by Richard Gwyn
“If the perfecti were exempt from future incarnations, then how come you, or Rocher, as you believe yourself to be, reappeared with the fourteen credentes?”
Pontneuf was completely unfazed.
“A very good question, and one which I would have provided an answer to in due course. But I might as well tell you now. I believe that Rocher, and the other two perfecti, elected to be reincarnated along with their followers. They might even have provided the others with the consolamentum before taking their leap, but that would hardly have been necessary, given the group’s agreement to re-incarnate together. In any case, true Catharism could not have prevailed into the future without Rocher, and the collective will of the group was that they remain together in the next life: they were and are reborn at a more propitious time in history.”
Presuming from his silence that Lucas was unable to respond to this piece of idiosyncratic logic, Pontneuf continued speaking.
“But to return, if we may, to your own role in this. You were a principal target for the fulfilment of our community. I saw you, as I have suggested, for a number of years, before actually tracking you down. I had come close when you lived in the Aude region of course. You kept appearing to me draped in vines, a peculiarly Dionysian vision. You had the kind of vibrant, earthy qualities that I like in a man.”
Lucas winced at this overt flattery.
“I found out later that you were working as an agricultural labourer in the vineyards round Lézignan, good Cathar country, of course. The Dionysian characteristics were rather dominant in your life at that time, I believe. However, I missed you then, and in hindsight I think it was probably a good thing. You settled down emotionally after your move to Barcelona, became a slightly more serious person, despite remaining a proud and self-important atheist.”
Lucas grunted, not wanting to let this taunt provoke him into another loss of temper. It was important for him to gain a balanced and sober understanding of Pontneuf’s peculiar brand of derangement. Besides, the analysis was not inaccurate. He was certainly an atheist, and probably proud. He could afford to let the “self-important” go.
“I discovered some interesting correspondences between you and Raymond,” Pontneuf resumed, “not out of idle curiosity, but because such details provided a kind of evidence in all the other cases of reincarnation that I had uncovered. The matching birthdays, for example, are not consistently verifiable with all our group, but we know that Raymond was born on the twenty-second of July, like you. That date is highly significant in the annals of Cathar history. It is, as you may know, the feast of Mary Magdalene, who held particular importance for some groups of lay Cathars, as it has done over the centuries for other, shall we say, marginal Christian groups. Mary, the first to see the risen Christ; Mary, who loved Jesus in a worldly as well as spiritual sense. She is revered by the gypsies of the Midi to this day. There is even a folk belief that she and Christ fled the Holy Land and settled in southern France.
“Her feast day, however—your birthday—coincides with the two earliest and in some ways most shocking of the slaughters carried out in the crusade against the Cathars by Simon de Montfort and his army of northern mercenaries, at Beziers in 1209 and at Minerve the following year. The odds against these events taking place on the same date in consecutive years are massive. ‘Kill them all: God will recognise his own,’ ordered Bishop Amaury at Beziers, when asked how his troops should distinguish Cathars from Catholics. The blood-letting was immediate and ferocious. The date became etched in the memory of Cathars throughout Languedoc: the most blessed and the most cursed of days.
“Raymond Gasc was thirty-three years old at the time of his disappearance. Like Christ, of course. And like you, at thirty-three years of age he had the opportunity to pass from his old life to his new. And yesterday he fulfilled that miraculous opportunity to rejoin his co-believers in the Cathar faith, when we gave you rebirth as your true self.”
So, thought Lucas, that was the meaning behind the coffin ride, the closing and opening of the lids, the incantations, the sprinkling with water (to help him grow, like a plant, into his new identity?). Pontneuf interjected on this train of thought.
“We are not taking anything from you, merely offering you a truer vision of yourself, the one to which you were born, but have forgotten. The exercise of the night before last was intended to tug at your memory, to find out if there is anything in you that will answer to the name of Raymond Gasc. I know that you and he are one and the same: I can prove it. We might begin with your affinity with animals, something which you have always been dimly aware of, something which you share with Raymond, of course. How domestic animals always seem to find it comfortable to be around you.”
