Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  The odd thing was that over the course of the week following the “single consciousness” lecture, she started to have niggling doubts. Wasn’t it possible that the professor’s views were just too extreme? If humans followed his precepts to the letter, wouldn’t the world be overrun by rats? Was sentience really equivalent to consciousness? Or was this claim he made purely specious and manipulative? Yet once she was seated again in the lecture hall, it was as if a beam of Absolute Truth emanated from the mesmeric figure on the stage. This beam enveloped her completely, and she felt grateful to be so indelibly enlightened. His voice itself had a peculiar power, she realized. His pronunciation was crisp, almost barbed. She thought he might be British or Australian. When he appeared most impassioned, he spoke very rapidly, as if he could not contain himself. His words seemed more than ever to be actual living entities that ran on before her, beckoning her, all aglitter with a holy fire. Or was it sometimes an unholy fire? For in each lecture, he described recent examples of animal abuse that left her burdened with grief and a self-disgust she could not properly disown on the grounds of ignorance. He was in the habit of closing the class with an anecdote so graphically horrific, she would find her body tensing in anticipation. She did not really want to hear. Yet not to listen was moral cowardice, was it not?

  “Rabbits,” he said. “Six baby rabbits. I want to tell you a story about how they went blind. It wasn’t an accident or genetic bad luck. These rabbits were bred in captivity in a laboratory where scientists are studying the physiology of the eye. In effect, these baby rabbits were doomed from the instant they issued from their mother’s womb because shortly after their birth, laboratory technicians sewed the babies’ top and bottom eyelids together. And why did they perform this barbaric operation? It was because they wanted to find out what effect exposure to light has on the development of the optic nerve.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you. Wouldn’t the least grain of common sense tell any decent human being what the inevitable result of such an experiment would be: that by depriving a newborn of light we condemn it to a life of sightlessness? How would you characterize this experiment, ladies and gentlemen? Careless? Stupid? Vile? Heinous? Soulless? Contemptible? Despicable? Bestial?

  “Personally, I am reminded of the abominations of Dr. Mengele. But here’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. Because these rabbits are only animals, no one is held accountable for the fact they were quite deliberately blinded.

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my parting shot for today’s lecture. Try to keep this reprehensible experiment in mind, and the invidious speciesism behind it, in all the readings you do over the coming week.”

  Agnes sat, feeling as she always did in the aftermath of the professor’s “parting shot”, numbed and enraged, torn between tears and the urge to stand up and scream. So trapped was she in the idea of the rabbits’ snowy white innocence and their utter powerlessness in the hands of their torturers she barely realized she had moaned aloud. Loud enough in any case to make a young man sitting in the row in front of her turn around and stare.

  She was shocked. The face of the person who regarded her so intently was one she never expected to see in the flesh. In her dreams, certainly, and countless times in Colour Plate 6 of the cherished book on Piero di Cosimo her mother had given her years ago. She could barely take it in, so uncanny was this young man’s resemblance to Piero’s curly-haired satyr who mourned the slain nymph. But it was true. She was looking at the same deep-fringed, slightly elongated eyes under straight, dark, silky brows; the same delicately moulded nose and lips. He even had the same downy goatee and soft moustache with its upturned ends which made his face look vulnerable and endearing, as if he were a child who had put on a disguise. Regular rounded human ears, of course, rather than the pointed goatish ones of Piero’s satyr. Most astonishing was the profound depth and colour of his eyes. Because Piero’s satyr was gazing down at the slain nymph, Agnes had never known their exact shade.

  Why had it never occurred to her that his eyes would be the most intense blue imaginable: the pigment made from lapis lazuli, a colour the Renaissance painters called ultramarine because this semi-precious stone came from far beyond the sea in the Hindu Kush? Recently she had learned it was the transparent splinters of calcite crystals embedded in the stone that made lapis lazuli’s dark blue look starry. And so it was. Starry. For although she looked down into this young man’s eyes, she had the illusion she was looking up, into the vastness of the night skies so thick with stars that she lost all sense of her earth-bound self. She was falling upward into the heavens. Was that possible? No, she thought. And then again: My God! I am falling in love.

