Читать книгу The Clouds - Juan José Saer - Страница 10

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.

Before its inauguration, the number of applicant families was surprisingly high, and though they were all from Buenos Aires, pleading letters began to arrive from the provinces within a few months of operation—from Paraguay, Peru, and Brazil, each one underscoring the great need in America for a place to treat phrenitis, mania, melancholia, and other more or less familiar mental ailments with the very latest scientific advances. To tell the truth, it was almost as though such diseases did not exist in the American upper classes until Dr. Weiss and I arrived to treat them; one might infer from the silence prevailing across the continent that those infirmities, at least without the existence of a science able to identify them, had been taken to be standard personality traits, which might explain all those incomprehensible deeds in our history. What is known is that the Casa was nearly full shortly after opening, and in the following year the doctor began to draw up plans for the construction of a supplementary wing.

This warm reception is easily explained: For those who do not know how to manage them, the mad rarely prove dangerous, but are always tiring. Even when families endure them with goodwill and, above all, lots of patience, at a certain point they exhaust themselves. Trying to make a madman behave like everyone else is like turning the course of a river: I do not mean that it is impossible, but rather that only a good engineer, lacking any prior assurance of his success, can try to set the water running the other way. For the general populace, the madman’s outlandish behavior is stubbornness, pure and simple, or even a fabrication. Impervious to common sense and reason, those who insist too much on trying to redeem the mad are the very persons who find their own minds disturbed. Take into account, also, that the stricter the principles of their environment, the more the lunatics’ peculiarities will stand out and the more ridiculous their eccentricities will seem. Among the poor, bound by survival to display more tolerant principles, madness seems more natural, as if it contrasts less with the senselessness of their misery. But one of the oldest wishes of the mighty, precisely the one upon which they would base their power, is to embody reason; madness in their midst, then, poses a real problem. A madman endangers a house of rank from ceiling to cellar, costing the occupants their respectability, and so they almost always hide mental illness like a scandal. There must be many families over there, too, that do not know what to do with their mad, Dr. Weiss said to me one day in Madrid, as we waited for the Court’s authorization to open our house in the Viceroyalty. For the science that makes them its object, the mad are an enigma, but for the families who keep them in their homes, they are nuisances. Obviously, complications arise when the external signs of insanity become too obvious. In the cases that go unnoticed, though, which are far more frequent than one might believe, that same insanity can rise through the ranks by general consensus, to hold the world on a string.

As I realize many of my words today still reflect the influence of my revered teacher, I believe it is advisable to evoke him in greater detail. Of his appearance, suffice to say that at first glance he betrayed himself as a man of science: tall, a little heavy; a deeply receding hairline that left graying blond hair permanently disheveled around a reddened brow. This exposed the ongoing activity within his head, which was rather larger than normal and well situated atop strong shoulders. Bright blue eyes shone behind gold-rimmed glasses, which danced against his chest on a fine gold chain around his neck (when they were not creeping up his nose)—roving and perceptive eyes, slightly ironic, and, in moments of great concentration, they disappeared behind half-closed lids, betraying his mind’s utmost occupation. His frank, ruddy face darkened slightly when he examined a patient, but at the dinner hour, after a day of hard work, wine and conversation were his chief pleasures. Nearly ten years after his death, I betray no secret in writing of his passion for the female sex; it was exaggerated even at his advanced age, and, as occurs often in northerners, his predilection was for the darker races. Brothels did not frighten him; on the contrary, they exercised too great a draw, and married women seemed to emanate further and unfathomable charm for his sensual appetites. As I was his principal interlocutor, his assistant, and his faithful disciple, and I found myself so often at his side as to be mistaken for his shadow, I became, for obvious reasons, his confidante. So I consider myself with all clarity of conscience to be the person who, at least in the final third of his life, knew him best. When Casa de Salud no longer stood and, for reasons beyond our control, we had to separate upon our return to Europe, he went back to Amsterdam while I began as an intern at the hospital in Rennes, of which I am currently the deputy director; until the day of his death we continued to write each other, mingling the scientific with the personal in our correspondence with fluency and good cheer. He was scrupulous about hygiene and, when the weather was hot, he liked to dress impeccably in white; on summer nights in Buenos Aires, when he left after dinner to pursue his fondest pastime, it was not uncommon, on seeing him pass by from darkened thresholds, from half-lit bedrooms, through wide-open windows seeking to catch a phantom breeze, to hear a male voice murmur in the darkness, mocking yet understanding, There goes the blond doctor, looking for whores. I believe the best way to describe Dr. Weiss is by that capacity he possessed for practicing his vices freely, for all to see, without loss of respectability. This was likely because he never mixed business with pleasure and was a man of his word: I never heard him tell a lie nor promise something he was not prepared to carry out. His immoderate and mysterious love of married women forced him to perform the odd moral balancing act, and on two or three occasions, forced by circumstance into inevitable duplicity, I saw him give up, resignedly, the pleasures he had already been assured. From these proclivities he fashioned a way of life, a discipline of knowledge and of living, almost a metaphysics. In a letter from his final days, he wrote to me: The moment, esteemed friend, is death, death alone. Sex, wine, and philosophy, they tear us from the moment, they keep us, temporary things, from death. Although he seemed to make no distinction between healthy and diseased, he treated our patients with the greatest decency, as though he thought he owed them more respect than the sane. And in a way, he was correct: Abandoned by families who rarely came to visit, the madmen were entirely in our hands; to them we represented a last link to the world. Upon the opening of Casa de Salud, Dr. Weiss warned the other staff and me that it was foolishness to lie to the patients, and that the sick would have sniffed us out just as sane people discern when madmen do everything possible to conceal their insanity, not realizing that those very efforts betray them. According to Dr. Weiss, deception is pointless because madness, by mere fact of its existence, renders the truth problematic. A detail that intrigued me when I heard him talk with patients: Often, in the face of the madmen’s wildest assertions, he would flash a brief smile of approval, not in his tightened lips, but in his blue eyes.

