FABLES FROM THE STRANGE LIFE OF MONTY CASTIN

I found the book in an old bookshop, you can imagine the shop quite easily, dusty, full of tomes, impossible to find what you came into buy but easy to find curios and oddities. It was a short book called Fables and Scenes From The Life Of Monty Catsin, who was easily identifiable as a roguish character, part Quixote, par Joan of Arc, never successful but always paying for his mistakes. An idiot-martyr. I turn to Chapter One and begin to read a little.

Monty Catsin was the prodigal son of a prosperous cork merchant from near the Spanish/French border. After excelling throughout eighteen years of schooling at the extremely well regarded San Christopher Insitituta, Monty travelled to France, to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. This was 1918, war was over. It was whilst living in Paris that he met and became a confident of the writer and theorist Andre Breton. Unlike Breton though, Catsin only wrote this one book, and as we will later find out, he wrote it in very unliterary circumstances. Andre Breton added a final memorial chapter after Catsin’s death in 1936. The book, composed of twelve other chapters, deals with a succession of unrelated events from Monty’s short life, we are recounted his homosexual liaison with Lorca as well as fist-fights with Hemingway, his pursuits of women seen about Paris and a million other divulgences of the mind. The first chapter deals with an episode in which Monty is fifteen and by his own admission was becoming a bit rebellious. The incident deals with his Aunty Marcia’s suspicions that Monty might be becoming a bit psychopathic. He was exceptionally bright, but he was within spitting distance of being an idiot savant. His mind was a dark room filled with treasure, he was beginning to explore all the different avenues of intellectual exploration open to him.

And so it was when he was fifteen that Monty became obsessed with the idea of anatomy, a right little Frankenstein; he wanted to explore the insides of the animals that roamed the expanses of their cork tree orchards. He would catch little mice or cats and splice them open, with a long cut from neck to rump, and another running horizontal to that. Monty really saw what they were made of. Lots of blood. Indeterminate and warm, organs, unspecific. He’d cut out the oesophagus and the trachea, remove them, inspect and leave them to bake on the hot, cracked and yellow soil. 

Monty says that for a long time he didn’t know that anyone knew about his strange childhood urges to cut open animals, for a long time he had forgotten about it too, he matured, stopped slicing animals open and moved onto other things, as we know he did well in his final exams and went to Paris to study. It was on his Aunty Marcia’s deathbed in 1929, that she uttered her final words to Monty – Monty – she stammered – no matter how much you’ve failed in your life and have had to be bailed out by your poor father, I’m just glad you didn’t turn out to be a serial killer or pervert like I thought you would when you were but a teenager.

Perplexed by this, Monty, who it must be said had failed in certain areas of his life, he had been bankrupted twice and married three times (one wife gone the mad and another to a remote Scottish island), did not know what she meant by suggesting he might’ve become a psychopath, his mind having subconsciously repressed the memories of his days as Doctor Death of the Cork Orchards.

He returned downstairs, left Marcia’s daughter, Maria, with her. He found his Father, half asleep in the red armchair, and asked him about Marcia had said. He half-smiled and said – when you were younger, this was during the war, just before Uncle Juan died, his sister, your Aunty Marcia, was accustomed to taking long walks in our orchards. There, on a now indeterminate day in summer, she saw you kill a cat. She was so shocked that she ran back to the house and told me immediately. Monty recalls here, how a whole pile of repressed memories rushed upwards to him, like a beam of light piercing the dust of an Andalucian church.

He remembered the way he used to cut those animals, down and across, and examine them.

Monty asked, ‘Why hasn’t she said anything till now? I’m horrified that she knew all this time, I had completely forgotten about it.’

To which his father replied that they had considered questioning Monty about it, but only if they’d caught you doing it again, and for awhile Marcia wanted to keep an eye on you, but then Uncle Juan died, and she must’ve forgotten about it because she didn’t bring it up for almost three or four years. Maybe longer actually, because it was just after you’d finished your studies at the Sorbonne and she said ‘I’m glad he didn’t turn into a psychopath.’

Sometime, after his Uncle Juan died, he must’ve lost that ‘killer instinct’, his Dad joked, which was clearly a reference to his financial misfortunes in the proceeding years, something that was of much shame to his family.

Despite the at times shoddy writing of the piece, I was gripped by the absurdity of this situation, the actual lack of the moral in the fable, leaving me to make my own equally absurd assumptions to fill the gaps in it.

The next chapter dealt with equally absurd homosexual fumbling with Garcia Lorca and his two encounters with Ernest Hemingway. The first was at a bullfight in Madrid, after which Hemingway, Catsin and a few other fellows embarked upon a game of cards. Monty had to escape out of the bathroom window, fleeing scarily large gambling debts to Hemingway. Their second meeting occurred in Paris a few years later in which Monty lost two teeth.

Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin, was given the name Montgomery after the now obscure Montgomery Ward, who in his day was a famed entrepreneur, he was the man who set up the first mail order business in the U.S. He gave his name to Monty Catsin through a bet between Montgomery Ward and Montgomery Juan Angel Catsin’s father, which stated that the first of them to make a million dollars would give their name to the next child to be born to either family. And two years later, in 1887, when Montgomery Ward made his first million dollars Monty Catsin’s father agreed to name his child, his first born, Montgomery, in his honour.

