The Marks of Cain Page 14

  Silence. David could sense neighbours peering out of windows, behind him. He was hyper aware of the gun, loaded, beyond the door: one blast of that would take down the door and maybe kill them.

  They had to end the drama.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, through the door – feeling absurd and very scared. ‘Please. We just came to talk. Don’t know if you can speak English but…I just want to know about my parents. They died here. They were killed here. Or we can go. We will just go?’

  Silence.

  He glanced Amy’s way. A faint sheen of perspiration shone on her forehead; a lick of her blonde fringe clung to her skin. He repressed the urge to run for the car. The door swung open. The girl was standing there. Her shotgun was broken over her arm.

  ‘I am Eloise Bentayou,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

  David stared at the Cagot girl. She was about seventeen or eighteen. A small silver cross around her neck was bright against her tawny skin and her nail varnish was vivid. The girl’s complexion was notably dark, almost Arabic-looking. But her black hair had that Basque look, flat against the skull.

  ‘We…’ David struggled to explain things. ‘We wanted to know about the Cagots.’

  Eloise regarded him, her young frown tinged with suspicion.

  ‘So you have come to look at the untouchables.’ She gave them a despairing shrug. ‘Ahh. What do I care. Come in. Come…this way.’

  David and Amy stepped over the threshold. A wooden clock with a picture of the Virgin Mary ticktocked, in a lonely way, on a wall. Eloise escorted them into a living room where a big, slightly old-fashioned TV flickered in the corner. Watching it was an elderly woman, sitting on a sofa.

  ‘Grandmère?’ Eloise spoke briskly yet solicitously, in French, to her grandmother, but the woman barely moved, she was staring at the TV. The sound was off, but she was still staring at some French game show. Finally she looked up, glanced at Amy, then David, then returned her gaze to the television. She was wearing tartan slippers.

  Eloise sighed. ‘Since the…since the murders she has not been alive. Not really. Et…Grandmère? Une tasse de thé?’

  The woman kept staring at the screen; Eloise shook her head.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ she suggested. ‘You want to talk about the Cagots? The last Cagots in the world! Before they kill the rest of us…’ She walked to the door. ‘I can make tea. English tea.’

  The kitchen was as unprepossessing as the living room. It wasn’t dirty, but it exuded neglect. A saucer of milk, set down for a pet, was beginning to congeal in a corner.

  They sat at a bare wooden table as Eloise made tea. David looked at Amy, he didn’t know what to say. He tried a compliment.

  ‘You speak very good English.’ Even as he said this, he felt pathetic.

  ‘My grandmother taught me. She speaks English very well. She learned it at college…She was a tour guide…Many years before. Before it happened. Now she just sits there.’ Eloise was gazing down at the mugs, now full of tea. She shunted the mugs across the table. ‘Here. Earl Grey. There is lemon here if you want.’

  They accepted the mugs. Eloise spoke: ‘I am sorry about the gun. It was my father’s before…before the deaths.’

  Amy intervened: ‘Eloise, do you mind my asking…about what happened?’

  The girl flinched, very subtly. ‘A month ago…my father and mother were killed.’

  ‘My God,’ Amy said.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ David added.

  The teenager’s dark brown eyes gazed directly his way.

  ‘That is why I let you in. Your story. It is very sad. I know how that feels. I sympathize.’

  ‘How were they killed?’

  ‘Shot.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘The police do not find anyone. The police do nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘At all. They are…unemployed. Chomage! Two people killed and they find no one. It is incroyable.’ Eloise was gulping her tea. David’s was still too hot to drink. Eloise didn’t seem to care. ‘They were shot in the car. Just like that! Maybe because we are Cagots? We do not know why. You see why I am scared. Of everyone, even the police. The Cagots are being killed.’

  The subject had been broached: the Cagots. David mentioned the website and the girl scowled.

