by Toni Sala
He did it in his own car despite the general alert over the robberies, excited by the idea of transgressing: not antagonism, like when he left home, not fleeing, but rather a triumph, because of the compatibility between his artwork and his father’s assignment, so he risked being taken for one of those burglars who had the area so terrified.
When he finished breakfast, the fog had pretty much vanished. The bitch wouldn’t stay quiet for a second. He should have finished her off the night before, as soon as he’d gotten to the shack, but he’d felt chilled and it was late—what difference would a couple of hours make?
He grabbed his coat and left to take his daily walk—the three kilometers to Lake Sils—with his eyes on the ground and a supermarket bag in his hand to gather up any animal he could find: a worm, a lizard, whatever. On Friday he’d found a wounded sparrow among some brush, blew the ants off its wings and legs, and took it with him; another day he returned to the shack with a bag full of snails that had escaped from a farm beside the road.
Crossing the highway was a bit of an adventure, but after that the walk continued peacefully through the fields. He went underneath the freeway overpass and, before reaching the small center of Sils, he took a path through ribbons of sedge, bindweed, and reeds, with poplars forming plantations that flooded every time it rained. The lake was residuary, dry in the summer and in the winter filled with migrating birds, insects, and—according to the informational panels—frogs, turtles, water voles, hedgehogs, and snakes. The last floury dust of fog scattered, the day was dawning, there were splotches of sun, and Nil’s outline appeared on the path like an insect emerging from the chrysalis of fog.
At that time of day, the lake was not a solitary spot. They had reclaimed and adapted it for public use, and it was a perfect park to bring the kids to. There was always someone jogging, biking, or walking their dog on the path that went around the lake.
He knelt down to collect a beetle, but he didn’t put it in the bag; he held it in his fingers, captivated by the iridescent greens on its shell. It felt soft, moving its long antennae that were as thin as hairs, tickling his hand with its six thorny legs. He pinched off one of its legs with his fingernails. When the spring came this would all be full of insects, but by then he’d already have taken refuge in his parents’ house—which would later become his house—and he would have concluded and forgotten the fourth period and have no reason to want insects. He pulled off one of the beetle’s wings, making it asymmetrical, a little bit like Nil with his lopsided ears. He would shave and cut off his ponytails. He would fix up his hair at the salon in Vidreres so everyone could see. He pulled another leg off the beetle. He would take out his flesh tunnel and have his ear reconstructed. He pulled the other wing off to reestablish the creature’s symmetry. He would have the tattoo on his hand removed, stop collecting insects, wouldn’t set foot in a dog pound ever again. His walks to the lake would turn into days of working in the terraced fields; his adventure would have come to an end, his wandering, he would never again be an artist. He dropped the beetle on the ground. It kept moving the couple of legs it still had, as if rowing, and since it couldn’t flee he stepped on it and rubbed it out under his sole.
He felt sorry for the beetle. He liked the colors, shapes, and scents of those perfunctory lives, knew them physically and even knew them somewhat morally, or thought he did: they were simple, empty carcasses, they were skeletons. He could imagine how they felt, the void enclosed by the cage, how he himself would have felt without his flesh, just bones and teeth, nails and hair—the two ponytails, a wisp of beard, the tattoo, and the ring in his earlobe. If he could have extracted the flesh from inside himself, emptied himself out through his mouth and ears, remove that confusion that made him do illogical things like killing the beetle—artistic things—exterminate the viruses that led him around by the nose, set him apart, tugged on him . . . If we could take out our flesh from inside, expel it . . .
On the path around the lake there were wooden observatories for watching birds. Inside, each had a long bench beneath a narrow, glassless window that ran from one end of the belvedere to the other. The window looked out on the lake. Sometimes, if he didn’t see anyone around, he would go inside and spend a while contemplating the ducks and the birds with sinuous necks, or wait for the train to pass by, the reflection of its cars on the water by the other shore. If someone came in while he was there, once the newcomer’s gaze grew accustomed to the dark and found him there alone, without binoculars or a camera, with only a supermarket bag on his lap—a bag that occasionally crackled, or suddenly inflated slightly because an insect inside had jumped—with his two ponytails and his flesh tunnel, it never failed: they got up and left.