It was true that cats and dogs seemed to like Lucas. In his childhood he had been fond of horses, though he was a little wary of them now, having been thrown on several occasions. But going back, the summers spent on his grandparents’ farm in west Wales, his happiness at being surrounded by the morning activities of milking and tending the cattle and goats; all this would verify Pontneuf’s assertion in some way. He liked birds too; could watch them for hours. But this proved nothing.
“You have become a city-dweller,” continued Pontneuf, “which does not suit you. You have lost touch with that element of yourself which was so clearly drawn in your childhood. And later. Can you not remember how you saved the lambs?”
The words impacted on Lucas like a blow to the solar plexus. He remembered the occasion well. Waiting out in the freezing cold for half the night and most of the following day. He must have been fourteen years old. On the farm near Tregaron. His grandfather, Tad-cu, calling him out of bed at three in the morning. Outside, a blizzard. Driving through the cwm on Tad-cu’s tractor until they were hemmed in by the snow, then trudging through the drifts, the sky and everything around them an otherworld of pulsing white flakes in the tractor’s headlamps. The flock was huddled, terrified, in the top field and Lucas bundled inside a trench-coat that suddenly seemed paper-thin, covering himself and the bleating newborn lambs with a tarpaulin. Lucas was to wait for Tad-cu to come back with help. The morning seemed never to arrive; his watch moved on, but beyond this eerie, mustard-tinged dusk the day did not progress. The lambs were frightened, and burrowed their faces ever deeper under Lucas’s woollen coat, diminishing his own fear. Saving the lambs became his only concern. They formed a little community under the tarpaulin, an oasis of fragile, animal-scented warmth in the total bleakness beyond the improvised tent. When eventually help arrived it was five o’clock, and night again. Lucas was utterly exhausted. But both lambs were alive. He heard the muffled sound of the snow-plough approaching, and then the scatching of the men’s shovels on the surface of their little cavern. He stood unsteadily as the tarpaulin was pulled away, holding the lambs snug beneath his coat. Tad-cu, an undemonstrative man, came towards him, eyes heavy with tears.
Lucas cut off abruptly in his silent re-tracing of the memory.
“Have you been digging up my past? Have you been to Wales and researched me?”
Pontneuf waved his hand dismissively, tut-tutting. As if such a pedantic course of action were necessary!
“I visualised you as a teenager, a very young man, holding lambs beneath an overcoat. Your teeth were chattering in the cold, but you were smiling. You were exhausted. That’s all. You’ve told me the rest yourself.”
So sure of himself. In that instant Lucas both hated and admired him. Here was some evidence that Pontneuf had the powers of visualisation which he claimed to have. But almost immediately Lucas began to have doubts. After all, the older man could, without difficulty, have discovered that Lucas had passed much of his childhood on a farm in Wales. Was it not a reasonable guess that he would have helped out in the kind of situation Pontneuf had described, at least once? And sheep, of course, the inner cynic added: just mention Wales and it’s the first thing many people think of. Lucas decided to test him.
“What else have you visualised conc
erning me?”
Pontneuf hesitated, detecting the scorn in Lucas’s question.
“I know of your musical interests, because I found out about your life, to a limited extent. But through my visualisation of the person I thought of as Raymond Gasc, music was an integral part of the picture I had of you. Raymond used to fashion wooden flutes and whistles, not an unusual pastime for shepherds, but he was also a fine singer and composer of songs. One of his fellow villagers told the Inquisition that his songs were “lewd and lascivious,” which smacks of someone telling the priests what they wanted to hear, that Catharism was a delinquent and subversive sect. But we know enough about the culture of the jongleurs and troubadours to assume that Raymond could still be close to that tradition. This is what you would expect in a rural backwater like Mélissac: last year’s songs. Have you by any chance a disc or tape in your collection of songs composed by the troubadour Peire Vidal?”
“That would not be difficult to establish. Your people have no doubt searched my flat.”
