The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  “Ignoramus,” Igbar interjected. “Just a story? Any story is just a story. What makes one any more just a story than another?”

  “A true story,” responded Sean, “is not just a story. This one has lurched through too many tests of plausibility to merit the epithet ‘true.’ Lucas is even giving us a range of narrative styles. He’s obviously pissing us about. That’s why he insists on referring to himself in the third person. A true story,” he repeated, with drugged determination, “isn’t just some screwball therapy session for unrequited love. A true story is a true story.”

  “A mindless pleonasm, peasant. No story is any truer than any other to the receptive mind.”

  “Oh, fuck’s sake, you two: grow up,” said Susie Serendipity.

  Sean looked up and caught a mosquito in his hand, wiping the residue of the insect on his jeans.

  “Little bastards,” he said.

  Eugenia sighed, shifting her position on the mattress.

  “Famous little bastards of history,” mumbled Igbar to himself, before taking a lungful from the pipe. The atmosphere on the terrace was transformed into one evocative of a Bangkok opium den: pungent, sharp, sweet and resinous.

  I finished my drink and lay back in the hammock, accepting a fresh pipe from Sean.

  “And then?” said Eugenia.

  “There’s not a lot to say,” I said. “I managed to escape from the Refuge, under cover of darkness. They sent out a Land Rover after me but I headed for the woods, unbound my wrists, and followed a track down the mountain. By the morning I had reached a village, got a lift to Berga, then a bus back to Barcelona. I left a message for you, Eugenia.”

  Eugenia nodded. “And how about Nuria? Didn’t you arrange to meet her back here?”

  “Assuming she could get away, yes. We didn’t exactly arrange anything. But coming home, I was out of my mind with worry. I felt like a refugee returning to the bombed-out remains of a previous life. I’d half-expected the place to be ransacked but as far as I could tell there had been no break-in and all my stuff—papers, books and music collection—was as I’d left it. The answerphone was jammed, of course. I sat on the bed and began to panic. Here I was, safe and comfortable, while Nuria, for all I knew, was facing some horrendous punishment for aiding and abetting my escape. In spite of her assurances that Pontneuf wouldn’t harm her, I was unconvinced. I felt as though, after all, I had been the one who’d betrayed her, and that by not going to the police at the first opportunity, perhaps in the village where I’d been that morning, I had put her life in danger. But she had told me not to go to the police. I didn’t know what to do. So I went scouting around her old flat, and that’s where I bumped into Zoff and Hogg. In Poble Sec.”

  Across the narrow alley in the next block of flats, a neighbour was strumming a guitar. A song of intimate despair carried towards us before stopping abruptly, as though the singer had forgotten the remaining words.

  I glanced at my audience. Susie was stretching on the mattress, Sean shaking his head and looking up at me awkwardly.

  “A most unlikely confabulation, if you ask me.”

  “Nobody did,” said Susie Serendipity.

  Eugenia said she had to leave but would call me soon. As I showed her out, she made no reference to my story, even though she had known more than any of the others about my romance with Nuria. She seemed unusually pensive.

  Igbar, by contrast, was ebullient and, proclaiming that the night was still young, was set to celebrate whatever came to mind: my escape from Pontneuf’s pyre, his spontaneous proposal of marriage to Susie Serendipity (rejected), the sale of another painting (yet to be transacted), or whatever other possible justification presented itself. The promise of the mescaline was tempting, but I was not sure my already-beleagured brain could have coped with such a demanding hallucinogen, especially if it involved, as seemed likely, a night of barcrawling and the inevitable accompanying chaos. Besides, I was weary, and so ushered Igbar and Sean on their way. Susie left with them.

  The next day I decided to visit the church of Santa María del Mar. It had always been my favourite among Barcelona’s many churches, and I felt anonymous but undiminished sitting for an hour under its massive arches and high vaulted roof. Why this place might mark the beginning of my quest for Nuria I did not know, but I was convinced that any systematic investigation was going to lead me nowhere. I had to rely on chance, or serendipity, on simply awaiting promptings from the unseen and the impalpable.