The only problem was that Monty’s father was not yet married, and thus was not in a position to be naming anyone’s children, and so he began his search for a wife. So desperate and depressed did he become to find and marry and beautiful senorita that he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome to receive a blessing from the Vatican. He walked from his villa in Spain, across the Riviera, crossed the Alps and made his way south to Rome. On one freezing cold night, after crossing the Alps and now being somewhere in Lombardia, Monty’s father took shelter in a tiny barn. It seemed perfect to him, and nestling in the warmth of the hay he quickly fell asleep. Morning shone through the rafters, the storm was gone and left clear skies in its trail, the air was still cold, but clear, crisp and refreshing, Senor Catsin breathed deep, filling lungs with Italian air. As Monty’s father stirred and awoke fully he was shocked to see the most beautiful woman he had ever set his little dark eyes upon stirring the donkeys from their slumber. This woman was heroically gorgeous, an Italian maiden stirring his passions along with the donkeys, buxom, dark hair, fair skinned. He quickly jumped down from his sleeping hole in the rafters and introduced himself. Her response was one of fear; she turned and ran away from this terrifying man who had been sleeping in her barn, and who was now accosting her in a strange foreign tongue, straw in his hair, dressed in dirty clothes, shoes almost falling apart. Monty’s father was devastated.

In Rome, he struggled, penniless, almost in rags, (conducting his journey in the true spirit of a pilgrimage, he hadn’t bothered to heavy himself with the assorted stuffs of life, he survived off apples and vegetables and the kindness of strangers). One day, wearing more suitable clothes now thank God, he joined the procession of people waiting to be blessed by the Pope. Whilst in Rome he had picked up a little Italian, and having grown quite accustomed to the culture he decided to stay for a few months. Juan and his Father were taking care of the Cork Orchards, and he decided that he could justify extending his excursion a little longer, so he rented a small room for two months and settled in. He got a job with an antique dealer looking for someone who could speak fluent Spanish in order to translate the rare books being shipped to him from the Iberian Peninsula and estimate their worth.

One day in the shop a woman walked in. Not just any woman. But THE woman. The one from the Lombardian barn. Astounded, he shouted! CIAO BELLA. The woman was taken aback, the lunatic from the barn was here, dressed and combed and cleaned, speaking Italian, working in a shop. Out of his rags and without the straw in his hair he almost looked quite attractive. Dark skinned, dark haired, with mottled grey about his young temples, quite dashing almost.

The rest as they say, is history, Senor Catsin and Beatrice were married, and in less than a year little Montgomery Catsin was born, and all of this from a bet and a Papal blessing, such auspicious beginnings and such strange adventures to follow. He was doomed to live an inversion of his fairy tale beginning. Such strange adventures, all with unhappy endings, such suffering and persecution, bad luck and bad decisions plague our Monty’s life, and he records them in this little memoir. Hairy escapades in South American with lepers and native Indians, being chased through Mexico by banditos and bulls, being shipwrecked on an island in the south pacific for four months and finally a chapter on his adventures with the French Foreign Legion. It is in this penultimate chapter of the book, the last written by Monty himself, where he describes what turned out to be his final adventure, and how we are able to have this little book and how we are able to read it.

This was after his second bankruptcy; he had to close down his publishing company, sell up his house and car and selected items from his luxurious collection of antiques and objects d’art. He was in a rut which even Monty realised he needed to get out of, but, like everything Monty did, he did it in a very oblique fashion. Instead of maybe trying to work his out misfortune, or possibly even join the family business back in Spain, he instead joined the French Foreign Legion. And so in the hope of heroic adventure he set off to Africa, to find fame and (hopefully) fortune, and maybe even (please God) a wife.

The Legion was not as great a success as Monty had originally hoped. His romanticism was quickly quashed, trodden face down into burning African sands. Monty deserted in Cairo. It was after a brief period of travel throughout Africa that he found himself in search of diamonds on one of the small Comoros Islands in the Mozambique Channel, just off the south-western coast of Africa.

In a little and very isolated village he ran into trouble with a tribe of cannibal natives when he tried to sexually engage himself with a local girl. The elders locked Monty in a treehouse cage high in the canopies whilst they debated his fate in tongues poor Monty couldn’t understand. Here, Monty had time to think, to mull over his life and his adventures. He still had his little note book with him and scratched out his memoirs in it whilst the silvered haired men talked back and forth for twenty days. It was on the twenty-first day when a soldier from the Legion disturbed them. He was hunting for a deserter by the name of Montogomery Juan Angel Catsin and, following a lucky lead from an informant on the mainland, he had found him, bearded now, looking a little rougher, much thinner. The Legionairre promptly sentenced poor Monty to death, by shooting, for treason and desertion.

This was of much annoyance of the elders, who were also busy sentencing Monty to death. The Legionnaire joined the elders and busily began talking to them in French about whose jurisdiction poor Monty’s life was in. Both sides made impassioned appeals, to have Monty tied to a tree and shot or alternatively to burn him alive and pick the nicely roasted flesh off of his bones. The Legionnaire’s rebuttal focused mainly on that he didn’t very well mind what they did to him, but only after Monty had been shot as per the regulations of the Foreign Legion. But where would the fun be in roasting alive a dead man? Where indeed, argued the Legionnaire back, would be the justice in shooting a man after he’d been cooked? They had almost reached a stalemate when the Legionnaire, hot, sticky, tired and bored of chasing after a rogue Spanish deserter, capitulated and said he didn’t particularly mind how he died to be honest, as long as he was dead. The little troublemaker.

Monty gave him his artefacts and instructions, sent his crucifix and Saint Christopher’s medal to his father, his memoirs, explaining what has happened to him, to Andre Breton. From which the document I just read is based upon. Breton’s epigram focused on what Monty’s last thought would’ve been as the flames crept slowly towards him, as he begins to slip away into death. Breton suggests that Monty’s mind begins to think of a way out of this debacle; that surely this isn’t the last adventure of Monty Catsin.