The Boys (15 page)

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 silent, 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.

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 . . .