  ‘My father’s idea! The stupid website! The last of the Cagots dot com. I told him it was dangerous to make that dangerous website! I told him it would attract attention. He and my mother, they said we Cagots should be ashamed no longer, that it was stupid for us to hide away. And because we were maybe the last, he wanted the world to know.’ A shrug. ‘He said someone had to record the fate of my people. Les Cagots! And so maybe my family died for it. N’est ce pas? Since then I have kept the shotgun. My father used it to hunt pigeons. I keep it all the time. They may come for us next. We are the last ones left, me and my grandmère. And I do not think my grandmother would care if they did kill her, it is like she is dead already.’

  David felt hopelessly inadequate as he listened. What response could match this grief? He knew what it was like to be orphaned, as an only child; the unequalled isolation, the inner song of solitary despair. He wanted to help; he knew the girl could not be helped.

  The girl nodded, with a demure sadness, at Amy’s queries. Her youth and dark prettiness only made her grief more poignant.

  ‘Yes, I can tell you…I do know the history. My father taught us since we were young, wanting to make us proud. Not ashamed.’ She turned and cocked an ear, listening for something; maybe her grandmother; she looked back at David. ‘This is what I know. This is what my father told me. We, the Cagots, we were…we are…a people. A unique race. We first emerge – is that the word? – yes, we first emerge in the documents around the thirteenth century. In this same region. Navarre and Gascony.’

  David drank some tea. Attuned to her every word.

  ‘By then we Cagots were already regarded as an inferior race. Pariahs!’

  Amy interruped: ‘Like outcasts? Untouchables?’

  ‘Oui. In medieval times Cagots were divided from the…normal peasants – in many ways. We had our own urban districts: usually on the bad side of the river, the malarial side.’ Eloise sipped tea, and continued. ‘Traces of these ghettos can still be found in Pyrenean communities, if you search – like St Jean Pied de Port or…Campan.’

  David nodded, eagerly. ‘We saw! The old cottages and ruins in Campan.’

  ‘Yes. The ghettos were known as cagoteries. Campan has one of the biggest.’

  ‘What else?’ said Amy. ‘The doors?’

  Eloise replied: ‘You need to know the history, first of all. Vraiment. Cagot life was marked by apartness: we were separated from everyone else, hidden away, like a shameful secret. Cagots were forbidden to enter most trades or professions. We were forced to be the drawers of water and the hewers of the wood. So we made barrels for wine and coffins for the dead. We also became very good carpenters.’ She flashed a sad smile. ‘Which is why we built many of the Pyrenean churches from which we were sometimes excluded.’

  ‘Like Campan again?’

  ‘Campan, yes. Bigorre. Many other villages.’ Eloise was talking more quickly now. ‘Some of the forbiddings on the Cagots were strange, so strange. We were not allowed to walk barefoot, like normal peasants, and this gave rise to the legend that we all had webbed toes. Cagots could not use the same baths as the other people. We were not allowed to touch the walls of bridges. Madness, non? And when we went about, we had to wear a goose’s foot, la patte d’oie, pinned to our clothes. Symbolical of the webbed foot. The mythical deformity.’

  ‘Just like the Jews and the yellow star. In the war,’ said Amy.

  ‘D’accord. And one of the other ways the Cagots were treated as different and inferior was in the churches. In the churches, we had to use our own doors, on the left of the main doors. The small doors you saw? Yes! We also had our own fonts – the benitiers. Marked with the foot! And we were giv
en communion on the end of very long wooden spoons, so the priests would not even have to touch us. To touch the dirty people.’

  ‘But why?’ asked David. His tea was finished. He wanted more tea, he wanted food, he wanted something to distract him. The pain of the girl was bringing to the surface his own subterranean grief.

  ‘Eloise, why did the Cagots get treated like this? Why were your people so oppressed?’

  The girl tilted her head, with a teenage moue of distaste.

  ‘No one knows this, mmm? No one is quite sure why Cagots were so mistreated. Peasants at the time said Cagots were psychotique. We were certainement regarded, as you know, inferior, as tainted and polluted. Infectious.’

  ‘Were Cagots…killed?’

  ‘Oui oui. On occasions, the bigotry was brutal. Very brutal. In the early eighteenth century a rich Cagot in Les Landes was caught using the font reserved…for non-Cagots – and his hand was chopped off and nailed to the church door.’