  Returning home, I paced the floor of my flat, flustered and frustrated by this impasse. Nuria’s assertion that we would find one another, somehow, seemed a shallow promise given the absence of any trace of her in the city where she had lived. I decided to try and call her family home, finding the number in directory enquiries.

  Nuria’s mother sounded anxious and suspicious. I spent a while reassuring her with a representation of myself that was at once concerned but non-predatory. I claimed to be a friend of Nuria’s from her London days who had visited Barcelona only to find she no longer lived at her old address. I exaggerated an English accent to this effect. I had known her family lived in Maçanet, and was calling to see if they had any news of her whereabouts. After various false starts and many questions about me, she eventually burst into tears, telling me, huskily, that she had not heard from Nuria for nearly three years and that if I found her, to please ask her to get in touch with her as a matter of urgency. I was, she said, to tell her that she was forgiven for the things that they had argued about in the past, and that she hoped Nuria could forgive her mother for the terrible things she had said.

  I might have sounded sober enough to convince Nuria’s mother of my good character, but no longer wanted to be. I had finished the last of the brandy with breakfast and so went down to the general store on the street corner to buy another bottle. While there I wandered through the market, bought some fresh anchovies and picked up a copy of El País from the kiosk, although I had no desire to read the newspaper. Simply buying a paper lent an aspect of normality to my actions, however spurious.

  Back in the flat I prepared the anchovies, dusted them with flour, and fried them in oil. Leaving the fish to cook, I made a salad and cut some bread. Then, just as I started to eat, there was a knock at the door. Barefoot and wearing only shorts, I crossed the studio to see who was there. It was Manu, my neighbour, leaning indolently against the door-jamb, a Ducados poking from his mouth. He greeted me as though we had last spoken only the previous day, rather than ten weeks earlier, and invited me to join him on the patio.

  Bringing my plate and piling another with the remaining fish for Manu, I followed him onto the back patio, explaining my long absence by saying I had been working in London. As soon as Manu picked at the food and began to speak, I braced myself for a further installation in the Saga of the Rabbits, which was still not concluded, in spite of an ongoing flow of threatening letters from the Municipal Health Authorities. Manu was by turns melancholic and belligerent, and it was evident that he too had been suffering his traumas since we last spoke.

  “And to make matters worse,” he confided, seated on an upturned crate next to his shed, offering me the relative comfort of a broken deck-chair, “to make matters worse, we have poachers.”

  An interesting term to use in an urban context.

  “Not regularly. I can’t pretend the thieving bastards have decimated my stock, but a couple go missing every week or so. And it’s definitely people, not cats.”

  I didn’t mention the visit from Ric, Fionnula and Ninja boy. Manu would no doubt regard it as an act of betrayal on my part if I had told him that I’d let them get away with two of his rabbits without protest. But I was curious to know whether he had heard anything, then or at any other time.

  “They say,” I began, disingenuously, “that there’s a group of kids who live out on the roofs…”

  Manu interrupted before I could finish. “You’ve heard this too? If they’re homeless, God knows, I wouldn’t deny them a r
abbit or two for the pot. Rather them than the sons of whores at City Hall exterminate the lot with a court order.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Shit, all kinds of stuff.” Manu scratched himself vigorously. “One person tells you one thing, another something else. I’ve never seen or heard a thing. I even spent a night up here with the shotgun in July, but I got too comfortable and went to sleep.”

  He straightened himself on his crate. More scratching. Manu had been drinking but was not drunk. He was never exactly drunk: his lassitude, his prime defining characteristic, merely became more pronounced the further he was from a state of sobriety.

  “Manu, do you have crabs?”

  “Joder, it’s a possibility.”

  “You should have yourself checked out. And you never told me you had a shotgun.”

  “It’s a secret. I don’t have a licence.”

  “What do you keep it for?”

