The Clouds Read online

  PRAISE FOR JUAN JOSÉ SAER

  “A cerebral explorer of the problems of narrative in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, of Borges, of Rulfo and Arlt, Saer is also a stunning poet of place.”—The Nation

  “To say that Juan José Saer is the best Argentinian writer of today is to undervalue his work. It would be better to say that Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language.”—Ricardo Piglia

  “[La Grande] is a daring, idiosyncratic work that examines the idea of an individual person navigating the whirl of random events that helps shape everyone’s lives.”—Kirkus Review (starred)

  “The most striking element of Saer’s writing is his prose, at once dynamic and poetic. . . . It is brilliant.”—Harvard Review

  “Brilliant. . . . Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington captures the wildness of human experience in all its variety.”—New York Times

  “What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters’ attempts to write their own narratives within its excess.”—Bookforum

  ALSO BY JUAN JOSÉ SAER

  The Event

  The Investigation

  La Grande

  Nobody Nothing Never

  The One Before

  Scars

  The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

  The Witness

  Copyright © Heirs of Juan José Saer, 1997

  c/o Guillermo Schavelzon & Assoc., Agencia Literaria

  www.schavelzon.com

  Translation copyright © Hilary Vaughn Dobel, 2016

  Originally published in Spanish as Las nubes, 1997

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-35-9

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Clouds

  “Afford thy desire some time.”

  —La Celestina, Act VI

  Prologue

  He finds himself already at the corner by the ice cream stand, shielded from the sun by the broad red-and-white-striped awning. Before moving out of the shade to the sunny sidewalk across the street, he anticipates the feeling of heat-softened asphalt beneath the soles of his brown loafers. And now, on the gray sidewalk that shimmers and burns in the summer siesta hour, his shadow pools at his feet as if shriveled by the sun as it finally begins to sink, slowly, from its high point.

  He is about to eat a double-scoop of chocolate and vanilla, his unusual lunch, and if he’s waited this long to leave his office to buy it—it’s nearly two-thirty—it is because he’s decided that the ice cream ought to get him by until dinnertime. Doubtless, the heat is the primary cause of such frugality, but a sort of athletic stoicism, as he imagines it (a result of the day’s caprice rather than habit), colors this stratagem of his ever so slightly with virtue. So he is pleased for the moment: content, spry, and healthy, and, not yet too far into his fifties, he believes he has great prospects, both immediate and long-term. He feels tall, bright, and vital, as if a red carpet stretched from the tips of his toes on to infinity. But almost immediately the harsh summer weather, the tumult of the street, and the black, noxious exhaust fumes carry him back to reality, to that midpoint in his soul between anxiety and euphoria that acquaintances—and he himself, grown convinced by what began as an idle joke—refer to with unjustified certainty as his temperament.

  The heat wave has broiled the city for over a week. From a cloudless blue sky, the sun beats down with a merciless, all-pervading light that scorches the trees, muddies the senses, and dulls the mind. The heat relents only at night, and, then, only a little, but during Daylight Savings Time—strictly an administrative decision, he likes to joke, only until the hens change their minds—at the year’s height, nightfall never ends and dusk lingers until just after 3 A.M.; when everyone’s still sleepless on account of the heat, dawn breaks, livid, in the east, and the intolerable sun reappears. Crowds of people lie tanning on the riverbanks, waiting for night, rain, vacation, an unlikely breeze, but the sweaty workers who eye them from the docks or one of the bridges, from the bus or the elevated metro over the Seine, watch the crowds with skepticism rather than jealousy.

  It is the sixth of July. Last year, intending to settle affairs with his few remaining friends, Pichón visited his native city for some weeks from mid-February through the beginning of April after a twenty-year absence. Despite the years, the let-downs, and the strangeness of it all, he returned to Paris with a handful of good memories and a promise from Tomatis to come visit, but a whole year has passed waiting for Tomatis to make travel plans. Certain Sundays, they would speak on the telephone though they never had anything particular to say. As they lived in different hemispheres, high summer for one meant the other had fists of frozen rain beating at his window. And because of the time difference—morning in the city is evening in Paris, and evening in the city is nighttime in Paris—the weather occupied much of their conversation. Until one Sunday in May, less than two months ago, they spoke about the weather a little longer than usual because, despite the difference in season, country, continent, and hemisphere, climatic conditions were identical (a cold, rainy day), and Tomatis announced the good news at last: in early July he would spend several days in Paris.

