Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Piero, on the other hand, thanked God that the Pope had seen fit to allow Savonarola this final clemency. Months later, he saw in the workshop of a colleague a painting of Savonarola’s end commissioned by one of the Arrabbiatti. It showed a panorama of the piazza with little groups of Florentine nobles in red or cream-coloured cloaks standing in stately disquisition. Two youths hurried across the piazza on the diagonal, bent almost double under bundles of faggots and fresh straw. They were headed toward the pyre whose orange flames were just about to reach the naked feet of the three monks strung together at the top of a wooden cross.

  How very small the artist had made the three doomed Dominicans, Piero noted, smaller even than the bundles of wood the two hastening youth were bringing to feed the fire. So diminished were the hanging figures, it was as if Savonarola and his two most loyal monks were already negligible and written out of the city’s history.

  Had he been given the commission, Piero knew he would have been compelled to make the dangling figures much larger, to show the flickering between agony and prayer on the faces of the two living monks, and the shadow of death on Savonarola’s. He would have endeavoured, by some contortion or deliberate disproportion of the Prior’s hanging corpse, to convey how many of the man’s bones his torturers had snapped upon the rack. Piero would have dared, if his patron was at all amenable, to dramatize the uncanny event many spectators swore they saw that day. The dead Prior’s right arm, already engulfed in flame, shot up out of the fire in a rigid salute. Did the dead man intend this harrowing as curse or blessing?

  For many weeks to come Piero was haunted night and day by this image of the Prior’s rigid raised right arm emerging from his flames. He was dogged as well by the presentiment the mighty shaping power of Savonarola’s voice had not been extinguished, but had only gone underground where it smouldered still, a fire in the roots of the earth that could spread insidiously and unseen. Until at last one day it would explode forth and that great puissance would be heard again, the voice with the inexorable power to bend men’s minds to its will and compel them to act in accordance with a system of beliefs so extreme they were denatured. So that they would spit out their souls on the pavement and became mere toys of their master’s mind.

  With the smothering weight of Savonarola’s dictates lifted from the city, song returned, and dance and love-making, within and outside the bounds of marriage. Provided he was circumspect, a man could once again adore and lie with another man, without fear of being maimed or executed. The books of ancient learning, of Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus, again took pride of place on scholars’ desks. The luxurious brocades and silks in rich hues, for which Florence was renowned, once again graced the elegant forms of noble men and women. Even those who were poor put on their brightest cloaks and stockings so that they might walk and work with a lighter heart.

  All artists were at perfect liberty once more to paint the subjects banned under Savonarola’s reign. Some weeks after the Prior’s execution, Piero received a commission for a panel for a nuptial chamber. It was to show a naked Venus reclining in a meadow with her lover Mars. He immediately began to sketch the scene in red chalk. He would present the two gods mere minutes after they have been joined in fleshly love together, flushed and sated. Mars, a beautiful young man with rosy cheeks and long auburn hair, was already asleep, his head upon a red velvet bolster, decorated with gold leaf. His sole garment was a woven drapery of delicate wine-coloured stripes covering his sex. In the background, winged putti played with the various pieces of the armour he had flung off in his haste.

  A diaphanous silvery band wove around the naked thighs of Venus, beneath her breasts and then, like a christening garment, over the head of the baby Cupid, whom she held close by her side. Piero’s chalk lingered lovingly over the details of the magnificent rabbit which also nuzzled against her naked thigh. The rabbit would be a pure snowy white, and his wonderful ears tipped in black. Piero had a fine model in mind and looked forward to welcoming him into his studio.

  FOURTEEN

  The Christmas Break

  THE MORNING AFTER SHE DRANK all the cheap brandy at the Ark, Agnes woke feeling very ill. The light seared her eyes. Her skin felt tight and sore. When she peered with trepidation into the mirror, she felt worse. Her face looked pinched and white, and nasty somehow, as if the heavy drinking had uncovered a foul trait of character of which she’d been unaware. She told herself she would never overindulge in this way again. Drunkenness was degrading and it made her look ugly.