  “Intruders.” I pondered for a moment the notion of Manu as armed vigilante, squat and pot-bellied in his stained vest and crumpled shorts, fag askew in his mouth, an ancient shotgun poised. It was an improbable image.

  “But when you came up here you fell asleep, right?”

  “Pues…no sé. Not straight away. I was kind of…resting. I wasn’t going to shoot anyone. I just wanted to give them a fright. The gun was for self-defence.”

  “But you didn’t find anything out.”

  “Not exactly nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It, uh, gives me shame to speak of it.”

  He waited a moment, then added confidentially, “I’ve told no one this, you understand?”

  “It’s all right, Manu. Secrecy assured. Word of honour.”

  I could see he was steeling himself against my ridicule.

  “Well, it’s simple. They came that night. I waited up for them and went to sleep.”

  “So while you lay snoring in your deck-chair, shotgun in your arms, they stole your rabbits?”

  “Oy, hombre; you mock me. This is not a mocking matter. Your word of honour, remember?”

  He was only half joking. I bit my lip.

  “So what did they do while you were sleeping?”

  “How the fuck do I know? Flamenco dancing on my co-jones for all I’m aware. Maybe that’s how I got the crabs. If I have the crabs. But whatever else they did, they stole two rabbits and left that thing in the cage.”

  Here he waved his hand at the door of the shed. I hadn’t noticed before then, but nailed to the door by its oversize ears was a child’s soft toy: a grey rabbit wearing dungarees and a lopsided grin. I suppressed my laughter. Pinned up in that way, the rabbit resembled some kind of juju talisman, as if warding off all who would enter the rabbit-shed.

  “And,” he continued, “they stuck a flower, a carnation, in the barrel of my gun.”

  I smiled. “That’s nice,” I said. I could picture Fionnula, the girl with multiple piercings and the snub nose, enjoying that moment.

  “Nice?” roared Manu. “They made me look like a fool. Whose side are you on anyway? Damn hippies.”

  “So they left you the cuddly bunny to replace the live ones, and you crucified it on the door. Was this meant to keep them away?”

  A long pause.

  “I thought it may have that effect, but they’ve been back twice since.”

  “Oh. And taken more rabbits?”

  “Yeah, but like I said, I don’t mind that so much. It was being outsmarted that riled me.”

  I reflected that outsmarting Manu was not an arduous task.

  “And what’s new with the civic authorities? Why haven’t they taken the rabbits away if they’re a threat to health and safety? It’s months since you had the first letter.”

  “Ah, you know. Letters might get written, but nothing ever gets done around here for two months in the summer. I have a court summons tomorrow week and I’ll turn up, guns blazing. Maybe you could come along. I’d appreciate that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s no problem. Just remind me of the date nearer the time.”

  “To tell the truth I’m sick of it all, the whole story. Sick of the rabbits, even. It’s a matter of principle now though.”

  So, I thought, he doesn’t mind the night raiders eating his rabbits but doesn’t like to be outwitted. He has accepted that the city will almost certainly confiscate and destroy his rabbits, but will fight the case on principle. Here was a man driven by a very definite code of what was what: something I seemed to lack, in spite of my recent experiences. Perhaps I simply didn’t care enough to care at all.

  We sat on the roof for a while, and when after half an hour Manu went downstairs for his siesta, I returned to my own flat and settled on the hammock.

  Two days later I rented a car and drove to Berga with Eugenia and Igbar. I suppose I should have been more careful: perhaps I should have informed the police after all, reported Nuria missing and made the trip with a police escort. After all, these people had threatened my life. But at first I only intended spying on the Refuge from a distance, as if to reassure myself that it really existed. In the forty-eight hours that followed my account of the abduction and imprisonment, I had come close to convincing myself that I had dreamed the whole thing up. I was suffering from an irrational belief that no matter how long I explored the area, I would never be able to find the Refuge again. So I bought a large-scale map and identified where I thought it must be: a huddle of tiny rectangles on the edge of a high plateau.

