Read Online The Clouds by Juan José Saer - Free Book Online Page B

the masters of the house seemed to still be sleeping, I went out walking in the city. I had visited it three or four times in the company of my father ten or fifteen years prior, crossing the great river over several hours of sailing from the Bajada Grande of the Paraná, beyond the troubled network of islands and creeks that separated the two main banks by several leagues. As my birthplace was a meager country house stacked atop the canyon that overlooked the river, the city always seemed enormous upon each visit: frenetic and brightly-colored, its inhabitants distinguished people well established in the world and engrossed in important business at all times. But now that I was returning after so many years, having detoured through Madrid, London, Paris, and even Buenos Aires, it was reduced toits actual proportions in my eyes, before which such true cities had passed; as is often the case for most people, the city that remained an unchanging image in my memory had shrunk in reality, as if external things existed in several dimensions at once. The city proper stretched out for a few blocks around the plaza in straight, sandy streets, largely unpaved, running parallel or perpendicular to the river, with a couple of churches; a council building, a long structure that was also the customs-house, jail, hospital, and police station; single-story houses with tiled roofs and barred windows so low they seemed to come out of the ground; and fruit trees, too: oranges, tangerines, and lemon trees laden with fruit, fig and peach trees bare in the cold, loquats, little fields of prickly pear, enormous acacias, jacarandas, medicinal lapacho trees, silk floss, and red-flowered ceibos , and weeping willows that abounded near the water. Orchards and farmyards opened onto back courtyards. In the outer districts, brick or tile-and-adobe houses were less common, and the hovels were spaced farther apart, were dirtier and more wretched, but downtown, a number of businesses had opened in the area immediately surrounding the plaza, and the streets bordering it had been paved. In the old church of Saint Francis, which the Indian converts had helped construct and decorate, was a convent and, five or six blocks from the council building, a house that sheltered several nuns. Of the five or six thousand city-dwellers, very few seemed to have left their houses that morning, perhaps on account of the cold, but I knew that all the city’s riches—cattle, timber, cotton, tobacco, leathers—came from the countryside, and it was clear at that early hour that there was next to nothing to do in the frigid and deserted streets. All the shops were still closed around the plaza. I went walking by the riverside, and I saw a few men fishing on horseback: The two riders entered the water with a net suspended between them to dredge the bottom and then, with a vigorous folding motion, cast the net onto the bank where fishfell twitching on the sand. One of the fish managed such a violent and desperate contortion that, leaping up to a considerable height, it fell back into the water and did not show itself again, which seemed quite comical to the fishermen, who guffawed on and on in noisy celebration.
    My stroll had been too early, for it was not yet eight-thirty when I returned to the Parra house, and the family had just awoken. We arranged ourselves, Señor Parra and I, in a large room next to the kitchen, which doubtless served as a dining room on ordinary days, and a negro youth prepared us mate and brought us warm cakes from the kitchen. The night before, we had eaten in a slightly more luxurious dining room, reserved for special occasions, but in the modest room where we took breakfast, proximity to the kitchen made the air warmer and more agreeable, as the adjoining stoves were nearly always lit in the wintertime. We had barely touched on the subject of his son, Prudencio, when Señor Parra openly and meekly offered himself up to my