Mouthful of Birds

by Samanta Schweblin

  Mom called Aníbal and explained to him that this was all happening because I was “very sensitive,” and I wasn’t prepared for “failure.” But that didn’t have anything to do with it. After seven days with no word I decided to call John at his office. His secretary answered. “Good morning, sir; no, sir, the doctor isn’t in; no, sir, the doctor can’t call you back.” I asked why, what was wrong, why was John doing this to me, why didn’t John want to see me? The secretary was quiet for a few seconds and then said, “The doctor took a few days off, sir,” and she hung up on me. That weekend I painted six more pictures of Korean heads splitting open on the concrete, and Aníbal was very excited with the work. He said the “Korean thing” gave “a new feel to the whole series,” but I was boiling with fury and also still very sad. And then Aníbal, on the condition I wouldn’t abandon my “new wave of inspiration,” got me John’s home address and telephone number. I called immediately, and a Korean woman answered. I said I wanted to talk to John, and I repeated his name several times. The woman said something I didn’t understand, something short and fast. She repeated it. Then a man answered, some other Korean who wasn’t John, either, and he also said things that I didn’t understand.

  So I made a decision, an important one. I wrapped the painting in the sheet, dragged it outside as best I could, waited forever until I caught one of those big taxis with enough room in back for the painting, and I gave the driver John’s address. John lived in a Korean world fifty blocks from my neighborhood, full of signs in Korean and of Koreans. The taxi driver asked me if I was sure about the address, and whether I wanted him to wait for me at the door. I told him that wasn’t necessary. I paid him and he helped me unload the painting. John’s house was old and big. I leaned the painting against the entrance gate, rang the doorbell, waited. There are a lot of things that make me nervous. Not understanding something is one of the worst, and the other worst thing is waiting. But I waited. I think these are the things one does for one’s friends. I had talked to Mom a few days earlier and she’d said that my friendship with John suffered from a “cultural gap,” too, and that made everything more complicated. I told her that a cultural gap was a thing that John and I could fight. I just needed to talk to him, to find out why he was so angry.

  The living room curtain moved. Someone looked out for a second from inside. A woman’s voice said “Hello” through the intercom. I said I wanted to see John. “John, no,” said the woman, “no.” She said other things in Korean, the intercom made some noises, and then everything went silent. I rang again. Waited again. Rang. I heard the bolts in the door, and a Korean man older than John opened it, looked at me, and said: “John, no.” He said it angrily, scowling, but without looking me in the eyes, and then shut the door again. I realized I didn’t feel well. Something was wrong in me, inside me, something was coming out of its place again, like in the old days. I rang the bell again. I yelled “John!” again, again. A Korean man who was walking on the sidewalk across the street stopped to look. I yelled at the intercom again. I just wanted to talk to John. I yelled his name again. Because John was my friend. Because “gaps” didn’t have anything to do with us. Because we were two people, John and I, and that’s what having a friend is. I pressed the doorbell again, one long ring, and my finger hurt from pressing so hard. The Korean across the street said something in his language. I don’t know what, it was like he wanted to explain something to me. And me, again, “John, John,” really loud, like something terrible was happening to me. The Korean came over to me and made a hand gesture to calm me down. I took my hand from the doorbell to change fingers and kept shouting. I heard blinds fall in another house. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. Like I didn’t have enough of something.

  Then the Korean, he touched my shoulder. His fingers on my shirt. And it was an enormous pain: the cultural gap. My body shook, it shook and I couldn’t control it, my body didn’t understand things anymore, like in the beginning, like other times. I let go of the painting, which fell facedown onto the sidewalk, and I grabbed the Korean by the hair. A small Korean, skinny and nosy. A shitty Korean who had gotten up at five in the morning for fifteen years to reinforce the cultural gap for eighteen hours a day. I held him by the hair so hard that my nails dug into the palm of my hand. And that was the third time I smashed someone’s head against the concrete.

  * * *

  When they ask me if “splitting open the Korean’s head on the back of my canvas hides an aesthetic intention,” I look up and pretend to think. That’s something I learned from watching other artists talk on TV. It’s not that I don’t understand the question, it’s just that I’m really not interested. I have legal problems, a lot of legal problems. Because I don’t know how to tell the difference between Koreans and Japanese, or Japanese and Chinese, and every time I see one of any of them, I grab him by the hair and start to slam his head against the concrete. Aníbal got me a good lawyer and he’s claiming “insanity,” which is when you’re crazy, and it’s much better in the eyes of the law. People say I’m racist, “a hugely evil” man, but my paintings sell for millions, and I’m starting to think about what my mom always said, which is that the problem with the world is that it’s in a great crisis of love. And also that, when it comes down to it, these are not good times for very sensitive people.

