The Serpent Papers (45 page)

‘I can take care of myself,’ she says. ‘I always have.’

* * *

Tito presses me into the yellow cab door, flashes a handful of euros at the driver, smacks the hood and leans through the open window. ‘Keep her safe.’ The driver nods. Then to me: ‘Goodbye. Hope it goes well.’ Formal. Broken. The cab speeds south, towards the theatre, cutting along side roads, darting down the Eixample grid, the wide, open balconies, sunny for midday, zipping west towards Plaça d’Espanya,
the fountains and the madness, then down, towards the sea. Classical music on the radio.

Had I asked Tito enough? No. I think again and again. You’re losing grip of them.

‘Where did they go next?’ A stupid question.

‘Natalia excused herself and went into the changing rooms. I wanted her to have an early night, to be fresh for the opening. Oriol and I spoke briefly. He wanted me to come for drinks – to celebrate. You know how actors are.’

‘Did you go?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t remember. I was too tired. I like to keep my distance from the actors’ social lives. To not drink with them. Debauchery of that kind is tasteless. Very tasteless. Besides, it was not the opening. Just the preview. The audience had responded well, the critics liked it; there was a standing ovation, even. We knew the press would be good – it was a great achievement. I lost a lot of money in returned tickets . . .’ His eyes pricked. ‘I was saving my celebration until I saw the performance’s effect on a real audience. I was right. In the end I went to a funeral.’ Tito called a waiter over, and gestured at the table.
Café con leche
,
he said.
One.
Our conversation was over.

Outside the Theatre of National Liberation people are laughing. Inside the rehearsal studios the dancers and the actors stretch. Sweatpants run around the stage. Lap after lap. He is joined by an equine nymph with striking musculature who chases after him; they run together, short bursts, sprint then stop, sprint then stop, breathe . . . I can feel them breathing. Dance shoes. Beaten leather on black boards . . . Smells saccharine and human.
Tap, tap! Crack!
Go to the boards! Arms stretch overhead. Muscle tears. A foot lands.
Breathe.
Wood gives, dust flies into the air. Empty seats hungry and admiring. As I watch the company warm up, the director Àngel Villafranca, stage right, talks to his Salomé. Her large ponytail pulled to the side, chalk scraped across cheek, sweat on brow. It is my first time observing Villafranca in person. Grey as a heron. Glasses aggressive on the bridge of his nose.

‘When you kiss him, I want to see desire, pure sexual desire . . . This is your conquest, you are destroying his manhood . . . in your body, twist – you are a snake.’ He gesticulates wildly in the air. ‘You are a moonbeam, you are a human manifestation of a violent goddess!’

At six o’clock the actors break. Oriol introduces me to the director. The director’s beard wiggles. For a long hard minute he stares at me. He does not say hello. ‘You like her, Oriol?’ he asks the actor rapidly in Catalan. ‘Do we trust her?’

Oriol grins. He nods.

‘Excellent. To business.’ Villafranca claps me on the shoulder. ‘The reading is positive. Oriol is my best judge of character. Now! Come along. Meet the world! Kike! Lydia! Javier! Meet the woman who has come to tell our story! Gather up, family! We are a family! Only when you understand this will you understand us properly. We can help you write this theatre into Natalia’s history!’

The director wipes his mouth drily.

‘You want another coffee?’

Villafranca scrapes his white shock from his forehead into a wave. His eyebrows a symbiotic species, whiskered, often furrowed. His hands flit about the table, tracing out words or playing with the tip of a black fountain pen he has taken from his interior pocket and placed on the napkin beside an empty cup of coffee.

‘Are you sure I cannot get you something?’ he asks again, speaking a perfect, fluent English.

‘No. Thank you.’

Àngel waves a waiter over, and gestures at the table. ‘Cafè amb llet,’ he says quickly. He holds up a finger. One. He looks at me, turns to the waiter and asks for two waters. ‘You must have something.’ Villafranca smiles. ‘I feel ridiculous otherwise.’

When the coffee arrives at the table, Villafranca reaches for one of the long, thin packets of sugar and cracks it deliberately in the middle, pouring the contents into his drink. He stirs it slowly.

‘I’m an addict.’ Villafranca smiles.

He lifts the cup gently to his lips.

‘I created her last show for her,’ he says, nodding to the picture. ‘I wanted to give her the space to explore her artistic talents, her paintings and her visions on the stage. It was a mistake.’ Then he pauses, looking sharply across the table at me. ‘If we are to continue our discussion, the only thing I ask of you is not to disturb her memory.’

‘Of course.’

‘As you know, she became my child, as well as my leading actress.’

Villafranca’s eyes cloud. ‘I raised her in this theatre, as we were building it from the ground. Her parents worked here with me – Natalia was born of the stage and into it, like a creature made of light – she had such luminosity! When she walked onto a darkened stage, the dead space of the theatre came alive. It transformed. One body, illuminated by one spotlight . . . You cannot take your eyes off her. And when she danced . . . Oh, when she danced, the world stood still.’

‘She must have been on the verge of becoming extremely successful.’

‘She was destined to be a great star.’ Àngel takes a decorous sip of his coffee. ‘My show would have transformed her life, her career. Recently I have worried that I pushed her too hard. My heart has been hurting. I may have been cruel; as a stand-in father, I asked a great deal. Sometimes, I fear, too much.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You cannot make something out of nothing. The notion of conjuring a performance out of air is a farce. Acting is not easy; a talent like hers is a form of transmutation. In the past I have called it alchemy.’ Villafranca continues: ‘Living with her particular kind of creative energy was a burden . . . I’ve met very few actors in my time who carry the mark of greatness.’ Villafranca looks at me quizzically. ‘Do you know what I mean by “greatness”?’

