Flicker (70 page)

It wasn't as graceful an exit as I might have wished, but it got me moving toward the door. A quarter of an hour later, after the Feathers and I had exchanged some final awkward words, I was headed home along the coast highway, wondering why I should feel the least unease about cutting myself free of the Grand Archon and his schizophrenic wife, no matter how ragged the tear might be. There was nothing I owed
them, and I was hardly likely to visit again. Yet I was taking a nagging sense of ingratitude away with me. As rinky-dink as the Albigensi Fellowship might be, Mrs. Feather—and whatever manner of being Guillemette Testaniére might be—had filled an important blank in my research. In the days ahead, I would need to know more about the wrath of the Cathars, where it came from, why it might be so enduring. I now had more than books to help me answer that question. I had the memory of Aunt Natalie writhing in unspeakable torment on the lawn among her prize hollyhocks, crying out for pity to a god whose name the world had forgotten.

The next time we met, I fully intended to let Faustus know how irked my mission to Hermosa Beach had left me. Involving me with the Feathers had all the earmarks of a mean trick played on both them and me. But he was utterly uncontrite. The man actually expected me to thank him.

“Come on now, Jonny, tell the truth. You have to admit that Mrs. What's-her-name puts on a damn good show.”

“Shows like that ended, as I recall, when they closed down Bedlam to spectators.”

“Could be you're attacking along the wrong epistemological flank.” Faustus was giving me his foxy grandpa squint. “Are you so sure the old girl's batty?”

“What else?”

“You heard her speak in tongues, didn't you?”

“Yes. So? Just some kind of gibberish.”

“Suppose I were to tell you what you heard the lady speaking was Old Provençal, vintage 1250 or thereabouts?”

“How could it be?”

“Well, I'm not that much of an authority. But I've used plenty of
documents from the period, enough to recognize a good imitation of the dialect when I hear it. That struck me right off the night I heard her. I tried to register as much of what she said as I could. Even asked if I could make some recordings, take some pictures. Bad mistake. The reverend wasn't having any of that. This isn't a freak show,' he tells me from atop his high horse, as if I was asking his wife to pose for dirty pictures.”

“I ran into a bit of that myself,” I said. “Made the mistake of mentioning the movies. Clunk. End of the line.”

“I gather the reverend and his little band of prophets are more or less at war with the gadgetry of modern life. You didn't use their socalled bathroom by any chance? That's an adventure. Well, anyway, it happens I've got a pretty sharp ear for languages, so I picked up a good deal of what the lady said. And I did take some notes. When I got back to school, I checked with my froggy friend Émile Giraud over in the French Department.
'Sacrebleu,'
the man says, ‘where did you get this?' Claimed it was as authentic a transcription of the old language as he'd seen—though of course I didn't have much more than fragments. There was most of a prayer she was saying, and part of a curse—on the heads of the Inquisitors. I can't swear to it, but I'd be willing to take an even money bet she was speaking coherent Old Provençal all the way through—and not in her own voice. That language hasn't been heard in Langue d'Oc in seven centuries.”

“Did she sing?”

“Now that you mention it, she did. About the dark savior.
‘Vale, Domine Tenebrice'…
something like that. Very woeful. Odd sort of religious chant. And that was a pretty good imitation of Church Latin, what I could catch of it.”

“You aren't suggesting … ”

“Okay, just file that one for a minute. Now suppose I were to tell you that there really was a Guillemette Testaniére—burned to death by the Inquisition in 1242 in Montaillou. Age eighteen. I looked it up.”

“Mrs. Feather could have looked it up too.”

“Not unless she did a lot of digging in a lot of very old, very obscure medieval French sources, which I don't think she'd be likely to find at the Hermosa Beach public library. I had to order photostat copies of records from three or four European colleagues. Cost me a couple hard months' research. Used some of it in a paper I wrote.”

“So you're telling me exactly what, Faustus? That Aunt Natalie is the reincarnation of a Cathar heretic?”

He shrugged his shoulders and reached to light his cigar. “Just telling it
wie es eigentlich gewesen,
buddy. The lady spoke the language, and what she says about her doppelganger (or etheric double or whatever the hell such like ectoplasmic entities are called) checks out with the documents available.”

