Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  When he returned to the Yellow House after two weeks in hospital, where they tended his maimed ear, Van Gogh was made to feel the full weight of his neighbours’ disapproval. They delivered a petition to the mayor demanding that he no longer be allowed to live there.

  It was shortly after this very public judgement on his character and behaviour that Vincent had himself committed to the asylum of Saint-Paul outside Arles. While in the asylum, he painted his bedroom in the Yellow House again. But in this scene, done from memory, the joyous “yellow high note” has all but fled. The wood of the chairs and the bed-frame are chestnut-brown and every object in the room is heavily outlined in black. Agnes much preferred the buoyant, all-embracing spirit of the first bedroom scene. How delightful it would be to snuggle down between the pale lemon sheets and pull the scarlet coverlet up to her chin. The casement window was open at just the right angle to let in the sweet night air of Provence. How happy he must have been when he first painted his room lifted aloft on its triumphant high note.

  She wondered if the Yellow House was still there; if the bedroom still perhaps existed exactly as it was. How marvellous it would be to see it and conjure up, in some small way, what Vincent’s happiness tasted like at that time, that fresh, buttery anticipatory joy at his friend’s imminent arrival. She became so lost in the spell of this image that time contracted. The past undid itself.

  Campbell and I could go together, she thought, in all innocence. She was already fantasizing about their rented motorcycle sailing past fields of lavender when the bitter truth returned. A little cry escaped her as she bent over double at her desk, clutching her midriff. Would it ever stop: the loss of him striking her like a physical pain? She took a deep breath, rubbed her eyes and put her fingers back on the keyboard.

  The old labours. This essay and then another and another. Then it would be Christmas break. Her unease about being with her parents and Phoebe again was fast becoming a dread, which she knew to be foolish. But as the days passed, the idea of spending the holidays “at home” became no more palatable. The e-mails and texts kept coming, gushy, formulaic, about how much they were looking forward to seeing her. And what day exactly could they expect her? She put off committing herself as long as she could; even toyed with the idea of not going back at all.

  On December 22, Agnes sat on a packed Greyhound, cramped and anxious. She had managed to get a window seat but the glass kept smearing with the fug of sixty passengers’ moist breath and the steaming damp rising from winter coats. They had all had to line up in wet snow while the various pieces of luggage were shoved into the undercarriage. Agnes pinched her nostrils, trying to shut out for even a few seconds the offensive reek of a wet fur coat somewhere behind her. This smell was rank and sad, not at all as the fur of a live animal would smell under the touch of snow.

  Her own coat was one of her more recent charity shop finds: three-quarter-length, made in Nepal of thick ivory-coloured cotton with a sensuous nub, like linen. Stitched into the neckline was a very long double scarf of the same fabric, which was so wide it could be pulled up at the back and worn as a hood. What she loved best about the coat was its bold, black stencilled designs that stood out so clean and clear against the ivory background. There were joyful trumpeting elephants, their bodies painted in ceremonial stripes; stylized rosettes that resembled coronets; and a man-in-the-moon with what looked like a bold capital “W” on his forehead. On both the right and left shoulders of the coat, a pair of elongated eyes stared out at the world from under arching brows. There was a circle with a dot where the forehead would be if these eyes were contained within the confines of a face. But they were not. Instead, they floated in space, as did the sinuous vertical stroke beneath them which might, or might not, denote a nose of some sort.

  She had no idea what the floating eyes signified, whether their prototype was on a temple wall somewhere, or if they were a purely fanciful glyph. And this too was part of the coat’s charm for her: that the meaning behind its many stenciled symbols was a mystery to her, one she was content to keep company with because the overall effect was so aesthetically pleasing and exuberant. Whenever she wore the coat, on campus or in town, there were always people who looked at it and then smiled widely at her. It was that kind of garment. It made people happy just to look at it. Once, in a line-up at the cash in a drugstore, a little boy kept reaching out to touch the elephants while his mother apologized. His eyes were round with wonder.

  This was not at all the case with the angular, frizzy-haired woman who had taken the seat beside Agnes on the bus. She stared frowning at the coat, which Agnes had draped over her knees. Then she focused fixedly on Agnes’s face, her eyes narrowed almost to slits and lips tightly pursed. Three times the woman made her crude appraisal, her neck swiveling as she scrutinized the coat and then Agnes’s face in a protracted pantomime of affronted disbelief.

  Trying hard to temper her annoyance, Agnes turned to confront the woman eye-to-eye. “Is something the matter?” She strove to keep her voice low and her tone even. She was many months out of practice for coping with this kind of raw appraisal of her appearance. Foolishly, she had let herself be lulled into complacency because she was able to go about unremarked in a benignly civilized college town. Now she was back in the “real world” with its very limited tolerance for peculiar little faces such as hers.

