The Serpent Papers (49 page)

The wind tugs at my tongue.

Blows around me.

No
,
I argue back.
You will unseat me. Derange me.

The headaches come again. Louder. Angry. I clutch at the colours on the air, the threads of indigo and gold – I listen, I feel for them.
Where do you lead?
I ask the pulse and throb.
Out.
To the heart of the Gothic quarter through the square of the Palace of Kings, where many overlapping arches form a wall of empty windows framing the sky. I do not remember leaving the apartment, only that in my quest to follow the golden threads I pass doors hiding
patis dels tarongers
, courtyards filled with orange trees echoing the interior lives of medieval gardeners.

Men in battered shirts roam the streets offering red cans of beer. They approach me carefully, as one who recognizes their quarry, jangling wares against moth-eaten mittens.
Cervesa? Un euro.
When I shake my head no, their voices drop to the language of underground exchange, a train of illicit substances:
heroin
,
coke
,
speed
,
hash
,
ecstasy
,
meth . . . 
the connoisseur’s full menu.
Barcelona’ll give you anything you want.
But I decline.

I must wait patiently. For the pores behind my ears to open up and the voice to make itself known. Soon she will arrive like a river, smooth stone strapped to my throat, tracing her weight into the lump of my cranial bone, nestling under my hair, swelling in my nodes. Transference is a dangerous pursuit – but this voice is so enticing, so heavy in my throat I cannot help but listen, and if the curiosity is strong enough, a mania sets in where logic – oh! Logic! Mine is tossed to the wayside and retrieved retrospectively. I have come here because
this stranger
felt it was necessary, her communication unspoken, I do not hear her, but I feel her reaching into my heart, impulsive, dictatorial, I feel the cold hard folds of a woman’s essence, compact and brown as a walnut.

Walk.

I obey. First I see the shapes emerging, the flickering tremors on the air, the glinting like ripples on the still veneer of the night, the shimmer in my retina. Aromas of modernity – fried oil, moped engine, rose perfume – morph into a stench of smoked animal pelt. I swoon into the wall of the Great Cathedral, staring up at the bowels of a gargoyle. Claws clenched around a spoke of rock. Panicking now, out of control, instinct rattles through me and I take out my phone to call Fabregat. It is difficult to hear myself in these situations. I am still conscious, still sentient, but my voice – that distinguishing characteristic of the soul is often the first symptom of relapse. My weathervane. In severe cases, cross-wiring occurs. Overlapping identities.

‘Nena?’ Fabregat asks, when the phone picks up. ‘What’s wrong?’

Nerves bloat behind my ears.

‘Where are you?’ he asks.

Skin cracking in my ear lobes, spots breaking out with pus.

‘We’ll find you – Nena, don’t move.’ But mist already coils along my river Lethe, and I forget myself entirely in the flow of green lanterns, translucent neon glow over covered rivers and veins – the knot of this foreign creature resting on my tongue.

Follow
, she commands.

I twist and turn through the Gothic maze until I reach a sloping alley, La Baixada de Santa Eulàlia
,
and then
the hulking frigate of the old Basílica of Santa Maria del Pi. Once there was a sacred grove here, filled with halting words, like no normal language – and I remember the deaf man’s tongue, round and full-bodied, that Illuminatus heard as he passed through this square on his way to the court of the kings –
the
pine of all pines
. In the flesh before me.

Dig
, the voice commands. Root of your root. Clay of your clay.

I kneel beneath the tree, ignoring the pedestrians, the buskers, ignoring the barmen and baristas, the clientele, the neighbours in their balconies. I kneel and bend my head and, short of any other tools, begin to dig with my hands in the earth beneath the trunk of the tree. A strength foreign to my own body enters my fingers. It has rained and the earth is muddy about the roots of the pine. The earth comes away easily. I dig and dig and dig, as this other mind directs me, for surely that is what I suffer, until my fingers strike
metal
. I work harder, faster, lust driving me, desire for the hidden object. I rub away the dirt, pull away the form and stop.
An intricately patterned box. Golden fig leaves laid over enamelled metal. Jewelled birds nest in dirt-smeared foliage.
I shake, holding it close to my chest. Rocking back and forth on the ground.
Is this it? Are these they? Is this what you wanted me to find?

Open it.