I let my skepticism show, but wasn't about to press the point farther. I could hardly afford to. The Orphans at Zuma Beach were enough for me to cope with just now. One nutty sect at a time. Besides, I had larger issues on my mind. However I might interpret Mrs. Feather's performance—metempsychosis or plain psychosis—it had raised a question that I knew Faustus wouldn't be able to help me with. Convinced that the story of the Cathars was an exercise in political skulduggery, he was not someone I could expect to take matters of doctrine seriously. And now more than ever, doctrine was what I wanted to know about. I'd witnessed the death of a Cathar—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. I'd heard the cries of agony, seen the flesh turn to ashes. Mrs. Feather's connection might have been some kind of hallucinatory simulation, but it had been laid before me in all sincerity as the living recollection of a great historical crime. Even knowing that her travail was a delusionary reenactment, I'd found it nearly too much to stomach.

That had set me to thinking. Once, seven centuries ago, others had stood in the presence of the indisputably real thing, watching the horror approvingly. What manner of theological hairsplitting could steel people to such a deed, blinding them to the inhumanity of what they did? Even more to the point: What about the victims who had gone into the flames singing the praises of a god whose worship had brought them nothing but derision and destruction? What was the faith that sustained them? I wanted more than academic answers to these questions. I was sure the beliefs that had once lived inside the minds of the martyred Cathars lived again in the films of Max Castle, indeed accounted for their strongest qualities. I would be failing the man if I didn't address the teachings of his church with all the seriousness they deserved.

But that wasn't easy for me. My mind simply refused to function theologically. Not that I didn't understand what I read and heard. But when I was finished, the same question was always waiting to be
answered: So
what?
Even when it came to the Cathars' principal doctrine, I kept coming up empty-handed.
Duo sunt.
One God or two, why should it make any difference except to religious zealots of a thankfully bygone age? Why would anyone in the modern world, let alone as sophisticated an artist as Max Castle, care about something like that? The Feathers had, in their halting way, tried to explain. “If
bonum
is the spirit and
malum
is the flesh. The flesh itself…” I turned what they'd said over and over in my mind, trying to squeeze a drop of living significance from it. I scouted out several works on mind-body dualism, but always finished with the sense that this was one of those long-defunct issues that belonged under glass in the philosophical museum. And just at the point when my mind was going slack with the effort, the words I needed came to me, the memory of one of Max Castle's most unlikely interpreters … a spaced-out nitwit of a kid I'd all but totally forgotten.

But let me get this in its proper sequence.

For weeks, as I labored to grasp the significance of the Great Heresy, I'd been scribbling notes, some of which I had to rephrase over and over before their importance broke through to me. And here's where I was when the moment came:

God of Light and God of Darkness
still
at war … where?
Within
us, every one of us. Their struggle = the struggle of flesh against spirit. God of Darkness = God of the body … this vile body, messy mortal package of unruly appetites and unholy desires. God of Light = God of the body's imprisoned spirit … the spark of divinity buried in the corrupting meat of us. Cathars are allies of the God of Light, are body-haters … want to set the spark free never to be sullied by the flesh again… .

There, I remember, my notes broke off. Because at that moment my mind flashed back to the film that had first thrust Max Castle into my life like a dagger.
Judas Everyman.
More important, I recalled the remark Sharkey's teenybopper girlfriend (what was her name … Shannon?) had dropped so casually as we sat taking in the effect of what we had seen.

It's enough to put you off sex for the rest of your life.

At the time, though none of us—Clare, Sharkey, myself—knew why, the comment seemed exactly right. With the words, I could recall my own experience on that day, the creeping sense
of uncleanness
that had come over me for the first time.

Shannon had put her finger on it.
That
was the purpose of Castle's film, of
all
Castle's films, as it was the purpose of his church down through the ages. To kill sex, deny the body, free the incarcerated spark. Faustus had told me that the elders of the Cathar faith (the Perfect as they were called) lived in absolute celibacy when few priests of the Roman Church felt compelled to do the same. They spurned the marriage and family they might have had. And went much farther. The most chilling practice of the religion came at the end of an elder's life. In a final supreme effort to prove their mastery over the flesh, many would voluntarily starve themselves to death.

