The Brain in Search of Itself

 

Hour after hour, year after year, Santiago Ramón y Cajal sat alone in his home laboratory, head bowed and back hunched, his black eyes staring down the barrel of a microscope, the sole object tethering him to the outside world. His wide forehead and aquiline nose gave him the look of a distinguished, almost regal, gentleman, though the crown of his head was as bald as a monk’s. He had only a crowd of glass bottles for an audience, some short and stout, some tall and thin, stopped with cork, filled with white powders and colored liquids; the other chairs, piled high with journals and textbooks, left no room for anyone else to sit. Stained with dye, ink, and blood, the tablecloth was strewn with drawings of forms at once otherworldly and natural. Colorful transparent slides, mounted with slivers of nervous tissue from sacrificed animals, still gummy to the touch from chemical treatments, lay scattered on the worktable. With his left thumb and forefinger, Cajal adjusted the corners of the slide as if it were a miniature picture frame under the lens of his microscope. With his right hand he turned the brass knob on the side of the instrument, muttering to himself as he drew the image into focus: brownishblack bodies resembling inkblots, radiating threadlike appendages, set against a transparent yellow background. The wondrous landscape of the brain was finally revealed to him, more real than he could have ever imagined. In the late nineteenth century, most scientists believed that the brain was composed of a continuous tangle of fibers, as serpentine as a labyrinth. Cajal produced the first clear evidence that the brain is composed of individual cells, later termed neurons, fundamentally the same as those that make up the rest of the living world. He believed that neurons served as storage units for mental impressions, such as thoughts and sensations, which combined to form our experience of being alive: “To know the brain is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will,” he wrote. The highest ideal for a biologist, he declared, is to clarify the enigma of the self. In the structure of neurons, Cajal thought he had found the home of consciousness itself. Santiago Ramón y Cajal is considered the founder of modern neuroscience. Historians have ranked him alongside Darwin and Pasteur as one of the greatest biologists of the nineteenth century and among Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton as one of the greatest scientists of all time. His masterpiece, The Texture of the Nervous System of Man and the Vertebrates, is a foundational text for neuroscience, comparable to On the Origin of Species for evolutionary biology. Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work on the structure of neurons, whose birth, growth, decline, and death he studied with devotion and even a kind of compassion, almost as though they were human beings. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” He produced thousands of drawings of neurons, as beautiful as they are complex, which are still printed in neuroanatomy textbooks and exhibited in art museums. More than a hundred years after his Nobel Prize, we are indebted to Cajal for our knowledge of what the nervous system looks like. Some scientists even have Cajal’s drawings of neurons tattooed on their bodies. “Only true artists are attracted to science,” he said. Halfway through the journey of his life, when he was forty years old, it seemed as though Cajal had achieved all that he had ever wanted. He had arrived in Spain’s royal capital, where he occupied the chair of anatomy at the Central University of Madrid, the highest appointment in his field. He was married to the perfect wife, in his estimation, and was the father of six children. His finances were finally in order. The university was building him a state-of-the-art laboratory. Three years earlier, he had revealed his “new truth” of the nervous system, revolutionizing the understanding of the mind and brain. His name was renowned in scientific academies across Europe. From his home in downtown Madrid, Cajal could hear the whistling of trains. The wrought-iron dome of the nearby Atocha Station, renovated to resemble the newly constructed Eiffel Tower, was a suitable landmark for a metropolis that some called “Little Paris.” Bright shop windows displayed French jewelry, English biscuits, and Italian opera posters. Even nannies pushing strollers through the elegant gardens of Retiro Park wore the latest fashions in silk and lace. Every morning, men in brass-plated hats washed and swept the streets until the pavement gleamed. On every corner there was a café, where famous artists gossiped, bullfighters recounted their triumphs, and politicians discussed the fate of the nation while lounging on overstuffed couches, sipping liqueurs and chocolate until dawn. The sidewalks were so congested that on Sundays and holidays it seemed impossible to move. Madrid was a city where no one ever asked where you were from. That was one of the reasons Cajal liked living there. The father of the neuron had no memory of his birthplace. His family had moved away when he was seventeen months old. Where he was raised, people were identified by the names of their native villages. The directory of the school he attended listed “Petilla” next to his name, and any formal petition to his university began with “I, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, native of Petilla…” Petilla was a tiny village located in the distant mountains of northeastern Spain, the highlands of Alto Aragon. His draft notice, his doctoral degree, his marriage certificate, the birth certificates of his children all served as reminders that he had almost no knowledge of his own origins. In spite of the many advantages of his life in Madrid, Cajal could no longer deny “a vehement desire of my soul”: he longed to return to his birthplace, to know the first impressions of his own brain, to travel back in time through the landscape of his consciousness until he arrived at its source. “The brain is a world consisting of vast continents and unexplored territories,” he said, and he would dedicate his life to charting its geography. Now, in 1892, what he sought was hidden in a village so microscopic that it did not appear on any map. According to legend, in the twelfth century, King Pedro II, “the Catholic,” of Aragon lost a card game to his royal neighbor King Sancho VII, “the Strong,” of Navarre. King Pedro offered four castles, including Petilla, as collateral for the debt of twenty thousand maravedis, a medieval copper coin. Six centuries later, when Napoleon conquered Spain, he divided the country into provinces, preserving its historic boundaries. Petilla became an exclave, surrounded by a foreign kingdom. No roads connected the village to even its closest neighbors. It is hard to imagine a more remote and isolated outpost in all of Spain. Cajal’s journey home could be broken up into three stages, each transporting him back in time and further away from civilization. First, he took a train almost three hundred miles to Jaca, the penultimate station on the northern line, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Cajal did not mind the long, monotonous journey; he claimed to have once spent twenty hours straight at his microscope, traveling one millionth of a meter at a time. Then he rode in a packed stagecoach westward to Tiermas, a medieval town with ancient Roman bathhouses, famous for its sulfurous, emerald-colored hot springs. The road that he traveled was unusually well maintained, as it was a stage of one of the holiest of Christian pilgrimages, the Way of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain and Cajal’s namesake. After disembarking in Tiermas, he hired a guide who knew the way to Petilla, a treacherous, twenty-five-mile trek through Pyrenean hills and gorges. In hemp sandals and knee-breeches, his skin leathery from the relentless sun, the peasant led the distinguished professor on the back of a mule. The highland climate was volatile. It almost never rained, but when it did, the storms were swift and cataclysmic. A few days before, the guide told Cajal, there had been a deluge, transforming the fields into mud. The peasants, who were desperately poor, had stripped their forests for timber to meet the Spanish navy’s demand for material for ships. Without trees to impede them, boulders tumbled down hillsides, damming stream beds and drowning crops. Where he came from, Cajal realized, nothing grew. A church bell rang in the distance—it was coming from Petilla. The guide halted the mule so that Cajal could listen. Suddenly, he was struck by an “inexplicable melancholy.” He was sure that no one would recognize him in Petilla. No one even knew who he was. But then Cajal and his guide came upon a stream where an old peasant woman was washing her clothes. Turning and seeing Cajal, she cried: “Señor, if you are not Don Justo himself, you must be the son of Don Justo! Do not deny it!” For better or for worse, he would always be his father’s son. The final stretch of the journey was a rough and narrow trail winding precipitously up a steep foothill. The heavily eroded slope had been cut into crude terraces, the villagers’ only arable land. Plows could not be used on such precarious terrain; farmers lugged manure and turned the soil using giant two-pronged forks called layas. Cajal felt proud to come from such hardworking stock. Farming in Petilla was an act of mythic futility. The deluges came; the retaining walls fell. The Petillans rebuilt them anyway. As it turned out, the priest and the mayor were waiting for Cajal at the top of the hill. A disfigured rock face loomed over the cluster of cobblestone dwellings like a gigantic tombstone. Windows were lopsided holes in the walls, with crudely whitewashed edges. Roof tiles were made of cracked terra-cotta. There were no streets, only the crevices, furrows, and inclines blindly carved by the elements. The Petillans had never even seen a wheeled vehicle before, and they had certainly never heard of the nervous system. The entire population of Petilla was gathered in the square. The oldest among them fondly recalled Cajal’s parents. They gave him a tour, which must have been brief. He was touched by their hospitality. Looking out from the railing on the church, the highest point in Petilla, Cajal took in the overpowering scenery of the landscape of his past. From that perspective, looking out over the empty highlands, life seemed infinitely small. But when the villagers brought him to the former home of the town surgeon, where he had been born, Cajal was shocked. It was in ruins, a heap of stones, a refuge for itinerant beggars. “A voice within,” Cajal recalled, “told me that I should never return to these places.” CHAPTER 1 “The Necessary Antecedent” The Iberian Peninsula is practically an island: 90 percent is surrounded by water, with the only overland route to the rest of Europe, to the northeast, cut off by the “great spiked collar” of the Pyrenees. The mountains protect the inhabitants from the devil, an Aragonese saying goes, but keep out God’s love as well. If geography is destiny, then the fate of Spain is isolation. The Aragonese highlands are a cloistered kingdom existing apart from time: “those hills, those soaring, rocky bluffs / those sunken glades, those harrowing ravines, wastelands and broad plateau” goes the epic The Song of Roland. Modern neuroscience is among the most sophisticated, hightechnology endeavors in human history, and yet Cajal, its founding hero, was a “peasant genius,” to quote his fellow Nobel laureate Charles Sherrington. The