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.
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.