The Serpent Papers (39 page)

On the sixth floor, Silvia ushers Ferran towards her desk. She clears her throat.

‘Ferran, I want to talk to you about Alexei. Apparently you are behaving quite inappropriately towards him.’

Alexei is a tall Muscovite, broad-shouldered, trained in the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts. To Ferran’s irritation, Alexei’s appearance at the Institute last autumn is worsened by rumours that his academic nemesis is a direct descendant of the great man himself. In retaliation, Ferran has taken to calling Alexei ‘Ivan Vasilievich’ in public after the character in Bulgakov’s
Black Snow
 – a reference which very few of his pupils find entertaining. The sharp-faced woman with pointy-rimmed glasses tuts.

‘We’re trying to modernize the course structure. Alexei already teaches a seminar on Stanislavski – and with all due respect, Ferran – he is our Russian expert.’

Ferran fiddles with a broken cigarette in his pocket, teasing out the tobacco, ripping the paper into pieces.

‘We are rearranging the academic roster.’

A low-flying plane over Tibidabo catches Ferran’s attention. He holds it with his eyes, following its trajectory west over Barcelona.

‘Ferran?’ Silvia breaks his concentration. ‘Your attention please. It pains me to have to put things in such concise terms, but the academic committee needs to see a shift in your behaviour. The Institute is changing. You need to find a new place in it.’

Ferran’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He meets Silvia’s gaze before checking the message that bleeps onto his screen. Every rebellion, no matter how small, is empowering. The left corner of her mouth twitches minutely.

* * *

When Fons leaves the office, he sees her again, through the glass windows facing the theatre. The posters of Natalia Hernández went up three weeks ago. (Ferran noted the date in his diary, underlining it twice in red.) Now they follow him everywhere: one hundred and fifty-four hung from Gaudí’s lamps lining Las Ramblas and El Passeig de Gràcia. Twenty-seven plastered over the ugly construction walls that barricaded the left side of his apartment in the Barri Gòtic, half of them peeling and sun-faded. He cannot ride a bus or go on the metro without being confronted by her face. Ferran guesses their dimensions: 80
×
120 cm. Dark red foundation. Text: All Caps. Font: a crisp Euphemia UCAS. Standard silk paper in full colour. High gloss. Distended contrast, popped exposure. One photograph. To describe it as an infatuation would be inaccurate. It is more of an
idée fixe
. In the words of Guillermo, his friend and amateur psychotherapist (an avid reader of Žižek), the girl encapsulates Ferran’s own ‘subconscious desire for self-perfection’. His fixation on her image is an act of ‘non-sexual shrine-making’ (Guillermo was careful to underline this point), not dementia or desire.

Why?

Why does she have this power over him? Ferran bites his lower lip. For days he despaired in his office, looking at her for a moment, steeling himself against the inevitable. Earlier that week, the longing had been so intense he had to leave school early to seek respite with the therapist Guillermo – so violent, it frightened Ferran –
I’m not myself
, he shuddered, as he packed the contents of his satchel, walked down the flight of stairs, exited the building and marched straight into the arms of Guillermo’s chaise longue on Passeig de Sant Gervasi.

‘I can’t do this any more. She’s taunting me.’

‘Relocate your energy. Describe your feelings.’

‘She sees everything I’ve lost, what I gave up.’

Guillermo asked him to continue. Earlier that week, Ferran was stopped on his way home from the Institute and swept into a
vaga
(‘There was passion,’ he told Guillermo, ‘real Nationalist passion!’), a demonstration which forced him into the throng of striking railway workers and dump-car drivers, and their children and bright clothes – and the flag – always the flag. Five red stripes of Catalunya and that brilliant yellow, the blazing gold of independence.

‘You like the summer,’ Guillermo told him. ‘You feel more . . .’ He lifted his hands in the air to prove a point. ‘You feel lighter. Freer. Winter weighs on your spirit – I tell you this as a friend –’ they decide to have a beer now in the Plaça del Sol – ‘not a doctor, OK?’

Ferran explained: it is the dream that makes things complicated. Had it simply disappeared, life would have remained far more intelligible. Now Ferran is perplexed. It has returned. The same lurid notes. The same strange insistence on the soldier, the boy with the blackened eyes and the hands full of limbs and organs. He is wearing an officer’s military jacket. It is oversized and he is thin. He will walk through the ruins of an old city, bearing the carnage to a shrine in the burnt-out chambers of a Gothic cathedral. There will be roman pillars knocked to the side. Enormous. They are covered with moss and red ivy. The marble is firm to the touch, and in parts green. When he reaches the shrine he will place his bloody cargo on the ground and take two steps back. Ferran will watch the soldier cross himself and cry.

Ferran does not tell Guillermo about the second dream. The ugly one, so dark and so secret it cannot be shared. The one in which he himself perpetrates actions that make him retch inside, so that he vomits in the bathroom. It’s the murders in the papers – he tells Guillermo – the reappearing naked girls in the Raval, the bodies police are putting away with no information – the city is sick, he repeats – my Barcelona – there’s something wrong. Guillermo nods. Ferran mutters –
and Barcelona takes to it like an old friend
 – his voice breaks, thoughts incomplete – the streets in my dreams – he shudders, sweat dripping from his brow in the chaise longue as the doctor takes notes. Ferran alludes to a terrible urge with a wistful, dramatic flick of the wrist.

