The Serpent Papers (40 page)

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 coughs. 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?

Fons turns green. ‘No. It is painful to remember the slight. They abandoned me. Wanted nothing to do with me – they would not let me near her. Bad politics. We’re all over that now. Atenció! Caminem!’ He storms on ahead, saying it will calm his nerves. ‘My heart is fragile.’ He puffs and shakes his head
.
I relax into the familiar crisp of winter darkness. A brisk roam through the city at night, a
ca
f
è amb llet
from the bookshop behind the university.

‘Do you remember if Natalia Hernández had any books or papers she valued? I’d be very interested in getting my hands on something like that.’

‘Books!’ he shouts. ‘Goddesses don’t read books! They embody them!’

He pauses, ruminating on something.

‘You must come to visit my archive.’

‘When?’ I ask him.

‘
Ara.
’ Fons growls, suddenly aggressive. ‘Now.’

I check my watch. Fons nods; he hums and haws. I agree. He beams.

‘Natalia Hernández represented this city for me, she was made of it, for it . . .’ We stand at the corner of Carrer de l’Hospital and the Rambla del Raval. Our breath makes dragons in the air. I watch him closely, out of the corner of my eye, suddenly, inextricably uncomfortable.
His thoughts roam across the music halls, the opera houses, lurking on the red tiles of the Mercat de Les Flors, thoughts opaque and musty.

‘I have devoted my home to the recording of modernity for future generations of thespians. My therapist encourages me to express myself through this non-sexual form of shrine-making. He says shrines are important to a modern sense of well-being and our culture of anxiety has come as a result of deifying the interests of the individual rather than the collective spirit of the community.’

Ferran Fons leads me up the stairs to his apartment in the Raval.

‘I moved five years ago – wanted to be closer to the action. More room. The place is quite special, I think you’ll find.’ He opens the double wooden doors, painted aquamarine. ‘It’s very festive, very bright.’

My eyes adjust to the sepulchral darkness as we enter.

‘One moment! One moment!’ Fons cries as he flicks on the lights. ‘
Et voilà!
Así nació el teatro!
’ Four walls covered in human faces – young, old, male, female, all histories, all persuasions, perhaps a hundred portraits? Stacks of books, two wide balconied windows and bright red curtains. Aubergine-coloured lounges at the centre of the room, ornate and baroque, puffed-up armchairs. A glass coffee table laden with architectural monographs, design pamphlets, sharp typography.

‘Take your time,’ Fons says. ‘My salon is dedicated to remembering.’

On the largest wall of his living room, above a black tiled fireplace filled with drying violet orchids, the centrepiece – the treasure of his collection. A poster, recovered I assume from some billboard or the press office of the theatre, of that face emblazoned into the subconscious folds of the city. The wide-open eyes, the shadow like a severance down her nose and brow and jaw, playing on the sheer lines of her face, the plum flesh of her lips parted, her tongue moist against her teeth, open. Waiting. Beckoning.
I have a secret
.
Just like yours
. The name of her play, the last play, serenading the reader in full caps. 20 JUNE – 10 AUGUST 2003
 . . . The show that Natalia Hernández never closed.
How many of these were tossed aside? Torn down in the wake of her death? Fons has mounted the poster against the wall in the style of an Andy Warhol print, eye-popping, room consuming.
There’s nothing else to see but her.
To either side, potted ferns, fecund and dripping. At the centre of the poster, beneath her mouth, a small wooden table perched on a single wooden leg. On this a kitsch figurine of the Virgin Mary and a red burning candle. He has hung pink and orange flowers round the sides of the poster, in the style of a Hindu shrine to Ganesh.

Fons beams.

‘I keep the Eternal Flame of Natalia Hernández lit whenever I am home. It’s complicated. I would like to have it burning always, but we had an accident when I first put the poster up – I burnt the bottom. Had to have it replaced. Took me ages to find one. An Artistic Disaster. Total Disaster. So now this must be footnoted as the eternally
monitored
flame of Natalia Hernández, the central altar in the Salon of Remembering, primary feature of the Museum of Departed Glory. She is well accompanied –’ he opens his arms wide in a swooping gesture – ‘by the collected treasures of my dramatic appreciation.’