Саманта Швеблин - Mouthful of Birds

“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 shoulders, 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.

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.