I am no longer what I was.
But what, then, was he? “I am a believer in the holiness of animals,” he told himself. “I will, wherever possible, strive to be their defender and to keep them from harm.” He recognized the overwhelming magnitude of this promise and his own limited resources for carrying it out. He was frail and he was fallible. He knew himself to be every bit as corrupt as the wicked boys. He saw that he had been up to now solipsistic and self-obsessed. He had wanted to be a “good man” so that he might narcissistically admire himself and luxuriate in the glow of his own virtue. Most despicable of all, he had wanted to be “good” so that he could feel superior to everyone who reviled him for his deformity. And his skin condition was a deformity. Why did he persist in kidding himself? He was an aberration. And then it hit him, as forcibly as a fist in the gut, why he had been born as he was. His freakish appearance made him alien enough to see the human species objectively. And his consequent role was to bear witness. He must spread the word; become a walking, breathing testament that nothing mattered more than this foundational ethical precept: that as a species, humans had to transform their attitude to animals.
How could he begin to build up the learning and the wisdom to make himself a fit proselytizer? What happens when your whole idea of mortality is upturned and no longer has just a human face? All these things Pinto ruminated on in the shower as the extremely hot water beat down on him, washing away the stink of the fire and of the boys’ evil.
It was an irony that nearly choked him. His very first deed in his new identity was to tell a lie. This was something he had seldom done in his life, except to spare someone else’s feelings. Which was undoubtedly the case with the untruth he told Mrs. Eatrides: “I am sorry, Mrs. Eatrides. I looked everywhere I could think of. We can try putting up notices around the neighbourhood with his picture. I can . . .”
She silenced him without a word, thrusting her right hand, palm outward, at the air. If he had been standing any closer to her, this hand would have struck him. She did not look like herself, with her right eyebrow raised appraisingly and her whole demeanour stern and judgemental. She was an ancient seer casting a cold eye on his frailty. He was certain she could see through his duplicity. He had gone on babbling for a moment, about putting up posters and searching further.
Mrs. Eatrides nodded sharply. “Done,” she said. “It is done.” And she showed him the door.
Mrs. Eatrides never spoke to him again. Although he went several times to her door, and knocked loudly and patiently, she did not answer. A month passed. When he next walked down her street, he saw a real estate agent’s bold red sign fixed to the white picket fence. A quick glance told him the house was already empty, even the blue-and-white ceramic pot, with its frilly geraniums, gone from the front step.
As he stood staring at the empty house, where once he had been made so welcome, he realized he was looking at the end of an entire passage of his life: a boyhood that had gone on far too long, where he had swaddled himself in delusions, most particularly about his own potential saintliness.
In the weeks that followed, he sought and found new heroes: like the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane who had experimented on himself rather than use animals, and Barry Horne, the animal rights activist who had died on a hunger strike in prison to publicize the crimes of the people who operated animal laboratories. Pinto regarded Horne’s as a supreme death, invested with the deepest possible meaning. More and more, he haunted the websites of groups like the Animal Liberation Front that took the protection of animals as gravely as a religious vow. He read stories and saw images of animals’ suffering that made the tears stream down his face and onto his keyboard. Some of the things he saw made him physically ill. But his indignation and rage were stronger than any nausea. He seemed always now to see, at the back of his mind, the iconic image of the rights warrior, his face obscured by a black wool balaclava, and a rescued dog or cat cradled in his arms.
By the agonizingly clear light of all that he learned, Pinto re-plotted his future. He would still study ethics, but he would focus as well on mass psychology. He wanted to know why it was that entire groups of people, and even entire nations, could become infected by, and then act upon, some absolutely vile idea. Salo. Babi Yar. Dachau. Abu Ghraib. If he thought about these things too long and too hard, he found himself wanting to divest himself of his human-ness, strip it off like a foul and maggot-ridden skin. He knew he had to be careful for his sanity’s sake. Above all, he determined never to be part of an unthinking cult where his own moral sense got utterly subsumed by the group.