Illnesses—and not just mental, but physical, which he was capable of treating with equal skill, though which he refrained from so as not to alienate other medical practitioners in the city, unwilling to draw away their clients—were not my teacher’s only area of interest: All the most varied manifestations of the natural world aroused the same curiosity in him, stimulating his gifts of reason and observation, from the regular turning of the stars to the tiniest prairie flowers, which he collected in a detailed herbarium. An insect, a mild October breeze, the behavior of horses, or the phases of the moon held equal value for him as objects of reflection, and more than once I heard him say that contrary to what man had made, there was no hierarchy in nature, and the laws that dictate the entire universe are present in every natural phenomenon. So by accurately explaining, for example, a flea-jump—he always liked trivial examples—one might comprehend the operation of the solar system. He also noted that the correct interpretation of a natural fact was in any event impossible, for as knowledge of the world increased, so too did its mysterious dark side.

He was a pleasant, helpful man, or perhaps more than pleasant and helpful: He was given to compassion. That feature of his character was much more commendable in him than in any other. Indeed, it kept him in check, as, in religious matters, I never saw a more avowed atheist. In one of his letters from Amsterdam, he told me: As God does not exist, it falls to us men to correct the world’s flaws. How I would have liked to leave him to that task—at the end of days, if he exists, evil would be his responsibility—and to be able to dedicate all my time to the one perfect thing he is known to have created: the female sex! His atheism sometimes left me perplexed; he always appeared to think the nonexistence of God an exhilarating condition. Although I shared his beliefs, I must confess that often, in my innermost thoughts, it all seemed rather discouraging, less for the infinite nothingness it attributed to my own being than for the incredible waste, supposing the existence of such a vast universe, varied and colorful, burst open at some time, some fine day, and generously left in our charge, all so it might suddenly collapse and disappear. Such an eventuality left Dr. Weiss unmoved; on the contrary, it seemed to encourage him. I believe that if he were to stand at the mouth of an erupting volcano—a speculation, in any case, though I think he lived in Naples a few years before we met—he would not have fled, but rather rubbed his hands together, preparing to study the igneous material about to consume him. This is an adequate comparison to describe our fourteen years at Casa de Salud. Seething lava threatened us from all sides: Indians, bandits, the English, and the Spanish royalists we called godos (in order of increasing ferocity), not to mention storms, floods, droughts, locusts, accusations, lawsuits, wars, and revolutions. Our hospital-laboratory, as the doctor called it, conceived as peaceful and white, ended as a miserable ruin, which, a friend has informed me, still exists today among the weeds. It seems, after the tragic scattering of our boarders—we searched for them for weeks without success—two of them returned the following year and settled in the ruins with no family to claim them. (Until their death, the Indians worshiped them and brought them food each day. Later, my friend learned the Indians were Christian converts from Areco who, in secret, were practicing a sort of cult around the two madmen, whom the Indians treated well so as to gain protection from the forces of evil.)

Politics and money are useful, no doubt, but they distract from what matters: Also distracting were the successive wars and greed of certain families, who paid the first year’s costs to cast off their sick and, having entrusted them to the Casa, forgot to continue payment, bringing an end to our venture. As for the authorities, while some enlightened persons encouraged us, many leaders, mostly businessmen, petty lawyers, ranchers, churchmen, and soldiers, nearly all of them eager, obscurantist, and uneducated, watched us constantly and created all manners of interference to our growth. Only those who dealt with Dr. Weiss directly supported us, having experienced his goodness, sincerity, and efficiency in their exchanges. And perhaps because they depended on him and because he had been known to ease their suffering on more than one occasion, the patients idolized him. I can tell you, he was able to speak with even the most violent of patients who thought he held them prisoner without cause and was torturing them, even patients who thought him their enemy and never stopped trying to hurt or threaten him. Despite this, those very men clearly respected him, though perhaps they never realized it, and when they feigned the belief that the doctor was the cause of all their ills, I could see in their words and carriage that they did not truly believe their claims. One way or another, they seemed to want him to give a sign that they were mistaken, or maybe extra attention or special interest, trying to goad him with libelous insults that the doctor bore with his impassive little smile, sometimes coming to nod his head affirmatively as though he approved of them. The workers in the Casa, those he was likewise mentoring—they, too, were devoted to him. For the most part, the doctor dealt with fairly uneducated people, but he believed the attributes his work required—intelligence, gentleness, physical strength, and patience—did not depend on schooling. Some ladies from the city tried to work with the Casa as an act of charity, but, with diplomatic cleverness, the doctor convinced them that it was dangerous work, at least in certain cases, terribly rare, to be sure, and once he managed to rid himself of them, he remarked to me confidentially, with his habitual little smile and a twinkle in his eye, Though I must say, I wouldn’t mind requesting a certain service from the younger ones.

