The students wriggle in their desks. I watch her. Can she pluck me from the crowd? Can she strike out by my bearing, or does my face read infantile, betraying a certain youthful naivety? Am I one of them? Or an outcast on the periphery? The hawkish students, pencils poised over notebooks, scratch words into paper.
Professor Sharp scans the multitude.
Is that a smile? Did the corner of her mouth twitch?
‘Kimia may also be derived from a second source word – the Ancient Greek chyma suggests a more science-oriented definition. If we take chyma as the base for “alchemy” meaning to “fuse” or “cast together”, we can see how Alkimia has given birth to our modern “chemistry”. Over the course of this semester we will follow the repercussions of this linguistic metamorphosis in the arts and sciences, studying the emergence of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment through the eyes of English poets from Chaucer to William Blake.’
A poem flashes up on the lecture screen behind the pulpit. Chaucer: The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. ‘I’d like to draw your attention to lines 773–77 in your Riverside Editions.’ The crunch of turning pages.
‘When you were reading the poem, did anything jump off the page? What do you make of Chaucer’s stance on the alchemical arts?’ Professor Sharp checks in with the class. ‘Any takers? Thoughts? Feelings? Throw something at me.’
When the lecture is over, students rustle as they leave their seats. A healthy chatter. Plans are made for the evening, phone numbers exchanged. Giggles and flirtations ignited. Who was that handsome fellow in the corner? That enigmatic girl with the plaited hair? I stand and walk down the wooden stairs to the lecture pit, making my way through the crowd.
‘Professor Sharp,’ I say when I reach the bottom.
She looks at me vaguely.
‘Anna Verco, from Picatrix.’
The haze lifts.
‘So glad you could make it.’ She reaches out both hands and takes mine. ‘It is such a relief you are here. Finally I can share the burden – maybe even unload it entirely.’ She laughs: a little chiming bell. Suddenly she is very, very pretty. ‘Do you mind waiting a moment while I gather my things?’
Professor Sharp opens the door to her office, clutching her notes in a brown satchel, the strap broken and retied at her shoulder.
‘Welcome to my lair.’ She slumps into the plush velvet chair behind her desk. ‘Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable.’
The room is large, fitted with glamorous floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that suit a library. A medieval folio is framed on the back of the door and a series of research awards are arranged on the windowsill behind an opulent desk. The desk’s oak surface is mounted with green felt. A stapler, paper clips and a small figurine of Santa Eulàlia in gold rest beside the computer. She checks her watch.
‘I’m slightly more cramped for time today than I had hoped.’ Emily takes off her glasses and looks at me closely. Her eyes squint in the half-light. ‘You have written some very provocative papers in the past, and I am sure that if you really have the talent your colleagues seem to grace you with, then you will handle this material well. Though it does strike me as somewhat outside your remit. There, are, however some rules I’m going to lay out.’
This isn’t unusual. She offers coffee. I accept. I listen to her speak quietly; she wants trust, faith, a degree of respect, privacy and to not be named. I afford her all this. She wants the private material we go over – her relationship to the boy who walked into the sea, their living arrangements and her long dead friendship with his sister – to be off the record. I agree – to a certain point: I won’t be bullied. If it is integral to the story, I say, then I will have to relate some of the details so that the picture is complete.
I make my own position clear: I don’t hang people’s underwear out in public unless I really don’t like them. She takes the pill, but then, of course, her eyes flash. ‘You might not like me.’
I laugh. ‘I swear to behave in a respectable manner with your story.’
The conversation eases. Emily Sharp explains that she had come to Barcelona in 2003 to assist one Professor Guifré (now deceased) in the classification and analysis of a well-known Mallorcan mystic by the name of Ramon Llull.
