* * *
When Fons leaves the office, he sees her again, through the glass windows facing the theatre. The posters of Natalia Hernández went up three weeks ago. (Ferran noted the date in his diary, underlining it twice in red.) Now they follow him everywhere: one hundred and fifty-four hung from Gaudí’s lamps lining Las Ramblas and El Passeig de Gràcia. Twenty-seven plastered over the ugly construction walls that barricaded the left side of his apartment in the Barri Gòtic, half of them peeling and sun-faded. He cannot ride a bus or go on the metro without being confronted by her face. Ferran guesses their dimensions: 80 × 120 cm. Dark red foundation. Text: All Caps. Font: a crisp Euphemia UCAS. Standard silk paper in full colour. High gloss. Distended contrast, popped exposure. One photograph. To describe it as an infatuation would be inaccurate. It is more of an idée fixe. In the words of Guillermo, his friend and amateur psychotherapist (an avid reader of Žižek), the girl encapsulates Ferran’s own ‘subconscious desire for self-perfection’. His fixation on her image is an act of ‘non-sexual shrine-making’ (Guillermo was careful to underline this point), not dementia or desire.
Why?
Why does she have this power over him? Ferran bites his lower lip. For days he despaired in his office, looking at her for a moment, steeling himself against the inevitable. Earlier that week, the longing had been so intense he had to leave school early to seek respite with the therapist Guillermo – so violent, it frightened Ferran – I’m not myself, he shuddered, as he packed the contents of his satchel, walked down the flight of stairs, exited the building and marched straight into the arms of Guillermo’s chaise longue on Passeig de Sant Gervasi.
‘I can’t do this any more. She’s taunting me.’
‘Relocate your energy. Describe your feelings.’
‘She sees everything I’ve lost, what I gave up.’
Guillermo asked him to continue. Earlier that week, Ferran was stopped on his way home from the Institute and swept into a vaga (‘There was passion,’ he told Guillermo, ‘real Nationalist passion!’), a demonstration which forced him into the throng of striking railway workers and dump-car drivers, and their children and bright clothes – and the flag – always the flag. Five red stripes of Catalunya and that brilliant yellow, the blazing gold of independence.
‘You like the summer,’ Guillermo told him. ‘You feel more . . .’ He lifted his hands in the air to prove a point. ‘You feel lighter. Freer. Winter weighs on your spirit – I tell you this as a friend –’ they decide to have a beer now in the Plaça del Sol – ‘not a doctor, OK?’
Ferran explained: it is the dream that makes things complicated. Had it simply disappeared, life would have remained far more intelligible. Now Ferran is perplexed. It has returned. The same lurid notes. The same strange insistence on the soldier, the boy with the blackened eyes and the hands full of limbs and organs. He is wearing an officer’s military jacket. It is oversized and he is thin. He will walk through the ruins of an old city, bearing the carnage to a shrine in the burnt-out chambers of a Gothic cathedral. There will be roman pillars knocked to the side. Enormous. They are covered with moss and red ivy. The marble is firm to the touch, and in parts green. When he reaches the shrine he will place his bloody cargo on the ground and take two steps back. Ferran will watch the soldier cross himself and cry.
Ferran does not tell Guillermo about the second dream. The ugly one, so dark and so secret it cannot be shared. The one in which he himself perpetrates actions that make him retch inside, so that he vomits in the bathroom. It’s the murders in the papers – he tells Guillermo – the reappearing naked girls in the Raval, the bodies police are putting away with no information – the city is sick, he repeats – my Barcelona – there’s something wrong. Guillermo nods. Ferran mutters – and Barcelona takes to it like an old friend – his voice breaks, thoughts incomplete – the streets in my dreams – he shudders, sweat dripping from his brow in the chaise longue as the doctor takes notes. Ferran alludes to a terrible urge with a wistful, dramatic flick of the wrist.
