Mouthful of Birds

by Samanta Schweblin

  A few months after high school started, the father left again. And one afternoon, finally, the father managed not to come back. For a time he was on the lookout, expecting the police to find him again. Would his father have some document with his address on him? His mother quickly got used to living without her husband. Almost three years later, the phone rang and it was his father. “I feel very alone,” his voice said.

  “Where are you, Dad? I’ll come get you,” he said, and when there was only silence, he tried: “Are you to the west? Or should I take the highway? Are you near or far?” He waited, but the father had already hung up.

  “Does it hurt there?” Mrs. Linn asked sometimes, and her hands moved around the painful zones.

  But, and maybe it was better this way, she almost never asked the question when it really did hurt.

  Later on, his sister left home, and he did the same a few years after. He left on a Saturday; he remembers because his father came home on a Wednesday. He had waited for his father nearly seven years, but all it took was for him to pack his own suitcases and leave home, and his father, just four days later, rang the doorbell of the house. His mother says that she looked out and saw him waving at her from the gate, and that for some days after, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. They agreed to sleep in separate rooms, and soon they grew used to each other again.

  When his son was born, the past became distant for all of them. They had Sunday dinners with the family and his father tousled the grandson’s hair with such affection that he wondered if he hadn’t exaggerated the pain his father had caused him. When it came down to it, he thought, maybe that’s what adolescence was all about: the invention of a couple of unforgivable events that help you leave home. And that’s the way things still were with them.

  A few weeks ago, he went to see Mrs. Linn without an appointment. He had his father in the passenger seat, in hermetic silence. He needed to see her, and she understood that as soon as she heard that both of them were in the waiting room. She wasted no time ushering him in, while his father waited outside.

  Mrs. Linn asked him to sit on the massage table and tell her what had happened. He said that that afternoon he’d been reading in the kitchen when his son came to get him and dragged him to his room. He’d prepared a little puppet show, and asked his father to sit and watch it. His son went behind an improvised curtain, and he could catch glimpses of the boy as he made a great effort to put the puppet show on well. He had never seen his son so serious. And now Mrs. Linn had to be patient, because what happened was something strange, difficult to explain.

  Mrs. Linn nodded, but she reached toward her tubes of lotion and picked one up before sitting down beside the massage table.

  The boy brought a puppet out onto the stage and the puppet opened its mouth, white and huge, and it trembled without closing it, as if it were screaming. He was only a few feet away, as alarmed as the puppet. But what happened next, what happened next was impossible to explain to Mrs. Linn. The boy hid the puppet behind the curtain and brought it out again, made it scream again, and hid it again. His son did that over and over, until he recognized the pain between the nape of his neck and his throat. The pain that stiffened him and terrified him in his dreams, the pain that tied him to his father and to his own image in the mirror, the yellow pain.

  Mrs. Linn held her largest tube of lotion, and she accidentally squeezed it too hard. The almond perfume flooded the room.

  “I felt,” he said, trying to understand himself, “my son’s boundless need for attention. An insatiable need, that’s what I felt. A need impossible to satisfy.”

  Mrs. Linn put down the tube of lotion and nervously extended her fingers, as though stretching them.

  “And then I couldn’t look at him, at my son. I looked away.” He tried to concentrate, but he felt a little dizzy.

  Then the boy put down the puppet and he looked out from the stage himself. He hid behind the curtain for a few seconds and then appeared again. The pain he felt every time his son disappeared was something brutal. Every time the boy hid behind the curtain again, an invisible thread pulled at him violently.

  Mrs. Linn brought the tube of lotion to her chest, and for a moment her elbows poked out behind her, more ready than ever to sink and compress.

  “I understood that I could no longer live with him, or without him. It was a huge mistake, whatever it was that joined us. A tragedy in which we would both fail miserably.”

  Mrs. Linn handed him the tube of lotion and he held it, and somehow the tube gave him the strength to go on.

  He tried to explain himself: he couldn’t meet the boy’s gaze. He looked for a point among the toys in the room, a fixed point that would save him from the panic, and he latched on to a yellow puppet hanging near the window.

  Mrs. Linn’s arms now hung straight down from her shoulders and her fingers were just barely moving, as if they were practicing in the air a new way to knead.

  “So I went to get my father, and I made him get into the car. I got on the highway and drove in silence for about thirty miles.”

  For a few seconds Mrs. Linn’s fingers stopped, as if they’d lost the thread or didn’t entirely understand what he had just said, but as soon as he went on, Mrs. Linn’s fingers followed him.

  His father didn’t say anything as they drove, and when the city’s lights started to disappear, he stopped the car on the side of the road and asked his father to get out.

  “I couldn’t leave home. I’m as weak as my father was. But there is something I could do, something that could change things in the long term.”

  He could give his father the push that he’d needed his whole life in order to leave them. He could forgive him and give him permission. He could sacrifice himself and disrupt this tragic cycle: loosen a link in the chain to break the circle. Maybe that way he would free his own son from the pain of sons, and his son’s children from the same pain.

  Mrs. Linn leaned over toward her shelf and quickly exchanged the tube of lotion.

