Once he was dead, his parents would lock up the shack. They would let the bitch go. She would run, limping and moaning in pain, back to Can Bou. What good is the land, his father would say, when, without children, it’s worthless? I’m tired of it all! This time for real! Now I know true disgrace! And why? What is this, a punishment? Haven’t I had enough, seeing it happen to my neighbor twice over? Do I have to go through it myself? Me? A truck shows up at the shack, his parents wait by the door, it’s there to take away the furniture, the extractor hoods, the clothes, the shoes, the camera, the computer with his videos. . What are these bottles, Lluís? Some of them are still alive! Is this what my son spent his time doing? Collecting insects? Where did he learn to do that? And why? Why did he do it, Lluís? And why did he come back so strange and unsociable? What happened to him in Barcelona? Why did he do that to his ear? And the videos? Why can’t I see them? Was our son crazy? Is that why he came back to Vidreres — to get killed?
But the shotgun ignored Nil. The old man opened the door, crying, and the two guys went in. Nil picked up the cell phone off the floor, locked the door behind him, put the key in his pocket with the phone, and asked the old man if the tables were in the kitchen.
They went through the empty dining room and there were the tables, of course, the same wide, heavy tables he had seen in the photograph online before calling the man’s son-in-law. Miqui and Nil carried them to the entrance, and from the entrance to the truck. They put them on the flatbed with the crane and tied them down for the trip.
Nil went back into the restaurant for a moment. The old man was sitting at a table with his head in his hands. Nil placed the money beside him, with the cell phone and keys on top. The man didn’t dare lift his head.
Miqui was waiting for Nil, smoking, beside the truck. He’d leaned the gun against one wheel. Anyone passing on the highway, a police squad car, could have seen the shotgun.
“Artists,” muttered Nil.
The truck followed him to Serradell. They unloaded the tables with the crane just as they had loaded them up and brought them into the workspace. They put them in the empty spot beneath the extractor hood.
“Are you a chef?” asked Miqui. Then he saw the tripod and camera. “You take photos? Photos of food?”
“Videos. Shorts. I’m an artist.”
“I admire artists.”
“They’re more common than you think. Do you want to see the tables get their first run? I owe you a favor.”
He brought Miqui a chair and asked if he wanted a beer. He focused the camera on the table. He turned on the lights, lowered the blinds, and hauled a cardboard box filled with plastic bottles out of the closet. He pulled out two and emptied them onto the middle of the largest table. He tapped the bottom of the bottles so the little black rocks inside would come out. They were beetles of varying sizes, which came to life on the table. Some of them seemed dead but weren’t, they were playing dead, trying to protect themselves that way. Others curled up right where they’d fallen, and still others ran over the edge of the table and fell to the floor.
He spritzed the largest group with a spray bottle and then splashed a rain of alcohol all over the table. The smell spread through the workshop. He turned on the extractor, started recording, and turned off the lights. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket, lit it, and brought it over to the largest beetle. The beetle burst into flame. The fire leaped from one shell to the next. The beetles ran with their fire, crashing into each other, spreading the small blue flame, turning into little rocks of light, then quickly going out.
He ran a brush along the steel, making the black dust fall to the floor, then emptied a couple more bottles out onto the table. The spiders burned faster than the beetles; they made one big flash and disappeared, consumed amid the smoke. They held up a flaming topaz on eight skinny legs. It lasted an instant. Just enough time for it to fix on your retina if you quickly closed your eyes. The image remained there for a few seconds, a luminous sketch of spider tattooed on the inside of your eyelid, until it too vanished.
He dumped out a mix of insects from another bottle, backswimmers, earwigs, ladybugs, praying mantises, and grasshoppers that leaped like sparks when they were set afire. They had parabolas of light over the embers of little legs and segments, jaws, hair, spikes, horns, wings, and antennae. He swept the table again and emptied more bottles. The worms twisted with their tips in the air, little red-hot horseshoes, lengths of live coal and then ash. Nil filmed the cloud of blue sparks from fleas; he lit up the evanescent galaxy of an anthill, ephemeral constellations of mosquitoes, hawker dragonflies on fire, damselflies and horseflies, bees that fell like a meteor shower, blue blowflies. . He pulled out a box from a pet shop. The lid was green mesh. He spritzed what was inside right through the mesh. He uncovered the box and out flew tropical butterflies with large wings, which he lit up with the lighter like the pages of a book. The colorful glitter made a short flight before scorching and melting into the darkness.
When Nil turned on the light, Miqui applauded.
“Amazing,” he said, “I swear, never seen anything like it. They must pay you well.”
Nil shook his head as he stopped the camera and started to sweep up.
“It’s a labor of love?” Miqui thought it over for a moment then said, “What a weird hobby. Post it online and you’ll get a million hits.”
“There are animal protection laws.”
“For spiders and flies? For butterflies? Are you saying you’ve done this with bigger animals?”
Nil turned the lights off again. He had his laptop connected to a wide-screen television. He switched it on. It was a film that was shot at night in the field in front of the shack. The camera gradually adapted to the darkness and focused on a shadow that became a lamb, a lamb tied by its neck to the ground, probably to a rock in the middle of the field. The camera remained in one spot. The elf with the hole in his ear came out with a container on his back connected by a tube to a spray gun. He approached the lamb and soaked it. Then he rubbed the liquid in with his fingers. Before untying the lamb, he kneeled down for a moment on the other side of the animal, where he lit something — a wick — then ran out of the frame.
“Here’s where the film will start once it’s edited,” Nil said.
Light appeared behind the lamb. The animal turned its head, looked at its thigh, and started to run in circles. The fire spread through its wool. In a matter of seconds the entire lamb was aflame and galloping through the field, streaking it with light. It fell, extended its legs with a tremble, then stopped, immobile. It kept burning until it went out on its own, amid a cloud of smoke.
He had dozens of videos, an encyclopedia; the lamb was the last one he had shot, but there were videos of cats on fire who bristled suddenly like a balls of flame, jumping with panicked yowls; he had dogs, running with just their tails on fire at first, then all of them, packs of dogs fleeing through the woods, always at night, hunting dogs, as if desperately chasing some prey, but all they were chasing was an escape from themselves, from their pain; and birds, thrown off a cliff, that flapped their wings of light four or five times — not to fly but to put out the flames, though only stoking them — until they collapsed suddenly like meteorites toward the depths of the abyss. And a snake that shot across the ground like a gilded arrow; a rabbit that hopped through the dry brush, leaving paths of flame in its wake. He had projects thought up that he wouldn’t get a chance to do, fields of flowers with their corollas on fire, fruit burning up on the branches, palm trees, forests, galloping horses of fire, herds of flaming goats climbing cliffs, bulls, peacocks, roosters, cows burning in green fields, fiery ducks and swans swimming, men and women and children dressed in flames.