At this point in the dream, an invisible assailant struck her between the shoulder blades with a weapon like a stout stick or a truncheon. The blow was so vicious she fell to her knees gasping. In that first rush of expelled breath, she felt something else leave her, something warm and fluttering and precious. The pain in her back was nothing to the sick sensation that now overwhelmed her. She felt as if she had swallowed an abyss. She knew that if she was to save herself she must recover the precious thing that had flown out of her mouth when she had been struck.
She got to her feet and looked about. Then she saw a tiny creature writhing in the dust. She immediately recognized this was her own soul squirming there, close to expiring. It was alternately an ugly and an exquisite thing, switching back and forth, now black, now luminously white; now a loathsome grub, now a delicate winged being that might be a glittering moth or even a fairy. It was in its grub shape when Agnes picked it up with shaking hands and popped it into her mouth. She was careful not to swallow. On her tongue, she felt the thing grow moist and begin to flutter. Then she felt it no more and she understood it was home now. She had restored her soul to herself.
Whenever Agnes woke from this dream, she would go over its various parts. Someone had struck her sharply from behind and made her spit out her soul. But she had found it again. She was more and more convinced that the assailant in the dream was the surgeon and the stout stick his scalpel and laser. She began to fear that the psychic costs of a new face might be terribly severe. Still she wavered in her decision, particularly when a very handsome boy at school cursed her without provocation in the hallway. “Fuck-face! How can you stand yourself?” He looked her in the eye and his expression was deadly serious, tinged with disgust. Her stomach lurched and her flesh burned in humiliation. Yet she strove, and succeeded, in keeping her own face impassive. What hurt most was that she had sometimes thought this boy smiled at her in a special way. She had imagined him to be sensitive and discerning, and entertained fantasies in which he stroked her face, breasts and thighs and told her she was beautiful.
One evening Agnes unfolded all the cosmetic surgeon’s pamphlets and spread them fanlike on her desk. She stood a very long time staring down at the photographs of joyful transformed faces. Or was it relief she saw in every “after” portrait? She began to cry silently, as she had done in the surgeon’s office. But these were her old scalding tears. As they fell upon the open pamphlets, she half expected the pages to smoulder and char about the edges.
She woke early the next day, hours before her parents and sister. She was agitated and restless, as if her body had some urgent message to impart. The difficulty was she could not hear it properly because there was simply too much interference: a buzzing in her ears, and a prickling along the nerves of her arms and fingers. She managed to make herself a cup of tea, struggling to control her trembling hands. Suddenly her fear became a live visible thing, swooping out of the corner of the kitchen like a huge bat with exposed fangs. She held, with all her might, to a single thought. She must not let this bat-thing suck her sanity out of her. She felt she was being smothered and fought for breath under the wings’ tight fretwork of small bones and stifling fur.
If she could only distract herself, she might neutralize the panic. It unnerved her that her legs were so unsteady and that she felt as weak as she had the previous winter during a severe bout of the flu. But with consciously slow steps, and deliberately deep breaths, she succeeded in getting herself from the kitchen into the living-room. There she drew back the curtains to reveal a jewel-like dawn. She made herself speak aloud the names of precious stones whose colours she recognized in the sky: beryl, amethyst, aquamarine, sapphire. She was amazed how this simple recitation helped calm her. She sat on the sofa facing the window so that she could focus on the various hues as they shifted one into another. When the sun rose, she had to look away because it struck her as brash and swollen and bloody. This was how her poor face would look after the surgeon’s operation, it occurred to her: a bleeding mash of flesh and bone against a white sheet.
“I am sore afraid.” Once again, she spoke aloud the words that came to mind. She put her forefinger to her cheek and lip and nose. Immediately she regretted this, for the gesture, added to her spoken confession of fear, triggered the panic again. She grasped the first thing that came to hand in an effort to divert herself. It was a British Sunday newspaper which her mother sometimes bought because the art critic was an old university friend. Agnes shook the paper so that the magazine insert slid out. It would be far easier, she thought, to look at pictures than to try to read.
