Free The Clouds by Juan José Saer

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    Young Prudencio Parra, just turned twenty-three, had fallen into a deep stupor for some months, a state that, in truth, was the culmination of a series of attacks, each one proving graver over time. Young Prudencio had acted strangely since puberty, but only in the last two or three years might his behavior be considered a state of derangement. What had been mere peculiarities at first were degenerating little by little into madness. At thirteen or fourteen, he spent whole days shut away in his bedroom filling notebook after notebook with “moral reflections” (as he called them) only to build an enormous bonfire in the basement of the house a few months later, using those and other papers blackened with his near-illegible handwriting, declaring that from that day forth he would wholeheartedly dedicate himself to good works; but those changes in humor, however, had not unsettled the family, as they attributed them to the sudden but short-lived excesses of passionthat are unique to youth. The tendency toward shifting moods seemed, for its part, inherent to his temperament; since early childhood, these abrupt changes had been observed not only by the family, but also by the nurses—who, slaves or not, were practically part of the family—and nobody took it seriously, to the point that the young man’s instabilities had become part of the household’s tradition of comic anecdotes. But since eighteen or so, things had grown more serious, and the gravity of the situation was evident. His bouts of melancholy were becoming more frequent and more acute. Several doctors, from the city or passing through, had examined him and prescribed him treatment, with no visible result. Señor Parra was a sensible enough man not to believe the rumors of demonic possession or witchcraft that raced through the city, and, not exactly among the less affluent strata of the population, but he had scruple enough not to hide them and even conveyed all the details to me, allowing me to prove once more how the powers of science might save mankind—not just those living in faraway regions of the planet, but also in supposedly enlightened European empires—from the ignorance and pain, for superstition and obscurantism had added defamation and slander to the case of young Prudencio, as if his grievous illness was not enough. According to Señor Parra, Prudencio was seized by such a frenzy for philosophical study that he read day and night, and when he’d exhausted the local libraries, which were few and sparse, he would order books from Córdoba, Buenos Aires, or Europe, so desirous of receiving them that, while he waited, he would go to the port every day to ask at the arriving ships if they had his books. But after a time a sort of despondency overtook him, and what once had been sheer enthusiasm, energy, and jubilation, turned to reluctance, dejection, sighs. He began to grumble that nature had not granted him the faculties required to study science and philosophy, and that only a foolish and overweening pride had made him err,comparing himself to the great geniuses, humanity’s benefactors like Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Voltaire. As I inferred from Señor Parra’s tale, the subject of his ineptitude for study tormented Prudencio for many months, and bit by bit he attributed to this supposed ineptitude a series of irreparable wrongs he believed he had committed, such that after a time he began to think himself responsible for great troubles—or mere mishaps—in the city, as well as those he learned of from the gazettes arriving from Buenos Aires or the Court. When that undue sense of duty did not reduce him to a weeks-long prostration, during which he would not leave his room, or even his bed, for anything, it would cause him spells of fever, during which it seemed by all means necessary that he act immediately to prevent certain catastrophes, though it was always impossible to