Of one thing he was sure. The ornate sculpture of her hair arrangement was sorely burdensome to the lady. He noticed how her head drooped slightly under its weight, how she must make a constant effort to keep her delicate chin tilted upward.
When, many years later, he received a commission to paint a memorial portrait of the lady, he understood she had borne a far heavier burden: that of her fabled beauty and her fame. During her brief lifetime, many Florentines saw in Simonetta, who was as good and pious as she was beautiful, the embodiment of Plato’s most sublime Form, the Love that surpasses perfection. She was resplendent and peerless; most could adore her only at a distance.
The most passionate of her admirers was Giuliano de’ Medici, younger brother of Lorenzo. On his twenty-second birthday, in 1475, at a magnificent pageant and joust Lorenzo staged in his honour, Giuliano entered the Piazza Santa Croce bearing a banner with Simonetta depicted as Pallas Athena. The message was clear. Simonetta was not only lovely as a goddess, but consummately wise as well. Sans pareil, the French inscription on the banner read. The unparalleled one. At the joust, she was crowned “The Queen of Beauty.”
Within a year this paragon of womankind lay on her deathbed, felled by a disease of the lungs. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent the finest physicians to attend her. But no earthly skill could save her. She was barely twenty-four and at the height of her fame and beauty when death seized her.
All of Florence mourned her passing and Marco Vespucci graciously acceded to the public’s request that his wife’s coffin be open for her final journey through the city’s streets to the family’s crypt in the church of Ognissanti. Thus all who loved and admired her might have a last glimpse of that exquisite countenance. Thousands followed her coffin, among them Sandro Botticelli, who pressed in close for a last look at the lady, whose image he could fold away inside his heart. For he too was besotted, and in the years to follow he would paint her features again and again — for the Venus on the half-shell who was to make his name immortal, and Flora of his Primavera, for whom he fashioned one of the most extraordinary confections in the history of dressmaking. The flowers woven into Flora’s gauzy skirt, bodice and sleeves gave the illusion they had wafted there on a wind out of the south. The gown evoked the very essence of spring: evanescent yet perpetually renewing.
In those memorial portraits Botticelli painted of Simonetta, her serene gaze was directly on the viewer. Her lips, compressed in a gentle half-smile, promised a rarefied bliss, far removed from illness and toil and the base urges of humankind. By contemplating her image, a man who sought the highest spiritual truth might find his longing realized and behold a divine radiance.
When, many years after the lady’s death, a scion of the Medici family commissioned Piero to create a posthumous portrait of Simonetta, it was the coiled arabesques of her extravagant hairstyle that came first to the painter’s mind. He remembered well the deliberate grace she had summoned in order to bear the heavy burden of her beauty. He had by then come to understand that physical perfection such as Simonetta’s was as much curse as blessing.
His Medici patron wanted an image of Simonetta that would show above all the luminous raiment of her soul, which he could contemplate at leisure in the privacy of his study. The portrait need not be an exact resemblance of the exalted lady as she had been in life, he instructed Piero, but rather an eidolon that caught the essence of her unmatched purity. By gazing at her portrait, the young man hoped to leave behind the shadowy cave of mundane matter and achieve a place at the Platonic Academy the Great Lorenzo had established at his court. As a guide for Simonetta’s expression, he gave Piero a quotation from the poet Poliziano’s paean to the lady: “She is regally mild; her gaze could quiet a tempest.”
As always, Piero began the work by first conceiving the subject fully in his imagination. He saw the lady in profile, just as he had seen her many years before when she rode by him on her white horse. He let his inner eye follow the cunning coils of her hair, the thick loops entwined with their milky ropes of pearls, the elegant scattering of larger milky stones. At the nape of her neck, below the thick outermost loop of her bright hair, a single ruby dangled, like a solidified drop of blood.