‘Things don’t happen in life as you plan. Originally I hoped to get a research fellowship at Oxford, but another member of my cohort won the position and I had to look for something else. I was in the fourth year of my PhD, read Latin, spoke Catalan and Spanish after completing my undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature. I applied for a Fulbright in Spain to work with Guifré and when the grant came through . . . I leapt at the chance. To some people in my programme the choice seemed illogical. I, however, could always see the through-line, though I didn’t think I’d ever wind up being a professor here. When the call came in from the Universitat de Barcelona . . . I thought why not. I moved back here in 2011. It is a shame you can’t speak with Guifré about this.’ Her eyes cast down. ‘He passed away three years ago, just after offering me this position in his faculty . . . But I’m getting off track.’
She catches herself. Redirects.
‘You wanted to talk about those letters. At the time it wasn’t unusual for me to receive manuscript files from Guifré to analyse. As his research assistant I often dealt with primary resources. But even I, lowly student that I was, recognized that these were particularly strange papers. I received scans of four letters sent through by the police. Parchment pages illuminated in a traditional style . . . They had no author and no context. They were eerie and unsettling. Laden with a deliberately obfuscated meaning. I remember . . . there was something electric about them.’
She sighs. ‘That summer has never been a place I permit myself to return to, despite the fact that, years later . . . I’m living here. Though nothing is ever quite the same? Is it?’
* * *
In the library on the morning of Friday, 20 June 2003, Emily opens her email and downloads the files sent by Jorge Guifré. She compiles a list of the images. Colours, postulated dyes, associated symbolic meanings. She is surprised by the fact that the diagrams on the second page of each letter are immediately recognizable. Each circle drawn within the other, divided into nine sections, creating three thin rings around a central image – three overlaid triangles. The numbers 3 and 9 are magic numbers, with important significance. Three for the Trinity – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and nine for the Llullian elements of God.
There can be no mistaking the charts. This she confirms in an email to Guifré. She cites them as being exact reproductions of Figure T of the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull. I’m equally certain that they are direct copies, Guifré responds. Emily’s eyes scans the outer ring of the diagram, fixing on the two-headed snake coiling into itself. Her eyes linger on the curves of its twin belly. With a few hits to the keyboard she enlarge the image. A golden serpent swallowing its tail, shimmering on the page. Interesting, she writes to Professor Guifré, even a little bit clichéd. Without a doubt a reference to the Hermetic Arts. Ouroboros. Not a difficult reference to find. Well done. He replies: You are correct. Can you do a survey of the reference for noon? I’d like you in a meeting with the individual who sent through these files. Come fifteen minutes before. We’ll discuss at 11.45. A shiver of delight runs down her spine. An ouroboros. Symbolically, quite like a dragon, often even synonymous.
Emily leaves her desk and speaks to the earnest librarian at the special archives collection. She hands over a set of call numbers to the woman, who says the batch will be ready in the Secure Reading Room in forty-five minutes to an hour. The books will be put aside for the rest of the day, you may return at any point . . . The woman frowns severely. But you are not allowed to bring anything in with you. All pens, pencils and personal items must be left with the security guard at the door. Emily thanks her profusely and returns to the notes on her desk.
It is at this precise moment that Emily Sharp’s peace is disturbed by the angry buzzing of h
er phone on the desk beside her. Emily answers it.
‘Can you come home?’ Núria Sorra asks breathlessly.
‘Can’t. Busy,’ Emily whispers, cupping her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m in the Athenaeum.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s Adrià.’
‘What’s he done—’
Núria cuts her off. ‘I really need you. Now.’
‘Call your uncle,’ Emily says fiercely. Núria’s uncle lived around the block from her apartment, a grand flat tucked behind the Picasso Museum.
‘Emily, I need your help.’
‘I have a meeting. I can’t leave.’
‘This is more important than a meeting.’
‘More important than a meeting?’ The library monitor raises an eyebrow.
‘No, seriously, I need you to come over. I need you to be here soon,’ Núria continues.
‘He needs help.’
‘I need help.’
‘Call your mom. Call your dad.’
‘I can’t reach them.’
Emily ducks into the women’s toilets on the library floor. Núria’s voice wells up with tears.
