Spotlights explode into her consciousness, supernovas brighter than the loveliest star, and then the floor lights spring out and Dance! With a pop, pop, pop and the little girl runs her hands in the liquid gold, watching the shadows as they form on the wall. A red lifeline glows round her fingers and she shrieks and giggles, playing in the dust clouds that rise around the lights, and the steam, for the air inside the theatre is damp. If she holds her hands there long enough and squints, she will see her bones, but the stage manager finds her then and tsk, tsk, pulls the little girl into her arms who says to the woman – Mama! Mama! A kiss on the forehead. At night she sleeps at the house of her guardian, and by day he brings her to the theatre where she sits in the wings with the pulleys and rope on a fly box and watches the people build new universes, the houses with their swinging doors and chequered tablecloths, the painted mountains and powdered flowers, the installation of the truss with its gels that change the colour of the light and all emotions with a delicious, whirring click, click! I have made this world for you, and only you, my nightingale. Her mother whispers in her ear and in that instant, she is gone, swept into the spirit of the wind, leaving the child standing alone in the centre of the darkened stage, staring into a void. In her pocket the girl reaches for the golden dials, the spheres made by her mother, engraved with the magic letters, and spins them intently, watching the combinations as they form.
B, C, D
First there was the theatre and only the theatre / As man is a pen so he is a knife. But tonight it is a dream. She is alone. But this is what she remembers. Com, Medi, l’Extrem, and she remarks that the legend is true. That the coming of Love brings a certain quality of Truth. You will see it all. The secrets of the beloved are revealed in the secrets of the lover / The secrets of the lover are revealed in the secrets of the beloved. Past–Present–Future. But in the meantime she drifts. The only rule of history that was any good was the rule taught her by her family. That in the world of the living, past–present–future means one thing and one thing only: an old maxim of the arts which wove round her thoughts in circles, like a prayer of intent. The ground slopes gently where she rests. The pain, which had been vast, has left her, and now there is only dampness around her ears, growing cold against the stones and the world very quiet beneath her. For a long time she is still. There are sirens in the distance and a car that crosses the upper line of the square. She can feel the cement cold under her fingers. She has been left close to the tree and she is grateful. If she had the movement of her hands, she would reach out and touch it, and hold herself against it – to be so close to something living! She does not want to go, not yet, she lies there and watches the clouds part above her head and tries not to think at all. To be empty and clear and remember her childhood. But – no. The memory is gone. When she closes her eyes, this is what she hears: Follow. Me. Two words, spoken soft and low.
* * *
I sit bolt upright in bed, pushing the covers away, breaking the dream, and look down at my clothed chest, running my hands over my stomach. My skin clammy and warm, jeans crusted to my legs. Why have I gone to sleep in my clothes? The air oppressively hot. I have left the heater on and now it stifles everything. My body rebels against the night. I stand and walk to the tall balcony window that interrupts the exterior wall of my bedroom. I pause here, pressing my forehead into the glass, looking out over the jagged line of Barcelona. A second city, the rooftop gardens, linked exterior patios, laundry lines, gargoyles and church steeples, cranes’ nests, a million mismatched TV radials. Hidden from view, I open the balcony windows, stepping out into the cool night air. The roar of the city devours me.
There is a book. She has hidden a book.
But where?
I stumble to the shower, cleaning my hair twice, scrubbing down my body with a hard stone, pushing suds over my chest and legs and arms. Time stretches and slows. I do not know if I am there for minutes or hours but I do not care. I lean my head against the glass of the shower walls and dissolve into the steam. I make a cup of chamomile tea naked in the kitchen, wet feet dripping on the floor. It is only then that I notice the flowers: a bouquet of yellow tulips in an ornamental vase. A folded note in confident English:
CALL ME. LET ME KNOW HOW YOU ARE.
Oriol.
P.S. DOES THIS HAPPEN OFTEN?
Shit, I think. He got me inside. How long did he stay here? What did he see? Nothing on my desk but a laptop. I send a quick text, too embarrassed to ask. Thank you. Sorry to put you in that position.
