by Richard Gwyn
In early July, Pontneuf decided that Lucas needed, as he put it, to “remember more” about his previous existence as Raymond Gasc, and from this point on, their private meetings acquired a new intensity. Pontneuf proposed using hypnotism to achieve this end, since, he explained, the techniques he himself had mastered for the purpose of “remembering” involved a long and arduous training. Hypnosis was merely a shortcut to the same objective. Lucas hesitated, but saw no reason not to comply. However, when Pontneuf actually attempted to hypnotise him, Lucas began to experience an utter resistance to his efforts, and proved a most unresponsive subject. His repeated assurances that he was not consciously trying to obstruct the process did not convince Pontneuf, who became short-tempered. The loss of his characteristic self-control in this outburst was quite a revelation to Lucas. He began to regard Pontneuf as a man pursuing an unknown but essentially vindictive campaign against him personally. Pontneuf seemed to believe that he, Lucas, possessed, and was withholding, knowledge of Raymond Gasc that was of vital importance to the outcome of his greater vision. In this way, both Lucas and Pontneuf suspected one another of precisely the same thing: harbouring an unshared agenda.
Nuria also became elusive and ill-tempered. Since she and Lucas shared a room and a bed, this was not something she was able to hide from him, nor did she attempt to. For several days, which coincided with a period of sexual abstinence entirely unrelated to the ideals of Catharism, the two of them sustained a climate of mutual indifference, which led to a barely concealed hostility.
One night Lucas dreamed of loss and betrayal, one of those dreams that persist in the memory throughout the day, leaving a bitter imprint on everything the mind touches. He was travelling on foot in a high and lonely landscape in the company of people he knew he should have recognised. A woman, or rather a conglomerate of women who united fleetingly in the shape of Nuria, was in that company. He was anxious and fearful, because he had made an arrangement to meet some people outside Albi cathedral at a particular time, and he was confused because he was not sure what they looked like. He had been told they would be representatives of some elite paramilitary group. He had no idea how he was going to leave the company he was in, drag himself away from the Nuria figure, and get to Albi. The trains were not running: there was some kind of strike. Nuria was openly and cruelly flirting with another member of the group, who appeared to have a man’s body and the head of a jackal, like Thoth, the Egyptian god of the dead. They came to a sharp turn in the path, entering a steep upland valley created by landslides. An armed figure stepped out from behind a boulder. He smiled at Lucas. Other armed men then appeared among the rocks and boulders. The jackal-man turned angrily to look at Lucas, who saw that he was drooling freely, his gums and lower jaw smeared with gore. “Ah, my dear fellow,” he growled, with the clipped upper-class English accent of a Hollywood villain, “I see you have invited your friends to our picnic.”
“Terry-Thomas,” said Igbar from his perch on the hammock. He was swinging one leg idly over the side, while lying propped up on an elbow.
“Who?” asked Eugenia.
“Oh, nobody you’d know,” answered Igbar, brushing away a fly. “I don’t think he’s really export material. A film actor from the 1950s. The archetypal English cad.”
“Plenty of choice there, then,” said Eugenia.
“Some girls do love a cad,” mused Susie Serendipity, in a malevolent tone.
“So I’m informed, sweetie,” said Igbar. “But I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Sean was lining up neat rows of white powder on the gaudily decorated cover of a volume entitled Out of Wedlock: Famous Bastards of History, which I had no recollection of owning. He rolled a bank note tightly, inserted one end into his nostril, and vacuumed up a line in one sharp snort, before passing the cargo carefully to me. I ingested in turn, and handed it to Susie.
“Please,” Eugenia said to me, “carry on.”
One day in late July, returning to their room after lunch in order to change for the afternoon’s gardening activities, Nuria startled Lucas with a series of accusations: of treating the enterprise of the Refuge with a lack of respect; of being vain and egotistical; of refusing to develop any kind of spiritual sensibility in accordance with his professed adherence to Cathar principles; and of using her sexually to accommodate his attachment to all things material, rather than regarding sex as a temporary obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve the higher purpose with which they had been gifted.
