After making the necessary inquiries, I sent the officer’s wife a discreet message. For two days, I awaited her response, fearing that marauding soldiers would burst into the pension where we were staying to drag us before the firing squad, but on the morning of the third day a negro servant delivered an invitation to a cup of chocolate at an estate on the outskirts of the city. A slave came that same afternoon at five on the dot to guide me to the meeting place.
In a garden, the masters of the house — faultless patriots, as I discovered upon arriving — confirmed what I had already guessed during the first minutes of conversation, namely, that they were relatives of one of our missing patients, who, even as we spoke, might have already died on the plains. When the officer’s wife arrived, they tarried with us briefly to exchange a few courtesies after the introductions, but withdrew after a few minutes with the utmost tact. Señora Mercedes listened with hooded eyes as I explained the situation, and I did not refrain from studying her so as to confirm the extent to which her person fulfilled the many feminine attributes that Dr. Weiss preferred: She had a generous figure, poise and self-control, lustrous black hair, and, most importantly, that dark, firm skin which had caused Dr. Weiss to lose his head so many times — even a glimpse of it was always a bewitchment for my teacher: It had the intolerable and delicious strangeness of belonging to another, which was a source of excitement and also of dangerous complications. Time and time again those traits, assembled within a soft, warm body, magnetically drew his energy by some ancient and inexplicable affinity and, with the iron regularity of the constellations, made him orbit their center. When I finished relating the facts, her eyelids rose and her eyes, huge and dark, fixed on mine, revealing so eloquently the intimate thrill of an intense passion and pride that, out of delicacy or prudence, I do not know which, I had to avert my gaze. Señora Mercedes vehemently affirmed that Dr. Weiss’s life was more precious to her than her own, and told me she would do whatever was necessary to protect it.
For the first and only time in more than three decades of our friendship, I faced the sad duty of lying to my dear teacher, finding myself in the deplorable situation of a physician who, in concealing the severity of an illness, must hide the truth from an old and dear friend. On the other hand, the meeting with Señora Mercedes, despite the determined air with which she pledged to take the reins on this matter, was unable to reassure me, since I heard nothing more from her. The doctor, as he awaited the occasion to publicly offend our enemy and force him into a duel, went to practice his aim in the field every morning, and then took fencing classes in order to perfect his skills, nonexistent though they were, in that activity. If the destruction of the Casa and the scattering of the patients, the execution of the Chilean youth, and our imminent physical destruction had not grown so serious and tragic, I would have laughed at the situation, which was more than ridiculous. Only the hours we spent in study calmed us: Closed up in our respective rooms, the candlelight, at times accompanying us until dawn with its flickering brightness, made a paltry halo around visible objects that, for the hours of our quiet contemplation, seemed to hold back the massive shadow outside where so many confusing emotions and so many unhappily-certain threats were creeping.
At last the dénouement: We were invited to a party attended “by all of Buenos Aires,” that is, by the members of the revolutionary government and other authorities, officers, clergymen, et cetera; the rich who, as I said before, were more or less the same as those authorities already cited; and foreign diplomats, the French, English, and North Americans especially. Owing to the many factions in open or covert power-struggles, we were also invited despite our recent disgrace. Several government officials, wealthy merchants, and other illustrious intellectuals were on our side for scientific and political reasons, and, in certain cases, even for private reasons, as the doctor had attended to several members of their families years before in Casa de Salud. (Unfortunately, at the time of the Casa’s destruction, none of our boarders came from Buenos Aires families; in just two or three cases, we had treated distant relatives.)
Even if, as I believe I have said, Dr. Weiss was naturally careful in his dress, that day his care was multiplied. He spent hours smartening up, as if he thought himself the guest of honor at that assembly, or as if he were attending his own wedding, his own apotheosis, or even, I thought with horror, his own funeral. All that time, I tried in vain to dissuade him from going to the party, until the good-natured disapproval in his eyes forced me to accept, silently, what was to come.
It was a fine party indeed. As it was quite hot, the house was opened up, and several tables were strewn throughout the interior and the garden, where a large canopy had been erected in case of a storm. Lamps shone in the garden, but the rooms gleamed with exceptional lighting that spilled onto the courtyards from open doors and windows. An orchestra sounded, or rather, screeched, a fashionable dance, and couples swayed together across the garden lawn and in illuminated rooms. As two-story houses are quite scarce in Buenos Aires, everything was more or less at ground level, flush with the immense plain on whose eastern border the city is crowded, at the wide and wild riverbanks. Entering the party and cutting across the floor, I had the strange impression that the house, its inhabitants and guests, and the shadowy city that surrounded them, were like a mere morsel in the jaws of an infinite mouth, the black, damp river and vast plains, the boundless firmament — a morsel nestled in a dark and eager cavity, ready to be devoured. That strange idea momentarily distracted me from the critical situation we found ourselves in, but seeing Dr. Weiss, I realized that no consideration, romantic as it was, could divert him from the object he had set upon, and it was hard to tell if it was vengeance or suicide.
Nothing important ever really happens — birth, death, and daily life are colorless and dull — but when something truly strange takes place, it seems less than a hallucination, passing fine and distant as a vague dream. As Dr. Weiss did not see our enemy in the garden, despite his scrutinizing the faces of everyone there with his lively, blue gaze, he headed for the house, my anxious and modest person at his heels. The officer was not in the anteroom, but when we passed through the doorway to the main hall, we discovered him opposite the entryway, beneath a great, gold-framed mirror that hung on the wall, where he conversed in a little group that also included Señora Mercedes. We stopped so suddenly that a few guests by the door looked at us with curiosity: The doctor’s blue eyes locked onto the officer’s, who, alerted by a fierce animal instinct of which men are deprived, had raised his head when we entered the hall and recognized us straight away. Despite the gravity of the moment, something small distracted me: At his side, Señora Mercedes continued speaking as if nothing had happened, smiling, worldly and fickle, not even lifting her head, though to this day I am convinced that of all the people at the event, she was the first to notice our presence. On the officer’s face, surprise gave way to a kind of savage joy, delighting at the thought of wicked deeds that, without his having actually desired them, we were giving him the opportunity to commit. I believe he grasped the situation at once and, seeing us walk decisively toward him, he prepared to receive us as he believed we deserved. As we approached him, I began to acquire the steely conviction that, at the other end of the hall, where the couples dancing made off to one side with astonishment and concern to let us pass, our haphazard lives would come to an end when, suddenly and again, with a funny, dreamlike unreality, the unexpected: Dickson, the English consul, intercepted us, obliging us to stop, and whispered that he had something urgent to tell us on behalf of Señora Mercedes, and when Dr. Weiss refused to listen, Dickson clutched at his jacket and said softly, but with uncharacteristic vehemence, that the message he carried would lead to a better realization of the doctor’s plot, and that if we intended to carry it out as planned, we were doomed to failure because we were being ambushed. I felt sweat run down my face, neck, and back, and seeing the large drops that broke out on Dickson’s forehead and ran down the creases of his reddened, prematurely wrinkled face, I could imagine, comparing it with the cause of my own sweat, what his frame of mind might be at that moment. The doctor hesitated for a moment, then accepted, and Dickson and I led him from the house. Before we left, I cast a fleeting glance in the officer’s direction and saw the disappointment on his face. But when I warily eyed Señora Mercedes, seeing her for the last time in my life before turning away, I confirmed that she had not for a single instant interrupted the cheerful conversation with her interlocutors who, I am sure, had not noticed a thing.