The director wipes his mouth drily.
‘You want another coffee?’
Villafranca scrapes his white shock from his forehead into a wave. His eyebrows a symbiotic species, whiskered, often furrowed. His hands flit about the table, tracing out words or playing with the tip of a black fountain pen he has taken from his interior pocket and placed on the napkin beside an empty cup of coffee.
‘Are you sure I cannot get you something?’ he asks again, speaking a perfect, fluent English.
‘No. Thank you.’
Àngel waves a waiter over, and gestures at the table. ‘Cafè amb llet,’ he says quickly. He holds up a finger. One. He looks at me, turns to the waiter and asks for two waters. ‘You must have something.’ Villafranca smiles. ‘I feel ridiculous otherwise.’
When the coffee arrives at the table, Villafranca reaches for one of the long, thin packets of sugar and cracks it deliberately in the middle, pouring the contents into his drink. He stirs it slowly.
‘I’m an addict.’ Villafranca smiles.
He lifts the cup gently to his lips.
‘I created her last show for her,’ he says, nodding to the picture. ‘I wanted to give her the space to explore her artistic talents, her paintings and her visions on the stage. It was a mistake.’ Then he pauses, looking sharply across the table at me. ‘If we are to continue our discussion, the only thing I ask of you is not to disturb her memory.’
‘Of course.’
‘As you know, she became my child, as well as my leading actress.’
Villafranca’s eyes cloud. ‘I raised her in this theatre, as we were building it from the ground. Her parents worked here with me – Natalia was born of the stage and into it, like a creature made of light – she had such luminosity! When she walked onto a darkened stage, the dead space of the theatre came alive. It transformed. One body, illuminated by one spotlight . . . You cannot take your eyes off her. And when she danced . . . Oh, when she danced, the world stood still.’
‘She must have been on the verge of becoming extremely successful.’
‘She was destined to be a great star.’ Àngel takes a decorous sip of his coffee. ‘My show would have transformed her life, her career. Recently I have worried that I pushed her too hard. My heart has been hurting. I may have been cruel; as a stand-in father, I asked a great deal. Sometimes, I fear, too much.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You cannot make something out of nothing. The notion of conjuring a performance out of air is a farce. Acting is not easy; a talent like hers is a form of transmutation. In the past I have called it alchemy.’ Villafranca continues: ‘Living with her particular kind of creative energy was a burden . . . I’ve met very few actors in my time who carry the mark of greatness.’ Villafranca looks at me quizzically. ‘Do you know what I mean by “greatness”?’
* * *
Natalia Hernández came onto this earth in the August of 1981 in the village of Valldemossa on the north coast of the island of Mallorca, in two folds of earth that lead into a gorge that drops five hundred metres to the sea. The time of her birth was summer – and for bad luck she was not born in a hospital. Her mother, nearly two weeks late, collapsed in their country house outside the village. Her husband, hearing the cries, ran in from the garden. The road to the hospital was blocked by a collision. A lorry had been knocked sideways across the thin highway to Palma. The nurse from the village was called, who ran up the trail in the fields, past the olive and apple trees, to the house where Joaquim Hernández had laid his wife across the kitchen table, and then collapsed into tears beside her, blood and water running down the legs of the table. Natalia was their firstborn child. Against the backdrop of a rustic kitchen, with ants running along the rim of the sink, and hunks of meat drying against the open windows, the midwife arrived, with the priest, who began to pray, as did half the village. The midwife reported that a car had been sent for a doctor who lived in a neighbouring village and he would be with them as quick as he could. A cold compress was placed on Cristina’s head, as her body rocked against the kitchen table. Many hours later, Natalia Milagros Hernández-Rossinyol was given into the light, with the priest praying all the way beside her. The child emerged with the umbilical cord wrapped around her throat; the doctor cut the flesh and the midwife carried hot water as the priest mumbled under his breath, as the monks of the neighbouring hermitage gathered outside the kitchen door, in the summer sun beneath the olive trees and meditated on the child who had come from the female line of Rossinyol.