It was the doctor who conceived and executed plans for the Casa. It consisted of a single, rectangular floor with a series of corridors that enclosed three courtyards. The façade faced the river, Just as the temple of Concordia faces the sea in the land of Empedocles, he would joke. The stout adobe walls were always an immaculate white; the trellis beneath the windows suggested colonial mansions, but rows of rooms that opened onto impeccable courtyards evoked the convent, monastery, or a rustic Academy. Only in the last corridor of the last courtyard did the doors have a lock. In the others, including my teacher’s, such protection was unnecessary. We lived alongside our mad. As for those working in the Casa, they kept only what they wished, which was very little, under lock and key. The rooms at the far end were reserved for patients who underwent periods of serious volatility. Certain madmen grew accustomed to their constant frenzy, or resigned themselves to it, but the sudden attacks of the silent, gloomy ones were often the most aggressive. In those cases, isolation became necessary, and we left them alone until their melancholia won out again. Strictly speaking, with our method, which is to say, Dr. Weiss’s method, over those fourteen years, we rarely faced raving lunatics who might have endangered our community or any of its members. When violence tempted our patients, it was more often against themselves. One of them would sometimes go suddenly running with a bang against the wall, for no apparent reason, leaving himself dazed and bloodied. Another, without prior warning, thought to cut himself all over with a knife. But in fourteen years, we mourned only three suicides. A Brazilian boy, ever and irresistibly drawn to water, found his end by casting himself into the river; one old man hung himself from a tree in the second courtyard one winter morning; and one woman poisoned herself. (She had given herself six months to recover, and, as she explained in the letter she left behind, she had arrived at the Casa with the poison hidden and had resolved to use it if the doctor’s treatment, her last hope for a cure, should fail.)

The staff, intermingled with the patients, was distributed throughout the three sets of corridors; they actually formed three squares, each with two shared interior sides. Built in a row and all continuous, the three squares aligned to form a rectangle together. The middle square shared two transverse walls with the first square past the entrance and the one farthest off; in matters of architecture, the doctor was fond of geometry. The first of those transverse sides in the middle square was a long salon that served as a refectory with a kitchen at one end. The cook was an employee, but his helpers and serving boys were all mad. Per Dr. Weiss’s instructions, when one of them wanted to cook, the chef placed the kitchen at his disposal. In fact, the cook once went to visit his family on the other side of Buenos Aires for two or three days, leaving the kitchen in the hands of a patient. In the lateral corridors opposite the lower square, just past the entrance, Dr. Weiss and I each had our rooms, which also served as our offices, his to the left and mine to the right.

In our Casa de Salud, truth be told, there were very few medicinal remedies. According to Dr. Weiss, of the various causes that might explain insanity, the most improbable were those that came from the body, and he posited that in matters of mental illness, the cause must be sought out in the mind. As the doctor told me in one of his first letters from Amsterdam: But that mixture of sensations, passions, imagination and thought, truth and lies, good and evil, love and hate, crime and remorse, desire and renunciation that is the mind, does not make our work easier. In a sense, for men the body is a remote region of their very selves, and if they hold it responsible for all their evils, they resign those evils to the control of nature, which for them is synonymous with fate. In what they call the mind, however, they themselves are deeply implicated. In the vast majority of cases, exchange with the outer world does not occur within the body, but in the mind. The body is a hidden land that few are privileged to tread or contemplate, while the mind is in constant exchange in the public square, and those who boast of maintaining a pure, hidden mind fail to see the point: That property they believe to be remote and ethereal, others can sully. For this reason, practically everyone prefers to find the cause of all wrongdoing in the body.

At any rate, Dr. Weiss’s principal method consisted of maintaining identical relations with the patients as he did with the sane, and only in extreme cases did he try some sort of treatment, often temporarily: the prescription of certain medications, for example, or confinement, or hot or cold baths. On rare occasions we found ourselves obliged to use a straitjacket. As for the baths, they were part of our routine, and patients bathed in a separate structure near the river, as white and well kept as the main building. We treated physical ailments by the usual methods, and in more serious cases, the doctor did not hesitate to summon one of his colleagues from Buenos Aires for a consultation. But I must add, if I want to abide by the utmost truth, that the vast majority of the many patients under our care seemed to enjoy exceptional health, physically speaking. Ensconced in their own worlds created entirely by their delirious imaginations and often incomprehensible to the rest of us, they seemed protected from the natural condition endured by those who enjoy, as they say, their full faculties. Encased in their own illusory worlds, the patients seemed to take root, and so did not suffer the decay that befalls all physical substance, but rather an interminable drying-up, a slow calcination whose hardening was not measurable with known instruments. The parts of them that came dislodged—hairs; teeth; skin; the occasional eye that seemed to vanish into thin air from behind a sealed eyelid; a few fingers severed in an accident; a leg that seized up and refused to walk, obliging one to always drag it like an old piece of furniture—these were like shreds of wrapping, torn in the bustle and commotion of a journey without the parcel they protect suffering the slightest damage.

