by Toni Sala
Had he foreseen the accident? He could smell the flesh from a distance, like the bitch whining beneath the table, still tangled in the net.
He’d spent four years away. He left Vidreres the way many rural students do, finishing high school and starting college wherever they can, just to get away from their family. He chose fine arts because he drew well; he had a whole collection of spiral notebooks that he’d turned into comics. He made them with ball-point pens, and a few of his teachers told him he had talent. The arguing with his parents lasted months.
“You’re leaving, but you’ll be back,” said his father. “You’re an ingrate.”
Nil left, convinced that getting his way with them meant he’d be able to take on the world.
He lasted a year and a half in art school. One day, when he had to turn in some stupid assignment he hadn’t done, he lost it over breakfast with some dorm mates.
“Fuck academia,” he said. “Fuck institutional, cookie-cutter art, fuck this bullshit.”
He gave up fine arts and started to do his own thing. Nil Dalmau’s first period was a tribute to the art department—he covered canvases with colorist splotches to disabuse himself of it, to purge the techniques he’d learned in class. When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere by just reacting, he threw it all out and entered the world of digital photography, which allowed him to refute the tradition via distortions and technicalities. Nil Dalmau’s second period lasted a year, and it was also a failure.
The first months with no classes and no obligations or schedule could have wrecked him, since he was used to the busy life of the farm, but they turned out to be an interesting adventure. He had to find his way in uncharted territory, both in his work and in the details of life. Without saying anything to his parents, he left the residence hall on Sardenya Street and rented a room in a shared apartment with three other artists in Poblenou. They also worked in the same divided-up studio space. He broke off contact with his art school classmates, but when he wanted to compensate by returning somewhat to his roots in Vidreres it was already too late. One weekend he went home intending to explain to his parents that he’d made a mistake by enrolling in fine arts and that now he would work under his own steam—he couldn’t use words like “create” or “explore”—but while they were having lunch, excited and lively, he realized to what extent he’d separated himself from his family and his world from before college in that year and a half. How could he explain what he’d done, when, instead of the natural bond between parents and their only son, there was only a wall of mutual distrust? His parents had hardly ever left Vidreres, they had never seen an exhibition and had no desire to and, truth be told, not even he was that clear on what it meant to be an artist. What had he gotten himself into? He found out later, all too well. For the time being, he had continued to flee the denigrating hypocrisy inherent in the mere name fine arts and in the oppressive world of Vidreres, with no idea where he was headed. It took him another half a year to confess to his parents that he had dropped out of school.
They gave him a monthly allowance, and he lived much better than his roommates, who could barely pay rent and had to go out every day and sell themselves for sporadic small triumphs or in the miserable circuit of group shows in municipal or neighborhood exhibition spaces in deserted galleries, squats, and garages, or else throw their work out onto the Internet’s global dumping ground. In a matter of a few months he saw quite a few artists hang up their brushes. He never knew if, the next day at the studio, he’d have the same neighbor. But for him it was easier to keep going than to quit, and he had a perverse envy of those who threw in the towel. The life of the artists was like a house of mirrors in an amusement park, each one hiding behind their deformed image. He wasn’t able to call it quits and go back to Vidreres, but he saw himself reflected in the others’ failure. In his second period he exhibited digital photographs in bars and avoided the indifference and criticism by drinking and quarreling with artists even more desperate than he was. Who ever said making it was easy? The recession closed galleries, there were no scholarships or grants, it was no use trying to prostitute yourself by making portraits or painting still lifes or landscapes. There were no commissions of any kind, and his more creative and ambitious colleagues ended up teaching painting classes.
