The Serpent Papers (28 page)

Adrià sat at the centre of it all like a king, a cross-legged
petit dauphin
surveying the court of his anarchy. A spliff hung between lazy fingers as he threw his head back and laughed. He was beautiful here – amidst his courtiers, a prince as delicate in features as his sister, his hair hanging in lank black waves to his shoulder. His face resembles an El Greco portrait of a saint, with fine brows and a long, aquiline nose. Adrià carries himself like an eagle of royal stock, with hands too big for his body and sunken, Byzantine eyes. Swedish Mark sprawled on the couch beside him. Vernon, the dreadlocked, pierced American who made his way in the day via internet gambling, was relating a story of sexual exploits. His ex-girlfriend (now night-time reprieve) dangled across his lap. She was French and loud. One of the Pakistanis who sold beer by the can on the streets was having an animated conversation with Tree, a Dutch university student who dealt coke on the kerb by the late-night club Genet Genet
.
Settling on the simplest attack, Núria threw her body against the wall, closed her eyes, and flicked on the lights. A terrible whiteness flashed into the room. The bleary-eyed revellers recoiled. Lovers in the corridor covered their faces and a girl threw up in the bathroom.

Adrià lunged off the sofa, instantly defensive. He swore out loud. Swedish Mark shaded his eyes with his hands, while Daisy the cat, stoned to oblivion, slipped peacefully from his shoulders.

‘Where’s Emily?’ Adrià asked.

‘Party’s over,’ Núria said. ‘It’s three in the morning. Time for you to go clubbing or something.’

‘Fuck clubs,’ Adrià said.

‘I’m serious,’ Núria said.

Swedish Mark waved hello.

Adrià raged.

‘I don’t care,’ said Núria. ‘I’m going to bed.’

Adrià retaliated: ‘These are my people, man, we’re having a good time. You’re stepping into my territory.’

‘Relax, man, relax,’ said Mark, tugging at Adrià’s shirt.

Adrià sat back into the sofa.Vernon, who had slept with Núria once months ago, leered at her in the brightness.

‘Hey, Núria,’ he said. Núria ignored him.

‘You all need to go.’ She pointed at the door.

Adrià glared at his twin. In the courtyard below a wandering drunkard sang discordantly, an old song in Catalan that echoed into the alcoves of the cathedral and drifted solemnly through the open windows of the balcony. The cathedral bell-tower struck the hour. A heavy fullness coloured three sad notes.

A mobile rang. Once. Twice. Núria switched off the music.

‘What the fuck, man!’ Adrià exploded, flinging the glass next to him to the floor. The glass shattered. In the corridor, the girl caught in the arms of her lover shrieked. Adrià screamed again, picked up another tumbler of vodka from the coffee table, and hurled it at Núria’s feet. Mark moved quickly. He grabbed Adrià by the arm and pulled him back down onto the sofa.

‘It’s all good,
tranquilo
,’ Mark said, putting away his phone. ‘It’s all cool, Adrià. We can go. Lola’s at the Macba. They’re heading to Alejandro’s squat.’

‘Cool,’ Adrià said, breathing heavily.

‘Alright, everyone,’ Mark said, taking charge. ‘We’re going.’

After the exodus, Núria tried to clean the kitchen, after sweeping up the glass in the living room, but gave up in disgust at four in the morning. She made herself a cup of tea and went solemnly to bed. At eight in the morning she was woken by Adrià, still drunk and stoned, desperate for revenge. Lola was there with her mismatched earrings and long black hair. Adrià only had time for Lola, and coiled himself around her in the corner of the blue sofa, reading excerpts from his pornographic novel and explaining the motifs of his art while Tree cut coke on the floor. Adrià was going to start a revolution, a Catalan Independent-State-of-Anarchy-and-Free-Love-Where-Nobody-Worked-and-Everybody-Fucked. Lola thought this was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and gazed dreamily into Adrià’s red-rimmed eyes. Núria hated this world of the Barcelonauts: the thrashing bodies and heavy music. These nights, when she entered her home, a dark decadence seemed to cling to the walls, reeking of impotence and frustrated revolution. The women were pierced and handsomely dirty, dreadlocks hung down their backs, their conversation coloured by desire. The boys, overstimulated by the presence of attractive women in their midst, reached constantly for that lawless place where tongues and hands are loosened by hash and empty pockets. Lola grinned, offering Núria a joint. ‘Enjoy it,
Maca
,’ she said, as the red embers smouldered between her fingers. ‘Fuck the
Mossos
.’ Lola curled her lip at the police.

