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.