But it is better to start from the beginning. For the most part in the time of the Viceroyalty, when a family wished to place one of its members in Casa de Salud, the transfer of the patient took place independently, and the necessary agreements were carried out by messenger: Over a couple of months, all the details were arranged, and the patient was delivered to us, so to speak, at the door of our establishment, which, once crossed, left him in our hands and as our full responsibility. Such was the unbending rule that governed their hospitalization. Early in 1804, however, four simultaneous requests for admission came to us from different regions, and after laborious negotiations, less of a financial than a practical nature, we consented to gather the patients in the city where I, as Dr. Weiss had decided, would go to fetch them, as said city lay approximately halfway between the places those patients came from and Las Tres Acacias. No expense was too great and no effort was spared when one sought to rid oneself of a madman, as it is difficult to find anything in the world that can be more of a bother, and so with the combined forces of the four families, one of which was in fact a religious community, it was possible to organize a mobile hospital of which I would be a sort of director for the duration of the trip through the desert. (A relative “desert,” moreover, for a series of outposts was placed every ten to fifteen leagues or so, and though miserable at best, they alleviated the distance somewhat. Unfortunately, circumstances would deprive us of them.)
That curious convoy we formed and the episodes that arose along our route, in my opinion, deserve a detailed retelling, and if I refrain from publishing it for now, this memoir will provide for some future reader, I hope, not only a picturesque charm, but also genuine scientific interest. Indeed, it is this scientific aspect that prevents the immediate publication of these pages, as my scrupulous preoccupation with accuracy has resulted in notes on the behavior of the deranged and of the other members of the caravan, alongside the transcription of their language, free of empty rhetoric, which might shock certain sensitive souls — but the scientific spirit will not be shocked, for it understands the reality of insanity and the true motivations of both man and beast, and how false by comparison are those notions that pass for rational and prevail in worldly assemblies. Those faithful descriptions, whose absence in a scientific tract would be reproached, might seem offensive in a memoir where personal experiences appear as well, but in this fidelity to truth, indifferent to prejudice and the disapproval of the majority, I do no more than follow the example of Dr. Weiss, who made that fidelity at all times a principle of science, and of life.
So we left at daybreak one morning in June: our guide Osuna, two escort soldiers, and I — still entangled in an anxious night’s sleep, teeth chattering with cold as in certain mornings of my childhood — I, who could not manage to hold my horse at a steady gallop to keep pace with my traveling companions. Always riding slightly ahead of us, swathed in his red-and-green-striped poncho, rode Osuna, rigid in his saddle, maintaining his horse’s regular stride without any visible motion to denote his mastery over the animal. Of the many hardships that made up our voyage, that image, though of no particular moment, neutral, as it were, is the one that visits me most frequently thirty years later, sharp and vivid: Osuna galloping parallel to the rising sun as it rose from the riverbank, the rider’s right side haloed in red while the horse’s left profile remained ever blotted with shadow. That image is both more and less than a memory now that, without my willing, returns with its original clarity in the most unexpected moments and situations of the day, and, on certain nights, when I lie in darkness with my head resting on the pillow before sleep’s black curtain closes completely, it is the last thing I see; certain mornings, after having deserted me for so long that I have all but forgotten, it is the first thing that appears with such renewed force — I might say it draws all the universe along behind it, making it dance about day-long in the waking theater. (The persistence of this primordial image, the first thing I saw in the light of day to begin my voyage, is explained by the state of elation I found myself in, from Dr. Weiss’s trust in me, placing the patients’ fates in my hands. Later, I would learn that the doctor had done so knowingly, deliberately. The ordeals of the trip failed to diminish the elation of the departure, whereas caution frequently tempered my enthusiasm at many points during our return.)
Sometimes, straying a little to the east, we drew near the river, and sometimes it was the river that drew near to us. The winter floods were visible in the unusual breadth of the riverbeds and the southerly current, dragging islands of lily pads and logs, branches and drowned animals. From time to time a watercraft struggled upriver, or a raft loaded with goods, shoving off from the bank where it had been moored for the night, was steered by its crew into the middle of the river to be dragged along by the current. The cold remained even in full sun, and by mid-morning we could still feel the horses’ hooves crack through the frost and blades of graying pasture-grass, glassy with cold. To the west each morning, and even several days after we had arrived close to our destination a hundred leagues north, the empty fields were dusted with a white layer of frost until almost midday. Twice, we slept out in the open or, rather, tried to sleep, crammed around a meager fire that seemed to smother in the freezing night air, and after a few hours, when it seemed the horses had rested enough, stiff, numb, and drowsy, we took up our march once more. In the darkness of night, the cold-clotted stars did not even twinkle and the icy firmament encircled us, so sudden and crushing that one night I had the unmistakable impression that we inhabited one of its remotest, most insignificant, and ephemeral corners. Dawn had just broken, the air a blue-tinged rose that seemed to trap us in a glacial half-light, a sensation that increased the countryside’s soporific monotony, but the sun, already high, turned everything crystalline — sharp, shining, and a little unreal out to the horizon which, no matter how we rode, always seemed fixed in the same place. That horizon so many think of as a paradigm for the outer world — it is no more than a shifting illusion of our senses.
As we encountered the little rivers that flowed west into the Paraná, a lone prospect tormented me, though of course I tried not to discredit myself or to let it show: the possibility that the ferrymen who carried travelers from bank to bank might be missing, and that I would have to swim across, or perhaps use one of those unwieldy leather flotation balls, getting jolted about at the slightest movement. But when some of the rivers were without ferrymen, there were rafts in their place, and of the outposts where we spent the night, only two were close to the water. Of those outposts, only one was a real shelter, uncomfortable to be sure, but at least it was equipped with a clean mess hall, large and sturdy, as the others were little more than ruins, certainly dirtier and more run down. A caretaker in one of them was sick with drink, and we had had to shake him a few times to alert him to our presence, which apparently roused him a little and gave him enough energy to get to his feet. The alcohol, which had already burned through his insides, was eating away at his outsides too; he was the sort of drunkard who always appeared to be living in a state of terror, spending all his time watching the door and starting at every sound, and three or four times in the space of an hour he even left the mess hall to scan the horizon; later, with the first swigs of liquor that loosened the tongue of the otherwise laconic Osuna, the guide explained that the caretaker, utterly alone in the dead center of the countryside, was afraid of an Indian attack.