He writes back immediately: ‘Res, Nena, res. ALL COOL.’
A second message flashes up: ‘I know something about you. You’re real.’
A third: ‘You have a bed in the city. A home to sleep in.’ Do I tell Fabregat? No, I think. Too embarrassing. Besides . . . Two pills into my mouth and swallow with water. You’ve got this under control.
II
A FATE LIKE HERS
I emerge with a pounding migraine. The lights of my apartment are dimmed and I stay flat in my bed, breathing carefully, so as not to forget myself in the repeated hammering on my skull. The plaster on the ceiling has lumps and I make out the shape of a rabbit. The skin around my ears itches, tingling down my back into my wrists. I check my alarm. I’ve slept through the best hour of the day. Why? Why do you do this to yourself? Bare feet on linoleum floor. Outside my barred window rests winter. She renders this city limp like the slit belly of a fish, cold and wet and slippery. A silver sheen to its roofs and radars. A damp, pernicious darkness, even in the afternoon sun. Grey walls consume the light, birthing fungi and rot – the line of mildew running round the corner of my roof. I stumble to the bathroom. The world spins. Something has died in my mouth and buried itself in the stale mulch of day-old liquor. Is it worth it? The mirror above the sink is cracked. I’m shocked by the circles under my eyes. Pale formaldehyde skin. You have come here to locate the palimpsest pages of a book. Nothing more, nothing less. Do not complicate it. But even I know that is a lie – You are seduced. You want to know, as much as the others did. You want to understand what would drive a man to murder, and a woman to sacrifice her life and the lives of three others, for that is what I am convinced she did. I distract myself from the stomping noises coming from the roof. A ghost has moved into the attic above my apartment and started dragging small objects from one side to the other. Pat, pat, BANG! goes the ghost. Or the footsteps of pigeons? My head throbs louder. Iron-smelting by my left temple. I run my hands under harsh water. The boiler is not working. My knuckles turn a bright inflamed red. And then I sense it. A presence in the room. A wind blows up from nowhere. Sliding through the apartment – rustling my pages – but I know that I have opened no windows, and this wind is dangerous, other-worldly. I shiver, and try to ignore it. You are summoning things, Anna, and they are coming as you call. Do you follow? Do you follow?
The wind tugs at my tongue.
Blows around me.
No, I argue back. You will unseat me. Derange me.
The headaches come again. Louder. Angry. I clutch at the colours on the air, the threads of indigo and gold – I listen, I feel for them. Where do you lead? I ask the pulse and throb. Out. To the heart of the Gothic quarter through the square of the Palace of Kings, where many overlapping arches form a wall of empty windows framing the sky. I do not remember leaving the apartment, only that in my quest to follow the golden threads I pass doors hiding patis dels tarongers, courtyards filled with orange trees echoing the interior lives of medieval gardeners.
Men in battered shirts roam the streets offering red cans of beer. They approach me carefully, as one who recognizes their quarry, jangling wares against moth-eaten mittens. Cervesa? Un euro. When I shake my head no, their voices drop to the language of underground exchange, a train of illicit substances: heroin, coke, speed, hash, ecstasy, meth . . . the connoisseur’s full menu. Barcelona’ll give you anything you want. But I decline.
I must wait patiently. For the pores behind my ears to open u
p and the voice to make itself known. Soon she will arrive like a river, smooth stone strapped to my throat, tracing her weight into the lump of my cranial bone, nestling under my hair, swelling in my nodes. Transference is a dangerous pursuit – but this voice is so enticing, so heavy in my throat I cannot help but listen, and if the curiosity is strong enough, a mania sets in where logic – oh! Logic! Mine is tossed to the wayside and retrieved retrospectively. I have come here because this stranger felt it was necessary, her communication unspoken, I do not hear her, but I feel her reaching into my heart, impulsive, dictatorial, I feel the cold hard folds of a woman’s essence, compact and brown as a walnut.
Walk.
