The Serpent Papers (15 page)

I make my way to the square of the cathedral where Natalia Hernández appeared at rest.
Her chest ornamented in blood.
For a moment I stare at the steps where they found her. They are vacant. Dark grey. Stub ends of cigarettes. A guard at the church door watches a group of gypsies asking for alms. I buy a clump of rosemary for good measure. Looping round Carrer del Bisbe,
I skim over flagstones.
Left onto Pietat.
And then the secret many people walk past. The street of Paradise. Carrer del Paradis. Dark and narrowing. Sucking out the oxygen. I am looking for a porthole.
A domed slit in walls.
Barred windows
.
The sign reads: ‘Ajuntament de Barcelona. Temple Romà d’August. Local del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya.’ Slip in beneath key stones, black beams overhead. Duck under low archway into open courtyard. Mustard-yellow paint and hanging window boxes. Follow the slight red arrow.
I pass a wrought-iron gate, descend worn steps. Enter a second tiny courtyard. Sea-green. Red brick at eye level.

There they are!
Stretching to infinity. Three enormous Corinthian columns squeezed between sea-green walls. I have reached the pagan outpost and sit on the bench beneath them, arching my neck to look up. A French couple snap photographs. A man and woman in their sixties. They are with me for a while, very quiet and reverent. And then they slip away.

Taking my notebook out of my bag, I write out the verses of Fabregat’s letters, placing the words in the order received. I will analyse it systematically. Slowly.
Now I am only beginning to think.
The collated words form an altar-shape, similar to Alexandrian poetry in the third century
ce
.
That is good.
An affirmation.

Find me in the Utterance of Birds (1)

You have called me (2)

Thrice Great (3)

Two-Faced (4)

Forked Tongue. (5)

No more riddles. (6)

I will teach you. (7)

Follow. Heed my words. (8)

Ancient Crimes. (9)

Count the grains of Sand (10)

And measure the Sea. (11)

Read the deaf-mute. (12)

And hear the voiceless. (13)

Serpentarius! (15)

One-who-is-arriving! (16)

Know this: (17)

Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man (18)

Listening to Fabregat tell his story, I had to contain myself. To not reveal anything. Neither the shaking of my hands, which I hid beneath my thighs, nor the voices I heard on the air, clamouring like a flock of gulls. For me the words on his tongue conjured colours. The letter
A
groans like dried blood. Scabs at the corner of my vision.
R
:
regal, dark, Tyrian purple. I hear
D
as indigo, and
I
makes a bright light, partially defined, like a clear haze, but pointed, sharp as a shaft of ice.
E
’s true colour is yellow. The sound delicate like the hind of a bee. My feelings are not sensible. They do not transfer to others. They cannot be easily explained. Ink breathes. The heart quickens. Voices make concrete shapes. Poem like a portal, opening my skin. I fight not to lose myself, to stop my eyes rolling back into my sockets and disappearing.

Lines 2–5 of Fabregat’s anonymous letters were carbon copies of verses of the poem presented to me by Harold Bingley on that sleety London afternoon in October. They provide an anchor and a key, rooting his conundrum into familiar territory – the palimpsest poem Captain Charles Leopold Ruthven cut out of the book in 1829 that fell from the walls of the lightning-struck chapel three days ago.

There is a rich and compelling history of documents like our elusive palimpsest. Books pulled from strange places in strange conditions with unexpected and incalculable outcomes. In 1896 Carl Reinhardt purchased the Berlin Codex from an Egyptian dealer in Akhim, who told a convoluted story of discovery – the book was wrapped in feathers, and hidden in a wall. Reinhardt suspected it had been retrieved from a burial ground. The Berlin Codex contained four Gnostic scriptures:
The Act of Peter
,
The
Gospel of Mary
,
The Secret Book of John
and
The Wisdom of Jesus Christ
. It was a groundbreaking find: a set of ancient manuscripts hidden from the world for two millennia.

In December 1945, following the end of World War Two, three Egyptian brothers rode out into the desert on their camels, tracking towards the red cliff Jabal al-Tarif, beyond the city of Nag Hammadi. The brothers intended to harvest a nitrate-rich fertilizer buried in the broken rocks at the base of the cliff
.
As they were digging beneath the boulders, they unearthed an ancient jar sealed with a bowl. In a fit of passion, the youngest smashed the jar open hoping for treasure – perhaps the death mask of a king, or a lapis lazuli scarab. Instead, he sent shards of disintegrating papyrus into the wind. Rather than gold, the youth stared down at thirteen bound codices. This trove is now known as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, constituting one of the most significant historical discoveries of the twentieth century. In the 1970s a third collection of Egyptian codices appeared on the market – their origins deliberately obscured. Rumour has it that the volumes were stolen from a burial cave containing a family of skeletons and a set of books housed in a luminous limestone box. This box held four works: a Greek mathematical treatise, a Greek translation of the Jewish Exodus, Coptic New Testament letters of Paul, and the infamous Codex Tchacos, a third set of Gnostic papyrus fragments that vanished into the private market – only to be found sixteen years later, stowed away in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York.