  Igbar, who had chosen to dress like a pimp for this excursion to the mountains, nominated himself as navigator, but after a couple of inventive detours in search of a hostelry that might provide “breakfast,” he was replaced in the front seat by Eugenia. Igbar resigned himself to smoking a succession of thin joints in the back of the car and demanding pit-stops for liquid refreshment.

  A half-hour’s climb beyond Berga, nothing about the landscape was remotely familiar. We made a wrong turning up a mud-track, leading to a lake that didn’t correspond with anything on my map, and then returned to the main road, where a village was signposted, nestling behind a clump of hills. We drove into the village square and parked by the church, opposite the only bar, which advertised a menú del día.

  “That’s the ticket,” said Igbar. “A hostelry.” He implored Eugenia. “A spot of lunch? A jug of wine and thou?”

  “We have the time?” She looked at me.

  “We have the time. It would be good to eat.”

  “Time. Yes. Is good to eat,” blathered Igbar.

  In the small bar the plump, eager landlady ushered us past solitary drinkers and a blaring television to a windowless backroom. One table was occupied by a group of local men, who took their time surveying us as we sat down. The rest of the dining area was empty.

  Towards the end of our meal Eugenia began chatting in Catalan with the men at the next table and steered the conversation discreetly towards the object of our search. However, fortified by a second bottle of wine, the importance of the oblique approach in village affairs was lost on Igbar. He launched himself towards the neighbouring table and demanded outright the whereabouts of the Refuge, fixing the men with a bleary stare. He swayed over their table, grey hair sticking on end, eyes bloodshot with ganja, splendid in his off-white linen suit, black shirt, and a bright red and white polka-dot kipper tie.

  “We’re looking for a castle where unspeakable things have taken place,” he slurred in Spanish, and leaned heavily on the table. “A place with dungeons dark and deep, run by the heretic Pontneuf.”

  The silence that greeted this did not prevent Igbar from continuing. To my annoyance, he was indicating me, with a generous sweep of the hand. “This man of wretched appearance was taken captive and tortured at a property near here. A heinous and pusillanimous act of cowardice.”

  Igbar dug his hands deep into the pockets of his linen jacket. The Catalans looked at him warily. Igbar was out on a limb here. I sensed impending disaster.
One of the men, a hirsute mountain type, leaned towards Eugenia and myself and raised his hands in a request for explanation. I made the universal gesture for insanity and indicated Igbar with a pitiful expression. The man grabbed Igbar by the shoulder and steered him back into his chair, drew up his own, and introduced himself. Although he knew of the Refuge, he hadn’t been there in many years, certainly not since the land had been bought by Pontneuf.

  In turn, Eugenia explained that she was a journalist working on a story about cults. She produced a press card she had acquired from one of her contacts, which seemed to convince him. Eugenia was good to travel with. The man turned out to be affable enough behind the customary Catalan taciturnity, and, over brandy, he gave us clear instructions on how to reach the Refuge.

  Back on the road we found the track, a few kilometres out of the village.

  “There, I squeezed it out of them, what?” said Igbar, stretching out on the back seat. “You need to take a direct approach with these native types.”

  After climbing for half an hour or so, the track levelled out onto the altiplano. I recognised the markers of the now-familiar landscape: the boulder-strewn pasturelands, the forest stretching away below, and the overshadowing presence of the granite peaks. We stopped behind a small ridge a kilometre from the settlement and scoured the landscape with the binoculars Eugenia had brought. The place had been abandoned. None of the vehicles—the two Land Rovers, the white van in which Nuria and I had first been abducted, and a larger truck—were in their accustomed places, and there was not a soul in sight, unless, Cathar-style, you included the animals. Even most of these appeared to have gone, apart from some hens, who ran towards the car when we pulled in. A solitary untethered goat bleated at us from near the entrance to the barn.

  “This the sorcerer’s lair then?” asked Igbar. “A goat, a few chickens. Quite a cheery spot. Chap could retire here. Grow some veg. A little weed. Vino from the valley down below. But where are the bloody heretics?”