I obey. First I see the shapes emerging, the flickering tremors on the air, the glinting like ripples on the still veneer of the night, the shimmer in my retina. Aromas of modernity – fried oil, moped engine, rose perfume – morph into a stench of smoked animal pelt. I swoon into the wall of the Great Cathedral, staring up at the bowels of a gargoyle. Claws clenched around a spoke of rock. Panicking now, out of control, instinct rattles through me and I take out my phone to call Fabregat. It is difficult to hear myself in these situations. I am still conscious, still sentient, but my voice – that distinguishing characteristic of the soul is often the first symptom of relapse. My weathervane. In severe cases, cross-wiring occurs. Overlapping identities.
‘Nena?’ Fabregat asks, when the phone picks up. ‘What’s wrong?’
Nerves bloat behind my ears.
‘Where are you?’ he asks.
Skin cracking in my ear lobes, spots breaking out with pus.
‘We’ll find you – Nena, don’t move.’ But mist already coils along my river Lethe, and I forget myself entirely in the flow of green lanterns, translucent neon glow over covered rivers and veins – the knot of this foreign creature resting on my tongue.
Follow, she commands.
I twist and turn through the Gothic maze until I reach a sloping alley, La Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, and then the hulking frigate of the old Basílica of Santa Maria del Pi. Once there was a sacred grove here, filled with halting words, like no normal language – and I remember the deaf man’s tongue, round and full-bodied, that Illuminatus heard as he passed through this square on his way to the court of the kings – the pine of all pines. In the flesh before me.
Dig, the voice commands. Root of your root. Clay of your clay.
I kneel beneath the tree, ignoring the pedestrians, the buskers, ignoring the barmen and baristas, the clientele, the neighbours in their balconies. I kneel and bend my head and, short of any other tools, begin to dig with my hands in the earth beneath the trunk of the tree. A strength foreign to my own body enters my fingers. It has rained and the earth is muddy about the roots of the pine. The earth comes away easily. I dig and dig and dig, as this other mind directs me, for surely that is what I suffer, until my fingers strike metal. I work harder, faster, lust driving me, desire for the hidden object. I rub away the dirt, pull away the form and stop. An intricately patterned box. Golden fig leaves laid over enamelled metal. Jewelled birds nest in dirt-smeared foliage. I shake, holding it close to my chest. Rocking back and forth on the ground. Is this it? Are these they? Is this what you wanted me to find?
Open it.
I unlatch the hook, yearning for the papers – imagining the folds of parchment, my stolen quire, cut out of the Book of Hours – instead I am met by revulsion. Three brown rags, stained with what looks like earth, wrapped around a pocket edition of a disappointingly modern, dingy little book. Agony bursts through my chest. What game are you playing? I turn the book in my hands, leaving the disintegrating rags in the rusty box. A working edition of the Oresteia: a trilogy of ancient tragedies produced by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus in 458 bce. The book well creased. Dented. Dog-eared. Stained in the same mire as the ugly rags. I peer closer. Passages are underlined. First – Agamemnon. Cassandra’s story. My heart skips. I keep the pressure down. Gentle. Be gentle. Flick back to an inscription on the title page:
To my Cassandra
From your Aureus
Words circled. I skim softly. Cassandra, high priestess of Apollo, stolen from Troy. Raped. As a maiden she rejected the romantic advances of Apollo, and was cursed by the god. She would bear the burden of divine foresight, but never be understood. And suddenly it clicks. Check. Check what is written. The dates in the letters to Fabregat.
1182–1188. 1312–1317. Coordinates in a play. Latitude and longitude of verse lines. My eyes scan to the line numbers at the side of the page. Hunting. I alight on my quarry. A thin underline below each one. A date. A marker. June 2003.
Lines 1182–1188:
Flare up once more, my oracle! Clear and sharp
As the wind which blows off the rising sun,
I can feel a deep swell, gathering head
To break at last and bring the dawn of grief.
No more riddles. I will teach you.
Come, bear witness, run and hunt with me.
We trail the old barbaric works of slaughter
Could it be? She was delusional. Mad. I feel the spasm in my belly. She was waiting for someone like you.