One night, at the bar where he was showing his work, an acting student invited him to see a Shakespeare play. When it was over he bought the book in the theater’s shop. Stretched out in his room, he spent the night obsessing over the difference between the words and the play. The words were incorruptible. They had a dictionary. The next day, he put aside the exhibition he was preparing and devoted the next few months exclusively to reading—he had barely ever finished a book before. He went through authors in a week, he voraciously jumped from one to the next, and no matter how different they seemed, he made them all agree inside of him. He sat reading with a cup by his side, the book turning damp and hot in his hands, his heart marking the beat of the letters; it pumped, the sentences swelled slightly on the page and took on a red tinge, the blood seeped through the paper, it came out of the fingers on one hand and went back into the fingers of the other, irrigating his thoughts, dissolving and mixing the author’s thoughts with his own, making them flow, transporting them along the channels of the printed lines. Instead of a head he had a book, and instead of a book he had a head. Those months—the autumn of two thousand and eleven—when he saw the library that was gradually growing on his shelf, it was as if he were looking at himself, standing with his back to the wall. He spent the days locked in his room, his studio mates never seeing him, not even he knew where he was; he was a shadow of the books.
Until he found he’d had enough of that lie as well—I have to be myself, that’s that—and knocked down the shelf, put the books in bags, and brought them down to the dumpster. You can surrender without realizing it and have the enemy inside. But how much harm did those books do him? What did abstractions and phantasmagorical secrets have to do with him, who was of farm stock, a clean, concrete, and sensible boy, who had always had his feet firmly planted on the ground? He was weakening in every aspect. What were those challenges, those murky regions that the books explored? What was he doing, far from the fields, filling his head with fantasies and erroneous paths? No one in his family had ever gotten a degree or owned books, and they’d never missed them either, as far as he knew. He didn’t save a single one. And there began Nil Dalmau’s third period, the beginning of the return, the ascension, the incarnation and body art, the exteriorization, the first period that was mature and his own, which he explained to himself with this motto: disguises disguised as disguises.
A studio mate gave him the address, and he went to get his ear gauged at a hair salon in the Raval. The piercing gun fired the starting shot of a race toward himself that irrevocably distanced him from the bookish life, but also from Vidreres. It definitively amputated him from his family, but was necessary if he wanted to create something that wasn’t just a series of consecutive self-deceptions. The opening in his lobe wasn’t the ornamental hole in a little girl’s ear, he was a prospector mining the first breach in the wall of his body, a bottomless well, a hole through which to evacuate the failure of the last few years and redeem the cowardly attempt to take refuge in books. A hole to let the world pass through, the porthole for a voyage, the flesh frame for an incorruptible, concrete work of art.
He grew his hair out and tried tattoos—he had one done on the back of his hand, where he couldn’t hide it—but the tattoos had little in common with the radicalness of the Frankensteins who, every Wednesday evening, gathered at the same hair salon. He couldn’t compare those people with anyone he’d ever met; strange people, people who were themselves—lives with mind-blowing value systems—fugitives of all places and all times, junkies, the mentally ill, elements of strange galaxies light years from his own. But what is art, if not that? Separating oneself, setting oneself apart, defining oneself. He started by putting in
a steel earring and a discreet piercing in his other ear, joining the group of those who were masters of themselves, who singled themselves out with spiral rings in their lips, colorful piercings in their noses or eyebrows, or kilos of scrap iron hanging from their eyebrows, gums, and tongue—some had had their tongues operated on, to make them forked—their uvula, nipples, belly buttons, and all the various parts of their genitals.
The first flesh tunnel that he did was a ring, four millimeters in diameter. Flesh tunnels were a legacy of the Harappan culture, from some two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ. It took a week to dilate the hole in his right ear. He added earrings, at night he slept with four rings in his ear, and the weight made the hole bigger, until the morning when, in front of the mirror with his ear inflamed, red and slippery with lubricant, he was able to insert the first tunnel. The others were easier. The lobe gradually gave like a tire. The flesh tunnel he wore now was two centimeters in diameter.
