In the brightly lit sunroom, sitting with me in the present day of this wintry January in Gràcia, ex-Inspector Fabregat deflates like a sad balloon. The breath sags in his chest. He stands and thanks me, ushering me out towards the evening, but stops me at the door.
‘One more thing: it is personal conjecture, nothing more. Natalia’s murder was different than the others. Brutal, fast, efficient. A cut to the artery below her ear. A slice to the lower muscle of her tongue. Very sharp blade, high speed, done in a matter of seconds. She must have been like a fucking water fountain, there was so much blood, it was all over the kid’s clothes . . . Who would do that? Kill that fast, and then take the body on a twenty-minute walk through town to the cathedral? Adrià may have been crazy – I’m sure he was crazy – but he wasn’t able to kill like that – I don’t think so . . . We are hunting for an expert – you’ve got to understand that. A person or persons who had killed many times before. Everything about it was habitual. Rehearsed. Up until Natalia’s death he never appeared on camera, left no trace of himself on victim or on site . . .’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That it doesn’t match, you see – what serial murderer would carry his fourth victim to the steps of a cathedral and leave her there before drowning himself in the sea? I’ve thought about that for a decade. The man who killed those women was calculating. Terrifyingly so. He was not impulsive. Each step had its own logic. Where does Adrià Sorra fit in that? He was a pawn, a means of hiding someone. So our fucker could just evaporate away. No one believes me – Ay Fabi, they say – Ostras, not again. Let it go, they’re all ten years dead. Ghosts don’t care. But I can’t shake my feelings. Natalia’s death held its own message; one I never knew how to read. Each letter gave me a riddle and a body. But there was no letter for Natalia. Call it an old man’s intuition – but I am convinced of this: Natalia knew him intimately. Bear that in mind, when you speak to people. The real murderer is out there. In this city. Tanning on the beach. Eating olives. Being a bastard. If I am right, he will be one of her crowd. He is someone she would have recognized, someone she trusted and then feared. Someone she knew.’
VI
HUNTING
Outside it is cold. Much colder than I had expected. I stroll down Passeig de Gràcia towards the shoreline, skirting the shadows along gridlocked, elegant fissures in the flesh of the Catalan capital, made with surgical precision across the chest of Barcelona.
In January, Barcelona feels lean. Stripped of leaves. Draped in slate clouds, and soft, rising mist. As I walk through the city, I see the metropolis shifting. Scraped, and scraped again.
Written and rewritten.
There is the Eixample, the new expansion, a victory of modernist foresight. Gaudí’s house of bones, Casa Batlló. Aquamarine tiles undulating and bulbous. Once-fortified walls hide beneath ring roads. I cross the vast Plaça de Catalunya, carrying my papers. Soon Barcelona slips into medieval garb.
I make my way to the square of the cathedral where Natalia Hernández appeared at rest. Her chest ornamented in blood. For a moment I stare at the steps where they found her. They are vacant. Dark grey. Stub ends of cigarettes. A guard at the church door watches a group of gypsies asking for alms. I buy a clump of rosemary for good measure. Looping round Carrer del Bisbe, I skim over flagstones. Left onto Pietat. And then the secret many people walk past. The street of Paradise. Carrer del Paradis. Dark and narrowing. Sucking out the oxygen. I am looking for a porthole. A domed slit in walls. Barred windows. The sign reads: ‘Ajuntament de Barcelona. Temple Romà d’August. Local del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya.’ Slip in beneath key stones, black beams overhead. Duck under low archway into open courtyard. Mustard-yellow paint and hanging window boxes. Follow the slight red arrow. I pass a wrought-iron gate, descend worn steps. Enter a second tiny courtyard. Sea-green. Red brick at eye level.
There they are! Stretching to infinity. Three enormous Corinthian columns squeezed between sea-green walls. I have reached the pagan outpost and sit on the bench beneath them, arching my neck to look up. A French couple snap photographs. A man and woman in their sixties. They are with me for a while, very quiet and reverent. And then they slip away.
Taking my notebook out of my bag, I write out the verses of Fabregat’s letters, placing the words in the order received. I will analyse it systematically. Slowly. Now I am only beginning to think. The collated words form an altar-shape, similar to Alexandrian poetry in the third century ce. That is good. An affirmation.