region where Cajal was born, stretching from the Ebro River to the Pyrenees, is known as Alto Aragon, or Upper Aragon, but the identification is more cultural than geographic. Ancient visitors commented on the people’s “characteristic of inhospitality” and the “higher degrees of superstition and tribalism in the northern outposts of Hispania than anywhere else.” So difficult was it to convert them to Christianity that, according to legend, they nearly drove Saint James to quit his divine mission. The southern coast of Spain is sculpted to a pinch-point, where only nine miles separate Europe from North Africa. In the year 711, a small force of Berbers—from the Roman word for “barbarian”—crossed the strait in boats and conquered the peninsula within three years. Around the turn of the ninth century, the Frankish king Charlemagne established the territory south of the Pyrenees as a buffer zone, and the highlands became the sacred battleground of a war between Islam and Christianity. Those Moorish rulers who were flourishing in the south considered the frontier region too godless and lawless for anyone but the most devout warriors to survive in. A few highland counties formed a core of resistance, and in the eleventh century became the Kingdom of Aragon, which led the charge to expel the Moors. Finally, in the fifteenth century, Aragon merged with the Kingdom of Castile to form the nucleus of modern Spain. This account of Spanish history, known as the Reconquest, is essentially a romantic myth, a story of national identity conjured and popularized in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Cajal was coming of age. The northern highlands, guarded by castles, forts, and towers, remained a contested territory, controlled by neither Muslims nor Christians, and it was there, in the year 864, that García de Benavides, nephew of the king of Pamplona, and Ibn Abdalá, son of the ruler of Zaragoza, fought a duel over a piece of territory. According to legend, both men broke their armor and chipped their daggers but continued swinging maces, bare-chested. Abdalá knocked García to the ground and was about to deliver the fatal blow, but García ripped a stone from the ground and smashed his enemy across the face, completely detaching his lower jaw, killing him instantly and scattering his teeth across the battlefield. In Aragonese—a distinct Romance language—the word caxal, or cajal, means “molar.” As the Greek historian Strabo noted, the highlands were “an exceedingly wretched place to live in,” and Cajal’s family came from the central Pyrenean region, the most rugged terrain of all. Annual rainfall was so low that grass for livestock dried up, and so few trees grew that peasants were left to gather firewood from bushes and shrubs. In the summer, the sun beat down like a vengeful god; and in the winter, temperatures could plummet to twenty degrees below zero, so cold that some highlanders, afraid of freezing, never took off their clothing. Agricultural plots were no more than a few acres of thin, stone-cluttered soil. Cajal’s father, Justo Ramón y Casasús, would have been the hero of the family had he never had a son. He was born in 1822 into a family of indigent farmers in Larres, which, with over two hundred residents, counted among the most populous villages in the comarca, or district. In those days, school was not compulsory, and so at around seven years old—as was customary for highland children—Justo began to work, both as a farmhand and as a shepherd. The land was still ruled by the medieval law of inheritance, which dictated that, to keep plots intact, property was to be inherited by firstborn sons only. Justo, the third son, grew up knowing that he would inherit nothing. He could either live under the guardianship of his eldest brother or leave his native village in search of a livelihood, but given the almost complete lack of social mobility in nineteenth-century Spain, his best option would have been to become a farmer, following in the footsteps of his own father, Esteban Ramón, also a younger son lacking an inheritance. Justo was in love with Antonia Cajal, the only daughter of the town weaver, whose family lived practically next door. Though three years older than Justo, she was confirmed during the same ceremony as he was. In Alto Aragon—a traditionalist, conservative society—where marriage was both a mercantile and sacred contract, whole communities protested the births of bastard children and divorces with extravagant mocking parades. Courtship was a matter of pragmatism, and with neither money nor prospects, Justo could not have been seen as a desirable match. When he was sixteen or seventeen years old, Justo decided to leave Larres for Javierrelatre, a village about twenty miles away, where he apprenticed himself to a barber-surgeon—a strange choice, given that barber-surgery was one of the lowliest professions in Spain. But Antonia’s mother came from the Casa Mancebo, the House of Nurses and Barbers, and Justo may have wanted to impress her family. He promised Antonia that he would marry her when he returned. Surgical procedures were once the province of the clergy until a twelfth-century papal bull declared the shedding of blood unholy. Already present at monasteries, tonsuring monks’ hair, barbers were skillful enough with a razor to open veins. In the Middle Ages, the most common medical treatment was bloodletting, a means of restoring equilibrium among the body’s “four humors,” an imbalance of which was thought to cause disease. One Renaissance handbook claimed that bleeding “clears the mind, strengthens the memory, cleanses the guts, dries up the brain, warms the marrow, sharpens the hearing, curbs tears, promotes digestion, produces a musical voice, dispels sleeplessness, drives away anxiety, feeds the blood, rids it of poisonous matter and gives long life.” Ads posted outside shops depicted barber-surgeons with rolled-up sleeves and blood-soaked hands amputating limbs or bandaging heads. For the first few years, Justo performed menial tasks, sweeping the shop floor and bringing water from the well to heat curling irons and wash shaving cloths. By watching his master, Albeita, Justo learned to wield the razor, extract teeth, administer enemas, splint fractures, and apply poultices, proving such a quick study that soon Albeita let him treat patients by himself. Roughly 75 percent of Spaniards over the age of ten were illiterate, and in the highlands that number was closer to 90 percent. Justo either never attended school or left before he could learn to read. Albeita possessed an ample library, where, during his scant off-hours, Justo taught himself to read, probably by matching up the illustrations of barber-surgery practices with his direct experience in the shop. In the process, he discovered that he had been blessed with a miraculous gift: he was able to memorize entire textbooks. The Spanish word for “bloodletter,” sangrador, was so demeaning that the Oxford English Dictionary notes that, though the term literally means “bleeder,” it also means “an ignorant pretender to medical knowledge.” To evade the stigma, sangradores lobbied the queen for a name change, and in 1836, right before Justo began his apprenticeship, she finally granted their request, reorganizing the medical hierarchy into three classes within the medical profession: first class (physicians), second class (surgeons), and third class (barber-surgeons). With Albeita, Justo had found not only a livelihood but also, perhaps, an inheritance, as he might one day take over his master’s shop or open his own. But Justo could not stand the thought of anyone looking down on him, and he believed that, with his extraordinary memory, he could elevate his status by earning an academic degree. One day, when he was twenty-one years old, Justo shocked Albeita by announcing his departure. With his remaining salary and a small loan from his eldest brother, Justo set out for Zaragoza, walking seventy miles to the provincial capital, toting all his worldly belongings over his shoulder. “If you give an Aragonese man a nail to drive,” a saying goes, “he would rather use his head than a hammer.” Justo settled in the working-class neighborhood of the Arrabal, where he apprenticed with another barber-surgeon while attending secondary school, eventually completing his degree. Without telling his master, he applied for a job at the provincial hospital as a practicante, a medical assistant, beating out twenty-five other candidates to finish first in the competitive examinations. Though the practicante represented the highest achievement for a barber-surgeon, Justo knew that he would remain subservient to the actual surgeons and physicians unless he earned a university degree. He enrolled at the University of Zaragoza for a secondclass certificate in surgery, but in 1845 the medical program there was shut down. At that point, he could have returned home and married Antonia, as he had promised. But no desire was stronger in him than professional ambition. Justo moved to Barcelona, a seven-day walk away, where he continued his training at the university medical school, which boasted the first modern medical program in Spain. The population of Barcelona—the capital of Catalonia and the first Spanish city to undergo industrialization—was two hundred thousand, a thousand times greater than that of his native village. Immigrants from the provinces crammed into foul-smelling slums and shacks made out of garbage. Homeless, Justo wandered the streets for days. In the village of Sarría, just north of the city, Justo found a barbersurgeon who let him work as his assistant while attending classes, walking to and from the university, an hour each way. He adopted a strict regime of austerity, spending no money, wasting no energy or time, refusing to let anything distract him. On Sundays and holidays, he opened his own portable barber’s stall near the port, the most popular destination in Barcelona. As hundreds of ships bobbed in the Mediterranean, thousands of dockhands and sailors roamed the quay in need of a shave. At Spanish universities, professors recited classical medical texts, which students were then required to memorize and recite back. Justo was the ideal medical student, and he increased his memory capacity with the popular training techniques of Abbé Moigno, a French savant and priest, whose method of associating words with sounds and meanings allowed him to retain up to 41,500 words and up to 12,000 facts. In 1847, Justo earned his licentiate in surgery with highest honors, officially entering a higher class. Justo kept pushing ahead, enrolling in a doctoral program at the University of Barcelona with the aspiration of becoming a physician. Bad luck struck him almost immediately, however. Justo’s boss fired him. Making matters worse, Barcelona was in the midst of an economic crisis, resulting in mass unrest, which the government suppressed by firing cannonballs into crowds of protesters. A stray one demolished Justo’s stand and wounded his leg. Injured and unemployed, he had no choice but to return to the highlands. In January 1848, there was an opening for a surgeon in Petilla, where the villagers suffered from high rates of asthma, thought to be the result of exposure to the harsh northern winds. Despite his achievements, the salary was less than half that of a typical rural surgeon. Justo agreed to provide “sanitary services,” including shaving the villagers and treating venereal diseases. In exchange, in addition to his meager salary, he would receive thirty loads of wheat per year and would be exempt from taxes. The ayuntamiento—the municipal council—gave him living quarters in