  Nor did the hangover help her perspective. Her headache and self-disgust sharpened the still-mordant grief for Campbell and her repugnance at the horrendous ways Fergus had been made to suffer. She was consumed again by the belief she did not deserve to live, when these two, and particularly Campbell, were dead. While she grasped how irrational this conviction was, it continued to plague her. She wondered if any of the others felt this way. But then, apart from Kit, perhaps no one else in the Ark had loved Campbell as fiercely as she did.

  And Kit, well . . . the evidence of her love was in that harrowing graveside photo in which she appeared gaunt, shorn and virtually unrecognizable. She looked so fragile and stunned, as if she would have put up no resistance had someone tried to push her into the grave on top of Campbell’s coffin. She would have welcomed the heavy earth raining down on her, extinguishing consciousness and breath.

  Agnes winced. She should not be thinking these things. It was crudely intrusive to try to imagine what Kit was feeling. It occurred to her that it would do Kit no good at all to hear about Fergus. Surely Horace would be able to insulate her from all the gruesome details, at least until she was stronger again?

  Agnes was still very much afraid that Fergus’s murder was linked to his activism. She had been surprised, but at the same time relieved, at how few details about the crime appeared in the local news, barely more than Fergus’s age and profession and the fact he appeared to have been strangled.

  “Appeared!” barked Minnie at a hastily summoned Ark meeting that soon turned into a maudlin wake for both Fergus and Campbell. “He was garrotted, for God’s sake! Where’s the ‘appeared’ in that?” Minnie maintained that the college board of governors had pressed the police for a news blackout on the sensational aspects of the murder.

  “I mean, who wants to pay thousands of dollars a year to send your kid to a college where professors get strangled and their private parts set on fire?”

  “Minnie, please!” Perdita urged. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Tough,” Minnie said. “It happened. You can’t mentally white it out because that kind of sick violence offends your sensibility or religious principles or whatever. It happened. Fergus suffered hellishly. At least what happened to Campbell was quick.”

  Perdita got up and left the room. Pablo, Pinto and Agnes all shifted in their seats as if this physical movement would dislodge the image of the vital man they had known turned into meat, sliced and branded. This evening, they had gathered to remember Fergus. They had to forget, for the moment, the grotesque manner of his death. Of course they wanted Fergus’s killer brought to justice. With the exception of Minnie, who announced she would gladly “see the bastard fry,” they all wrestled to exterminate any instinctive urge for vengeance. When Pablo wondered aloud about a possible link between the two deaths, Pinto shook his head: “There’s no point travelling down that road,” he said firmly. They then touched briefly, and with a deliberate constraint, on the shocking things done to Fergus. Soon enough, they arrived at what they thought a just conclusion: that the perpetrator was likely clinically insane and therefore deserving of mercy and pity. If this attitude toward Fergus’s killer demanded a wrenching effort, they knew nonetheless it was the right one.

  But perhaps a murderer would never be found. According to Minnie’s friend on the force, whoever killed Fergus had been organized and cunning enough to wipe the place clean of prints. “Absolutely pristine,” Mi
nnie’s friend said. Nor was there any sign of forced entry into Fergus’s home. Because he had lived some miles out of town in an isolated winterized cottage, there were no neighbours to interview, no one who would have heard his screams.

  “An absolute dead end so far,” said Minnie as she lit a slim joint and inhaled deeply.

  Agnes, who considered this rather a poor choice of phrase, sipped more of the peat-flavoured single malt Zebra had contributed to the gathering. As she brought the glass to her lips, she caught Pinto looking at her with concern and smiled at him in rueful remembrance. It was kindly Pinto who had helped her get back to the dorm, without making an unseemly display, after her overindulgence in brandy on that dreadful morning they got the news about Fergus. “Walk tall, and try not to breathe on anyone,” were his final instructions as they approached the front steps of her dormitory, where once Campbell had sat waiting for her with his Vulcan parked across the road. It seemed so very long ago now, although it was mere months. How beautiful he had looked that day.

