The Serpent Papers (42 page)

Standing next to me, he is uncomfortably taller than I had imagined.
So close to my skin!
I run my hands through my hair, steady my breath, trying to stop my eyes from covering his features as he stands before me; they strain to linger on the glow of his tawny bearing, his skin a flawless texture like polished sandstone . . . I distract myself (
What is he wearing?
A light grey sweatshirt and loose trousers) . . . restrain my eyes from dancing down the curve of his bicep, raised veins on the back of delicate hands. Nails immaculately trimmed. I make my introduction. He listens dutifully. ‘I’m happy to hear someone is doing a piece on Natalia.’ His eyes soften. ‘I hadn’t spoken to Fons in years – but I agree, it’s been too long since someone paid her attention. Fons says you’re good.
The American scholar
. You’re publishing with Balmes and Sons? That’s very fancy for a foreign kid.’

His eyes flick up and down, resting on my chest. I feel the heat rising again on my spine.

‘I’m free to talk now. If I like you, you’ll get more. But later.’

‘Of course,’ I stammer. ‘I’m all yours.’

Oriol leads me to the edge of the stage. ‘Sit?’ he asks. Not waiting for an answer, he lowers his body to the floor gracefully and leans back on his hands, legs dangling off the side, taking his cigarettes and BlackBerry out of his rear pocket, stacking them neatly beside him. Oriol hits the interview like a professional; not too rehearsed; he’s comfortable. Tone even. I don’t ask any questions – he starts with family.
Get a little of his own history out.

He explains that his mother and father were local politicians killed in a terrorist attack in Madrid . . . There was something about the perpetrators being an off-shoot group – inspired maybe by the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction? An anarcho-communist liberation front that disappeared into Cuba or the Soviet Union. Their car was bombed during a military procession in the capital.

He shrugs as if this were normal. ‘Natalia suffered more than I did; she lost her siblings and her parents. She was divorced from her home – she had no relatives and no family money, while I was blessed with aristocratic parentage and grew up surrounded by excess. I was too young to remember much of my parents when they died. Natalia lost parents she remembered and younger siblings. She was much more damaged than I was – but we shared a bond.’ Oriol waves his hand generously at the empty seats, gesturing at the proscenium arch behind us. ‘
The theatre.
My grandfather was draconian. He wanted me to be an athlete; he forced me to compete professionally as a fencer. “
To uphold an old family tradition
.” So I did.’ His hand twitches in the air, swoops and flies. ‘When I was fifteen I took up ballet – in a therapeutic kind of way – teach me some self-control. I was too old to be a dancer, professionally, exclusively, but I took to dance with ferocious appetite. I went to the Institute. They sent me here. I was seventeen when I joined Villafranca’s theatre. Natalia was a child who hid in the flies. She watched me, and I watched her. I thought nothing of it for years – you’ve got to realize, I was eight years older than her. But she grew up, and I stayed the same. It was our secret. You could be anyone! You could slip out of your memories and try another human voice, leave yourself in the dressing room and disappear into the adrenaline, the rush of performing. Of
making
.
For that reason I can only perform when I
become
entirely. Natalia understood my sense of isolation. After her parents died, we shared . . .’ He pauses, looking for the word. ‘More than a relationship – how do I put it? A conception – yes – a conception of loss. A great yearning to simultaneously forget ourselves and be embraced by love.
She understood me
. I couldn’t talk about it then – we wanted it to be secret. But we fell in love. When she was sixteen then and I was twenty-four. For years I didn’t act on it. I waited. We couldn’t keep it secret after that. And then she died.’

I look up. His face tragic.

‘Natalia would have gone on to be one of the greatest actresses this country ever knew.’

Flecks of green, a dark outer rim to the pupil, and light. Endless light.
I reach out to him, feel . . . 
nothing
. He is empty. Clean.

‘I got my first professional job at the theatre just after my grandfather had died.’ Oriol rolls up the sleeve on his arm. He notices my eyes drop down to the tattoo. He stretches out his arm. The pale inside flesh is engraved with a small black dog holding a flame in its mouth.

‘I got this when I was a kid. An early act of rebellion.’ He smiles. ‘They have to cover it with make-up every night. Villafranca always asks:
Why don’t you get rid of it?
But I like it. Sometimes we do stupid things. It’s good to be reminded of them.’

He gazes out into a private storm. I pull my knees closer to my chin. Crouch down.
Listen.

‘I’ve never understood why she didn’t come to me. Why she never told me what she was experiencing. It was like she was frightened of involving me – I don’t know. I became convinced it was someone she knew. I saw suspicion everywhere. They flocked to her. They wanted pieces of her. Admirers. Lovers. Fans. I hated them. All of them.’ He laughs. ‘I was an idiot about it.’

Listen harder. Are you the man I have seen? The man I am looking for?
That is all I want. A reflex. An echo. But there is no confirmation. No response.
Nothing.

