‘Where’s Emily?’ Adrià asked.
‘Party’s over,’ Núria said. ‘It’s three in the morning. Time for you to go clubbing or something.’
‘Fuck clubs,’ Adrià said.
‘I’m serious,’ Núria said.
Swedish Mark waved hello.
Adrià raged.
‘I don’t care,’ said Núria. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Adrià retaliated: ‘These are my people, man, we’re having a good time. You’re stepping into my territory.’
‘Relax, man, relax,’ said Mark, tugging at Adrià’s shirt.
Adrià sat back into the sofa.Vernon, who had slept with Núria once months ago, leered at her in the brightness.
‘Hey, Núria,’ he said. Núria ignored him.
‘You all need to go.’ She pointed at the door.
Adrià glared at his twin. In the courtyard below a wandering drunkard sang discordantly, an old song in Catalan that echoed into the alcoves of the cathedral and drifted solemnly through the open windows of the balcony. The cathedral bell-tower struck the hour. A heavy fullness coloured three sad notes.
A mobile rang. Once. Twice. Núria switched off the music.
‘What the fuck, man!’ Adrià exploded, flinging the glass next to him to the floor. The glass shattered. In the corridor, the girl caught in the arms of her lover shrieked. Adrià screamed again, picked up another tumbler of vodka from the coffee table, and hurled it at Núria’s feet. Mark moved quickly. He grabbed Adrià by the arm and pulled him back down onto the sofa.
‘It’s all good, tranquilo,’ Mark said, putting away his phone. ‘It’s all cool, Adrià. We can go. Lola’s at the Macba. They’re heading to Alejandro’s squat.’
‘Cool,’ Adrià said, breathing heavily.
‘Alright, everyone,’ Mark said, taking charge. ‘We’re going.’
After the exodus, Núria tried to clean the kitchen, after sweeping up the glass in the living room, but gave up in disgust at four in the morning. She made herself a cup of tea and went solemnly to bed. At eight in the morning she was woken by Adrià, still drunk and stoned, desperate for revenge. Lola was there with her mismatched earrings and long black hair. Adrià only had time for Lola, and coiled himself around her in the corner of the blue sofa, reading excerpts from his pornographic novel and explaining the motifs of his art while Tree cut coke on the floor. Adrià was going to start a revolution, a Catalan Independent-State-of-Anarchy-and-Free-Love-Where-Nobody-Worked-and-Everybody-Fucked. Lola thought this was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and gazed dreamily into Adrià’s red-rimmed eyes. Núria hated this world of the Barcelonauts: the thrashing bodies and heavy music. These nights, when she entered her home, a dark decadence seemed to cling to the walls, reeking of impotence and frustrated revolution. The women were pierced and handsomely dirty, dreadlocks hung down their backs, their conversation coloured by desire. The boys, overstimulated by the presence of attractive women in their midst, reached constantly for that lawless place where tongues and hands are loosened by hash and empty pockets. Lola grinned, offering Núria a joint. ‘Enjoy it, Maca,’ she said, as the red embers smouldered between her fingers. ‘Fuck the Mossos.’ Lola curled her lip at the police.
‘He’s ill!’ Núria shouted. ‘He’s sick!’
‘I’m not fucking sick! This is freedom, Núria. You have no idea what freedom even fucking is!’ Flinging up her hands in disgust, Núria gave in to the fates and locked herself in her bedroom. Later that morning as she stepped over the sleeping bodies of the Barcelonauts on her way to class at the Institut del Teatre, she paused at Adrià’s shrine, studying his pornographic novel. She removed the icon from its altar, slipping it into her bag. She felt guilty but did not return the object to its owner. Instead she hid the book in her locker at the university. When she returned to her apartment after the morning’s lectures, Núria made a life-changing discovery. Beneath a battered copy of short stories of the Latin American Boom Generation, a packet of tobacco and an uncapped pen, Núria found Adrià’s keys to the apartment. He had gone out to a course on Schopenhauer at the Autònoma in Terrassa and forgotten them. His sister recognized the power immediately. She confiscated them, clutching the keys in a tight fist. Núria realized once and for all that she did not want Adrià to come into the apartment. Not until he apologized. Not until he stopped having people over. She made that very clear. He was not to come racing up the stairs and he was not to pass the door. He was not to kick it in, and he was not to touch her. But Adrià did all these things anyway, just to spite her, hitting her across the face and calling her a Betrayer of Independence and Sexual and Social Revolution! And at three in the afternoon, when the doctors finally came to take him away, their uncle smoked a cigarette in the living room and called the Sorra parents to say Adrià had cracked again, and it was best if they took him out of the city. To the country house – why not take all of them? Get the kids to make up.
