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.