‘And the girl?’
‘I don’t know who she was,’ Villafranca says dismissively. ‘I never asked.’
You never asked? You are a strange man.
‘Were there any distinguishing characteristics of the killings?’
Villafranca shakes his head. ‘Nothing I can remember. I do not like to dwell on these things. But I am very old. For a while I suspected members of my own company.’ Villafranca pauses, and then dismisses the idea. ‘But that was illogical, a paranoid assumption on my part. My actors are good people – good, good people. We would never hurt a soul. But as you can imagine, it was quite disturbing. Cristina found it profoundly distressing. She became obsessed with discovering who was committing these acts of violence. I tried to dissuade her from probing, but she insisted on asking questions, on returning to the villages after we had left. She would stay for a few days and speak to the women, often taking her family with her. I told her that was mad, but she said we had to stand for some principles. In the end I think she got very close to finding out who the murderer was and he ran her off the road. I don’t believe the police ever made that connection. I think the national government wanted our theatre to collapse and looked at this as a blessing. As to the murders, they occurred in rural neighbourhoods where the policing perhaps was not strong. It is not an unusual thing. You seem like a sensitive young woman. Hopefully you will be more intelligent than our Guardia. They certainly have done nothing for Natalia.’
I think of Fabregat. What would he feel, listening to this?
Villafranca stirs his spoon in the last dregs of his coffee.
‘At the time, I felt extremely guilty. After the birth of Natalia, things had become more difficult for Cristina at the theatre. I probably complicated matters more than was necessary – I wanted her to leave her husband and come and live with me. Instead she made me the guardian of her children in the case of death. I told her that was incredibly morbid. She said we should always be prepared for the unexpected. In the end, it was a gift. I loved Natalia as much as I loved her mother. She changed my life.
‘There was a time when her mother wanted Natalia to be an artist – in the painterly sense. When Natalia was a little girl, she was very talented in this arena – in fact, a prodigy. Cristina taught her the art of calligraphy – and her daughter excelled. I suppose this was only natural, given her heritage . . .’
Villafranca drifts off into his memories. I watch him lingering in the thought. Check the time on my watch. ‘I brought some of her pictures to show you,’ he says. ‘They’re just little sketches. Her more major pieces are in the galleries – I have a few on my walls, but I think you’ll find these more interesting . . .’
He removes a manila envelope from his briefcase, places it gently on the table. He opens his jacket and removes a pack of tissues with which he wipes the tips of his fingers. He opens the envelope carefully. From the envelope he pulls out a sheaf of papers, which he places on the table before me.
‘Be careful. Too much handling and they’ll get damaged.’
He arranges the papers on the table, making sure the surface is dry before he sets each page down.
‘Most of these she painted when she was eighteen.’
Exquisitely delicate, rubbed black chalk, pencil lightly smudged beneath thin washes of pearly colour – a dreamy lilac sky. Alive. Images of the theatre, portraits of actors, a church steeple rising out of an urban landscape.
‘Who is this?’ I ask, lingering on the page furthest from me. A sketch of a man, mid-thirties, warm smile, bright eyes.
A call. I feel a call.
‘I don’t know.’ Villafranca frowns. ‘A friend. A man from her imagination. He’s very well drawn,’ he grumbles. ‘Clear, sensitive lines.’ He pushes the sketch towards me.
‘Do you mind?’
‘If you must.’ Villafranca nods absently. His eyes glaze over.
I handle the paper gently. Take in the smudged charcoal. I feel forward. She’s signed and dated the image 15 June 2000. She was warm. The day was warm. A dragonfly landed on the pond and laid a thousand infinitesimally small eggs. A man’s laughter, loud and ebullient, ever expanding. Echoing on mountains. Deep snow. Somewhere high and far off. An endless night on naked skin. Happiness. Certainly happiness. The next picture is a sketch of a village church set against mountains and lightly brushed with watercolours, a half-finished painting with brown stains as if it was made en plein air. There is another in the series, this time of a house built low and close to the ground with lime-washed walls and a Mediterranean garden painted in silvery greens. In front of the house a man reclines in a chair, a broad-brimmed hat hides his face. He reads with a book in his hands. Beneath this: Capileira. 18 June 2000.