  Amy winced; Eloise continued.

  ‘Shocking, non? Another Cagot, who dared to farm his fields, which was totally forbidden, he had his feet pierced with the hot iron spikes. If there was any crime in a village, the Cagot was blamed. Some were actually burned at the stake. Even in death, these discriminations persisted – the Cagots were buried in their own cemeteries.’

  David turned to Amy: she nodded. Arizkun.

  Amy asked: ‘But where did your people come from? Who were they?’

  ‘The provenance is not clear, because the Cagots themselves have largely vanished…from the records. During La Revolution, the laws against Cagots were, they say, abandoned – in fact I think many Cagots destroyed the archives, theystole and burned any documents that proved their ancestry. To get rid of the shame! After 1789, we Cagots slowly…assimilated. Many of us changed surnames. Most of us slowly died out. There were the…problems having children.’

  David looked at the girl. He thought of his grandfather: changing identity, Basque to Spanish. More ancient shame.

  Amy was still questioning the girl.

  ‘Are there any theories? About the descent of the Cagots?’

  ‘Naturellement. But the different contemporary accounts are so very confusing. They cannot even agree on what we are meant to look like! Some describe us as being short, dark and even fat. And suffering goitres and cretinism. Others say we are blonde and, you know, very blue eyed. A man, a scholar, named Michel wrote a book about this – L’Histoire des Races Maudites.’

  Amy interrupted: ‘The History of…the Cursed Races?’

  ‘Oui oui. In 1847. It was one of the first studies. Michel found at least ten thousand Cagots still scattered across Gascony and Navarre, still suffering, still excluded…’ Eloise stood up and took her mug to the sink. She washed it, in a lacklustre manner, talking the while. ‘Since Michel, some other historians have tried to solve the great Cagot mystery, despite the French not wanting to talk about us. One theory is that we were lepers – that would explain the rules against Cagots touching anything used by non-Cagots – another that we had some contagious mental sickness. However, this theory is not good – because many other books describe us as being healthy, and robust. And intelligent. As I hope you can see? We are not lepers! We are dark. We are not lepers, we are not mad.’

  David nodded.

  ‘Of course.’

  Eloise went on.

  ‘I believe we are, maybe, descendants of Moorish soldiers left over from the eighth-century Muslim invasion of Spain and of France. That’s why some people called us Les Sarasins. I know my family is very dark.’ She paused. ‘They were very dark. But we may never know now. It is too late, is it not? No one here likes to talk about us. There may only be a few of us left. Maybe my family was the only…purebred Cagot family…that can trace its ancestry. In the world.’

  ‘And the name. Cagot?’

  ‘Dogs of the Goths? That’s what some say. I believe the Cagot name is a very basic insult. The dirty people. The shit people. From caca or cack. You see now? You see why we Cagots tried to hide away, to assimilate…’

  Amy exhaled. ‘The last of the Cagots. Just remarkable.’

  ‘Yes.’ Eloise closed her eyes momentarily. ‘But this amazing story, it made my father and my mother…it made them killed.’

  David wanted to ask the obvious but question: why would anyone want to kill the Cagots now? But the question, and the logic behind it, was simply too brutal for the query to be posed.

  His dilemma was resolved by a noise. Eloise’s grandmother, in her cardigan and her tartan slippers, was in the doorway.

  ‘Grandmère?’ Eloise was gesturing her concern.

  The woman raised a frail hand. She was staring at David. She said:

  ‘I know why you are here, Monsieur Martinez. I knew your father.’

  19

  He found it hard to look at Madame Bentayou. Finally, he asked, ‘How did you know him?’

  The old woman sat down at the kitchen table, her hands embracing an empty mug. ‘I met him here in Gurs. Fifteen years ago.’

  ‘You mean when he was killed…with my mother?’ David felt the pounding of his blood.

  ‘I can tell you where they both died, if you want to know. It was a few minutes from here, by the camp.’

  The cat had come into the kitchen; it stalked to the saucer and began lapping at the sickly milk.

  ‘The camp?’

