by Richard Gwyn
“The heretics have fled.”
“As they would. Heretics flee. Inquisitors pursue. Soldiers pillage.”
“And loot.”
“Nothing much to loot here.”
There was not. I headed for the council hall and looked inside the anteroom where I had been prepared for the trial. There was nothing there.
In the centre of the square lay a wide circle of ash, the remains of the bonfire that had been intended for me. In Pontneuf’s office, books, files, even the rugs from the floor, had been taken. This all suggested a thorough evacuation planned over time, which meant, beyond any doubt, that Pontneuf had always intended to quit the site on completion of his task there: my trial and execution. The members of his community had no doubt been packing away their few possessions and cleaning the property while I was still imprisoned in the cellar.
“Anything wrong?” asked Eugenia.
“This whole place gives me the creeps,” I answered, “but I want to look downstairs.”
The door to the cellar was also unlocked. I led the way down steep steps, and into the corridor. Hearing the echo of our footsteps down the passage reminded me of the only sound I had heard during the long days and nights of my imprisonment. It was dark, and once I had found a light switch, it did not work. Then I remembered that the generator would probably still be out of action. I flicked on my cigarette lighter and scanned the interior of my cell, but there was nothing there for me except unwanted memories. I explained to Eugenia that this was the room in which I had been kept captive.
“Qué asco!” was Eugenia’s single comment.
“How vile, indeed,” mused Igbar. “Most definitely Dumas.”
There was another room at the end of the corridor, with a bed and mattress. A French porn magazine lay on the floor beside the bed; the only evidence of a lapse in the otherwise immaculate withdrawal of Pontneuf’s troops.
Outside, Eugenia and I followed tyre-tracks through the mud for a kilometre or so. The vehicles had taken a route northward from the settlement, heading for a breach in the mountains that led towards France. Once we could see where the tracks led, it seemed pointless following them further. Returning to the Refuge, Igbar was wading through the ashes left by the bonfire. This wrecked any chances of getting the police involved: they couldn’t carry out a forensic report on such sullied evidence. I had begun to feel depressed, and while I appreciated Eugenia and Igbar coming along to keep me company, I now wanted nothing more than to be alone.
We drove back to Barcelona and Eugenia at first attempted to make conversation, but soon gave up, as I had turned silent. Igbar snored in the back. We stopped for coffee in Berga and I apologised to Eugenia for my sullen mood. She sighed and said she understood, but she did not.
The next two weeks saw the slow return of Barcelona to its routine swing after the dead heat of August, but September brought no news of Nuria or her whereabouts. I longed for her with what amounted to a physical pain, and was tormented by her words to me when we had last spoken, promising one another that we would meet up as soon as we could. She had no reason to say that, unless she had meant it. Each day without news from her deepened my anxiety, until I realised I was leading my life solely in expectation of some kind of contact. Anger and frustration gave way to a sense of gloomy desperation.
I could not summon the slightest inclination to return to paid employment, and although I was aware that my savings were dwindling, I dropped unsteadily into a state of inertia, self-pity and sloth. It was pathetic testimony to the hollowness that I had encountered within myself during and immediately after my time at the Refuge. I did not dwell on my shortcomings however, but became immersed in a wilful intoxication with whatever the city had to offer. I stayed out at night, wandering from bar to bar, sometimes in the company of friends such as Zoff and Hogg, more often with people I met on the night. As well as drinking continuously whenever I was awake, I indulged freely in an eclectic range of narcotics and psychotropics. I managed a couple of desultory one-night-stands with women I met in nightclubs, but realised as soon as the alcohol and drugs wore off that I was only pursuing shadows of Nuria, and could not wait until my new partners were gone from sight. A third encounter involved someone who, in my befuddled state, I took to be a woman, but turned out to be a person with a large penis as well as spectacular breasts. Illuminated by a silver nitrate moon, which beamed directly through the window of my bedroom, the hermaphrodite’s glorious and hallucinogenic body inspired me with wonder, but no immediate desire to touch. Nor could its owner arouse me, though whether this was due to frigidity on my part or simply the fault of chemicals raging in my blood, I could not be sure. We compromised with cups of coffee and a joint on the veranda while Paolo/Paola told me his/her life story in lively Brazilian-accented Spanish, and then left to seek out a more fulfilling relationship elsewhere.