Villafranca nods at the inscription. ‘Capileira is the last village on the mountain road through the high sierra of Granada. The end of the earth from here. Why she went there . . .’ He shakes his head solemnly. ‘Who knew who she had met?’
Villafranca watches me as I take pictures of each sketch. Lining them up on the table like soldiers. Snap. Snap.
‘I’ll get you scans,’ he says. ‘Good quality.’
There is no question of who keeps the originals. He rustles in his briefcase again, producing a pocket phone book, five centimetres by five centimetres, gold-pressed letters, black leather.
‘I thought you should have this.’ He chews his words factually. ‘My housekeeper found it beneath a wardrobe in her summer bedroom in Mallorca when we sold the house two years ago. Natalia kept it when she was a teenager. Who knows how many secrets she had?’ Villafranca shuffles the pictures back into the envelope as I finish. ‘But then again, don’t we all keep something prisoner?’
He sighs deeply. Shakes his head.
‘You must not trust us. Trust none of us at all.’
Voices echo through me. I stop beneath the ornamental bridge connecting the claustrophobic walls of Carrer del Bisbe, each pulling back from the other as the street runs tighter and tighter. I gaze up at the interlocking flowers. A skull smiles down, stone dagger plunged through his bone. I linger for a moment, arching my neck. Looking up. Fresh air to clear your head. I walk slowly through the cold, pulling my scarf tight round my shoulders. In my satchel I carry Natalia’s pocket address book, hard black leather biting into me. I pass the cathedral, the boulevard busy – darkness charging into the afternoon. Windows like coal fires. Chatter and music. Couples with their legs entwined around barstools. Long-necked flutes of champagne. Short coffees, cortados pulled until midnight. A restaurant where the blind serve their clientele in the dark. Molecular cuisine makes its mark in the technicolour foam of El Bulli copycats. The skies are clear. I can see the moon blinking above me, a fragile thin line. She feels far away in the city. Hidden by a cloak of lights, her stars drowned out. Disappeared. In her place, they light the walls of black rock. Shimmering up towards angels. Lances and spears. The scaled spine of a dragon. A city built for defence.
I choose a tapas bar. Wooden doors open. Bundles of leather flasks hang over the windows, tied with red string. Full of light, spiralling out on the street. A camerero leans with his back against the wall. He lights a cigarette outside. The smoke catches on the sharp night air. ‘Quina fred!’ He shivers. Blackened barrels along the wall, blue and yellow tiles, flowers, a crowd of people standing, drinking. Along the marble counter, plates of pickled fish, salted olives, sardines, cuts of jamón íberico, botifarra negra, fuet, marinated capsicum stuffed with garlic, dried tomatoes shrivelled by the sun. Sandwiches on miniature rolls stacked invitingly. I take a plate and sit at the back. My thoughts flicker. A serpent and a cross carved on each hand. To witch is to whisper. Whisper as in to hide. I order a glass of wine. Too many. Too many. Open Natalia’s book.
And then I see it: a little drawing, a smudge of a serpent biting its tail. Anger builds in me. I want to shout at her: You cannot be so passive! Why did you accept the terms of this pact? This deliberate silence! One confession, one
clear answer, and you would have given the police everything they needed. Unless you yourself were corrupt?
I want to yell at her:
You are a coward!
But I understand the agony. She kept a secret.
Greater than it all.
Her tongue bore the paralysing weight of fear.
There’s a mirror in the restaurant across from my table. Divided into gold-rimmed panels, mottled, dusty glass. I see the blurred edges of a human – red nose, androgynous lips. A frown where my face is resting. I push my hair into place nervously. Look away. I will never be pretty. Tomboyish, I scowl, my body neither long nor full, but flat and thin, dwarfed in the heavy clothes of winter, a bland grey turtleneck and brown scarf. I think of Hernández, her dazzling features, her flawless skin. Of the signature ebony curls that formed an impermeable halo of beauty around her. Who would I have been if I had been born with those eyes? Those endless lashes? Who would we all be if our faces were cut from gold?