  She was reluctant to pull back from this otherworldly state: its blue-black, rushing, velvety radiance, and the undercurrent of enticing fear. If I touch him, what will happen? If he touches me, what will I become? Was this how it was to fall in love? To feel you were in the presence of someone with god-like powers who could whirl you through the heavens at will, or shrink you to a mote, to the barest sliver of light reflected in his eye? Get a grip, Agnes! She knew (surely she knew?) that she was indulging herself foolishly here.

  “Yokay?”

  At first she did not understand him at all. It might as well have been satyr-speech.

  “Yokay? Are you okay?”

  She had it now. “Yes.” But the word got lost in her constricted throat. She nodded.

  “It stinks, right? I mean, about the rabbits.”

  “Yes.” She managed this time to say the word. She wondered if he had any idea how extraordinarily beautiful he was. She wanted to tell him she had seen his face before; that one of the most sensitive and inventive artists of the Italian Renaissance had painted him over four hundred years ago; that thousands of people every year gazed at his features in the National Gallery in London.

  “Maybe you’d like to come to one of our meetings,” he said. “The Ethical Ark, we’re called. Next one is this Friday. Our house, mine and Pinto’s.” He gestured to the large, moon-faced man beside him, who, Agnes realized, must have been watching her all this time. She had seen him from time to time around the campus where he stood out, not just for his size, but also his peculiar complexion. He always looked very kind, she thought.

  “Here’s the address. We usually start at eight. And bring whatever you like to drink. Oh, and I’m Campbell. Campbell Korsakov. Some friends call me Camel. I don’t mind which.”

  “Thanks.” She took the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled their address and smiled as calmly as her state of agitation allowed. Campbell Korsakov. What an astonishing name.

  “Cute outfit,” he said, as he stood up to leave, nodding at her Punjabi pyjamas.

  She sat a while, a bit benumbed, pretending to pack away her lecture notes with painstaking care. In fact, she was watching Campbell Korsakov run lightly down the aisle between the rows of raked seats. He stopped to grasp around the waist, and kiss upon the lips, a tall, slender woman with waist-length red hair. She felt the first of many quick, sharp stabs at the heart she was to experience on Campbell Korsakov’s account. She kept watching as he and the woman with the magnificent hair left the hall together. The red-head wore a scoop-neck leotard top of dove grey and a long circular skirt in the same colour that swirled gracefully as she moved. All very spare, simple and elegant.

  For a perilous moment, Agnes felt herself to be ludicrously, even clownishly, dressed. Then she felt a trembling balance swing within her ever so slightly, and she knew it was all right. “Cute outfit,” he had said. She decided to sleep that night in her Punjabi pyjamas.

  SIX

  The Painter (1495)

  HE SAW THE YOUNG MAN outside Santa Maria Novella in the company of an elderly woman, perhaps his grandmother, who had grown faint in the close noon heat. She sat, heavily bowed, on the cathedral steps. The young man fetched water from the fountain in his cupped hand and urged her to drink. When she had wet her lips, he let the water spill from his fingers and
then laid his hand gently on her forehead. Piero watched as the youth next deftly removed his tunic and fashioned it into a light head-covering to help shield her from the sun.

  He feared for the young man then and cast his eye quickly about the piazza lest any of the Piagnoni be on the prowl. Piero did not doubt that Savonarola’s “weeping ones” would judge the youth’s naked chest to be a most immodest display; they might well find him guilty on the spot of attempting to inflame lustful thoughts in women going in and out of the cathedral. It was the children who were most to be feared among Savonarola’s followers. These youngest members of the Piagnoni melded into ferocious little bands, strutting puff-chested and proud of purpose. They were proud most particularly of their legitimized right to inflict punishment and let rain down blow after blow upon the flesh of the guilty. Their cudgels were cruelly fashioned, with prongs sharpened to draw blood.