  THE SIZE OF THINGS

  All I knew about Enrique Duvel was that he came from a rich family and that, though he was sometimes spotted out with women, he still lived with his mother. On Sundays, he cruised around the plaza in his convertible, withdrawn or self-absorbed, never looking at or greeting any of his neighbors, and then he would disappear until the following weekend. I’d kept the toy store I’d inherited from my father, and one day I caught Duvel in the street, peering dubiously in through the display window of my shop. I mentioned this to Mirta, my wife, who said that maybe I’d gotten him confused with someone else. But then she saw him herself. Yes, on some afternoons, Enrique Duvel stood outside the toy store for a while, looking in through the window.

  The first time he came inside, he seemed irresolute, as though he was ashamed and not at all sure what he was looking for. He stood by the counter and scanned the shelves behind me. I waited for him to speak. He played with his car keys for a bit, and finally he asked for a model-plane kit. I asked him if he wanted me to gift wrap it, but he said no.

  He came back several days later. Again, he looked in the window for a while, then came inside and asked for the next model plane in the series. I asked him if he was a collector, but he said no.

  On successive visits, he moved on to model cars, ships, and trains. He came almost every week, leaving with something each time. One night, I went outside to close the store’s shutters and there he was, alone in front of the window. It must have been around nine at night, and there was no one out on the streets. It took me a minute to recognize him, to understand that this trembling man with a red face and weepy eyes could really be Enrique Duvel. He seemed scared. I didn’t see his car, and for a moment I thought he’d been attacked.”Duvel? Are you all right?”

  He made a confused gesture.

  “It’s best if I stay here,” he said.

  “Here at the shop? What about your mother?” I instantly regretted my question, afraid I’d offended him, but he said, “She locked herself in the house with all the keys. She says she doesn’t want to see me again.”

  We looked at each other a moment, not quite knowing what to say.

  “I’d best stay here,” he repeated.

  I knew that Mirta would never agree, but by that point I owed the man almost twenty percent of my monthly earnings, and I couldn’t just turn him away.

  “But you see, Duvel . . . there’s nowhere to sleep here.”

  “I’ll pay for the night,” he said. He went through his pockets. “I don’t have any money on me . . . But I can work. I’m sure there’s something I can do.”

  Though I knew it
wasn’t a good idea, I brought him inside. It was dark when we entered. When I turned the display lights on, their reflection gleamed in his eyes. Something told me Duvel wouldn’t sleep that night, and I was afraid to leave him alone. I saw a towering stack of boxes full of toys that I hadn’t had time to sort through, and I imagined the rich and refined Duvel—the sometime subject of Mirta’s girlfriends’ gossip—stocking my empty shelves overnight. Giving him the task could bring problems, but at least it would keep him busy.

  “Could you deal with those boxes?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll explain in more detail tomorrow. You just have to organize the items by type.” I went over to the merchandise. “The puzzles with the puzzles, for example. You can see where they go, and just put everything together, there, on the shelves. And if—”

  “I understand perfectly,” Duvel said, interrupting me.

  He walked away from me with his eyes fixed on the floor, making a slight movement with his index finger, as if he wanted to shush someone but felt too humiliated to do it. I was going to tell him how there was just an old armchair in the storage room to sleep on, and to give him some advice about the toilet handle, but I didn’t want to bother him anymore. I let him be and left without saying goodbye.

  The next day, I got to the store a few minutes early; I was relieved to see that the shop’s shutters were up. Only once I was inside did I realize that leaving Duvel there alone had been a tremendous mistake. Nothing was where it belonged. If at that moment a customer had come in and asked for a particular superhero figure, it would have taken me all morning to find it. I remember thinking about Mirta and how I would explain this to her, and also the sudden exhaustion I felt as I calculated the hours it would take me to reorganize everything. Then I realized something else, something so strange that, for a moment, I couldn’t take it in: Duvel had reorganized the store chromatically. Modeling clay, decks of cards, crawling baby dolls, pedal cars—they were all mixed together and arranged by color. In the display cases, along the aisles, on the shelves: a subtly shifting rainbow stretched from one end of the store to the other. I still remember that sight as the beginning of disaster. He has to go, I thought. I have to get this man out of the store right now.

  Duvel was looking at me. He was very serious, standing there in front of his great rainbow. I was trying to find the words to say what I wanted when his eyes lit on something behind me. I turned toward the street to see what it was. Outside the window, a woman and her two children were looking into the store. Their hands were pressed to the glass like visors as they talked excitedly about what they saw inside, as if something marvelous were moving through the aisles. It was the start of the school day, and at that hour the block was full of children and parents in a hurry. But they couldn’t help stopping in front of the windows, and a crowd grew. By noon, the store was packed: never had business been as good as it was that morning. It was hard to find the things that people asked for, but soon I discovered that I had only to name an item and Duvel would nod and run to get it. He located things with an efficient ease I found disconcerting.

  “Call me by my first name,” he told me at the end of that long day of work, “if that’s all right with you.”

  * * *

  The color arrangement drew attention to items that had never stood out before. For example, the green swimming flippers followed the squeaky frogs that occupied the final ranks of turquoise, while the puzzles depicting glaciers—maroon at the earthen base of the photograph—brought the rainbow full circle by joining their snowy peaks with volleyballs and stuffed white lions.