* * *
In alchemy the best key is a simple code. A word or image that hides a true meaning. Or at least it should be. Short. Sweet. Easy to identify for the initiate, a kernel of knowledge that relies merely on obfuscation, a riddle that prompts the code-breaker in a language initially confusing but retrospectively clear. Painfully obvious. But you haven’t cracked hers – not yet, I remind myself.
You don’t have the full picture, I tell myself.
So listen. This night is ripe for listening. Evening settles in my bones. Sun sets too early in winter.
* * *
Before me: leafy trunks bedraggled and unclean. The streets empty but for the drunkards and pickpockets who make their trade with the foreign clientele of after-hours bars. Graffiti grins, the face of a leopard. Halal butchers, closed for the night. Red meat hanging from hooks. Veer deeper into the Raval, urban caves formed by a burnt-out complex, bricks falling out of the side of a stairwell, an open, hanging door of a brothel covered in piss. Bar Marsella. The first location marker. At the corner of Carrer de Sant Ramon the prostitutes are out in style – then two blocks to the south towards Drassanes – a back alley near Genet Genet – the hanging gardens of Baluard. The square of the first girl, Rosa, is lined with trees but none of them are flowering now. I saunter to the side, taking a seat on the step of a bar facing the square. Fifteen windows on the square, looking down on the action. And no one saw anything . . . Even now, shivering children look down from the railings of the apartments, a woman smoking a cigarette, in a nightdress, watching with dreamy slowness, laundry flapping in the wind, the smell of fish broth burnt on a gas stove. The notion of secrecy was a farce the law clung to, sobretot in this neighbourhood, where the network of informants is vast and news travels faster than light.
And yet, precisely what happened to Rosa has never been clear.
When I turn, I walk towards the square, very slowly, deliberately. Looking towards the municipal trash skips, the cracked cement. The dead borders. Pink plaster. Metal shutters. Four benches facing in. A placard on a stone. In Loving Memory of Rosa Bonanova 1987–2003.
Roses planted in scraggy bunches to either side. Bare of blossoms. Brittle and thorny. Still winter. No summer yet. And then I feel him. Eyes on me. A man standing at the upper corner of the street. A smear just beyond my field of vision. I look towards him sharply. Focus in. You. He waves. My heart ticks. Striding towards me?
‘Maca! Querida! I followed you. You caught me.’
Oriol hides his face behind ornamental, pretty-boy glasses, frames perched behind his ears. Worn black leather loose on his shoulders, jacket smooth as silk.
‘I’m sorry! Forgive me! I wanted to know where you would wander.’ He comes very close to my neck, breathing in as he kisses each cheek. A hot flush. I walk with him slowly. ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ he says. He leans into me, our shoulders touch. Not so close. An electric pulse in my chest. A scent of arousal.
He laughs. ‘I worry about the foreigners. You can never be too careful around here.’ Bashful. His mouth is tender. ‘What chance!’ he says. ‘Luck brought me to you.’ He smiles, boyish.
As we walk, he plies me with questions.
‘I know nothing about you. And you know everything about us.’
I drift above him, keeping myself removed, listening.
‘You know where I was born, my family, my house, who I loved, who I lived with, what I suffered. You know my shows, my history, my work. And you? What I know is superficial. You are a writer. An investigator. You have come here to resuscitate a dead memory. You are clearly an accomplished young woman. Very pretty – yes, Anna – you are pretty, I am a connoisseur of ingénues – did no one ever teach you not to blush? Ah, I have found the weakness of Little Miss Foreigner. What country do you come from? And where do you call home? You intrigue me, el meu petit misteri.’
His hand brushes against mine. I retract. My little mystery. His hand moves to the small of my back, propels me forward.
‘Tinc curiositat . . . I want to know more. What you stand for, what makes you tick . . .’ He leans into me. Sharp and protective. ‘You remind me of her. There’s something of her about you, it’s uncanny, almost as if she inhabits your eyes – there – I can see her, looking at me from a stranger’s face. You unnerve me, Anna.’
