Free The Clouds by Juan José Saer Page B

time to time he made an effort to give a slightly more detailed response, he would form two or three confused and faltering sentences, uttered weakly as if all energy had abandoned him. And in recent months, his prostration had been total, but a curious detail of his behavior, strange as it was to say the least, had come to light: He had closed his left hand in a fist and held it clenched tightly ever since. When asked the reason for his gesture, he would turn his head and press his lips together to make it clear that he was unwilling to answer, and the few times several family members tried to make him open his fist to see what would happen, at times even just for sport, he had resisted so frantically that his relatives had stopped out of pity and left him in peace. One day, Señor Parra noticed that Prudencio’s hand was bleeding; it dawned on him that all that time, his son’s fingernails had continued to grow, digging into the soft flesh of his palm, so he really did have to make him open the fist to cut his nails and care for his wounds. According to Señor Parra, young Prudencio had begun to howl and thrash about on the floor, trying to stop them from opening his fist, making such a racket that the neighbors came running, believing a crime had been committed in the house. Despite young Prudencio’s extreme weakness from his prostration and loss of appetite, his resistance was so great thatthey needed three or four strong men to hold him down, open his fist, and keep the hand open while they clipped his nails and tended to his cuts, which had become infected. For the length of the operation, Prudencio howled or whimpered with such a look of terror that the men pitied him, but many of those present noticed Prudencio peering nervously up at the room’s ceiling and walls as if he feared they would come down on him. The whole scene had reminded Señor Parra of a time when he (Señor Parra) was a boy, awoken from a hideous nightmare screaming and crying, and as the faces of his family inclined solicitously over him and tried to calm him with words, caresses, and meaningless gestures, he had sensed that, despite how close their bodies seemed, they were in two different worlds: they, in the unreal world of appearances and he, in the true, real one that he saw in his nightmare. According to Señor Parra, his son finally seemed to quiet somewhat, and though his sobs came further and further apart, the whimpering continued, broken by an occasional breath. Lying on the bed, his father and two slaves pinning him firmly while the doctor tended to his wounds, Prudencio signaled for them to free his right hand. When he got what he wanted, he drew it near, a little shyly, to the injury in such a way that when he was almost close enough to obstruct the doctor’s work, he motioned over the wounded hand with the healthy one as if snatching an insect from flight, and closed his right fist around it, which seemed to calm him completely. While the bandages on his left hand remained, according to Señor Parra, Prudencio kept the right fist closed, but when they were removed few days later, he changed back to the left hand. Since then, he agreed to open the fist every ten to fifteen days for his nails to be cut, but before he opened it, he would carry out the strange operation with the other hand, snatching something from flight that he apparently would not allow to escape for anything in the world. Señor Parra explained to me that his son undertook this curiousprocedure with the absolute and utmost care, and that every time he watched him do so confirmed that it was carried out with the devotion of a ritual.
    Before leading me to his son’s room, Señor Parra, answering a query of mine, told me of the treatments prescribed by the previous doctors who had examined Prudencio, none of which yielded the slightest result. The two doctors, chapter-certified for ongoing practice in the city, had treated him in