The Serpent Papers (23 page)

La Revetlla de Sant Joan
. Saint John’s Eve. Also called
la Nit de Bruixes
,
night of the witches. For us an endless evening of rapture. Of dancing, of bonfire, and fireworks. There are explosions in the sky like gunshots, and by midnight the city has the glow of a war zone. In memory of battle the city celebrates the life of a saint with pagan ferocity. Her countrymen dance in droves, banging pots and pans in the street and singing and setting fire to the beaches! There is no need for anything else but debauchery. That impulse seems to be all that is left of the saint.

I lie here, prostrate and open, my back against the sand.

Remember.

As you drank you burnt your sins away.

That morning, I greet the dawn stoned, watching the tradesmen waking. There are new lights in store windows.
Panaderos
bring out fresh rolls.
Coca de Sant Joan
. Pastries emblazoned with sugar fruits. Sticky pine nuts. Pigeons preen and coo in the alcoves of Barceloneta, watching me stumble home from the clubs of Port Olímpic. The beach, trash-strewn and grey, stirs in preparation. Within that triangular development built for the outcast fisherman of the city, tapas bars open their doors for deliveries – squid, dog-faced fish, cod, halibut, octopus – with
croquetas y pimientos del Padrón
 – piled to the rafters – knowing soon that the smoking masses will spill into the streets laden with liquor.

But on the morning of Sant Joan festivities are interrupted by sirens.

First a car. Then two officers.

They walk down to the stone jetty leading into the sea, uniforms black against the grey sand. I sit up and watch them. Then another car. Then a third. Sirens slide round the hot sun like the punched howl of a discotheque. The hunt follows the police cars on the shore.
A young man had disappeared into the sea.

They ask us –
Have you seen anything
? No, I say – No.

They find his shoes and socks next to the first jetty.

Big black boulders. He must have left them there and walked down the shoreline, trailing his feet in the water, until he was in the direct eyeline of the city. The police cordon off the area. They search the sea, like fishermen trawling for lobsters.

Behind them a woman stands on the sand in a black dress and prays.

I hold her in my imagination.

Eyes burning more fiercely than the sun.

The police below feel her gaze upon them.
An uneasy burden. They do not know what she wants, if she wills success or failure. If she prays for a body or a sign or if she believes that he was innocent or guilty. They know only that she watches.

A dark shawl pulled over her shoulders, her husband beside her, whispering in her ear.
We have to make a show of support, Marta. We have to let them know we care.

The next sign is the wallet. Escaped from his pocket some ten metres from the shore. They bring it up from the sea like a treasure. A pearl of information.
There is his photograph, a pink national identity card. Adrià Daedalus Sorra. Scraps of paper already dissolved into mud. Debit card and change.
His mother tugs her shawl tighter round her shoulders. In her heart it is icy cold.

As they hunt, the posters come down in the city. Pulled from city walls, ripped from scaffolding, unhooked from lamp posts, stripped from trains and buses. In the square of Plaça de Margarida Xirgu ten men work tirelessly to cover the face of Natalia Hernández with a dull grey paint. At the Theatre of National Liberation, her director stands on the balcony overlooking the square, hands crossed over his chest to watch the descent of his muse. On every floor of the Institut del Teatre, students studying for exams or singing in the hallways stopped. They walk to the vast glass windows facing the Theatre of National Liberation. They watch as the three magnificent posters come down. Her mouth distorted in waves as she falls. And though the students do not know why Natalia Hernández left the face of the theatre, they feel the terrible unease of disorder.

That morning curiosity replaces my desire for silence. I ask the policeman what has happened.

‘Read the paper.’

Taciturn, he stares into the sea.

They carry the story on the airwaves that night. I listen to them on a radio by a fire. The reporter interviews an old woman. Sharp as a whip. She lives in an apartment complex with balconies overlooking the sea. The old woman explains that at ninety-seven years of age she is not used to surprises.
That is to say, nothing much surprises her any more.

‘Which is why,’ she tells the radio, ‘I spend most of my time looking at the sea.’

Safe in her fourth-floor apartment on Carrer de la Mestrança, she has a straight-shot view of the beach. I realize with a start:
She was probably watching us all
, studying the fires and the dancers from her little chair in the window, watching the beach where we were lighting candles and flames and throwing beer down our throats.

She surveys the cement courtyard below, the palm trees along Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta, and beyond, over the sand to the waves. The world below pleasurably constant. She checks the weather and sees when storms come in from the south. In the mornings she watches the runners, the
paseos
of families, the sandcastle-makers from North Africa, the delivery of groceries to the Spar below. In the evening, the drug pedlars, the dancers, the partiers with their cans of red beer, the fat pit-bulls, Pakistanis selling their wares, the roller bladers and bicyclists in their bright-coloured suits, the heavy lifters, iron pumpers, ice-cream-smeared children and
guiris
. Her voice like
manchego
and sardines.