Guillermo says things would be worse if Ferran had dreamt his teeth were falling out, which is a sign of either financial troubles or imminent death, neither of which are desirable futures. This offends Ferran. How can the loss of dentures be more significant to the psyche than a solder carrying human remains to a crumbling altar? (Or the vision of a murdered actress, skin glowing in the street?) Ferran questions whether Guillermo is trained at all. He says, ‘You’re just an Argentine hoax.’ Guillermo snaps his tongue against his teeth, making a clicking noise. Ferran feels juvenile, ashamed. He returns to speaking about the girl in the poster, Chekhov, unresolved ambitions.
The dreams return. Ferran thinks it’s because he fell asleep staring at the poster of Natalia Hernández. There is now a massive one hanging from the deserted construction scaffolding outside his bedroom window. The dream is identical, only this time it takes place on the platform for the Ferrocarriles. There is a girl, small. Auburn hair. She has round eyes and no smile. An oversized military trench coat. Grey. Civil War era perhaps, date unclear, and a battered cap. Around her everything is modern, women wearing beige collared shirts carry elegant leather purses and silent children. The girl makes no eye contact. She stares at the ground or at the ceiling or into nothing. But you watch her incessantly, hypnotically, as the train pulls into the platform, and the electric doors pull open, and she steps gingerly up and over the lip of the platform and enters the train. Once inside things become more uncomfortable. She is hiding her left arm beneath the folds of her trench coat, and you seek to see it, as the train rumbles through the underground. Her weight adjusts suddenly. The train lurches to the side. The coat flies open, revealing the left stump of an arm where the hand has been shorn off. The cut is clean, but the wounds are open, and you see the blood and the chopped white marrow of her bones.
Guillermo recommends that Ferran start writing his dreams down as soon as he wakes up in the morning. ‘A dream diary,’ he says. ‘Keep a detailed account.’ Guillermo thinks that Ferran may be having an artistic resurgence prompted by his exposure to the erotic vitality of Natalia Hernández. He asks Ferran if he has fallen in love with the dancer. Back in the safety of his office Ferran promptly feels the urge to confess:
Guillermo,
It’s true. Everything you say.
I am in love with the poster of Natalia Hernández.
Ferran stares at the screen. He does not click ‘send’. Instead, he saves the draft to his inbox, shuts down his laptop, slips it into his messenger bag, turns off the lights to the office and makes his way down to the cafeteria, where he orders a cafè amb llet with one sugar from Maria the bargirl and drinks it slowly. He does not look at his watch once.
After arriving twenty minutes late to his own class that fateful Friday afternoon, Ferran discovers that the entirety of his students was absent and retires elegantly to Bar Xirgu. It’s far too close to the lunch hour to be lecturing postgrads on Stanislavski and interpretations of Method Acting. (Let them digest at least – he railed at the registrar. Hòstia, sisplau, after lunch they’re sleepwalking – all of them – they pass out!)
And as for his students (those few who had themselves been on time), they had gone to get coffee, or a smoke, or do something useful, and so when he arrives at classroom S2 P1 nobody is there to listen. Alas. He scribbles a note on the chalkboard. Find me at Xirgu. And leaves.
Forty-five minutes and two cortados later, Ferran’s students congregate around him in the Bar Xirgu, a café of mal-repute just outside the back entrance to the Institut del Teatre. On sunny days, which are most often, the lady of the establishment puts tables outside where the students can sit and smoke cigarettes in the breaks between classes. She sells plain sandwiches popular among the young – embutits, made up of dry bread and slices of cured sausage.
Once satisfied that he had successfully squandered half of his three-hour lecture in Xirgu, Ferran decides that it is time to go back inside. He corrals the po
stgraduates through the metal gates of the Institute of Theatre – that bastion of higher learning – past the doorman on the ground floor and down into the heart of the glass building, beneath the ballet rooms with the lovely high ceilings to where the black-box theatres are, no windows and no natural light, the workshop spaces designed for movement and theory courses: Stanislavski and Method Acting.
After debating the appropriateness of Stanislavski’s terms in the contemporary zeitgeist, Ferran feels it necessary to workshop his favourite Chekhov passage. Neither Catalan nor Spanish writers have ever managed to capture that intensity, he thinks bitterly. On the spur of the moment, he opens his briefcase and pulls out a battered photocopy of Act One of The Seagull.
