We had barely left the city when, as I have prematurely mentioned, the evolution of young Prudencio Parra took an unexpected turn: I had found him completely prostrate in his bed, fist gripped tightly, gaze fixed upon the void, deep creases on his forehead and between the brows to give him that suffering and lifeless expression, and this gave way to a certain animation — as I dare call it only in comparison to the months-long, total stillness — whose singular feature was the series of movements he made with his hands, repeating them incessantly, even at meals, which he absorbed meekly and indifferently. He would sit up in his bunk, and, unbothered by the jostling, would begin his movements, which he could replicate for hours like a machine, every so often casting a slow and serious glance at his hands, followed by the faintest of sad smiles.
He would extend the fingers of his right hand and then slowly contract them, until it gave his hand the look of a claw, though soft and never threatening; after a brief pause he’d continue the same movement until he closed his fist completely. And finally, when his fist had been closed for several seconds, his left hand would cover it and squeeze it hard. All day long, whenever anyone was present (since, mad or sane, it is difficult to know how a person acts when he is alone) he would make those gestures. While they surprised me at first, I came to think of them before falling asleep, and I realized that they were familiar to me, and, though I did not know why, this brought to mind the arcades of Alcalá de Henares one sunny spring noontime, giving rise to an agreeable sensation in me. When I woke the next morning and my mind, locked at night by the keys of sleep, opened to wakefulness, the first thing that awaited me was the answer to that mysterious sense of familiarity: In philosophy, we had studied Cicero’s Academica, and as the exam period drew near, I went strolling down Alcalá’s main street with a friend, memorizing that page where Cicero describes how Zeno the Stoic showed his disciples the four stages of knowledge: Fingers extended signified Conception (visum); when he folded them in a bit was Assent (assensus), by which Conception becomes patent in our spirit; then, with closed fist, Zeno tried to show how, by way of Assent, one arrives at Firm Conviction (comprehensio) of said Conceptions. And, in the end, raising his left hand to his fist, enveloping it and squeezing forcefully, he showed that motion to his students and told them that it was Knowledge (scientia). On remembering this, I leapt out of bed, and having dressed myself summarily, barreled down to young Prudencio’s wagon where he, in that early hour, was asleep and peaceful-looking. His open hands rested palms-down on the gray poncho that covered him. The Paraguayan soldier who had been an army nurse, and as such was entrusted with the care of the Verde brothers, and whose duty it was to look after the patients with another of his comrades, had ably tidied up the bunk. Again I noticed, as I had already several times in his home that, judging by the state of his bed each morning, young Prudencio’s nights must have been restful indeed. I stayed, hoping he would rouse himself, for I was keen to observe him pass from sleep to waking, to see how the strange machinery of his hands would set itself in motion. After a long time, he rasied his eyelids, as was his custom, and if my presence startled him he made no sign of it. He sat up slowly in bed, eyes hooded, and, resting his back against the carriage wallboard, began to stretch out the fingers of his right hand, preparing his left in the air so that, when the first three movements of the cycle had been completed, the fourth, in which he covered his right fist with his left hand and pressed forcefully, might be performed. The points of the two ever-present bits of white cloth stuck out from his ears, for whenever anyone tried to take them Prudencio would howl piteously, forcing me to order his release. But the impressively sunken area from cheekbone to jaw, the recessed cheek, had filled out somewhat, and his face, still so pale, looked unquestionably rounder and healthier. As was customary, he made as if to ignore me, but something told me that, from the remote location where he had been inwardly secluded for several months to escape the tumult within himself and in the world, the remnants of his self, abandoned perhaps in the blackest corner of the universe, were broadcasting signs of life. That his movements were completely identical with the gestures that served Zeno the Stoic to enact the phases of knowledge for his disciples (according to Cicero), I had not attributed a priori to some inconceivable coincidence between the ravings of a sick boy and the imagery wrought by the father of the Stoics at the height of his faculties, as if logic and madness might arrive at the same symbols by different roads — which can happen more often than one might think — but rather attributed it to the more easily explainable fact that in his period of avid and haphazard reading, young Parra might have one day encountered in a paragraph of Cicero, immediately making it his own, the explication of that inextricable world in whose disorder his fragile mind, astonished and terrified, had been awakened without knowing why.
But there was something yet more curious in young Parra’s sudden, if slow and limited, activity. It continued to hold my attention, and I took note of it in light of that golden rule which Dr. Weiss had instilled in me: According to him, all of a madman’s actions, as trivial or absurd as they seem, are significant. The fist that Prudencio held closed stubbornly and forcefully for so many months, which he only deigned to open from time to time so that his nails might be cut (and not before snatching up an invisible breeze with his other hand using the same gesture, though a little gentler, as we make to trap a fly in the air), that fist that had taken the strength of several men to open after so much time, had relaxed for some mysterious reason once our convoy left the city, and his two hands had begun to effect the precise but unhurried movements I have just described. As I believe has also been said, because of the flood we had to go north for two days until we met a bend in the river shallow enough to let us cross, so that, once on the opposite shore, we could journey in the other direction along the river’s western bank, returning, so to speak, to our point of departure. That situation gave me the opportunity to confirm the most surprising detail in Prudencio’s behavior: Since his fist relaxed as we left the city, once we started to approach our original point of departure before veering west to trek through the desert, would his hand-movements cease and his fist close up once more, its strength apparently renewed? While we kept to the outskirts of his native city, as we had plotted our route, his fist tightened obstinately, but the moment we began to seek dry land to the west, his fist relaxed, his body straightened in the bunk, and the hand movements, which had been so familiar to the students of Zeno beneath the Athenian arcades two thousand years ago, brought to light by unexpected means, promptly returned. A single explanation seemed possible to me: Every unique but fragmentary place in the world is embodied in its totality, so for young Parra, his birthplace contained the universe in all the enigmatic complexity he had tried to decipher with the help of frenetic and chaotic reading, until one day he lost his mind. So, as we moved away from the scene of that destructive experience, the terror diminished, but when we drew near it again, proximity to the city, steeped with such a painful past, caused it to worsen. (To this philosophical explanation of Doctor Real’s, let us offer a simpler and, more importantly, likelier counter: that what moved away and came closer with the trip’s ups and downs, and what had driven that poor young man mad, was not the enigmatic universe or anything of that sort, but, as is patently obvious, his own family. Note, M. Soldi.)