He saw then in quick succession three things that gave even him a jolt; yet immediately the vision appeared he knew it could not be otherwise. First, as proof of her unspotted soul, she would show the world her naked breasts, as small and innocent as a nubile girl’s. Second, she would display her marmoreal stillness in a setting where no semi-nude Florentine noblewoman would ever show herself — out in the countryside, with umber and dark sage hills defining the horizon. Just behind her head, in counterpoint to her porcelain quietude, an inky storm cloud glowered, swollen with the seeds of a tempest. Simonetta’s reflective purity, so evident in the unsullied profile, kept the tempest at bay, just as Poliziano’s memorial poem described.
The third element of Piero di Cosimo’s vision for the portrait was the one that most perturbed him. He found it very strange indeed, even given his predilection for the fantastical. Through the necklace of tiny linked chains hanging above the lady’s naked breasts, a live snake wound in sinuous twists of green and gold. Just above her collarbone and mere inches from the puckered flesh of her small nipples, the reptile’s sinister thread-like tongue and tail tip almost touched.
Piero saw immediately that the slender green-gold viper was as mesmerizing as the woman herself. It was only when the work was finished, and he had painted the last tiny scale on the live peril which rode upon her breast, that he recognized the snake’s true significance. Its serpentine twists symbolized the very vagaries of Fortune. This was the same Fortune that endowed Simonetta with a beauty that could inspire rapture, and had then just as capriciously struck her down.
Who knew, he reflected, where it would strike next – for good or for ill — the shadowy serpent that all mortal beings wore in blind ignorance about their necks?
When he saw the finished work, Piero’s young patron at first appeared displeased. He frowned at the boldness of Simonetta’s nakedness and shuddered at the sight of the viper’s flickering tongue so near her tender breast. Then, even sooner than the painter had hoped, the young man began to praise the enigmatic balance of these disparate elements. The snake necklace, he told Piero, paid a most fitting homage to Simonetta’s eternality.
Piero wisely said nothing. He had worked, in tempera on wood, a composition in exact keeping with his vision. He smiled at his creation for the last time, and pocketed his payment.
TEN
Pinto Reflects on a Soldier
PINTO HAD TRIED EVERYTHING TO shut out the sounds that now tormented him at night. Little balls of absorbent cotton stuffed in his ears had only a muffling effect. What he heard might be coming from deep beneath the sea. Perversely, he would then strain to catch any single whole words that emerged from the undertow — “No.” “Yes.” “Please.” This last was always the worst. It pierced him to the core.
He had bought earplugs designed for air travel which promised to insulate the wearer from the ambient roar of engines and the wails of distressed babies. The plugs came with a dull black eye-shade. This conjunction of sensory deprivation devices made him smile grimly in the dark. He felt ready for his own execution. With ears stopped up and eyes covered, he lay as still as he could, intent on the oblivion of sleep. Was it his nerves or his skin that continued to register the cacophony through the walls, the little sharp cries: “Oh, oh, oh”? Like machinegun fire, he thought. He lay on his long bed, clutching his midriff, digging his nails in where the pain concentrated its assault.
He had also tried humming quietly, with his pillow bunched up around his ears. When that did not work, he put on his clock radio with the volume turned low. He had the radio set permanently on the public broadcast station that played classical music non-stop. When he yearned for a musical cocoon, it was the melodic, melancholic Brahms he most wanted to hear. He thought of Brahms as a kindred spirit because of his un
requited love for Clara Schumann and wondered if the composer had ever struggled to subdue a corrupting rage against all the expert lovers in the world. Pinto tried very hard, as he lay in bed listening to Agnes’s protracted cries of delight, not to hate Campbell.
He had so far endured a full week of this torture. In part, he was disappointed in Agnes for succumbing to Campbell’s heartless ploys in the first place. He experienced, as well, a palpable disgust at the idea of what the two of them were actually doing just down the hall. He refused to let his imaginings go too far: of hands and tongues and . . . If he thought too much about it, he would surely go mad. What he did glean from the wild cries he tried to obliterate was that this sexual activity had an exceedingly vulgar aspect. Sometimes it sounded as if they were spanking each other. “Go. Go. Faster, baby, faster!” This was Campbell’s urgent voice, and it was horrible.
