‘And the Pythia at Delphi . . .’ he says softly.
I do not need to explain to Bingley that according to the myths, Apollo took the Oracle at Delphi from a coiling drakaina – a dragon snake whom the god transfixed with a thousand arrows. In Greek Homeric verse, the serpent is female: the terrible, vindictive daughter of the Earth goddess Gaia whose blood rotted into the Castalian spring, infusing the divine vapours with her essence. The word python, meaning rot, became a name for Apollo, Pythian, slayer of the serpent, which in turn became the name of his Oracle – the Pythia at Delphi.
I continue, adding that when the author identified herself as a Nightingale (disambiguation: Philomela) and a Python, she allied herself with a history of rhetorical contortion. Today the French pythonisse translates into English as witch, while sibylline comes into colloquial usage in much the same way that we might say cryptic or enigmatic. In Catalan, pitonissa means fortune-teller, while in Italian, the word resonates with Pythoness and Pythia, but also connotes sibilla (sibyl), sacerdotessa (priestess) and strega (witch). One can see the same shifts in the Greek word daemon – meaning guide, lesser deity, divine power, demigod. Now our demon.
‘And . . . ?’ he asks. ‘Have you reached any conclusion?’
‘The author also refers to herself as a whisperer.’ I direct Bingley’s attention to a subsequent note. ‘My preferred translation of the word “witch” emerges from Exodus, taken from the Hebrew kashaph which itself comes from the root “to whisper”. Scholars often interpret this as referring to witchcraft in the act of “whispering a spell . . .” but I read this to mean whispering in the sense of hiding.’ I pause. ‘It is this interpretation of witch which led me directly to the book’s author.’
A catlike smile creeps over Bingley’s pallid features.
‘An identical colophon has been used by an artist whose modern books are housed at the University of Barcelona – a calligrapher and restorer, educated in the 1960s in Barcelona before working in the theatre as a set designer. This author had hidden her name in a fairly rudimentary cipher, formed by the first letters of the titles for the initial six chapters. Such that if you were an initiate, and knew the author of the text and her previous materials, you could translate the hidden acrostics in the document—’
‘And you believe she had access to the Illuminatus Palimpsest?’ he asks.
‘That is what I am suggesting.’
‘Name?’
‘Cristina Rossinyol.’
‘Have we made direct contact?’
‘I can’t. She died. Nearly twenty years ago.’
‘Ah,’ Bingley says. ‘Pity that.’ He thinks long and hard for a while.
‘Any children? Any survivors?’
* * *
The first newspaper articles refer darkly to the case as a local tragedy. In a flowery retrospective printed in La Vanguardia, the writer mentions ‘that with a stroke of luck and a generous acquisition by the Special Collections Department of the University of Barcelona, Cristina Rossinyol’s gold-bound codices have found a home in the libraries of our city, ensuring the final resting place of one of Catalonia’s greatest contemporary calligraphers and illuminators’. A series of images, scanned photographs, arrive from the University of Barcelona’s collection. The first is of Cristina as a young woman, standing in overalls, in what looks to be a working studio, in front of a series of statues, cast in the Roman style. She hovers between two men, a dark bearded man with spectacles and a long face who looks to be in his mid-thirties and another, light-haired taller man in his later twenties. They both have their arms around her shoulders. The men wear loose jeans and T-shirts, arms exposed, with paint stains on their trousers. Cristina’s face is full. A lilt to her smile. She has long black hair swept off her forehead, and thick curls. Her nose freckled, her cheeks firm, her mouth smiling broadly. Her eyes are striking – a deep, emerald green – her face eerily familiar – as if I had seen her somewhere before – in passing on a street or sitting in the little café below my open windows. Even behind the smiles, there is something radical about Rossinyol’s body language in the old photographs. All three grin at the camera. The caption below reads: ‘1975. Back stage at the New Theatre. Àngel Villafranca, Cristina Rossinyol and Joaquim Vidal Hernández commence work on their first production.’ The next two pictures come from archives at La Vanguardia. The first published by the paper after the accident in 1996.
