious training, she had a strong literary inclination that she used to express, according to the Mother Superior, her devotion to Christ and the Blessed Sacrament. One of the order's principle tasks was to look after women of ill repute who, unfortunately, according to the Mother Superior (
and
, I thought to myself,
to the approval of my teacher
) abounded in America. It was a ministry the young sister had dedicated herself to with unbridled passion, just as with all she undertook, visiting them too frequently and familiarly, which gave rise to certain misunderstandings. The young sister's intensity, which always manifested itself far too spontaneously, had fueled town gossip, as the inhabitants' perpetual idleness, according to the Mother Superior, engendered a fatal tendency to meddle in the lives of others. But according to the Mother Superior, that was no great thing relative to the real drama that had taken place at the end of last year. A man they had hired to tend the garden, orchard, and farmyard—according to the Mother Superior, there were so many unemployed in the city that it was safer to hire them for something, for otherwise they'd turn into vagabonds and criminals—who had been working for the convent for several months, began to abuse the young sister in secret, submitting her to every type of bestial humiliation, and threatened to kill her if she dared tell anyone. Naturally, the Mother Superior omitted the details that were too painful, but it did not take much to understand, from the red spots
burning on her cheeks, that the memory of those details provoked strong emotions. One day, during the siesta hour, she, the Mother Superior, had come upon them in the little chapel, sprawled at the foot of the altar, engaging in, according to her, the sacrilege of animalistic satisfaction of carnal instincts. The gardener had been arrested straightaway and remained in jail, but the consequences had been devastating for Sister Teresita, to the point that she had lost her mind. The young sister was fragile by nature, and in the months leading up to what happened, she, the Mother Superior, had observed the signs of a stronger disturbance than usual in Sister Teresita, never imagining at any point, however, that those minor agitations, that attenuated but constant instability, the sudden shift from laughter to tears, and her excessive devotion to the Crucified One, once exacerbated by the sordid drama that would touch her life, would precipitate into madness. While lulls passed in the midst of her unrest, and one might not detect the presence of madness by looking at her, the Mother Superior went on to explain that her rapid changes in behavior were so very unexpected, the altered manners and language, that at first several members of the Church had believed themselves to be facing a case of demonic possession. They debated the possibility of sending her to the Inquisition, but the city's priest and exorcist, taking into account the fact the young sister had been the victim of such humiliations, believed there was an exact, known cause for her actions and that matters ought to be placed in the hands of justice and medicine. The ecclesiastical authorities in Buenos Aires had ruled on the case in the same way. Among those the Mother Superior cited, I recognized two who, contrary to the fairly widespread opinion of influential clergymen, were favorably inclined to Dr. Weiss's therapeutic methods. As I saw it, choosing the case's gnoseological interpretation at the expense of the demonological interpretation was less a question of common sense on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities than
a wish for discretion. I had spoken many times with Dr. Weiss about an undeniable fact, namely that, for the past two centuries in Europe, the dungeons of most mental hospitals had been discreetly filled with wretches unfortunate enough to have been too sensational to commit to the bonfires. But the prison's tragic role, an embarrassing one many families believed we sought to perform, protected our specialty's emergence in the Parisian hospitals and its necessary evolution, which was the constant reflection in the Casa under the enlightened direction of my teacher. For us, the rigorous practice of medical science was the only possible form of charity.

