“In hell?” said a girl.
“That’s right, he was in hell. ‘Hence,’ the young man said, ‘hold tight to that steed, for I am the devil!’”
The teacher had adopted a deep voice to imitate the devil, and the students laughed. She continued reading, slowly, so no one would miss a thing:
“‘Porter, hearing those words, said: “Jesus, save me, don’t forsake me, Blessed Virgin, be with me.” And thereupon. .,’ which means at that point, the horses: ‘both steeds proceeded through the lake, mountains, valleys, talking all the while. .’ The horses talked, they talked the whole time they took Pere to hell, what do you think? Can you imagine what they were saying to each other?”
What would animals say as they carried you off to hell? What was the beetle saying as I dismembered and squashed it, what had the bitch been saying all night long; what was it saying right now, locked up in the shack, tangled in the net? He saw a worm on a leaf. It must talk like a little snake. He collected the worm and put it in the bag. He turned over another leaf and peeled a snail off it. He kicked over a rock. Underneath, it was filled with earwigs and damp beetles, which he gathered and put into the bag.
“And do you know what Pere Porter was doing?” continued the teacher. “Well, he was holding on ‘tight to the mount. After an hour on horseback, having passed great valleys, great mountains, great rivers, and great seas, they entered the mouth of a cave and then egressed’—which means that they went out—‘onto a great plain that was all fire and demons, with multitudes of people.’”
That was when a boy in the group turned excitedly toward him, and Nil felt exposed. He crouched down, then fled with his head bowed like a chastened animal. He walked through the trunks, got tangled in the brambles, and when he raised his head again he realized that the boy hadn’t been startled by him, but by what Nil now saw before him: a hot-air balloon, inflated but still on the ground, that peeked out above some trees on the other side of the road.
The plain functioned as a base camp for the balloons; it was an ideal place for them to take off and land. A great plain that was all fire and demons, once flooded and centuries later drained for plant terraces and woodlands. The top of the balloon emerged above and a bit to one side of the tree branches; in fact, it looked like another tree, a colorful tree in the bloom of spring, and Nil crossed the road — he heard a couple of horns honking behind him but didn’t turn — and kept making his way to the shack before changing direction to get a better look at the balloon. He came out from the trees and approached it; they had inflated it in the middle of a barren field; there were two cars, a van, and a man who was watching the seven passengers in the basket about to take off. The pilot lifted his arms every once in a while with two lit flares, two vertical columns of fire, which he stuck into the belly of the balloon to heat up the air. The passengers — four adults, two kids, and the pilot — waved good-bye to the man who had remained on the ground, and when the pilot lit the fire, the jets of helium roared, and two luminous horns showed through the balloon’s fabric.
A great plain that was all fire and demons, and the balloon detached from the field and began to move horizontally, at first slowly and floating only just above the ground, walking, running as if carried by a breeze that didn’t move a single branch, that Nil couldn’t feel on his skin, and then it passed alongside a group of poplars and climbed diagonally toward the sky.
Planes out of the Vilobí airport were flying higher up; Nil followed them with his gaze as he waited to hear the bursts of fire from the balloon. The fire was light, painters were pyromaniacs, all artists were, he himself was a demon, working in fire. . But who knew, deep down, what he was. An artist? A demon? What is a demon? What does demon mean? Who knows if a murderer can ever become a murderer within himself, even if he wants to; who knows what we might find all the way inside a word. Words are traitors, they’re full of dregs; action, on the other hand, is luminous, it can be filmed.
He heard the bitch’s moaning before he reached the door of the shack. He opened it and saw the animal, still caught in the net. She had dragged herself from under the table to beside the fireplace. When the bitch saw him she reacted. She couldn’t move, but she lowered her eyes — she knew who was in charge — and was quiet for a moment, but then that unbearable whimpering began again.
Nil had no time to waste. He had gotten too distracted by the balloon; he had to empty the bag. He put the plug into the kitchen sink, poured the insects in, and watched the costume ball of beetles, grasshoppers, the earwigs he had found under the rock, the centipedes he’d grabbed crossing the road, spiders, snails, praying mantises, and ants, all hugging the steel dance floor. . Along the way there had been fights and deaths in the bag, and the hurly-burly in the sink was disturbing. He wanted to turn on the tap to give those empty little boxes stuffing, flesh, but it was just that emptiness that meant it would be hard to drown them — they would float like a raft of tiny pieces, a mosaic of colors.
He started by separating out the grasshoppers, who were big and had quickly freed themselves from the other critters and were jumping about the kitchen. He scooped them up and used a funnel to get them into a plastic bottle. He had half a bottle full. Then came the beetles, and then the backswimmers, the worms, and the snails, each type in their own container. Once the separating was done, he covered the bottles with perforated tops, put them in a cardboard box, and took them to his workspace on the other side of the wall.
He went back into the dining room. The bitch tried to roll over, like a fish. Her claws had gotten stuck in the strings, and she’d made a mess of the net with her legs. Nil put on gloves and covered one arm with protective padding, and he cut a hole in the net with a bread knife so the animal could get its head through. The dog growled and sunk her teeth into the arm pad. He let her. After she tired herself out, he put a muzzle on her. Then she didn’t moan because she couldn’t, but she started to whine. Maybe it was her leg, or maybe she had a broken bone; he tightened the muzzle with five layers of packing tape.
II
At midday he was in the parking lot of El Capitell restaurant, on the outskirts of Bescanó. The place had been closed for months, but you could see the building better from the highway now than when the restaurant was in business, because over each of the three windows on the ground floor, which was the dining area, they’d hung large independentist flags as curtains. The independentist movement had upended the power balance — Nil’s parents had hung the starred flag at their house, and he would have put one up at the shack, except no one ever passed by in Serradell.
On the door of the closed restaurant hung a sign that said FOR RENT / FOR SALE, with a cell phone number. As he maneuvered into the empty parking lot, Nil saw a flag-curtain lift slightly, and an old man peeked out from behind the glass. Nil got out of the Honda and walked to the door. He found it locked, but since he’d seen the man, he knocked on the glass. Nothing moved inside. He knocked a few more times, then sat down on the entrance steps. The highway was very empty and the few cars raced by. He got tired of waiting. He went back to the door and knocked harder and harder. He could see the keys hanging from the inside lock; he tried to force the door and knocked some more. The blows reverberated in the empty dining room. If he kept knocking like that, he would break the glass.