  She took a good swallow of the dark amber whisky, relishing its complex earthy taste on her tongue and liquid fire in her throat. What a wonderful drink. It seemed almost immediately to clarify her thoughts and purge the dross of pointless regret. She felt re-energized and hopeful. They would make his memory live, forever and forever. Campbell would be their guiding saint. A very sexy saint, she thought, raising the glass to her lips again.

  She glanced up and saw Pinto frowning at her. That silent admonition made her realize she had emptied her glass without being aware of doing so. A flash of rage exploded in her head. If Pinto were not such a genuinely well-intentioned man, she would have strongly resented this unsubtle surveillance. Did he really think she was an alcoholic-in-the-making because she’d drunk too much brandy on one very exceptional occasion?

  She looked across the room at him, put on a counterfeit composed smile, and set the empty glass down on the coffee table in front of her. It was the same one Pinto had broken in half the morning after Campbell was killed. She saw that it had been painstakingly mended, the two halves so carefully glued together that the seam marking the join was barely visible. She pictured Pinto labouring with extraordinary patience to bring the two halves together so precisely. Her eye kept returning to the seam down the centre of the table, where it exactly intersected the base of her empty glass.

  She could not deny that the Single Malt, within easy reach on top of a brick-and-board bookcase, exerted a strong pull, as if the lovely dark amber fluid were actually tugging at her will. She wanted very much to pour another inch into her glass, to taste the mysterious earthy components and experience again the golden glow of hope and bliss the sweet fire in her throat had delivered earlier. At the same time, she was uncomfortable with the nagging near-ferocity of her desire to drink more. And so she told herself that the barely visible line down the centre of the table symbolized Pinto’s sober moral rectitude, which she must strive to emulate. (She noted that tonight he drank only water.) She must stick with this resolve, for this stage of her life at least, when the wounds of bereavement were still so raw.

  In the following weeks she threw herself at her course work, setting her alarm for five and staying at her desk until well after midnight. She had deadline after deadline to meet for end-of-term essays, and the Christmas break was looming. She dreaded the idea of the holidays and her parents’ expectation she would return “home” to them and Phoebe. This was her home now: the college and the Ark. She knew who she was here and she liked herself. She did not trust her parents and Phoebe to recognize how much she had changed.

  To her surprise, the essay assignment that most riveted her was the one she had been slowest to tackle, out of concern she could bring nothing new to the subject. The topic was very specific: Explore, through one seminal work, “the yellow high note” on which Van Gogh focused in his paintings in Provence. Of course, she was familiar with The Sunflowers and other pieces from his fifteen months in southern France and it was exactly that familiarity that troubled her. She had seen these “iconic” works reproduced so often, on coffee cups, T-shirts, silk scarves and prints in doctors’ and dentists’ offices, she feared that, for her, they had long been drained of their once urgent vitality.

  Then, too, there was the popular image of the man himself, still arguably the most famous modern painter on earth. Everyone, even people who cared little about art, knew about the ear-cutting episode. What Agnes hated most was the way Van Gogh’s madness had become a public commodity, and the elements of his sad story so often contorted to belittle his achievement. She found him cruelly caricatured in books and films which showed him raging, inebriated, lurching from failed love affair to love affair, now frenetically ebullient, now desperately despondent. At best, the popular accounts made him a holy fool or idiot savant. They implied it was his insanity that produced the art works which burst full-fledged from his brain despite himself, an uncouth and barbarous man who probably smelled.

  As a corrective to this hackneyed caricature, she turned to his letters to his brother Theo. What she found there was a profoundly cultivated and literate man, fluent in three languages. He wrote feelingly of the sufferings of the working poor, whom he tried to help, first as a teacher in London and then as a missionary in the mining district of Belgium. There he subjected himself to such extreme self-mortification, giving away all his possessions, eating only enough to stay alive, living in a squalid hut, that he imperilled both his mental and physical health.

  As she read, Agnes saw how he hurled himself into the thick of every consuming passion, including his relentless pursuit of the women with whom he became besotted. When they rejected him, he plunged into the hell-pit of despair. He often referred to episodes of heavy drinking. When he described the overhead lamps in his Night Café as “delirium tremens in full swing,” she wondered if the metaphor was grounded in direct experience. In fact, she was struck by just how frankly self-aware he was. He knew all too well he was a social misfit, who had “no talent for relations with people.”

  This passage chimed with her own inveterate social awkwardness, and with Piero di Cosimo’s hermetic withdrawal from his neighbours. She still believed that Piero, like Van Gogh, was also plagued by black depressive moods that induced a killing stupor, when the hand could not move to grasp a brush, nor the mind see any point in doing so.

  And if she was right and it was wonder at the infinite beauty of the animal kingdom that liberated Piero from despair, then of course it was Van Gogh’s enthrallment with colour that liberated him. She learned with pleasure how he kept various coloured balls of wool in a special box so that he could try out strikingly unusual combinations, swathe by swathe. What he wanted, in these strange junctures of green-blue, yellow-gold, lilac, cobalt, pink-gold, bronze and copper, was to conjure up in paint the rapturous natural palette of Provence and its effects on a man’s soul.

  In the landscapes he painted in Arles, the sunlit, flowing fields, the vineyards, the starry skies, the cypresses like green flames, what she saw running beneath the turbulent, swirling brush strokes laden with pulsing colour was the living soul of nature itself — the Anima Mundi she perceived in Piero’s best works. Agnes had no doubt this extraordinary ability to reveal the tremulous current moving through Creation came at enormous cost.

  For her essay, she chose the painting Van Gogh did of his bedroom in the Yellow House he rented in Arles, just before Paul Gaugin came to stay with him. The gentle warping of the angles of the walls and the outlines of the furniture made the whole scene yielding and welcoming, drawing the viewer into its embrace. Vincent described for Theo the wood rush-seat chair and the solid frame of the soft bed with its scarlet cover as being the “yellow of fresh butter.” Here his “yellow high note” signalled his soaring hope for a perfect amity in his relationship with his fellow artist. Everything, including his outlook, was sunny and ordered, from the pale violet walls to the three painter’s smocks and the straw hat hanging on the wooden
rail.

  For many years, Van Gogh had yearned for a community of painters who would inspire each other and provide a sustaining fellowship. Gauguin’s coming to Arles was thus the fulfillment of a long-nurtured dream. It came to Agnes in a flash that that this sensuous depiction of his bedroom was in fact a nuptial painting, much like the canvases commissioned from Renaissance artists to grace the marriage chamber and symbolize a blessed and fruitful union. Vincent desperately wanted a happy marriage of mind and spirit with a colleague whose work he passionately admired, an unalloyed friendship that would extend to the farthest reaches of his observing mind and soul.

  Inside of two months, this dream of founding a perfect amity and fruitful partnership in the Yellow House turned rancid and violent. Whatever the root cause of the animosity — heavy drinking, an inescapable raw competitiveness, or the two men’s naturally tempestuous natures — it erupted, with ultimately fatal consequences when Van Gogh attacked Gaugin with a razor. Gaugin departed, never to return to Arles, and Vincent, in the legendary fit of despair and self-hatred, cut off part of his left ear. He then wrapped this dismembered piece of flesh and cartilage in a handkerchief and presented it to a local prostitute.

  As she pictured this grotesque bloody offering, Agnes was reminded of bullfighters awarded the animal’s ear after the kill. In Van Gogh’s painting of the bullfighting coliseum in Arles, it was the spectators on whom he focused, and particularly the women with their elaborately piled ebony hair, sparkling white bodices and red parasols. The bullring itself was the merest sketch in the upper right corner; the bullfighter and the bull the barest ideograms of pale indigo. Did he shrink from the gory spectacle itself, just as she would? Perhaps the ear cutting had been an unconscious penance for having partaken, even to this detached degree, in a diabolical “sport.”