Nothing escapes this old woman.

Not even the figure of a young man in 2003 who, in the earliest hours of the morning, runs topless, with long dark hair and stumbles, panting, breathless, to the edge of the sea.

Convenient indeed.
She clacks her tongue. A clear line of vision.

Something stirs in the darker annals of her memory. The old woman has seen a figure like this before, as a young woman, from the same windows, of the same house, which once belonged to her grandfather, and had stayed in the family through the Civil War, and Franco, and even the end of Franco and the wild years of the eighties and nineties to the present day.

Oh!
she wheezes
. Oh! The boy walked into the sea.

I imagine her blinking, her watery blue eyes hidden behind half-inch-thick spectacles. Round orbs fixed to her nose reflect the flickering pyres on the beaches.

This woman has a flair for storytelling, and she informs the radio – swearing on good faith – that with a sudden gust of wind, summoned at the exact instant the boy walked into the sea, all of the red votive candles in Santa Maria del Pi are extinguished! The priest is stunned by the wind as he wanders down the aisle counting prayer books for the morning mass. He flings himself on the stone ground.
Holy Mary, Mother of God.
Only the hanging lamps, now electric, stay illumined. Of the 154 candles, not a wick remains ablaze. Is it the ghost of the madman who burnt himself in the march of Corpus Christi? The curate crosses himself and prays. Or some other lost soul who comes knocking at the door?

* * *

Before me: a jetty of black boulders claws into the fading night, still deep within the realm of its power. I sit on the beach again, a decade later. Alive and cold in the dark. My knees pulled up under my chin.
The disappeared man walks down this avenue into the sea.
Rats ran along the rocks beneath his feet.
They make their homes in the cracks and hide there.

He removes his shoes and walks out further. Waves crash around him. He walks out. Out further than ever before. His feet no longer touch the muddy bottom; he is lifted and then brought down by the waves. The wind tugs at his hair. He walks until the water reaches the line of his neck, without stopping, and then begins to swim, and swim, and swim, until he was fifty metres, a hundred metres, two hundred metres out, much further than I am able to see, even on the best of days. What had she said? The old woman on the radio?

That he did not come back.

Which is the element of all this that reminded her of a black hour in 1937, when she watched a young man she knew and loved swim out to drown in the sea.

* * *

And you?
I ask the cold night air.
Why have you brought me here?

III

Excerpts from

The Contemporary Life of Rex Illuminatus

As compiled by his Allies

On the Island of Mallorca

PROLOGUE

WE HAVE WRITTEN this so that you shall come to learn of the Secrets of the Doctor and his Magic Works. For once the former is comprehended, the latter also will be more easily understood.

^{THE FIRST TALE}

Which Treats of the Doctor’s Return by Sea to Barcelona

THROUGH THE chinks in his cell, the rotten wooden boards coloured with a dark growth like the ash from an oak fire, the Doctor heard the breathing of the man beside him. The neighbouring breath is purple with sickness, lungs drowning in phlegm, and by the pattern of the voice and the choking in the night, the Doctor knew the duration of his fellow captive’s life would soon be counted in hours. The Doctor never meant to be here: it had not been part of his plans nor self-appointed destiny – but fate felt otherwise, and, slamming the door on all possibilities, she forced the Doctor to resign himself, once again, to the vacillations of sea salt and gangrene, memories broken by the company of rats that feast on the breadcrumbs at his desk – a sorry thing, made of a reclaimed bucket given as a latrine. This too was an unfortunate occurrence.

The Doctor’s beard was blue, and curved around his neck as a scarf. His shoulders were a dark, russet brown, his hide like smoked leather. The Doctor’s head was bald, and very round, like the fat end of an egg, and his eyes were marked by the thin lines of the crow’s foot, which returned to feed on pain, showing the path of its scaly burden across his cheeks. Through a crack in the ceiling of the boat, he could see a patch of cold, grey sky, a gift from the heavens. The Doctor moved himself so that his back was against the wood, before catching a sliver of the sun, and holding it for a moment in his palm.

WHEN they came for the Doctor, they dressed him in the long robes of the alchemist, Byzantine velvet and crisp silk. On his skull they placed the signature cap of the Doctor, a small black hat that moulds to the shape of his head, ending just above his ears. They give him his cane, his beard brushed and arranged, and he was then placed in the cart at the port of Barcelona. As he rode through the city to the court of the king, the Doctor regaled his captors with stories.

^{THE SECOND TALE}

Which treats of the deaf-mute