The Serpent Papers (38 page)

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.