  A leaden shadow would cloak his soul at the sight of these ardent boys, ten or twelve abreast, moving as one body through the streets. How high their colour was, as if already they scented their victims’ fear and blood. How wild the look in their eyes — a look he believed he saw in the face of the Prior himself, the one time he had gone to hear Savonarola preach in the Duomo. This little hunched priest had to stand upon a box in order to look out over the pulpit at the people who crammed into the cathedral to come under the spell of his voice.

  Piero was shocked to hear such dense power emanate from a form so bent and shrunken. He could shut his eyes and readily imagine it was an Archangel who spoke, or God Himself, as Savonarola claimed. There was thunder in this voice, and the crack of a horsewhip on frigid air. There was also the harsh music of crows, and it was from this note that Piero flinched in particular for he knew it was the element that would seduce him ultimately, if he listened too long. So complex and variegated an instrument he had never heard. It appeared the Dominican’s voice had some unearthly power to pour like liquid night into the ear and flood the mind, so that all ideas except his, the great Savonarola’s, were swept away.

  Many of these ideas were dangerous, which was why he had gone to listen to the Prior only once. He could not afford, for the sake of his sanity and of his art, to hear all the beauty of the world denigrated as illusory and corrupt, including the shape and substance of living creatures of all sorts. What a grim and terror-filled place Florence had already become after barely a year under Savonarola’s tutelage. The Prior preached penitence and made people tremble with his descriptions of how God’s sword would smite the city; how He would send unending pestilence and famine if they did not forsake their vanity and self-love, their greed and lust and fornication. Savonarola held his crucifix aloft as his doom-filled voice reverberated throughout the cathedral, reviling those who read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and the miraculous tales of Ovid. To save themselves, the people of Florence must hold fast to holy scripture, the Prior declared. Piero’s flesh tightened as Savonarola recited from the Book of Ezekiel on the filthiness of whores and sodomites: “They shall deal furiously with thee. They shall take away thy nose and thine ears; and thy remnant shall fall by the sword . . .”

  To Piero’s horror, the militant youth among the Piagnoni had begun to take these proscriptions literally. He heard, far too often, of vulnerable men and women maimed in the street by boys primed by their own righteousness and hot quest for blood. They were too young to share in the Prior’s self-disgust, or to embrace, as he did, the imminent destruction of the world when he would at last shed his foul carcass and join the heavenly host. The self-disgust Savonarola preached these youth went outward to become a hatred so exact, Piero heard it in the very tramp of their feet upon the stone streets. How relentless they were, how strong their hands, how sharp and white their teeth.

  It was his own secret, saving irony that he had used the repellent single-mindedness of the young Piagnoni as the model for hard-bodied killers in the two panel paintings he had done for Francesco del Pugliese. This Francesco was a devoted follower of Savonarola. He wanted, for purposes of deep reflection, two spalliere that set out in grisly detail an uncivilized man grappling to the death with his animal prey. “Show me mankind in his barbarous, unredeemed state, little better than the beasts he seeks to kill and eat. Let me see the very thick of the hunt: men’s thirst for blood and their craving for raw meat torn from the bone. Paint me a panel where I may look upon the corrupt and bestial state into which we sink without the benefit of God’s law and the scourge of discipline.”

  Piero had thrown himself into the commission with a fervour that soon enough became a fever. There were days he felt his own flesh befouled by this scene he painted. He would falter and step back to look aghast at the nightmare his hand was shaping upon the wooden panel. Who would not recoil from the naked, green-hued cadaver he had painted, foreshortened and inverted in a way that compelled the eye to travel its length, from around bare skull to splayed toes? It was an illusion that even he, its creator, found unsettling: to stare down at the dead man’s face, the skin stretched so tight against the bones that the lips pulled back from the teeth in a macabre grimace. Yet most horrible of all was the fact the stiffening corpse lay neglected and forgotten by his fellow hunters. Death had rendered the man useless. He was a defunct machine.

  These brutish men he painted were dedicated engines of destruction. Across their broad backs, along their muscular arms and legs, he set the shadow of the doom they carried. For he saw they had no souls. To kill was their greatest pleasure, and they did this as one unthinking creature. He gave them faces weathered and puckered and sour. But the hunters’ bodies he imagined to belong to the youthful Piagnoni, who had so vilely changed the character of his city and in whose eyes he seemed to see these things he painted now almost against his will. This was a world where one murderous act spawned another.