Find me in the Utterance of Birds (1)
You have called me (2)
Thrice Great (3)
Two-Faced (4)
Forked Tongue. (5)
No more riddles. (6)
I will teach you. (7)
Follow. Heed my words. (8)
Ancient Crimes. (9)
Count the grains of Sand (10)
And measure the Sea. (11)
Read the deaf-mute. (12)
And hear the voiceless. (13)
Serpentarius! (15)
One-who-is-arriving! (16)
Know this: (17)
Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man (18)
Listening to Fabregat tell his story, I had to contain myself. To not reveal anything. Neither the shaking of my hands, which I hid beneath my thighs, nor the voices I heard on the air, clamouring like a flock of gulls. For me the words on his tongue conjured colours. The letter A groans like dried blood. Scabs at the corner of my vision. R: regal, dark, Tyrian purple. I hear D as indigo, and I makes a bright light, partially defined, like a clear haze, but pointed, sharp as a shaft of ice. E’s true colour is yellow. The sound delicate like the hind of a bee. My feelings are not sensible. They do not transfer to others. They cannot be easily explained. Ink breathes. The heart quickens. Voices make concrete shapes. Poem like a portal, opening my skin. I fight not to lose myself, to stop my eyes rolling back into my sockets and disappearing.
Lines 2–5 of Fabregat’s anonymous letters were carbon copies of verses of the poem presented to me by Harold Bingley on that sleety London afternoon in October. They provide an anchor and a key, rooting his conundrum into familiar territory – the palimpsest poem Captain Charles Leopold Ruthven cut out of the book in 1829 that fell from the walls of the lightning-struck chapel three days ago.
There is a rich and compelling history of documents like our elusive palimpsest. Books pulled from strange places in strange conditions with unexpected and incalculable outcomes. In 1896 Carl Reinhardt purchased the Berlin Codex from an Egyptian dealer in Akhim, who told a convoluted story of discovery – the book was wrapped in feathers, and hidden in a wall. Reinhardt suspected it had been retrieved from a burial ground. The Berlin Codex contained four Gnostic scriptures: The Act of Peter, The Gospel of Mary, The Secret Book of John and The Wisdom of Jesus Christ. It was a groundbreaking find: a set of ancient manuscripts hidden from the world for two millennia.
In December 1945, following the end of World War Two, three Egyptian brothers rode out into the desert on their camels, tracking towards the red cliff Jabal al-Tarif, beyond the city of Nag Hammadi. The brothers intended to harvest a nitrate-rich fertilizer buried in the broken rocks at the base of the cliff. As they were digging beneath the boulders, they unearthed an ancient jar sealed with a bowl. In a fit of passion, the youngest smashed the jar open hoping for treasure – perhaps the death mask of a king, or a lapis lazuli scarab. Instead, he sent shards of disintegrating papyrus into the wind. Rather than gold, the youth stared down at thirteen bound codices. This trove is now known as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, constituting one of the most significant historical discoveries of the twentieth century. In the 1970s a third collection of Egyptian codices appeared on the market – their origins deliberately obscured. Rumour has it that the volumes were stolen from a burial cave containing a family of skeletons and a set of books housed in a luminous limestone box. This box held four works: a Greek mathematical treatise, a Greek translation of the Jewish E
xodus, Coptic New Testament letters of Paul, and the infamous Codex Tchacos, a third set of Gnostic papyrus fragments that vanished into the private market – only to be found sixteen years later, stowed away in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York.
When I was brought onto this case, Harold Bingley believed that the Illuminatis Palimpsest – as it was first called – was part of a missing Gnostic work that belonged to the secret history pulled out of the cliffs above Nag Hammadi. Within the Nag Hammadi Scriptures there is a poem called ‘Thunder’, an anonymous first-person discourse of the Divine Feminine. The poem boldly announces the identity of the speaker in a series of stylized contradictions, redolent of Isis aretalogies and the Jewish Wisdom, Sophia. Thematic parallels between the Gnostic poem ‘Thunder’ and the subtext of the Illuminatus Palimpsest had made Harold Bingley and those around him ravenously hungry for more. The Illuminatus Palimpsest, if an authentic Gnostic offshoot, would be among the very few tracts preserved in the Greek language. But I was not satisfied with his assumption. The correlation did not ring true, and though Bingley disagreed with me at first, he came to understand that I harboured a powerful theory of my own.