‘I need you to come now.’
‘You realize how important this is, don’t you?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Of your brother?’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘I don’t have time—’
‘Capitalista!’ Núria shouts and hangs up.
In the toilets of the library, Emily turns on the lights and looks at her face in the mirror. Her make-up has streaked – the mascara has left a fine black powder that emphasizes the circles forming beneath her eyes. She has struggled to sleep at home for the past few nights, even with earplugs, and the signs are showing. She feels disgusted at herself, at the smell of sweat she discovers under her armpits, clinging to her from the morning run – her tight brown dress, a size too small, the one she had bought on sale at H&M for twelve euros. Cheap metal necklace round her throat. Her breasts bubble up over the top rim of fabric – goose-bumped and raised, like skinned apples. She pushes them back down, into place. Emily runs her fingers in the water of the tap and began to clean away the black streaks of mascara beneath her eyes.
* * *
Some time later, a knock at Guifré’s door pounds three times. Guifré dusts off his hands.
‘And so the treasured calm departs,’ he hums, hopping off his chair. Emily watches his belly wobble as he pads to the door and gingerly greets the inspector.
‘Bon dia, Jorge.’ Inspector Fabregat embraces the professor. ‘Have I caught you in flagrante? Hòstia! Who is this lovely young lady?’ He doffs his hat at Emily in the corner. She flushes a bright crimson. Inspector Fabregat saunters deeper into the office.
‘Refreshments, Guifré? Is there such a thing as refreshments in this establishment?’
The fat professor bristles. Emily finds the inspector handsome. Disarming. A world apart from the men at the university. She has trouble focusing, scratching at the corner of her thumbnail, tearing at the skin. Inspector Fabregat flops into a plush armchair.
‘I’m tired,’ he proclaims loudly. ‘The whole business is terrible for the morale, Gordito!’ Little fatty. ‘I’ve been thinking of an early retirement.’ He puts his feet up on the coffee table, resting them on a history of the Balearic world. Guifré grumbles. Emily stifles a giggle.
‘I want to know what you think of what the bastard sent me! I wish you’d come down to the damned site, man.’
‘You are well aware I am working for your department on a casual basis,’ the professor huffs loudly. ‘Until we unlock the language of the text, we will be of little use to you. And please take your feet off the table. That footstool you have colonized is my most recent publication.’
Fabregat does as he is told, settling his weight into the seat below him, his shirt tight at the seams. He worries his cap between his fingers. ‘You’ve seen the files? And no – I don’t take sugar.’ He puts a hand out to stop Emily, catching her eye. He winks. ‘Bitter. Just milk will do.’
Professor Guifré adjusts his spectacles on his nose and frowns. Emily hands round the drinks. Guifré asks that Emily bring the files up on the projector. Illustrations dark on the page, indigo close to black. Fabregat studies the notched dial at the centre of the figures.
Confronted with the inspector’s brash exterior, Emily struggles to remember what she meant to suggest as analysis. One letter stands out purely for its beauty – Emily is enchanted by the delicate brushwork, the authenticity of the characters – painstaking hours for every stroke, she thinks. A calligrapher’s life of dedication. Curled into the letter B – she had gazed in awe! – a male devil with the feet of a goat who carries a bird Emily identifies as a nightingale, woven into a single consonant accompanied by a green lion, holding a map of Barcelona – the old town and Gothic, with the church peaks rising out of the mass of thatched roofs. The letters are dotted with ornate combinations of consonants and numbers – generally consisting of a strange gibberish. The devil always paired with a soaring bird – a nightingale, from whose beak emerged ornate lines of poetry. Most of all she admires the design of the golden serpent that recurs as a signature in the corner of each page, the size of a dime or the stamped press of a wax seal.