Lines 1312–1317:
I must be brave.
It is my turn to die.
I address you as the Gates of Death.
I pray it comes with one clear stroke,
No convulsions, the pulses ebbing out
In gentle death, I’ll close my eyes and sleep.
In the distance a siren, like a battle cry, whoop-whooping, playful, skipping over rooftop bars, merging with a chorus of voices – the wails and death throes and shouting and chattering, like the incessant squawks of birds, ca-cawing, shriek-shrieking. Drilling into my pores, screws biting into my skull, breaking bones, black pustules bubble up, opening like slits, or eyes, unlocking the energy that sits coiled in the base of my spine. And then the line, the invisible line that rushes from the apex of my scalp, down over my nose, through my tongue, and out over my chin. A magic line of palsy. Of division, of rupture. Throbbing round my lips before the left side of my face freezes, falling slack as the brain swells, it pulses and beats, followed by the extraordinary pain, like needles piercing flesh, those familiar microscopic haemorrhages in my ear canal.
Silence. She is coming. I feel her entrance. Ominous. You’ve pushed too far. And then my head throws itself back, my mouth no longer my own, and the voices rattle out of me, tumbling over my tongue as I fight to return into myself, pushing through the fog, begging, thrusting into my lungs! I must return to myself – before I am swallowed up again as the voices yap through me, yearning! Howling for expression.
‘Let me hold her!’ I bark – clutching the box to my chest – ‘I must hold her!’ The spirit shunting through my vocal chords is a woman. I listen as I speak – yes – a young woman . . .
Natalia?
The gurgling responds.
Follow.
I stand, facing the tree, unsure. People swirl around me, but I do not take them in because I sense the emergence of that dreadful being. Down she comes, unravelling, moving out of the branches, golden green. The snake descends regally, confident, unafraid, she moves over shoes, gliding round boots and stilettos, over a dog’s paw and the point of an umbrella until she reaches me. She is bigger this time, much larger, no longer a garden snake. She is a python.
Are you afraid? The dream voice asks. The snake unhinges her jaw, moving bone away from joint, the scaled rubber grows and grows, mouth trebling in size. At the bottom of her loosened jaw lies a golden fig leaf, like the leaves on the tree I had seen in my dream. Take it. Place it in on your tongue. I do as I am told. Reaching my hand into the green snake’s mouth, I am hallucinating wildly. This is madness, far worse than before, I will never come back . . . but I obey.
I feel the weight of the gold on my tongue, the wide expanse pressed down by the form of the leaf. The snake is gentle. She comes closer, putting her cold head next to my ear lobe; she licks me, once
on each side, tongue flicking. She is kind. The experience mesmerizing. The pine tree from which she descended grows in size, the branches bud with glass jars, magnificent amphorae, glittering ornaments. From each one I detect a voice. A chorus of whispers. I listen carefully, no longer afraid, plucking stories from the wind. The first memory is a man’s, very old and papery, made of crushed reeds.
‘It was at night as I crossed the desert alone from Chenoboskion to the city of Luxor that I came upon a woman lying on the road. Thinking that the woman had met with some assassin I went to her immediately. She lay on her back, with her arms outstretched to either side in the shape of a cross. Her body was covered in simple earthen robes. She whispered as I knelt beside her: “Do not fear for me. Be gone. I am meant to die.” – I knew then that she had been poisoned by a snake, judging by the wounds in her wrist – a sound drew my attention, and I saw the black form of an asp slither across the moonlit sands. I made a move to kill the creature! She reached to stop me. “Let her return to the desert. Your hands are already bloodied.” I held the woman to my chest as the snake’s poison raced up her arm. The end drew near, I praying to the Gods for her safe passage to the underworld, while from her lips the woman confessed that she had buried a book she called a secret. I asked, “What is this secret?” She would not answer clearly, saying only: “I have buried this work for eternity, giving our words into the earth, hidden as a seed from those who would destroy us, and like a seed it will emerge and its branches will reach towards the heavens.”
The Serpent Papers Page 31
