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.