Mouthful of Birds

THE SIZE OF THINGS

All I knew about Enrique Duvel was that he came from a rich family and that, though he was sometimes spotted out with women, he still lived with his mother. On Sundays, he cruised around the plaza in his convertible, withdrawn or self-absorbed, never looking at or greeting any of his neighbors, and then he would disappear until the following weekend. I’d kept the toy store I’d inherited from my father, and one day I caught Duvel in the street, peering dubiously in through the display window of my shop. I mentioned this to Mirta, my wife, who said that maybe I’d gotten him confused with someone else. But then she saw him herself. Yes, on some afternoons, Enrique Duvel stood outside the toy store for a while, looking in through the window.

The first time he came inside, he seemed irresolute, as though he was ashamed and not at all sure what he was looking for. He stood by the counter and scanned the shelves behind me. I waited for him to speak. He played with his car keys for a bit, and finally he asked for a model-plane kit. I asked him if he wanted me to gift wrap it, but he said no.

He came back several days later. Again, he looked in the window for a while, then came inside and asked for the next model plane in the series. I asked him if he was a collector, but he said no.

On successive visits, he moved on to model cars, ships, and trains. He came almost every week, leaving with something each time. One night, I went outside to close the store’s shutters and there he was, alone in front of the window. It must have been around nine at night, and there was no one out on the streets. It took me a minute to recognize him, to understand that this trembling man with a red face and weepy eyes could really be Enrique Duvel. He seemed scared. I didn’t see his car, and for a moment I thought he’d been attacked.”Duvel? Are you all right?”

He made a confused gesture.

“It’s best if I stay here,” he said.

“Here at the shop? What about your mother?” I instantly regretted my question, afraid I’d offended him, but he said, “She locked herself in the house with all the keys. She says she doesn’t want to see me again.”

We looked at each other a moment, not quite knowing what to say.

“I’d best stay here,” he repeated.

I knew that Mirta would never agree, but by that point I owed the man almost twenty percent of my monthly earnings, and I couldn’t just turn him away.

“But you see, Duvel… there’s nowhere to sleep here.”

“I’ll pay for the night,” he said. He went through his pockets. “I don’t have any money on me… But I can work. I’m sure there’s something I can do.”

Though I knew it wasn’t a good idea, I brought him inside. It was dark when we entered. When I turned the display lights on, their reflection gleamed in his eyes. Something told me Duvel wouldn’t sleep that night, and I was afraid to leave him alone. I saw a towering stack of boxes full of toys that I hadn’t had time to sort through, and I imagined the rich and refined Duvel—the sometime subject of Mirta’s girlfriends’ gossip—stocking my empty shelves overnight. Giving him the task could bring problems, but at least it would keep him busy.

“Could you deal with those boxes?”

He nodded.

“I’ll explain in more detail tomorrow. You just have to organize the items by type.” I went over to the merchandise. “The puzzles with the puzzles, for example. You can see where they go, and just put everything together, there, on the shelves. And if—”

“I understand perfectly,” Duvel said, interrupting me.

He walked away from me with his eyes fixed on the floor, making a slight movement with his index finger, as if he wanted to shush someone but felt too humiliated to do it. I was going to tell him how there was just an old armchair in the storage room to sleep on, and to give him some advice about the toilet handle, but I didn’t want to bother him anymore. I let him be and left without saying goodbye.

The next day, I got to the store a few minutes early; I was relieved to see that the shop’s shutters were up. Only once I was inside did I realize that leaving Duvel there alone had been a tremendous mistake. Nothing was where it belonged. If at that moment a customer had come in and asked for a particular superhero figure, it would have taken me all morning to find it. I remember thinking about Mirta and how I would explain this to her, and also the sudden exhaustion I felt as I calculated the hours it would take me to reorganize everything. Then I realized something else, something so strange that, for a moment, I couldn’t take it in: Duvel had reorganized the store chromatically. Modeling clay, decks of cards, crawling baby dolls, pedal cars—they were all mixed together and arranged by color. In the display cases, along the aisles, on the shelves: a subtly shifting rainbow stretched from one end of the store to the other. I still remember that sight as the beginning of disaster. He has to go, I thought. I have to get this man out of the store right now.

