The blow from behind is hard, on the nape of his neck, and there ends his fourth day.
* * *
Benavides wakes up on the night of the fourth day, and without hesitating he puts his feet into his shoes and leaves the room. The nighttime light shines in through the hallway windows to guide him on his gloomy tour. What brings a man like him to flee the house of his doctor at that hour of the night? Can a professional like Corrales, surely under strict orders from Donorio, refuse to let him see his wife? Were the restrictions part of a treatment of utmost rigor, a strategy to cure him from an illness, surely venereal, that brought him to hallucinate strange murders or to doubt his very own doctor? While he goes down the main stairs with painstaking care, Benavides wonders if these men want something in particular from his wife, whether for some reason they have seen in her things that they don’t see in other women. Pleasant memories assault him like a wave of jealousy and desire; in the end, his wife is his wife and no one else’s.
In the darkness it’s hard to find the door out to the garden, where flashing signs light up the surroundings for seconds at a time. Soon he will reach the garage, he will get his wife out of there and go home with her in a taxi. So thinks Benavides until he discovers that his glory will be short-lived.
That is, until he receives, a little more to the left this time, that day’s second blow to the head.
* * *
“The man’s in bad shape, Corrales.”
“It’s the pressure. Success is not easily assimilated by small bodies, and we have to give him time.”
“But the opening is tomorrow.”
“And is he necessary, Donorio? Is it necessary to expose him like this?”
“Without the artist, the opening loses meaning. It’s what I was talking about with context. Do you remember, Corrales?”
“Yes, of course.”
“If the public recognizes themselves in the artist, the work’s effect is magnified. Do the test yourself; think what would have happened if on Sunday night, instead of Benavides, the work had been brought to you by an athletic bodybuilder with long hair and stylish shoes . . .”
“No, no, of course. Don’t think me stupid, either; the difference is . . . vast.”
“Violent, Corrales, like the work.”
On the bed, Benavides opens his eyes to find the two men in the room with him, sitting in armchairs.
“How do you feel, Benavides?”
Benavides closes his eyes.
“It seems he’s regained consciousness . . .”
Benavides opens his eyes again. Dr. Corrales comes over to raise his eyelids and study his left eye.
“Perhaps he loses his memory intermittently,” says Corrales as he shines the bright beam of a small flashlight into the center of a restless pupil.
“Are you feeling well, Benavides?”
Benavides screams, “I killed my wife, of my own volition and by myself!” and without taking his eyes from the men, he clutches the sweaty sheets.
Corrales makes an admonishing gesture, and his eyes meet Donorio’s. Both men’s thoughts hold unfocused doubts and the beginnings of disillusionment.
* * *
The finished installation galvanizes the media to announce the event. People form expectations and clamor for advance tickets. The air grows polluted with an anxious public’s murmurings and rises to the ears of Benavides, who—for the fifth day in a row—wakes up in this house. What is a man like him doing in this room, so far from his home and his wife? Can a doctor like Corrales enter with a formal suit folded over his right arm and a set of clean underwear in his left, and say, “The socks will be a bit baggy, but the suit is just right for a man like you”? Corrales sits at the foot of the bed and gives the patient’s legs a few pats, perhaps out of an affection that developed a while ago but of which Benavides has no memory, and finally he smiles and says things like “How well you’re looking, Benavides,” or “How I envy you, Benavides, an artist like yourself, on a day like today, with an eager public and the press on fire,” or “Don’t be nervous, there’s every indication the opening will be a success.” But Benavides is not happy: a night watchman, perhaps even Donorio himself, is monitoring the entrance to the garage, where his wife is waiting. It’s an inaccessible zone for a body as prone to being beaten as his, and it’s lit up, even in the shadows of night, with two potent spotlights at either side of the door, and, above them, bright signs that shamelessly pay homage to this kidnapping. It’s gotten to the point that Benavides cannot distinguish evil intentions from good ones, or evaluate his doctor’s postures with any certainty. He watches Corrales stretch the socks, and he sinks into a sudden unease.
Some hours later, doctor and patient study their suited-up bodies before the mirror.
“You see that it’s your size, Benavides?”
Benavides stands motionless while Corrales adjusts his tie for him.
“Perfect.” He points to their bodies in the mirror. “Just wait till the girls see you like this.”
After some respectful knocks at the door they hear the voice of one of the women:
“Mr. Donorio sent me to tell you that everything is ready, but if the artist needs, he can wait.”
“Not at all, let him know we’ll be right down.”
The room is large, but small compared with the crowd that has gathered. Many people didn’t get in and are waiting in the front yard, peering through the living room windows or standing in line at the door guarded by the men in blue. Inside, with the work still hidden behind a red velvet curtain, the public’s fervor grows.
Donorio takes the microphone.
“Ladies, gentlemen . . .”
The audience listens to the speaker.
“Today is a very special day, for me and for all of you . . .”
A few timid comments float up from the crowd and are lost in the thickness of a growing silence.
