The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  The perfecti preached also, and the constant butt of their condemnation was the Catholic priesthood, with their bishops’ palaces, the abbeys bursting with gold, the fat preachers with their concubines, the abuses of the poor and needy, and their constant denigration of the true teachings of the Christ. They singled out the selling of sacred charms and indulgences as a typical indication of the parlous state of the Catholic church. They questioned the notion of Christ’s literal corporeality, and regarded the symbolism of the cross with extreme scepticism. As for the sale of pieces of the true cross, which Catholicism endorsed, they regarded it as a treachery of the very worst kind. Since they denied the possibility of a material manifestation of divinity, believing that they walked in the footsteps of an idealised and somewhat abstract Christ figure, they insisted that only by living lives of purity, chastity and holiness could they escape repeated incarnation into this world of the flesh (which was the fate of ordinary believers) and achieve everlasting salvation in the kingdom of the holy.

  For those who were bound to repeated incarnation in the world of flesh, the kind of life-form that their spirits might next find themselves in depended to a large extent on the type of life they lived in the present. Thus a person might find himself in the shape of an ox, or a cat, or a horse in a future life, or perhaps a lizard or a crow. It was thought that the spirit living in these animals might have some dim recall of a previous life, and this spirit would strive to attain human form in its next incarnation. But if, once in human form, the person lived the life of a sinner, then he was condemning himself to repeat the cycle of rebirth. Sometimes a previous existence might be recalled briefly by a person in a moment of realisation, as when one felt a familiarity, whether genial or antagonistic, towards a particular person or place. Thus a sensation of déjà vu was frequently explained as the memory of a previous life. There were many stories of perfecti recalling the most intricate details of previous lives.

  Raymond set off down the mountainside. He walked with a relaxed but purposeful manner, in a way that seemed to correspond entirely with his natural surroundings. This organic bond between Raymond and nature was also reflected in his relationship with his large white sheepdog, who, with his strength of character and mildness of disposition, constituted an exact four-legged replica of his master. Indeed, this relationship was just one example of Raymond’s profound organic relationship with the animal world. He had few plans: those that he did have centred on his life in the village, and on his marriage to Clare, his childhood sweetheart. He had never thought in terms of fleeing his own village, of abandoning a life whose rightness and inevitability had become as natural to him as the progression of the seasons in the shepherd’s year.

  Although the blossoms indicated the onset of warmer weather, it became cold quickly in the evening in these uplands. Raymond knew that if the soldiers were pursuing heretics, it would not be long before they arrived at his village, and he must alert his friends, especially the perfecti; otherwise they would be taken away, interrogated, and forced to retract their faith. They would never do that, of course, and so they would be tortured, and probably burned at the stake in Carcassonne or Toulouse.

  Why could the Barons of the north and their bishops not let the ordinary people live in peace? It was enough that they took the rich farmlands, built their castles, and imposed their language and customs on the people of Languedoc, without dictating also what they were or were not to believe. And always, the priests came hard on the heels of the butchering soldiers. Raymond had heard stories of the terrible persecutions endured by the Cathars to the north and east of his home, of how they were rounded up in hundreds and slaughtered like geese. Those who survived the tortures and the massacres were forced to wear the mark of the yellow cross on their tunics or outer garments, making them more readily identifiable to the new forces of power and authority in the region. There were relatively few perfecti left in these parts now, and they were the last of the breed.

  Raymond arrived at the outskirts of the village. Everything was peaceful. The scent of woodsmoke drifted on the cool evening air. The stone houses felt safe and solid, with their blazing hearths and warm animal smells. He went straight to the home of Pierre, his uncle, who immediately convened a village council. It was decided that fourteen villagers would leave, in the company of the three perfecti who had sought refuge among them over the past two years and who acted as their unofficial priests. They included Bernard Rocher, the Inquisition’s most targeted and sought-after Cathar leader, and also another man and a woman, who had been passing themselves off as a married couple, common practice among the hunted Cathar perfecti. The villagers elected to leave were the adult members of those families most closely associated with the Cathar faith over three generations. It was believed by the more conciliatory (or frightened) members of the community that by informing the Inquisition that all the Cathars had been driven out by the remaining villagers, clemency would be afforded them, and that they would be left in peace. It transpired that this was a mistaken view.