‘The doctors have got the medication into him, they’ll keep him overnight, and then perhaps the country air would do him good?’ the uncle suggested hopefully as Núria wailed in the corner, showing the bruises left by her brother to Emily Sharp.
In the train leaving Barcelona that Friday night Emily was hungry and tired and content to disappear – to grab a bite to eat, a few drinks on the river, followed by an early evening in the sleepy country city of Girona. The girls sat side by side, facing forward. Núria had the window seat and pressed her hand to the glass thoughtfully. ‘The house is nice,’ Núria finally said. ‘We go every summer. Adrià and I used to love staying there.’
The fields outside the window were a rich golden yellow. Emily shifted her weight. She would not share what she had thought as she raced up the stairs to their apartment, remembering blood on the floor from where Adrià’s hand smashed through the honey yellow windowpane. Instead she asked:
‘Will he be alright?’
Núria shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My parents are bringing him tomorrow.’
A childhood friend of Núria’s met them at the station in Girona. She had agreed to host them for the night in an apartment overlooking the sluggish river before Joan picked the girls up in the morning. The friend had a hunch, which she would pursue throughout the evening, plying Emily with alcohol and questions – a hunch built on the observation of Adrià and this American girl. Something had passed between them. Núria’s friend was a queen of deduction. Something suspect. Something sexual. And here she chewed on her hair thoughtfully. Adrià and Emily exhibited a tangible amount of attraction, you’d be tonta not to notice it – Núria, they like each other, her friend had whispered long ago. Núria ignored her – Don’t be stupid. She knows he’s trouble.
‘Stupid? You’re stupid. Seriously, Núria! It’s obvious.’
I do not want her to know. Núria tugged at Emily’s shoulder. One evening presented a time frame the girls agreed was manageable, though clearly undesirable. They would go out with the intention to dance the night away, and if possible, with guise and cunning, locate new friends who might be able to entertain them for the nocturnal hours of the escapade. The girls all armpits and necklines. Their limbs swayed to the beat of the forest. Dance floors built into woods, sky illumined with strip lights, gyrating colours. Alive with music! Quick! Green bottles and blue vodka! Emily walking, body curving, one step forward, two steps back, but still, not enough alcohol for oblivion, not even enough alcohol for a slight high, till the dance floor, oh the dance floor, hands in the air now, feel the beat, and midnight was forgotten in the city of Girona – Come! Come! Núria was dancing and Emily watched fiercely, but she will not go to her, no, not yet, until, hiding in the forest they stood nose to nose and kissed deeply and there could be no such thing as darkness, only colour! Music! Bodies! Dance! The throng has run to the great arching tents that replace the cramped bars of winter with the open dance floors of summer. Trees stretch up into the air. Leaves pulse with music, leaves sway to the thumping bass of desire. Desire for the night, d
esire for the world, desire for the desperate stolen kiss outside of the concrete bathroom to the south side of the tents and the haggard woman who guards the toilet paper in little piles and wears gold and smokes a cigarette sullenly through the night from the earliest bell-cry of eleven to the first sigh of dawn.
That morning the jeep raced along the flat roads of the valley. Gold to all sides, cypress trees and big, leafy walnuts. In the distance the Pyrenees curved into prostrate giants, elbows and knees jutting into an endless sky. The girls slipped gently into the swerving rhythm of summer. The wind streamed through the back of the car, tickling their ears. Núria batted at a fly lazily as the car jumped over a dip in the road.