The image on the magazine’s cover grabbed all her attention. Instead of the usual striking human face or figure, dramatically posed, she was looking at the life-sized portrait of a female chimpanzee. The white-type caption, set against the animal’s wiry, dark hair, told her that this was Noona, aged three, a resident of an animal sanctuary in north Congo. Noona had been rescued from hunters who had slaughtered her parents for bush meat. For her portrait, the chimpanzee had compressed her lips in an apparent smile. Agnes was struck by how human Noona’s mouth looked, as did her brown eyes. They had the depth and gleam of warm topaz. She perceived no wariness in the animal’s eyes: only an unsullied trust and innocence and a tragic gentleness that made her want to wring her hands in anguish.
She imagined the frantic squeals of Noona’s parents as the poachers hacked at their flesh. She felt nauseous, and then overcome by useless fury. Inside the magazine, she found twenty more portraits of bonobos, orangutans and chimpanzees, all of whom had found refuge in sanctuaries. The text under each portrait gave the animal’s name and a brief history of the ordeals it had undergone at the hands of hunters or unscrupulous owners or exotic pet traders. Many of these rescued animals were suffering from mental disorders — like Ruella, an orangutan who had been found in a poacher’s hut, curled up beside her mother’s decapitated head.
A cataclysmic jolt went through her spine. Agnes sat erect under the force of an emotion she could not at first define. The longer she looked at the individual portraits, the more she perceived not just a vague resemblance to her own mirror-face, but an actual bond of blood and being. “Flesh of my flesh,” she said aloud. Never before had she understood anything with such clarity. She was connected to these animals through time past by way of an ancient ancestral lineage. But she was bound, as well, through all her personal future time. These bonobos and orangutans and chimpanzees were the beings who had preceded her on the road where she had been forced to spit out her soul. That they were ahead of her meant she could learn from them. She saw how she might strive to emulate their dignity, and cultivate the watchful awareness that made their eyes glow so finely.
Was she romanticizing? Of course she had read about human beings’ sacred relation with animals, and this had always struck her as a pleasing idea. But never before had she properly grasped what it meant. Now that she had actually experienced the irrepressible and electrifying nature of this bond, she saw that it must, and would, revolutionize her life. Nothing in her world would be the same again. The very sunlight she walked in and the air she breathed would look and feel different to her. Two other new certainties came to her: that she would never again eat meat of any kind, or allow the cosmetic surgeon anywhere near her face.
Half an hour later, when she heard her parents come into the kitchen, she was able to tell them with absolute confidence: “I have decided. I don’t want the operation. I don’t want my face to be cut.”
“Honey, you’re sure?”
It disturbed Agnes to see how deeply furrowed was her father’s brow. She saw the same perplexed concern on her mother’s face.
“I am sure. I want to keep this face. My face.”
It was not her parents, but Noona’s trusting topaz eyes she saw as she spoke these words.
She had made her decision with all the clarity and courage she could muster, and was sure it was the right one. Nevertheless, she kept seeing the conce
rn that had clouded her parents’ eyes. Could she really bear all her life to come with this face? She began then to think about her mother’s reaction to Piero di Cosimo’s Hunt; her refusal to recognize the suffering that was the lot of living creatures everywhere. With that inane perspective, how on earth could she understand her own daughter’s daily fare of pain? Agnes tasted something vile in her mouth and wondered if it was the bitterness of lost illusions. She had always believed her mother felt the pain along with her; that she ached, as much as she did, at the indignities she had to undergo every day, the humiliations that sometimes made her want to claw her own flesh from her face.