a cobblestone building, slightly taller than its neighbors, set on uneven ground, with a main entrance in the back. On the ground floor—usually used for storing animals and tools—Justo established an office: a wooden table on the flagstone floor and two mirrors facing each other, one large and one small. On the second floor was space for a family. Within a year, when Justo had saved enough money to furnish his home, he decided it was finally time to marry Antonia and have children. On September 11, 1849, Justo Ramón y Casasús Pardo Casasús and Antonia Cajal Puente Marín Satué were married at the same church in Larres where they had been confirmed. Their first child was born on May 1, 1852, at nine in the evening, in a small room in the town surgeon’s house, on a simple iron-framed bed beneath a cross nailed to the cracked plaster wall. They named the boy Santiago Felipe—after the patron saint of Spain —and the following day he was baptized. “I cannot complain about my biological inheritance,” Cajal wrote. “With his blood [my father] transmitted to me traits of character to which I owe everything that I am.” The myth of his father’s life, said Cajal, was “the necessary antecedent” of his own. CHAPTER 2 “Perpetual Miracle” Most of what we know about Cajal’s childhood comes from his autobiography, Recollections of My Life. There are almost no corroborating witnesses to the events that he described. Autobiography is inherently unreliable; the famous nineteenth-century British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley called the genre “a special branch of fiction,” and Cajal, who wrote fiction from his teenage years through middle age, knew how to craft a story. When he was young, he imagined himself as the hero of a picaresque novel, a characteristically Spanish genre in which the protagonist—or pícaro—is a boy from a lower social class who embarks on a series of loosely connected adventures, surviving on pluck and guile, his behavior ranging from impish to criminal. In his autobiography, Cajal presented himself as he saw himself and had always wanted to be seen. In 1853, when Santiago was seventeen months old, there was an opening for a town surgeon in his parents’ native village, Larres. Justo’s contract in Petilla had yet to expire, and the new job was also temporary, but he could not pass up the opportunity to return home. He and Antonia were happy to have family and friends help care for their infant son—nicknamed “Santiagüé”—who, according to his nurse, was exceptionally willful and restless. When he was around three, he almost died when a horse that he hit in the hindquarters kicked him in the head. When Santiagüé was two, a second child was born—his brother, Pedro—who turned out to be far more easygoing and affable than Santiagüé, who described himself as a “wayward, unlikeable creature.” When Lorenzo Cajal, Antonia’s father, moved to Larres from his native village of Isín in 1809, he brought the textile trade with him, becoming the town weaver, and as a young child, Cajal spent countless hours in his grandfather’s shop. The loom was a flimsy wooden structure, rigged with pulleys and rollers, which creaked and swayed as the weaver pressed his foot to the pedal. Santiagüé’s family called him “the devil child”—his earliest memory was of tangling the threads of his grandfather’s loom. No one would have guessed that he would one day untangle the impossibly complex threads of the nervous system. In 1855, Cajal’s family left Larres because of tension between Justo and the ayuntamiento, most likely over his salary. The same aggression that drove him to succeed earned him enemies wherever he went, and his ambition always trumped the family’s interests. They moved to Luna, a larger town with better pay, where Justo worked for less than a year before relocating to Valpalmas, which was smaller and offered less. The likely explanation is yet another conflict. In 1857, Cajal’s sister Pabla was born. All three children looked like their father. With a toddler and an infant, Antonia paid less attention to her eldest, then five years old, and Cajal admits that he longed for more time with her. In her absence, Santiagüé became his father’s charge. Regretful of his lack of early schooling, which had hindered his intellectual development, Justo was determined to accelerate his son’s education. There was no greater sin in the world than ignorance, he believed. Justo was the kind of man who would stop to lecture other people’s children in the street. He thought of boys as young horses, by nature rebellious and wild, in need of discipline. Sometimes it took corralling and whipping to tame them. In 1857, Spain passed its first comprehensive education reform—the Moyano law—requiring every child to enroll in school at the age of six. Justo started educating Santiagüé a year early. Justo’s contract required him to treat patients as soon as he found out that they were sick, and so he would lead Santiagüé away from the town, where no one could find him. In the dry, scraggly fields, they discovered a small, dark cave—so small that Justo, a stout, broad-shouldered man, carrying an abacus and a globe, would have bent down to step through the narrow opening. There were no chairs, only rocks, and Santiagüé and his imposing father must have sat almost knee-to-knee in the cramped space. Sitting still is the worst torture for a child, Cajal wrote. Santiagüé was desperate to be free. He was disorganized and restless—not a model student. “Only my father could make out in the untamed and chaotic weeds of Santiago’s brain the light of an intelligence,” his brother, Pedro, later said. Justo believed that it was possible for even the most stubborn mind to learn. Day after day, for the duration of that year, he brought his son to the cave and taught him the basics of geography, arithmetic, grammar, and even physics, nurturing the lofty, seemingly absurd hope that Santiagüé would someday become a great scholar. It was rare for Spaniards of any age to learn a foreign language; many spoke only a provincial dialect and not Castilian, the national tongue. But Justo taught his son French, the lingua franca of European culture. Geographically speaking, France and Spain could not have been closer, but the distance seemed immense. The French highlands, in the eyes of travelers, stood for refinement and civility, while the Spanish highlands seemed melancholy and savage. “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees,” said the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, “error on the other side.” Together, Santiagüé and his father read a 1699 French novel called The Adventures of Telemachus, written in simple vernacular prose, telling the story of Telemachus after the return of his father, Odysseus. Santiagüé came to believe that he might follow in his father’s footsteps. Even as an old man, Cajal found himself transported back to the cave whenever he saw the cover of that book. Santiagüé turned out to be a natural reader and writer, able to grasp concepts quickly, and Justo could not help fantasizing that his son would one day surpass him. But Santiagüé showed one trait that threatened to undermine his father’s plans: he struggled to recall names and dates, stammering and sometimes failing to retrieve words. He was his father’s heir yet had failed to inherit his verbal memory, his family’s most valuable asset. Justo was not a strict Catholic; he believed in the divinity of the human will. So failing to complete his academic mission in Barcelona was more than a practical setback—it had provoked a crisis of faith in himself, and the fact that he never finished his degree had depressed him for more than a decade, according to Cajal. As his family’s needs grew, Justo saved money for tuition, imposing the same austerity on his family as he had on himself. It was Cajal’s mother who sacrificed the most, spending almost nothing, cooking with fewer ingredients, and mending every garment herself. In 1858, when he was thirty-five, Justo finally re-enrolled in school in Madrid, where he took the requisite courses in public hygiene, legal medicine, and toxicology. He found another surgeon to replace him, asked the man to look after his family, and left six-year-old Santiagüé in charge of all correspondence. He gave half his savings to Antonia and kept the rest. The family moved to Larres to live with Cajal’s grandfather. Justo would visit only during breaks and for the birth of his fourth child, a daughter named Jorja, in the spring of 1859, the only child who did not resemble him. “Our father was the best example of conduct in life,” Pedro said. But for two years, while Justo was gone, Antonia was the children’s sole parental influence. Antonia was deeply religious. Whereas her husband had grown up illiterate, she had learned to read in girls’ school as a child, and she loved novels. When her sweetheart first left Larres in the hope of making his fortune, then nineteen-year-old Antonia occupied herself with cheap romances and tales of knights errant until his return. Antonia, according to her daughter Pabla, had astonishing mental coordination and perceptiveness. But Justo, a strict utilitarian, denounced works of fiction as harmful distractions and allowed only medical texts in the house, and so Antonia hid her novels in a trunk and secreted the books to her children when their father was away. Santiagüé and his siblings savored these stories. Little is known about Antonia Cajal, and nothing survives from her own hand. But her inner life is hinted at by her choice of novels, two of which feature oppressed women as protagonists: Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, who was accused of adultery and then beheaded; and Genevieve of Brabant, also vilified for infidelity, who escaped execution and lived alone with her son in a cave. With his father gone, Santiagüé was free to indulge “one of the unbridled tendencies of [his] spirit”: exploring and admiring the “perpetual miracle” of nature. “I never tired of contemplating the splendours of the sun,” Cajal recalled of his hours wandering around the outskirts of town, “the magic of the twilight, the alternations of the vegetation, with its gaudy spring festivals, the mystery of the resurrection of the insects, and the varied and picturesque scenery of the mountains.” Throughout his childhood, Santiagüé took a special interest in birds, searching for nests and studying them for hours, hoping for a glimpse of a wagtail, chaffinch, linnet, or cuckoo. One time, he got stuck halfway up a tree, and a search party from town did not find him until after dark. His long absences always concerned his mother, who was constantly worried about his well-being. Santiagüé began collecting bird eggs in a thin box that he divided into labeled compartments, a hobby that his father encouraged. At first, Santiagüé was attracted to the eggs only because of their colors— aqua, speckled gray, cream brown, white with red stains—but after leaving his collection outside on a summer day and returning to find a liquefied, stinking mess, he began incubating them. Nothing delighted him more than witnessing the metamorphosis of the newborn birds. From Humboldt to Darwin to Cajal, all great naturalists share one essential quality: they would rather be observing nature than doing anything else. In January 1860, when Cajal was seven years old, the Spanish army conquered the city of Tetuán, in the North African territory of Morocco. For over a year, Spain had been fighting the “African War” against Berber tribesmen, descendants of their perennial enemies, the Moors. The mission inspired a massive enlistment of volunteers. Ten thousand Spaniards