  Raymond Gasc was one of those selected to leave, along with his wife, Clare. In fact the full list of names of those who left the village that May night has been made available in the parsimonious script of one of the Inquisition’s official transcribers in the scourge of Mélissac that followed. It is known exactly when they left and what they took with them. It is known that they were headed towards Castelldenau, well to the south of the Pyrenees, where there already existed small communities of Cathar refugees.

  With a few basic provisions and homespun blankets, the fourteen credentes and three perfecti left the village at dawn on the fifteenth of May, 1247. They travelled light, but carried bundles of warmer clothing for the cold nights on the higher slopes of the mountains. Raymond’s dog accompanied them, the sole non-human refugee. He circled and backtracked, as though rounding up the straggling procession of now indigent adherents to the dualist faith, as they made their way along the winding paths into the upper reaches of the Pyrenees.

  Straggling chains of migrants were not such a rare sight in those times. Victims of the crusades launched against the Cathars over the past forty years had left thousands dead and thousands more displaced and homeless. Often the members of these wandering bands would have been mutilated by the torturers of the Inquisition, their eyes gouged out, their noses and upper lips sliced off. Such were the punishments meted out by the executors of northern French and papal order on those who would resist the sweep of a rigorous and barbaric religious and political orthodoxy.

  By late afternoon the distant forests of the lowlands had receded into an unvarying green swathe, and the exiles’ route was defined by more perilous tracks. They were now beyond the upper reaches of the summer pasturelands. Giant boulders were strewn across the mountainsides, lumps of grey rock halted in their downward path during some prehistoric landslide. It was an eroded and windswept landscape, snow-swept for nearly half the year, although at this season clumps of spring flowers sprouted prolifically across even the rockiest escarpments. This was the territory of eagle, wolf and mountain bear, of vertiginous ravines, and of icy streams and waterfalls. It was a route known to Raymond Gasc, at least, who ventured further afield than most other of the villagers, as well as to Rocher himself, who had spent a previous stay of exile in the Cathar settlements on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees. One other traveller, Bertrand Moyet, who had family in the village of Castelldenau, towards which they were heading, three days’ march to the south of the highest peaks, would have been familiar with the route they were taking. The group intended staying there until it was safe for them to return to Mélissac, or else remain in exile for the rest of their lives.

  We might presume, if we follow Pontneuf’s story, that the Cathars continued until nightfall and set up camp by some upland spring before continuing their journey at first light the next day. Whether or not they reached the plateau of Puigcerdà, in the shadow of Mount Cadí, is not known. What is certain, from Pontneuf’
s account, is that they never arrived at their destination in Castelldenau. Nor did they ever return home. Somewhere along the route, between Mélissac and what is now Spain, they simply disappeared. The whole troupe of seventeen souls vanished out of time and out of history.

  I read the document with a mix of emotions. I did not understand why I was being given it to read and whether the reading of this account was the sole reason for my abduction and incarceration in Pontneuf’s mountain stronghold. I was still angry, but my anger was tempered by the sheer improbability of my situation. Far from being uninterested in the account of Raymond Gasc the Cathar shepherd, I found myself absorbed by it. I could even detect within the tale—but here the power of retrospective knowledge might be affecting my perceptions—a familiar ring, as though it were something I had been told many years before, but had forgotten.

  PART TWO

  These men denied reality to all appearances and any material manifestation of divinity.