My mother has never really understood what I endure. In the cold light of this bleak revelation, Agnes saw herself condemned to a future where she was utterly isolated, subjected to unending sadistic treatment and shame. And there was increasing shame these days, as the nasty remarks hurled at her had more and more a prurient cast (“I guess you like it from behind, eh monkey-girl?”) What gave them the right, she raged within herself, the greasy-haired men who yelled at her out of the windows of their rusting cars; the twelve-year-old boys in the private school blazers who sniggered at her on the bus? She tried so hard to pity them for their self-damning shallowness and their sad, sick obsessions. In fact, she hated them because they made her feel so dirty. What have I done, she thought. Have I thrown away my only chance to look and feel normal?
She felt more and more sick and overwhelmed by dread. How could she possibly bear her life to come if she was never to feel a genuine empathy from another living human creature? To steady herself, she retreated to her room and took out the precious art book. Turning several of its heavy glossy pages at once, a scene opened before her that seemed uncannily to respond to her need. A lovely young woman lay in a flowering meadow flanked by two mourners: a gentle-faced satyr kneeling at her head on his strong goat legs and a sorrowful brown hound keeping vigil at her feet. So palpable was the grief of these two compassionate attendants that she felt they reached out to embrace her as well, with all the stirring warmth of their creature-life.
She sensed, in her very blood, that this painting conveyed a poignant mystery, a holy secret that the painter had won through the agonized labour of his craft and a belief in something fine and transcendent that lifted all life high above the abyss of bloody deeds and coiling tragic circumstance. Every detail intensified her conviction: the care he lavished on the tiny wildflowers of the meadow; the reappearance of the loyal brown dog on the sandy strand in the distance where he appeared to be stopping a fight between a black dog and a white one; a great heron silhouetted against the misty water, its supple gaunt frame looking so like a keyhole; the way the young woman’s rare luminosity, even in death, was mirrored in the sheen upon the blue-white river. If she meditated on this painting, as religious people did on icons, she sensed she might enter the hushed mystery of its world. The more she looked, the more she wanted to look. And the more she wanted to know.
She was certain that the painting contained a life-giving truth, despite the fact it was a death scene. Discovering that truth, and how it connected to the painter’s obvious care and attention to the lives of animals, was a task she knew she had to take on.
She lay on the bed with the heavy art book propped on her knees, and turned the pages with a slow and tender care. Many of the book’s colour plates drew from her gasps of astonished joy. In the animals she saw there, some with their own and some with human faces, she encountered, again and again, eyes that knew the bloodied, troubled road she travelled. These eyes were benign, wise and sorrowful. They seemed to look out at her directly and to welcome her. So too, she believed, did the artist who painted them.
TWO
The Painter (1492)
PIERO WAS GRIEVING FOR THE Medici’s giraffe. The marvellous creature, a gift to Lorenzo from the Sultan of Egypt, had broken its neck when some fool in the family’s household led it beneath too low an archway. The animal’s needless death sickened and enraged Piero, for the giraffe was a veritable miracle and he had loved it dearly.
The first time he saw the giraffe, its head like an antlered flower atop the astonishing neck, he had wanted to fall on his knees and weep for joy. Had he painted himself at that moment, he would have shown his face shining, his eyes and mouth as round as apples. He was elated, and thanked God for the existence of such an incomparably graceful being. And what a gentle regard the animal turned on all those who looked at him in wonder. Children ran to peer out upper windows to see him as he cantered by, then clapped their hands in delight. The giraffe had seemed to smile upon them. His eyes were mild.
Piero had been privileged to sketch the giraffe on several visits to the Medici menagerie at Poggio a Caino. He had recast his sketches as pen-and-ink drawings for inclusion in his book of portraits of animals, rare and exotic. In these drawings, he had portrayed the giraffe with his head uplifted so that he seemed to yearn toward the stars, where he might meet his mate again and graze upon sidereal delicacies. How nobly the animal bore his loneliness and years of exile. How he must have missed his African homeland. Perhaps it was a comfort to him to be so much admired, Piero thought, and to draw forth so many smiles and cries of joy whenever he went about the city as the brightest feature in the Medici’s many pageants and parades. Such was the gift all animals gave to humankind, if men had but the eyes to see and understand this rightly.