died in the conflict, and Alto Aragon had been a hotbed of recruits. After Spain’s victory at Tetuán, Morocco sued for peace, resulting in the Treaty of WadRas and a resounding Spanish victory. In the town square of Valpalmas, people danced the jota, an intricate folk dance set to twanging guitars with brisk, clapping refrains, as women whirled and ruffled their skirts and men roasted chunks of mutton over a bonfire, which they passed to Santiagüé, along with leather pouches full of sweet black wine. This first encounter with patriotism—which Cajal recalled as a sense of collective uplift—would imprint itself upon him for the rest of his life. Alto Aragon was a devoutly Catholic place, and Santiagüé grew up with his teachers and parents—and even his more freethinking father— telling him that God was a loving Father who would always maintain order in the universe and protect him from evil. He was required to read the Bible, presented to him as the ultimate source of moral authority. In 1851, the year before Cajal was born, the Spanish government signed a concordat with the Vatican, in reaction to the anticlerical Liberal government of the decade before, reestablishing Catholicism as the official religion of Spain. Article II of the document reads, “Teaching in universities, colleges, seminaries, private and public schools of all types will conform in every respect to Catholic doctrine.” Santiagüé attended the one-room schoolhouse in Valpalmas, which had bare wooden benches and a picture of Jesus Christ on the wall facing the students. One afternoon, the class was reciting the Lord’s Prayer when the sky suddenly darkened and the students heard a deafening crash. The school had been struck by lightning. In his autobiography, Cajal unbelievably claimed that the bolt entered through a window in the school’s attic, destroyed the ceiling of the first, and then headed straight for the portrait of Jesus, smiting the Lord and Savior before exiting through a mouse hole. He described children racing outside, covered in plaster, where they saw the scorched body of the town priest dangling from the bell tower. While his own godlike father was absent, Santiagüé, for the first time, questioned the existence of God. According to Cajal, the lightning struck at the exact moment when he and his classmates uttered the words “Lord deliver us from all evil.” That summer, scientists predicted a total solar eclipse, and people from all over the world traveled to Spain for a glimpse of the rare phenomenon. The path of the eclipse’s shadow was illustrated in Alto Aragonese newspapers—Valpalmas happened to be right on the fringe. On the morning of July 18, 1860, Santiagüé stood on the top of a tall hill alongside his father, who had just returned from Madrid, having finally completed his degree. Justo explained to his son that scientists could calculate exactly when and for how long the sun would disappear. Santiagüé stared through smoked glasses at his father’s watch to see if the prediction would come true. Severe thunderstorms darkened the sky, and a heavy mist lingered well into the afternoon, until suddenly the sky turned from pure azure to indigo as the sun began to slowly vanish. As darkness enveloped the earth, Cajal said that, surprisingly, his mind was absolutely calm. Reason served him as a shield against superstition. He had lost one faith and found another. CHAPTER 3 “Plunging into Social Life” The fortunes of Cajal’s family changed dramatically with the achievement of his father’s new degree. People now addressed Justo as Don, an honorific with echoes of blood aristocracy, and his credentials now qualified him for higher paying, more stable positions. Later in 1860, he moved the family to Ayerbe, a town of three thousand residents located on a main road between three larger population centers, with weekly agricultural and livestock markets attended by people from all across the district. Ayerbe lies south of the Pyrenees, closer to the fertile plains of the Ebro River where there are only the inklings of foothills. Land deeds—not academic degrees—served as proof of real status, and the Ramón y Cajal family still rented their home. They lived in a tiny, narrow apartment on the second floor of a multifamily house, where all four children shared a single bedroom. Justo had to compete with other surgeons, which meant that he was often away from home, too busy to tutor Santiagüé. Justo moved the family to Ayerbe in part because its school was better than the one in Valpalmas. Because of his early lessons, Santiagüé was ahead of his peers; his father sent him to school mainly for discipline, but with only one teacher and one assistant to control a hundred students, real supervision was impossible. At that time, primary-school teaching was a profession for those who lacked either the resources or the intelligence to pursue another career. Students were drilled on multiplication tables and forced to do penmanship exercises, and Santiagüé was routinely asked to recite from textbooks, exposing the weakness of his memory. For a shy, sensitive child, public failure was a nightmare, and furthermore, Santiagüé knew that poor academic performance would disappoint his father. He began to act out in class, sometimes skipping school altogether. Santiagüé had no friends other than Pedro, who followed his brother everywhere. “Things always interested me more than people,” Cajal wrote. It would have been difficult for Santiagüé to make friends, even if he had wanted to, since Ayerbe was his fourth home in eight years. He noticed that whenever someone spoke to him, their words instantly supplanted his own thoughts, almost as though they were trying to dominate his mind. He was determined to remain “the owner of his own solitude.” Whenever he could, Cajal said, he wandered into the countryside by himself, drawn inexorably toward the mountains, following the courses of streams and stealing into orchards. The Somontano district, where Ayerbe is located, was the scene of many battles during the Reconquest, and the ruins surrounding the town thrilled Santiagüé more than any school history lesson ever could. “From the heights of the mountains,” Cajal recalled, the ruins “seemed to tell us heroic stories and legends of distant grandeurs.” In his imagination, the structures of the past came back to life. In the future, he would perform a similar act of imagination, deducing the workings of cellular life by examining dead tissue samples. The first time he set foot in the town square of Ayerbe, Cajal recalled, the other boys mocked him. He wore the wrong clothes. He spoke the wrong dialect. Since his father was a medical practitioner, the town boys assumed that Santiagüé was wealthier than they were. They punched, kicked, and threw stones at the new boy, whom they nicknamed forano, the Ayerbean word for “foreigner.” Suddenly, Santiagüé felt the “necessity of plunging into social life.” He wanted to prove himself in front of the boys who derided him. The hyperbole in his autobiography is almost comical: he claimed the flutes that he carved reached notes no other flute could, and children followed him around when he played as though he were the Pied Piper; the slingshots that he made, using leather from his own shoes, were so fine that all the local shepherds clamored to buy them; the bows that he shaped were perfect, and the arrows that he carved flew straighter and farther than anyone else’s. Even at a young age, Pedro said, his brother was driven by a “blind desire to overcome, to be first in everything without making amends for anything in order to achieve it.” Every fight, theft, and act of vandalism seemed to lead back to the home of the respected surgeon, where neighbor after neighbor—including the mayor and the priest—appeared at the door, accusing Santiagüé of a litany of transgressions. Santiagüé’s dismal academic performance and unruly behavior, in his father’s assessment, were symptomatic of a grave disease that required harsh treatment. When Justo returned home after a long day to find that his sons had misbehaved, he would become enraged, screaming at Antonia for her “excessive softness,” Cajal recalled. The tools of a barber-surgeon—such as artificial leeches, tonsil guillotines, hemorrhoid forceps, skull saws, and mouth gags—easily doubled as torture implements. Patients, bound to the operating chair, were known to thrash and shriek and die como chinches— like bugs. There is good reason why, in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury popular imagination, barber-surgeons were the archetypal villains. Cajal’s father would whip him until the skin on his back became raw and bled, then beat him with a club, and sometimes pulled at his flesh with tongs, which could be heated to even more painful effect. Cajal recalled feeling “absolute terror.” Yet he devoted only a few lines to this trauma in his autobiography, and he never wrote about these experiences again. His response to the violence, as a child, was to affect numbness. “I am used to it,” Pedro recalled his brother telling him. “The blows anesthetize me, and I no longer feel pain.” During an attempted escape—one of many—Santiagüé and Pedro skipped school and headed into the hills, where for a few days they lived in the wilderness. One night, they were sleeping in an old lime kiln when their father appeared, shook them awake, tied their arms together, and paraded them back to town, leading them through the square so that people could gawk and jeer. It was around this time that Santiagüé suddenly began to experience what he later called an “irresistible mania”: the impulse to draw. He scribbled constantly on every surface he could find—on scraps of paper and school textbooks, on gates, walls, and doors—scrounging money to spend on paper and pencils, pausing on his jaunts through the countryside to sit on a hillside and sketch the scenery. Unable to focus in the classroom, Santiagüé could draw for hours, his chaotic energy channeling itself onto the page. He entertained his classmates with caricatures, and they began to recognize him as an artist, earning him the validation that he desperately sought. While drawing, he would concentrate so intensely on an object or a fantasy that he later described his mind as a well-fortified castle. One day, when he was ten years old, Santiagüé marched into the living room and declared that he was going to become a professional artist. His father considered artistic expression a developmental defect, an illness of the will, and artists themselves itinerant deadbeats. Justo assured Santiagüé that once he became a doctor, he could waste his time on any dilettantish hobby he wanted. In the meantime, Justo confiscated Santiagüé’s art supplies and tossed his drawings into the fire, so Santiagüé began using wadded-up bits of paper as a brush, extracting blue and red pigments from the bindings of cigarette papers by soaking them in water, and hiding his drawings between rocks in the fields. To Santiagüé, art was a portal to a fantasy world of heroes and legends of bullfights and battles; catapults, armor, and charging steeds; and sailors, cannons, and the open seas. Cajal “entered the Castle of Science,” Pedro later said, “through the Door of Art.” Nonetheless, seeking a second opinion on his son’s talent, Justo showed Santiagüé’s drawings to the most prestigious art critic that Alto Aragon had to offer: a plasterer hired by the ayuntamiento to whitewash the walls of a local church. A transient worker, who depended on community leaders like Don Justo for business, the plasterer knew exactly what to say when Justo asked if his son had any talent. The plasterer replied, “None,” Cajal