One particularly sodden evening I even called up Fina, my ex-girlfriend, with the intention of angling for some kind of sexual encounter, but she hung up on me as soon as she realised who was on the line.
Occasionally, I spoke on the phone with Eugenia, but she and I had always based our friendship on mutual confidences and shared meals, innocent of deceit, and we had joked together that even if she had not been a lesbian we would have been unwilling to compromise that friendship for the sake of a physical relationship. However, our visit to the Refuge and my late-night calls to her began to put a strain even on that valuable friendship. Eugenia’s practical suggestion that a return to work might at least salvage some self-respect seemed to me to cloak a reprimand. During one such call we arranged to meet the following evening in the Plaça Reial. It was a Saturday night that belied the oncome of autumn, after a solitary day of warm sunshine, and everyone, it seemed, had taken to the streets. I had been similarly heartened by this change in the weather, and, rising late, had even felt inspired to pick up the guitar for the first time since my return to the city. After an afternoon spent undisturbed, loafing and reading, my torpor had diminished sufficiently for me to take a walk, making my way unhurriedly across the barrio in the direction of the Ramblas. Taking a left off Ferran, I wandered into Plaça Reial and sat in a cushioned aluminum chair.
Even those who have never been to Barcelona suspect that such a place as Plaça Reial exists. It boasts some up-market cafés and night-spots now, suggesting a degree of gentrification, but still retains a shadow of lingering depravity for which it was once renowned. I was staring at the beautiful lamp standards that dominate the centre of the square, designed by Gaudí and decorated with the insignia of Hermes, when Eugenia joined me shortly after nine. Almost at once she expressed concern about the way I was leading my life. The air of thoughtful abstraction that I had been attempting to cultivate while waiting at the café did not convince her, and she announced that I had begun to look like an irredeemable degenerate. This was hardly perspicacious, but to my annoyance, she added to the unwelcome insight by suggesting a retreat at a Buddhist centre she sometimes visited, near Narbonne. My irritation must have been more obvious than I intended, and my evasiveness was apparent even to myself.
“I know you’re trying to help. But personal oblivion has its attractions, and consciousness frightens me, because I keep making connections with all the things that happened over the summer. I see Pontneuf’s agents lurking on street corners. In bars, pretending to read the newspaper. A part of me knows they’re probably nothing of the kind, but sometimes I’m not so sure. A stranger looks at me suspiciously and that’s enough to drive me into hiding for days.”
As I should have known, Eugenia did not accommodate to this kind of talk.
“If that’s really where you are, you should do something about it. Not let your world disintegrate around you. I’ve been worried about you, you silly boy. You hardly ever call me, and when you do you’re usually incoherent. I realise you had this big upset in the summer, but perhaps it’s time to put that aside, leave it behind. Put yourself into something else. Remember, i
n the spring, you offered to write something for the catalogue of my exhibition in Madrid next year? Have you given that another thought? I know I’m thinking of myself here also, but it might give you a chance to get out of this mess.”
I nodded. It was true that I had been enthusiastic about the commission at the time she had suggested it. But that seemed like an aeon ago, and right now the prospect of any kind of creative work filled me with panic. I told her this. I was simply unable to concentrate on anything while consumed by my quest for Nuria.
“I don’t know where to begin looking. I guess they all went over the border into France. And since I never knew who the other people up there really were—they had made-up names based on their Cathar identities—there’s no way of tracing them. Pontneuf’s done just what he originally claimed his bunch of Cathars did in the thirteenth century—vanished into thin air.”
