The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  “And what about your beautiful companion, the one you came to Alastair’s party with?” Igbar continued. “Was she locked up with you?”

  “No. She had her own cell. We did briefly share accommodation, but could not agree on the décor.”

  I was beginning to get into the swing of this.

  Sean looked at me thoughtfully, as if weighing up the possibility that I might be telling the truth. For Sean, more than most of us, every proposition presented a range of interpretations and choices. The difference was that Sean tended to go through these options with a stupefying pedantry. Chronically and acutely indecisive, Sean appeared to regard life as a sequence of near-impossible quandaries from which escape was rarely possible, but from which temporary refuge might be sought through a self-paralyzing absorption in minutiae, interspersed with frequent and chaotic bouts of drug-taking and drunkenness.

  “Tell us more,” pleaded Sean.

  “Not now,” I replied. “Another time. Lucas has Achilles’ heel syndrome and is tired of this saga.”

  “But you have been up in the Pyrenees?”

  I nodded assent.

  “And how were you taken in by this sect, these medievalists?” persisted Sean, sweeping aside my resistance to questioning and propping his head between his hands, elbows pivoted to the table.

  “Okay then. Lucas was not exactly taken in. It was like this. One night, after a day on the beach at Sitges, during which they were confronted by a mad hag, Nuria and Lucas went back to her flat, which, incidentally, is just around the corner from here. In the middle of the night a cyclopic giant and a leper jumped out of the wardrobe, drugged them, tied them up, and drove them in a windowless white van up to an abandoned village below Mount Cadí. In coffins.”

  “Hang on,” demanded Igbar, his clear blue eyes fixed on me in confusion. “This is a lot to take in. You said ‘in coffins.’ You were in coffins inside the van?”

  “Yeah. Coffins with air-holes for breathing.”

  “Aerosols?” Sean interrupted, incredulous. “They don’t help you breathe.”

  “Air-holes, arsehole. Carry on,” said Igbar.

  “Who drove? The man with one eye or the leper?” Sean wanted clarification.

  “Lucas has no idea.”

  “But,” Sean insisted, “it makes one hell of a difference. A man with one eye in the middle of his forehead could not reasonably be expected to drive a van at night, even a white one. A leper, on the other hand, providing he held a current driving licence, and had fully adhering limbs, would be able to drive as well as you or I. Well, you, anyway. I don’t drive.”

  “Shut up, you bloody fool. No one said the one-eyed man did drive the van. Nor that said eye was centrally located. Man’s telling his life story. Important chapter from. Stop interrupting.”

  “Okay, okay. Keep your many shirts on.”

  “Please. Continue.”

  “Once the abductees were safely locked away in his mountain hideout, the leader came to visit Lucas. His name was Pontneuf, an erudite and unscrupulous Frenchman.”

  Sean hissed.

  “He was dressed like a monk. He performed a ceremony of re-birth. Much jiggery-pokery and mumbo-jumbo. Incense, water, etcetera. Then, the introductions over, he presented Lucas with a manuscript relating to a group of Cathars from the thirteenth century. His intentions were to recruit Lucas and Nuria into his loyal band of followers.”

  It was Igbar who interrupted now.

  “Cathars? The Albigensian heresy. Very trendy. Yellow cross merchants. All over the place at the far end of Els Cecs de Sant Cugat and also on a derelict building in Templers.”

  I knew this first street, tucked away deep in the Old City. Its name means “The Blind Men of Saint Cugat.” Templers was nearer the centre, not far from Sant Jaume Square.

  “What?” I asked. “You’ve seen them?”

  “Sure, man. I live near there. A whole row of yellow crosses. I thought, well I didn’t think then, but it struck me afterwards as a brilliant idea, that they might be starting a Cathar theme bar. Or night club. ‘Forthcoming events: Saturday night, a burning at the stake. Bring an old flame.’”

  Igbar broke off into spasmodic chortling, which in turn brought on a fit of asthmatic wheezing and coughing.