“You’re playing some stupid game with me, with André, and with the whole community. It’s not as if I can’t see through you. You either don’t want to progress or else you’re simply spiritually stunted. You just want to have sex with me and watch the show. You don’t care about what happens to us as a group.” While Lucas took in this outburst, she added, “André’s right about you.”
“I beg your pardon?” Lucas asked, shocked by this disclosure. “Do you mean to say you discuss my ‘progress’ with him? Does he tell you about my individual sessions with him?”
Nuria hesitated. Perhaps she was wondering whether she had said rather more than she intended.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Well, not specifically. But you’ve told me yourself that you were experiencing resistance, that you had some sort of blockage.”
“I’ve told you nothing of the kind. I simply said that we weren’t getting anywhere with the hypnosis, that André’s attempts were unsuccessful. ‘Blockage’ was a term he used to describe it, yes. But I never told you that. So he must have. What else has he told you, in your little sessions with him?”
Nuria paused again, and Lucas knew she had overstepped an agreed boundary. That is, one she had agreed upon, not with him, but with Pontneuf. It was clear to him then that she and Pontneuf discussed more than her personal spiritual development when they were in private.
“Except in the most general terms, nothing at all. André goes on a bit sometimes, as though he’s thinking aloud. Doesn’t he do that with you?”
“No,” said Lucas.
“Well, I’m sure it’s not a big deal. He says things about other people too, but I’ve never really thought about them much. Whoever said these meetings were strictly confidential? Anyway, it’s you he’s trying to hypnotise. Can you really not remember anything about your past life? It might provide the clue he’s after. You might be holding onto some knowledge that will help us all.”
“You’re beginning to sound like him,” Lucas responded, his voice rising. “Pontneuf’s parrot. And I don’t like the way you two carry on. It’s as if you’ve known each other for years. Did you by any chance have anything to do with him before we met?”
Nuria turned towards him, openly angry now.
“That’s a very stupid question to ask, considering your alleged acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation.”
“I haven’t accepted anything yet. Allegedly or otherwise. I’ve gone along with it this far because I was worried about you.”
Nuria stared at him incredulously.
“What were you worried about, precisely? That I wouldn’t conform to some pretty ideal of the kind of girlfriend you would like to have, to feed your ego? You weren’t worried about me. You were worried about yourself. It’s the only thing you’ve ever worried about. And your insinuations about André and myself only go to prove it.”
And with that she left the room, slamming the door behind her.
Lucas’s suspicions about Nuria and Pontneuf were aroused again the next afternoon when he noticed the two of them talking outside the dining room. He waited, out of hearing, for them to move on, expecting Nuria to return to their room, but instead they set off together towards Pontneuf’s private quarters. Lucas followed, at a distance.
Once they had gone inside, he moved around to the side of the building which contained Pontneuf’s study, and saw the shutters being pulled to and shut from the inside. This was something which Pontneuf never did in his private meetings a
s a rule; indeed, Lucas had never known these shutters to be closed at all. He crept along the wall, with the intention of listening beneath the window, but was unable to make out any sounds from the room. Instead he felt a hand on his shoulder as he crouched there, and turning, was grabbed from behind by Pontneuf’s henchmen, Zaco and Le Chinois. They dragged him around the corner of the house and in through a side door. Le Chinois rapped on Pontneuf’s study door, while Zaco held him in an arm-lock. There was a pause before the door was answered by Pontneuf, who seemed angry to be disturbed.
Lucas was shoved into the room by Zaco, and the door was closed behind them, Zaco positioning himself against it. Nuria sat on the sofa, legs crossed, trying hard to look indifferent, but her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were like small infernos. Lucas’s first impression was one of an interrupted liaison, and a dense, dimly erotic atmosphere seemed to permeate the room. In spite of his earlier suspicions and the closed shutters, he was startled by the suddenness of his revelation, and by the sordid and predictable conclusions that he inferred from this afternoon tryst. It was all so at odds with the aims of the Refuge. All so much at odds with what Lucas had considered to be the special nature of his relationship with Nuria, the almost sacred dimensions that their being together held for him, and, he had believed, for her also.