It did occur to him to confront the boys who had tortured Mikos, to see if he could at least stir their remorse. But he desisted simply because he feared he would not be able to control himself. He had burned their playhouse down, and perhaps that was vengeance enough, although vengeance was not what he had intended.
He had thought that fatal month of May could hold nothing worse for him than the crucifixion of Mikos. But then the second terrible thing happened. What he noticed first was Yangtze’s limp and the way she held her head oddly to one side. Then he saw how glazed her eyes were. And yet how brave she was, trying to bound toward him and dance in her usual way, but stumbling and falling. He put his arms around her neck and tried not to sob too much into her fur, lest he upset her.
The veterinarian prescribed an antibiotic and a steroid to reduce the swelling in Yangtze’s brain. Other than that, there was nothing to be done, except wait and watch and hope. Pinto tried, and failed, to be as brave as his dog. She was so uncomplaining, never whimpering or moping as most humans would have done. He thought he would never see anything as noble as her forbearance. His heart ached when she tried to rally for his sake. She would assume her old dancing pose and then collapse. Toward the end, he had to hold her up while she peed, because her legs simply gave way beneath her. He looked into her eyes and saw she knew it was time. He believed, and time proved him right, that he would never look into eyes more beautiful than Yangtze’s.
For weeks after he had her put to sleep, he felt numb. He walked into doors and three times let the bathroom sink overflow. Sometimes it felt like someone was scraping a roll of barbed wire repeatedly across the inside of his chest.
At college, he kept on his bedside table a photograph of Yangtze so that the first thing he saw on waking was his beloved friend’s image. But in the first semester of his second year, something odd happened. Now, when he woke, it was another face that entirely dominated his thoughts: that of a young woman in his “Animals and Ethics” course. She was the most exquisite-looking person he had ever seen. He yearned to sleep with her, and to cradle her small body in his arms and feel her wonderful breasts pressed against his chest. He had asked his friend Campbell Korsakov to find out her name. He experienced an exultant joy simply when he repeated its syllables to himself. Agnes. Agnes Vane.
FIVE
The Punjabi Pyjamas
ONE OF THE GREAT SENSUOUS pleasures in Agnes’s new life was dressing up. Her scholarship left her enough spare cash to indulge in occasional trips to charity shops where she hunted happily for choice vintage clothing. She seldom spent more than ten dollars on a single item and delighted in the sheer luck by which she stumbled on some of her very best finds. Who would have thought you could buy a dramatic thirties felt cloche for just four dollars, or a gauzy silk bed jacket with cape sleeves embroidered all over with flowers of pale lilac and silver for seven?
She liked to imagine intimate histories for each of her purchases, seeing the little stains and mended tears as evidence of the original owner’s passions and thrift. From the dime-sized patch of ochre near the edge of the bed jacket’s left sleeve, she conjured up a spill of night-time brandy topped with cream. It even crossed her mind that this silken confection might have belonged to Oscar Wilde and that he had forgotten it one morning, amidst the tumbled sheets in a hotel bedroom while on his reading tour of America. When she held the bed jacket up to her nose, she wondered if it w
as the scent of lovemaking she inhaled. Whoever the jacket had belonged to, Agnes was convinced it had played its part in some splendidly erotic moments, the embroidered silk draped beguilingly from smooth shoulders, then slipping away, to reveal breasts as round and firm as her own.
The bed jacket inspired fantasies Agnes judged to be elegant and even decorous. At nineteen, she was still a virgin. This fact did not greatly dismay her. Although she was extremely curious about sex, she had decided to wait until she fell in love; and, above all, until she knew with full certainty this feeling was reciprocated. When she had lived with her mother and father and the flawless Phoebe, she was constantly beset by doubts that anyone would ever find her appealing enough to love and desire. Now, far removed from them, she saw her own reflected image in an utterly different light.
She had a small face, full of character. She thought it likely that in the entire history of humankind, no other person had ever looked exactly like Agnes Vane. Recently, she had come upon the French phrase belle laide and immediately appropriated it as exactly right for her. To be simultaneously ugly and attractive was surely far more interesting than to be simply, and boringly, beautiful. How extraordinary it was to feel at last comfortable in her own skin. It was this new ease with her physical self, something she had not experienced since she was a very young child, that prompted her to pack away all the clothes she had brought with her to college, the baggy, serviceable shirts and slacks in olive and brown she had worn for many years in the hope she might go unnoticed.
