As we speak of madmen, it seems to me I should proceed with the memoir and return to my own: They were my chief concern, and of course, with the obstacles standing in our path, placing them safe and sound into Dr. Weiss’s hands was more complicated than I had imagined. Of the five, I knew there were three who, even if their illness were to worsen suddenly, would not cause further problems. Locked within the narrow cells of their madness, they seemed to have dispensed with the outside world altogether, and any aggravation to their state was not going to make the prison where they lived darker or more wretched, nor increase their indifference and passivity. The elder Verde’s monologues, passionate as they were, were not meant, at heart, to convince anyone, and Verdecito’s mouth-sounds were a sort of sonic wall that cut him off from the world — not to mention young Parra who, some mere months after he was admitted to Casa de Salud, allowed himself, without complaint, to be taken out of bed for the first time (and a year later, out of his room). As exasperating as he was, the elder Verde’s only phrase—morning, noon, and night, as you will recall — with which he tried to address every theme of conversation, argument, and even fatherly edification of his interlocutors, was enacting the paroxysm of his madness, and a change of state could only reduce his fervor to the deepest gloom. With regard to Verdecito, it is true that hardship increased his anxiety, his mouth-concerts, and his deafness — I had to repeat the most trivial phrases several times before they reached him — but as far as what I speak of, the main trouble was that he stuck to me like my shadow and seemed only to feel safe at my side, which on one hand allowed me to monitor him, but on the other would cause me to lose patience and, as a corollary, disturb his calm.
It was Sister Teresita and Troncoso, even prior to departure, who worried me. Unlike the others, they grew unruly because, as often happens with a certain class of the mad, rather than shutting themselves in, they fervently believed in the legitimacy of their delusions and wished to impose them on the world at all cost, militant in their madness. The little nun was convinced that Christ had ascended to divine love in heaven after the resurrection, separating himself from mankind, leaving only his sparks scattered among men. She, then, had as her mission to reunite these sparks through the carnal act, to merge divinity and humanity anew. Her Manual for Love is exceedingly explicit on this point, and though her thinking disintegrated in the final pages, giving way to a senseless list of profanities, there is a reasoned exposition of her doctrine in the first part of her treatise, which, if one briefly adopted her theology’s point of view, is unassailable indeed. Given that theologians call purely speculative and rational theology “positive” and mystical theology “negative” (I believe), we can imagine that, drafting her Manual, Sister Teresita, like Saint Thomas, acquired her conviction to enact the recommendations received from Christ in Upper Peru, and if this hypothesis is true, it casts new light on the raison d’etre of her treatise’s final section. In any case, Sister Teresita was without the slightest doubt a troublesome presence in our caravan, and the central dilemma she posed for me was trying to keep her apart from the soldiers without imprisoning her in the wagon; there was a contradiction between keeping her under lock and key during the trip and the fact that in Las Tres Acacias, the patients, with very rare exceptions, could move in total freedom throughout the establishment. Another problem was knowing to what extent the members of the convoy — cart-men, soldiers, whores — were aware of the sort of madness that had taken hold of Sister Teresita. For the first two or three days I held the illusion, completely unjustified of course, that nobody knew of the little nun’s erotic ravings until, one afternoon, I saw a group of soldiers in a circle near Basque’s saloon, looking profoundly attentive and serious as they listened to somebody speaking inside. Intrigued, I approached to see what was being discussed, and over the shoulder of one of the soldiers I was able to confirm that Sister Teresita, slit-eyed with indignation and lowering her voice, as if disclosing a terrible secret, was revealing to the soldiers that, If Christ was crucified, it was because he had such a huge. and accompanied her words with a familiar gesture, raising her hands to chest height and, placing the palms facing each other some thirty centimeters apart, bobbing the two simultaneously to indicate an approximate size. When she saw my astonished face over a soldier’s shoulder — he, like all the rest, was bewitched by Sister Teresita’s words and failed to notice my presence — the nun began to laugh, and with an impudence that makes me smile to this day when I remember, stuck out her tongue, ran it with feigned delight across her narrow lips and, preempting my summons, left the circle of soldiers and accompanied me meekly to her wagon. We never discussed it, and it all happened casually, but what impressed me most deeply, and especially incited me to reflection, was the seriousness, even the gravity, with which the soldiers listened to her. It was clear they would not doubt for a single instant, for the rest of their lives, that the little nun had just revealed the true cause of the crucifixion.