At least, this is what I understand from the story the old director is telling me: the concentration of prayer at the moment of her birth, the priest later proclaimed, in conjunction with her genetic inheritance, gave her a close proximity to God. In the summers after her family’s death, Natalia would return to the island with her guardian Villafranca. They did not stay in the Hernández house, but rented a little flat in the village, close to the shrine of Santa Catalina Thomas. It was in this village, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, in the cloister of the Carthusian monks, that she experienced her first vision. Walking across the garden at the centre of the cloister, she approached a well beneath a statue of a saint. Touching her hands against the cold rock, she leant her young face over the edge and looked into the mouth of the well. A voice behind her spoke her name. She turned, to see an old man, with a blue beard, and a black cap on his head, and a fur ruff round his shoulders, seated on the low wall of the cloister that rimmed the inner garden. He was very old, with lines down his cheeks. She insisted that she had seen his face before – perhaps in her dreams, or in the stories of her mother. When she approached, the old man showed her the gilded book he carried between his hands, a book bound with wide copper clasps. The cover was also made of a copper plate, engraved with strange symbols and letters, in a language she could not recognize. The pages of the book were not of paper or parchment, but of a material like bark. Hours later, Àngel Villafranca found his ward unconscious at the centre of the walled garden facing the square of the Capuchins.
‘Natalia is a vessel . . . in the old sense’ Villafranca says. ‘As a child she was strange, she seemed to have come from other worlds. I can’t quite explain it. She had an uncanny ability to access our collective consciousness. For such a small thing, she carried the weight of the universe on her shoulders.’
‘But you say that she was happy?’
He laughs bitterly.
‘Happiness is a complicated thing for actors – I don’t know how to stress this – but she was content. Just as she was also, at times, very sad. She was an orphan. She lost her parents. She suffered from bouts of paranoia. She saw things that did not exist and yet were recognizable in the world around us. She was an Artist. A kaleidoscope of emotion. When a child is forced to learn about death the hard way, it never leaves them.’
‘It must have been devastating for her to lose her family so young.’
Villafranca’s brow furrows. ‘It was a very sorry affair. Their car crashed off the pass to Sant Cugat. Everyone died in the accident. Mother, father, sister, brother. But for me, she was alone in life after that.’
‘How did she survive?’ I ask. ‘There are no reports of her having been in the vehicle at the time of the accident.’
‘She had hidden herself in this theatre.’ Villafranca’s wrinkled face breaks into a smile. ‘She was always losing herself in there. Her mother would leave her with me in the mornings . . . That particular day the family left to visit a friend in Sant Cugat. When I heard the news, I didn’t know what to do. I found her in the wings, sleeping on the rope of the fly system, the coiled pulleys; she’d made a bed for herself in the dark. I held her to my chest, counting the minutes that I could extend the life of her family, before I had to wake the sleeping child and tell her what had happened to her world.’
Villafranca’s eyes hold a piercing stare.
I meet his gaze evenly. ‘I would like to know more about her mother, Sr Villafranca. Cristina
Rossinyol, if I have the name down correctly?’
‘That is a long story.’ Villafranca checks his watch. ‘I will tell you the short version. Another coffee, please.’ Villafranca waved the waiter over from the bar. Two, he says, to the waiter. ‘Even if you don’t drink it. Call me old-fashioned, but it is impolite to take coffee alone.’
Villafranca leans into the bench. He has selected a table on the far side of the cafeteria, next to the windows overlooking the square. The coffees arrive at the table. Villafranca speaks quietly. ‘I suppose we should start at the beginning. Cristina Rossinyol was born in a village one hundred and sixty kilometres to the south of Barcelona, on the island of Mallorca. She was to be the only child of her parents. Her father was the last of a lineage of dragon-makers. Do you know what that is?’
‘No.’
‘A dragon-maker is an iron-mason who makes the casts for the fire festivals – our Correfocs – when he is not tending pots and pans. Her mother was a religious painter. Before the war the mother’s family had been something better. Between the village uprising of 1936 and the culls of the 1940s, both sets of grandparents died. It is not important how or why. Like many things then, it simply happened.