When it came to housework, each helped according to his needs and as desired, and repairs, painting, and the orchard and gardening, along with maintenance of the farmyard (which lay outside the building past the three large acacia trees that gave the place its name), and kitchen tasks as I have already mentioned, were shared as necessity arose among whatever volunteers turned up, Dr. Weiss included. More than once, I saw him tend to a patient as he worked in the garden or painted the adobe walls, the preservation of whose immaculate whiteness, along with the scrupulously clean rooms and corridors and the care of the farmyard and tree-lined courtyards, occupied most of the day’s labor. With regard to these communal chores, I ought to note they did not result from disciplinary impositions, but rather from the whim of the patients volunteering; this labor system that Dr. Weiss so carefully devised yet again proved his inimitable realism and unerring shrewdness. If madness is defined by the very delusions it manifests, and if in many cases the patients are free from physical pain, it is clear that its other consistent feature is unruliness: Reason, though capable of imposing its discipline even onto lightning that drops from the sky, is not enough to tame delusion. He who wishes to deal with the lunatic is wiser to appeal to his caprice rather than to his obedience. Our mad did not often follow externally dictated standards, but rather what their own delusion required, sometimes with the foreseeable consequence that the outer world, hitherto unquestionable, yielded to them. I recall an incident in 1811, when a Revolutionary official whom I would have numbered among our enemies, charged with inspecting our establishment, took an unexpected tumble from his horse during the first days of his visit—though it failed to shuffle him loose the mortal coil, as they say. He commented at the end of his stay, not inappropriately, that during his recovery at the Casa he had spent all his time trying to distinguish the madmen from the sane, to which my esteemed teacher responded—the usual twinkle in his bright blue eyes, but without receiving even the slightest smile of complicity in return—that when he passed through the streets or halls of Buenos Aires, he was frequently assaulted by the same bewilderment.

The object of this memoir is not a detailed relation of life in Casa de Salud, but our voyage of 1804, whose scant hundred leagues were multiplied by obstacles, foreseen or unforeseen, that delayed our advance, and by natural phenomena that upset our plans, and by certain unusual episodes that led us more than once to the brink of disaster. But before I tell the story, I want to remark upon the circumstances that led to the Casa’s fall.

In Madrid, we obtained the necessary authorizations to settle with ease, which can be explained by the fact that the Crown believed each new institution founded in the colonies helped to solidify its presence there. It is also explained by the ignorance of nearly all the Court officials regarding our area of expertise and the manner in which we thought to exercise it, even though Dr. Weiss had been partly inspired by the example of some doctors in Valencia who had practiced a more humane treatment of madness during the previous century. To this I might add the fact that we had to pay a tax because, in truth, taking into account the financial state of practically every European monarchy, it always sped proceedings along. Besides, convinced of the nonexistence of anything outside their purview, the dignitaries believed there were no madmen in America with families able to pay for someone to look after them, so in their private counsel they doubtless thought that Dr. Weiss and I were two naïfs, ready and willing to squander his fortune on a half-cocked undertaking destined for failure. But when the long white rectangle opened its doors at the feet of the three acacia trees and the patients began to flock in, local dignitaries began to take us seriously and, when word of our novel methods spread, public opinion split over their seriousness, their efficacy, and even their decency. The Church for example, which granted itself power in the colonies of which it would never dare dream in the motherland, sought to judge how patients should be treated, requiring Dr. Weiss’s inexhaustible patience and cleverness, ever-ready to overcome any difficulties. During our private deliberations, the doctor told me that, for the moment, a direct confrontation with the clergy would be unproductive and not without danger, and that the best way to fight them was to proceed with our scientific work without making concessions; but, at the same time, even when we ought to have avoided provocation, he was unwilling to renounce his ideas. When the Revolution came years later, we hoped it would also come for us and that our work would finally be recognized, but many of its supporters were no different from its enemies in terms of political, scientific, and religious views. The wars that followed did little more than exacerbate the situation: The civil war was already brewing in the wars for independence, and one might even say that the first battles of the war for independence were in fact a sort of civil war, for those killing each other were the same as those who, five or six years earlier, had been fighting together against the English. Though in truth the region had never really been calm, during wartime we often saw companies of soldiers passing through by land or water, sometimes branching off from their route to come knock at our door out of curiosity or to see a doctor, or sometimes to beg a little water or even something to eat. Most often, when they realized they had found a hospital, and especially when they discovered what kind of patients we treated, they rushed off, leaving us in peace: It is already known that madness often provokes unease, if not laughter, and, more often than not, consternation and fear.