Piero began to shape in his mind how he might give the giraffe a memorial more lasting than his pen-and-ink drawings. In oils on canvas, he could render the creature’s subtle colouring of ripe apricots and weathered ivory. Against an unmarked sky of palest blue, he could show to advantage the long, pure curve of his neck, and the fine modelling of his face, antlers and ears. And, to offset perfectly the taut strength of the animal’s tawny back and shoulders, he would set behind him a mountain of turquoise. He would depict the giraffe in that stance he had so often assumed in life, his pale right foreleg bent slightly at the knee, and his hoof lifted from the ground.
The portrait must catch that exact moment when the giraffe turned his head and his features took on the expression that Piero most loved to see. This was a look of benign curiosity with which the giraffe regarded men and women at their work or daily chores. Piero saw suddenly, on the shining tableau of his mind’s eye, the diverse elements of the scene on which the giraffe would gaze. Two gods sit upon the ground, their flesh sagging about their jaws and naked chests, aging as real men age. The grey-haired Aeolus, god of the winds, pumps bellows to keep alive the fire of the forge at which Vulcan works, shaping molten iron with instruments utterly new to mankind. This was the Golden Age, the painter realized, a time of men and women’s innocence — an unreal time perhaps, but one in which he wanted ardently to believe. No blood lust. No scheming cruelty. No slaughter of animals and no eating of their flesh. A time of veneration for every living thing in the natural world.
For Piero, these things included mountains, the craggy outcroppings of cliffs and simple stones. They too lived and had their own individual character. In the foreground of the scene, he saw a cricket sunning itself, content upon the flat, warm stone that was its dear companion. In this scene, he envisioned, fire would also be mankind’s loving consort. The sparks Aeolus tended with his bellows glinted, as rubies did, inside a white hearth shaped like a scallop shell. Fire’s potential uncontrollable frenzy was here contained and nurtured in its correct proportions by pagan gods who grasped its most capricious nature.
Piero stared into the flames of his own hearth. Their leaping and mercurial shapes seemed a mirror of his mind. The flames’ very dance gave birth to faces, forms and figures so distinctive and so numerous he feared he might not live long enough to set them upon paper, wood or canvas. So teeming they were, and so quick and restless in their movement, most especially the marvellous hybrid creatures: trees with human faces, mermen with fishes’ tails, satyrs and centaurs. He delighted to see them, each and every one. The satyrs now vaulte
d from flame tip to flame tip, their hooves gleaming like hazelnuts.
All these creatures’ most natural wildness, their shining purity, counteracted the heaviness of spirit that sometimes affected him so sorely he could not abide the company of men. There were days indeed when he could not bring himself to pass through his front door out into the Via della Scalla. In these tormenting hours, he was so conscious of human sinfulness, it seemed to stain his very skin. He would study the backs of his hands, his palms and his naked forearms and see where the shadows had seeped into his flesh. He saw in himself that sombre hue, of mud rather than clay, that the great Masaccio had given the faces of Adam and Eve when they are expelled from the Garden of Eden. What inarticulate cry, what howl, issues from Eve’s open mouth? Piero was sure he knew. Whenever he visited the Brancacci Chapel to stare awe-struck at Masaccio’s fresco, he felt the need to stop up his own mouth with his hand, lest he sob aloud in sympathy with Eve and Adam’s misery and most grievous shame.
Of course, his own ingrained melancholy was in part responsible for the loathsome burden that so often encumbered his spirit. Melancholia seemed to warp both his mind and his eye so that he saw nothing but humankind’s vicious destructiveness and blind arrogance. How could men think themselves superior to the creatures of the forests and seas and skies? What right had they to murder these beings to satisfy their despicable gluttony, vanity and blood lust? In his worst states of despair, his habitually vigorous body would fail him. He slumped upon his chair in a dim corner. When he did manage to stir himself and rise, he shuffled like a man of fourscore years, palsied and drained of strength.
Hunting Piero Page 2