Саманта Швеблин - Mouthful of Birds

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.

But time passes and nothing happens. Every object is composed of millions of shifting particles, and yet Benavides cannot perceive anything in the room that could be considered movement. Finally, he stands up. He’s slept in his clothes, so now he only has to put on his shoes. He opens the door. His eyes hurt from the light coming in the windows at the end of the hallway. He isn’t sure which of the many doors leads to the room where he left his wife the night before.

He finds the study, and matters get worse. What it holds, or more like what it doesn’t hold, is distressing. Inside the room, nothing that resembles a suitcase. And the wretchedness finds Benavides even in a house that isn’t his: someone has taken his wife. Walking quickly, he searches the second floor, goes down the stairs, crosses the central hall toward more corridors, enters parts of the house heretofore unknown to him: there are even more hallways, other rooms, winter gardens distributed capriciously throughout the massive house, and a large kitchen into which he bursts, exhausted, only to have three meticulously uniformed cooks look at him for a few seconds, their faces betraying no surprise. But Dr. Corrales is nowhere to be found, and Benavides does not see his suitcase or any other, and he certainly does not find his wife up walking and talking. The women in the kitchen return to their culinary tasks.