“Art is memorious, dear audience, and from the least likely molecules of this, our society, true artists majestically emerge. Ladies, gentlemen, scholars, I wish to introduce you to a dreamer, a friend, but above all else an artist on whom the world cannot turn its back . . . Benavides, if you would . . .”
Amid the crowd’s thundering applause, pushed forward by Corrales, Benavides makes his way toward Donorio, who has accompanied his words with a gesture of welcome. When the artist ascends to the stage and discovers the audience, the audience discovers in him the candid, humble features of pure and sincere creation. An excited ovation grows. It calms, or pauses briefly, when Donorio returns to the microphone. The monologue continues, but the audience does not take their eyes from the artist, who studies the ceiling and the walls. One hundred pairs of eyes expectantly follow the creative movement of the artist, so removed from their gazes and their praise.
“. . . something of the past remains in our collective memory, in the brilliant minds of our artists. Horror, hatred, death, all throb intensely in their persecuted minds . . .”
The artist discovers the large red velvet curtain to one side of the stage, behind which, one presumes, the work awaits. But what is it that so disturbs the artist? Why, in his simple, genius face, do pale glimmers of fear suddenly emerge?
“Gentlemen, ladies, what you are about to see goes beyond the superfluous emotions of common art. The work, this work, is the answer. Benavides, we’re listening,” says Donorio, and finally he leaves the microphone and cedes his place to the artist.
The audience waits. A man in blue runs to the microphone and lowers it to Benavides’s height. Benavides looks at the microphone like someone studying the weight of a crime, its punishment. He takes three steps forward. It seems he is going to speak.
Donorio looks for the complicit gaze of Corrales, who keeps his eyes on the artist, proud, as though looking at a child who has finally become a man. Benavides turns toward the curtain, and th
en back toward the audience. There is a thrilling silence. Then Benavides takes the microphone and says:
“I killed her.”
The message takes time to sink in. Once the audience processes the words and understands their meaning, they start slowly to applaud, moved. Euphoria breaks out. He says he killed her, they say to one another. Now, that is intense, they comment. Pure poetry, shouts someone in the back. The evening’s first tears of emotion fall. On one side of the stage Corrales nods along with the general murmur. Donorio moves the artist aside and returns to his position. Two men in blue come onstage and stand to either side of the red cloth. And Donorio says:
“Friends, the work . . .”
And like the sun brings light or like the artist discovers the most human truths, the curtain that had covered the creation now, slowly before the collective hunger, falls to the floor. And there is the work: violent, real, carnally alive. Donorio has lost the public’s attention, but even so he names it. He pronounces the title, savoring every letter:
“Violence.”
And the name lands: it descends to the crowd, and the crowd explodes.
The euphoria is uncontainable. People shove, try to climb onstage. A dozen men in blue form a barrier that blocks their advance. But the audience wants to see, and the barrier gives way. Excitement. Commotion. Something emanates from that work and it drives them mad. The sovereign image of the purple body. Death a few feet away. Human flesh, human skin. Giant thighs. Coiled in a suitcase. Squeezed into the leather. And the smell. The artist is still very close to the suitcase. Too exposed. His singular face stands out in the crowd, and they discover him. There is a surprising moment. When they realize it’s him, they lift him up, pass him from hand to hand. Corrales shouts: “The artist!” and some men in blue leave their human barricade to rescue Benavides. The audience, after hearing Corrales’s cries, lets go of Benavides, and he is lost among the people like a pearl in muddy water. After the stillness of married life, this unprecedented experience excites him. Hidden in the crowd, concealed even from the crowd itself, he moves through the euphoric bodies toward the nucleus of the disturbance. There are shouts, shoves, people fight to get a better view. Then Benavides feels a chasm open. It opens in front of him and separates him from the rest of humanity. Corrales sees it all, because he intuits the artist’s feelings. He has bet on Benavides’s future. He wishes, in the small man, for a kind of discovery: the ancestral pleasure of knowing oneself a creator, anxiety contained. He wants to see Benavides’s hands squeeze absent matter in the air, seek something to knead, sense the scant time and the colossal task, forget the leisurely latency of the common man. To see, before his candidly expectant eyes, the matter: dozens of bodies that throb and wait, the primordial mass to be rent, coiled, forced, to attain, majestically, under the expert hand of a practiced superior, the precise measures of the leather suitcase.
And though none of that happens, Corrales does not feel frustrated. His close relationship with human processes fills him with faith. Donorio smiles at him. Benavides, finally restrained by the custodians, withdraws through the main door.
With growing enthusiasm, everyone welcomes smiling waitresses bearing champagne. The opening has been a success.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samanta Schweblin was chosen as one of the twenty-two best writers in Spanish under the age of thirty-five by Granta in 2010, and in 2017 she was named one of the Bogotá39’s best Latin American writers under age forty. Her first novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. She is the author of award-winning story collections, and her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Megan McDowell has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, and Diego Zuñiga, among others. Her translation of Zambra’s novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, and her translation of Samanta Schweblin’s first novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. McDowell’s story translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Vice, among others. She is from Kentucky and now lives in Santiago, Chile.
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Mouthful of Birds Page 16