recalled, then proceeded to mock the child. Standing beside his father, hearing the verdict about his artwork, Santiagüé, who never broke down during beatings, could barely stop himself from crying. Some of Santiagüé’s childhood drawings have survived. A simple pencil sketch, made when he was eight years old, depicts an Aragonese peasant in full costume, leaning on a walking stick, the folds of his blouse and sash expertly contoured and shaded. Particularly striking is a cobblestone wall in the foreground of a watercolor of the Ayerbe church. The wall is a conglomerate, like cellular tissue, a unified structure composed of distinct, individual rocks, each of which Cajal renders true to its unique form. Within his youthful artwork are the outlines of his scientific drawings. CHAPTER 4 “A Castle of Dreams” Cajal finished primary school in 1861, when he was nine years old, and Spanish law did not require children to continue their education. Secondary schools, or institutos, existed to bestow titles, confer social status, and groom elites, and only around 5 percent of boys between the ages of ten and sixteen attended, most of whom were children of aristocrats or the bourgeoisie. Recent liberal reforms, however, offered rural children newfound possibilities for advancement. Justo was determined to send Santiagüé to secondary school regardless of how uninterested he was in his studies. A baccalaureate degree—awarded after a six-year course—was a prerequisite for university enrollment, and so Santiagüé could not become a doctor without one. More than that, the choice of school would define his role in society. “You are where you did your baccalaureate,” wrote one twentieth-century Spanish novelist. Parents often looked to religious boarding schools to straighten out their wayward children. Justo decided to send Santiagüé to the Institute of Jaca, a private school run by Aesculapians, a sect of Jesuit priests devoted to teaching medicine, especially renowned for its program in Latin; physicians and surgeons distinguished themselves with their knowledge of the language, while barber-surgeons—also known as romancistas—spoke only in the vernacular. Santiagüé declared that sending him to Jaca would be a waste of money and begged to be sent to an instituto that offered drawing classes, but his father refused. When Santiagüé left home at the end of the summer, Antonia cried and pleaded with him to obey his teachers. She was afraid of the treatment that her son might receive. The motto of the Spanish education system was la letra con sangre entra—“knowledge comes with blood.” In the highlands, there is no real autumn; near the end of September, winter was already looming, and Santiagüé had never been away from home. The journey took about ten hours, the road heading north into the heart of the Pyrenees. Santiagüé sat at the front of the carriage on a mattress spread out over his luggage to cushion him from the bumps in the road. His father accompanied him, to ensure that he made a good impression. Justo knew the landscape intimately, since the towns of his youth were located not far from the road. Santiagüé pelted his father with questions. They shared a curiosity about nature, which became the best—if not the only—way for them to bond. As long as Justo held forth while his son dutifully listened, their relationship was relatively peaceful. Justo began to tell his son the kinds of stories that he loved to hear, tales of heroism and war, of highland battles that took place on the very terrain that they rode along during the 1808 War of Independence, when Napoleon invaded Spain. The French were better disciplined and better armed, but the Aragonese possessed one unassailable advantage, according to the revolutionary general Francisco Espoz y Mina: the guerrillas were “commanders of themselves.” Sunk in a furrow between two heavily eroded glaciers, Jaca, in geological terms, is founded on a depression. At twenty-seven hundred feet, the medieval city, hemmed in by turreted walls, has an air of gloomy detachment. The peak of Mount Oroel—where it is said that bonfires were lit to signal the start of the Reconquest—was visible from any point in the city, its stern gaze seemingly following the residents of Jaca wherever they went. The institute was an old building with a peeling facade and no windows; the priests, in their black hats and black robes, resembled executioners; and the dormitory, with its rows of plain metal beds, looked less like a home than a barracks. Santiagüé would live with his uncle Juan, his mother’s brother, whose house was a few minutes’ walk from school. Santiagüé was given an entrance examination in three parts, including Castilian grammar and religion. “Who was incarnated?” the test asked. “Who was Jesus Christ? What does Jesus wish to say?” Santiagüé made no errors, raising the expectations of his new teachers. Justo tried to explain that his son might not perform as well in class, that he learned differently, but that, though he might seem shy and lacking in confidence, Santiagüé would produce the right answers if given a chance. At the same time, Justo encouraged the priests to punish Santiagüé for even the slightest infraction. Through gritted teeth, Cajal recalled, he vowed that his oppressors would never break him. Forty boys, looking gaunt and homesick, sat crammed together on short benches in a classroom. Secondary-school teaching was like “cerebral injection,” a contemporary of Cajal’s explained, with rules and formulae jammed into the heads of students. The Spanish state dictated a national curriculum, discouraging individuality and creativity and punishing critical thinking and innovation. Pupils absorbed lectures in the morning and were expected to regurgitate them in the afternoon. Brandishing rulers, whips, and straps, Santiagüé’s teachers stalked the room, primed to lash out at the slightest error. Cracking sounds echoed through the hallways and thumped in his head “like those of a door knocker in an empty house.” In his famous painting La letra con sangre entra, Goya depicts a typical classroom scene: some crying students are being whipped while the rest of the class, seeming not to notice, go about their studies. With its numerous conjugations and declensions, Latin was an especially tortuous subject for a boy like Santiagüé, who struggled to recall words. According to Cajal, his Latin teacher once threw a student against the blackboard, shattering it and injuring two more students with the flying shards. The teacher imposed a daylong fast for every error, and when the list grew longer than the number of days in the term, he tacked on beatings and public shaming. Santiagüé had to dress as the “King of Cocks,” donning an oversize feathered robe and running back and forth between two lines of students, each of whom—along with the teacher himself—punched him as he passed. The fathers began locking him in the freezing classroom after school for hours, without food. Santiagüé’s response was to hide any evidence of pain by staring directly at his abusers and holding back his tears. Cajal recalled that he approached the classroom each day “trembling with fear.” He struggled to concentrate. The more hostile the environment, the deeper Santiagüé retreated into fantasy, drawing more feverishly than ever, conjuring worlds where mythical heroes lived forever and evil was always conquered by good. “For if the world does reject or bore us,” Cajal said, “we may build a castle of dreams inside ourselves.” Outside school hours, Santiagüé took long walks alone in the wilderness. “Before the grandeur of the tremendous mountains which surround the historic city,” Cajal said, “I forgot my humiliations, discouragements, and sorrows.” Sitting in an abandoned fort, he pretended to be a medieval watchman, surveying the vast, empty plain for hours on end. In keeping with family tradition, Cajal’s uncle Juan was a weaver and owned a respectable shop, but since his eldest son, Victoriano, had unexpectedly left home, Juan’s business had begun to struggle without his help. He had accrued a considerable debt, most of which was owed to his brother-in-law, Don Justo, who agreed to wipe the slate clean in exchange for his son’s room and board. Worried about the future, Juan spent long nights at the loom, oblivious to the affairs of the house. During Santiagüé’s stay in Jaca, Juan’s wife, Orosia, died. Cajal claims that she passed away before his arrival, and though he misremembered other names and dates in his autobiography, just as he did when he was a student, this discrepancy seems especially significant. The death of his aunt brought about the return of his cousin Victoriano, who remained a dear, lifelong friend. Curiously, all that Cajal mentions about the homecoming is that the quality of his meals improved. Victoriano was the older brother Santiagüé never had, a handsome, strapping young man in his early twenties, headstrong and rebellious, with independent opinions that he never cared to hide. The stories that Victoriano told were as entertaining as any adventure novel: he had set out alone as an adolescent, resourcefully taking on odd jobs and bravely meeting every challenge. Santiagüé wished that he could escape his father, and while he had tried and failed to run away from home, Victoriano had actually succeeded. He never became a weaver. He was the rare example of a firstborn son who had defied the law of inheritance. By the end of the year, Santiagüé had stopped going to school. The fathers threatened to expel him, leaving him with no choice but to write to his own father, who was furious at first, but who then asked the teachers to be more lenient, seeing that their regime of terror had failed. His son could never become a doctor, Justo reasoned, if he was too afraid to attend class. Santiagüé passed his examinations at the end of the year in Latin I, Castilian I, Principles and Exercises in Arithmetic, and Christian History and Doctrine, earning the lowest possible grades—no doubt aided by the fact that Justo had performed a life-saving surgery on the wife of one of the examination judges. Santiagüé returned home to Ayerbe that summer looking so sickly and battered that his mother hardly recognized him. She nursed him back to health, cooking hearty stews and serving them to him by his bedside. Before long, Santiagüé was back on the streets causing trouble. He taught himself to make gunpowder, and, with an assortment of junk, he was able to construct a cannon, which he fired at the neighbor’s house. The police appeared at the door and arrested Santiagüé, and he spent a few days in the town jail, sleeping on a moldy straw pallet infested with bugs while townspeople gathered at the window grate to point and laugh at him. Justo ordered the constable to starve his son, but his mother recruited a friend to sneak him fruit, meat, pies, cakes, and biscuits. In Cajal’s personal mythology, his mother existed as an unconditional source of love and care. Justo wanted to send his son back to Jaca, despite the obvious damage the teachers there had caused. Records show that Santiagüé’s tuition was paid, but he failed to appear for registration. The following day, he wrote a letter to the director of the Institute of Huesca formally requesting admission. Some friends in Ayerbe, who studied in Huesca, had sold him on the school. Teachers punished students but did not torture them, and since the institute was not geared toward medical study, Latin was not emphasized. And while religious classes were held every day in Jaca, in Huesca they were held only three times per week. Santiagüé never accepted Catholic dogma. “Jesus did not prophesy mathematics or thermodynamics nor use the microscope…,” Cajal later wrote. “The whole Bible seems to ignore science and is full of singular contradictions, starting with Genesis.” He drew wicked caricatures of the church ushers who tried to discipline him. “Through every fanatical Catholic,” he later wrote, “one can always make out a financier.” Justo, who almost never reversed his judgments, especially not as a concession to his family, finally agreed to Santiagüé’s transfer. It must have been Antonia who convinced him. She had a way of wisely choosing moments to undermine his tyranny, and her intercession saved Santiagüé from another year of torture. He never discussed the conflict between his parents, which must have been ferocious. Some things, Cajal admitted, he would “prefer to bury in the shadows of the unconscious.” CHAPTER 5 “The War of Duty and Desire” The story of his youth, Cajal said, was one of “a reaction against the overly utilitarian and positivist tastes and culture imposed on the author by fathers and teachers.” In “the war of duty and desire,” Santiagüé’s transfer to Huesca constituted his first victory. Located south of Ayerbe, Huesca was even farther from the highlands, even closer to the plains, both geographically and symbolically in the opposite direction from rugged Jaca. Framed by reddish peaks and propped up by a gentle hill, its buildings chalk-white and crumbling, the ancient city of Huesca was arranged in the shape of a crude oval, as though drawn by an unsteady hand, its Gothic spires visible from a distance like the masts of a great ship. Santiagüé was always hungry for new, impressive sights, and Huesca promised him a panoply. On this second journey away from home, there was no sadness, only joy. Fearful that his son’s “artistic instincts” would return, Justo installed Santiagüé in a quiet boardinghouse in the shadow of the cathedral, owned by a religious widow and frequented by seminarians and priests. Justo paid an older boy—a family friend—to drill Santiagüé in Latin until he mastered every nuance of Horace and Virgil. As soon as his father was gone, Santigüé became the commander of himself once again, and his first mission was to find the local art supplies store. To European travelers in the nineteenth century, Huesca seemed like nothing more than a large town, but in the enchanted eyes of a country boy, it qualified as a metropolis. Towns in the highlands had only rugged mule tracks, while Huesca’s streets were paved, and its buildings, unlike the austere houses of his childhood, rose above two stories and had elaborate facades. The population of a highland town—at most—was in the low thousands, and Huesca’s was ten thousand and growing. In the decade before Santiagüé’s arrival, new cultural institutions had been founded, including centers for dance and music and an intellectual organization for study and debate. For the first time ever, Santiagüé saw a bookstore, which appeared to him “like an open window to the universe.” While awaiting the completion of his school transfer papers, Santiagüé was left with a few weeks to occupy himself. The library at the institute was endowed with thousands of books, and he chose to borrow Memories and Beauties of Spain, a well-known, richly written travel and history book, featuring beautiful illustrations, to guide him while he explored. The Isuela River flowed through the center of the city, watering the alamedas, groves that Aragonese cities often planted to compensate for their lack of trees. Santiagüé liked to sit among the butterflies and birds, sketching every rock, flower, and tree, imagining the secret lives of insects and plants, contemplating the world from their perspectives. He visited San Pedro de Viejo, the eleventh-century monastery in the central plaza, where it seemed as though, on holidays, all of Huesca knelt as one in prayer. In the bowels of the cathedral, illuminated by lamplight, he came face-to-face with the tombs of Aragon’s medieval kings, heroes from the legends of his childhood. The Institute of Huesca was housed in an old palace whose byzantine lobby was adorned with portraits of its famous alumni. The classrooms were dreary, and the textbooks the same as in Jaca, but the atmosphere in Huesca could not have differed more, as students sat in the back of the classroom smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and reading novels. The institute did have a “jail,” out by the stables, where repeat offenders like Santiagüé might serve sentences of up to twenty-four hours. He relished this confinement. With smuggled chalk and charcoal, he could draw all over the walls. At the Institute of Huesca, Santiagüé finally found a subject that he enjoyed: geography. He had learned the basics from his father years before, but it was more than the names of countries and seas that now engaged him. Geography class involved drawing. Atlases, globes, and maps, which the department had in abundant stock, served as course materials. Students were required to copy maps in detail, and though he struggled to remember the spelling of words or their order within a sentence, Santiagüé never forgot an image. He relied not on abstract thinking but on direct experience. His visual memory was every bit as impressive as his father’s verbal one, and his talent allowed him to reproduce even the most intricate maps to perfection. Santiagüé barely passed his examinations at the end of his first year in Huesca, though not failing felt like a major success. After a year in Huesca, where he was the “absolute master of his own actions,” Santiagüé returned for the summer to Ayerbe, reuniting with his old gang to show off his drawings, brag about his exploits, and wreak havoc in the streets. The idyll lasted only a few days. Having missed a whole semester, Santiagüé had fallen behind in the curriculum, and his father ordered him inside to study. “Such a decision was like a jug of cold water poured over my head,” Cajal wrote with typical flair, “which was aflame with eagerness to give joyful rein to my natural inclinations.” Around that time, a classmate in Huesca began lending Santiagüé novels and volumes of poetry, the kinds of books that his father banned. Santiagüé’s favorite poet was José de Espronceda—sometimes referred to as the “Spanish Lord Byron”—who wrote Romantic odes to persecuted revolutionaries. “Every soldier is an absolute king,” reads one of his refrains. “The world is mine: I am as free as the air!” reads another. Santiagüé also read Mournful Nights, the 1774 poem by José Cadalso, infamous for its treatment of necrophilia and suicide and a cult sensation among the youths throughout the country, who organized midnight readings by candlelight. Approaching adolescence, Santiagüé began painting darker scenes, including illustrations from an Espronceda poem in which the narrator recites his morbid fantasies. Santiagüé already had the soul of a Romantic; now he had officially discovered Romanticism. Santiagüé asked his father if he could study in an abandoned pigeon shed on top of the barn, a request that his father granted. From the doorway, Santiagüé could see whether anyone was watching him, and behind the nearby chimney, he hid his paper, pencils, watercolors, and novels in a niche that he built out of sticks and boards. Whenever he heard someone coming, he would race across the roof tiles and back to the empty coop, where he’d pretend to read his textbooks. His algebra book presented polynomials as reflections of divine truths from a metaphysical realm; his Latin book assaulted him with declensions; and his history book was an endless march of incidental names and dates, utterly barren and bloodless. One day, reconnoitering his private realm, Santiagüé happened to look through a window into the neighbor’s attic, where, along with pieces of old furniture, he spied trays of sweetbread and candied fruit. The neighbor, who owned the town confectionery, was a man of refined taste. Examining the room more closely, Santiagüé found a trove of books, including histories, novels, stories, poetry collections, and travel narratives. Though the sweets tempted him, literature proved even more seductive. Santiagüé, the veteran orchard thief, devised a plan: before dawn, while the neighbors were still asleep, he tiptoed across the roof of the barn, edged past the chimney, crawled onto the neighbor’s roof, and lowered himself down through the window. He did this all summer, taking one book at a time, figuring that if he returned it promptly, the neighbor would never notice. No book would be gone for long, since Santiagüé devoured each one quickly. The protagonists of Romantic novels were like kin to the heroes of Aragonese legend: self-centered, larger than life, and impossible for society to contain. Santiagüé recognized his own qualities in them, albeit exaggerated for dramatic effect. His favorite books offer a window into his psyche: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, whose hero is a disfigured outcast; The Three Musketeers, wherein a poor, clever, and fearless young man leaves his provincial home and joins an illustrious band of swordsmen in Paris; The Count of Monte Cristo, about a falsely imprisoned man exacting his revenge; and Robinson Crusoe, in which a young man defies his father, sails across the ocean, and, through his own ingenuity, survives a shipwreck on a deserted island. Cajal sought out Romanticism, he later said, as a reaction against his utilitarian upbringing. Reality was too harsh; he preferred imagining himself as a character in a novel. During his summer of literary awakening, Santiagüé also discovered Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a book that would inspire him for the rest of his life. Santiagüé sympathized deeply with Quixote, who, like himself, hailed from a rural village and became obsessed with romances and books of knight-errantry. The nature of Quixote’s madness is that he cannot distinguish fiction from fact. Santiagüé preferred the world of fiction, and he was indignant when, at the end of the book, the “Mournful Knight” is forced to renounce his life of chivalry. In his neighbor’s attic, Santiagüé also encountered The Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo, the classic picaresque novel from the seventeenth century, the golden age of Spanish culture. The protagonist’s father sends his son to religious school, where priests starve him nearly to death, and Santiagüé could surely recognize Quevedo’s descriptions of the boy’s empty stomach, dizzy head, dusty mouth, and rattling bones. Santiagüé’s cousin Victoriano had made himself into a pícaro, and the stories he told him upon returning home from his travels exemplified the genre. Santiagüé wanted to transform himself into a pícaro too. He drew no distinction between that fantasy and his own life. At the end of the summer, Justo decided that Santiagüé was not mature enough to return to school. For most of 1865 he remained at home, and then returned to Huesca in 1866 to begin what he called “the most disturbed and unfortunate period of my student life.” Pedro, now eleven years old, joined Santiagüé at the institute. More doubtful of his eldest son’s prospects than ever, Justo pinned his hopes on Pedro, who was obedient and steady, the model student. Still, the brothers were both spitting images of their father, with the same intense expression and prominent nose, so much so that they were often confused for each other. Spanish boys were called by their fathers’ surnames; Santiagüé and Pedro both went by “Ramón” and were known as “the sons of the surgeon of Ayerbe.” They were the only two people in the world who shared the burden of their father’s expectations. Worried that Santiagüé would corrupt his younger brother, Justo housed the two boys separately, sending Pedro to live in a quiet boardinghouse and Santiagüé to apprentice with a barber, where the work would be so demanding that he would have no time to cause trouble or make art. If he did not manage to finish secondary school, which seemed more and more likely, at least his son would have acquired a vocation, his father thought. “And at what a time!” Cajal recalled, with customary floridity. “Exactly when my soul was still vibrating with the tremendous jolt which it had received from its sudden impact with the romantic!” He believed that he was destined to become a great painter, the next Titian, Raphael, or Velázquez, and tasks like sweeping up hair and lathering beards seemed well beneath the dignity of an artist. But the barber, Acisclo, whom Cajal described as a kind of ogre, with coarse features, jaundiced skin, and a violent temper, offered him an indispensable piece of advice: forget how you are feeling and focus on the task at hand. Barbershops were social clubs for the lower class. Neighborhood characters like the militiaman, the cobbler, and the milliner, their faces masked with soap, showed off their scars and told tales of swashbuckling exploits. Justo’s plan had backfired; he wanted to sever his son’s contact with fiction. Instead, Santiagüé soon found himself in a Romantic novel come to life. Talk at the barbershop revolved around the conduct of the rural police, a militarized force formed by local elites to protect their interests and property, which constantly harassed and abused the townspeople. Officers in brown uniforms, who earned twice as much as the average day laborer, delighted in issuing heavy fines for the slightest infraction of the most obscure laws. The barbershop gang, all political rebels, discussed the prospect of revolution in hushed tones. Liberal generals were rumored to be returning from exile in France, crossing the Pyrenees and heading south through the highlands, enlisting volunteers. Santiagüé understood nothing about politics at that time, but he longed to take part in a rebellion, and, with his “inborn dislike” of authority and hunger for individual freedom, democracy instinctively appealed to him. In the nineteenth century, Spain—“the most reactionary nation in Europe”—experienced eighteen different governments, three constitutions, and more than two hundred uprisings, “a tangle of revolutions,” to quote a historian of the day. Students at the institute divided themselves into Liberals and Reactionaries for their war games. The Spanish Liberal party had emerged soon after Napoleon invaded Spain, in 1810, when a group of parliamentary delegates began calling themselves Liberales. Their 1812 Spanish Constitution advocated for equality before the law and a constitutional, representative government. Liberal ideas spread from the intelligentsia to politicians, the military, some clergy, certain professions such as lawyers, and rentier landowners, who argued that the Old Regime was economically inefficient and unjust and that the Church and nobles enjoyed unfair privileges. Ayerbe and Huesca were traditional Liberal strongholds. Santiagüé’s schoolyard allegiance was never in question. He always fought on the Liberals’ side. When he was not at the barbershop, Santiagüé could be seen wandering around lost in thought, brow furrowed, face burdened by a perpetual frown. A former classmate described Santiagüé as “capricious”—referring not to flightiness but to a type of goat that roams the hills of the Italian island of Capri, alone. Santiagüé appeared suspicious and untrustworthy in the eyes of his classmates, who interpreted his rare smile as a sign of sarcasm, not happiness. He had a tendency, after not speaking for long periods of time, to burst into uncontrollable laughter, irritating his teachers, who assumed that he was mocking them. He never followed their instructions and attended class only when it suited him. Well-behaved students knew to steer clear of Santiagüé, but some classmates—the more wayward boys—liked to trail him on his rambles, not knowing where he was going or why, responding to the mysterious, commanding power in his silence. Every day, before, after, and in between classes, Santiagüé and his friends staged battles in the alleyway next to the school, leaving him cut up and bruised, with lumps on his head so large that he was sometimes unable to put his hat on. When he was around fourteen years old, the future author of some of the greatest works in the history of scientific literature produced his first book: a slingshot manual outlining projectile selection, firing strategies, and battle plans, complete with his own illustrations. He called it Estrategia lapideria (Lapidary Strategy); Latin class had finally come to good use. During his teenage years, Santiagüé also wrote and illustrated a novel, a facsimile of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and he convinced some classmates to act out the plot. The Isuela River became the Atlantic Ocean, its alamedas a great jungle, and wearing makeshift loincloths, with mud smeared on their faces, the boys shot bows that Santiagüé had shaped out of greenwood branches and arrows he had tipped with shoemakers’ awls, blunted for safety. He led a group of boys—fellow academic underachievers —in a failed attempt to run away and, like Crusoe, become sailors. “Cajal was a novelist of action,” a fellow classmate later recalled, after Cajal had achieved fame as a scientist. He “believed and made us believe in the possibility of his novel being realized in actual life.” That summer, Santiagüé returned to his family, who had moved to a town called Gurrea de Gállego after a fight between Justo and the ayuntamiento of Ayerbe. Santiagüé’s grades at the end of the year showed no improvement, and now more furious than ever, his father decided to teach him the ultimate anti-romantic lesson: he apprenticed him to a cobbler. The word that Cajal uses to describe his experience is antiesthetic; the shoemaker confiscated his paper and pencils and did not even allow him charcoal to draw on the walls of the barn. He slept on the vermin-infested floor of a dark garret, but at least it was a room of his own, and after dinner he would rush back there and spend all night staring at the stains and cobwebs on the walls and ceiling. He discovered that the longer he concentrated, the more the forms seemed to become animated, “transformed, by the power of thought, into the wings of a magic stage, across which raced the cavalcade of [his] fantasies.” For Santiagüé, imagination was nothing frivolous—it was necessary for his survival (along with the meat and pies his mother smuggled to him so that he did not have to eat the cobbler’s disgusting stews). “Never did I live more prosaically,” he recalled, “or dream more beautiful, noble, and consoling dreams.” A quick learner and skillful with his hands, Santiagüé excelled as a shoemaker. In the fall, when Justo resumed his position in Ayerbe after reconciling with the ayuntamiento, he apprenticed Santiagüé to another shoemaker, a friend of his nicknamed Pedrín. Justo told Pedrín to starve Santiagüé if he did not eat the food that he was served. Santiagüé worked hard and did not complain, and Pedrín was thrilled with his new apprentice. One day, Justo visited the shop to check on his son’s progress. “So? Are you chastened?” Justo said, according to Pedro. “Do you want to come back home?” “No,” Santiagüé replied, “I am more than fine here. I like the job and don’t want any other.” He said that he would rather become a factory foreman than an academic of any kind. Santiagüé learned to make boots, trim heels, and fashion ornamental toecaps, which the local aristocrats fancied, and by the end of the summer he was able to buy more paper and another pencil with the tips that he’d received. He considered himself a shoe artist. That summer, the battalion of Republicans descending from the highlands to overthrow the queen met the royal Spanish army in a battle that happened to take place just outside Ayerbe, in Linás de Marcuello. Since Linás belonged to Ayerbe’s medical district, Justo was charged with treating the wounded royal soldiers, and while fulfilling his official responsibilities he secretly tended to the injured rebels, hidden in surrounding villages, whose cause he supported. He asked Santiagüé to accompany him. Battlefield surgery would serve as the perfect introduction to medicine, Justo thought, understanding his son well enough to know precisely how to engage his attention. Though he had read about death in Romantic poems, Santiagüé had never seen a real corpse. CHAPTER 6 “The Nasty and Prosaic Bag” After Santiagüé’s year as a shoemaker’s apprentice, Justo proclaimed his son cured of his “artistic madness” and sent him back to school in Huesca for the 1867–1868 academic year. Santiagüé promised to focus on his studies if his father enrolled him in a drawing class, arguing that, during the Renaissance, drawing was regularly taught to engineers and even doctors, and that over the course of the previous decade, linear and figure drawing had come to be accepted as an industrial profession in Spain. Housed in a separate building, drawing class was not part of the institute’s standard curriculum and would cost an additional fee, which Justo agreed to pay, so long as Santiagüé also got a job at a barbershop. Though only a few years old, the arts program in Huesca had already acquired an outstanding reputation. Its founder, León Abadías, was a respected Aragonese painter, having trained in Madrid at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the school once directed by Francisco de Goya. The purpose of art, according to Abadías, is not to produce work but to cultivate self-awareness, “to learn to realize what you do and why you do it.” “What I really want to make clear to you,” he said, “is the necessity of discovering how to acquire an artistic soul.” Abadías was the mentor Santiagüé had been waiting for. He was living proof against Justo’s claim that all artists are failures—he was a respected professional whom the provincial and city governments commissioned to paint murals and restore frescoes in local cathedrals. Drawing class provided Santiagüé with an “intoxication of the aesthetic,” and Abadías called Santiagué his most brilliant pupil (“more than once,” Cajal emphasized). Drawing was the only class in which he received a grade of excellent, and his work was even awarded a prize. In the summer of 1868, Justo decided that it was time to start Santiagüé’s medical education, beginning with osteology, the study of bones, the first course in the standard university curriculum. For centuries, due to taboos against handling blood, only barber-surgeons were allowed to perform dissections—perhaps the only advantage of their lower status—and while at university, Justo studied with professors who were known to accompany their surgery lessons with autopsy reports. The word autopsy means “seeing for oneself.” Justo told his son, who hated reading textbooks, that the only way to learn about surgery was from direct experience. Throughout the Middle Ages, human dissection remained forbidden, except in special cases, when a judge might allow for a criminal to be “anatomized” after hanging. The shame of dissection was so intense that, immediately after public hangings, friends and relatives would rush to the corpse of an executed man to protect it from so-called anatomizers. A decrease in the number of executions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to a dearth of cadavers, while medical schools proliferated, and