This brings me to my two new patients, who, along with the guard that accompanied them and the other members of the caravan, had to negotiate an incredible series of obstacles to arrive in the city. The patient we were expecting, about whom letters had been exchanged between Asunción and Las Tres Acacias, was a man some thirty years old called Juan Verde, a relative of the owner of the transport company that had rented the wagons to the patients’ families for such a reasonable price. The man would go from hesitant silence to overly-lively or impassioned conversation, which, oddly, tended to consist of a single sentence. He repeated it constantly, changing his intonation and adding such varied facial expressions and gestures that it was as if he were indeed holding a conversation with his interlocutor in which, as spoken sentences changed, so changed the feelings and passions that spurred them. To be clear, I should state that what Verde always said was not even a sentence, as it had no verb, but consisted of the expression morning, noon, and night, which he addressed to his interlocutor, and sometimes even to himself in the course of the conversation, always repeating it and changing only the intonation, which at each exchange would suggest such distinct things as greeting, courtesy, astonishment, joy, anger, disagreement, concentration, interest, et cetera. That curious form of speech, which ultimately wore on his interlocutors, as one might guess, alternated, as I have said before, with many hours of hesitant silence each day. As for the unexpected patient, I must admit that all his papers were in order when they entrusted him to me on arriving in the city. He was Verde’s middle brother, son of the same father but not the same mother, and as he was much younger (he would have been fifteen or sixteen at most), all members of the caravan, to distinguish between them, and with certain affectionate familiarity, began to call him Verdecito, or “little Verde.”
Since antiquity, many causes of madness have been posited, varying by the type of illness under discussion, and so, when multiple cases appear in the same family, not only in parents and children but even over generations — or as they seemed to occur in the Verde family, in the same generation — the suspicion that hereditary factors exist in certain cases of insanity seems more than justified. Without being quite identical, the Verde brothers’ symptoms displayed many similarities, particularly in a sort of perversion of speech; it did not manifest the same way, but still drew attention. (Dr. Weiss noticed the phenomenon immediately, and he tried to make an inventory of the two brothers’ shared symptoms, as well as their divergent traits, in order to establish a classification principle for both. I will not rest on these details too long because, as the reader will recall, the object of this memoir is not to enter into scientific minutiae.)
Verdecito, as we called him, might have been the finest young man in the world, but, owing to his symptoms, his company could grow exasperating after a time. This explains why, despite his docility, the family had rid themselves of him, sending him to Casa de Salud. In the letter they sent from Asunción, justifying the lad’s unexpected delivery, they offered the explanation that the two brothers were joined so intimately and by such a deep affection that it would have been cruel to separate them — that perhaps neither one would survive. Accustomed to the oft-criticized rhetoric that families usually resort to in order to justify admission of any of its members seized by madness, I made haste to uncover the true source of Verde and his younger brother’s continuous verbal, oral barrage — whatever you might call it — to which they submitted their interlocutors. The pretext of a cruel separation that neither would survive did not bear up, for I could show even the most incurious bystander how clearly the two brothers barely knew each other, speaking — or not speaking, to be more precise — to one another with the vaguest and most apathetic indifference. Verdecito, contrary to what transpired with his older brother, was able to maintain a fairly ordinary conversation, and his repertoire of phrases was varied enough, although their concepts and themes always proved a little childish for his age and, as if he were slightly deaf — though he was not, and reacted immediately to other stimuli outside the conversation — showed a tendency, which could become exasperating, to repeat the phrases spoken to him several times. What hampered his verbal exchanges was his custom of continually making all manner of noises with his mouth: screams, grunts, sneezes, hiccups, coughs, stammers, belches, and, in moments of great excitement, profanities, and even howling and yelling, though directed at no one in particular. It was impossible for him to pass by a horse without neighing to make fun of it, or any other animal without imitating its cry. He did so with ease, and was sometimes given to copying even the other noises he heard around him, from a spoon’s metallic clink against a tin plate to the murmur of water passing from one vessel to another. So it was that Verdecito’s presence was always accompanied by an endless string of buccal sounds that were strewn throughout his sentences and, more importantly, filled the silences between them; perhaps the simplest explanation for that tendency to repeat the sentences uttered to him stemmed not from an alleged deafness, but from the fact that the constant din from his mouth simply blotted out the conversation. Leaving aside the exasperating aspects, it is worth pointing out that neither brother was able to maintain a normal conversation with people, in one case owing to his emitting too great a variety of sounds and, in the other, too poor; there was this paradox, that, in the one capable of offering such a gamut of sounds, his conversation seemed more apathetic, while the one who repeated his four paltry words ad infinitum seemed more emphatic. There was something poignant about those two brothers, separated from the world by the same impenetrable wall of madness; two different mothers had brought them into the world, so if it was hereditary, their insanity could only have stemmed from the paternal branch. Perhaps what they inherited was not madness but a shared fragility before the harshness of things, or perhaps, by unfathomable coincidence, the secret vagaries of fate had made each, though different from the other, traverse the same hidden corridor where, without brutality or compassion, madness lay waiting.
With my five patients, I felt like one of those circus jugglers spinning five plates by their rims on a table at once, dashing about from one plate to the next to keep them all spinning upright and at the same speed, never dropping or breaking a thing. All the while, the time of our departure drew near. We had yet to repair the carriages that had suffered damage on the rough roads, to assemble a few more troops to serve as our escort, and to see an improvement in the weather, so that a storm would not force us out into the desert, which was inhospitable even on clear days. By then, we stood at July’s end, the dead of winter: not a leaf on the trees as they rose gray in a dark and shining filigree against the flattened sky, itself a gray that was ever so slightly brighter. The freezing downpours had given way to a steady drizzle, which, after two or three days, turned to a sort of mist that seemed always to float, motionless, between earth and sky. It seeped into things, icy cold, leaving them soaked to the marrow. Getting into bed, the damp, chilly sheets stuck to the skin, and no matter how the braziers burned day and night, not to merely heat the rooms but to speed evaporation of the damp, nothing was ever completely dry. Those milky, suspended water droplets filled every available space. The water was everywhere, falling not just down from the sky, but also creeping up from the region’s many and powerful rivers as they overflowed; from the city center to the outer districts, it imprisoned the town in a watery ring that narrowed by the hour. Many houses built too far down in the lowlands had already flooded, and some riverside streets could only be traversed by canoe. The five or six thousand inhabitants of that forgotten desert village, which the official papers called with certain hyperbolic pomposity a city, kept watch on the water’s height from the moment they rose each morning; the rest of the day, trapped in that air of imminent disaster, they spoke of nothing else. In those final days, the delay weighed on me too heavily: Little tied me to that place, though it was, in a way, the site of my childhood. Returning to that city after so many years, it was there that I first learned how the world that endures in the places and things we have left behind does not belong to us, and what we abusively name the past is no more than the bright but gauzy present of our memories.