  His brush shaped a magnificent lion that one hunter had caught fast by the tail while another made ready to smash its skull with a club. A naked man knelt upon the back of a rearing horse, strangling it to death with iron-hard hands. Should he weep or groan aloud to paint such things? He gave the ancient trees of the forest his voice. They stood like blasted mourners, stolid and sombre. He could hear them moaning. Their very roots sent up a piteous lamentation.

  He knew he had satisfied the requirements of Francesco de Pugliese’s commission to the letter. Was there ever before such a scene of brutish early man drenching the world with blood? Yet he could not leave the painting as it was, without a note of either hope or redemption. He must insert some sweet and sustaining ambiguities, some swirl of cleansing spirit upon the painted air to catch the attentive, seeking eye.

  Let them loose, his hand and spirit commanded. Let them loose! And so at the extreme left of the work, at the very perimeter of this soiled and accursed world, he set down lovingly and with infinite care, a menagerie in flight. Ox and capuchin monkey, deer and bear, wolf and sow and female lion, all ran for their lives. He would have them escape, for their limbs in motion and their very shapes were as dear to him as were the Eternal Forms to Plato.

  Then he set yet another secret within the painting’s frame to counteract the burden of horror. Clinging to the top of a blasted tree, a tiny monkey with a white-tipped muzzle watched the animals flee westward. His expression was a mix of fear and of care for his fellows. Who would even notice the little monkey, he wondered. Who would look up from the hunters’ frenetic mangling of flesh to see him, holding fast to his tree, taut, alert and his round fine eyes alive with looking?

  This young man who stripped off his tunic to shade his grandmother’s head from the sun — he was one who would soon spy the little monkey. The youth bent over the elderly woman protectively and lay his hand upon her shoulder. Piero stood a moment, captivated by the concern in the young man’s face. The youth was of that age where beauty can manifest a singular androgynous aspect. Such faces always stirred in him thoughts of human tenderness and hope. The slight upturn of the nose, the soft, full lips, the long dark ey
es, the tumble of black curls falling over his forehead and cheekbones, all these features made the youth a perfect model for the faun who was to be a primary figure in his next commission: a painting for a marriage chest where this young satyr mourns the death of a nymph. The subject was inspired by a tale of Ovid’s, where the nymph was mistakenly killed by her lover when she hid amongst the reeds. He was much taken by the name of the dog in this tale, which was Laelaps.

  He looked closely at the boy once more, to set his features and his posture in memory, and then set off briskly to his house in the Via della Scala to fetch a head-covering for the old woman so that the boy might clothe himself again. By the time he returned, they had gone. Yet he comforted himself he had seen no sign of the Piagnoni, either going on his way or returning.

  After his sighting of the youth, he worked on the marriage chest painting in a state of rare serenity, as if a gentle guiding spirit watched over his shoulder. It was through this spirit’s prompting that Laelaps the faithful brown hound appeared, mourning at the nymph’s feet. He had seen this very dog just weeks ago when he was walking in the countryside. Noble of head and demeanour, stern and silent, the mastiff sat in the courtyard of a farmhouse guarding a child who dug in the earth with a spoon.

  It was the spirit presiding over the work who also showed him how fine and fair was the tufted down on the satyr’s long pointed ears, how strong his forearms and how graceful the hand that cupped the nymph’s naked shoulder. The long-necked herons upon the pale sands in the distance, the dawn light whitening the river, and the pure deep blue of the hills — all these things flowed from his brain as if planted there by a power that had known the story of this painting long before he did himself. He filled the green meadow in which the dead nymph lay with wildflowers whose petals seemed to tremble in a quiet lamentation: violets, daisies, marigolds, narcissi. He stands back with tears in his eyes, such an ache rises in him for the loss of this lovely girl, perhaps barely fifteen, her innocent life drained away through the wound he has just set, a scarlet gash, in the hollow of her neck.