“Well, this is pretty,” Lucas said, finally. “You two seem very snug. The term ‘perfectus’ has taken on a whole new significance for me.”
Pontneuf sighed, while Nuria simply stared at Lucas blankly, then at the floor.
“There is considerably more at stake in our lives here than your pathetic jealousies,” said Pontneuf.
There was a brief silence between them. Outside, Lucas could hear the rhythmic knock of someone chopping firewood.
“Well, kataskapos, it didn’t take you long to come sniffing around my doorstep. Full of pouting envy and justified rage.”
Pontneuf inspected Lucas closely, and his gaze was devoid of any pretended comradeship, or even of familiarity.
“You really should take time to study your soul,” advised Pontneuf. “You might find something hitherto undetected by your wayward and undisciplined intellect. If you’re lucky.”
Lucas found Pontneuf’s admonitions tedious in the extreme. But he had no idea what was going to happen next. He was still struggling with the evidence, as he saw it, that Nuria and Pontneuf were having an affair. It now appeared obvious, with the benefit of sudden and inglorious ratification. The amount of time they spent together, their joint arrival, late, at mealtimes; Nuria’s recent frigidity, her increasingly unguarded repetition of certain of Pontneuf’s stock phrases, and her mindless regurgitation of his ideas. That there was a sexual component to this relationship should not have surprised Lucas. He wondered how long it had been going on; considered with revulsion the notion that it had been going on long before he and Nuria had even met; for all he knew had been in progress (although temporarily suspended) even during their passionate fortnight in Barcelona.
“How long have you two been carrying on this—how should I name it—partnership?” asked Lucas.
Neither Pontneuf nor Nuria answered at first, though they both now stared at him.
“Is that any concern of yours, I wonder?” replied Pontneuf, at length. “But how about you going somewhere conductive to quiet meditation, so you can think about it?”
He spoke as though responding to a challenge over an article of faith. Just like a priest, thought Lucas. And with that thought, a torturous possibility began to take root. He recalled the story of the priest at Nuria’s convent school. Could that simply have been a lie? Was it Pontneuf himself who had instigated everything, had nurtured her as “his little heretic,” had acted since then as Nuria’s mentor, and, intermittently but consistently, as her lover?
While Lucas raged in silence, Zaco grabbed his arm and led him from the room. He turned in the doorway and caught sight of Nuria, now looking at the floor again. Outside, Le Chinois took his other arm and kneed him cheerily in the groin. Lucas doubled over, and the two thugs dragged him down some steps into a basement room. Once he was inside, they locked the door. He heard them conferring briefly, and then there was silence.
15. SOLITAIRE
“So you were slung in the hole?” asked Igbar Zoff. “Solitary confinement, iron manacles, what?”
Igbar searched through his pockets for more cigarettes. I handed him mine.
“A dungeon, filled with slimy crawling things?” asked Sean, incredulous. “Narration slips seamlessly from Gothic fantasy to The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“Just so. Lucas himself a slimy crawling thing,” I answered. “Are there any more drugs?”
“Mandragora, marzipan, migraine medicine, mescaline,” chanted Igbar from the hammock.
“Mescaline, for sure,” I said.
“No kidding,” said Sean, and produced a small package from inside his jacket.
“Christ almighty,” groaned Susie. “How’s he meant to concentrate on what he’s telling us with that stuff?”
“Prerogative of the storyteller,” answered Igbar. “Ancient Celtic custom, as you must know, Ms. Serendipity, given your roots. Feed the bard, nourish the tale.”
“I have one of sprites and goblins,” Sean added, handing me the carefully folded foil wrap.
“You have one of pure gobshite,” responded Susie Serendipity.
“On reflection, I’ll stick to the intoxicants of my ancestors,” I said.