That morning he came across a high school class on a field trip, about twenty kids with two teachers Nil’s age. The teachers were young, attractive women who would have been frightened by the sight of him, but he didn’t mind. He’d have time to focus on girls when spring came, when his hibernation was over and he emerged from his lair. Then he’d no longer be living in the shack; he could drop by Can Bou and, without forcing anything, find himself attracted to Iona. He could count on that, and would try to make up for stealing her dog, maybe even for Jaume Batlle’s death and everything else, and Nil’s satisfaction would be the same as his parents’. And one day, decades later, he would confess to Iona the long road he’d taken as a young man to reach the land, which would then be three lands: Dalmau, Batlle, and Sureda.
The high school kids were thirteen or fourteen years old, surely he would be the father of kids like these by then—Nil Dalmau, in his mature fifth period—and his eldest son and heir would go out with him to their land the way he would very soon begin to go out with his father. The school group stopped and made a circle around one of the teachers, and gradually they grew quiet.
Since he was still far away, Nil left the path and approached them, discreetly, stepping softly amid the trees and brambles so they wouldn’t hear him. The teacher had opened a book and spoke loudly, so the teenagers could follow her:
“You’ve heard the legend of the cauldrons of Pere Botero, right? Well, that happened in this area. Many, many years ago. . . in 1608, to be exact. That year, a farmer from Tordera named Pere Porter. . . Pere Porter. . . You see the resemblance to Pere Botero? And do you know why it mentions cauldrons? Well, because he saw them. Yes, don’t laugh. He saw them because he went down into hell . . . and he entered hell right around here. Do you see this book? It’s an edition of the anonymous manuscripts that tell the story of Pere Porter. Pere Porter was a farmer who was forced to repay a debt that he’d already paid, because of an evil notary. . . it was some sort of a scam, you get it? And Pere went to Maçanet to look for the money demanded from him and came across a young man on horseback, pulling another horse behind him, and they went on the road together. As they walked, Pere Porter explained what was going on with him, and when they reached Lake Sils, Pere asked if he could ride the other horse. And the young man said he could and . . . Now be very quiet, and I’ll read you what happened. Pay attention, because it’s old Catalan. ‘Porter crossed himself, and when he mounted the horse it all changed: every hair on his head rose as he heard and saw the steeds speaking with one another. . .’ His hair stood on end because the horses started talking to each other! And then the young man said he would take Pere to see the evil notary who hadn’t recorded the payment of his debt . . . and you know where he was, right? Where do you think that evil notary was?”
“In hell?” said a girl.
“That’s right, he was in hell. ‘Hence,’ the young man said, ‘hold tight to that steed, for I am the devil!’”
The teacher had adopted a deep voice to imitate the devil, and the students laughed. She continued reading, slowly, so no one would miss a thing:
“‘Porter, hearing those words, said: “Jesus, save me, don’t forsake me, Blessed Virgin, be with me.” And thereupon . . . ,’ which means at that point, the horses: ‘both steeds
proceeded through the lake, mountains, valleys, talking all the while . . .’ The horses talked, they talked the whole time they took Pere to hell, what do you think? Can you imagine what they were saying to each other?”
What would animals say as they carried you off to hell? What was the beetle saying as I dismembered and squashed it, what had the bitch been saying all night long; what was it saying right now, locked up in the shack, tangled in the net? He saw a worm on a leaf. It must talk like a little snake. He collected the worm and put it in the bag. He turned over another leaf and peeled a snail off it. He kicked over a rock. Underneath, it was filled with earwigs and damp beetles, which he gathered and put into the bag.
“And do you know what Pere Porter was doing?” continued the teacher. “Well, he was holding on ‘tight to the mount. After an hour on horseback, having passed great valleys, great mountains, great rivers, and great seas, they entered the mouth of a cave and then egressed’—which means that they went out—‘onto a great plain that was all fire and demons, with multitudes of people.’”