Duvel was looking at me. He was very serious, standing there in front of his great rainbow. I was trying to find the words to say what I wanted when his eyes lit on something behind me. I turned toward the street to see what it was. Outside the window, a woman and her two children were looking into the store. Their hands were pressed to the glass like visors as they talked excitedly about what they saw inside, as if something marvelous were moving through the aisles. It was the start of the school day, and at that hour the block was full of children and parents in a hurry. But they couldn’t help stopping in front of the windows, and a crowd grew. By noon, the store was packed: never had business been as good as it was that morning. It was hard to find the things that people asked for, but soon I discovered that I had only to name an item and Duvel would nod and run to get it. He located things with an efficient ease I found disconcerting.

“Call me by my first name,” he told me at the end of that long day of work, “if that’s all right with you.”

The color arrangement drew attention to items that had never stood out before. For example, the green swimming flippers followed the squeaky frogs that occupied the final ranks of turquoise, while the puzzles depicting glaciers—maroon at the earthen base of the photograph—brought the rainbow full circle by joining their snowy peaks with volleyballs and stuffed white lions.

The store didn’t close for siesta that day, or any of the following days, and little by little, we started pushing back our closing time. Enrique slept in the store from then on. Mirta agreed that we should set up a space for him in the storage room. At first he had to make do with a mattress on the floor, but soon we found a bed. And once or twice a week, during the night, Enrique reorganized the store. He set up scenes with the giant building blocks; he modified the interior light by constructing intricate walls of toys against the windows; he built castles that stretched across the aisles. It was useless to offer him a salary; he wasn’t interested. “It’s best if I just stay here,” he’d say. “Better than a salary.”

He didn’t leave the store, or, at least, not that I ever saw. He ate what Mirta sent him: packed meals that started out as slices of bread with cold cuts in the evenings, and later became elaborate lunches and dinners.

Enrique no longer went near the model kits he used to love so much. He put them on the store’s highest shelves and there they stayed, always. They were the only things that remained in one spot. Now he preferred puzzles and board games. In the mornings, if I arrived early, I’d find him sitting at the table with a glass of milk, playing with two colors of Chinese checkers or fitting the last pieces of a large fall landscape into place. He’d grown quieter, but he never lost his attentiveness toward the customers. He got into the habit of making his bed in the mornings and cleaning the table and sweeping the floor after he ate. When he was done, he came over to me or to Mirta—who, because of the extra business, had started working behind the counter—and said, “I made my bed,” or “I finished sweeping,” or even “I finished what I had to do.” And it was that manner of his—obsequious, as Mirta called it—that made us start to worry, somehow.

One morning, I found that he had built a small zoo on the table using dolls, farm animals, and Legos. He was drinking his glass of milk while he opened the gate for the horses and made them gallop, one by one, over to a dark sweater that served as a mountain. I greeted him and went to the counter to start working. When he came over to me he seemed embarrassed.

“I already made the bed,” he said, “and I finished what—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter if you make the bed or not. It’s your room, Enrique.”

I thought we were understanding each other, but he looked down at the floor, even more embarrassed, and said, “Sorry, it won’t happen again. Thank you.”

After a while, Enrique also stopped reorganizing the puzzles and board games. He placed the boxes on the upper shelves alongside the model kits, and retrieved them only if a customer asked for them specifically.

“You have to talk to him,” Mirta said. “People are going to think we don’t have puzzles anymore. Just because he doesn’t use them doesn’t mean they’re not for sale.”

But I didn’t say anything. Things were going well with the business, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

Over time, he started to reject certain foods. He would eat only meat, mashed potatoes, and pasta with simple sauces. If we gave him anything else, he would push it away, so Mirta started cooking only the things that he liked.