  The grandmother shrugged wearily. David asked: ‘Please, can you show me?’

  There was a tenderness in her reply: ‘I can show you.’

  It was a ten-minute walk through the leafy desolation of neglected suburbia, past an ugly church, past the half-hearted brasserie, and down a long straight road. They approached the old, nettly, rusty brown railway track – and crossed nervously, as if they all feared a train – though the track had obviously been derelict for decades. It seemed unnaturally flat. David wondered why the whole area felt quite so dead. So bleak and shunned.

  Black insects whirled in the cooling twilight, as they crossed the open concrete and gravel, by the looming crucifix. Madame Bentayou, still in her tartan slippers, sat on the wooden bench next to her granddaughter. David remained standing, and asked the older Cagot woman: ‘So…this is the camp? The cross? What happened here?’

  Madame Bentayou waved a weary hand, indicating the vacant acres of weeds, and grey concrete footings.

  ‘It was a Nazi camp. A concentration camp.’

  She fell silent.

  David gazed around. So that was it: that explained the desolation of the little town – no one wanted to live here any more. It was poisoned by its grievous history, like an inner-city district known for a murder house, a place where the police find bodies. You don’t want to live there.

  The old woman went on, ‘The Nazis occupied…the southwest corner of France, right up to the Spanish border. The border with Vichy, the puppet France of Pétain, was a hundred miles east. This was the main Nazi camp in southwest France.’

  ‘And who was kept here?’

  ‘The usual peoples. That is a memorial to them over there, the cross, and also the glass walls.’ Then she pointed to his left. ‘The two buildings over there are some barracks. Preserved.’

  Amy was frowning.

  ‘They kept Jews here?’

  ‘Yes. But also…’ Madame Bentayou paused. ‘Lots of people. When the Nazis took over it was already a prison place for refugees from the Spanish War. So it was already full of communists and, you know, the Basques. The Gestapo added Jews and gypsies. And other minority.’

  The ground looked notably swampy, rancid puddles reflecting the darkening clouds. David looked to the rear of the camp: the most distant section was divided from the rest of the prison by a low wall. A second cross had been erected upon it, another memorial.

  The woman noticed his gaze, and explained.

  ‘Another shrine. Because that is the most…the most notorious part of the camp.’

  ‘Why?’

>   Madame Bentayou paused, as if to brace herself.

  ‘It was the medical section. It is very terrible. The Germans took that part of the camp…they did the experiments here…scientific tests. Medical experiment.’

  The old woman had a handkerchief balled in her hand, ready to dab at any tears. She went on, ‘Blood tests. Tissue tests. And there were tortures. People killed or tortured. Many people.’

  Her words dwindled, the tears were close. David realized the ghastly and obvious truth.

  ‘Madame Bentayou.’ His words were faltering. ‘Were you here?’

  Her voice was whisperingly quiet.

  ‘Oui. I was here. As a very young girl. And so was my mother, she was in this camp. Like so many Cagots.’ She shook her head. ‘So I know what you ask next. You want to know why we never moved away after the war?’ The old woman flashed him a defiant, passionate glare. ‘The Cagots have been here for a thousand years, why should we let them move us!? We stay. We always stay, unless they kill us.’ She was wiping away the tears with her handkerchief. Then she seemed to still her emotions: ‘Monsieur Martinez…’

  ‘David. Please.’

  ‘Monsieur David, I want to go home now. I am sorry. As you must see this is very upsetting. I never speak of it normally.’

  She rose. David felt the unasked questions like a pain. ‘But please – I really want to know. About my parents.’ He could hear the neediness in his own voice. He didn’t care. ‘What were they doing here? Where were they killed? How did you know them?’

  Her face was sombre. ‘Your father…came to Gurs. And I recognized him.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Your father looked like your grandfather. Non? Is this not true?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is true. Dark hair, big shoulders. Tall…’

  ‘I saw your grandfather in your father, the same way I recognized you. All three of you, you look the same…And this is what I told your father: I said to him, “Monsieur Eduardo, I was in the camp with your father, Sergio Martinez”…’

  ‘My grandfather.’