According to him, offending the officer before witnesses and forcing him to fight a duel provided two fundamental advantages: First, the incident would spread word of the officer’s barbarity, the Casa’s destruction, the shooting of the Chilean youth, and dispersal of the patients, to the public and even to the entire civilized world, and, second (this he voiced with the slightly childish pride of one who has just constructed a flawless syllogism), dueling was the only option that allowed a distant hope of escaping the venture with our lives. At the same time, the provocation would set all responsibility on his shoulders, leaving me free from reprisal. (This gentle concern for my safety was of course a tacit confession of the entire conflict’s wanton origins.)
The suicidal plan he had just revealed seemed so unassailable to the doctor that, rubbing his hands together, he told me with his usual lack of hypocrisy that a stroll to the brothel would ease his mind, and he left me in the dark and muddy street, terrified of what was to come. Flight seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the most sensible of solutions. It is true that the doctor was not one of those who, on the pretext of study, neglected to maintain his body, but he was not a young man either, and further, his adversary, as an officer, was a true instrument of death. There was no mistaking the outcome of that unequal match. But the satisfied glint in Dr. Weiss’s gaze robbed me of any inclination to dissuade him.
Ideas as wild as his began to hound me. Nothing stimulates delirium more than being faced with a situation for which one is unprepared; unfathomable as the minuet for the savage or waste for the miser, so were tyrannical power and violence for us, men of libraries and lecture halls. It occurred to me that I could run ahead of the doctor and goad the officer into a duel myself, where my youth might accord me a greater 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 of the 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 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,