“Wise choice. Put it away, Sean. I for one want to listen, not wrestle with alligators.”
Sean obediently returned the mescaline to his jacket pocket.
“Bones,” said Igbar.
“What?”
“The bones of your ancestors,” insisted Igbar, apparently dwelling on his own last contribution. “The final line of a Turkish imprecation. In which the speaker threatens to fornicate with each and every member of the interlocutor’s family, rounding off with the ancestral relics.”
“How unsavoury,” murmured Sean.
The sun had moved out of view behind tall buildings to the west. Susie pulled on a cardigan, and settled herself more comfortably on the cushions. Eugenia was looking at me intently, ignoring the banter. She appeared to be caught up in her own reflections. Tolerant, curious, but not easily distracted.
“Go on,” she said.
Inside the cell there was complete and utter darkness. Lucas felt his way around, having barely taken the room in before the door was closed and the light from the corridor shut out. Fumbling along the stone walls, using fingers as eyes, he negotiated all four corners, then came upon the door frame, returning to the place where he had been deposited by Le Chinois’ final push. He then remembered that he had a lighter in his pocket, along with some cigarettes. He flicked on the flame and looked around. It was a small room, and it was completely empty. In the upper recess of the wall facing him was a grill consisting of metal bars, a few inches wide, that might have served as an air-hole set just above ground level, but which was sealed off by a sliding metal plate on the far side of the grill.
The flame heated the cheap lighter and scorched his fingers. He returned to the darkness, his eyes immediately conjuring hallucinatory shapes and colours in the sudden blackness. He suspected that the cell had been prepared for him especially. It was intended, he surmised, reflecting on Pontneuf’s fondness for allegory, as a symbol of his inner emptiness. He no longer believed that Pontneuf left anything to chance, but that in all he did were implicit messages, secret resonances: he had hatched plans for Lucas long before Lucas had ever met Nuria.
Kataskapos. Lucas could see why Pontneuf had called him a spy. Apart from attempting to eavesdrop on Pontneuf’s rendezvous with Nuria, he had, over the weeks, placed himself outside the group, and refused to play along with Pontneuf’s efforts to elicit his “remembering.” But he was also, in Pontneuf’s eyes, a spy of a different order, as he would shortly discover.
Lucas sat on the stone
floor with his back against the wall. It was damp and cold, and he was dressed only in tee-shirt, jeans and sandals. Shivering, he reached in his jeans pocket for cigarettes, pulled one to his lips, and lit it. He inhaled deeply, grateful for the small comfort of smoking, and for the meagre light which the glowing orange tip provided in the obscurity of his prison.
In the course of the next few hours he cultivated a bright and raging hatred for Pontneuf. It had been kept at a distance during the preceding weeks at the Refuge, since he held out hope that Pontneuf’s innate character could not be so manifestly corrupt if he had embraced a religion so pacific and harmonious as Catharism appeared to be.
He became convinced that Pontneuf had been unfrocked as a Catholic priest. Perhaps Nuria was an early victim in more ways than one. However, could such a man’s sway over her persist into her late twenties?
Lucas’ cigarette slipped into the crook between his fingers, burning him, and he spilled the stub to the floor and lifted his hand to his mouth, moistening the skin where it had burned.
Hours seemed to pass by. Lucas knew that prisoners kept in solitary, above all those confined to darkness, were liable to confusion and disorientation. No sounds from the outside filtered through to his cell. Gradually his anger gave way to a despairing sense of resignation. He had been comprehensively gulled. He had allowed his pride and self-importance to blind him to many things about his relationship with Nuria that were now so transparent. It had been clear from the outset that they were being monitored; and yet he was the only one of the two who remarked on it. Nuria never once raised the issue. She responded to Lucas’s questions and concerns about the postcard, about the reader of Kierkegaard, and about the roof people, with a barely concealed lack of interest. Only the unexpected and dramatic behaviour of the witch in the bar at Sitges had unnerved her, and she had not spoken of the reason for this.