‘The year of Cristina’s birth was 1950. At that time, our Catalan language was banned. You could not speak it in your home. You could not read it in the papers. You could not study it in school. We were denied our books. Our theatre. Our art. Our history. You cannot understand Cristina’s work without understanding this. You cannot imagine how that feels. To not be able to speak a word of your internal tongue. The language of your dreams. It is a prison. Many children born of Cristina’s generation lost the Catalan language entirely. Cristina’s family, however, kept it alive in their kitchen, passing down the poems and passages of plays that had been memorized. She learnt the language this way through repetition. Through the theatre of the hearth, the old folk stories and songs. Even this was a dangerous pastime. As far as I could tell, she was alone in the world when she arrived in this city, though she had help from the church of Santa Maria del Pi. A young priest named Canço. I have seen him in passing in the Plaça del Pi. He is an old man like me now.
‘Cristina Rossinyol showed a natural artistic flare. In Barcelona she studied restoration and illumination. She was a medievalist, a calligrapher and an avid painter. I discovered her then – I can’t remember where or how, it simply happened, like these things do. I sat down for a coffee or a drink as I am doing with you now and she appeared, like an apparition of the future. More beautiful even than her daughter, if you can believe it. I fell in love with her instantly.’ He smiles ruefully, and a dreamy haze falls over Villafranca. His concentration drifts. ‘Sadly, I was not the first – or last – to do so . . .
‘At first we became close friends. Cristina brought the talents of the dragon to our radical community, making costumes and carving wooden masks for actors as she had learnt to do in the mountains. We had performances in abandoned railway stations, squats, old factories . . . Always in Catalan, always the old stories. For us, drama was the front line of non-violent resistance! When we had a show, word would pass orally, to all members of the Catalan underground. People came individually, often hours earlier than necessary, so they would not be followed. We asked them to take circuitous paths. By the grace of God we were never caught. Our performances were folk-inspired. They were poor, with few props, with Cristina our set designer, costumier, calligrapher, and maker of things. Our moment was perfect and we seized it with gusto. This city was in the midst of throwing off the shackles of Franco, and the theatre put its shoulders to the task. In 1974 I had dreamt of filling the stage with words that the actors would move through as a forest. And in 1975, with the help of Cristina Rossinyol, that dream became a reality. First we built our makeshift theatre. Success followed swiftly. In the late seventies, we came here. Everything you see we made; with the help of devoted engineers and architects, Cristina and I brought this marvellous space back to life.’
‘And her husband? Joaquim?’
Villafranca waves his hand dismissively.
‘Quim Hernández was just another member of the company. He was much younger, handsome, good with his hands, and an idiot. He didn’t deserve her. We grew apart after he married Cristina. He had nothing even close to her genius . . .’ Villafranca sighs. He takes a sip from his coffee. ‘But that is not important. Look around you. The men who built the foundations of this theatre envisioned it as the best in the world. It was a matter of honour to keep that promise. Cristina was determined that our work never lose its connection to the folk roots of the Catalan language. For our opening show – oh, you cannot imagine the crowds – it was as if the people of this city had discovered Mecca. We answered their call with words. Cristina painted towering Names of Things, the trees of my forest, in the old Gothic script. It was an enormous success. After that, Cristina and I were inseparable. We began to see each other again as lovers. I only tell you this because I am old, and all the participants are dead. I do not think Joaquim ever knew.’
He looks at me slyly.
‘I always believed Natalia was my child. When her family died, fate gave her to me. She became my legal ward. When I lost her, I lost everything. I do not believe that Cristina should have died when she did. If you have read the reports you will see that a second vehicle knocked the car off the road. I am convinced that it was not accidental – that someone was trying to silence the family. It was the final straw in a series of black events that had been plaguing the theatre that year, and we were very shaken. I decided to protect Natalia from that history. I wanted it to be something kept secret. She was only fifteen. I walked away from my position as a director in January 1997. We went abroad. I worked in London for a time and in Paris, also at the Venice Biennale . . .’