That was when a boy in the group turned excitedly toward him, and Nil felt exposed. He crouched down, then fled with his head bowed like a chastened animal. He walked through the trunks, got tangled in the brambles, and when he raised his head again he realized that the boy hadn’t been startled by him, but by what Nil now saw before him: a hot-air balloon, inflated but still on the ground, that peeked out above some trees on the other side of the road.
The plain functioned as a base camp for the balloons; it was an ideal place for them to take off and land. A great plain that was all fire and demons, once flooded and centuries later drained for plant terraces and woodlands. The top of the balloon emerged above and a bit to one side of the tree branches; in fact, it looked like another tree, a colorful tree in the bloom of spring, and Nil crossed the road—he heard a couple of horns honking behind him but didn’t turn—and kept making his way to the shack before changing direction to get a better look at the balloon. He came out from the trees and approached it; they had inflated it in the middle of a barren field; there were two cars, a van, and a man who was watching the seven passengers in the basket about to take off. The pilot lifted his arms every once in a while with two lit flares, two vertical columns of fire, which he stuck into the belly of the balloon to heat up the air. The passengers—four adults, two kids, and the pilot—waved good-bye to the man who had remained on the ground, and when the pilot lit the fire, the jets of helium roared, and two luminous horns showed through the balloon’s fabric.
A great plain that was all fire and demons, and the balloon detached from the field and began to move horizontally, at first slowly and floating only just above the ground, walking, running as if carried by a breeze that didn’t move a single branch, that Nil couldn’t feel on his skin, and then it passed alongside a group of poplars and climbed diagonally toward the sky.
Planes out of the Vilobí airport were flying higher up; Nil followed them with his gaze as he waited to hear the bursts of fire from the balloon. The fire was light, painters were pyromaniacs, all artists were, he himself was a demon, working in fire . . . But who knew, deep down, what he was. An artist? A demon? What is a demon? What does demon mean? Who knows if a murderer can ever become a murderer within himself, even if he wants to; who knows what we might find all the way inside a word. Words are traitors, they’re full of dregs; action, on the other hand, is luminous, it can be filmed.
He heard the bitch’s moaning before he reached the door of the shack. He opened it and saw the animal, still caught in the net. She had dragged herself from under the table to beside the fireplace. When the bitch saw him she reacted. She couldn’t move, but she lowered her eyes—she knew who was in charge—and was quiet for a moment, but then that unbearable whimpering began again.
Nil had no time to waste. He had gotten too distracted by the balloon; he had to empty the bag. He put the plug into the kitchen sink, poured the insects in, and watched the costume ball of beetles, grasshoppers, the earwigs he had found under the rock, the centipedes he’d grabbed crossing the road, spiders, snails, praying mantises, and ants, all hugging the steel dance floor. . . Along the way there had been fights and deaths in the bag, and the hurly-burly in the sink was disturbing. He wanted to turn on the tap to give those empty little boxes stuffing, flesh, but it was just that emptiness that meant it would be hard to drown them—they would float like a raft of tiny pieces, a mosaic of colors.
He started by separating out the grasshoppers, who were big and had quickly freed themselves from the other critters and were jumping about the kitchen. He scooped them up and used a funnel to get them into a plastic bottle. He had half a bottle full. Then came the beetles, and then the backswimmers, the worms, and the snails, each type in their own container. Once the separating was done, he covered the bottles with perforated tops, put them in a cardboard box, and took them to his workspace on the other side of the wall.
He went back into the dining room. The bitch tried to roll over, like a fish. Her claws had gotten stuck in the strings, and she’d made a mess of the net with her legs. Nil put on gloves and covered one arm with protective padding, and he cut a hole in the net with a bread knife so the animal could get its head through. The dog growled and sunk her teeth into the arm pad. He let her. After she tired herself out, he put a muzzle on her. Then she didn’t moan because she couldn’t, but she started to whine. Maybe it was her leg, or maybe she had a broken bone; he tightened the muzzle with five layers of packing tape.