“So. Precisely my point. They’ve disappeared. You can pretend they never existed. An illusion, a bad dream. So, as they say, get a life, start something new.”
“Nuria existed.”
“Okay, Nuria existed. But not as the person you imagined her to be. You created her over those two or three weeks here in Barcelona. And then you found out that she was not the person you thought her to be. You have to un-create her.”
“But that last day up at the Refuge, she helped me to escape. I honestly felt she had changed back into the person I had known before.”
“It could have been part of the act. Can’t you see, Lucas? The whole thing was probably scripted. And Nuria was a part of it. The trial itself was a ploy, a trick. The guy who fixed the generator, Zaco, did it with Pontneuf’s connivance. And when you ran off into the night they didn’t come after you with lights and dogs and guns, did they? They were never going to burn you alive.”
“But why go to all that trouble? It’s ludicrous. You can’t tell me that the whole thing was set up in order to give me some kind of a weird experience, or to give Pontneuf a thrill. Like some psychological experiment gone wildly off-beam. Are you serious?”
“You’re the one who’s intent on attaching a specific explanation to it,” she said. “I’m not saying why it all took place, just suggesting that there might be an alternative explanation to what you believe happened up there. A different kind of fiction to the one you’re proposing.”
“You’re saying that my perception of those events is deluded?”
She framed her response carefully. “Let’s imagine,” she started, “that there’s a novelist called Lucas, who has an idea for a book. Not a bad idea, good enough for him to get started on it. It describes his life in a modern city, his falling in love with a young woman, and their subsequent abduction by a crazed cult. His story takes a shift of direction, however, when we learn that the abduction wasn’t really what it appeared to be, but that the girl was compliant with the abduction all along. It becomes a tale of betrayal and paranoia. This serves the fiction well: the cult happens to believe certain things about a medieval religious group and reincarnation, and our hero begins to half-believe them himself. His lover is already committed, has been ever since she fell under the cult leader’s influence years before. Let’s also imagine, let’s pretend, that parallel to the writing of his story, the novelist Lucas happens to meet and fall in love with a young woman and is unsure that his feelings towards her are as fully reciprocated as he would like. He therefore begins to insert his doubts into the story he is writing. At the same time he imputes characteristics typical of his fictional heroine to the girl that he, Lucas, has fallen in love with; and characteristics of his real-life lover begin to infiltrate the person of his fictional heroine. The elements of betrayal and paranoia already implicit in the plot are compounded by more sinister developments. What is more, the cult’s leader is revealed to be quite insane, and possibly murderous. But the novelist can’t let go of the possibility that the girl he has met in the real world might turn out to be the love of his life, so he has his fictional heroine help his protagonist to escape. However, once he’s escaped, and returned to the city, his character is filled with feelings of desperation and loss. He pines for the fictional heroine, just as the novelist Lucas pines for the girl he met one day in an art gallery. The rest you know. You’re living it.” Eugenia shrugged. “As I say, it’s your life. And at the moment you’re making—what is it in English?—a dog’s breakfast of it. I don’t think my interpretation is such a bad one. And it gets you out of a fix.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“How so?”
“Because I don’t believe in it.”
As for Eugenia’s suggestion that I go on some kind of retreat, I recoiled. Religion, I said, was the last thing I needed just now. I would, I said, with the stupefying logic of the obsessed, prefer to carry on as I was and see where that took me.
Where it took me was downwards and in upon myself in ever-diminishing spirals. I was tracing the rough edges of the soul’s Sahara, and could not resist the pull towards its scorched and barren centre. I was overcome by a debilitating sense of absence. Of absence and being absent. When in company I would begin sentences and fall into silence after only a few words, having lost the thread that connected language with mental function. I would wander from room to room in my flat, looking for things which I was either carrying in my hand or had just put down on the table in front of me. My sleep pattern went hay-wire, sleeping either not at all for days on end—fuelled with cocktails of cocaine, amphetamines and alcohol—or else spending days under a blanket, getting up only to replenish my supply of drink. Since I would awaken at odd hours, days and nights lost their defining characteristics and I began to inhabit a perpetual twilight. I stopped buying and cooking food. On the rare occasions when I did leave the flat, I often ended up in places I had no intention of going when I had set off. My feet would lead me away from Santa Caterina in spite of my dread of bringing some unforeseeable catastrophe down on myself. As the autumn settled in, with winds blasting down from the north, I ventured out less and less.