He hands it to a pretty red-haired French girl in the front row. Once he had entertained great hopes for her. But he has abandoned everything. She has no talent. Now he enjoys simply tormenting her.
‘Read it again,’ he says.
The girl stumbles over the lines.
‘I am alone. Once in a hundred years my lips are opened, my voice echoes mournfully across the desert earth, and no one hears. And you, poor lights of the marsh, you do not hear me. You are engendered at sunset—’
‘More emotion,’ he interrupts, holding his hand out to the classroom. ‘Is this the correct response to the text?’ A porous silence. Ferran’s soul slips out of S2 P1 and relocates itself between the barwoman’s breasts in the Xirgu. They are useless, these students. Boring, vapid, the opposite of stimulating. They are empty of everything except youth, and even that they refused to share with him. Even Núria is absent, he thinks forlornly, scanning the classroom. The one rising star from the abyss of apathy.
The girl reading the lines falters.
‘Again?’ she asks.
‘No! No! No!’ Ferran shouts. ‘I do not want you to go again. Somebody else read! Please! For God’s sake, what do you think she is saying? What do you think she is feeling? Find it.’
He rips the lines from the girl, pressing them into the hands of a gangly boy in the front row. ‘Go,’ Ferran commands, settling back in his chair to listen.
Where had all the time gone? The grand schemes? The banners lining city streets proclaiming the advent of a new Stanislavski-ism – a Catalan evolution of realism – that far surpassed the moody modernist psycho-babble filling up the theatres of Barcelona. Sadness wells in his lungs, a heavy liquid far worse than the grey malaise he generally encounters there. No! Enough! The boy could not act either.
But she can.
Natalia Hernández can.
And that is everything.
Always the same, always uncontrollable – the perpetual torment!
His heart yearns for salvation, but his mind’s eye races back past the long limbs, her tawny skin, the crease of the corner of her mouth, away from the images on the streets, to the portrait emblazoned on his cerebral self – Oh! Oh! Oh! That first almighty vision of the actress Natalia Hernández on stage.
A spotlight illumined a single Edwardian chair, dilapidated, propped up against an antique table. That night there was a typewriter and a blue china vase, a feather-pen and a skull. The professor of drama scribbled details in his diary. A single note struck in the orchestra. The critic next to him murmured an illicit secret in the ear of her husband. She giggled. Followed by the long protracted sigh of a flute. From the floorboards, a figure stirred, obscured in the shadowy folds beyond the frontier of light. Ferran yawned, checking the time on his phone as he switched off the volume. Nothing worse than an oppressive focal point at the beginning of an avant-garde performance. ‘Cheap emotional tricks.’ Ferran wrote this down, fidgeting in his seat.
In an hour and fifteen minutes he could gracefully leave at intermission, return to his office and finish his article at the Institut del Teatre. If timed correctly, he would then emerge, unscathed, for the end of the show – greeting his colleagues at the reception with the required complimentary graces. His attendance during the first half of the performance was unavoidable. He had students in the act and, as professor, was duty-bound to make an appearance. Still, Agustí raved about this performance. Said it was worth his while. Ferran settled into his chair. Agustí had questionable taste, of course.
The shadowy figure hidden beyond the threshold of light moved. A tiny gesture, perfectly executed, a delicate extension of fingers and toes. The hunched form lowered itself to the floor, serpentine, flat. The sigh of the flute returned, filling up the dome of the theatre with a dark Apollonian hunger.
There, in the blackness, the creature turned. Cautious. Uncomfortable. Hands and legs and feet emerged. It stood, then staggered towards the halo of light, the table, the typewriter. A long hand. Protracted fingers reached into the beam, touching it gingerly. Female, almost feline. Something animal and naive, Ferran thought. He settled in his chair. The body unfurled into the half-light, features still obscured. He found that it was beautiful to watch: slow, elegant, introspective.
The tones of the symphony expanded. An angry violin stroke, dangerous and menacing, shattered the calm with a yellow dagger.
The figure danced two steps forward, swayed, then tripped, collapsing to the ground, now desperate, part blinded, part hungry for the light – Ferran’s heart leapt – curving hips pushed the form to the frontline of brightness, where it threw its arms wide. The form hovered for a moment, before stretching its naked feet into the brightness. Then chest, shoulders, hips and legs were bathed in light, revealing a woman, lit with brilliant clarity. Dust from the stage swirled around her like fireflies. Her eyes were round and wide, painted black. Her hair was matted and dirty, her lip stained with violet dye. Streaks of dirt ran across a thin white dress. She breathed. Once. Twice. Ferran watched her chest rise, up and down. The woman’s frail arms reached out to the focal point of light.
As Ferran watched, he felt his body fall away from him.
He hung suspended, a thought awaiting discovery.
Natalia Hernández’s performance was a brief one. It was not the title role or even a supporting one. She represented a type of energy, a malevolent force of sadness destroying the world enclosed by the thin spotlight. At one point, she lifted the typewriter off the desk and smashed it onto the floor, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. She wrote in the air with the quill, and then writhed on the ground. Her legs convulsed, gripped by an electric shock, as she slammed herself into the stage again and again, before singing, recoiling from the darkness. The sound of her body hitting the floorboards so stunned Ferran that he jumped in his seat, gripping the velvet plush of his armrest. He wanted to cry out – cry out to her! – call her name, rescue her from the darkness, from the world. He found himself weeping, tears running down his cheeks in rivulets, when she rose up and raced across the stage, leaping and pirouetting, then running – running more and more frantically, like a moth, like a blind thing maddened by the warmth of the light.
* * *
The professor looks at his students.
Can they understand this vision?
‘Drama,’ Ferran says, ‘is the art of being alive. Of conveying . . . aliveness.’
He swoops his arm round over his chest. His fingers are splayed, and the palm of his hand presses down into the collar of his denim shirt.
The professor breathes slowly. Deliberately.
His chest moves with an uneasy comfort.
Up, down. Up, down.
The classroom rustles, interested. He continues to breathe. The St Petersburg student who has been peeling dirt absently from beneath her fingernails lifts her head momentarily to listen. The sounds of Ferran’s breath echoes softly, volume magnified by the darkly angled walls of the black-box theatre. The Valenciano catches the attention of the Russian and nods absently from his chair across the classroom. The professor breathes louder. He closes his eyes, and lifting one finger into the air, points gently upward. His mouth parts. A trickle of saliva rolls to the edge of his lip and hangs there with a static energy. Someone cou
ghs. Silence. The professor’s hand moves slightly, a paralysing calm, and then with a screech of action, he jerks his arms wide, flings back his head and screams.
He was asked to take a leave of absence from the Institute that evening.
* * *
‘Be merry, my girl!’ Fons says when he has finished. ‘This is cause for celebration! You have returned to the fold! We’ve missed you at the Institute. I always hoped you’d be a director. But you didn’t go into theatre?’
I shake my head.
‘But you want to write about Natalia, and the theatre?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re still in the theatre,’ Fons declares. ‘Good. Indirectly, at least. And if you are writing, you are struggling. You haven’t sold your soul to commerce. You are one of us. I can be frank. As to gossip!’
Fons adopts a ceremonious whisper:
‘Àngel Villafranca has become creative director of the Theatre of National Liberation – would you like to meet him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Oriol?’
‘Can you arrange it?’
‘Can I arrange it? Can I arrange it? Of course! Oriol is an old friend, though he seems to value my company less these days. My dear, this I can do, but only if you promise to be very sensitive, very well behaved. Nothing rude! They are colleagues! Brothers in arms.’
After we finish, Fons invites me to stroll with him through the Raval. I ask him what he knew of that night – if he had been to her last show – No! he cries – there were no tickets! I was persona non grata, no room at the inn. A tragedy of fate. Did you see them that night? Out for drinks? Can you remember anything?
The Serpent Papers Page 25
