The Serpent Papers (43 page)

‘Tito’s back?’ Ferran had met the Argentine once before, at a recent benefit for the university. He’d seemed very close friends with Oriol. Powerful fellow. Nice, too. Ferran’s pulse quickens.

‘He arrived this morning. He’s coming to the press gala tonight. You’ll be there?’

‘No invitation.’

Oriol nods.

‘Shame about that. House is full, otherwise I’d grab you a seat.’

Ferran brushes this aside.

‘I’m not in a good place, Oriol. All used up. Nothing to say.’

A young woman enters the square, pushing an old perambulator from Carrer de Lleida. A little girl in a pink dress runs circles around her mother. The infant inside the perambulator wails.

‘Don’t worry about these things. You’re an institution, Ferran.’ Oriol smiles.

‘Maybe. Once. Not any more.’

Ferran’s eyes hover over the poster of Natalia Hernández.

‘Is she good?’

‘You know she’s good.’

‘No, I mean, does she transform?’

‘Did you see her in Casas’s
Tennyson
?’

‘Yes.’

‘She surpasses that.’

Ferran lets out a slow, exhaling whistle.
‘Mare meva
,’ he says.

‘This play will change everything,’ Oriol says. ‘She’ll eclipse all of us.’

The two men stare at the poster.

‘You never taught her, did you?’

‘No. No. She didn’t train at the Institute.’ Wistfulness in the corners of Ferran’s eyes.

Oriol’s attention goes to his watch.

‘Nearly seven,’ he muses.

Like clockwork, the assistant stage manager emerges from the stage door. A plain girl with a fierce haircut. ‘Oriol, your call is up.’ She glares at Ferran.

Oriol says goodbye fondly, pressing Ferran’s hand. ‘I’ll do my best,’ Oriol reassures him. Ferran offers eloquent thanks and kisses his former pupil on both cheeks. He walks slowly back towards the Institute, heading to the ramp leading to the car park. From the other side of the square, Ferran waves once to Oriol. The actor stubs out his last cigarette. Like mist on a lake, the professor’s parting shout wafts across the
plaça
: ‘She has a gift, Oriol! She’s our future.’

* * *

‘I got him backstage, that night.’ Oriol frowns. ‘Out of pity – out of respect. I don’t know. I will always regret that choice. He made her uncomfortable; I could feel his eyes on her as we moved, and I hated him for it. I couldn’t control the rage. Later that evening, Natalia and I had an argument . . .’ His attention drifting away from something distant. ‘Once upon a time I had a sense of faith.’ He sighs. ‘I met Natalia, and I began to believe in something bigger than myself. That’s gone now.’

His attention darts again, to the stage behind me.

‘You were with her that night, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

I wait
. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

‘I think she knew she was going to die.’ Oriol sighs deeply. ‘But I didn’t understand it . . . I didn’t understand what she was saying.’

I watch him as his eyes wander over the seats in the theatre.

Oriol has gone very quiet. His legs limp, the energy tightening in his stomach. He looks at his hands, stretching his fingers out in front of him before turning to me.

‘I can’t really tell you who she was because I don’t really know. I don’t think I’ll ever know.’

* * *

‘It was a pleasure meeting you today.’ Each vowel a tart gem.

I sit up on the telephone, surprised.

‘Fons gave me your number.’

‘Oh.’

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

I make a vague gesture to my work – a day in the archives.

‘Come to our rehearsal. Come and see what we’re up to.’

I feel my cheeks flush pink.

‘Are you sure that will be alright?’

‘Yes. You’ll fit right in. I’ll meet you at the theatre after lunch tomorrow. Join us for the afternoon.’ Oriol Duran perplexes me.
Fragile
,
I think.
For all that physical strength, he feels fragile.

Later
I flick through YouTube videos, hunting for a crackling version of the recording. One I have seen before. On the evening following Natalia’s death, Oriol Duran was asked to speak at the end of the newscast. The police had agreed and so Oriol was permitted to send his message out to the world. He had not practised the speech; he wanted the emotion to hit home, the words to be unhindered by overfamiliarity. He wanted this to be raw, real, he wanted to help, he decides to do something ‘Historical’ – or, in the actor’s tried and tested drawl, ‘Epic’, according to the press interview.

‘
Increïble
.’

‘
Enorme.
’

They would break the news about Natalia Hernández to the public as the bonfires were being cleaned off the beaches and San Juan’s day came to a close. Oriol Duran would initiate a national search for the killer. Oriol Duran would give a live speech at the end of the show. After all the remainder of the day’s crap they would return to Natalia. The story runs big. Oriol gives his piece as a man suffering the loss of a woman he had loved. He calls on the people of Barcelona, the people of Spain, the people of the world, to come forward with information on the whereabouts of this Adrià Sorra, while he rests at the centre of it all, like an oracle of hope. Oriol’s voice echoes out from my computer screen, skittering into my kitchen, Oriol soothing his masses with the ultimate opiate of murder, better than pornography, better than sex, better than anything in the world, the apotheosis of mystery and death and wrongdoing – and I listen, my beating heart open and veins throbbing with the crackling lines of cable. In 2003 the radio waves hummed with the story, and Oriol Duran knows then that this is Big – the camera will swing around, they’ll bring him on, and the show – for it was a show – and now! Now! Now! Now! Oriol Duran stands in front of the green screen, and looks directly into the floating camera. He has the stance of a politician. He breathes slowly. He loosens the collar of his cream shirt – he does not wear a tie – which adds to an aura of dishevelled melancholy, honeyed eyes rimmed with stress, golden curls flattened on his forehead. His hands do not rise to his face, but hang at his side. He loosens his spine, and drops his tension to the floor, feels his breath, opens his mouth and speaks. On the beaches wine is uncorked and poured into clear plastic glasses. On the airwaves they replay his message. I watch the face of Oriol Duran tighten and crumple in turn as he begs, prays, demands information!