In this small, benignly tolerant liberal arts community where she now lived, she felt buoyantly free to wear outfits she would never have considered in her previous existence. Like her latest six-dollar acquisition, which she had christened her Punjabi pyjamas, a long tapering cotton tunic in a feathery black and white Paisley pattern with matching slim-leg pants. The tunic was bordered with a wide rosy braid embossed with zigzags of amethyst and pale gold. Decorating the widest band of braid, stitched down the tunic’s central closing, were thirty-two appliquéd diamonds. She had counted them. Inside each diamond was a flower with a violet centre. Most striking of all was the sunburst of embroidered orange and gold marigolds above the tunic’s hem. This vibrant cluster was set just slightly off centre, an asymmetry that appealed to her artistic eye.
She was amazed how light-footed and exotic she felt when she put on her Punjabi pyjamas, particularly with red velvet slipper shoes and a simple black scarf tied around her brow. This was the outfit she was wearing the day she fell in love.
It happened in the third lecture of her “Animals and Ethics” course. This course was very popular principally because the young and charismatic professor, Fergus Jonquil, was so passionate about his subject. He was also an intensely attractive person, lithe and quick-moving. With his trim beard and flashing eyes, he reminded Agnes of portrait photographs she had seen of D. H. Lawrence. The professor’s moral authority electrified the hall, his sentences assembling in her head like radiant lines of force, all building toward a great edifice of enlightened thought. By this light, she saw her own ignorance and complacency starkly revealed.
She had not believed she was in any way arrogant in her attitude to animals. His lectures showed her that she was.
“I want you all to consider carefully over the coming week the questions I am about to pose.” As he spoke, Professor Jonquil strode briskly back and forth across the stage. Agnes accepted this show of restlessness as a natural overflow of his charisma. It had yet to occur to her that his physical agitation and the wild, swooping gestures were all quite deliberate; that he used his wiry frame and crackling energy to compel their attention, and bind them to his belief.
“First, what would it feel like to be the mouse abruptly upturned by the plough in Robert Burns’s poem? Cowering, Burns says. Timorous. Seized by panic. Its heart pounding so hard, its ears are probably ringing. Read the poem. It’s on today’s handout. You’re all smart enough to figure out the dialect. Put yourself inside that little creature’s terror. Thought by thought. Perception by perception. Live it out.
“Second, and here comes the plough again, but this time you’re an earthworm. And you’ve been cut, sliced in half by the blade. If you honestly think the worm feels no pain, you probably don’t belong in this class.
“Inhabit that worm. Be it.
“Next, I want you to consider what sentience really means. It means that everything that lives — and I mean everything — can feel and can suffer. Not just furry creatures. But also toads and salamanders. Bats and rats. Ants and gnats.
“All living things feel and perceive and have experiences that are unique to their particular lifetimes. And the totality of every living creature’s experience, the multiplicity of every consciousness, are all connected and interwoven.” He flung his arms wide.
“ ‘Each outcry from the hunted hare / A fibre from the brain does tear.’ That’s William Blake writing in about 1800. Whose brain does he mean? Certainly not just the hare’s. But our brains as well. Every individual who hears and reflects on the hare’s pain. And something far greater. I think Blake’s talking here about the very soul of the world, the Anima Mundi. The soul of the world suffers and is diminished at the cries of every hunted, suffering creature.”
His right arm swung up abruptly. He pointed at random at faces among the hundred and more students in the amphitheatre. “I know some of you are sitting there thinking this is all mystical claptrap. Or maybe you see me as some kind of holy fool, standing here bleating on about the sensibility of a creature you would just as soon ignore because it’s negligible. It’s only an animal.