  He got out of the car and turned around to open his father’s door. What he felt at that moment was the complete opposite of fear—it was something close to madness, but with the absolute certainty he was taking the right step. The exciting anguish of recognizing that what one is doing will ultimately change something important. To free his father was to free them all. His father had always known he had to leave. Now his son was there to help him. But the father didn’t move.

  “He didn’t move,” he said. “I told him to get out. I waited. I said it again, harshly. But he couldn’t even look me in the eyes.”

  He’d only sunk into his seat, terrified.

  “Where is your father?” asked Mrs. Linn. “Bring him in.” He looked at her, he looked at his Mrs. Linn. He hesitated a moment, trying to emerge from his story’s aura, and a gentle push on his shoulder set him in motion.

  “Go on, get him.”

  When he came back with his father, Mrs. Linn had turned on her two lavender vaporizers. She circled the father and the son a few times, as if she needed to be sure they were similar enough. Then she had the father sit on the massage table. Perhaps the father thought he was dealing with something else, because before he gave himself over completely and let the specialist work, he made his son promise not to say a word to his mother. His son assured him he would not, and he had to explain that his face went into the opening, and that it wasn’t anything painful.

  Mrs. Linn indicated that he, on the other hand, should wait seated in the armchair beside the table. But he was restless and didn’t sit down, and before he knew it, Mrs. Linn’s elbows, fists, and knees climbed up his father like a big spider in a trance. They sank and spun over his shoulders, his shoulder blades, his spine and coccyx. Her fists compressed the waist, then lifted it and dropped it. His father’s entire body let itself be kneaded and resettled. On the table, Mrs. Linn held him by the shoul
ders, arching him back more than he would have thought a father could arch. There were tugs, pushes, rotations. The oiled elbows sank into the hips and he, never taking his eyes from the father, let his body fall, completely relaxed, into the armchair. As if Mrs. Linn had been waiting for exactly that moment, she dug one of her knees into his father’s spine. It was a quick and surgical movement. Something cracked in his body, so loudly he felt it in his own, so loudly that he was frightened by the tug, the precise and expert correction. The three of them were still for a few seconds. Then, with relief, he understood it was all a good sign.

  Mrs. Linn said goodbye to them in the waiting room. The receptionist made a file for his father and handed him a card.

  They walked to the car and made the trip back in silence. They passed the plaza, and at the stoplight to cross the avenue, they both sat looking at the pedestrian crosswalk. There were green, red, and yellow lights. There was a turnoff for each street, and at each corner everyone knew what to do. He waited for his signal, and his father accepted the wait. When the light changed to green, they were already feeling much better.

  THE HEAVY SUITCASE OF BENAVIDES

  He returns to the room carrying a suitcase. Durable, lined in brown leather, it stands on four wheels and offers up its handle elegantly at knee level. He doesn’t regret his actions. He thinks that the stabbing of his wife had been fair, but he also knows that few people would understand his reasons. And that’s why he opts for the following plan: Wrap the body in garbage bags to keep the blood from seeping. Open the suitcase next to the bed and take every pain required to bend the body of a woman dead after twenty-nine years of marriage, and push it toward the floor so it falls into the suitcase. Unaffectionately cram the extra flesh into the free space, finally getting the body to fit. Once that’s done, more out of diligence than caution, gather the bloody sheets and put them into the washing machine. Swaddled in leather atop four now buckling wheels, the woman’s weight doesn’t diminish in the slightest, and though Benavides is small, he has to lean down a little to reach the handle, a gesture that lends neither grace nor efficiency to his task. But Benavides is an organized man, and within a few hours he’s out on the street, at night, taking short steps and pulling the suitcase behind him, walking toward Dr. Corrales’s house.

  Dr. Corrales lives nearby. There’s a large, plant-covered gate above which loom the residence’s upper floors; Benavides rings the doorbell. A feminine voice on the intercom says, “Hello?” And Benavides says, “It’s Benavides, I need to talk to Dr. Corrales.” The intercom crackles like it’s on its last legs, then falls silent. Standing on tiptoe, Benavides peers between the lush plants growing on the other side of the brick wall, but he can’t see anything. He rings the doorbell again. The voice on the intercom says, “Hello?” And Benavides says, again, “It’s Benavides, I want to talk to Dr. Corrales.”

  The device makes the same noises and is silent again. Benavides, perhaps tired out by the tensions of the day, lays the suitcase on the ground and sits down on it. A while later, the gate opens and some men emerge, saying their goodbyes. Benavides stands up and looks at the men, but doesn’t see Dr. Corrales among them.

  “I need to speak to Dr. Corrales,” says Benavides.

  One of the men asks his name.

  “Benavides.”

  The man tells him to wait a moment and goes back inside the house. The rest of the men look at Benavides curiously. Some minutes later, the man who had gone inside returns:

  “The doctor is waiting for you,” he tells Benavides, and Benavides takes hold of his suitcase and enters the house with the man.