* * *

On Friday, 20 June 2003, the Institute of Theatre lights up before him, a six-floor glass exemplar of design. Time passes. The sun has just begun to dip towards the horizon. Long shadows cut across the square like pinstripes. The Plaça de Margarida Xirgu is magnificently desolate, the travelling circus that had occupied it for the last week has left,
thank God
, taking their Russian dancing bears, dwarves and desultory Bearded Lady with them. For ages the yellow tent of the circus had obscured Oriol’s view of the trees that lined the square. Now he is free of it. The actor likes to have the space to himself, to inhale slowly and breathe the warm smoke out of his lungs into the calm of the Plaça, interrupted only by the lone skateboarder or stray dog. Behind him the Theatre of National Liberation glows with the self-assurance of power, a powerful building that curves around an oblong
plaça
. The theatre is painted orange and has a bright terracotta tiled roof. On the first floor there is a bistro and bar, with a balcony overlooking the square. The building has a small tower, and three stages, each bigger than the last.

Oriol stands beside the stage door, leaning against the wall of the theatre. Surveying the extent of his kingdom. Oriol has arrived a good thirty minutes before his call. His is a ritual of sorts. First a cleansing of the hands in the men’s toilet on the ground floor. Flicking water through his hair, pushing the sweat from his brow. Scraping the dirt from underneath his fingernails. A warm damp towel. A moment of silence, intense and alone, sitting cross-legged on the wooden stage, safe behind closed curtains. Not a meditation – a contemplation (he will tell imagined future biographers) – an assumption of space, claiming every smell of the dusky theatre, every creak in the floorboards, every dead space in the corners, each mysterious darkness turned over and examined. Then a coffee from the battered machine in the green room. Paper cup swirled into light brown espresso, thin crema, congealed milk. Next a cigarette, first of many, smoked alone in the Plaça de Margarida Xirgu, where we find him now, listening to the call of early summer swallows. He will wait here for the producer, Tito, watching each of his fellow actors stroll into the square, crossing the vast expanse, morphing, transforming internally, as they enter the auspicious realm of the theatre. From his vantage point, Oriol can see Ferran approaching. The two men wave to one another, across the vacant swathe of concrete – actor and academic emerging from their respective homes. Oriol studies Ferran as the professor changes his course, moving directly across the square to the bench where Oriol stands languidly, second cigarette stubbed out, gathering his soul into place, finding his centre. The tech run will start soon, those arduous rehearsals when lighting directors map out each painstaking shift in mood. Natalia has yet to appear, but she will come, Oriol is sure, and then the dressing would begin, the hair and make-up, the officious march of the stage manager. The quiet will be gone, he thinks sadly. Oriol lingers for a moment in the evening warmth of
Plaça de Margarida Xirgu
. The trees are green again in the
plaça
. They cast lovely long streaks of shade as the sun begins to press itself low into the horizon of the city. Observing Ferran’s arrival, the actor weighs the advantages of a swift departure. A polite retreat behind the thick glass doors of the Theatre of National Liberation to the men’s dressing rooms. But something keeps him there. Perhaps it is the general stillness of the moment? An unspoken law that forbids sudden movements? Or a deeper tenderness for Ferran. He does not know. The two men embrace.

Ferran gives Oriol a gentle kiss on each cheek, and claps his hand on his shoulder. They speak in the same accented Catalan.

‘How were they today?’ Oriol asks.

‘Dreadful.’

‘Not one with potential? Not one bright spark?’

‘They are an absolute void of creative material.’

Oriol laughs. ‘You would have said the same of me in my day.’

‘No. You were different.
Are
different. From the start.’ Oriol blushes and pushes the gold curls of his fringe away from his forehead. One of his more charming characteristics. For the leading role in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Oriol has grown a blond moustache that he tends ruefully. Oriol believes it makes him look like a pederast. Long ago, Ferran decided that Oriol carried a genus of false innocence, fascinating in a younger man – an uncomfortable emptiness that registered as a yearning for other worlds. (‘His energy stretches at the seams of his body,’ Ferran once noted, at an early performance in Gràcia, years ago now. ‘Oriol Duran’s physical work expresses a buoyancy that is uncontainable.’) Before fame and fortune found him and removed him evermore from the land of the lowly and mundane, the man had been a sportsman. He remains lithe, sinewy, muscular.

Trained in stage combat, Oriol had been a nationally competitive fencer when he joined the Institute, as a dancer. He later made the transition to the stage at the bequest of Ferran and an old colleague recently passed away – joining the
Tragafuegos
, Ferran’s touring troupe that gave folk performances in the villages. The director Àngel Villafranca discovered him then – at a
Petum
in Sant Cugat, dancing the part of the dragon. Oriol Duran, much inspired by the American school of Method Acting, insisted on becoming the character, which ran against the grain of the more traditional approach adopted by his Catalan colleagues. This impressed Villafranca, who looked for something more vivacious, more raw, more daring – he had explained to Ferran – in an actor.
Risk.
Àngel Villafranca said in a hushed undertone,
I want them to risk themselves on stage, body and soul, push the limits – you know – and he does. He has it, Ferran. He has success written into his bones.

‘I need your help, Oriol. They’re trying to push me out,’ Ferran continues, stumbling through his own reveries.

‘Who? Silvia?’

‘All of them. I don’t know. Silvia delivered the message. I should have a public affair with a student and get it over with nobly.’

‘
Molt bé!
’ This impresses Oriol. ‘You wouldn’t dare. You’re too square a man for that.’

‘Oriol, I’m desperate. They won’t be able to make me leave if they see how connected I am. I’ve taught all of you. I gave Catalonia a new community of actors.’

‘Let me think about it.’ Oriol frowns. ‘I’ll have a word with Tito.’