II
At midday he was in the parking lot of El Capitell restaurant, on the outskirts of Bescanó. The place had been closed for months, but you could see the building better from the highway now than when the restaurant was in business, because over each of the three windows on the ground floor, which was the dining area, they’d hung large independentist flags as curtains. The independentist movement had upended the power balance—Nil’s parents had hung the starred flag at their house, and he would have put one up at the shack, except no one ever passed by in Serradell.
On the door of the closed restaurant hung a sign that said FOR RENT / FOR SALE, with a cell phone number. As he maneuvered into the empty parking lot, Nil saw a flag-curtain lift slightly, and an old man peeked out from behind the glass. Nil got out of the Honda and walked to the door. He found it locked, but since he’d seen the man, he knocked on the glass. Nothing moved inside. He knocked a few more times, then sat down on the entrance steps. The highway was very empty and the few cars raced by. He got tired of waiting. He went back to the door and knocked harder and harder. He could see the keys hanging from the inside lock; he tried to force the door and knocked some more. The blows reverberated in the empty dining room. If he kept knocking like that, he would break the glass.
“What do you want?” the old man finally shouted from behind the door.
“I’m Nil Dalmau, I’ve come for the tables! We have an appointment!”
The old man approached the glass, shaking his head.
“You must have talked to my son-in-law!”
Nil was used to these roles. “The truck’s coming now!” he said.
It seemed that the old man was calming down, but he shook his head again. “Where’s the truck?” he shouted.
“I said it’s on its way! Can you show me the tables?”
“Haven’t you seen the photos?”
“Hey!” shouted Nil. “Do you want to sell the tables or not?”
The old man hesitated for a moment, and then shook his head yet again.
“Are you saying you had me come all the way here for nothing?” asked Nil.
Just then the truck arrived. Miqui stopped in the middle of the parking lot and, without turning off the engine, hopped down from the cab and came over to shake Nil’s hand.
“Should I bring the truck closer?” he said.
“Wait, there’s a problem,” said Nil, pointing with his chin to the old man behind the door. “He doesn’t want
to open up.”
“He doesn’t want to open up?” Miqui went over to the door to talk to the old man. “Good morning! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. We just changed our minds.”
“What’s that?”
Nil also approached the door. He had ten fifty-euro bills fanned out in his hand.
“Do you think we’d bring you the money if we were planning anything bad?” he said.
The old man hesitated again. His hand was already on the knob, but he stopped, lowered his head, approached the glass, and said:
“I can’t. We’ve got coffeemakers in here, refrigerators, machinery. . . I can’t risk it, it’s all we have. The faucet factory closed down, we used to get the workers in for lunch every day. But there’s no cash register, no safe. My son-in-law left me here alone. I can’t open up. He would never forgive me. Come back later today, he’ll be here, he’s usually here, but this morning they called and he had to go to the bank . . . The bank calls the shots, it’s not his fault. Come back this afternoon, please, let’s do it that way. I’m sure he’ll give you a discount.”
“Open up,” demanded Miqui. “We’re good people, for fuck’s sake!”
They could have broken the glass door with one kick. The old man was starting to sweat. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket.
“Come back this afternoon, please,” he said. “Leave, or I’ll call the police.”
“You know what?” burst out Miqui. “You’re fucking with us. Don’t call the police, because if you call the police, I’m going to come back some day and do something that’ll make you and your son-in-law never want to fuck with anybody again. Who do you think you are? Screw you and your fear! I’ve had it with old people who think they’re the kings of the world! I have a job, I make an honest living, you hear me? Do you know what it costs, just in gas, to get here in my truck? You think I’m loaded or something? You think I have nothing better to do with my time? Have a little respect, goddamn it. No one fucks with me, you got that? Open the fucking door right now, or I’ll break the glass and come in myself to get the tables. Put down that phone!”