  “You know about the Cathars?” I asked, when he had recovered.

  “Quite a lot, actually.” Sometimes Igbar compounded his received pronunciation with the supercilious nuances of the public schoolboy that he had once been.

  “I could lend you some books,” he resumed. “But when I saw those yellow crosses I thought, Hullo hullo, a Cathar revivalist society? In Barcelona? You see, it’s been pretty big in the south-west of France for quite a while now. Parallel with the renewed interest in all things Occitan. Troubadours, jongleurs, throwing live pigs from the battlements of Carcassonne. That sort of thing. But now, apparently, there is a more widespread revival in the religion itself, communes being set up near Castres, which claim to replicate the simple lifestyle of the original Cathars, with an emphasis on frugality and holiness, compounded with sixties fantasies about free love and the more contemporary concerns of feminism and vegetarianism. Apparently one or two wealthy Germans involved—they always get in on the act, eh?—buying up abandoned villages: and if this were not enough, rumours of links with far-right political organizations. Not popular at all with the locals, of course, many of whom see themselves as the direct descendants of the real Cathars. More wine?”

  I knew Zoff well enough to realise that this brief outburst was probably reliably informed, and what he had said aroused my interest. It didn’t quite tally with Pontneuf’s unique vision of a Catharist revival centred on the work of a handful of recruits, and resonated more with any number of confused cultists, whose affiliations and followers were concerned with predictable notions of dropping out and adopting alternative lifestyles, whatever the guiding philosophy. But it was the idea that such communes were being set up by wealthy individuals, German or otherwise, that interested me. I presumed that such communities all differed from one another to some extent; that they each reflected the idiosyncratic beliefs of a single, more or less charismatic leader. I began to wonder how many versions of “Catharism” existed, and to what extent, if any, they reflected the actual beliefs and practices of their medieval antecedents. I needed to find out more, but already my conviction was growing that there was no such thing as a single identifiable Cathar faith, but rather, that a once-coherent religion had somehow become, centuries later, a melting pot of fashionable beliefs and millenarian fantasies, shaped by the dictates of whichever would-be guru had the cash to buy up a few hectares of land and start a “movement.”

  “So once you’d been initiated into this group, what then?” asked Sean. “Did you have to bite the head off a living cockerel? Enjoy sexual congress with a Pyrenean mountain bear?”

  Sean clearly knew nothing about the Cathars.

  “No. Something far harder. Pontneuf asked Lucas to trust him. To believe in him.”

  “Pontneuf. The bad wizard. And you say he’d locked up Nuria in a coffin? The scoundrel.”

  “The necrophile.”

  “The cad.”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m glad to see the story has touched you, boys. But sympathy does not carry Lucas far enough.”

  “No,” confirmed Igbar. “What you want is Revenge.”

  “With a capital R,” added Sean.

  “In my book, it already has one,” I said.

  “You’re writing a book?” asked Sean.

  “But most of all you want the girl back,” said Igbar.

  “Of course he does.”

  “And that would constitute Revenge. On the New Bridge.”

  “That’s what you could call the book.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Without the girl there can’t be a happy ending.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And revenge is sweet.”

  “Sweeter than a
thousand kisses.”

  “So when do we get to find out, Lucas? The ending.”

  “Lucas is working on it.”

  “We have plenty of time,” said Igbar.

  “Never short of time,” echoed Sean.

  So I told them what I could remember. And ejected myself from the story altogether.

  12. DUALISTIC DROP-OUTS AND THE EAGLE’S DIVE

  Pontneuf’s account of the events that took place in 1247 was long, rambling, and melodramatic. Lucas could not know to what degree his story of the Cathar flight from Mélissac varied in detail from those given to other members of the community, since after reading his personal copy that day, he never saw it again.

