They reply in the negative.
This time Benavides will not go looking for him. Some men wait apathetically for others to command them. But he will solve this on his own, and at once. He will call a taxi and take his wife home. He’s already leaving the house and crossing the garden. Halfway to the garage he stops: in front of its open doors he sees a dozen men dressed in blue rushing about. On their backs gleams a logo printed on a white rectangle: “Museum of Modern Art. Installation and Transportation.” Benavides realizes that the garage has been entirely emptied out. That is, all the furniture, every item or object that once formed part of the household landscape, has been removed, and now, in a larger, empty space, alone, unique, original, sits the work. And there are Corrales and Donorio, attentive, cordial, open to the artist’s feelings:
“How did you sleep, Benavides?”
“That’s my wife.”
Corrales looks at Donorio, and in his voice is the slow melody of growing disappointment.
“I told you, Donorio, this kind of site-specific exhibit is not to the artist’s liking. We should have brought the work to the museum.”
“My wife.”
“I’ve been working in this field for years, Corrales. Believe me, the public will prefer it this way.”
“But she’s my wife.”
“But, Benavides, you are not an artist for the common man. Your work is directed at a select audience of intellectuals, minds that scorn even the innovations of the museum, men who appreciate something more, above and beyond the simple work. That is . . .”
Donorio’s arm gestures in a flourish toward the garage, while Benavides and Corrales await his conclusion.
“Context,” Donorio finishes.
“Beautiful, quite so . . . How absurd to question his strategy,” says Corrales.
“But she’s my wife,” Benavides repeats.
“Benavides, please, this subject has already been discussed. The subject is not ‘the wife,’ it’s ‘violence’ . . . Let’s not go back over this, I beg you. We’ve agreed,” he sighs. “As I was saying: context. In any case, we’re going to add certain elements. Getting out of the museum is a novel way to go, but we must maintain standards, the right environment.”
“Yes, of course . . .” says Corrales.
Benavides repeats once more what he has already said over and over. He moves away from the men and approaches the suitcase. Donorio signals to the men in blue; Benavides makes a break for it. Someone shouts, “Don’t let him touch it!” and everyone stops what they’re doing to run after Benavides’s short steps, and he barely manages to touch the suitcase’s handle before a dozen heavy blue bodies pile on top of him. What a disgrace, his disgrace; in the darkness of other men’s weight, he concludes that death must be something like this. From far away, Donorio’s voice reaches him: precise instructions to be executed upon his own person. And that is the end of his short third day.
* * *
Benavides wakes up in the light of a new day, still far from his bed and his wife. This time he goes barefoot, without even shielding his body from the cold; he stands up and goes right out of the room, down the hallway and the stairs, out of the house and across the garden to reach the garage. The men in blue are gone. They’ve hung bright halogen lights from the ceiling, and there, in the middle of the room, the open suitcase frames the coiled body of his abandoned wife.
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.”