  It’s no surprise to find Dr. Corrales in the midst of displaying his talents before a dozen of his disciples. Sitting upright at the piano, surrounded by young and beautiful admirers, he gives himself over to a sonata that grows more demanding by the second. Benavides waits among the columns in the center of the hall until the performance ends, and the men who had surrounded Dr. Corrales applaud and open up the semicircle they had formed around him. Dr. Corrales gratefully accepts the glass of champagne he is offered. A man approaches the doctor and whispers something in his ear, looking over at Benavides. Corrales smiles and motions Benavides over. Benavides and his suitcase approach.

  “How are you, Benavides . . . ?”

  “Doctor, I need to speak with you in private.”

  “Tell me, Benavides, we’re all friends here . . .”

  “Telling you is no problem, Doctor. The thing is that . . .” Benavides looks at his suitcase. “It’s that I need to show you something.”

  Dr. Corrales lights a cigarette and studies the suitcase.

  “All right, no matter. I’ll give you five minutes, Benavides. Come with me to my study.”

  The white marble stairs are hard for Benavides, who bears the inconvenience of that oversize suitcase. The next staircase, which starts on the second floor, is worse still. It’s too narrow, with high, short steps framed by dark corridor walls papered in brown, black, and wine-colored arabesques, and it makes Benavides’s efforts into an exaggerated struggle. Dragging the heavy suitcase step by step, he is soon drenched in sweat, while Dr. Corrales’s agile and unhampered body bounds away and disappears up the stairs. And perhaps it’s the damp, dark solitude in which Benavides finds himself that makes him reflect on and doubt the present. Not the immediate present—that is, the present of the stairs, the effort, and the sweat—but that of the murder. Maybe this is when he tells himself it could all be a dream, that he’s been fantasizing again about killing his wife. He wonders if he is now climbing the stairs to his doctor’s study—the doctor he has imposed upon at two-thirty in the morning, taking him away from his famous and prestigious guests—only to have to tell him, Look, Doctor, I’m sorry, but this has all been a mistake. What to do, then? It would be senseless to lie and useless to run back down the stairs, given that in his next session with the doctor he would have to tell the truth anyway, and he’d also have to come up with some excuse that would justify fleeing in the wee morning hours with a heavy suitcase in tow.

  At the top of the stairs Benavides finds Dr. Corrales waiting by the small door to his study, waving him in. Once inside, the doctor turns on a small lamp; its tenuous light barely illuminates the space around them. He motions Benavides to a chair on the other side of the desk. Without letting go of the suitcase handle, Benavides obeys. The doctor puts on a pair of glasses and searches in his file cabinet for the last name Benavides.

  “Very well, why are we in such a hurry to move your next session up thirty-eight hours?”

  Benavides shifts in his seat.

  “Doctor, this is all a big misunderstanding, I owe you an apology. You see . . .”

  Dr. Corrales observes Benavides over his eyeglasses.

  “It’s a dream. I mean . . . I’m confused, for a moment I thought I had killed my wife and stuffed her into this suitcase, and now I understand that really—”

  Dr. Corrales interrupts him:

  “Let’s see if I understand, Benavides . . . You barge into my house at two-thirty in the morning while I’m having an intimate party, with a suitcase you say holds your wife, murdered and stuffed inside, and now you’re trying to convince me that it’s all a dream so you can get up and leave, just like that . . .”

  Benavides clutches the handle.

  “You think I’m stupid, Benavides.”

  “No, Doctor.”

  Dr. Corrales looks at him for a moment. A few seconds at him, a few seconds at his suitcase. He doesn’t seem to be annoyed or put out. It rather seems that, somewhere deep inside him, he has already made some kind of decision.

  “Stand up!”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Benavides stands up without letting go of the handle, a hindrance that makes him lean slightly to his right.

  “You, sir, are highly upset. Exhausted. We’re going to try to calm down, okay?”


  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Leave your wife here and follow me.”

  “My wife?”

  “Didn’t you say that was your wife?”

  Corrales is already heading for the door, but Benavides is unable to let go of the suitcase handle.

  “Relax, Benavides. You’re overexcited. You need rest. I’ll give you a room, you can sleep for a bit, and in the meantime I’ll think about what we’ll do. How does that sound?”

  “No, Doctor, I’d rather . . .”

  Corrales pushes a glass of water toward Benavides. He gives him two white pills.

  “This will help you,” he says, and he watches until Benavides obeys and swallows them.

  He urges Benavides to leave the study without the suitcase.

  “We’ll come back for her later,” says Corrales.

  They walk down a carpeted hallway along which every few feet there are two doors across from each other. Corrales stops before the third set of doors and opens the one on the right.

  “Your room,” he announces. “Rest while I take care of your problem.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Benavides wakes up in the light of a new day, and for a moment he believes himself to be in his own bed, beside his wife, on an ordinary unhappy morning. Quickly, he realizes his situation.

  What to do with his wretchedness? To think that just a few rooms away his wife awaits him stuffed inside a suitcase. He is sure he will hear the doctor’s voice on the other side of the door: Wake up, Benavides, your problem is solved, or Good morning, Benavides, I’m here with your wife and she’s feeling better now, or simply Wake up, Benavides, it was all a bad dream, let’s have some breakfast while we wait for your taxi. It’s the problem’s prompt resolution that matters here, not the manner by which it is solved.