It was not all misunderstandings and threats in the surrounding world, and I must recall that in the fourteen years of Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud, a group of friends and advocates, hailing from all social classes and political factions—including dignitaries of the successive governments, scientists, and even members of the clergy—backed our expertise in every way. A good part of our madmen’s families, if only so they would not have them reappear suddenly in their houses one day if our institution closed, always paid on time, as each without exception formed part of the moneyed classes that, whatever faction they belonged to, were the only ones who granted themselves the right to govern, using their influence however they could to ensure we were not bothered. But on several occasions, grudges, rivalries, and conflicts of interest nearly brought us to ruin. When the wars of independence began, the revolutionaries accused us of being royalists, and the royalists, of being revolutionaries. As the Crown had authorized our settlement, the criollo revolutionaries accused us of espionage, and a few even expected us only to admit foreign patients to the Casa from families supporting the Revolutionary cause. The most ridiculous thing about that situation was that Dr. Weiss and I had always been avowed revolutionaries—he had been in the streets of Paris in ninety-three—but as we were forced to conceal this during the Spanish Viceroyalty in order to survive, the revolutionaries claimed we chose to defend their cause out of opportunism or, even worse, in order to more effectively carry out our supposed duty as spies. What followed was what follows in all revolutions, really, which is to say, the leaders were in one small group made up of die-hard revolutionaries, who always lose in the end, while the rest was comprised of one part influential men from the previous government, changing sides as they went along, and one part those neither with nor against them, who simply seek to gain advantage from the unforeseen circumstances that brought them to power. Aside from the families who had entrusted one of their own to us and from certain scientists who were genuinely interested in our work, no one understood what it was we were doing, and so we suffered the eternal scourge that threatens those who think, or those who mistrust a man who denies what he does not understand.

I have been told that these days (Roughly 1835 by my calculations. Note, M. Soldi) they go slitting throats all across the land; in my day it was the firing squad that seemed to be the fashion. An unforeseen ally saved us from this painful and, in short, all-too degrading end: the English consul, who considered us—you will pardon me for taking the liberty in my account of attributing to a diplomat, and an Englishman no less, the faculty of thought—a couple of charlatans, even suspected, with just cause on his part, that in reality Dr. Weiss and I, who were often in the habit of crossing him at social gatherings, were having our fill of laughs at his expense. Shortly after resettling in Amsterdam, the doctor wrote to me: I have arrived here safe and sound again in Europe, and all thanks to Mister Dickson. The poor man, torn between his hatred of Spain (for commercial reasons) and his hatred of all 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 was not 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 party and 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 Casa of Dr. Weiss, it must also be noted that, even when their own families had disowned them, none of the patients, abandoned by reason and all as they were, took part in these shameful acts. Perhaps this proves an argument I had heard the doctor make to himself many times: Reason does not always express the best of humanity.

We slept in the ruins that night, and the following day we resettled in Buenos Aires with what we were able to salvage from the disaster: some books, five or six pages of an herbarium, the bust of Galen which by some miracle had remained intact. But the doctor’s bottomless sorrow, though it seemed to intensify, did not last for long; three or four days later a new determination, so intense it inspired a little dread in me, appeared on his face. When he decided to put this determination into practice, a grim but solemn spark of satisfaction arose in his gaze. In the back of a tavern one night, inspired by the wine, he explained his plan to me: He would challenge the officer to a duel. The doctor explained his crazy idea, which was essentially a suicide mission, with his customary logical clarity, and was so pleased with the rational evidence that he seemed to have forgotten his many years of medical practice, during which his principal task had been to patiently and insightfully dismantle the hallucinatory fallacies of the patients—patients who were, just as the doctor was now, incapable of seeing for themselves their preposterous concatenations. According to the doctor, the officer would not pursue us, which no doubt was true, and we had no alternatives but flight or confrontation. Yet it was clear we could not go searching for him in his encampment, where his troops’ superior numbers were an insurmountable obstacle, nor could we kill him in the street, nor report him to the authorities, which he was a part of and over whom he held considerable sway. Nor were we able to lay an ambush (I am merely listing the options, each one more absurd than the last, that the doctor was proposing). According to him, offending the officer before witnesses and forcing him to fight a duel provided two fundamental advantages: First, the incident would spread word of the officer’s barbarity, the Casa’s destruction, the shooting of the Chilean youth, and dispersal of the patients, to the public and even to the entire civilized world, and, second (this he voiced with the slightly childish pride of one who has just constructed a flawless syllogism), dueling was the only option that allowed a distant hope of escaping the venture with our lives. At the same time, the provocation would set all responsibility on his shoulders, leaving me free from reprisal. (This gentle concern for my safety was of course a tacit confession of the entire conflict’s wanton origins.)

The suicidal plan he had just revealed seemed so unassailable to the doctor that, rubbing his hands together, he told me with his usual lack of hypocrisy that a stroll to the brothel would ease his mind, and he left me in the dark and muddy street, terrified of what was to come. Flight seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the most sensible of solutions. It is true that the doctor was not one of those who, on the pretext of study, neglected to maintain his body, but he was not a young man either, and further, his adversary, as an officer, was a true instrument of death. There was no mistaking the outcome of that unequal match. But the satisfied glint in Dr. Weiss’s gaze robbed me of any inclination to dissuade him.

Ideas as wild as his began to hound me. Nothing stimulates delirium more than being faced with a situation for which one is unprepared; unfathomable as the minuet for the savage or waste for the miser, so were tyrannical power and violence for us, men of libraries and lecture halls. It occurred to me that I could run ahead of the doctor and goad the officer into a duel myself, where my youth might accord me a greater prospect of victory; even if it were to cost me my life, to this very day I am certain that no one would have been able to prevent my teacher, in turn, from provoking that source of all our woes, and that my sacrifice would have been in vain. Convincing him to flee would surely have been an exhausting endeavor, but, more importantly, a useless one: Only one such as me, who knows the elegant adaptability of the doctor’s mind, might distinguish his determination from mere pigheadedness. Once he made a decision it was unlikely, if not impossible, for anyone or anything to stop him from setting it in motion. Feeling my way through the muddy streets of Buenos Aires, many solutions, just as half-formed and impossible, struck me and seemed workable for a few seconds until they revealed their absurdity and, with the same fervor that my mind had fleetingly built them, they crumbled. Only when I retired to the peace of my room and, more importantly, to a horizontal position, and the weariness of the day began to fade, did my ideas become clearer, allowing me to conceive of the solution that, as the least fantastical, was the most sensible: going to talk to the officer’s wife.