  ZOÉ OLDENBOURG

  11. THE CITY GHOSTLY IN THE HEAT OF SUMMER

  It was a day of unrelenting sun. Outside Nuria’s house I rang the bell for her ground-floor flat. The street door buzzed back at me and I pushed it open. As I walked into the hall, the door of her apartment opened and a woman emerged, pausing in the doorway. She looked set to go out, carrying a shoulder bag, with keys in her hand. She was in her early twenties, dark-skinned with long frizzy blonde-streaked hair, and wore a pale green dress with a red floral pattern. She seemed surprised to see me, as though expecting someone else.

  “Oh,” she said, confirming this impression. She looked tense, and waited for me to speak.

  “I’m sorry. I came to see Nuria Rasavall. I thought she lived here.”

  She relaxed a little, and laughed nervously; a half-laugh.

  “Nuria. That was the name of the girl who lived here before. But she moved out in June sometime. Are you a friend of hers?”

  “Yes.” I was utterly confused. “I’m her boyfriend.”

  I checked the address with her. There was no question of me having rung the wrong doorbell. Besides, this woman knew of Nuria. I decided to spin a story.

  “Nuria phoned me from Paris to ask if I could pick up any mail. You see, I’m going to visit her there tomorrow and she thought it would be easier if I brought any letters with me.”

  I smiled pleasantly, and tried to look harmless and sincere.

  “Well, there isn’t much, and most of it looks like junk mail. Hang on a minute.”

  She turned to go back inside the flat. I desperately needed to see inside the flat, to confirm that this was not some elaborate hoax. But I couldn’t just barge in. As I pondered this, the woman spoke again, just the friendly side of businesslike.

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  I followed her.

  The place had been completely re-decorated. Everything of Nuria’s was gone. In the living room, the futon had been replaced by a sofa covered in a pale blue spread, and the low table of dark glass had likewise disappeared. I was unable to glance inside the bedroom, since the door was closed. I wanted to see whether the large wardrobe remained there.

  In the living room, the woman handed me a small pile of letters. She was exraordinarily trustful of me, which again made me suspicious. Why should she so willingly allow me, a stranger, inside her flat, and hand over a previous tenant’s mail, simply taking me on my word that I was who I claimed to be?

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll make sure she gets them.”

  She adjusted her shoulder bag and tossed her hair out of her eyes with a self-conscious little nod. She smiled, only half as businesslike now.

  “You’ve saved me the trouble of taking them along to the post office. You see, your Nuria didn’t leave a forwarding address. I phoned the agency to find out, but they said she hadn’t rented from them.”

  “So you got the flat through an agency?”

  “Yes.” She looked at me curiously, and I at once regretted asking. “I came to look at the flat in the middle of May. Your friend said she’d be moving out at the beginning of June. She said she’d be travelling, but didn’t mention France.”

  “Of course. It’s just that Nuria didn’t actually rent the place through the agency. She rented direct from the owner. I forget the name.”

  I was freewheeling now, but the girl seemed relaxed.

  “Pons. Something Pons. It was in the contract I signed.”

  “You haven’t met this Pons, have you, by any chance?”

  She tutted a negative.

  “Is something the matter?” she asked, innocently. I was biting my lip.

  Her naïvety was quite beguiling.

  “No,” I replied.

  Outside in the street there was the blaring of a car horn.

  “Oh my God,” she said suddenly. “Look, if you don’t mind I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I was expecting somebody.”

  “Sure. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  “Oh no. No trouble. It’s just my boyfriend. You see, he’s the jealous type.”

  She giggled, and with that comment, and that laugh, I immediately discounted her as being in any way connected with Pontneuf’s crew. She was too obviously ordinary. I thanked her and left. I opened the door to the street just as a smooth young man in a sharp suit and shades reached for the buzzer. He looked at me suspiciously. I wished him a good afternoon and made for a café.

