The Serpent Papers

by Jessica Cornwell

  ‘This is alchemy!’ I cried – starting from my seat to stand in the golden leaves. ‘This is the very wonder Rex Illuminatus spoke of! The fashioning of Gold!’

  Lucretia panted, breath heavy before me. What emerged as a glow from her lips and eyes and ears swiftly transformed into a marvellous light, brighter than a thousand flickering candles, a heady gold like the rising of the sun, and it poured out from her neck and throat and chest, lifting her body up off the ground as the light sent out roots to the floor and suddenly her entire form appeared to shatter as a leaf of gold shatters under the hand of the illuminator, bursting into luminescent dust until there was nothing left but the song, a crooning deep song, and from the dust and song there grew a tree of light, the breadth and length of Lucretia’s body, split into four branches, and at the top of the branches in place of leaves there was a hanging crescent moon. The figure of the woman flickered in and out of the golden light – while I found myself mute, stupefied into wonder – I could not gather strength to speak, so terrified was I by the spectacle. A single moment seemed interminable, stretching for hours. The woman emerged from the golden tree to put out her hands, and showed them to me. With this language you can create anything. It is the unutterable alphabet of the imagination. The sound of flux, of Spirit. With it you can read the universe, conjure entire histories, see all futures, live forever, but should you use it coarsely, greedily, inhumanely, the more it shall burn, eating you away until you enter the wind! Then holding her hands above her chest, she rubbed her palms together, harder and faster she rubbed them, sweat streaming from her brow as a cold shiver ran through my bones, and I felt the urge to abandon everything. To run far away, fast down the mountain valley – away from there! Too soon the voices came again – fiercer, louder – the windows and doors of the cottage burst open with sudden gusts of a howling inferno – light rushing from the woman’s fingers until we were all surrounded, and light spun about her until with a great roar it exploded out and covered up my eyes, showering my skin with gold! At once I threw myself down on the floor, trembling with fear.

  ‘Lloret!’ I cried in horror. ‘What devilry is this?’

  In a final gust the siege abated. The light drained from Lucretia and her gaze cleared. She wiped the spittle from her mouth before slumping down in a chair like a dried chaff of wheat.

  ‘Mark me, Sitwell. Mark me well,’ she whispered. ‘I am in you now. I have bound your blood to mine.’

  The lapsed priest bowed his head, kneeling beside me.

  ‘Tell him,’ she said fiercely. ‘Mikel, you must tell him now.’

  Lloret’s eyes met mine.

  ‘I have brought you here tonight, Master Sitwell, because I was ordered to do so upon certain eventualities. Eventualities I could not reveal until after the fact. You cannot return to Valldemossa. The Captain has made provisions for your safety. He has given you everything. His wealth, his heritage, his library. You are a rich man. He wishes that you return to London, where his solicitors will pass his estate into your possession.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ I rasped.

  ‘The Captain has asked me to inform you in this fashion and not from the papers.’ With that dreadful pronouncement, Lloret handed me a crumpled envelope and watched as I read – but I can write no more of this – I must tell you straight and frankly: Captain Ruthven is dead. Worse, he is murdered. Found dangling from a noose in Barcelona, his heart violently removed from his chest, his body burnt. He has sacrificed himself to his enemies. And in doing so he has given me all that they feared the world might find. As his sole benefactor, I must bear this lodestone. I hold the entirety of his estate. And I do not know what to do with my terrible burden! For Ruthven’s death has shackled me to his fate . . . Dear God, perhaps my writing has endangered your life, alongside mine? You must be swift. Gather up my letters, even the messages of love – you must gather every word that I have sent you since leaving England and place them in the most secret of locations. Tell no one what I have told you. Tell no one, from this point forward, that I have written to you at all. Do not act rashly, you must be strong – on no account should you seek to destroy or burn our correspondence, for it must stand as evidence of what I have witnessed shall Ruthven’s murderers ever be brought to justice. I have entered into perdition. My darling, you must keep my secret as your life depended on it, for surely it does now – forgive me, please forgive me – for once you have known what I have known, there is no turning back – but do not fear. Wait word from me, and stand your ground. My God, Katherine. One thing and one thing alone is clear—

  Book the Third

  A Prophet’s Holograph

  ‘Divination is fiction applied to life to predict the future.’