  After he had finished reading, Lucas fell asleep in his chair, slumped forward over the table. He was still sleeping, his head resting on the manuscript, when the door to his room was unlocked once more and a young woman came in, carrying a tray of food. She greeted him pleasantly, placed the tray on the table, and departed immediately, leaving the door ajar. It was a relief not to be locked in, but Lucas expected another visit from his chief captor. Sure enough, Pontneuf arrived shortly afterwards and led him out of the room, down a corridor, and outside into warm sunshine. This time the priest was unattended by any strongmen. He led Lucas to a stone bench at the edge of the village square. They sat down.

  “I have just left your friend Nuria,” Pontneuf began. “She is in excellent spirits and you will see her shortly, after she has bathed and eaten. I need to talk with you first, however, and must apologize for keeping you waiting. No doubt you’re impatient for the truth. But the truth can be hard to accept sometimes, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lucas chose not to respond to this inanity.

  “Does the name Arthur Guirdham mean anything to you?”

  Lucas shook his head in the negative.

  “Guirdham was a psychiatrist who practised in the west of England. In the early 1960s he was consulted by a young woman who had, over a period of years, displayed curious symptoms of displacement and anxiety. She claimed to have suffered from terrible dreams, witnessing, among other things, a burning at the stake. Under hypnosis he found that his patient spoke a variety of Occitan, which, as you know, is the language of Languedoc. Guirdham’s investigations led him to the belief that a link of some kind existed between a group of Cathars from thirteenth-century Languedoc, one of whom, at least, had been reincarnated in a quiet and prosperous region of rural England. He found himself increasingly drawn to this patient’s story, and her precise recollections of thirteenth-century life. He did some research, confirming not only the veracity of her story, but his own role within that story. Eventually he came to accept that he, too, had been a Cathar in a previous life, and that his encounter with this patient had to a large degree been dictated by the events of their past lives. Did you know that the Cathars believed in reincarnation?”

  Lucas admitted that he barely knew who the Cathars were, other than from the potted history he had read in Pontneuf’s pretty manuscript.

  “Permit me to give you some background,” continued Pontneuf, apparently oblivious to sarcasm.

  “The Cathars believed that an ordinary believer, or credens, was subject to innumerable reincarnations, until he or she attained a state of perfection, and would be absolved from further incarnation. The perfecti, or spiritual leaders of Catharism, had by definition achieved this state, and they led by example. Virtuous lives, no meat, sexual abstinence. The ascetic virtues of self-denial.”

  Lucas stared hard at Pontneuf as he talked. There was little doubt that the priest considered himself as falling into this latter category.

  “Guirdham’s findings, although fascinating, are by no means unique. There have been several instances of Cathars being reborn en groupe, as it were. I have made it my business over many years to find this out, and to check the evidence. I have concluded that some groups of believers, notably those who were about to face death at the stake, made a covenant among themselves to meet again in a future life. Perhaps doubting their attainment of perfect status, they aspired towards a collective re-birth in a future when their faith might be better tolerated. Guirdham’s patient, and Guirdham himself, as far as we can establish, formed the nexus of one such group, though his conclusions have been condemned by some as little more than wish-fulfilment and transference. I met the man. I have no doubts as to his integrity and admire his scrupulous refusal to dismiss his patient’s claims in the way that many of his medical colleagues would have done. I myself have come across three other cases in the past twenty years which I can vouch for, including groups of between three and seven reincarnated Cathars. And this brings us to our present community, which constitutes the fifth, and I believe most significant case of multiple reincarnation.

  “I say the most significant case not out of any vanity, you understand—because I discovered its component elements myself—but because of the records compiled by the Inquisition, relating to its leader, Bernard Rocher. We know that their accounts were thorough and meticulous, detailing their interviews with hundreds of Cathar suspects. However, the records which remain intact and public, compiled in the cloisters of Saint Sernin, are not the only ones in existence. I have discovered manuscripts which have been kept in secret for seven and a half centuries, and are not even in the vaults of the Vatican.”

  Here a conspiratorial note of the successful police evader was apparent in Pontneuf’s voice: the discovery of these allegedly hidden manuscripts must have signalled a victory of particular importance for him.