The lengthy conversation was not without discomfort on both of our parts, as evidenced by our mutual reticence, and afterward I knew I could not gain an accurate idea of Sister Teresita's condition if I did not take the opportunity to see her myself; I explained to the Mother Superior that my professional obligation required me to see the patient immediately, and despite her visible hesitation, she ultimately agreed. The patient was in a room in the basement of the house under lock and key. The first thing I noticed in that narrow room was that the grille-covered window looked onto the gallery and courtyard, not the street. As the shutters were closed, the room was all in shadow at that moment, and we arrived dazzled by the clear, midday winter light, so for a few seconds I could not see much except a lively gray blot that emerged from a corner and came toward us, stopping in the center of the room. I stood blinking at the threshold, but the Mother Superior entered and went over to the window, prudently opening the shutters halfway. A ray of sun came in and lit up the girl with the intensity of a spotlight. She was rather petite and had very short hair, and, instead of the order's habit, she wore a sort of gray blouse that covered her from the neck, where it buttoned tightly, to her ankles. Although the room was freezing, I saw that her feet were bare on
the brick floor, but she seemed unbothered by the cold. Noting the disapproval in my gaze, the Mother Superior rushed to explain that the sister wouldn't tolerate a brazier, as she had violent hot spells and declared that the cold had no effect on her. I searched for Sister Teresita's gaze to confirm what I had just heard, but I found it impossible to meet; she had gone still, eyes closed and a shy smile on her lips, the hands that emerged from the gray shirt-cuffs of her blouse resting softly on her belly, one atop the other. That overly-obvious shyness was not unfamiliar to me: It was not difficult to identify an attitude of fakery, common in certain mental patients brought before a doctor for the first time, of adopting a theatrical pose to try to persuade him, that it would be an unjustified waste of time to bother with people so normal to the naked eye as they. In presenting herself so calmly and demurely, there was also an attempt at seduction, quite effective on her part and ultimately unnecessary, as I must confess that her lively and energetic presence captured my sympathies immediately, though I did not let myself forget the strong likelihood that I was addressing a sick person. It did not take me long to realize Sister Teresita was trying to establish some private bond with me, not just apart from the Mother Superior but perhaps also apart from the convent and even the world, maybe to prove to them, and also to herself, that she and her actions could once and for all be properly interpreted.

When I approached her, she opened her eyes and looked at me: She had round, gray little eyes, too restless there between her broad, domed forehead and her small nose, a round, pale little button with almost no septum, a single fleshy bump protruding above her thin lips, which remained closed all the while. Her tiny white face, a circle drawn from where her hair emerged above her bulging forehead, outlined her pink-dusted cheeks and closed at her delicate, almost nonexistent, chin. It was hard not to love her at once, with the same love one has for a pet rabbit, for example,
knowing that its hot and nervous existence will bring us more complications than happiness once we adopt them—their motives, so different from our own, count ours for nothing. When our gazes met, I thought I perceived fleeting sparks of mockery in hers, that sort of tacit mockery with which, in the presence of third parties, certain people acknowledge us, believing we share the same point of view about things; in reality, it is a search for complicity, and usually a fruitless one. The Mother Superior noticed it right away and, more worried about morality than the health of her ward, went to Sister Teresita and encircled her shoulders with an arm concealed by the wide, black sleeve of her habit, exposing no more to the world of sin and corruption than a white, slightly wrinkled hand that alighted firmly but without violence on Sister Teresita's left shoulder. A detail that almost immediately attracted my attention, although frequent dealings with madness had accustomed me to that kind of dissonance, was the contrast I observed in the little nun, between the terrible humiliations she had borne for months, and the good humor, the air of health and determined energy reflected in her person. When I began to interview her, as pleasantly as possible, she adopted an attitude both childish and demure, curling up against the Mother Superior's chest so, I realized, the Mother Superior had to respond to my questions for the patient, who darted occasional glances at me from the corners of her eyes, provocative yet mocking. As the Mother Superior's answers added nothing new to what she had told me upon my reception, I chose to defer the interview for the coming days and took a moment to cast a glance about the room, ascertaining that the meticulous reigned therein: The bed was made without a wrinkle, with a sort of black cape spread carefully at the foot, and there was a table with a three-branched candelabra from whose stand not a single drop of wax had fallen, as well as two stacked books of equal size, a metalwork inkwell with two or three pens resting in the horizontal groove at
the base, a small rectangular pile of white, well-aligned papers, each one in its place, and a crude wooden chair whose rattan seat was tucked in beneath the table. Even the wicker cushion of the armchair from which she had arisen to see us enter seemed not to have a crease, not a dent, as if the small girl's body resting on it a few moments ago had been weightless and without substance.

When I expressed my wish to retire, announcing I would return a few days later to finish the preparations for departure, the Mother Superior, relieved perhaps, removed her arm from Sister Teresita's shoulders and approached me, intending to bring me to the front door. The little nun did not move from her spot but, abandoning the vulnerable attitude she had held a moment ago, she straightened up so the sunshine streaming through the window suddenly made her look bigger and stronger. A noise I could not at first identify began to carry through the room, until I realized that the little nun had grit her teeth and puffed her cheeks out slightly, building up saliva inside her mouth and making a screeching sound, and I was still wondering why when she began to writhe her tongue obscenely, moving it all about, licking her lips, thrusting it in and out of her mouth, rhythmic and rigid, and how, even as she carried out these movements, she was gathering spittle, drooling and screeching. A heightened expression of ecstasy came over her face and her eyelids drooped once more. She pushed her belly in and out while she slowly shook her head in rapture as, at the sides of her body, her hands made strange, slow movements. All this sudden activity, excepting perhaps the writhing of her tongue, reminded me of certain group dances I had seen the African slaves perform sometimes in the port of Buenos Aires, and it took me a few moments to realize that my astonishment at the little nun's contortions, presented somehow like a dance, came from the fact that they were carried out (apart from the saliva-choked screeching) in utter silence. The pink in her cheeks burned even
brighter and, because of the effort it cost her to produce saliva, spread across her whole face, but when I turned to the Mother Superior, who had lost all reserve in my presence and looked at me, her expression helpless and supplicating, it was plain to see that redness—in her case of shame and confusion—had won out on her face, as well. Sister Teresita's outburst came to be of great use to me, however, as it allowed me to show great calm before the Mother Superior, which I did not refrain from exaggerating, to suggest to her how ordinary the little nun's behavior appeared in the eyes of science. When I saw that despite her so-called ecstasy, the little nun would sneak glances from time to time to see the effect her behavior had on us, I burst out laughing, which alarmed the Mother Superior but not so the little nun, who abandoned her strange posture and, having cheerfully contemplated us for a few satisfied moments, came toward us. Thirty years have passed since that morning, but I can still see clearly the curious way she moved then, throwing her torso forward and her buttocks slightly back, arms folded with elbows out and hands crossing each other rhythmically at her navel, a slight swing in her hips, adopting with her expression and agility, despite the apparent delicacy of her form, the masculine air of a young boy. Impudently, she planted herself a meter distant and wagged her left index finger, crooking it in to signal me to come closer; trying, amiable and firm, in the patient tone one might use with a disobedient child, she said:
Come here, and I'll suck it
. With a cry both overwhelmed and appalled, the Mother Superior hurled herself from the room, although she must have witnessed similar scenes many times. But among the mad I had seen far worse, and I have to say, there had been something amusing in the contrast between the little nun's crudeness and the excessive modesty of the Mother Superior, who was unable to see things from a medical angle, and so—without becoming the slightest bit upset, and trying not to appear shocked by anything—I
approached the little nun with my best smile, explaining that I had not come for that, but rather to look after her as a doctor, and that as we were going to be living together from now on it was best that we maintained a good relationship. She burst out laughing and stuck out her tongue again, and tapped at it lightly with her finger, taking it into her mouth and asking:
So not like this . . . ?
I promised I would come by to see her that week and left the room. While the Mother Superior was locking up, Sister Teresita stood in the window behind the grille, and, in a cheery and playful tone, as if telling a secret the three of us would share, began to softly recite a list of horrifying obscenities, describing voluptuous acts that the Mother Superior and I were supposedly about to commit and from which she was unfairly excluded.