“Charity, Senhor Soares, certainly enters into my way of thinking, but only as seasoning—like salt, you might say—for that is how I interpret Saint Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “And if I know all that can be known, and have not charity, I am nothing.” The real purpose, though, in this Casa Verde project of mine, is to carry out an in-depth study of madness in its various degrees, classifying each type and finally discovering both the true cause of the phenomenon and its universal remedy. Therein lies the mystery of my intentions. And I believe that in this I will be doing a great service to humanity.”

“A very great service indeed,” said the apothecary.

“Without this asylum,” continued the alienist, “I could achieve very little, but with it, my studies will have much greater scope.”

“Much greater,” echoed the apothecary.

And they were right. Lunatics from all the neighboring towns and villages poured into the Casa Verde. There were the violent, the meek, the monomaniacs, indeed the entire family of all those strangers to reason. By the end of four months, the Casa Verde was a hive of activity. The initial cells soon filled up, requiring a further wing with thirty-seven more cells to be added. Father Lopes admitted that he had never imagined there to be so many lunatics in the world, nor that some cases would be so totally inexplicable. There was, for example, the ignorant and uncouth young man who, every day after breakfast, would launch into an academic lecture embellished with tropes, antitheses, and apostrophes, with a few Greek and Latin flourishes and the odd snippet from Cicero, Apuleius, and Tertullian. The priest could scarcely believe his ears. What! A boy he had seen only three months before playing handball in the street!

“Oh, I agree,” said the alienist, “but the truth is there before your very eyes, Your Reverence. It happens every day of the week.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” replied the priest, “this can only be explained by the confounding of languages in the Tower of Babel, as described in the Scriptures; since the languages were all mixed up in ancient times, it must be easy to switch between them when reason is absent.”

“That could well be the divine explanation for the phenomenon,” agreed the alienist after a moment’s reflection, “but it is not impossible that there is also a human, indeed purely scientific, explanation, and that is what I intend to look into.”

“Very well, but it troubles me, it really does.”