  “Rocher,” he continued, “was a man of unquestionable eminence among the Cathar perfecti. He had, like other Cathar leaders, been trained as a priest in the Roman faith: he attended a seminary in his home town, continued his studies in Salamanca, and came from a noble and privileged family, related by blood to the kings of Aragon. He is said to have converted to the Cathar faith after spending three years travelling around Italy with a group of lepers, dressed in rags, and living long periods in the wild, sustained by fungi, herbs and roots. Nothing, I’ll grant you, too unusual by the extraordinarily rigorous measures of the medieval epoch. He was known as “the leper monk,” but the Inquisition’s papers insist that he was not leprous himself, apart from (as the Inquisitors insisted) in a spiritual sense. His failure to contract the illness after such a long spell among a contagious cohort was deemed by Cathar believers to be miraculous, and by the Catholics as evidence of his tryst with satanic forces. The Catholics also spread the idea that he gained his sexual pleasures from sodomising young leper boys. These inventive asides, however, were probably inserted at a later stage, when the telling of his story necessitated such unseemly details.

  “Rocher was an idealist, perhaps a kind of primitive communist. The era, as I’m sure you know, was strewn with such figures, from Francis of Assisi to John of Leiden. What made Rocher different was the evident fear he inspired in his enemies. Converts flocked to the Cathar faith when he preached. He managed to escape from Montségur at the height of the siege in 1244. All the other perfecti solemnly agreed to go to the stake, but on condition that Rocher be saved at all cost. He was considered indispensable to the successful outcome of the Cathar cause. And among the papal ministry there developed a belief that if he could not be captured and killed, then his name and deeds must be obliterated from history. That, I was able to conclude from my research, is why his name does not appear in any extant manuscripts. He has been airbrushed from the history of the period.

  “I discovered some interesting facts about Rocher. I learned of his parents, his upbringing in the Toulousain, his education. I retraced the steps he had taken, visiting places where he had been. I began to acquire a sense of the presence of the man. After several years, wherever I trod I found the shadow of Rocher. Obscure and remarkable synchronicities began to permeate my life. On a more mundane level, I might offer some of the facts. The composite numbers of our years of birth, 1187 and 1943, both add up to seventeen, the precise number
of exiles, fourteen laypersons and three perfecti, who left the village of Mélissac that May morning in 1247. Perhaps the forgotten science of numerology does not impress you, but bear in mind that for centuries before our grossly literalistic era, the skills of the mathematician would have been considered worthless unless explanatory; that is, unless linked to the magical properties of numbers.

  “Rocher has been my guiding light and master; or else he would have been, had I envisaged him as an individual distinct from myself. But for many years now I have believed that I am Rocher, and have a simple destiny to fulfil: the founding of a world religion based on Cathar principles. Our community here contains the seed of that vision.”

  Pontneuf was in his stride now, his eyes bright with a sense of mission, with the single story that governed his life. His was a remarkable rhetorical presence. Although evidently well-rehearsed, his account was delivered as if for the first time. He was a preacher preaching the faith as well as the storyteller and protagonist of his own fantastical theatre. He was in the process of fulfilling a potential that very few achieve: of fashioning a new world entirely in accordance with his own convictions.

  “That disappearance of the seventeen Cathars in May 1247 became the focus of my life. What had happened to them? Was there a traitor among their number? If so, who was it? Moyet, whose family was to provide sanctuary for them in Spain? Gasc, the pantheistic shepherd? Or one of the others, payrolled by the Inquisition, who may have led them into an ambush? Had they been pursued, hunted down and killed? If so, why is there no record of the fact in the documentation of this period? Did they walk, hand in hand, over a precipice and into some Pyrenean abyss? If so, no remains have ever been found which would correspond with such an outcome. Were they then captured by aliens, or otherwise abducted by extraterrestial forces? Yes, I will admit, the possibility did cross my mind, fleetingly. But, alas, I do not believe in such things.”

  He uttered these last words in a tone of mock regret, then added, “I do however believe in the unwavering call of destiny.”