‘And the theatre?’
‘I left it to someone else.’ Villafranca checks his watch. ‘Are you hungry?’
I shake my head. ‘No. But I don’t want to keep you.’
‘Well, I have another half-hour.’ He smiles. ‘I am known for being long-winded. It is a terrible habit. I talk and talk – but! I will be as brief as possible, because I want you to understand. Understanding is crucial. It is gold. And you cannot understand her without knowing this: in the late eighties my company began to tour the smaller villages of Catalonia. We were interested in reigniting the folk traditions – I wanted to work with els tragafuegos, exploring the Petum, the gunpowder festivals – you must have heard of these? We were known as “fire-eaters”. Old Fons was with us in the early days, a fantastic period for theatre – very wild. Best reviews of my career – we’re in the textbooks, my darling. Visceral Performance, we called it. The touring company was very small. It consisted of twelve actors, our lighting director, a lighting assistant, stage-manager, producer, two stagehands, myself, Cristina and her husband. Twenty-one in total. We went in the autumn – in the warm months before winter. Things were very bohemian, very raw, very creative. For the first month? Bliss. But as we travelled things began to happen.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
He sighs dramatically. ‘Death chased me like a curse. In the late eighties we toured the villages near the northern base of the Pyrenees and suffered a series of quite brutal acts of violence. On the night of the twenty-first show – I will never forget it! A slaughtered pig laid out the morning after our performance. It had been quartered – literally quartered into four, and buried, feet up, in the earth outside around the local church . . . It was absolutely vile, my dear, just disgusting. And so it continued for the next five performances. At first we thought this might be a reference to local traditions or customs, a deranged lunatic . . . many of the villages upheld quite pagan customs, and our work explored rituals of sacrifice and magic. After a month, the killings ceased. But then we performed again, this time in the high mountains. Cristina came to me one night – she said the play had to stop. I told her that we would not bend under the pressure of a lu
natic. We went to the next village, performed that evening, and after the play a local farmer found a young woman laid out in the snow.’
My stomach turns.
‘The villagers came to us with questions. She was a local healer. She had been to the performance. She had last been seen at our bonfires. We gave our testimony to the police and continued, rather more than shaken, I must say. Cristina broke. She could not take the strain and insisted we put off the show for a few years, but as our company became more famous, I wanted to revisit the themes of those early performances. I became obsessed with the idea of authenticity, of folk-magic. In the early spring of 1996 we launched a nationwide tour with the original cast and crew – Natalia’s mother and father among them . . .’
As I listen to him speak, I can almost hear the bonfire crackling, the villagers gathering round the fire set in the central square of the crumbling town, the actors on their makeshift stage, dressed as nymphs and goblins, skin bare, near naked, breasts unclothed, bodies covered in ink. They wear the old masks of wood spirits and witches, there is a good saint and a bad devil, a man-turned-dragon who terrorizes the dancers, nymphs, beautiful girls. The play is simple – a rendering of the old witch dances of San Juan; the fire dancers – they dance the dance of the old revellers, which becomes more and more frenzied, whipping the villagers into such a state of excitement, such a state of joy, that the town itself is running and jumping and shouting, skin bare and glistening, tongues kissing, groins moaning, until under Villafranca’s expert direction the spectacle morphs into a sexual explosion and the Lord of the Bacchae descends on the crowd while the Devil dances merrily through the flames, the growling bonfire. I can feel the heat on my skin, the ash, the crushed grape and steam . . .
‘It was meant to be a release.’ Villafranca’s eyes narrow. ‘A Dionysian celebration of excess and freedom. It became a living nightmare. At the first performance in a decade, another girl was killed, and left in a tree on the side of the road. My actors worked themselves into a state of total panic. We had to cancel overnight despite the fact –’ he sighs, a picture of melancholy – ‘that the reviews were fantastic, and we returned to Barcelona.’
The Serpent Papers Page 29
