The Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page B

that is revolutionary (his national idiosyncrasy), he finds himself ever the servant of two masters, lacking sympathy for either. And all the same, his sense of honor, lacking any hold on reality, has saved our lives. I trust I do not offend anyone by explaining, twenty years later, the allusions contained in the doctor’s letter.
    For several months, a Chilean youth had been interned in the Casa, sick with melancholia, his father having been executed on the charge of high treason in Valparaíso for taking up the Spanish cause. A government spy informed a military officer in Buenos Aires about the Chilean youth’s presence at Las Tres Acacias, and the officer held that the doctor and I kept the young man at the Casa on the pretext of his illness to protect him, and that he wasnot actually sick but was rather a fugitive, which proved, according to the officer, that we were spies for the King of Spain, as some suspected. The young man was seriously ill, seized with the deepest melancholy, and naturally we refused to surrender him. But when the military emissaries withdrew, Dr. Weiss, looking concerned, explained to me that he, like the officer, knew the Chilean youth was no more than a pretext and that the real reason was the officer’s unspoken suspicion that his wife was cuckolding him with the doctor: A libelous suspicion , sighed the doctor, for Mercedes and I haven’t seen each other for six months . So it went that my dear teacher’s inexplicable taste for married women nearly brought us before the firing squad.
    Two or three days later, they arrested us and threatened the staff into departing for their homes. A couple of men, nobly concerned for the patients, who returned secretly to the Casa, were flogged, staked, and forcibly conscripted into the army. The building was brutally and deliberately looted and smashed as the patients fled in terror. The doctor and I were imprisoned in the jealous officer’s camp for three weeks until they came for us one day at dawn and, joking and saying they were going to shoot us, brought us out to the countryside; having given us a beating, they mounted us bareback, half-dressed, on a single horse—I had the reins—and set us free.
    In Buenos Aires, the doctor sought redress from the government for the officer’s unforgivable conduct, and that was how we uncovered a fact more horrible than our adventure: Despite his illness, the Chilean youth had been arrested on the soldier’s orders, and was shot the next day on the charge, no less ignominious than it was false, of treason. We were heaved about by anger and pain, staggering between anxiety and revenge, but the most important thing was to search for the patients the marauders had set loose. So with the help of our protectors, we formed a partyand went out into the vastness of the plains to find them. Faithful Osuna, untouched by the years, guided us through that featureless expanse—like him, ever the same—in which he alone was able to perceive the details and nuances. But though we searched day and night for weeks, we did not see a single trace of the patients. Many years later, until the day of his death, in fact, the doctor and I continued to speculate in our letters about possible explanations for this complete and sudden disappearance.
    For the first time I saw the doctor’s features reflect a passion previously unknown in him: hatred, and a feeling that saddened me all the more: remorse. Some days, he wandered, somber and silent, amid the wild disorder that the marauding soldiers had left in the Casa: the trampled orchard and garden, plants torn up by the roots, broken glass, furniture hacked into pieces, scorched books with the pages ripped out, papers everywhere. The most fruitful years of our lives had just been senselessly laid to waste by the savagery that, to hide its unspeakable instincts, thought to call itself law and order. Of the boarders we took in at the white