Guillermo says things would be worse if Ferran had dreamt his teeth were falling out, which is a sign of either financial troubles or imminent death, neither of which are desirable futures. This offends Ferran. How can the loss of dentures be more significant to the psyche than a solder carrying human remains to a crumbling altar? (Or the vision of a murdered actress, skin glowing in the street?) Ferran questions whether Guillermo is trained at all. He says, ‘You’re just an Argentine hoax.’ Guillermo snaps his tongue against his teeth, making a clicking noise. Ferran feels juvenile, ashamed. He returns to speaking about the girl in the poster, Chekhov, unresolved ambitions.

The dreams return. Ferran thinks it’s because he fell asleep staring at the poster of Natalia Hernández. There is now a massive one hanging from the deserted construction scaffolding outside his bedroom window. The dream is identical, only this time it takes place on the platform for the
Ferrocarriles
. There is a girl, small. Auburn hair. She has round eyes and no smile. An oversized military trench coat. Grey. Civil War era perhaps, date unclear, and a battered cap. Around her everything is modern, women wearing beige collared shirts carry elegant leather purses and silent children. The girl makes no eye contact. She stares at the ground or at the ceiling or into nothing. But you watch her incessantly, hypnotically, as the train pulls into the platform, and the electric doors pull open, and she steps gingerly up and over the lip of the platform and enters the train. Once inside things become more uncomfortable. She is hiding her left arm beneath the folds of her trench coat, and you seek to see it, as the train rumbles through the underground. Her weight adjusts suddenly. The train lurches to the side. The coat flies open, revealing the left stump of an arm where the hand has been shorn off. The cut is clean, but the wounds are open, and you see the blood and the chopped white marrow of her bones.

Guillermo recommends that Ferran start writing his dreams down as soon as he wakes up in the morning. ‘A dream diary,’ he says. ‘Keep a detailed account.’ Guillermo thinks that Ferran may be having an artistic resurgence prompted by his exposure to the erotic vitality of Natalia Hernández. He asks Ferran if he has fallen in love with the dancer. Back in the safety of his office Ferran promptly feels the urge to confess:

Guillermo,

It’s true. Everything you say.

I am in love with the poster of Natalia Hernández.

Ferran stares at the screen. He does not click ‘send’. Instead, he saves the draft to his inbox, shuts down his laptop, slips it into his messenger bag, turns off the lights to the office and makes his way down to the cafeteria, where he orders a
ca
f
è amb llet
with one sugar from Maria the bargirl and drinks it slowly. He does not look at his watch once.

After arriving twenty minutes late to his own class that fateful Friday afternoon, Ferran discovers that the entirety of his students was absent and retires elegantly to Bar Xirgu. It’s far too close to the lunch hour to be lecturing postgrads on Stanislavski and interpretations of Method Acting. (Let them digest at least – he railed at the registrar.
Hòstia, sisplau
, after lunch they’re sleepwalking – all of them – they pass out!)

And as for his students (those few who had themselves been on time), they had gone to get coffee, or a smoke, or do something useful, and so when he arrives at classroom S2 P1 nobody is there to listen. Alas. He scribbles a note on the chalkboard.
Find me at Xirgu.
And leaves.

Forty-five minutes and two
cortados
later, Ferran’s students congregate around him in the Bar Xirgu, a café of mal-repute just outside the back entrance to the Institut del Teatre. On sunny days, which are most often, the lady of the establishment puts tables outside where the students can sit and smoke cigarettes in the breaks between classes. She sells plain sandwiches popular among the young –
embutits
, made up of dry bread and slices of cured sausage.

Once satisfied that he had successfully squandered half of his three-hour lecture in Xirgu, Ferran decides that it is time to go back inside. He corrals the postgraduates through the metal gates of the Institute of Theatre – that bastion of higher learning – past the doorman on the ground floor and down into the heart of the glass building, beneath the ballet rooms with the lovely high ceilings to where the black-box theatres are, no windows and no natural light, the workshop spaces designed for movement and theory courses:
Stanislavski and Method Acting
.

After debating the appropriateness of Stanislavski’s terms in the contemporary zeitgeist, Ferran feels it necessary to workshop his favourite Chekhov passage. Neither Catalan nor Spanish writers have ever managed to capture that intensity, he thinks bitterly. On the spur of the moment, he opens his briefcase and pulls out a battered photocopy of Act One of
The Seagull
.

He hands it to a pretty red-haired French girl in the front row. Once he had entertained great hopes for her. But he has abandoned everything. She has no talent. Now he enjoys simply tormenting her.

‘Read it again,’ he says.

The girl stumbles over the lines.

‘
I am alone. Once in a hundred years my lips are opened, my voice echoes mournfully across the desert earth, and no one hears. And you, poor lights of the marsh, you do not hear me. You are engendered at sunset—
’

‘More emotion,’ he interrupts, holding his hand out to the classroom. ‘Is this the correct response to the text?’ A porous silence. Ferran’s soul slips out of S2 P1 and relocates itself between the barwoman’s breasts in the Xirgu. They are useless, these students. Boring, vapid, the opposite of stimulating. They are empty of everything except youth, and even that they refused to share with him. Even Núria is absent, he thinks forlornly, scanning the classroom. The one rising star from the abyss of apathy.

The girl reading the lines falters.

‘Again?’ she asks.

‘No! No! No!’ Ferran shouts. ‘I do not want you to go again. Somebody else read! Please! For God’s sake, what do you think she is saying? What do you think she is feeling? Find it.’