A few hours after I examined them, during the celebration, I could tell that the camp’s apparent tranquility concealed more than one conflict, and that the most reprehensible outrage came from those who were seen as “normal.” After dinner, the French woman with whom I had spoken two or three times at the start of our trip came to inform me of certain things that had transpired in the camp during my absence. While her word did not seem entirely credible, owing to the many contradictions I had noticed when she told me of her own life and the reasons that, according to her, she had been forced to practice her profession, the facts she related, as outrageous as they might have seemed at first glance — and perhaps exaggerated out of jealousy and perhaps also from a feeling of professional indignation — seemed likely enough: According to the woman, Sister Teresita (caught by the same woman previously rolling about in the grass with the two soldiers) had engaged in sexual congress during my absence with all the men who had stayed in the camp, except for the patients, Sergeant Lucero, and the Indian Sirirí. According to the woman, every night the soldiers would take turns entering the little nun’s carriage, and during the day they invited her to drink with them in the Basque’s shop. They were always together, according to the woman, and one or two nights, the nun had slept out in the open, splayed on the grass among the soldiers. A handful, five or six in particular, were glued to her side and acted as if they were her personal escort. During the day, since they had nothing else to do but hope for our return, the soldiers would go hunting on the far side of the lake to amuse themselves and try to find something to eat besides dried meat, and she would go with them, a cigar between her lips so she was always pulling faces. According to the woman, the little nun, in view of everyone, would step away and, lifting her skirts to the waist and opening her legs, urinated standing up like a man. Those details, more than her hedonistic activities, were what caused me to credit the Frenchwoman’s story somewhat, for I had already observed Sister Teresita’s tendency to take on masculine behaviors as if, in her endless search for the fusion of divine and human love, she also wanted to reunite the two sexes within herself. The loathing the little nun inspired in the woman who told me, irate, what had happened in my absence, was honestly the result of a misunderstanding, for the little nun’s actions also included her, and it had to have been when she started to preach the Gospel to the city prostitutes that the idea came to her of putting into practice the order that was, according to her, received directly from Christ in Upper Peru in such a fashion. In one sense, instead of evangelizing the women of ill repute, she had been evangelized by them, and what the women took as an affront on the little nun’s part, was, in a way, an homage she paid them.
To gain some clarity, I extricated myself from the woman, promising to handle the matter, as her rancor extended to the monetary side of things, and I went to see Sergeant Lucero. The slightly confused excuses I obtained perhaps proved that the French woman had not exaggerated, but when I called on him to show his usual sincerity, he confessed that he believed the rumors to have a grain of truth, but with all the soldiers implicated in the matter, it would be difficult to get the necessary clarifications from them. More than taking advantage, the sergeant told me, the soldiers seemed to protect and even obey her. He conveyed the sense that they quite revered her, though he knew not why; it was not she who instilled obedience in them, but they themselves who practiced it spontaneously and out of a deep respect that she seemed to inspire. Lucero was reasonable enough to see that the little nun, excellent person though she was, was mad, and that my medical obligation was to try to cure her of her madness and not to allow for half the world to become involved, and so we agreed to prevent, in the remaining days of travel, those unsavory complications from repeating.
The following day, after the celebration, it was laborious setting off, for at midmorning the soldiers were still asleep in the shade of the carts, as they had calculated the shadow’s morning path before turning in at dawn. No calculation of that sort had been allowed to the horses, and they lacked even a lone tree in that vast, empty space to seek protection in the shade. In the region, it is said that the San Juan summer reaches its peak intensity during those days. It had arrived gradually, in the early days surreptitiously melting the built-up frost from the first icy week after the rain and, as it warmed the earth and air, had evicted the impatient plant-life, a fleeting simulacrum of spring. From the gray ground, hardened with cold, the new grass began to sprout, greening the flatlands, but after just two days, almost within hours, the heat grew and so the tiny leaves began to flag, and the fields dried up again almost at once, transformed into a vast, yellowed expanse. For days we saw not a single cloud in the sky — a deep and troubled blue — nothing but the blistering sun, leaving earth, air, and everything exhausted and hot, and because no wind stirred, and the nights were as hot as the days, nothing had time to refresh itself. We crossed that great furnace in the coldest month of the year, a huge yellow circle we trekked through at such pains, locked beneath its blue dome with only the sun’s arid stain to travel it by day, blackened by night and filled with shining points, and for days it was the only scenery, so identical in every one of its interchangeable parts, that sometimes we were fooled into thinking that it had us bound, completely immobile. Movement seemed impossible past a certain time of day, but, as Osuna said, it was just as unfavorable to wait for dusk to travel when it was cool, first because to remain in the middle of the countryside, where we had no shade beyond what the wagons provided, was more grueling than travel, as our displacement might procure us some gust of air, laughable as it was, and in the second place because it did not cool sufficiently by night, but if we camped, the darkness, placing us under protection from the glaring sun for several hours, helped us to rest. With the heat, the silence of the empty countryside seemed to grow, as if all the species that populated it, unable to move, lay spent and lethargic. We too, who claimed to reign over them all, went about as if in sleep, men and women, civilians and soldiers, believers and agnostics, erudite and unlettered, mad and sane, made equal by that crushing light and the burning, brutal air that rubbed out our differences, reducing us to our equally feeble sensations. Shut in their wagons, the patients dozed all day and barely peeked out at night, save the little nun, who was always surrounded by her guard of soldiers, many of them almost completely naked, scarcely a pair of tight and tattered breeches to cover them from the waist to just above the knees, and which left visible through their holes certain parts of the body that would have been more prudent to keep hidden, giving them an indecent appearance — though no one took notice, and it even seemed respectable compared to the women, who, when it was hot enough, walked about with their breasts bared and sometimes completely nude. When we passed by a river, almost everyone undressed without even waiting for darkness, and went to frolic with animal pleasure in the lukewarm, cloudy water. The unusually prolonged trip had forced us, imperceptibly, to set our own standards of living, and the whims of the climate, which made the untimely seasons follow one another with the speed of days and hours, added to the singular composition of our caravan; we had had to create a peculiar universe, as time passed, stranger and stranger than our way of life before departure. Although authority was relaxed, it was plain to see it was no longer necessary: In the fever of those unreal days, ordinary interests seemed to have disappeared. Only a few grudges remained: Sirirí bitterly disapproved of our growing distance from the rules that had been instilled in him and which were his only reference for any possible world, and Suárez El Ñato, who did not stray from his master’s wagon, like a faithful but slightly addled dog, signaled with his resentful gaze that, in his opinion, it was I, and not insanity, who was responsible for Troncoso’s terrible collapse. But even his hatred, in that flat and yellow infinity, had lost its reins.