Regarding Troncoso, the complications that brought about a change in his condition proved much more serious, even endangering the life and property of the members of our caravan, demonstrating once again, though such redundancy is needless, that delusion, whether the philosophers like it or not, is as qualified — if not more so — as the will to direct the order of events according to one’s whim. Even before departure I saw Troncoso’s agitation grow, almost imperceptibly at first, manifesting in an unspoken grudge against me that drove him to compete with me, especially for the organization and command of the caravan, a responsibility which, as I believe I have said, I shared with Osuna and Sergeant Lucero. Ever since I had to display my authority before him and his men during our first encounter at Señor Parra’s house, Troncoso’s feelings toward me had vacillated between dread and spite, prudence and mockery, respect and resentment, forecasting the difficulties that often follow the aggravation of hostility, and which were to multiply on a journey like the one we were about to attempt. But despite his ill-concealed disdain, a disdain to which I doubt I dissuaded him from adding both sarcasm and slander, he was my patient, nothing more, and as I was his doctor, his health and his person were my responsibility, all of which would come to naught unless I could incite him to more moderate feelings. When we were still in the city, Troncoso always assumed, in a manner perhaps vaguely deliberate, an attitude that bordered on the limits of my tolerance, for I, as his doctor, instructed him in our daily conversations in what he was allowed to do as far as his comings and goings, his public conduct, his meals, hygiene, and daily routine, though, as I have already said, he was always on the verge of disobedience. The moment we began our journey, his fiery temperament grew rather more flammable, and I feared (and not without reason) an explosion at any moment. His remarkable animation, which lacked an object in the monotony of the plains, kept him from staying at rest in the wagon as the other patients did and, no matter the hour I went out into the morning after rising and getting dressed, he was already mounted on his blue roan, trotting about nearby, talking loudly with the soldiers or cart-men, who did not always seem to quite understand the meaning of his sarcastic remarks, or his shouts and orders. He was a gifted rider who went about as though he had forgotten he was on horseback, but he never committed a single fault; the beast he rode seemed indifferent to its rider, as well, and all they did together — walk, trot, gallop, race, halt, reverse, or prance — seemed the result, not of an undetectable order given by man to beast, but of a spontaneous and almost magical coincidence that, by extended chance, externally harmonized the casual movements of two wills, each focused on itself and ignorant of the other. His expertise as a horseman overcame the soldiers’ reservations, and, despite his eccentricity, they grudgingly respected him, which, along with El Ñato’s obsequious loyalty, complicated my monitoring duties. A sure sign of his worsening state was that he not only engaged in frenetic activity without any practical purpose all day and night, since he barely slept and gave no sign of weariness, but also the fact that his external appearance — his clothing, beard, and mane of hair — was deteriorating, for he hardly changed clothes or shaved anymore, let alone bathe. As a result, his trousers and jacket were riddled with stains and even holes, and his flounced white shirt, so clean on his arrival in the city, was all wrinkled and of an uncertain color. There were always a few little bubbles of saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth; if anything contrasted with his body’s restless fever, it was the steadiness of his gaze, shot through with veins that clouded and reddened his eyes. Sometimes at dusk, he got down from his horse and walked stiffly among the motionless coaches with great, energetic strides, chest puffed, head erect, hair disheveled and skin browned by the sun — a sun which burned a little brighter each day. He might have a book in his hand, poring over it without breaking his stride or, if he left off reading (or pretending to read), he did not deny his thoughts externalization with shouts, hoots of laughter, or condescending and garbled observations that he would direct to whatever member of the caravan he encountered, not stopping as he passed. A few times, he visited me to demand I modify the trajectory which, according to him, would help speed the journey, but mostly he complained about the three prostitutes and the nun — whom he dubbed, with a caustic smirk, the Strumpet Superior—present in the convoy, claiming the contract his family signed to stipulate the conditions of his treatment would feature prominently within the clauses that the patient was not to mingle with persons of low estate or dubious morals. He sent El Ñato to me daily with a dispatch, which I, obviously, never answered. Sometimes his nonsensical proclamation went on for several pages and sometimes was limited to a single sentence that might have seemed to be gibberish at first glance, or to have many different meanings upon successive readings, or, if one remembered later and thought the better of it, a precise but enigmatic meaning which, though the reader had divined it himself, was impossible to unravel. Troncoso saw those continuous ravings as a grand political program destined to change the foundations not only of society, but of the universe. According to those proclamations, he was to depose the King, disown the Viceroyalty, guillotine the Roman authorities, and also — I transcribe this last claim word for word—to abolish, once and for all, having no other basis beyond custom and the spiritual enslavement of the peoples, the hereditary and unwritten privileges of the Sun and the other stars in the sky. The construction phase of his program consisted of federating the indigenous tribes on the continent and, to avoid giving offense, bestowing them with a ruler from outside their ranks and who was also to play the role of supreme representative of a new religion, a kind of king-priest to impose legislation on social and religious life, at once military commander and spiritual father of the new community. Needless to say, for anyone able to decipher his bulletins’ tangled prose, the traits of this eminent personage had more than one point in common with the author, borne increasingly along by his delirium to envision himself as the legitimate master of the universe. He was beside himself when I left his messages unanswered, but it would have been a mistake on my part to grant him the slightest sign that his ravings could be taken seriously. In his defense, I must admit that in my long life, in Europe just as in America, in recent years, I have seen the same insanity as Troncoso’s succeed many times. Thanks to the reading of Tacitus or Suetonius in the painful centuries that came before, such insanity prospers now until it reaches its foolish objectives, which are none other than crushing, on pure whim and overweening pride, with bloodied heel, the hopes of the world.