We walk forever. I pause and stare up at the buildings ringing Plaça del Pi. That is the house where Ruthven lived. White on chalky orange. The exterior façade a bright coral, with portraits of cherubim, wreaths of grain in raised plaster. Paint peeling. Faded glory marked by inlaid flowers on the internal walls and an old teak banister. Don’t go inside. Below, a knife shop. The doors Sitwell must have walked through with the servant Brass Buckle. The pine he stood under, the night the woman came – today the shop front below displays sharp objects made to look like art. Cooking knives, cutting knives, climbing knives. Knives to skin a lamb or whittle wood. Knives to bone a fish, knives to pull out feathers, knives to carry in a back pocket, hooked knives, jagged knives, smooth knives. Ivory-handled. Ornamental. Chopping blades. All sorts. Everything you can imagine.
Oriol leads me through a winter market. Little stalls with taupe-coloured shelters. Peaks and waves of fabric. At long tables, men in aprons offer sweet marmalades, honeys, beeswax candles. Cured meats.
‘Try this –’ Oriol gives me a marzipan square covered in candied pine nuts. It is sweet and damp on the tongue. A warm buzz, though hands stay inside pockets, scarves wrapped round cold necks, moisture drips from red noses. I feel his weight drift towards me. He points out gargoyles in the Gothic, a secret fountain, the grave of a philandering bishop, the square of a massacre. He pushes my attention to the ferns growing out of balconies, the sun-faded roofs.
‘This is my city,’ he says again and again. ‘My home. I belong here.’
I hear him calling, a siren-voiced yearning. Come closer. He walks quickly – ‘The Born? You’re staying in the Born?’ In the restaurants before the cathedral he buys me a beer and tapas. Black bread. Salt cracked between forefinger and thumb. I watch him move his hands, playing a beat on the tablecloth, running fingers through his hair. He is kind. Gentle. Lonely. He feels lonely. When we are finished I do not know what to do. I do not want him to know where I live. For privacy. For intimacy with myself; no one from her world can be permitted into mine. I remind myself. An arm’s length. A healthy distance. For clarity’s sake. Another beer. I giggle. Stupid. A third. A fourth. At the door to my apartment I stop him. He looks up at the house number, my windows. I put out my hand. ‘You’re not coming in.’ He leans in towards me, body closer – laughing by my ear. ‘You really are very pretty for a researcher.’ I brush him aside. His lips close to my own. Oriol Duran—
I open my mouth to speak when the chuntering rips through me. Chattering down through the crown of my skull. Laughing. Singing. Crying. Louder. They come louder and louder. I lose control of my body, slumping forward onto his shoulder, my face collapsing into his chest, my throat swelling – b
ut I am silent! I keep them out with all my power. You will not come through – you will not come uninvited.
I smell the full-bodied man of Oriol – feel the hard muscle of his chest – his body dips under my weight, but he holds me up against him, I grind my teeth together. You will not come out, not here, not now. The blood rushes from my forehead, tingling in my elbows and knees and I know that they have come for me – that nothing I do will keep them out. With the familiar certainty of the damned, I accept their presence. These episodes – the doctors say – are psychological side effects of physical relapses caused by a degenerative neurological disorder that has created an epicentre of lesions in the tissue of my brain. The doctors call these psychic constructs hallucinatory incubi. That is an idiotic name for them. I am meant to breathe deeply – relax, damn it, relax – I am meant to enter the state of sleeping and let them fade away . . .
‘You are a funny little thing,’ Oriol whispers into my ear. ‘You’ve had too much to drink.’ I feel my body lift off the ground, arms around my shoulder and legs. The tangy jingle of keys in the latch.
* * *
Remember.
I look closer. Slither of woman in violet darkness. Think of your family. Of your history. Think of your love, of your happiness. Think of your future, your past, your present. First there was the theatre and only the theatre. Yes. That’s good. The theatre was the cave. A watery sheen. She has run to the edge of the stage and waits for the lights to illumine. Molt bé! Molt bé! grins a bearded gentleman in spectacles, who lifts her on his shoulders and pirouettes before setting her down on the floorboards. You were born to dance, my Maca! Querida Estimada, t’estimo! Escolta . . . sounds like rich xocolata and cold water. We must build the walls here, he says, and cover the orchestra pit so they may walk out into the audience and appear to be floating.
The Serpent Papers Page 30