I unlatch the hook, yearning for the papers – imagining the folds of parchment, my stolen quire, cut out of the Book of Hours – instead I am met by revulsion. Three brown rags, stained with what looks like earth, wrapped around a pocket edition of a disappointingly modern, dingy little book. Agony bursts through my chest.
What game are you playing?
I turn the book in my hands, leaving the disintegrating rags in the rusty box. A working edition of the
Oresteia
: a trilogy of ancient tragedies produced by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus in 458
bce
. The book well creased. Dented. Dog-eared. Stained in the same mire as the ugly rags. I peer closer. Passages are underlined. First –
Agamemnon.
Cassandra’s story. My heart skips. I keep the pressure down.
Gentle. Be gentle.
Flick back to an inscription on the title page:

To my Cassandra

From your Aureus

Words circled. I skim softly.
Cassandra, high priestess of Apollo, stolen from Troy. Raped. As a maiden she rejected the romantic advances of Apollo, and was cursed by the god. She would bear the burden of divine foresight, but never be understood.
And suddenly it clicks.
Check. Check what is written. The dates in the letters to Fabregat.

1182–1188. 1312–1317. Coordinates in a play. Latitude and longitude of verse lines.
My eyes scan to the line numbers at the side of the page.
Hunting.
I alight on my quarry.
A thin underline below each one. A date. A marker. June 2003.

Lines 1182–1188:

Flare up once more, my oracle! Clear and sharp

As the wind which blows off the rising sun,

I can feel a deep swell, gathering head

To break at last and bring the dawn of grief.

No more riddles. I will teach you.

Come, bear witness, run and hunt with me.

We trail the old barbaric works of slaughter

Could it be? She was delusional. Mad.
I feel the spasm in my belly.
She was waiting for someone like you.

Lines 1312–1317:

I must be brave.

It is my turn to die.

I address you as the Gates of Death.

I pray it comes with one clear stroke,

No convulsions, the pulses ebbing out

In gentle death, I’ll close my eyes and sleep.

In the distance a siren, like a battle cry, whoop-whooping, playful, skipping over rooftop bars, merging with a chorus of voices – the wails and death throes and shouting and chattering, like the incessant squawks of birds,
ca-cawing
,
shriek-shrieking
. Drilling into my pores, screws biting into my skull, breaking bones, black pustules bubble up, opening like slits, or eyes, unlocking the energy that sits coiled in the base of my spine. And then the line, the invisible line that rushes from the apex of my scalp, down over my nose, through my tongue, and out over my chin. A magic line of palsy. Of division, of rupture. Throbbing round my lips before the left side of my face freezes, falling slack as the brain swells, it pulses and beats, followed by the extraordinary pain, like needles piercing flesh, those familiar microscopic haemorrhages in my ear canal.

Silence. She is coming.
I feel her entrance. Ominous.
You’ve pushed too far.
And then my head throws itself back, my mouth no longer my own, and the voices rattle out of me, tumbling over my tongue as I fight to return into myself, pushing through the fog, begging, thrusting into my lungs! I must return to myself – before I am swallowed up again as the voices yap through me, yearning! Howling for expression.

‘Let me hold her!’ I bark – clutching the box to my chest – ‘I must hold her!’ The spirit shunting through my vocal chords is
a woman.
I listen as I speak
–
yes – a young woman . . . 

Natalia?

The gurgling responds.

Follow.

I stand, facing the tree, unsure. People swirl around me, but I do not take them in because I sense the emergence of that dreadful being. Down she comes, unravelling, moving out of the branches, golden green. The snake descends regally, confident, unafraid, she moves over shoes, gliding round boots and stilettos, over a dog’s paw and the point of an umbrella until she reaches me. She is bigger this time, much larger, no longer a garden snake. She is a python.

Are you afraid?
The dream voice asks. The snake unhinges her jaw, moving bone away from joint, the scaled rubber grows and grows, mouth trebling in size. At the bottom of her loosened jaw lies a golden fig leaf, like the leaves on the tree I had seen in my dream.
Take it. Place it in on your tongue.
I do as I am told. Reaching my hand into the green snake’s mouth, I am hallucinating wildly.
This is madness, far worse than before, I will never come back . . .
but I obey.

I feel the weight of the gold on my tongue, the wide expanse pressed down by the form of the leaf. The snake is gentle. She comes closer, putting her cold head next to my ear lobe; she licks me, once on each side, tongue flicking. She is kind. The experience mesmerizing. The pine tree from which she descended grows in size, the branches bud with glass jars, magnificent amphorae, glittering ornaments. From each one I detect a voice. A chorus of whispers. I listen carefully, no longer afraid, plucking stories from the wind. The first memory is a man’s, very old and papery, made of crushed reeds.