He was appalled to think of Agnes being so devalued by Campbell’s lust. Lewdness. Pinto pondered the word, which conjured up a sickly stew of hormonal urges and secretions. He wanted Agnes liberated from all this cheap nastiness. If she willingly came to him, how high a place he would prepare for her, nurturing her true self in his mind and heart. Soul enfolded in soul. And a lovemaking consonant with this: a gentle rocking rather than the rambunctious, crude copulation that was Campbell’s apparent preference.
If Agnes were only willing, he would worship her with his body. He would share with her the quiet yet intense Tantric techniques he had studied; the matchless joining of blood, breath and life-force that would bring them both to true ecstasy. True. Not tawdry and brutish.
“Fuck, baby,” he hears Campbell yell. “Fuck. Fuck.”
Pinto thrust his index fingers so far into his eardrums that it hurt. Well, since he already hurt all over, what was the difference? He wondered if this ache was even worse than his mordant grief when his dear dog Yangtze died. He had never wanted anything so badly as for Kit to come home. Surely it would be soon?
“Arghhh . . .”
He gritted his teeth. Had Campbell achieved his greedy climax at last? But if the past few nights were anything to go by, they would soon be at it again. It was already 2:00 AM and Pinto had an early class at eight. Two nights ago he had tried going out for a walk to escape the disturbance. But he had deeply resented having to do so and as he walked that resentment fuelled his old mindless, destructive urge to a degree that shocked him and made him question whether he had progressed at all in mastering his core rage.
He’d gone to the river to the same bench he’d taken Agnes when Campbell’s strong pot upset her. He sat, staring into the dark water, wondering if the huge snapping turtle were down there somewhere, its claws stirring the muddy bed as it dreamed of fresh and yielding prey. He had seen the turtle in the spring when the new ducklings were skittering about on the water. They’d looked tiny and vulnerable, more like water-bugs than waterfowl and so his heart had lurched in his chest when the mother duck began sending out anguished warnings to her six babies. She swam up rapidly behind them and then circled the group, quacking her alarm all the while.
The snapping turtle was so monstrous and formidably armoured compared with the minuscule, crushable ducklings. How leathery and grey and ancient the turtle’s head looked, and how sharp the claws of the webbed feet that churned the water so steadily and slowly. Yet this steadiness and slowness were all illusion, for the massive turtle kept gaining on the ducklings, who remained apparently oblivious to the danger. It had been the reptile’s relentlessness he’d found most chilling, as though it had been swimming toward its prey forever, a slow missile out of a prehistoric time that nothing whatsoever could deter. For an instant he’d stood transfixed by its wrinkled head and lidless eyes. He’d had the hideous notion that what he saw there was the antediluvian shape of Fate itself.
How ridiculous his actions had been, flailing his arms and waving his knapsack back and forth over the water and the reptile’s head. “Leave them alone,” he’d bellowed. But although his shouts had had no impact on the turtle’s resolute trajectory, they had succeeded in frightening the ducklings, who’d paddled toward the safety of the bank in a neat little V-shaped flotilla.
As the noises continued on the other side of the wall, he closed his eyes and again saw the turtle swim on, unblinking and unperturbed, to feast elsewhere. He tried hard not to think of the creature as malevolent. Had he interfered with an elemental process? What would have become of the principle of natural selection if well-intentioned humans had always been intervening in this way? This question perplexed him. Had he been right or wrong to try to save the ducklings?
He was delighted to find that by plunging back into this unsettling scene and its attendant moral dilemma, he had finally managed to blot out the noises coming from Campbell’s bedroom. In the hope he could repeat the trick he turned to another ethical conundrum that had recently preoccupied him. The week before, while researching an assignment for Fergus’s class, he had come upon an article whose revelations continued to haunt him. Each day since then, he had found himself passionately wishing he could speak with the protagonist in this story.
This was impossible on two counts: first, because the individual in question had died in the fifth century; and second, because he had probably never possessed any form of human speech. How well the author had set him up for the unexpected twist. He began by describing the grave of a Roman soldier archaeologists had unearthed earlier that year in the Pyrenees. Only then did he reveal that the young warrior, buried with honours in his finest uniform and with his gleaming metal belt or cingulum, was an adolescent macaque, originally from North Africa.
