The Serpent Papers (46 page)

‘The year of Cristina’s birth was 1950. At that time, our Catalan language was banned. You could not speak it in your home. You could not read it in the papers. You could not study it in school. We were denied our books. Our theatre. Our art. Our history. You cannot understand Cristina’s work without understanding this. You cannot imagine how that feels. To not be able to speak a word of your internal tongue. The language of your dreams. It is a prison. Many children born of Cristina’s generation lost the Catalan language entirely. Cristina’s family, however, kept it alive in their kitchen, passing down the poems and passages of plays that had been memorized. She learnt the language this way through repetition. Through the theatre of the hearth, the old folk stories and songs. Even this was a dangerous pastime. As far as I could tell, she was alone in the world when she arrived in this city, though she had help from the church of Santa Maria del Pi. A young priest named Canço. I have seen him in passing in the Plaça del Pi. He is an old man like me now.

‘Cristina Rossinyol showed a natural artistic flare. In Barcelona she studied restoration and illumination. She was a medievalist, a calligrapher and an avid painter. I discovered her then – I can’t remember where or how, it simply happened, like these things do. I sat down for a coffee or a drink as I am doing with you now and she appeared, like an apparition of the future. More beautiful even than her daughter, if you can believe it. I fell in love with her instantly.’ He smiles ruefully, and a dreamy haze falls over Villafranca. His concentration drifts. ‘Sadly, I was not the first – or last – to do so . . . 

‘At first we became close friends. Cristina brought the talents of the dragon to our radical community, making costumes and carving wooden masks for actors as she had learnt to do in the mountains. We had performances in abandoned railway stations, squats, old factories . . . Always in Catalan, always the old stories. For us, drama was the front line of non-violent resistance! When we had a show, word would pass orally, to all members of the Catalan underground. People came individually, often hours earlier than necessary, so they would not be followed. We asked them to take circuitous paths. By the grace of God we were never caught. Our performances were folk-inspired. They were poor, with few props, with Cristina our set designer, costumier, calligrapher, and maker of things. Our moment was perfect and we seized it with gusto. This city was in the midst of throwing off the shackles of Franco, and the theatre put its shoulders to the task. In 1974 I had dreamt of filling the stage with words that the actors would move through as a forest. And in 1975, with the help of Cristina Rossinyol, that dream became a reality. First we built our makeshift theatre. Success followed swiftly. In the late seventies, we came here. Everything you see we made; with the help of devoted engineers and architects, Cristina and I brought this marvellous space back to life.’

‘And her husband? Joaquim?’

Villafranca waves his hand dismissively.

‘Quim Hernández was just another member of the company. He was much younger, handsome, good with his hands, and an idiot. He didn’t deserve her. We grew apart after he married Cristina. He had nothing even close to her genius . . .’ Villafranca sighs. He takes a sip from his coffee. ‘But that is not important. Look around you. The men who built the foundations of this theatre envisioned it as the best in the world. It was a matter of honour to keep that promise. Cristina was determined that our work never lose its connection to the folk roots of the Catalan language. For our opening show – oh, you cannot imagine the crowds – it was as if the people of this city had discovered Mecca. We answered their call with words. Cristina painted towering
Names of Things
, the trees of my forest, in the old Gothic script. It was an enormous success. After that, Cristina and I were inseparable. We began to see each other again as lovers. I only tell you this because I am old, and all the participants are dead. I do not think Joaquim ever knew.’

He looks at me slyly.

‘I always believed Natalia was my child. When her family died, fate gave her to me. She became my legal ward. When I lost her, I lost everything. I do not believe that Cristina should have died when she did. If you have read the reports you will see that a second vehicle knocked the car off the road. I am convinced that it was not accidental – that someone was trying to silence the family. It was the final straw in a series of black events that had been plaguing the theatre that year, and we were very shaken. I decided to protect Natalia from that history. I wanted it to be something kept secret. She was only fifteen. I walked away from my position as a director in January 1997. We went abroad. I worked in London for a time and in Paris, also at the Venice Biennale . . .’

‘And the theatre?’

‘I left it to someone else.’ Villafranca checks his watch. ‘Are you hungry?’

I shake my head. ‘No. But I don’t want to keep you.’

‘Well, I have another half-hour.’ He smiles. ‘I am known for being long-winded. It is a terrible habit. I talk and talk – but! I will be as brief as possible, because I want you to understand. Understanding is crucial. It is gold.
And you cannot understand her without knowing this:
in the late eighties my company began to tour the smaller villages of Catalonia. We were interested in reigniting the folk traditions 
–
I wanted to work with
els tragafuegos
, exploring the
Petum
, the gunpowder festivals – you must have heard of these? We were known as “fire-eaters”. Old Fons was with us in the early days, a fantastic period for theatre – very wild. Best reviews of my career – we’re in the textbooks, my darling.
Visceral Performance
,
we called it. The touring company was very small. It consisted of twelve actors, our lighting director, a lighting assistant, stage-manager, producer, two stagehands, myself, Cristina and her husband. Twenty-one in total. We went in the autumn – in the warm months before winter. Things were very bohemian, very raw, very creative. For the first month? Bliss. But as we travelled things began to happen.’

‘What do you mean?’
I ask.

He sighs dramatically. ‘Death chased me like a curse. In the late eighties we toured the villages near the northern base of the Pyrenees and suffered a series of quite brutal acts of violence. On the night of the twenty-first show – I will never forget it! A slaughtered pig laid out the morning after our performance. It had been quartered – literally quartered into four, and buried, feet up, in the earth outside around the local church . . . It was absolutely vile, my dear, just disgusting. And so it continued for the next five performances. At first we thought this might be a reference to local traditions or customs, a deranged lunatic . . . many of the villages upheld quite pagan customs, and our work explored rituals of sacrifice and magic. After a month, the killings ceased. But then we performed again, this time in the high mountains. Cristina came to me one night – she said the play had to stop. I told her that we would not bend under the pressure of a lunatic. We went to the next village, performed that evening, and after the play a local farmer found a young woman laid out in the snow.’

My stomach turns.

‘The villagers came to us with questions. She was a local healer. She had been to the performance. She had last been seen at our bonfires. We gave our testimony to the police and continued, rather more than shaken, I must say. Cristina broke. She could not take the strain and insisted we put off the show for a few years, but as our company became more famous, I wanted to revisit the themes of those early performances. I became obsessed with the idea of authenticity, of folk-magic. In the early spring of 1996 we launched a nationwide tour with the original cast and crew – Natalia’s mother and father among them . . .’

As I listen to him speak, I can almost hear the bonfire crackling, the villagers gathering round the fire set in the central square of the crumbling town, the actors on their makeshift stage, dressed as nymphs and goblins, skin bare, near naked, breasts unclothed, bodies covered in ink. They wear the old masks of wood spirits and witches, there is a good saint and a bad devil, a man-turned-dragon who terrorizes the dancers, nymphs, beautiful girls. The play is simple – a rendering of the old witch dances of
San Juan
;
the fire dancers –
they
dance the dance of the old revellers, which becomes more and more frenzied, whipping the villagers into such a state of excitement, such a state of joy, that the town itself is running and jumping and shouting, skin bare and glistening, tongues kissing, groins moaning, until under Villafranca’s expert direction the spectacle morphs into a sexual explosion and the Lord of the Bacchae descends on the crowd while the Devil dances merrily through the flames, the growling bonfire. I can feel the heat on my skin, the ash, the crushed grape and steam . . .

‘It was meant to be a release.’ Villafranca’s eyes narrow. ‘A Dionysian celebration of excess and freedom. It became a living nightmare. At the first performance in a decade, another girl was killed, and left in a tree on the side of the road. My actors worked themselves into a state of total panic. We had to cancel overnight despite the fact –’ he sighs, a picture of melancholy – ‘that the reviews were fantastic, and we returned to Barcelona.’

‘And the girl?’

‘I don’t know who she was,’ Villafranca says dismissively. ‘I never asked.’

You never asked? You are a strange man.

‘Were there any distinguishing characteristics of the killings?’

Villafranca shakes his head. ‘Nothing I can remember. I do not like to dwell on these things. But I am very old. For a while I suspected members of my own company.’ Villafranca pauses, and then dismisses the idea. ‘But that was illogical, a paranoid assumption on my part. My actors are good people – good, good people. We would never hurt a soul. But as you can imagine, it was quite disturbing. Cristina found it profoundly distressing. She became obsessed with discovering who was committing these acts of violence. I tried to dissuade her from probing, but she insisted on asking questions, on returning to the villages after we had left. She would stay for a few days and speak to the women, often taking her family with her. I told her that was mad, but she said we had to stand for
some
principles. In the end I think she got very close to finding out who the murderer was and he ran her off the road. I don’t believe the police ever made that connection. I think the national government wanted our theatre to collapse and looked at this as a blessing. As to the murders, they occurred in rural neighbourhoods where the policing perhaps was not strong. It is not an unusual thing. You seem like a sensitive young woman. Hopefully you will be more intelligent than our Guardia. They certainly have done nothing for Natalia.’

I think of Fabregat. What would he feel, listening to this?

Villafranca stirs his spoon in the last dregs of his coffee.

‘At the time, I felt extremely guilty. After the birth of Natalia, things had become more difficult for Cristina at the theatre. I probably complicated matters more than was necessary – I wanted her to leave her husband and come and live with me. Instead she made me the guardian of her children in the case of death. I told her that was incredibly morbid. She said we should always be prepared for the unexpected. In the end, it was a gift. I loved Natalia as much as I loved her mother. She changed my life.

‘There was a time when her mother wanted Natalia to be an artist – in the painterly sense. When Natalia was a little girl, she was very talented in this arena – in fact, a prodigy. Cristina taught her the art of calligraphy – and her daughter excelled. I suppose this was only natural, given her heritage . . .’

Villafranca drifts off into his memories. I watch him lingering in the thought. Check the time on my watch. ‘I brought some of her pictures to show you,’ he says. ‘They’re just little sketches. Her more major pieces are in the galleries – I have a few on my walls, but I think you’ll find these more interesting . . .’

He removes a manila envelope from his briefcase, places it gently on the table. He opens his jacket and removes a pack of tissues with which he wipes the tips of his fingers. He opens the envelope carefully. From the envelope he pulls out a sheaf of papers, which he places on the table before me.

‘Be careful. Too much handling and they’ll get damaged.’

He arranges the papers on the table, making sure the surface is dry before he sets each page down.

‘Most of these she painted when she was eighteen.’

Exquisitely delicate, rubbed black chalk, pencil lightly smudged beneath thin washes of pearly colour – a dreamy lilac sky.
Alive.
Images of the theatre, portraits of actors, a church steeple rising out of an urban landscape.