The Serpent Papers (54 page)

Peter’s relationship with the young woman now standing in his doorway had been brief – spanning six months, over the autumn and winter of her first year as a trainee actress at the Catalan Institute of Theatre. He is thirteen years older than her. When they met she had been eighteen, stunningly beautiful. (And she remains beautiful: dressed demurely in a grey overcoat, hairpins pull her fringe back, revealing graceful features, gold pendant earrings, the curve of her neck as it dips into the collar of a white lace shirt.)

Peter Warren remembers the date: Monday 23 June. The day before she died.

Natalia Hernández. In the flesh.

Staring at her now, as he had done when they first met, he is filled with a sensation of wonder: he never understood what she saw in him. A British contributor to guidebooks on Spain, Peter Warren spends the bulk of his time composing briefs about restaurants and museums. When not writing, he devotes a great deal of energy to the gym, and an equal number of hours to sunbathing on his balcony. As a consequence, his exceedingly tanned physique is perfect, his chin chiselled, his taste in clothing appropriate and his intellect sharp, if underdeveloped. Three years before she died he’d found Natalia Hernández in a club he was reviewing near his apartment. That night they connected instantly. But like so many things in Peter Warren’s life, the love hadn’t succeeded.

* * *

In the bar of their first encounter, Peter bought Natalia an expensive glass of red wine and a mixed set of starters – assorted
pintxos
,
jamón serrano
on thickly sliced bread,
pan tomàquet
, olives. Later that night, at his place, when they came in from the taxi, he kissed her in the darkness by the mailboxes at the bottom of the stairwell. He kissed her on each floor they walked up, pressing her into the wall, and running his hand up and under the white lace shirt, his fingers straining, reaching for her nipple, tucked under a black bra, the bra she always wore, no padding – thin and cheap, too tight round the edges. The fabric cut into her flesh so that a rich fold spilt out through his fingers, and he ran his hand over this each time she moved.

Things evolved quickly. He loved the smell of her hair, and her youth, the flash of excitement that brought pinkness to her cheeks and lips, the colour of her skin, deep olive, the black depths of her eyes. He loved her age, her suppleness, her softness, it reminded him of being in his early twenties, and brought him strength, confidence, ease.

He took her out to restaurants, to parties, to the theatre, he bought her tickets everywhere, guided her on walking tours of the city, went to her first performances at the Institute, but never introduced her to his friends. She was too young, he told her, he’d find that embarrassing (after all, his friends had known his ex-wife) and the whole thing was so sensitive, so secret, their love should only be between them – Natalia and Peter – artists at large, out on the town.

When they went to the opera, her face was so open and wide that he imagined she was his daughter, and he wanted to hold her to his chest and stroke her hair and tell her that everything was going to be OK, that he was going to be OK, that he’d make it all work with the mortgage and his house and his dependency problems, and that the tropical plant he’d bought from Ikea (she said it was a coconut tree) would survive, even though it had no direct sunlight in the corner of his bedroom, and he never opened the windows – he wanted her to love him in that moment, and he wanted to love her, but not in that ugly untruthful way. Not this time. No. But one morning she found a pearl earring in the sheets. She sat up naked in bed and held it in her hands.

‘Who does this belong to?’

‘My cleaning lady.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She put the earring gently on the bedside table, next to his copy of Gaskell’s
North and South
. ‘You’d better give it to her tomorrow.’

He justified the lying to himself because she was new to the city and needed to learn what it meant to live in an urban hinterland. She needed to learn that you couldn’t trust anybody in Barcelona. That it was a city built on secrets. Some of these secrets were so dark and ugly that it wasn’t even worth looking for answers, wasn’t even worth wanting to know the truth. His life was like that. His decisions were protecting her. Keeping her innocent for as long as possible, before the darkness swallowed her up – as it had swallowed him up, as Barcelona swallowed everyone up. Always had done. For centuries.

* * *

When the buzzer rings to his apartment at 14.47 that Monday afternoon Peter Warren does not expect to see her. Her face in front of his is the furthest thing from imaginable in the realm of possibility. Two years have passed of absolute silence between them.

Seven hundred and thirty days of zero communication.

And now?

‘Hello, Peter.’

Hello, Peter
. So gentle, so demure, so confident
. Hello, Peter
renders him embarrassed, unsure, compromised. His hands shake. A memory flashes into his head. Chocolates in the duty-free zone of Barcelona’s airport. The taxi ride back to her unappealing student home. I’ve brought you these, he said, sheepishly, after a weekend trip away. He presented her with Belgian chocolates, at her door. He’d surprised her. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you.’ The memory interrupted his capacity to speak. Overwhelmed him. Subsumed him. At the door to his apartment, today, now, Natalia looks at him, curiously.

‘I know I’ve come at an unusual time.’

‘Yes.’

An awkward silence.

‘I wasn’t sure if you’d still have the same address,’ she says.

‘Do you want to come up?’ he asks, out of politeness.

‘No, no, thank you.’

‘Doing well, now, aren’t you? Haven’t been able to get away from your face recently.’

She laughs. ‘I hope that’s not a bad thing.’

‘No. It’s good. I like being reminded of how successful you are.’

An off-hand compliment. A grimace.

‘I know this is strange, but I’d like you to keep this for me.’

She hands him a crumpled package wrapped in paper.

‘Why?’

‘You’re good at keeping secrets, at least for a short while.’

