I’m trying to reach my uncle. ‘His cell phone isn’t working. Tell him I want to speak to him urgently. About Natalia.’
‘Un Peet-Tirr Warren. Si. Lo tenemos. El inglés. The Englishman? I know him. Yes. Si,’ she adds gently. ‘Of course, we will help you. Of course.’
The next morning it’s sports bra first, uncomfortable elastic round flesh. Black leggings, baggy long-sleeved shirt, braced for winter, hair tied back, hidden for now. Grab the metro pass, keys, music, stuff it into a pocket, close the door, groggily stumble down the stairs, wipe the sleep from the eyes again, squint, open the inner door, take a second look in the mirror for good measure. This part of the ritual is always a mistake. Face sleep-bloated and worn. Close eyes. A message chimes into my phone. Notícies? Has esmorzat? Fabregat wants to know if I have eaten. Ignore reflection, then click, door open, freedom, escape into the road, and run. Up past the memorial to the Catalan fallen, the eternally burning flame to the west of the apartment. Salute the gargoyles of Santa Maria del Mar. Street cleaners in their funny green cars brushing the cobbles like mad – and continue running. Up Via Laietana, the great central square of the city – Plaça de Catalunya – just a little bit (mustn’t strain the self) into the Ferrocarriles. Catch a train, up the mountain to Funicular de Vallvidrera. Vertical. Ride up to the Carretera de las Aigües. Escape train – walk into: dirt, cacti, open earth, sea breeze, sun white bright morning. Tie your shoelace. Now. Breathe. Run. And as you run the city wakes. The sun rises higher in the sky above the sea. You are alive! In time with my breath. The sweat stains the small of my back and I feel free of coldness. Light pours over the terracotta rooftops. Dust flies. Thoughts calm.
When I return to my apartment I seat myself at my desk and prepare my work for the day. I have scheduled a call with Bingley to let him know things are moving, carrying forward. At 10 a.m. the phone rings. An unknown number. I pause. Decide. Then pick up. The voice comes like a salutation from the heavens.
‘Hello . . . ’ English syllables I recognize. Precise and clear. ‘Peter Warren here.’ He pauses. ‘I think I might have what you are looking for.’
The Englishman Peter Warren sits on the patio of his country house in the Alpujarra, eighty kilometres south of Granada, up and along the old road that runs past the mass graves of Órgiva and Lanjarón, marked by legends of a holidaying Generalissimo who once bathed in mountain springwater. The wine in Peter Warren’s hand is pink, much like his cheeks. Oh, Peter Warren. He is content as a man can be – admiring his Gibraltar Candytuft in his greenhouse (grown from a clipping smuggled in from the littoral flora of the rock) with its many blushing petals, a hazy cloud of violet splayed in concentric circles. He has planted heirloom roses in three varietals: a climbing peach Gloire de Dijon, a bed of Sombreuil, and an Aimée Vibert and they are doing brilliantly, though they will not bloom for many months yet. As he was away for the majority of the last year, Peter Warren hired a local woman from the village, Concha, to come daily and water his plants and she has done a bloody splendid job, has Concha, tending the lavender and the young olive trees at the end of the drive. Peter Warren’s patio curves around a 300-year-old pine, which emerges from the ledge below, and shades the house from the late afternoon sun across the valley. The patio is formed of pebbles, arranged in interwoven circles. The house had been his father’s, and had only recently received electricity, which pleases Peter Warren. The water that runs from the taps is hard, and the surfaces in the house are positively medieval – but Peter Warren likes these details. The wormwood and fire-blackened rock link him to his father who had loved Spain, and to an old Andalusia near extinction – the land of the Alpujarra, the last strongholds of the Moors and Cante Jondo and by God he loved it. Possibly more than he loved women, possibly more than he loved Barcelona, he loved this house in the mountains so deeply he dreamt of never leaving here and making a vegetable garden and living off the land until he expired in his sleep; whereupon women who adored him in the village would bring his body cured meats and dried flowers as offerings to the dead and the priest would bless him and lay him here in the ground forever.
He leads me quickly into the house. The cedar beams are low. Inside, Peter Warren sits with his back to his desk, turning his chair to face me. I am struck then by how well young Natalia had drawn him. She was a master. The desk is a wide slab of oak on metal, circular legs made of old piping, facing the square window cut out of the rock wall of the house and looking into the garden. Concha, my cleaner. He nods; through the window I see an old woman opening the cast-iron gate and walk up the cold dirt path to the garden, weaving her way beneath the pine tree.
Sitting with his back to his desk, Peter Warren speaks openly.
‘At first I was afraid when you called. I wanted nothing to do with it. Let the past die. Move on. But you can’t kill it, can you? I make a point not to answer my phone anyway. When you called again, I thought, damn, this girl is persistent. Then the third, fourth time, and I began to feel guilty.’
Peter’s eyes wander to the washerwoman as she gathers a tin watering can in her hand, goes to the old tap to fill the can with water and tends to the icy roses.
‘A drink?’ he asks me.
Yes, I nod.
Peter Warren returns to the kitchen and pours us two glasses of a sparkling white wine. He takes some dried almonds and cuts a slice of bread with black crust and offers them to me on terracotta plates. He eats slowly. He sits with his back to the desk, where the green Olivetti typewriter of university sleeps solemnly, gathering dust. The sheaf of paper he had placed in its jaws untouched. I feel the noise and darkness of Barcelona fall away from my shoulders with all the satisfaction of a finished thunderstorm.
‘I betrayed her.’ Peter Warren watches an ant run up to the rim of the terracotta bowl that holds the olives on the wooden table. ‘It was not a great betrayal. I did something small, and all the more cruel for that smallness.’ Peter Warren wipes his eyes on the back of his hands.
‘Don’t know what’s come over me. Tea is required in moments like this. Sugar?’
I shake my head and thank him. He claps his hands on his knees and stands, his body towering over me.
Peter Warren returns with two steaming cups and sits down beside me on the sofa. He claps me on the knee. ‘So,’ he says. ‘I suppose you’d like to see it?’
‘Yes.’ Warm liquid slips down my throat.
‘Give me five minutes. I’ve hidden it away somewhere. Didn’t want to get it out without company. Brings bad things up.’
That summer, Peter Warren’s apartment had been on the fourth floor of a modern brick complex to the north side of Gràcia – west of metro stop Joanic near a florist who specializes in South American orchids. It is small and sparsely decorated. White walls covered by a few theatre posters in black frames, and a remodelled kitchen that had cost him nearly his entire life savings.
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.
The Serpent Papers Page 34