Cristina Rossinyol died in a car accident off the pass to Sant Cugat, along with her husband and two youngest children aged six and eight. The date of the accident: 21 February 1996. The road was a dangerous route, and they had driven it in inclement weather, unseasonably cold for Barcelona. It was conceivable that they had skidded off the road, due to a thin layer of black ice that had formed in the morning, but judging by the damage to the side of the car that had not hit the ground, the car had been thrown over the edge of the road by a hard impact, probably from another vehicle. Traces of paint and metal on the shattered car later proved that it had likely been a large vehicle, painted black. The mountain highway was known for its reckless drivers, kids returning home after a wild night out in Barcelona, and when no evidence could point to a potential motive, the police closed the case on the basis that it was the kind of hit and run typical of drunk driving on the BP-1417.
There is a shot of Cristina’s family attached to her obituary.
Mother holding the youngest children’s hands, a little boy and girl.
A teenage daughter stands in the middle, with a short pageboy haircut, almost masculine in her features, her father to her left side, in front of the entrances to the Theatre of National Liberation, a poster for Cristina’s final show behind them.
To have lost a family so young.
There she is. Standing beside her mother.
Natalia Hernández. Just fifteen.
Old enough to hide something.
* * *
From my seat on the cold marble step in Barcelona I watch a mouse run out from the corner of the courtyard, wrinkling its nose. Rump bouncing along the bricks at the base of a Corinthian column. The mouse is small and grey with a long tail and a fat bottom. He is mousing for crumbs. Cautious but intrepid. Much braver than I am. I can feel the tremor in my hands. Nerves build. Have I made a mistake? Should I be here at all?
I hear the spur again: ‘It is not that you aren’t performing – no, no, I would never suggest that – it is simply that the work is not, perhaps, as swift as one would wish.’
Bingley’s teeth were yellow. Stained with tea.
‘Sloth, my dear, is a technical term. We are experiencing a great deal of sloth. Now I do realize that your health has been an issue . . . but speed is that intangible essence which defines the success of Picatrix. It is the essence we trade in. Precision and efficiency lead to results.’ He smiled, that spectre of a man, he had smiled and said: ‘My dear girl, no one, no matter how clever, is indispensable. It is one of the great fallacies of life to assume we are irreplaceable.
‘I am not interested in amassing scraps. These pieces you have brought me are good – in fact they are excellent – I would not deny that, but they have no true value. Let us not forget the grail we are seeking. You have been employed to find one thing and one thing only. The next time I see you I wish to be presented with a palimpsest. In the instance that this fails to occur . . .’ His lisp intensified. ‘I am afraid we may need to rethink the terms of our agreement.’
I stand in the cool beneath the columns. Dust off my knees. The sky enclosed by the empty courtyard. The mouse has disappeared into the roots of what was once Colonia Julia Augusta Faventia Paterna in honour of the Emperor Augustus. Barcino. Barca Nona. Barkeno. These stones form her reliquary. Amongst Corinthian folds I catch evidence of living ghosts. Pieces of antiquity poke out of street corners. Sleep underground. Fragments hurry to the surface. I run over Fabregat’s story. What do you see in the carved symbols on the body of a sixteen-year-old girl hanging from a jacaranda tree?
The answer comes back cold.
In the nine-letter alphabet grafted on to Rosario swaying beneath a lamp post?
In the circle of blood round the navel of Roseanne in the copse below Tibidabo?
I see a trail of breadcrumbs.
Linking me uncomfortably to the past.
Book the Second
Relic Box
We have employed an alphabet in this Art so that it can be used to make figures, as well as to mix principles and rules for the purpose of investigating the truth. For, as a result of any one letter having many meanings, the intellect becomes more general in its reception of the things signified, as well as in acquiring knowledge. And this alphabet must be learnt by heart, for otherwise the artist will not be able to make proper use of this Art.
Ramon Llull, from his Ars Brevis
1308 ce
When you have landed and come to the city of Cumae and the sacred lakes of Avernus, among their sounding forests, there deep in a cave in the rock, you will see a virgin priestess foretelling the future in prophetic frenzy by writing signs and names on leaves. After she has written her prophecies on these leaves, she seals them all up in her cave where they stay in their appointed order. But the leaves are so light that when the door turns in its sockets the slightest breath of wind dislodges them. The draught from the door throws them into confusion and the priestess never makes it her concern to catch them as they flutter round her rocky cave and put them back in order or join up the prophecies. So men depart without receiving advice and are disappointed in the house of the Sibyl.
Virgil, The Aeneid
29-19 bce
I
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF LLEWELLYN SITWELL
Vol. 1
1 November 1851, Barcelona
Dear Heart,
Your letter has arrived at long last and I am grateful! So grateful! My heart lifted and swollen on the nectar of your love, though you rebuff me – I imagined you in fields and I was jealous of your lace, for I longed to see your throat, to reach out and kiss you! Though I write from darkness, I write more honestly for it, and this is a comfort to me, that you might hold the record of my thoughts, in case of my devastation. You cannot have known my troubles, but I see your face and your features like the orb of good faith and take comfort in the thought of our Love! Love, which sent me from your side to seek my Fortune, now requires that I write these truths to you! That you might keep my testament alive. There is no finer torture than my fear that I might not return to you! No greater fire! Katherine, you have not written directly of Love, you are too discreet for that, but I have intuited it in the use of such words as Self-denying, and Friendship – I am more than Brother or Lover, more than Friend! I am your devoted servant, your caged poet, your lovesick amalgam of a man, and though you have pushed me from your side – do not doubt that I will return to your bosom, twice as amorous! Return I will! A richer and more loving disciple, for if you wait for me – my God, Katherine, you will have me till my dying day for there is no stronger draught than the Love which I consumed for you this summer! I know our Friendship is short and my departure from England does not inspire confidence. I know men are fickle beasts, that we are weak upon temptation – but I had sworn off Love until I met you. How I am repentant now – though not ungrateful. For my selfishness and disinterest in the fairer sex has only left me more susceptible to your remarkable powers – I am transformed! Religion which once eschewed me I more fully understand – for my religion is now Love! Love of you! You have written in your letter last that I must not think of you as an ideal, but only as a weak woman, eternally struggling for the light. You have written: ‘You must not think me better than I am.’ Katherine, you are perfection in your imperfections (if indeed you have any). You are an Angel! You are the air I breathe! And no! It is not dreadfully selfish of you at all to accept my Love. It is enlightened! It is truth! You have asked me to be your confidant in Letters; I willingly accept, if you shall be a confidante in mine. I would like to write you near daily of my exploits, to keep you beside me and in my thoughts through writing. You shall be as a constant companion, Kitty Markham! My adviser and my Friend!
This morning at nine o’clock I was met at Barcelona port by a sallow envoy of Captain Charles Leopold Ruthven, a lean man with a face like a hawk and a malevolent disposition who seemed to be of some strange northern extraction; refusing me his name, I christened him Brass Buckle – his hands (rough and broad) suggested that the fellow had come from the mountains and never eased into the civil-living of the city. Brass Buckle was dressed in luxury for a man of his station, with gold cuffs and a great beaver-trimmed coat; his collar a bright, luminescent gold, his hair short beneath a broad cap. This man accosted me tersely – striding across the melee of travellers to take my luggage with an aggressive nod before pointing to the carriage that awaited me. I had taken measures to send Ruthven my likeness from London, but it surprised me that this alien figure should intuit my features. I resisted mounting Brass Buckle’s carriage in the instance that his was an elaborate scheme to hoodwink me of my belongings – I have prepared myself for these European dishonesties by reading the books you lent me – paying particular attention to the depravities of St Irvyne cautioning wisely against corrupt Rosicrucians and Alchemists (of which I am sure there are many).