  The woman jerked away when Agnes spoke, to signal her offended surprise. Then she drew herself up very erect and said in a voice at once too steely and too loud, “If you don’t mind me asking, do you belong to some kind of cult?”

  “What . . .?”

  “The weird symbols on your coat,” the woman said, jabbing a forefinger at the floating eyes and then the moon face. “And your book . . . that pagan thing.”

  Agnes was stupefied. Surely this person wasn’t serious? The book in question was Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. “It’s a book about how ancient Greek myths influenced Renaissance art,” she tried to explain, with all politeness she could muster. “And the coat is from Nepal. It’s nothing to do with a cult.”

  “Whatever!” the woman snapped. “It’s weird. Spooky. I don’t want those creepy eyes staring at me for the next seven hours. What if I fall asleep? People have been decapitated on buses while they slept, you know.”

  Agnes started at the unfortunate participle. Was the woman insane? She began to wonder if she was the one who should be afraid.

  “Look, I’ll turn the coat over. Will that suit you?” Agnes held the jacket briefly in front of her, then rapidly reversed it so that only the plain buff lining lay across her knees.

  “If you don’t mind me saying,” said the woman in a stage whisper, “someone who looks like you shouldn’t be wearing a coat that makes you stick out even more.”

  Agnes heard several passengers in the immediate vicinity snigger. Someone guffawed. She felt her stomach swoop in the old conditioned response to derision and worked very hard to hold back an equally rude retort.

  “Yes, I do mind you saying,” she said between clenched teeth. “Now can we please just ignore each other for the rest of the trip?”

  “Well!” With this histrionic exclamation, the woman laid claim to being the offended party. Then she riffled busily in her carry-on bag and pulled out a magazine which she held very close to her face, as if to shield herself from possible defilement.

  Agnes inserted her earplugs. On her iPod she had several compilations of Renaissance music, Gabrielli, Monteverdi and Palestrina. The music’s meditative rise and fall, full of a dignified yearning, transcended everything commonplace and soiled. Like this wretched bus. She was gripped by a sudden childlike wish to undergo one of those breathtaking Ovidian transformations and soar through the metal ceiling, like a lark or a pure jet of water. Wasn’t that the imagination’s function? She could go at will into Ovid’s and Piero’s worlds where the radiant potencies of myth were Truth. A truth that had nothing at all to do with the tawdry “reality” that s
urrounded her now: an overheated, smelly bus hurtling down the highway toward the Canada-U.S. border, sharing a seat with a person who thought she might be a blood-thirsty fanatic because her book had the word “pagan” in the title.

  She glanced at the woman who was already asleep, with her mouth hanging open. Agnes could not help but notice the extremely poor condition of her teeth. Several were badly discoloured, both black and yellow, and worn quite thin, like little pegs protruding from the gums. Perhaps she was in discomfort; obviously she could not afford decent dental care. Thinking of the woman with sympathy rather than persisting in anger owed something to Pinto’s influence, she realized. She now often found herself trying to emulate his example: the oceanic empathy, the refusal to be snide, patronizing or vengeful.

  As she pictured his broad, beatific face with pleasure, it came to her with a start that Pinto was her first real friend. She did not consider this fact pathetic, given that she was now nearly twenty years old. She was simply grateful. She sensed that the unconditional trust Pinto offered her was rare, even among people who were naturally kind and gregarious. I have found a home, she repeated to herself, and in her mind’s eye saw Zebra, Minnie, Perdita and Pablo standing on the porch of the Ark. Above them, and the charming sign with its boatload of animals, Campbell’s spirit floated, generative and pure.

  Agnes mounted the three steps to her parents’ front door, dragging her bag behind her. But once she stood on the stoop, opposite the white door with its small inset oval of scarlet and chartreuse stained glass, she could get no farther. She had the key gripped in her palm. Why, then, would her fingers not follow the motion through and insert it cleanly in the lock, and then let herself in?

  Was it just weariness kept her standing there? Her shoulders ached, as did the small of her back and her buttocks. But this was more than fatigue from spending the past twenty hours on various buses. It was the peculiar embodied tension where her nerves thrummed taut as overhead wires in the frozen air. The confrontation with the foolish woman on the bus had propelled her back to a besieged vulnerability; the perpetual edgy expectation of odd looks, hissed insults and crude comments about monkey-girls, freaks and paper bags. In truth, the remainder of her journey had not been too bad. Of course, certain people stared at her. But that would always be the case, until perhaps she got too old for anyone to notice her at all.