So hostile were the Cathars to the physical body that extremists among them refused to believe Jesus ever walked the earth as a living man. Instead they insisted that he, the messenger of the God of Light, had appeared among men as a mere phantom to act out a phoney crucifixion. The purest of the pure, how could he possibly have submitted to the indignity of wearing the corruptible flesh? As some Cathars described this strange, illusory Jesus, he almost seemed to have the quality of a motion-picture projection, an actor transformed into an image of light, moving ghostlike across the screen of history, there but not really there.

It was only now that Brother Justin's pronouncement came home to me, and the deep pathos I'd heard behind it.

“…we live in hell, we are damned souls.”

Why? Because hell begins very close to home. This very body we inhabit belongs to the Dark Lord. We are his playthings, his prisoners … like the tragic convict in Castle's film,
Shadows over Sing
Sing, trapped in the stone cellar of the universe, his body transformed into the stone of that cellar. This, along with many another image from Castle's movies, flooded into my mind, emblems of torment and decay: the zombies, vampires, ghouls, hounded criminals… .

What was it Brother Justin had quoted from a prophet named Seth—a prophet I'd never heard of, but whose writings, I had since discovered, held an honored place in the Cathar Bible? “… this very flesh that clothes thee is thy perdition.” Brother Justin believed this! He really did. As had Max Castle.

Could I?

I tried, if only for a moment, to imagine believing it, to feel the body I inhabited as if it were a cage, a vault, Count Lazarus' fetid coffin … and at once drove the thought from my mind. It stifled me with a claustrophobic panic, as if the whole universe were a locked
tomb in which I'd awakened buried alive. And with that panic, a stunning new realization came over me, something that turned my thinking upside down. Since my research began, I'd been regarding the Cathars as the heroes of the story, the victims of a bigoted church.
What if that were exactly wrong?
What if the Cathars, far from being martyrs who deserved my sympathy, were the carriers of a terrible doctrine? Sex-denying, love-denying, enemies not only of the Church of Rome but of life itself.
Of life itself!

No wonder, then, that Brother Justin could see Simon Dunkle's ugly little fantasies as works of high art. They were the perfect expression of a world-despising vision. I winced to hear myself wondering: perhaps it was for the best that the Cathars were hunted down, liquidated, every last one of them. Except, that is, some few who managed to survive the holocaust, then vanished from the world's sight to return centuries later in the unlikely guise of moviemakers.

Faustus might have had little patience for discussions of religious doctrine. But doctrine connected with sex was sure to get a rise out of him. As he once told me, “Making love is almost as satisfying as making war. That's where your generation went wrong, my boy. A man doesn't have to choose between the two.” I tried to maintain a scholarly air as I broached the subject, but I suspected he would put his own more salacious construction on the subject. “There were rumors,” I observed, “that the Albigenses went in for some pretty bizarre forms of eroticism. Do you think there's any truth to that?”

He growled out a dirty laugh. “I've been wondering when you'd get around to that, Jonny. Always wanted to try a book on the subject.
Strange Sexual Perversions of the Western World.
The Cathars would be worth a whole couple of chapters. The churches—that's where you find all the best hanky-panky. Hell, every religion in the world goes back to fertility cults and love feasts. But the Albigenses had a different slant on things. Their objective was infertility. For them, nothing was a greater abomination than the church's insistence that sex has got to lead to reproduction. They saw that as delivering another pure soul into the bondage of the flesh. Now the most obvious way to frustrate procreation would be celibacy. Which was fine for the Parfaits, some of whom may actually have been castrati. But there's never been much of a market for abstinence beyond the chosen fanatical few. So for the swinish many, the Albigenses came up with a lesser discipline: some kind of genital gymnastics that allowed the
body to enjoy its impure pleasures, but kept the seed corralled. Possibly the practice was imported from the East. There are yogis who go in for that kind of ejaculatory cliff-hanging. They claim it's the secret of eternal life.”