“I do not take you for a fool, and nor would I expect you to do the same for me. The reason I mention this particular troubadour is that many of his songs were current in this period. There is one particular song that Raymond used to sing, according to the Inquisition’s informant. It is called ‘La Trystesse de la Dona Marie.’ Do you know it?”
Lucas nodded his head. He had a recording of Vidal’s music, made by a contemporary French ensemble. “La Trystesse de la Dona Marie” was his favourite song, but he had no recollection of ever telling anybody as much. Furthermore, he had not played the tape for months, if not years. Even if Pontneuf’s knowledge of the existence of the cassette was easily accounted for, his challenge about this particular song was either insightful or simply inexplicable. Once more, Lucas felt acutely uncomfortable.
“Some years ago I heard the same song at a concert of music by a young French group who made a little-known recording on disc. Perhaps you have it, perhaps not. I assure you I have not checked. But you do not have to believe me. The point I want to make is this. The night following the concert I dreamed about you, exactly as you are, in precise physical detail, singing this song, and accompanying yourself on the guitar. It was the first time I was granted a clear image of you. From that point onward my search became easier. I knew what you looked like. I could have pointed you out in a crowded street. I simply had to wait until the appropriate time, when you would make yourself available to us.”
Lucas felt engulfed by a physical sense of shock and displacement, even more pronounced than when Pontneuf had mentioned the lambs. This was quite simply unknowable to anyone but Lucas. He had been alone, sitting in a farm cottage in the Corbières region, drinking wine and playing the guitar. It was night-time. He had just had a bust-up with Pascale, the only one of his French girlfriends with whom a long-term relationship had seemed a likelihood. In fact, it was their differences of opinion on this issue that led to her tearful departure. In typical fashion Lucas found self-pitying comfort in red wine and music, and he had worked out an arrangement of “La Trystesse de la Dona Marie” and played it over and over in accompaniment to his own mournful and inebriated rendering. He could not remember ever singing the song again.
If Pontneuf enjoyed Lucas’s moment of confusion, he was diplomat enough not to show it. He stared at him intently for a short while, then abruptly changed the subject. Lucas was left straining after explanations for this impossible insight into a private and obscure fragment of his life, and was unable to provide one.
“It might be news to you, but there is a considerable interest in the teachings of the Cathars at present,” Pontneuf persisted, indifferent to Lucas’s frantic attempts at self-collection. “Many young people, dissatisfied with orthodox religious practices, have sought alternative ways to express their spiritual cravings. Most of these alternative religions and cults, I’m afraid to say, are simply disastrous. However, my own teachings on Catharism have not gone unnoticed. I have attracted a following among certain groups of young people, even among those who inhabit the rooftops of Barcelona. Those whom you had cause to speak with the other night.”
Although reeling, as he was, from Pontneuf’s previous disclosures, Lucas could acknowledge that this, at least, made sense. It also explained, conclusively, the arrival of the Miró postcard under his door. A scatterbrained collection of dopeheads and petty criminals, street urchins and middle-class dropouts would latch onto the more attractive aspects of Catharism—reincarnation, the relative equality of women and vegetarianism—as easily as a previous generation turned on and tuned into the freewheeling spiritual ecstatics of Timothy Leary.
So why had Pontneuf not chosen a less strenuous way of bringing his religious movement about? Hundreds of others had done so. People will buy into any creed as long as they consider themselves in some way different or elect. Why insist on the veracity of his vision of a nucleus of reincarnated Cathars, which could surely only categorise him in the eyes of the wider world as yet another Messianic loony? And how to reconcile his detailed and convincing psychic insights with this insane wider project?
But that, Lucas realised, was precisely where Pontneuf’s special appeal lay. If he could convince his sixteen contemporary followers of their shared experience in a past life, he was breaking new ground in the annals of religious dissent. And from that starting point, he could insist that the true Cathar flame had never been extinguished, precluding accusations of having cooked up some New Age hotchpotch of ideas for sale to the desperate and disillusioned.
