by Toni Sala
The old man started to dial, and Nil grabbed Miqui by the arm. He didn’t know whether his threats were serious or not. He pulled him away from the door, signaling to the old man to calm down.
“Don’t call, please,” said Nil, and he came back over to the door, making sure to turn his face to show his good ear. “We’ll come back later when your son-in-law is here. I’m interested in the tables. We’ll come back this afternoon when your son-in-law is here, no problem.”
The old man looked up from the cell phone and said, yes, they needed the money, but as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief his eyes widened like saucers and the cell phone dropped to the floor. The trucker was pointing a shotgun at them from the door of his truck.
As Miqui approached the door with the barrel raised, it became clear that he was threatening the old man. But Nil didn’t take that for granted at first. Nearly anyone who had to choose between shooting a frightened old man and a freak like him wouldn’t hesitate. His tunnel was provocative, being different was provocative, and even more so outside of Barcelona. Leaving the herd made you stronger, but it provoked other people: strength is as effective a provocation as weakness. Now that the starred independentist flags were the majority, their presence incited the other flags. But it was misleading—difference, when exposed, lost strength. Any form of expression weakened it. Maybe he would pay the price for wanting to speak with his body—without words or gestures, with physical, permanent, and solitary actions—for having been foolish enough to turn inward. What was he looking for by playing the artist, to turn inward until there was nothing left? And the end would be his disappearance? Ending up flat out with a bullet in his chest at the door of a closed restaurant in Bescanó? And the earring, the fires, what were they? Signs leading to him?
In less than a second he could be lying beside the two boys killed in the accident. In less than a second he could have more in common with the Batlle brothers than with any sucker who was still breathing. The old man in that restaurant, the grasshoppers and worms he collected, the guy with the shotgun, the bitch locked in the shack, the family in the balloon, Iona Sureda, his father, the fucking poplar plantations would have more in common with each other than with him. The land they’d left behind had more life in it than the two boys. Even as he was crushing it, the wingless, legless beetle’s life was worth infinitely more than all the human and nonhuman lives that had been snuffed out since the universe began. Supposedly, he was involved in a gambit to become an heir, to embody a succession—he’d had a stroke of luck. But now that land might be used to bury him. Damn immortal land. What would happen to the fields? Who would inherit them? That desertion, that lack of an owner—that was death.
He wanted some steel tables, and he had needed someone to transport them. On Tuesday, he was at the club with Iona, and this Miqui showed up like a godsend, giving him a business card. Like a godsend. Now he might blow him away by squeezing his finger half a centimeter. His mother had been right. The shack was a bad idea. Without the shack he wouldn’t have come back to Vidreres, without the shack he wouldn’t have thought about setting up a workspace, he wouldn’t have needed the tables, and a nut wouldn’t be aiming a shotgun at him. In the four years away from home, the year and a half surrounded by weirdos, he’d never seen anything like this. Ah, but then he had been among his people! And now, where was he? In no-man’s-land, neither here nor there. There was nothing he could do: death always comes without warning, that’s the only way it can catch you, always by accident; even for the terminally ill death has to be a surprise, it catches you by surprise or it doesn’t get you. Tell that to the animals he collected in the mornings or that he picked up at the pound, tell that to the bitch he had in his shack, or to the Batlle brothers. He was about to enter that world shared by people, animals, and plants, where life was the same for everyone: zero. Where did this Miqui person come from? Why was he carrying a shotgun? Had he been looking for Nil? Was he part of one of the groups of thieves who had the remote homes so frightened, who made their owners check the windows, doors, and blinds, who made the whole family hush if the littlest brother thought he heard some slight sound, maybe some footsteps, something falling to the floor—I heard it perfectly, said the boy, and I’m scared—so the family kept still, waiting in silence, with their eyes wide and their fingers crossed, to see if someone really had broken into the house. . . With that same attention, with that microscopic precision, with his ears pricked up, with the vibration of his metal tunnel in the surrounding flesh he would hear the click of the trigger that would release the hammer and expel the bullet. That’s how death approaches, by surprise, always uncertainly, never sure.
Once he was dead, his parents would lock up the shack. They would let the bitch go. She would run, limping and moaning in pain, back to Can Bou. What good is the land, his father would say, when, without children, it’s worthless? I’m tired of it all! This time for real! Now I know true disgrace! And why? What is this, a punishment? Haven’t I had enough, seeing it happen to my neighbor twice over? Do I have to go through it myself? Me? A truck shows up at the shack, his parents wait by the door, it’s there to take away the furniture, the extractor hoods, the clothes, the shoes, the camera, the computer with his videos . . . What are these bottles, Lluís? Some of them are still alive! Is this what my son spent his time doing? Collecting insects? Where did he learn to do that? And why? Why did he do it, Lluís? And why did he come back so strange and unsociable? What happened to him in Barcelona? Why did he do that to his ear? And the videos? Why can’t I see them? Was our son crazy? Is that why he came back to Vidreres—to get killed?
But the shotgun ignored Nil. The old man opened the door, crying, and the two guys went in. Nil picked up the cell phone off the floor, locked the door behind him, put the key in his pocket with the phone, and asked the old man if the tables were in the kitchen.
