The Boys (14 page)

Iona had the instinct to embrace her, but she felt the same repulsion as she felt for the image of the two dead boys in which she appeared. The woman who should have been her second mother was with them, wherever they were, more than here with her. She was in the fire, inside the fireplace, being consumed with her sons, going straight toward death. It pained Iona, but she was unable to approach her;
she would have gotten burned.

When they were about to leave, Iona grabbed the picture again.

“Thank you,” she said.

But Llúcia shook her head, no.

“You can't have it, Iona.”

“I'm in it.”

“Put it back where it was, please.”

“It's me, here in the middle, Llúcia. You see that, right? That's me. It's mine.” And she headed toward the door. “Good night.”

Her father caught up with her on the threshing floor outside.

After dinner, in her room, Iona cut herself out of the photograph. Then she stretched out on the bed with her laptop and reread the message from the trucker. She looked at the photographs she had of Jaume and started erasing them from the folders.

When everyone was in bed, she slipped secretly out of the house. The two horses poked their heads out the stable window. Seda was awake and followed Iona to the cherry tree. Right past where they'd buried Frare, with the same scissors she'd used to cut up the photograph, she opened a small hole in the ground and buried the picture of Jaume and his brother. She had to do it twice because the first time, as soon as she turned around to go back, Seda started scratching at it. She whimpered, it was hurting her injured leg, but she couldn't stop. The second time, Iona stamped down hard on the dirt, took Seda by the collar, and dragged her to the
house. One horse snorted, and the other whinnied a little when they saw her returning.

The next day she left early for the university. She glanced at the cherry tree from her car. The bitch had not gone back. It was very foggy. Behind the cherry tree, the giant barrow of the Montseny could barely be seen.

A GREAT PLAIN THAT WAS ALL FIRE AND DEMONS

I

At Can Bou they locked the gate at night, but it was low, and the dogs jumped over it.

Nil got there around three, and turned off the engine and headlights of his car. Everything went well. The dogs came rushing out of the shed, barking, but halfway to him they were silenced by the overwhelming scent. He had the window lowered so they would smell the meat, and he had a rag, wet with urine, tied to the handle on the outside of the door.

He had spent the afternoon at the dog pound in Tossa, chatting with the supervisor and giving water to a dalmatian in heat. He knew the guy—he knew the supervisors at half a dozen dog pounds—and the guy remembered him, because everybody remembered him.

“Where's Ringo?” asked the supervisor.

“Son of a bitch leaves my car covered in hair,” answered Nil, as he dried the puddle of piss on the cage's cement floor with the rag. Then the supervisor held the dalmatian while Nil ran the dry tip of the rag along the bitch's ass.

“You could take her with you,” said the guy.

“I'll think about it.”

“Artists.”

People who complicate their lives.

He drove to Can Bou with protective pads on his legs and arms, and gloves so thick he had trouble shifting gears. He carried an open sack on his lap, beneath the steering wheel, wet with blood, with fifteen or twenty kilos of lamb meat that he had deboned himself. He emptied the bag out the window. The dogs jumped the fence and leaped on the meat.

He should have scattered the cuts when he'd thrown them. Now he'd have trouble catching a single dog. They were growling with pleasure, the males hankering to sniff the rag on the door. He grabbed the net from the back seat and went out the passenger side door. He placed a gloved hand on the back of one dog to separate it from the others, but the dog turned its head, bared its teeth, and sank its muzzle into the meat again; they were crazy for the meat.

Then he heard some whimpering from the other side of the gate. A dog was trying to leap over it, but one of its legs kept giving out. He didn't think twice, threw the net on it, climbed the fence, finished wrapping up the animal, and tossed it back over the gate. The bundle fell like dead weight on the other side. He carried it to the trunk, pulled off his leg protection and the gloves, got back in the car through the passenger side, and turned on the engine. Can Bou was still dark.

One of the nice things about spending time at the workmen's shack was being able to watch, every morning, from his
fishbowl amid the fields—as he breakfasted behind insulated windows with the heat on—how the fog dispersed and the outlines became sharper. The fields took on depth, the edges of the tree plantations came into focus, and the homes at the center of Vidreres appeared one by one, piled up around Santa Maria, all beneath the bell tower and the church's gabled roof.

The bitch spent the night moaning, and Nil had barely gotten any sleep, but it was still too early to go out for his daily walk around Lake Sils. The fields were wet with dew, and everything was glazed with fog. It seemed that, overnight, without a word, the lake's water had risen up and now again filled the land it had occupied before it'd been drained. Nil had seen photographs of old maps where the lake was larger than the one in Banyoles, and the fog and the dew made him think of the water reemerging from its nocturnal lair, retaking La Selva plain, soaking the lands and turning them into a swamp that grew into a deep lake between the mountain walls of Les Gavarres, Les Guilleries, and L'Ardenya.

The sun came up, the water receded, and all that was left on the entire plain was the shallow pool of Lake Sils. The intermittent streams, the irrigation channels, and the holes in the springs drained the water; the earth sucked it up. While the water on the bottom collected in aquifers, the water on top evaporated and gathered as cloud cover like a giant UFO in the sky, leaving a trail of fog tangling like gauze through the brambles and coppices. During that morning smoke drivers on the national highway and the AP-7 put themselves in the hands of fate as they went through the
fog banks, gripping the steering wheel in their fists and digging their nails into it, praying that the road was straight and a semi wouldn't plow into them from behind. It was then that the Vilobí airport closed its runways and sent the planes to Barcelona, and when a train could, as had happened a couple years back, pass right through the Sils station because the engineer didn't see it, and have to double back. The flat, fertile lands gained from the lake's draining had memory. Where there had once been water and where there were now fields of fodder, poplar plantations, and plane trees, the winter mornings rose wet with milky fog, and the dew's pledge—branches with pearl earrings on their tips, wisps of fodder with necklaces of crystal flowers, grains of sand with tiny diamond rings—swore evanescently that, by night, the lake would flow again.

Watching through the window as the curds of fog dispersed, he said again that, before spring, he too would emerge, renewed, from inside himself. That was why he'd come back to Vidreres, to remake his previous life, to get up each morning with the serenity of that small piece of the world on the other side of the window. It wasn't easy, but five mornings earlier luck had turned his way, and out of the fog came the car with its bloodied windows.

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.