Joan laughed and pointed to a stone house in the distance. ‘That is the beginning of Fontcoberta. Molt macu,’ he said in Catalan. ‘Molt molt macu.’ The villages were Romanesque, he explained, pointing out the window. Built in the eleventh century. Golden stone, like the fields. ‘We have a church in our village that is beautiful,’ he reassured them. ‘A Romanesque gem,’ he shouted into the back seat. ‘You’re in for a real treat.’
Joan Sorra was a large man, with slouched shoulders and a bruiser’s features. The man was exceptionally tall, like his twins, but heavyset, with arms like a woodcutter or an old camperol; he boasted an ageing fighter’s broken nose and paunch. Brown as a nut. Stubble on his chin and cropped silver hair. His hands were big as well, with thick fingers that moved with deliberate precision. Beyond his height, Emily does not see much of his twins in him – perhaps when he was younger? When he was slimmer, before the years and wine caught up to him – perhaps then she could have seen the line – though there is something of his eyes in Núria; yes, there must have been something of his eyes.
At the door to the country estate, Núria’s mother La Marta greeted the girls with open arms – shrill coos of pleasure, dyed ash-blonde curls bounced around a flat face like the moon. The woman was soft as an overripe peach. Her body bore the same signs of age as her husband, cheeks rouged by too much drink, neck wide beneath sea pearl necklace, coral blouse, gold bangles on puckered wrists. She was unpleasant, unsettling . . . tourmaline on plump fingers, which she flitted nervously on the air.
‘How was he, darling?’ she asked Núria. Emily’s anger burnt. But no one would mention that. La Marta would cook dinner and give them towels, before escorting them to the guest wing of the restored farmhouse, the old hay barn. The donkeys used to sleep on the bottom floor. The walls of the house are firm and yellow – pillars of strength. There was the traditional llar de foc – home of the fire – a hearth in the bowels of the living room, pushed into a dark alcove around which the family would have gathered over the centuries to sing, or do needlework or sharpen their swords. The living room filled with modernist furniture – yellow velvet chairs built like small, vintage thrones, many-patterned sixties carpets, lace curtains.
The girls moved down the corridor, brushing shoulders. Núria and Emily would share a white stucco bedroom in a wooden loft. They fell into each other inside. Wrapped in each other’s skin, they curled like nesting birds, fingers wandering through hair, kissing eyebrows, they slept entangled. The bathroom window gazing over the street behind the farmhouse. Crumbling stone and dirt. In the distance the tips of six swaying columns. Cypress trees flirting with the sky. A neighbour, in a smaller house across the cobbled street, draped Tibetan meditation flags over his door. Later Emily napped in one of the lounge chairs on the patio, overlooking blue mountains. White arms all bare and angular. Summer dress. Straps loose at the shoulder. Plum-coloured roses. A golden field of grain. She felt easy and calm. Lovely and still.
* * *
When Adrià arrived at the farmhouse that evening he did not say hello.
He sat on the wooden chair at the centre of the stone patio that faced the mountains. From the guest bedroom, Emily observed him through the window, his face obscured by the hanging branches of a vine that grew around the trunk of a citrus tree. For the rest of the afternoon Emily successfully avoided talking to him. The decision uneasy, mutual. Later Adrià cornered Emily in the garden, behind a rock wall hidden from the house. He pressed his body into her, bit her neck. I want what my sister has. Emily was very still. Does she tell him that she hates him? He would not hurt her. This at least she knows. I hate you, she wanted to say. Instead?
Nothing.
Adrià gave her a piece of crumpled paper.
On the paper he had written:
My sins
Are unutterable thoughts.
I must atone.
‘Go. Go and show them,’ La Marta said at dinner. She flicked her wrist at her son. Dismissive. Regal. Adrià’s mother, bovine and rouged, exposing it all at the table, a great crevasse that runs from her throat to the low coral silk. That evening the moon rose late. A grove of citrus behind them. Sweet lemons. Overhead, clusters of wisteria dripped from a wooden frame. Adrià shirtless, streaks of sweat pooling over his collarbones. In the light of the summer candles, his chest heaved as if his lungs were bulging out of him. Making his excuses from the table, Adrià pushed out his chair, and went into the house. From the courtyard below, as he ran up the carved stone steps to the house, his silhouette stood out against long French windows. A sharp breeze blew from the valley below the patio. The night’s breath drunk with the scent of lavender and sun-warmed mud, thick and heady. In the house, the curtains rustled, curling through the open windows. Drone of the cicadas singing.