‘He’s ill!’ Núria shouted. ‘He’s sick!’

‘I’m not fucking sick! This is freedom, Núria. You have no idea what freedom even fucking is!’ Flinging up her hands in disgust, Núria gave in to the fates and locked herself in her bedroom. Later that morning as she stepped over the sleeping bodies of the Barcelonauts on her way to class at the Institut del Teatre, she paused at Adrià’s shrine, studying his pornographic novel. She removed the icon from its altar, slipping it into her bag. She felt guilty but did not return the object to its owner. Instead she hid the book in her locker at the university. When she returned to her apartment after the morning’s lectures, Núria made a life-changing discovery. Beneath a battered copy of short stories of the Latin American Boom Generation, a packet of tobacco and an uncapped pen, Núria found Adrià’s keys to the apartment. He had gone out to a course on Schopenhauer at the Autònoma in Terrassa and forgotten them. His sister recognized the power immediately. She confiscated them, clutching the keys in a tight fist. Núria realized once and for all that she did not want Adrià to come into the apartment. Not until he apologized. Not until he stopped having people over. She made that very clear.
He was not to come racing up the stairs and he was not to pass the door. He was not to kick it in, and he was not to touch her.
But Adrià did all these things anyway, just to spite her, hitting her across the face and calling her a Betrayer of Independence and Sexual and Social Revolution! And at three in the afternoon, when the doctors finally came to take him away, their uncle smoked a cigarette in the living room and called the Sorra parents to say Adrià had cracked again, and it was best if they took him out of the city. To the country house – why not take all of them? Get the kids to make up.

‘The doctors have got the medication into him, they’ll keep him overnight, and then perhaps the country air would do him good?’ the uncle suggested hopefully as Núria wailed in the corner, showing the bruises left by her brother to Emily Sharp.

In the train leaving Barcelona that Friday night Emily was hungry and tired and content to disappear – to grab a bite to eat, a few drinks on the river, followed by an early evening in the sleepy country city of Girona. The girls sat side by side, facing forward. Núria had the window seat and pressed her hand to the glass thoughtfully. ‘The house is nice,’ Núria finally said. ‘We go every summer. Adrià and I used to love staying there.’

The fields outside the window were a rich golden yellow. Emily shifted her weight. She would not share what she had thought as she raced up the stairs to their apartment, remembering blood on the floor from where Adrià’s hand smashed through the honey yellow windowpane. Instead she asked:

‘Will he be alright?’

Núria shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My parents are bringing him tomorrow.’

A childhood friend of Núria’s met them at the station in Girona. She had agreed to host them for the night in an apartment overlooking the sluggish river before Joan picked the girls up in the morning. The friend had a hunch, which she would pursue throughout the evening, plying Emily with alcohol and questions – a hunch built on the observation of Adrià and this American girl.
Something had passed between them.
Núria’s friend was a queen of deduction.
Something suspect. Something sexual.
And here she chewed on her hair thoughtfully.
Adrià and Emily exhibited a tangible amount of attraction, you’d be
tonta
not to notice it – Núria, they like each other
, her friend had whispered long ago. Núria ignored her – Don’t be stupid. She knows he’s trouble.

‘Stupid? You’re stupid. Seriously, Núria! It’s obvious.’