They went through the empty dining room and there were the tables, of course, the same wide, heavy tables he had seen in the photograph online before calling the man’s son-in-law. Miqui and Nil carried them to the entrance, and from the entrance to the truck. They put them on the flatbed with the crane and tied them down for the trip.
Nil went back into the restaurant for a moment. The old man was sitting at a table with his head in his hands. Nil placed the money beside him, with the cell phone and keys on top. The man didn’t dare lift his head.
Miqui was waiting for Nil, smoking, beside the truck. He’d leaned the gun against one wheel. Anyone passing on the highway, a police squad car, could have seen the shotgun.
“Artists,” muttered Nil.
The truck followed him to Serradell. They unloaded the tables with the crane just as they had loaded them up and brought them into the workspace. They put them in the empty spot beneath the extractor hood.
“Are you a chef?” asked Miqui. Then he saw the tripod and camera. “You take photos? Photos of food?”
“Videos. Shorts. I’m an artist.”
“I admire artists.”
“They’re more common than you think. Do you want to see the tables get their first run? I owe you a favor.”
He brought Miqui a chair and asked if he wanted a beer. He focused the camera on the table. He turned on the lights, lowered the blinds, and hauled a cardboard box filled with plastic bottles out of the closet. He pulled out two and emptied them onto the middle of the largest table. He tapped the bottom of the bottles so the little black rocks inside would come out. They were beetles of varying sizes, which came to life on the table. Some of them seemed dead but weren’t, they were playing dead, trying to protect themselves that way. Others curled up right where they’d fallen, and still others ran over the edge of the table and fell to the floor.
He spritzed the largest group with a spray bottle and then splashed a rain of alcohol all over the table. The smell spread through the workshop. He turned on the extractor, started recording, and turned off the lights. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket, lit it, and
brought it over to the largest beetle. The beetle burst into flame. The fire leaped from one shell to the next. The beetles ran with their fire, crashing into each other, spreading the small blue flame, turning into little rocks of light, then quickly going out.
He ran a brush along the steel, making the black dust fall to the floor, then emptied a couple more bottles out onto the table. The spiders burned faster than the beetles; they made one big flash and disappeared, consumed amid the smoke. They held up a flaming topaz on eight skinny legs. It lasted an instant. Just enough time for it to fix on your retina if you quickly closed your eyes. The image remained there for a few seconds, a luminous sketch of spider tattooed on the inside of your eyelid, until it too vanished.
He dumped out a mix of insects from another bottle, backswimmers, earwigs, ladybugs, praying mantises, and grasshoppers that leaped like sparks when they were set afire. They had parabolas of light over the embers of little legs and segments, jaws, hair, spikes, horns, wings, and antennae. He swept the table again and emptied more bottles. The worms twisted with their tips in the air, little red-hot horseshoes, lengths of live coal and then ash. Nil filmed the cloud of blue sparks from fleas; he lit up the evanescent galaxy of an anthill, ephemeral constellations of mosquitoes, hawker dragonflies on fire, damselflies and horseflies, bees that fell like a meteor shower, blue blowflies . . . He pulled out a box from a pet shop. The lid was green mesh. He spritzed what was inside right through the mesh. He uncovered the box and out flew tropical butterflies with large wings, which he lit up with the lighter like the pages of a book. The colorful glitter made a short flight before scorching and melting into the darkness.
When Nil turned on the light, Miqui applauded.
“Amazing,” he said, “I swear, never seen anything like it. They must pay you well.”
Nil shook his head as he stopped the camera and started to sweep up.
“It’s a labor of love?” Miqui thought it over for a moment then said, “What a weird hobby. Post it online and you’ll get a million hits.”
“There are animal protection laws.”
“For spiders and flies? For butterflies? Are you saying you’ve done this with bigger animals?”
Nil turned the lights off again. He had his laptop connected to a wide-screen television. He switched it on. It was a film that was shot at night in the field in front of the shack. The camera gradually adapted to the darkness and focused on a shadow that became a lamb, a lamb tied by its neck to the ground, probably to a rock in the middle of the field. The camera remained in one spot. The elf with the hole in his ear came out with a container on his back connected by a tube to a spray gun. He approached the lamb and soaked it. Then he rubbed the liquid in with his fingers. Before untying the lamb, he kneeled down for a moment on the other side of the animal, where he lit something—a wick—then ran out of the frame.
“Here’s where the film will start once it’s edited,” Nil said.
Light appeared behind the lamb. The animal turned its head, looked at its thigh, and started to run in circles. The fire spread through its wool. In a matter of seconds the entire lamb was aflame and galloping through the field, streaking it with light. It fell, extended its legs with a tremble, then stopped, immobile. It kept burning until it went out on its own, amid a cloud of smoke.