The servant explained in broken English that Ruthven had instructed him as to my bearing and the clothing I had agreed to wear as a symbol of our friendship: a silk necktie sent to me in London by post. I also wore my frock coat and a wide brown-rimmed hat. The necktie is a disagreeable colour, mauve (I prefer the fashionable black), but having been warned of Ruthven’s eccentricities I did as I was told, and the meeting was, in the end, smooth. I agreed to be taken by the servant and his driver to the house of this elusive scholar, bumped and buffeted by a gold-encrusted carriage that wound its way through a marvellous array of crowded streets with Gothic overtones. In short time I arrived at a square marked by the emergence of a large pine spreading its prodigious bows over a covered market and the black face of an imposing church. Across from the church I noted an impressive façade in which (I assumed as the carriage approached) was the address of our Ruthven. I was correct. The carriage dropped me at his door, the servant taking my cases from the driver before bustling me into the house. The gilded door opened for a second, I slipped through. The portcullis was slammed and bolted by the servant behind me. The abruptness of this arrival startled me, as did my lavish environs. The servant uttered a series of fragmented words (Brass Buckle later proved to be alone in his duties), leading me through a series of rooms to the second floor of the building. It should be noted that Ruthven is by all accounts very rich, having made his fortune by the discovery of a hidden mass of gold many years ago while a naval man in Peru, gold he invested wisely in East Indian ventures. I can attest to the truth of these London rumours by the display of opulence in his home. The floors of the home are marble, arranged in a criss-crossing geometric pattern of interlocking black and white slabs. The walls, when not inlaid with stained teak, are covered in the most delicate silk, ornamented with birds and fruit. The furniture is primarily Indian woodwork, the entry hall decorated with swords, pistols and scimitars arranged in the shape of a star. Greek columns and statues intermingle with vast urns from the Chinese Empire. Books are thrown everywhere, piles of paper sit in the corners, the windows are firmly shuttered and very little light enters the bowels of this establishment. The whole sensation is one of confusion and isolation within the luscious comfort of an opium den. After abandoning the service of the Queen (and the uncovering of gold) Ruthven devoted his career to more adventurous pursuits, and the fruits of these travels decorate his home. He is a career explorer, an adventuring type – you know his name from the excavation of the tombs at Abu Simbel – previous to his deployment in Peru! And his subsequent work with Monsieur Jean-François Champollion, translator of the Rosetta Stone. Not satisfied with mastering the language of the ancients
and seeking out their bounty, Ruthven has now immersed himself in the study of my own passion, the Catalan mystic Rex Illuminatus and his Muslim counterparts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the hopes that they will expand his understanding of Alchemy, the minting of divine gold being his current inclination! The resulting treasures of this journey of many wonders: pages of illumined manuscripts in gilt frames, curiosities from the Empire – Indian goddesses and Sanskrit passages, portraits of Ruthven with forgotten Mughals and elephants, Chinese dogs on every fireplace, the floors decorated with Persian carpets and incense burning on the walls. The black-coated servant led me to a sitting room whereupon Ruthven emerged from his chair.
‘Sitwell,’ he said. ‘I trust you have journeyed safely?’
Ruthven looked me up and down before extending his hand to introduce himself. He then nodded at his servant who brought brandy. The sitting room was lit by gas lamps and a single Russian candelabrum on the mantelpiece. The blinds of the windows were drawn in thick curtains, the interior lined with tapestries depicting a woodland scene, the faces of women flickering in and out of the shadows behind Ruthven. It was only as my eyes adjusted to the dark that I realized that the panels were also decorated by a series of four hand-drawn diagrams framed in gold that duplicated the illustrated charts of Rex Illuminatus and that scattered around these pictures on the floor were alchemical instruments medieval in nature. There was a triangle and an eye carved into the wood of the beam above the fireplace. It is true then that he shares this fascination, I thought, my heart lifting.
The Serpent Papers Page 11