His mother had bought him a car so he could come every other Sunday to Vidreres to have lunch with the family, and during those months, every time he showed up, the hole in his ear was dilated a few more millimeters. His parents couldn’t imagine that he’d excavated that repulsive tunnel precisely in order to come back home with them. Through it he was regaining his confidence. His attempt to survive under his own steam had failed—it was impossible, no one managed it—he was twenty-three years old, and he had no intention of living off his parents in the city among dead-beat artists who only got younger and younger; there was no point in spending his days endlessly shooting and retouching photographs that no one was interested in. Since he couldn’t emancipate himself from his family home, he’d decided to emancipate himself inside, as he finally understood his parents, grandparents, and all his ancestors had done. He wasn’t living anything new. Everybody was born with blood in their veins. You can’t escape your genes, you can’t leave your body, but you can subjugate it, and that was how he became a comic book monster like the ones he drew in high school.
Nil Dalmau’s fourth and final period, the darkest one, the incendiary one, was comprised of a series of videos that he filmed without any intention of ever exhibiting. They were a farewell to art, he wanted to bury his fears in them, bury the shame of the last few years, bury youth itself. Returning to Vidreres was the end of this project—returning to his parents’ house and beginning to work the land. He would reappear like the lake reappeared in winter, gradually, naturally; recovering milieus, recovering family, recovering friends, recovering his own self. And since he couldn’t imagine himself just going straight back into his parents’ house, one Sunday in November he asked them for the workmen’s shack in the fields of Serradell.
“I don’t find any of this amusing anymore,” said his father. “As far as I’m concerned, you can do what you want. If you want to move in there, you can have it by New Year’s.”
His father’s willingness had a lot to do with the ear. Without the flesh tunnel, his father wouldn’t have come up with the money or wouldn’t have wanted to waste it on useless renovations. But to humiliate his son? To punish him? Here you go, failed monster, enjoy.
His mother didn’t understand, or pretended not to.
“Serradell is too isolated,” she said. “The only people who ever go to the fields over there are driving the machines, for sowing or harvesting.”
She thought it was dangerous because that year there’d been violent robberies in remote homes throughout the Baix Empordà, Girona, and La Selva. The thieves were breaking into farmhouses and housing developments while people were home, which was new. They would tie up the owners’ wrists with telephone cords, beat them till they gave up their money and jewels, and wouldn’t stop until they knew where their safe was hidden. Just a few days prior, some burglars had entered the house of a hotel owner in Platja d’Aro. They waited for it to get dark, jumped over a wall, and went through the yard and into the house where they tied up the couple. Since the man was screaming, they stuck a rag in his mouth. The man ended up suffocating. Shortly after that, in a house in Campllong, the intruders splashed two women with diesel oil from the boiler and threatened them with a lit piece of paper. In Santa Cristina, the same robbers, or some others, tied up a retired Brit, put a gun to her head, and played two rounds of Russian roulette. There was joy in these crimes; they had an artistic touch to them. They wore masks over their heads and gloves; the security cameras were useless. They carried knives, shotguns, and pistols, and they were so bold and confident that, in one attack in Llagostera, they made an omelet in the kitchen while the owner of the house was tied up in the dining room. Everyone installed alarms and filled their yards with dogs just like at Can Bou. The police hadn’t caught anyone, and the burglaries continued. A crime expert published an article in the El Punt Avui newspaper warning of a government plot to discredit the Catalan police force now that the regional government was becoming pro-independence.
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” said his father. “Don’t you watch TV, Nil? Here, everyone who can rob, does, from the king to the last patsy. Nothing can be done about it; this is a country of thieves. Look at the mess we’re in. You’re smart to come home. Everything is so rotten that the day things hit the fan, it will all happen at once. They’re making our lives miserable, they’re squeezing us on every side, and now we can’t even sleep peacefully in our own homes. You’re lucky. When you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Do you mean that, Lluís?” asked his mother. “Imagine they break into the shack and take him and call us saying that they have him and they’re heading over here. What good would all the alarms in the house do us then?”