When I was brought onto this case, Harold Bingley believed that the Illuminatis Palimpsest – as it was first called – was part of a missing Gnostic work that belonged to the secret history pulled out of the cliffs above Nag Hammadi. Within the Nag Hammadi Scriptures there is a poem called ‘Thunder’, an anonymous first-person discourse of the Divine Feminine. The poem boldly announces the identity of the speaker in a series of stylized contradictions, redolent of Isis aretalogies and the Jewish Wisdom, Sophia. Thematic parallels between the Gnostic poem ‘Thunder’
and the subtext of the Illuminatus Palimpsest had made Harold Bingley and those around him ravenously hungry for more. The Illuminatus Palimpsest, if an authentic Gnostic offshoot, would be among the very few tracts preserved in the Greek language. But I was not satisfied with his assumption. The correlation did not ring true, and though Bingley disagreed with me at first, he came to understand that I harboured a powerful theory of my own.

* * *

I hear the words forming as I sit beneath the columns. A familiar voice. Like the cries of the siren, she sings to the root of me. Snakes round my mind, singing:
Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man
. Confessions of a killer or clues to something deeper? Some dark old thing hidden deep inside?

* * *

The story begins like many others do. An old woman walks through the forest carrying a heavy burden. Tattered sack thrown over her shoulder. Despite her age she is strong, with the thick neck of a bull and the bulk of a wrestler; she hides her hair beneath a white cloth tucked over her ears, framing mannish cheeks and a gnarled nose like a dried head of garlic. In her cloth sack the old woman carries nine books, which she bears to the court of a king. Each scroll beautifully bound, made of sacred leaves sewn into volumes containing a verse history of the world. The letters of her book are Greek, for that is the language she comes from. When she arrives at the gates of the city the old woman demands to speak directly to the King. He grants her a single audience, whereupon the woman offers her books for a hefty sum and a promise of endless knowledge.

The King sneers at the crone.

‘I would have nine books for nothing, for nothing is surely what they are worth.’

Calmly the old woman selects three scrolls from her sack, and with a flick of her magic wrist sets them alight in a golden blaze. The books of leaves crackle into embers.

She asks again:

‘King, what will you give me for my books?’

‘Nothing, crone. Kings do not read the mad ramblings of old women.’

The woman plucked another three volumes from her sack. ‘You do not know what you lose.’

The King laughs in her face.

‘The choice is yours,’ she says, and with a second flick of her wrist three more volumes burst into flames.

A priest rushes forward in horror. ‘King Tarquin!’ he cries in agony. ‘Do you not recognize the counsel of your ancestor Aeneas, who sought out the Sibyl at Cumae? Whatever verses the Madam has written on the leaves, she has arranged in Divine order; they remain unchanged in position and do not shift in their arrangement. King Tarquin, you have flung the door open in haste and disturbed the order of her scrolls! They are lost to us! Burnt into nothing!’

‘It is true,’ the old crone says to the King. ‘You have spurned six books of knowledge of the ancients and lost potential futures of your empire, for I am the Sibyl of Cumae and I would have given you everything.’

King Tarquin begs her forgiveness. Thinking of the words of Aeneas, he plies her with supplications: ‘Do not give your verses to the scrolls and leaves, but sing the prophecy yourself!’

But the Sibyl does not sing to please, and asks that the King pay the full price for the three remaining Sibylline Books, so that he might learn a lesson from his pride.

* * *

Folklore states that the Sibylline Books or
Libri Sibyllini
came to Rome in this fashion, delivered in person by the Sibyl of Cumae. In the sixth century
bce
, King Tarquin the Proud – Tarquinius Superbus,
poppy slayer
 – ordered that the books of scroll prophecies be kept in the city for perpetuity. They were first held on the Capitoline Hill, fiercely guarded by two select priests. The number of priests given exclusive access to the Sibylline Books grew as Roman power expanded from two to ten in 367
bce
and later to fifteen men during the Republic, forming an elite college of priests known as the
Quimdecimviri Sacris Faciundis
. The lines of text in the sacred books were regarded as the highest of state secrets.

When the Sibylline Books burnt in the conflagration of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in 83
bce
, the Romans sent out the
Quimdecimviri
to recover prophecies from other Sibyls, collating a new set of divine proclamations from sources at the furthest reach of empire. Emperor Augustus later ordered a purging of these texts, cutting out the words that did not suit his vision of the future. Nero consulted them following the fire of 64
ce
, while Julian the Apostate would look to the books in 363
ce
in the last year of his life and reign. General Stilicho finally destroyed the remnants of the
Libri Sibyllini
around 408
ce
, in the violent build-up to the sacking of Rome. Today, the original Sibylline prophecies are entirely erased.