  The store didn’t close for siesta that day, or any of the following days, and little by little, we started pushing back our closing time. Enrique slept in the store from then on. Mirta agreed that we should set up a space for him in the storage room. At first he had to make do with a mattress on the floor, but soon we found a bed. And once or twice a week, during the night, Enrique reorganized the store. He set up scenes with the giant building blocks; he modified the interior light by constructing intricate walls of toys against the windows; he built castles that stretched across the aisles. It was useless to offer him a salary; he wasn’t interested. “It’s best if I just stay here,” he’d say. “Better than a salary.”

  He didn’t leave the store, or, at least, not that I ever saw. He ate what Mirta sent him: packed meals that started out as slices of bread with cold cuts in the evenings, and later became elaborate lunches and dinners.

  Enrique no longer went near the model kits he used to love so much. He put them on the store’s highest shelves and there they stayed, always. They were the only things that remained in one spot. Now he preferred puzzles and board games. In the mornings, if I arrived early, I’d find him sitting at the table with a glass of milk, playing with two colors of Chinese checkers or fitting the last pieces of a large fall landscape into place. He’d grown quieter, but he never lost his attentiveness toward the customers. He got into the habit of making his bed in the mornings and cleaning the table and sweeping the floor after he ate. When he was done, he came over to me or to Mirta—who, because of the extra business, had started working behind the counter—and said, “I made my bed,” or “I finished sweeping,” or even “I finished what I had to do.” And it was that manner of his—obsequious, as Mirta called it—that made us start to worry, somehow.

  * * *

  One morning, I found that he had built a small zoo on the table using dolls, farm animals, and Legos. He was drinking his glass of milk while he opened the gate for the horses and made them gallop, one by one, over to a dark sweater that served as a mountain. I greeted him and went to the counter to start working. When he came over to me he seemed embarrassed.

  “I already made the bed,” he said, “and I finished what—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter if you make the bed or not. It’s your room, Enrique.”

  I thought we were understanding each other, but he looked down at the floor, even more embarrassed, and said, “Sorry, it won’t happen again. Thank you.”

  After a while, Enrique also stopped reorganizing the puzzles and board games. He placed the boxes on the upper shelves alongside the model kits, and retrieved them only if a customer asked for them specifically.

  “You have to talk to him,” Mirta said. “People are going to think we don’t have puzzles anymore. Just because he doesn’t use them doesn’t mean they’re not for sale.”

  But I didn’t say anything. Things were going well with the business, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  Over time, he started to reject certain foods. He would eat only meat, mashed potatoes, and pasta with simple sauces. If we gave him anything else, he would push it away, so Mirta started cooking only the things that he liked.

  Every once in a while the customers would give him coins, and when he had saved enough he bought from the store a blue plastic cup with a convertible car in relief. He used it at breakfast, and in the morning, when reporting the state of his bed and his room, he began to add, “I also washed my cup.”

  Mirta told me worriedly that one afternoon she’d been watching Enrique play with a boy who’d come into the store, and he suddenly grabbed a superhero figure and refused to share it. When the boy started to cry, Enrique stomped off and locked himself in the storage room.

  “You know how much I care about Enrique,” my wife said that night, “but we just can’t let him get away with things like that.”

  Although he still had his genius when it came to reorganizing the merchandise, over time he also stopped playing with the little articulated dolls and the Legos, and he archived them, along with the board games and model kits, on the now overcrowded upper shelves. The range of toys that he still reorganized and kept within the customers’ reach was so small and monotonous that it barely attracted the youngest children.

  “Why do you put those
things up so high, Enrique?” I asked him.

  He looked disconsolately at the shelves, as if, in effect, they were too high for him as well. He didn’t answer; he was quieter all the time.

  Little by little, sales went back down. Enrique’s rainbows, displays, and castles lost the splendor of those first days, when almost all the toys participated in his radical remodeling. Now everything happened at knee-level and below. Enrique was almost always hunched over or kneeling in front of a new pile of toys that was ever smaller and more amorphous. The place had started to empty of customers. Soon we didn’t need Mirta’s help anymore, and Enrique and I were left alone.

  I remember the last afternoon I saw Enrique. He hadn’t wanted his lunch, and he was wandering up and down the aisles. He looked sad and lonely. I felt, in spite of everything, that Mirta and I owed him a lot. I wanted to cheer him up, so I climbed the moving ladder—which I hadn’t used since Enrique had started helping me in the store—to reach the highest shelves. I chose a model kit for him, an imported one of an old-fashioned train. The box said that it had more than a thousand pieces, and, if you added batteries, its lights worked. It was the best model train we had, and it cost a fortune. But Enrique deserved it, and I wanted to give it to him. I climbed down with the gift and called to him from the counter. He was coming back from the farthest shelves, a violet stuffed animal—I think it was a rabbit—hanging from his right hand. Head down, he stopped and looked at me. He looked small among the shelves. I called to him again but he suddenly crouched down, as though startled, and stayed there. It was a strange movement that I didn’t understand. I left the train on the counter and approached him slowly to see if something was wrong.