Naturally, if I did so, I would not be able to reveal that I was aware of her relations with the doctor, and I would speak in the name of science, of the tormented patients, appealing to her Christian charity, et cetera. Dr. Weiss could not learn of my interference for anything in the world, as that would hinder the realization of my plan. A few months later, I would write to him in Amsterdam from Rennes recounting my intervention (I lacked the courage to do it during our voyage across the Atlantic) but, to my surprise, he replied that he knew of everything, that a recent missive from Mercedes, having arrived in his hands through none other than the English secret service, contained the explanations I gave in my letter, and some others as will be dealt with later.

After making the necessary inquiries, I sent the officer’s wife a discreet message. For two days, I awaited her response, fearing that marauding soldiers would burst into the pension where we were staying to drag us before the firing squad, but on the morning of the third day a negro servant delivered an invitation to a cup of chocolate at an estate on the outskirts of the city. A slave came that same afternoon at five on the dot to guide me to the meeting place.

In a garden, the masters of the house—faultless patriots, as I discovered upon arriving—confirmed what I had already guessed during the first minutes of conversation, namely, that they were relatives of one of our missing patients, who, even as we spoke, might have already died on the plains. When the officer’s wife arrived, they tarried with us briefly to exchange a few courtesies after the introductions, but withdrew after a few minutes with the utmost tact. Señora Mercedes listened with hooded eyes as I explained the situation, and I did not refrain from studying her so as to confirm the extent to which her person fulfilled the many feminine attributes that Dr. Weiss preferred: She had a generous figure, poise and self-control, lustrous black hair, and, most importantly, that dark, firm skin which had caused Dr. Weiss to lose his head so many times—even a glimpse of it was always a bewitchment for my teacher: It had the intolerable and delicious strangeness of belonging to another, which was a source of excitement and also of dangerous complications. Time and time again those traits, assembled within a soft, warm body, magnetically drew his energy by some ancient and inexplicable affinity and, with the iron regularity of the constellations, made him orbit their center. When I finished relating the facts, her eyelids rose and her eyes, huge and dark, fixed on mine, revealing so eloquently the intimate thrill of an intense passion and pride that, out of delicacy or prudence, I do not know which, I had to avert my gaze. Señora Mercedes vehemently affirmed that Dr. Weiss’s life was more precious to her than her own, and told me she would do whatever was necessary to protect it.

For the first and only time in more than three decades of our friendship, I faced the sad duty of lying to my dear teacher, finding myself in the deplorable situation of a physician who, in concealing the severity of an illness, must hide the truth from an old and dear friend. On the other hand, the meeting with Señora Mercedes, despite the determined air with which she pledged to take the reins on this matter, was unable to reassure me, since I heard nothing more from her. The doctor, as he awaited the occasion to publicly offend our enemy and force him into a duel, went to practice his aim in the field every morning, and then took fencing classes in order to perfect his skills, nonexistent though they were, in that activity. If the destruction of the Casa and the scattering of the patients, the execution of the Chilean youth, and our imminent physical destruction had not grown so serious and tragic, I would have laughed at the situation, which was more than ridiculous. Only the hours we spent in study calmed us: Closed up in our respective rooms, the candlelight, at times accompanying us until dawn with its flickering brightness, made a paltry halo around visible objects that, for the hours of our quiet contemplation, seemed to hold back the massive shadow outside where so many confusing emotions and so many unhappily-certain threats were creeping.

At last the dénouement: We were invited to a party attended “by all of Buenos Aires,” that is, by the members of the revolutionary government and other authorities, officers, clergymen, et cetera; the rich who, as I said before, were more or less the same as those authorities already cited; and foreign diplomats, the French, English, and North Americans especially. Owing to the many factions in open or covert power-struggles, we were also invited despite our recent disgrace. Several government officials, wealthy merchants, and other illustrious intellectuals were on our side for scientific and political reasons, and, in certain cases, even for private reasons, as the doctor had attended to several members of their families years before in Casa de Salud. (Unfortunately, at the time of the Casa’s destruction, none of our boarders came from Buenos Aires families; in just two or three cases, we had treated distant relatives.)

Even if, as I believe I have said, Dr. Weiss was naturally careful in his dress, that day his care was multiplied. He spent hours smartening up, as if he thought himself the guest of honor at that assembly, or as if he were attending his own wedding, his own apotheosis, or even, I thought with horror, his own funeral. All that time, I tried in vain to dissuade him from going to the party, until the good-natured disapproval in his eyes forced me to accept, silently, what was to come.