the demand for anatomical material increased. The first known “body snatchers” were caught stealing corpses from a cemetery near a university in Italy, where public dissections for the sake of teaching anatomy had recently begun. Men called “resurrectionists” in Great Britain were paid to exhume and deliver bodies, often working in teams, sending women as scouts to funerals, and casing cemeteries for fresh dirt. In the middle of the night, Santiagüé’s father led him from their house to the cemetery on the outskirts of town. Santiagüé was no stranger to trespassing; having his father beside him as an accomplice, however, was exceedingly strange. On the other side of the high brick wall, they landed in a hollow, which served as the public ossuary, where old remains were deposited to make room for the newly dead. Heaps of bones, coated with gravel and nettles, lay half buried in the scraggly grass. Justo instructed Santiagüé to pick out the most intact pieces, and they filled their sacks with crania, ribs, pelvises, and femurs. Cajal recalled the haunting sound of bones clattering behind him. Back at the family barn, Santiagüé and Justo emptied their sacks and started sorting through the contents. Justo opened The Complete Course in the Anatomy of the Human Body, the Spanish textbook that he had used in medical school, a massive, five-volume tome describing every known structure of the human body, and proceeded to hold each bone up to the lamplight, examining every inch from every possible angle, noting the smallest details, no matter how insignificant they might seem. The most important skill for anatomists is observation, and it was Cajal’s father who taught him how to observe. Justo, busy with his surgical practice, devoted all his free time that summer to teaching his son osteology. According to Cajal, his father “experienced an incomprehensible pleasure in awakening childish curiosity and hastening intellectual development.” When Santiagüé gave a correct answer, his father would look up at the ceiling or raise his hand to his lips, barely able to contain his excitement. Santiagüé finally absorbed his father’s lessons, and his father no longer dismissed him as foolish and lazy. Justo even asked his son to rattle off the names of bones to impress his friends. The cemetery raid—clandestine, macabre, and daring—felt like a scene from a Romantic poem. Osteology offered Santiagüé clear visual perceptions—“fragments of solid reality”—allowing him to establish natural, logical connections between words and images, which he then had no problem recalling. Skeletons were not unlike the other intricate mechanisms that captivated him, like cannons and guns, and when he took the bones apart and put them back together again he experienced a similar thrill. Once more, his father tried to recruit him to the ranks of surgery, comparing the human body to a battlefield and legendary physicians to surgeons. Those arguments had no effect on Santiagüé. He had no interest at all in being a surgeon. “If things are looked at in their true light,” Cajal later admitted, “osteology constituted one more subject for [my] pictures.” One afternoon, in his final year at Huesca, a classmate of Santiagüé’s asked if he wanted to see a secret. They walked along the edge of the city to an abandoned church—one of many properties confiscated decades earlier by the Liberals during the desamortización, a systematic redistribution of ecclesiastical property—and descended the broad stone steps underground to the vault. Santiagüé’s friend knocked, and the door opened. Inside were trays of strange liquid and an eerie red light. Students from the institute had set up a darkroom. Even in Alto Aragon, Santiagüé had encountered traveling photographers, unmistakable in their pinstripe suits and button-down vests, watch chains dangling as they knelt to set up box cameras under black tents. Exposures were long and awkward; subjects had to sit still for several minutes, stared at by a giant accordion camera, until the bitter puff of magnesium smoke punctuated the interaction. In the secret darkroom in the vault of the church, Santiagüé witnessed the intricate process of wet collodion, the dominant method of photography at the time, an improvement over previous techniques such as the daguerreotype and calotype. First, the photographer smoothed a glass plate with a polishing stone and then treated the surface with a solvent, before brushing the plate absolutely clean, since even the smallest particle of dust would appear as a dark spot on the final image. A solution of syrupy liquid —collodion—was then poured onto the center of the surface and guided to the corners, photosensitizing the whole plate. Cajal recalled the aroma of collodion, slightly sweetened by the smell of ether, which is part of the solution, as “delicious.” The process itself was thrilling, even perilous, since gun cotton, added to the collodion, was highly flammable. After the plate was exposed to light and removed from the camera, pyrogallic acid— the developing agent—was poured in a sweeping motion over the plate. As the image slowly appeared, seemingly out of nothing, Santiagüé was “positively stupefied”; the photograph was so accurate that even the finest details were reproduced. His peers cared only about the commercial possibilities of photography, according to Cajal, but he was fascinated by the underlying principle, which he called “the theory of the latent image”— that hidden on the plate itself, there is a germ of some invisible structure, waiting to be exposed. From that moment on, Santiagüé became a lifelong devotee of photography, recording his life in images, constantly experimenting with techniques. He was his own favorite subject. His self-portraits were composed and staged in order to project an image of himself as he desired to be seen by others. They capture his fantasies and aspirations, and, as with every story that Cajal told, there is more than a hint of mythology. He used the most accurate method of portraying reality in order to communicate a carefully curated fiction. In one image from his adolescent years, the future Nobel laureate is shown wrestling, tautly muscle-bound and wearing a loincloth, facing off against another boy clutching a spear. Early on the morning of September 18, 1868, the residents of Cádiz, a city on the southern coast of Spain, were awakened by a twenty-one-gun salute. They gathered at the port, where the royal Spanish navy had arrived to declare an insurrection against the queen. Celebrations swept through the streets, and soon news of the rebellion spread to nearby towns, then on to cities like Málaga, Granada, and Seville, before reaching the northern parts of the country a week or so later. Cajal recalled waking up early one morning in Ayerbe with an eerie sense of restlessness. He walked down to the square, where he found the townspeople wildly cheering, shouting the names of the great Liberal saviors whose portraits he had drawn while apprenticing at the barbershop, his first artwork ever to be hung on a wall. Revolutionary proclamations were read aloud: demands for universal suffrage; freedom of the press, trade, and religion; and the abolition of the death penalty. They invoked morality and enlightenment, heroism and honor, echoing the rhetoric of Romantic novels. The rural police laid down their uniforms and peasants took up arms, wielding sickles and daggers. The September Revolution—which Queen Isabel called “the mortal enemy of tradition” and Liberals referred to as “the Glorious Revolution”— divided Spanish society between property owners and laborers. Rebels raised the red flag of socialism and burned a portrait of the queen in the town square. A mob paraded through the streets, shouting and jeering, chanting, “Down with the Bourbons! Death to the Conservatives!” and Santiagüé heartily joined in. In Santiagüé’s final year of secondary school, Latin and Greek—his least favorite courses—were replaced on the curriculum by natural history and a combined course of physics and chemistry. The science department at the institute was spectacularly equipped; the natural history reading room in the library featured thousands of volumes as well as a cabinet with sixteen hundred specimens, and there were a host of gadgets in the physics and chemistry room—levers, pulleys, and gears; pumps, cranes, and propellers; magnets, magic lanterns, and turbines—the kinds of strange contraptions that would captivate a young, curious mind. Classroom lectures had always seemed dry and pedantic; now they sparked and crackled. Nonetheless, his academic reputation was far from stellar. Cajal “was the typical student who was inattentive, lazy, disobedient, and annoying, a nightmare for his parents, teachers, and patrons,” one teacher at Huesca recalled. He “will only stop in jail,” predicted another, “if they do not hang him first.” In September 1869, at seventeen years of age, Santiagüé finally graduated with his baccalaureate degree from the Institute of Huesca. Three days later—not wasting any time—Justo accompanied Santiagüé to Zaragoza to enroll him in the medical school there, his own alma mater. Fearing a return of his son’s artistic demons, Justo arranged for him to stay with a local surgeon, a friend and former classmate named Mariano Bailo, who lived in the Arrabal, the same working-class neighborhood where Justo had spent his student days. Santiagüé also served as Bailo’s assistant, to gain experience in the field of surgery, which his father expected him to pursue as a career. “Farewell to ambitious dreams of glory, illusions of future greatness!” Cajal recalled lamenting. “I must exchange the magic palette of the painter for the nasty and prosaic bag of surgical instruments.” Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, was a legendary city of resistance. During the French siege of 1808, a small force of Aragonese volunteers managed to hold off Napoleon’s much greater army for days, armed with only a hodgepodge of old cannons and defending the thresholds of their homes with knives. So many Zaragozans were wounded that virtually every building was transformed into a hospital, yet as the city crumbled around them, they fired away with abandon, even glee, declaring the Virgin Mary their captain general and dancing and singing in the streets. Santiagüé was eager to reunite with his old friends from Huesca, now studying in Zaragoza, but they treated him coldly. After his transfer and apprenticeship, he had fallen a year or two behind his peers, who had since formed new friendships and abandoned him. Since he had been bullied in Ayerbe, Santiagüé had done everything possible to make himself indispensable to his gang. Despite not feeling brave, he noticed that when he acted bravely—during fights, for example—more and more people seemed to believe that he was brave. He now realized that his bravery had been a performance. Was he like Don Quixote? Had he been delusional the whole time? The Arrabal was located on the left bank of the Ebro, directly across a fifteenth-century stone bridge, which offered the best view of the city. “The sight of it was a great pleasure,” Cervantes wrote of Don Quixote’s arrival in Zaragoza. Santiagüé sat listening to the hissing and lapping of the shallow waves. Suddenly, he was overcome by the impulse to follow the course of a river. He hiked fifteen miles upstream and ten miles down, but his expeditions failed to satisfy him. What he wanted was to discover new territory, a virgin plot of land with “sylvan glades and idyllic wild-flower beds unprofaned by the footsteps of man.” He wanted to be like Robinson Crusoe, exploring his own island, far away.