Lucas was by now impressed by this strategy. He began to question his own resistance to the possibility that he was linked to Raymond Gasc and the Cathar movement. He was here, after all, as was Nuria. And he was not resisting as stubbornly as his late-twentieth-century persona wanted him to. He could feel the first stirrings of self-doubt.
He summoned a series of rash and desperate explanations for Pontneuf’s knowledge about him. He must have simply forgotten later performances of that particular song. Pontneuf had hypnotized him that first night. Or one of his agents had, before the abduction. But hypnotism, Lucas knew, required a willing receptor. And a knowledge of his musical tastes did not suffice for Pontneuf having “seen” him sing that song, any more than a knowledge that there were a lot of sheep in Wales could have provided him with the vision of his rescue of the lambs.
Pontneuf got up and moved closer to the crystalline stream. He took off his sandals and stretched his feet into the water. He looked a picture of virtuous serenity: a monk at peace with nature, his God and himself. He rested back on his elbows, lifted his face to the sun, and closed his eyes. A gentle wind blew around them, the kind of wind that at this altitude carries a warning chill. From somewhere out of sight Lucas could hear the mewling of a bird of prey.
But Lucas remembered Nuria, and a long-restrained anger began to simmer. He had been so absorbed in Pontneuf’s metaphysical acrobatics that he had almost forgotten the brutal manner of his and Nuria’s sequestration and imprisonment at the hands of the man in priest’s robes. He realised that he could, if he wished, kill Pontneuf on the spot. A rock raised above the head, a furious release, the crack of a splitting skull. Repeating the action while Pontneuf lay on the ground until his hands became a mess of splintered bone and brain. Never before had Lucas experienced such a spontaneous murderous instinct. It was followed by an onrush of conflicting emotions—uncertainty, fear, guilt—and beneath them that irreparable sense of loss and sadness evoked by remembering the lambs.
Pontneuf’s next comment unsettled Lucas further. Raising himself abruptly on one elbow, he looked at Lucas with concern.
“There is no accounting for the thoughts that assail us at critical moments. At the time of the crusades against the Saracens, the ordinary foot-soldiers, the rabble, believed that the Jerusalem they were being sent to deliver from the heathens was one and the same city as that described by John in his Book of Revelation. A glittering bejewelled city which promis
ed the attainment of eternal bliss. But what they found was squalor, disease and death. Those who returned set in place the mood for change, tentative at first, which would turn the twelfth century into the most radically disquieting in history. Until our own, that is. And it was during this period that the seeds of the Cathar faith were sown. So, you see, expectations of immediate gratification during this lifetime are often premature.”
He sprang to his feet with surprising agility, dusted down his robe, then continued talking.
“The Cathars believed that it took multiple lifetimes to achieve the status of a perfectus. It has usually been assumed that the perfecti were then excused future re-birth. However, to my mind, this is merely a point of dogma. As I think I have explained, there should be no reason why one who has achieved perfect status might not select the option of re-birth, if, for whatever reason, he or she felt that there was unfinished business to attend to. That is why we are here, you and I. Unfinished business.”
14. KATASKAPOS
It was approaching daybreak when I left Igbar and Sean and walked home. The wind blew in gusts around me from the direction of the sea. It had been a hot day, but this wind brought no relief. The blasts of warm air chased the shadows cast by the scant lighting in this part of the city. There were few people around. The drugs I had consumed, and the dislocation of myself from my own story, combined to make my trip home both detached and vivid. In the dark, narrow streets, sound was intensified; every shadow a recumbent night-creature. I remembered those muted voices in the alleyway of two hours earlier, and Santiago’s “This much I know.” The bar owner’s words hung in the air long after the explanation that followed them.
When I did pass the occasional pedestrian, the muscles in my neck and shoulders tightened. I became gradually overtaken by an obsessive hypothesis: that the few people I passed were ghosts, led on leashes by the unseen hands of the living, and that I, too, was of their number.