It was a fine party indeed. As it was quite hot, the house was opened up, and several tables were strewn throughout the interior and the garden, where a large canopy had been erected in case of a storm. Lamps shone in the garden, but the rooms gleamed with exceptional lighting that spilled onto the courtyards from open doors and windows. An orchestra sounded, or rather, screeched, a fashionable dance, and couples swayed together across the garden lawn and in illuminated rooms. As two-story houses are quite scarce in Buenos Aires, everything was more or less at ground level, flush with the immense plain on whose eastern border the city is crowded, at the wide and wild riverbanks. Entering the party and cutting across the floor, I had the strange impression that the house, its inhabitants and guests, and the shadowy city that surrounded them, were like a mere morsel in the jaws of an infinite mouth, the black, damp river and vast plains, the boundless firmament—a morsel nestled in a dark and eager cavity, ready to be devoured. That strange idea momentarily distracted me from the critical situation we found ourselves in, but seeing Dr. Weiss, I realized that no consideration, romantic as it was, could divert him from the object he had set upon, and it was hard to tell if it was vengeance or suicide.

Nothing important ever really happens—birth, death, and daily life are colorless and dull—but when something truly strange takes place, it seems less than a hallucination, passing fine and distant as a vague dream. As Dr. Weiss did not see our enemy in the garden, despite his scrutinizing the faces of everyone there with his lively, blue gaze, he headed for the house, my anxious and modest person at his heels. The officer was not in the anteroom, but when we passed through the doorway to the main hall, we discovered him opposite the entryway, beneath a great, gold-framed mirror that hung on the wall, where he conversed in a little group that also included Señora Mercedes. We stopped so suddenly that a few guests by the door looked at us with curiosity: The doctor’s blue eyes locked onto the officer’s, who, alerted by a fierce animal instinct of which men are deprived, had raised his head when we entered the hall and recognized us straight away. Despite the gravity of the moment, something small distracted me: At his side, Señora Mercedes continued speaking as if nothing had happened, smiling, worldly and fickle, not even lifting her head, though to this day I am convinced that of all the people at the event, she was the first to notice our presence. On the officer’s face, surprise gave way to a kind of savage joy, delighting at the thought of wicked deeds that, without his having actually desired them, we were giving him the opportunity to commit. I believe he grasped the situation at once and, seeing us walk decisively toward him, he prepared to receive us as he believed we deserved. As we approached him, I began to acquire the steely conviction that, at the other end of the hall, where the couples dancing made off to one side with astonishment and concern to let us pass, our haphazard lives would come to an end when, suddenly and again, with a funny, dreamlike unreality, the unexpected: Dickson, the English consul, intercepted us, obliging us to stop, and whispered that he had something urgent to tell us on behalf of Señora Mercedes, and when Dr. Weiss refused to listen, Dickson clutched at his jacket and said softly, but with uncharacteristic vehemence, that the message he carried would lead to a better realization of the doctor’s plot, and that if we intended to carry it out as planned, we were doomed to failure because we were being ambushed. I felt sweat run down my face, neck, and back, and seeing the large drops that broke out on Dickson’s forehead and ran down the creases of his reddened, prematurely wrinkled face, I could imagine, comparing it with the cause of my own sweat, what his frame of mind might be at that moment. The doctor hesitated for a moment, then accepted, and Dickson and I led him from the house. Before we left, I cast a fleeting glance in the officer’s direction and saw the disappointment on his face. But when I warily eyed Señora Mercedes, seeing her for the last time in my life before turning away, I confirmed that she had not for a single instant interrupted the cheerful conversation with her interlocutors who, I am sure, had not noticed a thing.

When we left for the garden, not a breeze was stirring in the sultry night, but a feeling of coolness, probably imagined, came over me. Dickson asked that we accompany him to the harbor, where Señora Mercedes’s slave awaited us with a message from her lady. We traversed the deserted streets, feeling our way through the dark city amid clouds of buzzing mosquitoes. In a lighted window, behind the grillwork, a man stripped to the waist was eating a piece of watermelon shaped like a half moon. Looking up, he recognized us and, with a sarcasm both gentle and familiar, asked: Out to see the whores, Doctor? Whereupon, with his venerable bonhomie, my dear teacher stopped and burst into laughter, which seemed to perturb Dickson, and launched back this unforgettable response: Not necessarily. The man shook his head as he took a bite of the watermelon, as if we had lost his interest, and when we resumed our march, despite the gravity of the situation, the doctor’s suppressed chuckling echoed in the darkness, irresistibly contagious, so when we arrived at the harbor, our top hats shook against the faint evening light that seemed to diffuse the great open space of the river, whose unmistakable odor, rhythmic splashing on the banks, and genuine coolness in the air betrayed its proximity. Dickson, who retained his seriousness in spite of our certainly unjustified good mood, ordered us to wait and remain silent, and once we obeyed, he began to whistle to notify someone of our presence. Shortly, some thirty meters out, a light signaled and we walked in its direction. When we arrived, six or seven men began to converse in whispered English with Dickson; we were all crammed together around the lantern, studying one another with suspicion and curiosity until the consul, signaling to the doctor and me, moved a few steps away and withdrew into the night. Suddenly, utter darkness overwhelmed me; it took barely a fraction of a second to realize that a cloth had been thrown over my head—a sack, perhaps—and that two or three men had tied my hands. The muffled protests and gasps from the doctor indicated to me, in that total darkness in which I was plunged, that exactly the same thing had happened to him. I tried to struggle, but it was useless. Two powerful arms—Scottish, I discovered later—lifted me up, and it was in that precise moment that my feet ceased to tread the soil of my fatherland forever, or in any case, to this day.