He accepts the package into his hands.

‘I can’t give it to anybody else,’ she says.

‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Yes. Yes it has. So many things have changed.’

He nods. ‘Are you happy?’

‘Yes . . .’ Her voice falters. ‘I hope we can see each other more in the future.’

‘Yes,’ Peter Warren says. ‘That would be nice.’

Walking back up the stairs to his flat, Peter feels the sensation of being hit by a truck on a dual carriageway. He is physically attacked. Assaulted. Ill. He might heave or vomit and when he opens the door to his flat and stumbles inside he cannot even muster the strength to make a cup of tea. He falls onto his couch at the centre of the living room and stares at the blank face of his flat-screen TV. He does not turn it on. He sits very still and waits for the storm to pass, holding the brown paper parcel in his hands. But the memories do not leave him. Oh no. Memories inundate Peter Warren. They attack him. Leave him flooded. Broken. Her face, her voice, the tremor in her hands, the slightness of her waist, the tiny mole to the left of her mouth – everything destroys him with a savage pleasure.

‘I’d like to take you out to dinner,’ he’d said the last time they’d seen each other. That dreaded Sunday in February.

‘As a way of apologizing for what has happened between us.’ By which he meant his infidelities, his lack of commitment. She’d agreed like a girl in a dream (she was only eighteen to his pronounced thirty-six, he reminded himself, she had no idea what she was doing). And he’d felt comfortable. Like he could get it all back in the bag. Start over. He couldn’t believe his luck when she shut the door to her apartment behind her and walked with him out to a restaurant to eat.

‘I’d like you to come with me to England,’ he said, over dinner, dangling a piece of whitebait on a fork. His hand was shaking. He was trying not to lose control of the fish – not to drop it, not to break her eye contact – maintain calm. He repeated the word ‘calm’ to himself, but then he remembered that bitch Fiona pulling back the sheets, and how the naked girl beside him had covered her chest with her hands. Of course Natalia hadn’t known he was seeing Fiona. Up until that terrible confrontation, his plan (or lack of plan) had gone exceedingly well. Natalia hadn’t realized the earring belonged to Fiona, that Fiona even existed, (a triumph of masculine ingenuity in and of itself), let alone was a longstanding lover, someone he couldn’t shake off, An obsession. Later, when he smoked a cigarette with Fiona on the balcony by the dead plants, Natalia had come out with all her clothes on, looked at them both and said:

‘He isn’t worth it. I promise you.’

And she’d left. She’d walked out of the house, leaving him standing there, wrapped in a towel, as Fiona dug her fingernails into his hand. He’d found the whole thing totally out of control. But that didn’t stop him from inviting Natalia to dinner that Sunday in February – three weeks later – and asking her the question. Looking at her in the restaurant, he’d been filled with a powerful yearning to kiss her.

Instead he stammered: ‘Come with me to London, please, let’s start over? Let’s leave – I’m a mess, Natalia, I’m a mess without you.’

She stared at him across the salad and white china. Blinked twice. Drank from the glass of cava. He could tell that she was thinking. He wanted her to think. But not to rationalize, he wanted to win her over through an emotional thought process, one in which rationality would logically be put to the side and the heart, that precious, fickle thing, would speak openly.

Maybe she would come with him then.

‘Why do you do this?’ she asked. ‘You already know what the answer is.’

She put her napkin down on the table, stood up, and left.

From that point onward there was no contact.

No emails. No text messages. No phone calls.

Once he had seen her crossing the street in the Raval, and he had shouted her name. She did not turn around, so he chased after her, running down the street until he stopped her, grabbing at her coat sleeve. She had turned to him, and given him such a look of disdain, of disgust, that he could not bring himself to speak. So he let her go. Stood panting on the curb of Carrer de l’Hospital. He watched her walk away.

* * *

So why had she chosen him?
I ask myself, listening to Peter’s story. Perhaps because he was her own secret. That no one would think to look for him? Because he worshipped her? Obeyed her?

* * *

In his apartment, Peter Warren unwraps Natalia’s package slowly, inspecting its contents. A heavy book. Musty smell. Cracked spine. He turns the book over in his hands. Perhaps she picked it up at one of the dusty libraries of antiquities in the Gothic? One of the backstreets behind the cathedral. On the title page
THE ALCHEMICAL HISTORY OF THINGS 
– printed in London in 1855 and complemented by etched illustrations, with a foreword by one Llewellyn Sitwell. She has rebound the book herself, a small issue, cased in calf’s leather, cutting blank folia to size, binding period vellum over boards, with gilt borders and titles. The leather is detailed with red and black Moroccan labels, filigree gold leaf, scarlet thread through the spine. Pages trimmed in red. Original endpapers vibrantly marbled. Peter Warren chokes. He feels increasingly nauseous.

Then he remembers that she is performing in a new show at the Theatre of National Liberation. Tag-lined ‘An Original Take on Sin’ by that ancient director Villafranca. The posters for the production are everywhere. But still. Unease. Yes. There is unease in his stomach. If the twenty-two-year-old Natalia was anything like the eighteen-year-old Natalia, every gesture, every statement was laced with meaning. When he lifts the book off the table, an envelope falls onto the floor. Peter Warren reaches down and picks the envelope up, turning it over in his hands. He tears the letter open with his thumb. Two tickets to the opening night of her performance, and a note that reads: