Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Disfigurement” was the word their family doctor had used. He referred Pinto to a dermatologist who was reputedly a wizard with laser surgery. Foolishly, Pinto had allowed himself to hope. The meeting with the dermatologist was heartbreakingly brief. In such cases, she told Pinto and his mother, the chances of success were very slim. Moreover, the surgery, which would involve a long and painful healing process, could cost upward of a quarter of a million dollars. Pinto heard his mother groan. Finding this amount of money was, he knew, like asking them to make a soup out of moonbeams. His mother worked in a casino, and they lived in a tiny rented house. There was no other family member who could help them raise such an enormous sum. Pinto’s father, whom he could not remember at all was, according to his mother, “a deadbeat who had never contributed even a penny of support.”

  The dermatologist proffered crumbs of comfort. “There are new technologies being developed all the time,” she said. “In another decade, there may well be something we can do for you with more assured results and far less pain. By then, you’ll be — what? — just twenty-one or twenty-two. And your whole life still before you.”

  Pinto responded with the beatific smile he had already begun practising. He had scotch-taped a picture of Mahatma Gandhi to the mirror in his bedroom because the Mahatma’s was the smile he wanted to emulate. Gandhi, the “great-souled,” was one of his heroes, the embodiment of a moral daring, courage and selflessness that filled him with awe. He often thought about the ratcheting pain to which this gaunt and often ill elderly man had subjected himself: the hunger strikes and the long, punishing protest marches on naked, bleeding feet. A civil disobedience founded on non-violence. That was Satyagraha. Pinto liked to say this word aloud. It sounded to him holy, and yet solid, like the kind of sturdy, deep-rooted tree that held the cosmos together. Satyagraha meant you turned the other cheek. You did not strike back when your opponent dealt you a heavy blow.

  Pinto often had reason to turn his other mottled cheek when he found poisonous words, and sometimes dog turds, flung his way. At fourteen he towered over every boy and most of the teachers in his school. Because of his size, and his schoolmates’ persistent fear his skin condition was infectious, they kept their distance. They treated him as if he were a pariah dog and felt free to curse him. He heard himself called “devil’s arse-face” and “disgusting dog vomit.” He heard many ugly things and tried ardently to rise above it and smile bravely. What hurt most was when the foul words came from girls and young women. Once he got home, he would stare at himself in the bathroom mirror and touch, in turn, each of the diverse blotches of colour upon his face. “You are unique, Pinto,” he told his mirror reflection. “You are kind-hearted and you will be loved.”

  “You will be loved,” he repeated because repetition exerted its own magic, like mantras or the choruses of old English and Scots ballads. He found the plots of these ancient songs consoling because they showed him there were many fates far worse than his own.

  He took great solace, too, in singing to himself the song Gandhi had sung as he walked all day barefoot on stony ground with only the spotless loincloth covering his rickets-thin frame:

  Walk alone

  If they answer not thy call, walk alone;

  If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,

  O thou of evil luck

  Open thy mind and speak out alone

  “O thou of evil luck.” That was him: Peter (Pinto) Dervaig who had the bad, bad luck to be born with such a face. Yet he would persist. He swore to himself he would. He would go on striving to emulate, to some small degree, the illustrious life examples of people like Mahatma Gandhi who defined their own “good” and then lived it.

  Above all else, Pinto strove to be kind. In his own neighbourhood, he made a practice of befriending several old ladies who lived nearby and needed help with cutting their lawns or carrying heavy garbage cans and recycling boxes to the curbside. None of them ever commented on his “affliction” or even so much as looked at him askance. They gave him milk and cookies for his services (he always refused their offers of money) and showed him photographs of their children and grandchildren, whom they seemed sadly never to see.

  Often all they wanted was someone to talk to and Pinto, who had no social life of his own, had time for them. He was a good and patient listener, although he did quite often find his mind wandering. He told himself this was forgivable. While his old ladies chatted on, he would indulge in daydreams — of how it would be when he got into a good college and lived in a real intellectual community. No one there would call him a freak. And he would have professors to guide him so that he would finally understand what Kant meant by the Categorical Imperative, or how he might, like Julian of Norwich, “purify” his motives.

  He had a certain plan for his future life when he would escape at last from the small-minded cruelties of his peers. He clung to this plan, as to a lifeline. He studied hard. He got excellent grades in all his subjects except trigonometry. He continually deepened and widened his interior world. He chanted Gandhi’s walking song to himself and practised his beatific smile. He kept on in good faith, envisioning the fine and noble-hearted man he would become. And how he would look: no longer disfigured, but transfigured. He would be as beautiful as Yangtze. His skin would have a radiance that wrapped him in a glow of warm light. His very physical being would reflect his striving toward the pure shining Forms of Love and Goodness Plato wrote of, and which the deep work of the soul and small acts of kindness might discover.

  It will be so, he told himself each morning and evening. I will transform my evil luck.

  Then the terrible thing happened.

  It began with an old lady’s anguish. Just as he was leaving the house on his way to school the morning of May 5 — a date he was never to forget — he saw Mrs. Eatrides limping along the street half-dressed and with her long white hair streaming unbound. She seemed not to realize that her dress was gaping open at the front. Then he saw to his horror that she was actually clawing at the exposed flesh of her chest. He feared, although he could not quite believe, that she had gone mad.

  Mrs. Eatrides had always struck him as one of the most vigorous and self-reliant of the elderly ladies he helped. She sometimes asked him to cut her lawn at the height of the summer when the grass grew too rapidly and thickly for her to keep up. Or to help her get Mikos, her much-cherished ten-year-old male cat, into his carrier for visits to the veterinarian. Mikos was a long-bodied cat with topaz eyes and thick fur the colour of dark honey. He was also spoiled, stubborn and haughty.

  “Mikos. Mikos.” When Pinto ran out to the distraught Mrs. Eatrides, she could only repeat the cat’s name over and over, in a voice made hoarse by calling. He saw that the old lady’s bottom lip was bleeding and guessed she had bitten it unthinkingly in her distress. He managed to calm her a little and persuaded her to come inside his house, where he made her a mug of tea, heavily sugared.

  Pinto’s mother was asleep after her night shift at the casino, and he did not like to wake her. Yet he was reluctant to help Mrs. Eatrides button up the front of her dress or tidy her hair. To try to do so struck him as disrespectful. He was apprehensive as well, that she might at any moment become hysterical again and start plucking at the loose flesh of her neck and chest. He put the mug of tea in her hands. She inhaled the warmth and the scent, took a sip, and then set the mug down, precisely centred on a cardboard coaster imprinted with words “Bonanza Casino.” This simple domestic gesture was enough to restore her to herself.

  “Such a state,” she whispered as she buttoned up her dress with trembling hands. That finished, she began to smooth her hair, gathering the straying lengths into the rucked elastic from which they had escaped, winding and patting until the sliver strands assumed the familiar shape that satisfied her.

  “Sorry, so sorry,” she gestured vaguely to the front of her dress and to her hair. “Such a kind young man. So rare. Very rare.” She nodded to herself.

 
Then her body sagged. She began to shake and to sob. “Mikos. Mikos.”

  “Is he sick, Mr. Eatrides?” Surely not dead?

  “Gone. Gone. Missing. Two days. Three nights.” She held up three fingers and looked at them dolefully.

  Pinto escorted Mrs. Eatrides home, and saw her safely inside. He promised her he would go immediately to look for Mikos. He could easily afford to take the day off school. Besides, he was full of foreboding. There was in the neighbourhood a tribe of young boys, all between eight and eleven, who delighted in the torture of small creatures. Pinto had twice come upon them stoning wrens and chickadees, and had chastized them as calmly as his burgeoning rage allowed.

  “Fuck off, yuck-face!” the bravest of them had retorted. But he was three times the height of the tallest of the boys and more than twice their breadth and he had seen the fear in their eyes and had managed to save a bird or two from a torturous death. He was under no illusion that his reprimand and warning had curbed the young band’s sadistic practices, so when he set off in search of Mikos, he prepared himself for the worst. There was, to the west of the neighbourhood, a railway track long defunct, bordered by three storage sheds that had somehow survived decades of neglect and torrential rain. Ever since he could remember, these sheds had been colonized by successive gangs of young boys indulging in pursuits grubby and bloody. Or so he surmised from the reek in the vicinity of the sheds and the crude drawings of sexual organs and dismembered body parts daubed on the outer walls.

  Because he was a loner, Pinto regarded the things bands of boys did together from an almost anthropological perspective. He observed and sniffed the air, and was unsettled by their penchant for cruelty. He was at an utter loss to understand the satisfaction they apparently took from inflicting pain on small animals, themselves and each other. Once, he had sat on the bus beside one of the tribe and been appalled at the suppurating mess on the boy’s forearm.

  “You ought to have the school nurse look at that,” he’d said, striving for a non-patronizing tone.

  “It’s a tattoo, yuck-face. They always look like this to start with.”

  The boy stared fixedly ahead, while Pinto tried not to think about dirty needles and pins, and poisonous home-made inks. He went inward, to that place he worked at so hard to cultivate: the cool crystalline corridors where he focused solely on things holy, like Plato’s Eternal Forms and Gandhi’s selflessness.

  All that changed when he opened the door of the second shed and found what was left of Mikos nailed to the wall. The boys had plucked out one of the cat’s eyes and torn off his left back leg. They had ripped open his soft topaz belly and pulled out his lungs, and guts and small heart.

  Pinto’s stomach lurched. His eyes streamed. His fists twitched. He began to pray — he was no longer sure to what — that Mikos had expired long before the boys began to blind and maim him. Then he saw, through his tears and unholy rage, a deathly human face superimposed on the wall beside the crucified cat. He knew two things for certain: that the face was not really there; and that what he saw was the demise of his own imagined soul and the man he had wanted to be. At that moment, the very idea he was a man disgusted him. He turned his back on Mikos because he could not bear to look at the mangled remains any longer. Nor did he have it in him to take the cat down and bury its body deep in the earth. He could not stand the idea of touching the corpse, and becoming any more contaminated than he already was, contaminated by reason of being human. For one of the most terrifying things he’d felt within himself was a desire for vengeance, bloody and exact. He wanted, and loathed himself for the urge, to hurt the little tribe of torturers as they had hurt Mikos.

  “I am this,” he thought, as the tears streamed down his face and his fists tightened into balls; he imagined pummelling the boys’ faces, mashing their flesh together with their bones. Again and again, he saw in his mind’s eye, re-enacted for him in heartless detail, the death of the luminous soul he had cherished and laboured at so hard. Its death’s-head grinned at him as if at some merciless cosmic joke. His whole life plan had been pure sham and delusion. He did not have the makings of a saint or a mystic. He was too corrupt, too full of self-disgust at his own humanity ever to become a truly “good man.” Yet some residue of his old self still yearned to do the decent thing. He must beat back the desire for vengeance, he told himself, even if this meant a physical scourging of his own flesh.

  And he must keep Mrs. Eatrides from ever finding out what the boys had done to Mikos. He was certain she would torment herself by dwelling on the cat’s agony and ultimately go mad. He could think of only one way to destroy the evidence and that was to burn the building down. There was no shortage of matches in the shed, nor of flammable materials, including greasy pizza boxes, chip bags, pornographic magazines and discarded ragged clothing. Pinto set fires in all four corners and stayed long enough to see the flames leap up the wall where Mikos hung.

  Then he went out the door and squatted at some distance to watch the vile place consumed by a conflagration he believed wholly justified. It did occur to him that if he were spotted, he might be charged with arson or mischief-making of some sort. He told himself it was well worth the risk to stay and see the shed burn. He ardently hoped that Mikos’s bones would burn as well. Mrs. Eatrides must never know what I know, he kept telling himself. It would destroy her.

  He was surprised what pleasure he took from the spectacle of the fire: its glow and wild mercurial aspect struck him as consummately beautiful. He shifted from his squatting position to his knees and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer. He had not at first understood that by starting the fire, he was initiating a ritual. He was purifying the ground that had been polluted by evil and enabling Mikos’s spirit to go free. He concentrated, as fervently as he could, on the image of Mikos, made whole and healthy again, floating high above the flames. What magnificent angels cats would make, he thought, far nobler, gentler and clean-souled than the chubby-faced boys with wings who cluttered the sky in old paintings of the Virgin Mary. Cherubim, he realized, looked far too much like the boys in the gang who had done this unspeakable thing.

  The smoke made his eyes smart and he began to cry freely. If Mikos were an angel, why couldn’t God be an antelope or a bear or a lion? Weren’t animals wholly superior to humans, in any case? Didn’t they once rule the world, from horizon to horizon? And deep in the secret caves of the earth, weren’t the first paintings humans ever made portraits of animals that throbbed with sacred power? Pinto’s eyes watered as he pictured first Mikos, the cat-angel, and then a hand that trembles in awe as it applies lines of red oxide and black charcoal to a cave wall. Revealed in the imagined torch light were shapes of auroch, horse and antelope, swift and eternal.

  Ink-black clouds were gathering to the east as the remnants of the last two standing boards collapsed into the pyre. There was an unmistakable buzz in the air that presaged rain. Soon the skies would open, the fire would go out and this foul place would be doubly cleansed. He kept going back to the idea of animals’ cleaner souls. No animal would have done to another creature the horrific thing the loathsome boys had done to Mikos, certainly not willfully, gleefully, urging one another on in their perversity.

  No animal would have done this. A revolutionary thought seized and shook him. What he saw, with such an astounding clarity it made him almost afraid, was that human beings had taken a wrong turn that corrupted evolution. It had all gone terribly awry after men made those holy paintings of animals deep in the caverns of the earth. What should have come next, he saw, was a natural shift into mutual respect and fraternity; and yes, even conversations between animals and humans. He recalled in excitement pictures he had seen of St. Francis of Assisi shaking hands with a wolf, and talking with birds.

  This was no fairy tale, he realized. Once upon a time, animals spoke. And if human beings had only listened properly, men and women and animals might have lived as equals, guiding each other and fructifying one another’s thought. He wondered
if “fructify” was quite the right word. But he liked the abundant possibility it suggested and the idea of a natural flowering of the spirit. If we had only opened our ears, we might not now be so foul a species, base of heart and drawn to do evil far more often than good. Or was it really that simple? Was he deluding himself?

  Did he hallucinate what happened next? For the rest of his life he would swear to himself that he had not. There was perhaps no one he could ever tell what he had seen who would not think him mad. Yet it had happened. Mikos the cat-angel appeared in the sky and tried to speak to him. But to his immense sadness and frustration, Pinto could neither hear nor understand.

  You have a holiness we have not. These were his last words to Mikos before the vision faded, and there was only the rain falling and the sizzling sound of the fire dying away under the downpour. When he stood up, he was at first unsteady on his feet. It was as if some essential interior balance had been forever undone. “I am no longer what I was,” he chanted to himself as he ran. The repetition of this simple sentence helped repel the image of the crucified Mikos which threatened to invade his brain. He ran on with the heavy rain drenching his hair and pouring over his face and down his neck. His jeans and his shirt clung to his skin. Like seaweed to the corpse of a drowned man, he thought.