Read The Clouds for Free Online Page A

prospect of victory; even if it were to cost me my life, to this very day I am certain that no one would have been able to prevent my teacher, in turn, from provoking that source of all our woes, and that my sacrifice would have been in vain. Convincing him to flee would surely have been an exhausting endeavor, but, more importantly, a useless one: Only one such as me, who knows the elegant adaptability of the doctor’s mind, might distinguish his determination from mere pigheadedness. Once he made a decision it was unlikely, if not impossible, for anyone or anything to stop him from setting it in motion. Feeling my way through the muddy streets of Buenos Aires, many solutions, just as half-formed and impossible, struck me and seemed workable for a few seconds until they revealed their absurdity and, with the same fervor that my mind had fleetingly built them, they crumbled. Only when I retired to the peace of my room and, more importantly, to a horizontal position, and the weariness ofthe day began to fade, did my ideas become clearer, allowing me to conceive of the solution that, as the least fantastical, was the most sensible: going to talk to the officer’s wife.
    Naturally, if I did so, I would not be able to reveal that I was aware of her relations with the doctor, and I would speak in the name of science, of the tormented patients, appealing to her Christian charity, et cetera. Dr. Weiss could not learn of my interference for anything in the world, as that would hinder the realization of my plan. A few months later, I would write to him in Amsterdam from Rennes recounting my intervention (I lacked the courage to do it during our voyage across the Atlantic) but, to my surprise, he replied that he knew of everything, that a recent missive from Mercedes, having arrived in his hands through none other than the English secret service, contained the explanations I gave in my letter, and some others as will be dealt with later.
    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 manyfeminine 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