* * *
I hear the words forming as I sit beneath the columns. A familiar voice. Like the cries of the siren, she sings to the root of me. Snakes round my mind, singing: Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man. Confessions of a killer or clues to something deeper? Some dark old thing hidden deep inside?
* * *
The story begins like many others do. An old woman walks through the forest carrying a heavy burden. Tattered sack thrown over her shoulder. Despite her age she is strong, with the thick neck of a bull and the bulk of a wrestler; she hides her hair beneath a white cloth tucked over her ears, framing mannish cheeks and a gnarled nose like a dried head of garlic. In her cloth sack the old woman carries nine books, which she bears to the court of a king. Each scroll beautifully bound, made of sacred leaves sewn into volumes containing a verse history of the world. The letters of her book are Greek, for that is the language she comes from. When she arrives at the gates of the city the old woman demands to speak directly to the King. He grants her a single audience, whereupon the woman offers her books for a hefty sum and a promise of endless knowledge.
The King sneers at the crone.
‘I would have nine books for nothing, for nothing is surely what they are worth.’
Calmly the old woman selects three scrolls from her sack, and with a flick of her magic wrist sets them alight in a golden blaze. The books of leaves crackle into embers.
She asks again:
‘King, what will you give me for my books?’
‘Nothing, crone. Kings do not read the mad ramblings of old women.’
The woman plucked another three volumes from her sack. ‘You do not know what you lose.’
The King laughs in her face.
‘The choice is yours,’ she says, and with a second flick of her wrist three more volumes burst into flames.
A priest rushes forward in horror. ‘King Tarquin!’ he cries in agony. ‘Do you not recognize the counsel of your ancestor Aeneas, who sought out the Sibyl at Cumae? Whatever verses the Madam has written on the leaves, she has arranged in Divine order; they remain unchanged in position and do not shift in their arrangement. King Tarquin, you have flung the door open in haste and disturbed the order of her scrolls! They are lost to us! Burnt into nothing!’
‘It is true,’ the old crone says to the King. ‘You have spurned six books of knowledge of the ancients and lost potential futures of your empire, for I am the Sibyl of Cumae and I would have given you everything.’
King Tarquin begs her forgiveness. Thinking of the words of Aeneas, he plies her with supplications: ‘Do not give your verses to the scrolls and leaves, but sing the prophecy yourself!’
But the Sibyl does not sing to please, and asks that the King pay the full price for the three remaining Sibylline Books, so that he might learn a lesson from his pride.
* * *
Folklore states that the Sibylline Books or Libri Sibyllini came to Rome in this fashion, delivered in person by the Sibyl of Cumae. In the sixth century bce, King Tarquin the Proud – Tarquinius Superbus, poppy slayer – ordered that the books of scroll prophecies be kept in the city for perpetuity. They were first held on the Capitoline Hill, fiercely guarded by two select priests. The number of priests given exclusive access to the Sibylline Books grew as Roman power expanded from two to ten in 367 bce and later to fifteen men during the Republic, forming an elite college of priests known as the Quimdecimviri Sacris Faciundis. The lines of text in the sacred books were regarded as the highest of state secrets.
When the Sibylline Books burnt in the conflagration of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in 83 bce, the Romans sent out the Quimdecimviri to recover prophecies from other Sibyls, collating a new set of divine proclamations from sources at the furthest reach of empire. Emperor Augustus later ordered a purging of these texts, cutting out the words that did not suit his vision of the future. Nero consulted them following the fire of 64 ce, while Julian the Apostate would look to the books in 363 ce in the last year of his life and reign. General Stilicho finally destroyed the remnants of the Libri Sibyllini around 408 ce, in the violent build-up to the sacking of Rome. Today, the original Sibylline prophecies are entirely erased.