In the letter he sent me from Amsterdam some time later, the doctor offered several additional explanations, since we had already been given the primary ones on the high seas, about what had happened, clarifying the exact motives of the English consul’s intervention: From the outcome of our adventure, one can judge, dear Dr. Real, Señora Mercedes’ subtlety and discretion, two attributes we must add to the undeniable charms she possesses and that you, I believe, have had some occasion to admire de visu. The explanation for the conduct of Dickson, to whom we were always so unkind, is the following: Some time after we parted, Mercedes, trying vainly, according to her, to forget me, began to visit the English consul, who, without elaborating on what she affirms in her letter, was of course never aware of our relations. Mercedes convinced Dickson that her husband, believing himself cuckolded, had the wrong target, and was going to avenge himself on us, believing I was his wife’s lover. Dickson then found himself obliged to intervene. So that’s how they saved our lives, the diplomatic service, secret agents, and naval forces of the great island nation that holds the undisputed mastery of the seas, propagating freedom of commerce, as others do the Black Death, wherever they go.

Hooded by sacks and suffocating, arms bound to our chests by ropes, we were placed on a vessel; the regular sound of its oars accompanied us for some twenty minutes, and then we were hoisted like bundles onto a ship’s deck; finally, they removed the sacks, but returned to bind us at the wrists and ankles with our arms behind us—a humiliating treatment that, I recognize, was effected firmly but not roughly—and left us alone in a silent cabin enveloped in the deepest darkness. Distant voices and sounds reached us, and at last we realized that the ship where we lay sequestered had weighed anchor and was sailing at a steady clip to destinations unknown. In the hours of our imprisonment, the doctor, who had not lost the habit or capacity of reasoning with methodical patience, elaborated a series of hypotheses about the remarkable events that had transpired, and when we heard the door open and a man’s calm, educated voice began to apologize in English for how they had been obliged to treat us, the doctor (a revealing detail if one takes into account that he had been tied hand and foot and hurled into darkness) responded with perfect tranquility in perfect English that we understood (also perfectly) what had happened, and that we were grateful how quickly the English government had acted to save our lives. When the lights came on we realized we were in the elegant guest cabin of an English frigate, whose captain, a tanned and affable Scotsman, was waiting for the two sailors who accompanied him to untie our bonds and help us to our feet before giving us a jovial welcome. A month later, penniless and still a little shaken, more by recent events than by the volatility of the rough, gray ocean, and the captain having conceded to Dr. Weiss every game of chess they played during the voyage, we disembarked one sad and rainy morning in Liverpool.

I have dwelt on the establishment of Casa de Salud and, in brief, I have noted the treatment methods of Dr. Weiss, his character and philosophy, as well as the ravages of the barbarity that in a few hours left the work not even of years, but of my teacher’s entire life, in ruins. It was a calling to build that institution from nothing, especially in a time of unrest, and my sole, original contribution to it was that month-long trip through the plains, in such demanding conditions, which constitutes the principal theme of this memoir. (In any case, that trip was a unique experience for me, for which, as will be addressed later on, I am also in debt to Dr. Weiss, and I hope that my instructor, forgiving the egoism in supposing to present myself as the protagonist of my tale, will be good enough to consider that I relate what was for me the most singular adventure of my life.)

The patients we had to transfer from the city of Santa Fé, located on the banks of the great river across from my birthplace and some hundred leagues north of Las Tres Acacias, were people disturbed in their innermost selves by the ravages of insanity and required special care; the voyage across the desert plain was an aggravation to their conditions, but their derangement was at the same time itself disruptive, and, by its singular presence, helped break the balance of the old, unwritten laws of the desert. Patients, Indians, women of ill repute, gauchos, soldiers, and even animals, domestic and otherwise—we had to live together for many days in the desert which, though already hostile by definition, saw its hostility increase as unforeseen calamities amassed.

But it is better to start from the beginning. For the most part in the time of the Viceroyalty, when a family wished to place one of its members in Casa de Salud, the transfer of the patient took place independently, and the necessary agreements were carried out by messenger: Over a couple of months, all the details were arranged, and the patient was delivered to us, so to speak, at the door of our establishment, which, once crossed, left him in our hands and as our full responsibility. Such was the unbending rule that governed their hospitalization. Early in 1804, however, four simultaneous requests for admission came to us from different regions, and after laborious negotiations, less of a financial than a practical nature, we consented to gather the patients in the city where I, as Dr. Weiss had decided, would go to fetch them, as said city lay approximately halfway between the places those patients came from and Las Tres Acacias. No expense was too great and no effort was spared when one sought to rid oneself of a madman, as it is difficult to find anything in the world that can be more of a bother, and so with the combined forces of the four families, one of which was in fact a religious community, it was possible to organize a mobile hospital of which I would be a sort of director for the duration of the trip through the desert. (A relative “desert,” moreover, for a series of outposts was placed every ten to fifteen leagues or so, and though miserable at best, they alleviated the distance somewhat. Unfortunately, circumstances would deprive us of them.)