I do not want her to know.
Núria tugged at Emily’s shoulder. One evening presented a time frame the girls agreed was manageable, though clearly undesirable. They would go out with the intention to dance the night away, and if possible, with guise and cunning, locate new friends who might be able to entertain them for the nocturnal hours of the escapade. The girls all armpits and necklines. Their limbs swayed to the beat of the forest. Dance floors built into woods, sky illumined with strip lights, gyrating colours. Alive with music! Quick! Green bottles and blue vodka! Emily walking, body curving, one step forward, two steps back, but still, not enough alcohol for oblivion, not even enough alcohol for a slight high, till the dance floor, oh the dance floor, hands in the air now, feel the beat, and midnight was forgotten in the city of Girona – Come! Come! Núria was dancing and Emily watched fiercely,
but she will not go to her, no, not yet
,
until, hiding in the forest they stood nose to nose and kissed deeply and there could be no such thing as darkness, only colour!
Music! Bodies! Dance!
The throng has run to the great arching tents that replace the cramped bars of winter with the open dance floors of summer. Trees stretch up into the air. Leaves pulse with music, leaves sway to the thumping bass of desire. Desire for the night, desire for the world, desire for the desperate stolen kiss outside of the concrete bathroom to the south side of the tents and the haggard woman who guards the toilet paper in little piles and wears gold and smokes a cigarette sullenly through the night from the earliest bell-cry of eleven to the first sigh of dawn.

That morning the jeep raced along the flat roads of the valley. Gold to all sides, cypress trees and big, leafy walnuts. In the distance the Pyrenees curved into prostrate giants, elbows and knees jutting into an endless sky. The girls slipped gently into the swerving rhythm of summer. The wind streamed through the back of the car, tickling their ears. Núria batted at a fly lazily as the car jumped over a dip in the road.

Joan laughed and pointed to a stone house in the distance. ‘That is the beginning of
Fontcoberta. Molt macu
,’ he said in Catalan. ‘
Molt molt macu.
’ The villages were Romanesque, he explained, pointing out the window. Built in the eleventh century. Golden stone, like the fields. ‘We have a church in our village that is beautiful,’ he reassured them. ‘A Romanesque gem,’ he shouted into the back seat. ‘You’re in for a real treat.’

Joan Sorra was a large man, with slouched shoulders and a bruiser’s features. The man was exceptionally tall, like his twins, but heavyset, with arms like a woodcutter or an old
camperol
; he boasted an ageing fighter’s broken nose and paunch
.
Brown as a nut. Stubble on his chin and cropped silver hair. His hands were big as well, with thick fingers that moved with deliberate precision. Beyond his height, Emily does not see much of his twins in him – perhaps when he was younger? When he was slimmer, before the years and wine caught up to him – perhaps then she could have seen the line – though there is something of his eyes in Núria; yes, there must have been something of his eyes.

At the door to the country estate, Núria’s mother La Marta greeted the girls with open arms – shrill coos of pleasure, dyed ash-blonde curls bounced around a flat face like the moon. The woman was soft as an overripe peach. Her body bore the same signs of age as her husband, cheeks rouged by too much drink, neck wide beneath sea pearl necklace, coral blouse, gold bangles on puckered wrists. She was unpleasant, unsettling . . . tourmaline on plump fingers, which she flitted nervously on the air.

‘
How was he, darling?
’ she asked Núria. Emily’s anger burnt. But no one would mention that. La Marta would cook dinner and give them towels, before escorting them to the guest wing of the restored farmhouse, the old hay barn. The donkeys used to sleep on the bottom floor. The walls of the house are firm and yellow – pillars of strength. There was the traditional
llar de foc
 –
home of the fire
 – a hearth in the bowels of the living room, pushed into a dark alcove around which the family would have gathered over the centuries to sing, or do needlework or sharpen their swords. The living room filled with modernist furniture – yellow velvet chairs built like small, vintage thrones, many-patterned sixties carpets, lace curtains.