  It was the same slightly seedy café I had come to with Nuria the morning of our meeting at the Miró Foundation. I sat down at the same table under the plane tree and ordered a beer. It was that time of early evening in late summer when the city has begun to stir again after the narcolepsy of afternoon. The little square was overlooked on two sides by tall houses girded with ornate balconies. A playground was on the third side, backing onto an infant school, and on the fourth, behind the road, ran a low wall behind which lay a construction site in a permanent state of abandonment, where a beaten-up bulldozer had been nuzzling the same pile of sand for as long as I could remember. On the low wall this side of the site someone had sprayed FUCK in large red letters.

  I was caught up in increasingly confused and melancholic reflections when I heard a familiar, disbelieving and inebriate voice calling my name, and turned just in time to be grasped on the shoulder by the unsteady hand of Igbar Zoff. Standing alongside him was the equally well-lubricated but more vertical figure of Sean Hogg.

  “Lucas, old pal,” beamed Igbar, evidently overjoyed at finding a potential companion with whom to continue his day’s carousing. Sean looked around painfully, weighing up the advantages of this spot under the plane tree as opposed to the several other empty tables, before pulling out a seat and sitting down on my left. He grinned at me, as if recognizing me for the first time.

  “Lucas,” he echoed. “My old fiend.” He spat discreetly on the ground in the direction of the plane tree and offered me one of his cigarettes.

  “Hullo,” I replied, happy, for the moment, to have had the process of morbid and wearisome reflection broken up by their arrival. They were a pair of amiable drunks as a rule, and never so amiable as on occasions when, such as now, they had cash to spare. It transpired that Igbar had, that very morning, sold a painting for a quarter of a million pesetas, and the two were wasting no time in divesting themselves of this unaccustomed wealth in the only way they knew.

  “It was a Japanese collector chappy. Paid cash,” explained Igbar, who with his Balkan bandit’s moustache presented a preposterous spectacle, dressed as he was in jeans several sizes too large, which concertinaed over his laceless trainers. As always he wore a quantity of clothes that guaranteed his body temperature was kept at furnace heat. Now, on an afternoon in August, he wore a shirt, pullover, linen jacket and ragged tweed overcoat, this last displaying loose shreds of cotton where there had once been buttons. The absence of laces, buttons and other fasteners on all Igbar’s clothes represented an aversion on his part to closure of any kind, as though Igbar
was in dread of tying things up or keeping them shut away. As usual the zip of his fly was ajar, or, as he would claim, broken, and fastened by a single coy safety-pin.

  The painting that had been sold was one I knew. It was a spacious canvas that showed an empty deck-chair beside a multicoloured parasol on a beach. The sea was blue, the sky a cloudless lilac. Across the painting were stencilled, in red, the names of Igbar’s favourite bars worldwide, from Cuernavaca to Singapore. The list provided a detailed geography of inebriation, the letters precise and clinical against the ludicrous beach iconography of the background. Ironically, due to his abundance of clothing, it was hard for me to imagine Igbar on a beach at all, ever. Or in a state of undress, for that matter. He was a person persistently and irrevocably dressed, and always in too many and overlarge clothes.

  “Where have you been all summer?” enquired Igbar. “The Hogg and I have called your place a number of times, but no reply. You look pale, Lucas. Have you been over in blasted Blighty?”

  “No,” I replied, then hesitated. What had happened to me over the previous ten weeks seemed too close, too suffocating, to recount right then. But Igbar’s use of my name provided cover, of sorts. I replied with circumspection.

  “Lucas has been locked up in a cell by a madman who heads a medieval religious sect in the high Pyrenees.”

  “Blimey,” said Sean, surfacing from some private daydream and voicing the mild and un-American expletive in imitation of his friend. “That’s dramatic.”

  Igbar burped. I signalled to the waiter, who came over to the table.

  “What’ll you two be having?”

  “No, I insist,” said Igbar. “On me today.” And to the waiter he said: “A bottle of cava, three glasses. And olives. Lots of olives.”

  The waiter withdrew, returning a minute later with the order.