  But that wasn’t all. Tomatis went on to say that Marcelo Soldi—that bearded lad, they’d spent a day taking his father’s dinghy out with the boys to visit Washington’s daughter, did he remember?—meant to send him something he’d been preparing over the last few months, and Tomatis, without further explanation, let drop an enigmatic phrase to pique Pichón’s interest: “He went to search for Troy and nearly tumbled into Hades.” But it must have been in earnest since, perhaps a month later, the parcel arrived: a very long letter and a floppy disk in a medium-sized, self-sticking bubble envelope, which Soldi had further sealed up with clear adhesive tape as a precautionary measure. Soldi had masculinized the word disquette and given it an accent grave, which, as written, appeared as el dìsket. In a passage from the letter, he said: “Beyond conversations with Tomatis, who can occasionally tax my patience, I’ve been amusing myself with impromptu jaunts out to the countryside and poking my nose into old papers that, often miraculously, preserve the memories of this place—or of some other place, if one happens to live elsewhere. What’s valid for one place is valid for all space, and we know that if the whole contains a part, the part, in its way, contains the whole.”

  And elsewhere in the letter: “I have a certain advantage over the archive’s other aficionados: I get along with the elderly. The text I’ve sent you in the dìsket was entrusted to me by a woman in her nineties who, I believe, never actually read it. Lucky for her, she died, the poor thing, while I was deciphering and transcribing it with the utmost fidelity into a clean 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 envel
ope 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 the truth in all, I must admit that moving to the Americas had been his aim far longer than he had known me, and that his interest in my insignificant person only grew once he had learned from a third party that I came from Río de la Plata. The faraway Spanish colonies were already attracting scientists, traders, and adventurers; the motherland’s stockade, in
place to isolate the colonies, was riddled on all sides with holes; it was quite simple to slip in through the gaps, to the point that even those appointed by Madrid to prevent such things profited from the situation. But Dr. Weiss was not the sort of man to involve himself in smuggling. Before crossing the ocean (and, might I add, with greater ease than it took me some years later to cross a sea of solid ground), we petitioned the Court and in a few months obtained the necessary authorization. So it was that in April of 1802, Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud was unveiled two or three leagues north of Buenos Aires, in a place called Las Tres Acacias, not far from the river but on high terrain to prevent flooding, with the short-lived triple blessing of the prominent locals, the authorities of Río de la Plata, and the Crown. Dr. Weiss’s intentions were not philanthropic—for him, growing rich was rather a means to further his investigations and, if possible, recoup part of his initial investment. He had sunk his entire family fortune into books, travel, measures to sway influential people to grant him any necessary authorizations, and, most of all, into the construction and upkeep of the aforementioned Casa de Salud, a vast, multi-winged edifice with thick, white walls and tiled floors on a hill overlooking the river.

  The Casa was patterned after a model already existing in Europe, particularily in Paris, where several institutions of this type had been founded in recent years, but the architecture was inspired by the convent or béguinage, the philosopher’s retreat, vaguely reminiscent of the Academy and the Garden of Epicurus, rejecting the otherwise typical chains, jail, and dungeon: The result was an ideal hospital for the provision of rest and care which, unfortunately, by its very nature, only the ailing rich would be able to enjoy. But Dr. Weiss intended to look after the poor as well, elsewhere and by other means, for even if the poor proved indifferent (which of course was not the case), his scientific interests demanded it. For him, mental illness was sometimes due to concomitant causes from different parts of the body, but the better part of the illnesses began in the mind itself, along with other external causes from the surrounding world: climate, family, status, race, strain. That the rich alone were able to afford treatment offers a sense of its meticulous complexity: Each patient was considered a unique case, treated gently and appropriately over the course of a lengthy regime that required not just time but space, labor, and expertise. Sensible of the fact that rich families did not know what to do with the mad, and that, to protect their reputations, they desired a place to take in their madmen, as they refused to let them wander the streets like the poor did with their own, the doctor had the idea to open his Casa de Salud, providing a surrogate home for what the sick had lost: It was perhaps the first of its kind in all the American territories.