Emily’s notes direct Inspector Fabregat to the Libro di Biadiolo, held in Florence, and the Belleville Breviary at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris – with special emphasis on the royal illustrator Jean Pucelle, who employed ornamental flowers, dragonflies, swallows, and distorted, miniature musicians in the border of his work – such that the text itself appeared to sprout petals and leaves, curling ivy and roses, like the music of devils that play the flute menacingly, vines tumbling forth from terrible illustrations of vengeance against young women, dramatizations of the lives of martyrs, Emily assumes, weaving into and out of a nonsensical combinations of letters and words. The artist is clearly well-versed in the art of illumination, and its history, drawing references from the period. Beyond this observation, however (and a detailed explanation of the typical meanings of an array of classical symbols), there is limited information Emily can give about the nature of the writings. ‘Egg tempera and leaf gold’; as to the paper, ‘Parchment made in the traditional style’, are her descriptive comments. It is obvious that the anonymous author had a purpose in writing – but whether that purpose was sheer madness or eccentricity – or what import these letters held – neither she nor Guifré can say.
Fabregat and Guifré discuss the mystery for a while in oblique terms. Later she voices her feelings that the lines of poetry were intermingled with a text that took direct inspiration from the illustrated manuscripts of the thirteenth or fourteenth century (hence the medieval dates at the bottom of two verses).
Her phone buzzes silently in the pocket of her dress, against her thigh, a hot, warm warning. Emily offers coffee from a stainless steel pot on Guifré’s desk. Fabregat accepts.
‘Do you want to answer that?’ he asks her, phone still buzzing in her pocket.
‘No.’ She blushes again. ‘Sorry. I’ll turn it off.’
Fabregat terse. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. The lines of poetry. Do you have any idea of what the hell this means?’
‘No.’ Guifré flustered as a beetroot. He huffs and heaves. ‘Did he send you any more than this? Have you received anything else?’
Fabregat shakes his head. Emily’s interest piqued.
‘God help us,’ Guifré laments. ‘We know what they are, Fabsy, I’ve told you as much, but what, why, or who sent them?’ The professor sorrowful. ‘I am not a savant. I cannot know these things.’
The inspector barks back at him. ‘So there’s nothing in any of the letters that provides any clue to what it means?’
‘Ah. “Meaning” . . . what is the meaning of meaning?’ Guifré laments again to no one. ‘We can make some headway. Individually, the illustrations, for instance, are translatable,�
�� Guifré says. ‘The diagrams belong, as we have already told you, to the medieval Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull. The snake is an ouroboros and most likely a signature of the sender. The dates beneath the verses here –’ he points to the screen – ‘and here, also link to Ramon Llull. We start with 1312–1317, if we are to assume they reference the Common Era. This is the window within which Ramon Llull died. We have no historical confirmation of this event, which is estimated to have occurred between 1315 and 1316 ce. Coincidence? I think not. The second set of dates 1182–1188 are more perplexing. We cannot be sure of what they refer to in the life of Llull . . . Emily has gone through possibilities, and the strongest implication seems to be the 1184 ce Papal Bull of Pope Lucius III, the Ad Abolendam, which emerged from a growing desire to eradicate diverse heresies in Western Europe, particularly the Cathars.’ Guifré muddles his words, takes a deep breath and starts again with a loud huff.
‘Given that Ramon Llull was the victim of a similar anti-heretical Papal Bull two centuries later, there could be something there . . .’
‘And what do you make of this?’
Guifré shrugs. ‘That your writer is a fan of Ramon Llull, perhaps?’
* * *
It leaps out at me as soon as Emily begins speaking to me about her involvement in the whole affair. It would not have been their fault. Guifré didn’t misread the signs.
No. Not at all. To some extent the assumption was justified. But they are not the same. Their language is different. And this is key. Accurate translation is crucial in a game of symbols. Misread the reference, and you are doomed. Guifré would not have wanted to see the alternative, though he might have recognized the parallel. And he would not have wanted to see the difference because it would not have followed logically, given the information he had to hand.
Is there any doubt?
I ask myself.
Could you be wrong?
No.
Guifré would have argued against you if he were alive.
The Serpent Papers Page 16