Every once in a while the customers would give him coins, and when he had saved enough he bought from the store a blue plastic cup with a convertible car in relief. He used it at breakfast, and in the morning, when reporting the state of his bed and his room, he began to add, “I also washed my cup.”

Mirta told me worriedly that one afternoon she’d been watching Enrique play with a boy who’d come into the store, and he suddenly grabbed a superhero figure and refused to share it. When the boy started to cry, Enrique stomped off and locked himself in the storage room.

“You know how much I care about Enrique,” my wife said that night, “but we just can’t let him get away with things like that.”

Although he still had his genius when it came to reorganizing the merchandise, over time he also stopped playing with the little articulated dolls and the Legos, and he archived them, along with the board games and model kits, on the now overcrowded upper shelves. The range of toys that he still reorganized and kept within the customers’ reach was so small and monotonous that it barely attracted the youngest children.

“Why do you put those things up so high, Enrique?” I asked him.

He looked disconsolately at the shelves, as if, in effect, they were too high for him as well. He didn’t answer; he was quieter all the time.

Little by little, sales went back down. Enrique’s rainbows, displays, and castles lost the splendor of those first days, when almost all the toys participated in his radical remodeling. Now everything happened at knee-level and below. Enrique was almost always hunched over or kneeling in front of a new pile of toys that was ever smaller and more amorphous. The place had started to empty of customers. Soon we didn’t need Mirta’s help anymore, and Enrique and I were left alone.

I remember the last afternoon I saw Enrique. He hadn’t wanted his lunch, and he was wandering up and down the aisles. He looked sad and lonely. I felt, in spite of everything, that Mirta and I owed him a lot. I wanted to cheer him up, so I climbed the moving ladder—which I hadn’t used since Enrique had started helping me in the store—to reach the highest shelves. I chose a model kit for him, an imported one of an old-fashioned train. The box said that it had more than a thousand pieces, and, if you added batteries, its lights worked. It was the best model train we had, and it cost a fortune. But Enrique deserved it, and I wanted to give it to him. I climbed down with the gift and called to him from the counter. He was coming back from the farthest shelves, a violet stuffed animal—I think it was a rabbit—hanging from his right hand. Head down, he stopped and looked at me. He looked small among the shelves. I called to him again but he suddenly crouched down, as though startled, and stayed there. It was a strange movement that I didn’t understand. I left the train on the counter and approached him slowly to see if something was wrong.

“Enrique, are you all right?”

He was crying, hugging his knees. The rabbit had fallen to one side, facedown on the floor.

“Enrique, I want to give you—”

“I don’t want anyone to hit me anymore,” he said.

I wondered if something had happened that I hadn’t seen—if some customer had given him trouble or if he’d had another fight with a child.

“But Enrique, no one…”

I knelt beside him. I wished I had the model train right there; I was sure it would be something special and it hurt me to see him so upset. Mirta would have known what to do, how to soothe him. Then the door to the street opened violently, almost slamming against the wall. Both of us froze. From the floor, we saw, under the shelves, two high heels advancing down the next aisle.

“Enrique!” It was a strong, authoritative voice.

The high heels stopped and Enrique looked at me in fear. He seemed to want to tell me something, and he grabbed my arm.

“Enrique!”

The heels started moving again, this time in our direction, and a woman appeared at the end of the aisle.

“Enrique!” She stormed toward us. “All this time I’ve been looking for you,” she yelled as she stopped very close to him. “Where the hell have you been?”

She slapped him so hard that he lost his balance. Then she grabbed his hand and yanked him up. The woman cursed me, kicked the stuffed rabbit, and practically dragged Enrique away. I followed them for a couple of steps. They passed the counter, headed for the door. When they’d almost reached it, Enrique tripped and fell to the floor. On his knees, he turned to look at me. Then his face crumpled. She grabbed his hand again, yelling, “Enrique, come on!”

I stayed where I was, watching and doing nothing. Just before the door closed, I saw his little fingers trying to pull away from his mother’s as she, furious, leaned down to pick him up.