* * *
The Sibyl of Cumae, author of the Libri Sibyllini, was just one of many Sibyls circulating books in the ancient world. The Sibyl, as a symbol, as an icon, as a woman, presents a rich literary tradition, though very little of her work survives. While many confuse her with the Oracle at Delphi, the Sibyl was a lone operator, more freelance than institutional. A clairvoyant rather than a medium, she had more in common with the function of a prophet. Her soul was fundamentally different from an oracle: there were no limitations to her prophecy. No set days of the year for consultation, no clear affiliations with a single god, or priestess, or worship centres. The Sibyl alone crafted verses of original poetry as an autonomous author who addressed the gods directly. She placed herself in dialogue with divinity, but did not succumb to its advances. She did not wait to answer questions, posed by dignitaries of state or High Priests. She lived in the ancient forest, far removed from cities and pastoral meadows. Her home? The Neolithic cave. She saw what was going to happen, and she bothered to write it down, despite the fact that nobody had asked for her opinion. In books, no less. And in her own voice. Not as the god Apollo. Not as a vehicle or a vessel, but as a woman, speaking in the authoritative first person from the vantage point of her cave.
This insistence on sovereignty has implications on a stylistic level. The Sibyl claimed a primeval heritage, an eternal watchfulness, placing herself before Troy. Before the floods, the Sibyl asserted her hegemony using the distant, unknowable past. She was critically non-denominational, unbounded by nationality or creed. She claimed she had been watching always. That she predicted all this mess. That she had seen the future from the beginning, and written it down. She said sometimes that she was from the East. That she came from the mountains of Turkey, or the hills beyond Jerusalem, or the high walls of Babylon, that she was born deep inside Libya and Egypt. Always insisting that she knew something old and powerful. In Early Medieval European mythology, this came to mean that she knew the One True God. Her influence was such that she survived through the Dark Ages, becoming a powerful prophet of monotheism, the Pagan seer who gave the word of God to Rome and a vision of Christ to the Emperor Augustus, who left the first acrostic in her poetry and knew the voice of the Infinite in the desert. She wrote Pagan Sibylline Books and later Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles. The Sibyl became a layered manuscript, a bridge into the past, a palimpsest of her own.
My argument to Harold Bingley has been the following: that in The Alchemical History of Things, the alchemist Rex Illuminatus claims he met a tongueless woman in the mountains of Mallorca who had given him a secret book. If we are to belie
ve that this woman was indeed a Sibyl, as Rex Illuminatus suggests, then the Illuminatus Palimpsest could in fact contain surviving Sibylline oracles lost in the ancient world.
* * *
I pause, looking down at Fabregat's lines of text. Would someone kill for a secret like this?
Yes. I grit my teeth.
Yes they have – and yes they will.
It is easy to forget how often people have died for books like these.
And you?
What will you do?
How far would you go to hold such a secret in the palm of your hand?
What would you give?
Your eyes? Your ears? Your nose? Your tongue?
VII
EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SIBYL
from
The Alchemical History of Things
by Rex Illuminatus
The Sibyl carries on her person such a booke of parchement that answers all questions. She has called this booke the Song of the Sibyl but I calle it the Serpent or Serpentyne Papers on account of the texture of the leaves, which, when sewne together at the tip and tayl create a surface very much lyke that of the mottled scayles of a serpent. In the bynding of these leaves, the Sibyl has occupyed manie hours, forgyng meaning from the nonsensical patterns of prophecie, arrangyng words and phrases in algorithms that seemed to her lyke songs, and so the urge for order gave berth to poetry, reflectyng her secret desyre: the dream of the artist to understand the fleetyng rustle of oak leaves blowne about the floor of the cave. She has used the secrets of these leaves to give divinatorie instructions relatyng to my chartes, which I shifted to include her language, believyng that she has access to an inarticulate power which takes a shape of the serpent coyled in the base of her spyne, rumblyng and movyng in her throate when she speaks, makyng its voice heard despyte her stubbed tongue. Since takyng up her language, which I call the Utterrance of Birds5, the accuracy of my charts has expanded thryce-folde, and my alchymical experiements have been bountiefullie enriched. To learne of the success of my rosie gold, call for:
The Serpent Papers Page 9