18. THE FIRE-EATER
Every few days I would become incredibly hungry, and because I could no longer bear to cook for myself, would head for one of two or three cheap restaurants in the barrio which I visited by turn. Among these was Santiago’s place in Neu de Sant Cugat. One early afternoon in October, when the morning’s rain had been blown inland by the wind, I decided to go there to eat, having spent a bad night with persistent sweats, rising late to try and fend off the (by now daily) onslaught of the shakes by downing a litre of red wine. Finishing the wine, I immediately felt hungry and decided to go out to eat, but having lately sensed an attitude of disapproval in the Galician who owned the nearest restaurant, I opted for Santiago.
As I approached the abandoned building in Assaonadors daubed with yellow crosses, I noticed a figure hunched on the low stone steps leading up to the door. A thick matted thatch of dirty-blond hair resembling a coarse rug poked out through a blanket. From somewhere inside the hair came a voice asking me for a few duros, a little change. When I slowed my step, puzzling out the exact configuration of this human shape, it shook its hair, revealing itself to be the reckless fire-eater whom I had seen that evening in May when I first met Nuria. Simple association with that distant day lent the man special privileges, so I dug into my pockets for some loose change.
I dropped the coins into his outstretched hand and he muttered a brief word of thanks. I stood unsteadily in front of him. By stopping walking, I had suddenly become aware of the precarious status of my sense of balance, and of anything approaching sobriety in my own demeanour. I also recognized, to my surprise, that I was desperate to conjure an exchange of some kind with this vagrant.
“So, fire-eater,” I began slowly, as though waiting for the words to formulate themselves rather than rushing them towards anything as conclusive as a meaningful utterance. “We meet again.”
The beggar blinked up at me, without a glimmer of recognition. I felt myself to be oddly advantag
ed by this. My tone became celebratory, and almost vindictive.
“You told me once that you knew me. You knew me. And clearly not in a Biblical sense.” It was a pathetic joke. “But now,” I continued, glimpsing the sudden and unwanted mental turmoil that I was inflicting on him, “I know who you are, while you, evidentemente, have not the monkey’s arse of an idea who I might be. Correct?”
The fire-eater nodded glumly, nonplussed. Perhaps he was waiting for a punchline, after which I would, with any luck, disappear, and he could slope off to buy wine with his earnings. But the unexpected meeting had for some reason planted a seed in the inner recesses of what remained of my mind. I saw the fire-eater as yet another link, a cipher in my quest for the Truth.
I gave him some background.
“Granada, let’s say three years ago? This spring, here in Barcelona, I forget the name of the square. You are a symptom of perpetual return. But whose? Yours? Mine? Who knows? What I mean to say is, you confirmed the prognosis of a May evening. You sniffed out my dreamy lust for her. I in turn smelled the promise of her juices on your rancid breath, along with petrol fumes. You sought me out, dog-man, though you don’t remember. I am now doing the same to you. Tit for tat. Trouble is, the one doing the seeking is always barely conscious. Hardly makes for purposeful interaction, do you think?”
The beggar was trying, with some effort, to stand up, probably with a view towards escaping this madman’s diatribe. But while I sensed in him this imperative for flight, now that I had my prey within my grasp I was not about to let him go that easily.
“Hey, mister sniffer dog, where’s your doggy mask? And where do you think you’re going? I was just getting started. Renewing a friendship. Let’s talk of old times. Have you seen a ghost? Or just lost your nerve? Is that why you’re not out there doing the dragon stuff?”