“Don’t make me laugh,” said his father. “If anyone breaks into the shack, it’ll be the burglar who gets a nasty surprise.”
His father personally supervised the bricklayers, electricians, plasterers, and painters who fixed up the shack so Nil could work and live there, with a kitchen/dining room, bathroom, fireplace, bedroom, separate workspace, and a small garage. He had the road fixed so he could drive on it with no problems. By Christmas, the renovations were completed.
Nil had been living in the shack for two weeks when the Batlle brothers were killed in that car crash.
The burial was on Monday. Tuesday afternoon, his father showed up at the shack. It was the first time he had come to see Nil. He found his son with the fireplace lit, stretched out on the sofa watching a DVD.
“I’ve made a very generous offer for the Batlle land,” said his father. “But that doesn’t mean a thing. Can Batlle is right next to Can Bou, and Iona Sureda was practically part of their family. If the Suredas play dirty, no matter how much money we offer, it won’t be enough. We have to act fast. There isn’t a moment to lose. I know them, at Can Bou. They have no ethics, they’re poor as church mice, and they’ll want to take advantage of that family’s tragedy. That’s not right and they know it, but we won’t just stand around with our arms folded. That’s why I’ve come to see you. Your mother would be surprised if I went out so late, and I don’t want to upset her, there’s no need, so it’s best if she doesn’t know. You’ll do fine. Throw a chunk of meat filled with fishhooks or pieces of glass near the entrance to Can Bou. When they see a dog dead like that, they’ll understand that this is no free-for-all.”
His father’s frankness caught Nil off guard, but he quickly understood what he was saying. Not upsetting his mother was an excuse. He would have liked to go further, and for a moment—a moment that he would never forget, because it could have changed everything—Nil was about to confess to his father how united they were in this venture, united by a momentous stroke of fate, by the same momentous fate by which you’re born to a certain father in a certain place; he was about to tell him: You see how I never left, you see how you can be proud of me the way I am of you? But he let the moment pass, there was no need—it was out of immature selfishness, him wanting to be himself again—so he kept si
lent, thinking that a secret was a secret and that it had more strength incubating inside like a seed, and it would be better if his father was the one to make the overture for him to return home. He had come to him for a blood ritual, for a secret between father and son like those in every family. The Batlle lands would become the Dalmaus’ through him. A generational concern. From the Batlle boys to the Dalmau boy. Years from now, he would inherit the fields, but first he would have to earn them. This was the moment. What more could he ask for? He felt very proud of his father and absolved for his attempt to flee; it was as if he were physically embracing his father, as if he carried him inside, as close to him as when he was little and rode on the tractor and his father held his shoulder as they went over the furrows.
When he was alone again, sitting on the sofa beside the fireplace, watching the silent flame gnaw on the trunks, Nil opened a beer and thought how everything was coming together: the years away from Vidreres; his return; the death of the Batlle brothers; the assignment his father had given him; and the series of videos he was filming, his farewell to artistic life. It was all compatible. Nothing was wasted. It all added up. The assignment would be a bridge between the life he was leaving behind and the one he was beginning, tying together what he’d been searching for in those years away from home with the life that awaited him. The assignment was the passport that allowed him to return as an adult to the country of his parents, his grandparents, the dead, all the people buried in the fields. And it would be recorded on video.
Euphoric with optimism, the next morning he went to buy a live lamb from a shepherd in Maçanet. The lamb left the trunk of his Honda covered in little black balls. After cleaning them up, he went to the dog pound in Tossa, and the supervisor—without asking many questions, with that idiotic respect people have for artists—helped him with the urine and lent him the protective pads, gloves, and net. That night he sacrificed the lamb. He filmed the lamb’s death the way he would film the dog’s, when the moment came. He would incorporate it into his project; he would make it art. He buried the lamb’s skin and carcass. He put the meat he’d deboned and chopped up into a sack, tied the rag to the outside of the car door, and went to steal one of the dogs from Can Bou.