He had dozens of videos, an encyclopedia; the lamb was the last one he had shot, but there were videos of cats on fire who bristled suddenly like a balls of flame, jumping with panicked yowls; he had dogs, running with just their tails on fire at first, then all of them, packs of dogs fleeing through the woods, always at night, hunting dogs, as if desperately chasing some prey, but all they were chasing was an escape from themselves, from their pain; and birds, thrown off a cliff, that flapped their wings of light four or five times—not to fly but to put out the flames, though only stoking them—until they collapsed suddenly like meteorites toward the depths of the abyss. And a snake that shot across the ground like a gilded arrow; a rabbit that hopped through the dry brush, leaving paths of flame in its wake. He had projects thought up that he wouldn’t get a chance to do, fields of flowers with their corollas on fire, fruit burning up on the branches, palm trees, forests, galloping horses of fire, herds of flaming goats climbing cliffs, bulls, peacocks, roosters, cows burning in green fields, fiery ducks and swans swimming, men and women and children dressed in flames.
“You could make money off all this,” said Miqui. “We could commercialize it; there’s no risk, I can tell you that. If you don’t need the money, think about other people for a second.”
Nil didn’t answer, and in that silence the bitch’s wail could be heard through the door.
“More material,” said Miqui.
“That’s my dog. It’s dinnertime, he’s hungry.”
“Why don’t we talk about it, the Internet thing? Why don’t you let me look into it, and we can give it a try? We can do it from a server in India or the ends of the earth. I don’t think it’s illegal, at least not with the fleas and a few fucking beetles, that’d be ridiculous, but it’s got a morbid appeal, I’m sure it would work, people love sick shit.”
“No. I don’t want any problems.”
“What if I buy it off you?”
“You don’t need to buy it. You can do it yourself. I’ll let you have the idea.”
“I’m no artist, Nil,” said Miqui. “I never would have thought that up. Let me look into it this afternoon. Don’t pay me for the trip, man. Let’s get together later. I’ll come pick you up. I have some girlfriends, I’ll introduce you to them, you should unwind a little, you seem worked up, we’ll relax and talk business and you’ll see things differently. I’ll come get you at eleven, OK?”
The bitch on the other side of the door was getting louder and louder. Nil nodded; he’d have a lot to celebrate tonight.
The bitch had been rubbing her snout against the net and had managed to detach some of the packing tape. Even so, Nil stretched out on the sofa and dozed off after lunch. He slept for a couple of hours straight—his dreams squashed deep down inside him—until the bitch woke him up again. When it got dark he would put her down. That was the end of it. He would give the short films to the trucker, and he could do whatever he wanted with them. He would give him the camera and the laptop with the photographs from his second period, and then they would go celebrate with the girls.
The bitch was still and looking intently at the door, exhaling hard through her snout with her ears tensed but not lifted, because of the constraints of the net. Nil went over to look out the window. It was the end of the afternoon, and there was thin fog that would vanish at dusk; it was a prelude that gave way to the thicker fog. He’d learned to watch it as he waited for night to fall, a fake fog that could just as easily have come from the fires of farmers as from steam escaping from the ATO milk processing plant, or from the tanker trucks that constantly came to Vidreres to fill their steel tanks at the plant in the industrial park.
Shit. Someone was coming along the path, and it could only be his father. The shack wasn’t anywhere that people just passed by, it was at the end of the path. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there, because his car was parked outside. His father wouldn’t be pleased to find out that he’d taken the dog with him instead of killing it at Can Bou. Nil wouldn’t have an easy time explaining it either. He quickly grabbed the packing tape to wrap up the bitch’s muzzle again. He still had time to drag her into the workshop. But he took another look out the window. The person approaching was Iona, from Can Bou.
Shit. But better Iona than his father. He grabbed his coat, left the shack, and walked quickly over to her. He stopped her far enough away that she wouldn’t hear the bitch.
“I’m looking for a dog,” said Iona, “her name is Seda, she’s been missing all day. I thought maybe you’d seen her, maybe she headed this way, she must be really lost. She’s got a bad limp, we found her injured on the road . . .”
“If you got her off the road, she must have g
one back to her owners. Dogs do that, it seems like they’ve gotten used to you, but one day they wake up and go back home.”
Iona’s hair was shiny, her skin taut and porous; she had bags under her eyes from crying, but the pupils darted around. Nil thought about the pretty young teachers he’d seen that morning and the trucker’s friends awaiting him that night. Would he eventually get used to this girl? Would he really like her? When spring came, Iona would have to forget about the bitch and about Jaume. He himself will have changed a lot by then, he won’t be like he is now.
“How’s it going, life in the shack?” she said.
“Come some other day and I’ll show you,” Nil said. “I was just leaving.”
But Iona didn’t move. She had to make an effort to say what came next:
“One question, Nil. Why did you show me that video?”
“I made a mistake. You’re right, I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t the right moment. I just wanted to be there for you.”
“Be there for me?”
“I wanted to be there for you in your grief. I’m trying to adapt to being here again, fit in. I don’t know anything about anyone. I’ve been gone a long time.”
Iona took in a deep breath—Nil perfectly heard her take it in—and suddenly took off running toward the shack.
“I just have to see for myself!” she screamed in a cracked voice as she ran. “I can’t leave without checking! I have to check, Nil! I have to see it for myself!”