* * *

Natalia Hernández came onto this earth in the August of 1981 in the village of Valldemossa on the north coast of the island of Mallorca, in two folds of earth that lead into a gorge that drops  five hundred metres to the sea. The time of her birth was summer – and for bad luck she was not born in a hospital. Her mother, nearly two weeks late, collapsed in their country house outside the village. Her husband, hearing the cries, ran in from the garden. The road to the hospital was blocked by a collision. A lorry had been knocked sideways across the thin highway to Palma. The nurse from the village was called, who ran up the trail in the fields, past the olive and apple trees, to the house where Joaquim Hernández had laid his wife across the kitchen table, and then collapsed into tears beside her, blood and water running down the legs of the table. Natalia was their firstborn child. Against the backdrop of a rustic kitchen, with ants running along the rim of the sink, and hunks of meat drying against the open windows, the midwife arrived, with the priest, who began to pray, as did half the village. The midwife reported that a car had been sent for a doctor who lived in a neighbouring village and he would be with them as quick as he could. A cold compress was placed on Cristina’s head, as her body rocked against the kitchen table. Many hours later, Natalia Milagros Hernández-Rossinyol was given into the light, with the priest praying all the way beside her. The child emerged with the umbilical cord wrapped around her throat; the doctor cut the flesh and the midwife carried hot water as the priest mumbled under his breath, as the monks of the neighbouring hermitage gathered outside the kitchen door, in the summer sun beneath the olive trees and meditated on the child who had come from the female line of Rossinyol.

At least, this is what I understand from the story the old director is telling me: the concentration of prayer at the moment of her birth, the priest later proclaimed, in conjunction with her genetic inheritance, gave her a close proximity to God. In the summers after her family’s death, Natalia would return to the island with her guardian Villafranca. They did not stay in the Hernández house, but rented a little flat in the village, close to the shrine of Santa Catalina Thomas. It was in this village, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, in the cloister of the Carthusian monks, that she experienced her first vision. Walking across the garden at the centre of the cloister, she approached a well beneath a statue of a saint. Touching her hands against the cold rock, she leant her young face over the edge and looked into the mouth of the well. A voice behind her spoke her name. She turned, to see an old man, with a blue beard, and a black cap on his head, and a fur ruff round his shoulders, seated on the low wall of the cloister that rimmed the inner garden. He was very old, with lines down his cheeks. She insisted that she had seen his face before – perhaps in her dreams, or in the stories of her mother. When she approached, the old man showed her the gilded book he carried between his hands, a book bound with wide copper clasps. The cover was also made of a copper plate, engraved with strange symbols and letters, in a language she could not recognize. The pages of the book were not of paper or parchment, but of a material like bark. Hours later, Àngel Villafranca found his ward unconscious at the centre of the walled garden facing the square of the Capuchins.

‘Natalia is a vessel . . . in the old sense’ Villafranca says. ‘As a child she was strange, she seemed to have come from other worlds. I can’t quite explain it. She had an uncanny ability to access our collective consciousness. For such a small thing, she carried the weight of the universe on her shoulders.’

‘But you say that she was happy?’

He laughs bitterly.

‘Happiness is a complicated thing for actors – I don’t know how to stress this – but she was content. Just as she was also, at times, very sad. She was an orphan. She lost her parents. She suffered from bouts of paranoia. She saw things that did not exist and yet were recognizable in the world around us. She was an Artist. A kaleidoscope of emotion. When a child is forced to learn about death the hard way, it never leaves them.’

‘It must have been devastating for her to lose her family so young.’

Villafranca’s brow furrows. ‘It was a very sorry affair. Their car crashed off the pass to Sant Cugat. Everyone died in the accident. Mother, father, sister, brother. But for me, she was alone in life after that.’

‘How did she survive?’ I ask. ‘There are no reports of her having been in the vehicle at the time of the accident.’

‘She had hidden herself in this theatre.’ Villafranca’s wrinkled face breaks into a smile. ‘She was always losing herself in there. Her mother would leave her with me in the mornings . . . That particular day the family left to visit a friend in Sant Cugat. When I heard the news, I didn’t know what to do. I found her in the wings, sleeping on the rope of the fly system, the coiled pulleys; she’d made a bed for herself in the dark. I held her to my chest, counting the minutes that I could extend the life of her family, before I had to wake the sleeping child and tell her what had happened to her world.’

Villafranca’s eyes hold a piercing stare.

I meet his gaze evenly. ‘I would like to know more about her mother, Sr Villafranca. Cristina Rossinyol, if I have the name down correctly?’

‘That is a long story.’ Villafranca checks his watch. ‘I will tell you the short version. Another coffee, please.’ Villafranca waved the waiter over from the bar.
Two
, he says, to the waiter. ‘Even if you don’t drink it. Call me old-fashioned, but it is impolite to take coffee alone.’

Villafranca leans into the bench. He has selected a table on the far side of the cafeteria, next to the windows overlooking the square. The coffees arrive at the table. Villafranca speaks quietly. ‘I suppose we should start at the beginning. Cristina Rossinyol was born in a village one hundred and sixty kilometres to the south of Barcelona, on the island of Mallorca. She was to be the only child of her parents. Her father was the last of a lineage of dragon-makers. Do you know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘A dragon-maker is an iron-mason who makes the casts for the fire festivals – our
Correfocs
 – when he is not tending pots and pans. Her mother was a religious painter. Before the war the mother’s family had been something better. Between the village uprising of 1936 and the culls of the 1940s, both sets of grandparents died. It is not important how or why. Like many things then, it simply happened.