“For you in particular, but this applies to everyone in my classes, I urge you to examine your assumptions mercilessly. Be rigorous. Remember we spent the first two lectures trying to expose how deeply we in the Western world are conditioned to think of animals as the lower orders of creation. They are mere things that exist to labour for us, or amuse us. Or they are commodities to be eaten and stripped of their skins to make us boots and shoes and belts and ridiculously expensive accessories.
“Plastic,” he said, pointing to his narrow tomato-red belt. “Rope and rubber.” Holding aloft one rather ungainly looking sandal.
“And according to Descartes, who puts thinking man at the pinnacle of creation, animals are beast-machines. He honestly believed they are incapable of feeling. Which is why, as I told you in our last class, the Cartesian philosopher Malebranche had no problem whatsoever in kicking a pregnant dog who happened to get in his way when he was out walking.
“So the essence of your assignment for next week is to remove yourselves, imaginatively and empathetically, as far from that kind of heinous conditioned response as you can. Write me an essay from the point of view of Burns’s mouse or the worm dissected by the plough, or Blake’s hunted hare. Enter their experience and ask yourself, is there really any difference between sentience and consciousness?
“And please do all the readings listed on your handout. And please reflect hard on that fibre of your brain tearing each time a hunted hare cries out. So shirk off the arrogance, ladies and gentlemen, and concentrate on cultivating respect, empathy and compassion for every living creature, whose experience — just like ours — is part of a single consciousness. Every one, all connected and interwoven.”
This idea resonated strongly with Agnes. It seemed so perfectly to describe the fluent, radiant world of di Cosimo’s paintings with their wondrous human/animal hybrids. The week previous she had got on a Greyhound bus and made the journey to the Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. There she had gazed a full two hours at The Discovery of Honey. This painting, much loved by the Surrealists, showed a boisterous procession of satyrs, attendant on a boyish, red-nosed Bacchus. As they danced along, they were apparently making a great clamour as they banged on pots and pans, a fire shovel, and a waffle iron so as to drive away the bees hived in a massive tree.
She focused on the seductive colour and varied furs o
n the satyrs’ graceful goat legs, the smooth musculature of their naked human chests; and their pointed ears, bristling with hair, that looked so astonishing appended to their very human faces. What struck her most was their evident joy, and their courteous and highly civilized interaction. These were not at all the devilish-looking satyrs bent on rape and destruction that showed up in the works of other Renaissance artists, like Botticelli. Agnes was drawn in particular to a contemplative male satyr, who wore a huge scallop shell as his codpiece. He held a chubby baby satyr carefully on his shoulder so that the child could see everything going on.
In the background, a stately lion descended a winding path originating in one of di Cosimo’s mysterious cloudlike mountains. The lion, who was in no hurry, was obviously one of the company of beings who inhabited the world of the painting. He intended no harm. Agnes loved the fact that the animals were always there in di Cosimo’s work. Even in his religious paintings, which were by no means her favourites, he would include at least one animal with a markedly individual character. In a nativity scene, where the Virgin Mary cradled the Christ child, he even had a black rat walking along an ancient beam of the stable wall.
Even the loathsome, putrid rat. Agnes realized di Cosimo would not have known rats were plague carriers. But surely he could not have loved rats in the way he apparently loved horses, dogs, leopards, boars, or the Medici giraffe? Or was she just projecting her own ingrained prejudice? Whenever she caught sight of a rat, as she sometimes did in her walks by the river, she felt physically ill.
Rats, according to Professor Jonquil, were one of the most abused creatures on the planet. “Every day in every supposedly civilized country of the world, laboratory rats are subjected to tortures of the flesh and mind that can only be described as fiendish.” When she first registered for his course, Agnes had not expected to be brought to account for her instinctual aversion to rats and sorry indifference to their fate. But under the influence of the professor’s densely persuasive powers, she often felt ashamed of all the ways she fell short. She was a vegetarian, working at becoming a vegan. She had never worn fur. She sent money every year to several animal rights charities, including — in tribute to Noona — an African refuge for orphaned and abused bonobos and chimpanzees. Despite all this, she would leave Professor Jonquil’s lectures in the grip of a fierce, almost painful self-questioning. Was she complicit in an evil so pervasive she was blind to it?
Hunting Piero Page 5