Information from the age of consumption!

While in the streets they congregate and mourn the revelries of yesterday.

And the sand is warm and dry underneath bare feet.

The rites of la Revetlla de Sant Joan were simple. They smelt of gunpowder and ash. Of burnt skin and cheap red wine.

But tonight, police lights have replaced bonfires on beaches that burn, burn, burn. They turn on the lights of their cars, and station themselves in forensic units facing the place where he entered the ocean.

The sea blacker than crude oil. Slicker and darker and more impossible than the wind, with nothing to say.

‘First there was the theatre, and only the theatre.’ Tito Sánchez announces boldly. He immediately strikes me as feline. Sanguine. Smiling. Arms wide, breath cigar-fused, broad back plastered to the leather cushions of the restaurant. I have landed in the upscale part of town, north of the tourists, of Las Ramblas, where the well-to-do moved on the Avinguda Diagonal, direct to Madrid. ‘This was decided by the men who brought their heads together to organize the 1929 International Exposition. It would be built with a proscenium arch in the style of the Ancients and would boast an architectural feat in which the stage could be submerged with water or rise into the audience on mechanical platforms. A masterwork emulating the great outdoor theatres of the Roman Empire, like the ruins of the coliseum left at Tarragona, overlooking the sea. It would seat 3,500 visitors but – unlike the Greek – they were building higher on the hill, cut simply out of stone – this theatre would represent the excesses of modern engineering. The roof would be inlaid with plate gold in the shape of shells, and crystal chandeliers would hang over the heads of the audience that would dim or lighten (depending on the mood, of course) through the latest and most marvellous infrastructure of thin metal cables that carried currents of electricity. Intent on having the finest performance spaces to accommodate the fleets of dancers and acrobats and singers and orators required for the Russian schools of theatre they built the stage with vast wings behind the proscenium, equipped with pulleys and ropes that supported the shell and the red velvet of the safety curtains. This fly system was designed to be the fastest in the world, allowing for the installation of sixteen drops – such that set changes were possible in seven seconds! To this they added a revolving platform built in the centre, which would allow for the construction of a spinning set – on which you could interlace three individual universes and have them turn swiftly, thus showing events of multiple characters near simultaneously. A hush fell in the meeting room of the organizers of the 1929 International Exposition. The engineers and the directors and producers and architects smiled, for truly they were building the most extraordinary theatre in the history of the world.’

He pauses.
Tortilla con espinacas, queso y jamín, muchos gracias – y usted?
Olives and bread arrive. Waiters flit, formal, at the beck of the clientele, blue suits, waistcoats and ties, mistresses chamois-dipped and pearl-earringed, Chanel bags and gold watches. Children uniformed, socks pulled up to knees, skid marks and scars. Hair in pigtails or ruffled under caps.
Tortilla for one. Tortilla for all.

‘When the theatre was completed in 1929,’ Sánchez rumbles, Argentine accent like shrapnel, meaning business, ‘at the base of the gardens of Montjuïc it had fountains to either side and a mounted wall mosaic, and a series of backdrops painted by Picasso. The first ballet to be performed on the opening night of the exposition is the touring Russian
Giselle
. For the next seven years the Theatre of Barcelona’s 1929 International Exposition is the best in the world, its glittering lights the finest architectural feat on the Plaça de Margarida Xirgu, before time runs foul and in the midst of something darker, Montjuïc forgets its gardens and becomes once again a fortress, and the theatre fades into nothing before being caught in a fire in 1939 and burnt halfway to the ground.’

A bottle of white wine appears at the table, two glasses.

‘I came to Barcelona for the theatre back in 1975. A home away from home. I had some other business at the time – but theatre! Theatre was the passion. Today I am proud to say I am its oldest patron and greatest producer.
Now.
’
He folds his hands under his chin like a table, leans into me. ‘I don’t like journalists. Never have. But, equally, I don’t like what happened. Under my watch. As it were. Whole business makes me sick. So. We eat. I talk. You listen. That night is all I’ll give you.’

And then?

‘You write this, you write this well, and then you fuck off right back where you came from.’

* * *

That night, in the reconstructed glory of the Theatre of National Liberation of Liberation, Tito Sánchez takes his seat in his private box, his mouth full-lipped, like a woman’s, delicate and sweet. His face round with bright eyes of a rich umber colour. He sports a loose blue dinner jacket, tight against a violet shirt collared with enamel buttons and a barely discernible floral paisley. Grey jeans reveal his rower’s thighs, on his left wrist a chrome watch face, plastered to a mottled snakeskin strap. He pours himself a glass of champagne from the carafe on the table to his side and watches the press filing into the audience. There’s that smug critic with her long-faced husband and the crooked reviewer from Girona (always good for information). The photographers march into rows. Cameras over shoulders, draped around necks. Àngel Villafranca catches Tito’s eye from the balcony with a salute. The director will join Tito for the show – they’ve already made the arrangements – but for now Villafranca grazes in the crowd. Customary handshakes and greetings for a few. The lights dim. The orchestra begins to play. A hand on Tito’s back. Villafranca slides into the chair beside him. Villafranca is in his late sixties. He has thin, steel-rimmed spectacles and a strong nose. His cheeks are long and hollow. His face bearded. There is very little fat on his body, and his white hair is thick on his forehead. The director is no longer calm, now shaking with nerves.