  ‘Fiction?’ I asked. ‘What is that?’

  ‘A novel form of writing.’

  ‘Outside of the canon? There can be no books that do not relate to God,’ I said.

  Thinking warmly of my Book of Hours.

  ‘Do you not dream in stories?’ Philomela asked, signing with her hands.

  Rex Illuminatus,

  The Alchemical History of Things

  1306 ce

  Let who says

  ‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,

  A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph . . .

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

  Aurora Leigh

  1856 ce

  I

  FACE TO FACE

  When he arrives, nearly half an hour late for our evening rendezvous, Ferran Fons shouts at me across the bar, glowing in his churlishness: ‘Hòstia Anna! You’ve cut your hair. You look like a boy.’ Linen shirt, top three buttons open, chest hair sparse, but present nonetheless. Coffee stain on right pocket.

  ‘How many years since you got our degree?’ Fons asks. ‘I can’t keep track. We give you a diploma and you’re ass-over-heels outta here, never to be seen again. And me? You think nothing of me! Deserted! Betrayed! And now? The heavens have sent you again! A drink, girl, a drink!’

  Fons lets out a whooping laugh.

  ‘Anna! I’m starving. Beer? Wine? Pintxos? What’s got you here? In your message you mentioned Hernández?’

  ‘Yes—’

  He cuts me off, waving frantically at the camarero.

  ‘Maestro!’ the waiter cries, and bows, doffing an invisible cap. ‘Where would your highness like to sit?’ Fons gestures regally. We are moved to our table, his hand paternally on my shoulder.

  ‘In the drinking establishments of this city,’ he beams, ‘Ferran Fons, and Ferran Fons alone, is King. It is my last pleasure. One of the very few in life. Now – does Oriol Duran know you’re in Barcelona doing this?’ Fons asks. A thundering whisper through the back corner where we are seated, separated by an elegant wooden frieze from the other diners. ‘You need to be sensitive to him. He loved her deeply and has been very cut up since her death. Ten years later and he’s only just recovering. Walking wounded, I’d say. It’s a delicate situation and I expect you want to go crashing into things.’

  ‘What makes you think I would do that?’

  A waiter appears at our table. Fons smiles, then orders for me, asking for a bottle of cava. I made no move to stop him.

  ‘It’s a fragile community here. You haven’t lived it with us – so you wouldn’t know,’ he adds tartly. ‘You left. Deserted everything. Got mixed up in books.’ He shudders.

  ‘Should I apologize? We’ve been through this before.’

  ‘No. But this worries me. Your being here now. Don’t like it.’

  His words hang uncomfortably in the air. Fons frowns and folds his napkin into a triangle. His fingers are thick. My heart goes out to him. There is a black ink circle on his right thumb.

  ‘Have you given any thought to our community?’ Ferran blinks. ‘We suffered! For Villafranca, and for us, Hernández is a clean slate, done deal, wrapped up. You come back and say you’re curious – academically – conducting interviews about her life to be published
. . . and the whole investigation starts again.’

  I pause, uncertain.

  ‘I don’t want to reopen any investigations. That’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I have to ask one thing, Fons. A decade later. Are you satisfied?’

  I look at him directly.

  ‘With what? Cava? Have a drink.’

  The waiter uncorks a bottle and pours two glasses. Fons evasive, as always.

  ‘The story. The accounts you had. Does it bother you?’

  ‘I’ve made peace with it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ve moved on.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

  ‘Do I look like a man who’s suffering?’

  Fons bites the knuckle of his thumb.

  ‘How do you want to do this? A séance? Perform a resurrection on a mountaintop?’

  ‘I want to write about it. Revisit everything.’

  Fons lets out a low, guttural sound like a growl. Disapproval.

  ‘Alright. A personal account?’

  ‘A history.’

  ‘About what? That night? You’re curious about that night?’

  ‘I want to create a running testimony of events – with the clarity of hindsight. Look at what people remember.’

  ‘You do not know her career intimately enough.’

  ‘I want to study it.’

  ‘To prove what point?’

  Food arrives. Two hefty bowls of soup. Pa amb tomàquet. Bread. I sit very still, studying my plate. Botifarra negra. Escudella i carn d’olla. An acquired taste. Fons slurps hungrily. Hunks of black meat floating in a thick bean broth.

  ‘As to that hooligan who carried her, I used to teach his sister.’ Fons frowns. ‘Núria. Troubled girl.’ He turns to me. ‘You must watch what you say in this town. Everyone knows everyone, we’ve all crossed paths, always –’ he claps his hand together – ‘bumping! Like little atoms, zinging about, coincidences here are collisions. But . . . I do think about what happened that summer . . . if and when I allow myself.’

  ‘Of course, Fons! You’re a sentimentalist. Comes with the territory.’

  ‘Natalia’s a myth.’ Ferran Fons pushes his chair out from under the table. He waves the waiter down, and asks for wine. ‘A very dangerous one. Trust me. It would be better for us all if you let her rest. But you have asked for my services and I admire you! So, I will do what I can. Pull a few strings in the community, etc. Get you an interview. This I can do. However, be warned. I’m more interested in the living than the dead – and I want to keep it that way.’ He raps the table with his finger. ‘Don’t stare at your food. It’s impolite.’

  Fons orders me a coffee and a crema catalana. ‘The best in Ciutat Vella.’

  * * *

  Ferran Fons represents something of a mystery. Foul-mouthed, sweet-tempered, and strangely tragic, he has a tendency to lecture for hours without interruption. In class he is harshly critical, but never grades harshly, which his students appreciate and enjoy. When asked about his history, he remains silent. He accepts appointments for office hours but never keeps them. If one were to conduct a survey of information gleaned by his students – gossip exchanged at the university canteen, conversations overheard between whispering dramaturges in the library, an unattractive sighting with a younger woman at the Opera Liceu, etc., etc. – one would arrive at a motley hodgepodge of information. Details are sparse. Age: unknown (mid-fifties?). Wife: award-winning actress Aurora Balmes (a point of infantile excitement among the young). Separated six years ago. Never officially divorced. Daughter, twenty-five. Not on speaking terms (an argument witnessed by two masters students in the university cafeteria). Difficulty relating to women. (Noted tendency to mark down female papers.) Painful romantic. (Caught weeping during student production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.)

  A British exchange student researching the emergence of modern Catalan folk art in the 1980s made the most pivotal discovery. A peeling black-and-white photograph in a journalist’s private collection entitled ‘Traditional festa of Northern Catalonia’. The picture captured a group of young men holding masks, next to a magnificent metal dragon. Ferran was smiling at the centre, hair tousled. In his heyday, he was a member of a troupe of radical actors called the ‘Fire Eaters’ or Tragafuegos. Thus the British student unwittingly exposed Ferran’s point of origin: he was one of els rurals – a fire-dancer from a northern village near the Pyrenees. Only the cruellest critics aptly described him as what he was; as a bitter Sevillana said in a late night smash-up at the Bar de Choco: ‘Those who can’t do, teach.’

  If he’s pressed to remember, Ferran Fons will tell you that his office in that fateful summer of 2003 was near the library, a shoebox on the second tier of the drama school. He shares the office with his aged English colleague Professor Tums. On this particular Friday – the last Friday before Natalia Hernández died – Tums is absent, once again taken ill by a predilection for liquor. (Ferran bitterly notes a collection of airport-sized bottles of whisky in the third drawer of the translator’s desk.) Tums’s expatriate speciality was that of Catalan adaptations of Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest was on at the Teatre Goya) and he had catapulted to relative fame by insisting in the local nationalist papers that Wilde ‘read better in Catalan than he did in his native tongue’. On the opposite side of the office, facing the back wall (age and rank secured both Fons and Tums the window vistas) is the desk of a young postdoc from Madrid who taught commedia dell’arte to the undergraduates. Occasionally, when no one was looking, Ferran would rifle through the papers on Marco’s desk, to see if the Madrileño had any rival theories to his own beleaguered attempts at cultural criticism. Once satisfied that Marco was another talentless chump employed by the institute to fête the wealthy children of Barcelona’s elite, Ferran desisted from illicitly reading Marco’s material. Though not before encountering a bland love letter to beautiful Maria, the café girl downstairs who served coffee to the world, was already engaged and, Ferran pleasantly muses, well beyond young Marco’s reach.

  Satisfied, Ferran Fons bides his time, preparing for the afternoon class. According to his lecture notes, Stanislavski was a Russian Theatrical Genius, Method Acting the bastard child of Poor American Translations – a category of dramatic criticism widespread and constantly growing. Ferran thinks about this often. He hates Poor American Translations – but most of all he hates Commercialization of Art – something he views as sacrosanct. He hopes to express this belief in the three-hour lecture afforded to him by the Institute of Theatre, but that morning, when he drearily arose from the comforts of his bed, he had awakened uninspired.

  So he was late. As is often the case.

  This afternoon he distracts himself easily. There is a poster on the Theatre of National Liberation, hanging from the terracotta wall next to the Theatre Café. From his office, on the second floor of the Institute, he can see the flirtatious edge of her smile, a corner of her right eye, the shadow that devours her cheekbone, the black stain where her jaw joins the flesh of her neck.

  Ferran Fons settles into his chair. A knock at the door sounds suddenly, rasping twice at the wood. Clack. Clack.

  ‘Silvia,’ he groans inside, recognizing his superior’s mincing hand. He resigns himself to the torment.

  ‘You’re late,’ she declares as Ferran opens the door.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘It’s half past two.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silvia purses her lips.

  ‘Follow me.’

  The head of the Performance Department, Silvia Drassanes has her offices on the sixth floor of the Institute. She shares the room – much grander, open plan – with her assistant Caridad and the resident artist (an actress with thin fingers and a foul disposition). Ferran follows Silvia into the elevator morosely, wishing that he too had been ill that day, that he had never come in to teach, that he had stayed firmly where he belonged: in bed.

  On
the sixth floor, Silvia ushers Ferran towards her desk. She clears her throat.

  ‘Ferran, I want to talk to you about Alexei. Apparently you are behaving quite inappropriately towards him.’

  Alexei is a tall Muscovite, broad-shouldered, trained in the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. To Ferran’s irritation, Alexei’s appearance at the Institute last autumn is worsened by rumours that his academic nemesis is a direct descendant of the great man himself. In retaliation, Ferran has taken to calling Alexei ‘Ivan Vasilievich’ in public after the character in Bulgakov’s Black Snow – a reference which very few of his pupils find entertaining. The sharp-faced woman with pointy-rimmed glasses tuts.

  ‘We’re trying to modernize the course structure. Alexei already teaches a seminar on Stanislavski – and with all due respect, Ferran – he is our Russian expert.’

  Ferran fiddles with a broken cigarette in his pocket, teasing out the tobacco, ripping the paper into pieces.

  ‘We are rearranging the academic roster.’

  A low-flying plane over Tibidabo catches Ferran’s attention. He holds it with his eyes, following its trajectory west over Barcelona.

  ‘Ferran?’ Silvia breaks his concentration. ‘Your attention please. It pains me to have to put things in such concise terms, but the academic committee needs to see a shift in your behaviour. The Institute is changing. You need to find a new place in it.’

  Ferran’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He meets Silvia’s gaze before checking the message that bleeps onto his screen. Every rebellion, no matter how small, is empowering. The left corner of her mouth twitches minutely.