He kept visualizing the young monkey laid in his grave, while his comrades wept and saluted. He reasoned the macaque must have been much loved to be interred with such care and ceremony. But how had he come to be part of a Roman legion in the days when the Empire was crumbling? And was he really a soldier who took part in battles against the Barbarians or was he a mascot?
Had he been kidnapped, torn from his family? Did he lament his fate? Or had he come to love what he did, marching and fighting with his fellow legionnaires? Did he understand he was not the same as them? Was he willing to do what he did, even if initially he had been coerced?
Yet the macaque belonged. They would not have buried him in his best uniform, with his belt shining about his waist, unless they felt he was one of them. Pinto felt a sudden, absurd stab of jealousy towards the long-dead macaque. I will never belong, not really. Not to any one, or any group. This bald self-pity shattered his lovely speculative globe. Now he could hear again, all too clearly, Campbell’s crude, greedy cries.
“Harder, baby, harder!”
He will hurt her with his selfish crudity, Pinto thought. Unconsciously, he had tightened his big hands into fists. He struggled hard, as he had so often of late, against the terrible desire to wrap his huge hands around Campbell’s elegant neck and choke him until he turned blue. Until Campbell was ugly, and spat out his life’s blood.
Pinto pressed his fists into his closed eyes, until they smarted. How he loathed himself for these violent thoughts. Whatever his faults, Campbell was still his friend.
His ceaseless tossing had made a tangle of his sheets. He unwound the top one from his legs and spread it carefully over his thighs. Then he began to breathe as deeply as he could, as necessary preparation for a calm clarity. But a single wish continued to flash neon-like in his brain.
Oh, if only Kit would come home soon. Campbell would drop Agnes then, and he, Pinto Peter Dervaig, would comfort and love her as she deserved.
Please come home, Kit. Please.
ELEVEN
The Demonstration
GRIEF AT HER AUNT’S DEATH and her mother’s continued decline had transformed Kit. Her porcelain skin had a bluish cast and there were hollows in her cheeks where none had been before. These were changes that would have made most women look wan, ill and undesirable. But on Kit, they served only to dramatize her fine-featur
ed, fairy-world beauty.
Agnes could not help but gaze awestruck at the picture Kit made on the back of Campbell’s bike. She sat like a tall stately elfin queen, with everyone’s eyes (or so it seemed) drawn by the magnificent river of red hair that streamed from beneath the motorcycle helmet as Kit strapped it on. Agnes was unsure if it was the same helmet Campbell had given her to wear and told herself it did not matter. The principal fact was obvious and humiliating enough: it was not that she had been supplanted by Kit in pride of place behind Campbell on his bike and in his bed. It was that she had been “whited-out,” apparently obliterated from his memory altogether.
She kept watching for a particular smile or covert gesture he might send her way as a token of affection; some sign of gentle remembrance she could hold to assuage the hurt. She found nothing. Not a scrap.
Yes, she had been a fool. An utter fool to enter into an undertaking whose rules she does not comprehend. She saw the dangers clearly now and just how easily a person can be undone by an addiction to sex, an obsession that could ruin one’s life as surely as would drugs or alcohol. If she let herself dwell on the ways he had touched her, and the heavenly sensations he aroused in her . . . But she must not.
Work, she told herself each day. Work would be her salvation. That and a passionate, unflagging commitment to animals’ rights and welfare. Wasn’t that the reason she’d gone to the Ethical Ark meetings in the first place? She knew this wasn’t strictly so, or that it certainly had not been her only reason. But the compulsion to take action was, if anything, surging in her more strongly than ever before. She was obsessed with the pitiable plight of the cats, dogs and rabbits that were even now on their way to the new laboratory where the stark metal operating tables and torturing instruments awaited them. She could smell their terror as they fouled themselves, crammed into wire cages stacked floor-to-ceiling inside the frigid transport trucks.
Hunting Piero Page 11