The Clouds Read Free

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 causesfrom 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 exhaustthemselves. 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