When Adrià returned he carried an object wrapped in thick cloth. Cradling it in against his chest like a babe in swaddling. His mother threw open her arms.
‘Come, come!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell them the story – it’s a lovely story, Joan – go on, tell them, Adrià, like you told me in the car.’
Adrià hugged the cloth closer to his chest.
‘Funny story.’ Adrià laughed. Too loudly. ‘I was at a party—’
‘You are always at a party,’ Adrià’s father interrupted. Adrià released the package with a dull thud onto the table. A cigarette hung languidly from Adrià’s lower lip. Emily’s nostrils burnt.
‘Yes, Papa. I was at a party. With Max, actually – you know him. We caught the train out from Barcelona, towards Sitges. Max heard there was a rave, or something, you know, one of those big house parties by the sea – in an abandoned mansion that some squatters had taken over in April. They’d been found out a week earlier by the police –’ Adrià spat emphatically – ‘and were about to be evicted. So they decided to have a garden party.
‘When I got there, I knew the place was special. The house had doors that opened onto the sea, and art everywhere. Big paintings. Portraits – old pictures of men with ruffs around their necks and sour faces. Luxury. Real luxurious house. The squatters had the music playing loud, turntables, a dance floor in the garden – it was . . .’
Adrià shook his head violently, slamming his chair away from the table. He flung his arms out into the air. ‘It was crazy! The music was slamming, and I was dancing –’ his body hurtled round the courtyard – ‘and there were so many people there, crazy people, dancing like this, and like this, and like this . . .’
‘Adrià,’ his father said. ‘Deixes de fer això.’ He caught his son by the wrist, and pulled him back into the table. ‘Sit down.’
Adrià refused to sit down.
Adrià’s mother smiled a pained smile. She put her fat fingers over her mouth as she spoke. ‘Isn’t Adrià a good dancer? What a nice dance, Adrià.’
Adrià stood firmly by his seat. His hair electric, made wild by the dance. ‘I haven’t finished my story.’ Adrià took the cigarette from his lips, and tapped it twice, sprinkling ash onto the table next to his father’s plate.
‘Go on, Adrià.’ His mother looked at Joan for affirmation.
‘Please, Adrià,’ Joan said. ‘I would like to know what happens next.’
‘It was crazy . . .’ Adrià shrugged. ‘And I was dancing.’
He paused, resting hi
s hand on his father’s shoulder.
‘And the whole place was up in the air.’
Adrià consumed space with his body.
‘The people were rammed inside. I loved it. By the sea they had set up a barbecue and a bonfire, and people were shadow dancing and drinking. Max and I only knew a couple of people there, but you know how it is. We met this little guy from Granada, small, with glasses, clean cut, but a true Anarcho brother . . .’
Adrià’s father coughed.
‘The kid from Granada asked me if I wanted to leave the music for a second and explore the house, and I was like, sure, come on, let’s go. He said that the man who’d owned the house had died suddenly and his body was still in his bed. So we went up to the second floor and along the corridor and then we opened this massive bedroom door and everything was all gold and beautiful and wild, and there at the centre of the bed, surrounded by the sheets was the dude himself – dead. Pale and grey and stony as shit. And I was like, hey man, you weren’t kidding . . . So we left the bedroom and this Andalusian guy said I could take anything I wanted from the house, that it would be his gift to me, for trusting him and being all cool – you know – and agreeing not to tell anybody what I had seen.’
Adrià picked up the long spool of cloth on the table and unwrapped the contents. Núria’s face emptied. Eyes glued to her brother.
‘What did you choose?’ asked Joan jovially.
Adrià unveiled his prize possession. There, pressed into the cloth was a long, stainless steel knife with a wooden handle. A folding knife of extreme proportions – more machete than tool. Adrià picked the knife up and twisted the handle, locking the shaft into place. He held the handle flat against his palms, showing the blade to the table.
‘Let me see it,’ his father said.
‘No.’
Adrià balanced the blade between his fingers. Metal stained by the candles. Radiating light.
The Serpent Papers Page 18