  She felt very cold. Nevertheless, she did not want to go inside, in part because there was so much she must keep secret from her parents. Some days after Campbell’s death, she had made the mistake of telling her mother in an email that a friend of hers had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The response she got was trite and unfeeling: “Honey, so sorry to hear about your friend. It must be terrible for his parents. Motorcycles are such dangerous things.” The message swung immediately to the latest news of Phoebe and how well she was doing in her drama classes.

  Agnes had clenched her fists; then closed her laptop quickly, so violent was her urge to smash the screen.

  The door opened suddenly. “I’m sorry. We don’t . . .” She recognized her mother’s standard lines for politely dispatching door-to-door solicitors.

  “Mum. It’s me.”

  “Agnes! My goodness, honey, you look so different. Your hair . . . and what happened to your nice grey wool coat? You didn’t lose it, did you, hon? Come in, come in. Your dad’s dying to see you too, and Phoebe.”

  Her mother looked even more fragile, her skin startlingly translucent wherever it was stretched over bone. She seemed smaller too. Or was it that Agnes had grown taller? They were now eye to eye.

  Agnes held fast to this new equivalence. She would not let them undermine her, or deflect her from her purpose. Nor would she inadvertently reveal anything that was sacrosanct to the Ark.

  “Agnes! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Her father’s hug was so warmly enveloping, she almost gave way. Was it possible they really did care?

  “You’ve lost weight, haven’t you, sweetie? Doesn’t she look thinner to you, Meg?”

  Her mother nodded. “Are you eating all right, Agnes? And you’re very pale too. You know what they say about vegetarians and a lack of Vitamin B12.”

  “I’m tired. That’s all. I’ve been travelling since noon yesterday.” This came out sharply plaintive, a tone she had not intended.

  Both her parents looked hurt. “Agnes, we’re sorry it was so difficult for you, but neither Daddy nor I had the free time to drive down to get you. If you’d chosen Brock or Queens or even York, the travel would be a lot easier for you. And we’d love having you closer. In fact, your father . . .”

  “Meg! Perhaps now is not the best time. Let Agnes drink her tea and have a nap before we . . .”

  “Before we what, Dad? Is something wrong? Are you ill?” Her mind emptied of everything but panic on her parents’ account. All the time she’d been away, she had never once given a thought to their well-being. She’d just assumed they would continue as they always had, enjoying the rewards of their remarkable good health and looks, charm, intellect and energy.

  “Tell me!” she insisted. She banged her cup on the table, harder than she had intended.

  “I’m sorry, Agnes. We’ve handled this badly,” her father began. “Let’s make it clear. Your mother and I are fine. Phoebe’s fine. It’s your welfare we’re concerned about.”

  “What!” She was immediately apprehensive. What did they know? Could they have found out about the attack by the security guards at the laboratory? She had never even mentioned anything about the Ark in her e-mails to them.

  “We have real fears Bremrose is not a safe place for you to be, Agnes. I know it’s quaint old New England, but it’s still America. It’s simply a more violent culture south of the border.”

  “Bremrose is just as safe a place as here,” she protested. “I live in a dorm with a surveillance camera on every floor and electronic locks. The building is sealed tight by eleven.”

  “Agnes dear, we’re skirting the issue here. We have heard about the philosophy professor at your college who was murdered.”

  She nodded, staring down at her whitened knuckles. She had not expected this; had not in any way prepared herself for sitting in her parents’ kitchen, their eyes fastened on her, trying to probe inside her head. And what would they see if they could? Her imagined Grand Guignol of the naked Fergus, face bulging and distorted as he fought for air with the wire tightening around his neck? Or those unendurable scenes where a fiend charred Fergus’s freckled flesh with what — a blowtorch, a hot poker constantly renewed in the woodstove? Or just wooden matches, struck one at a time, for the most lingering effect? Her thoughts too often ran on then to the idea of Fergus as martyr, a characterization that was perhaps slipshod, and of which she must be wary.

  Wariness was most definitely called for in her current situation, which was beginning to look like an interrogation. She wished she were not so exhausted; that she did not feel so emotionally raw. What if she blurted something out that made the others in the Ark vulnerable? Why did she feel so diminished in her parents’ presence, as though they were systematically draining her of her defining light and all she had gained?

  She was aware she was clenching her teeth.

  “Yes, of course. It was horrible the way he died. Fergus . . . I mean Professor Jonquil . . . was a crusader. A firebrand.” She bit her lip at this last description. What a stupid thing to say.

  “Fergus!” Her mother pounced on the familiarity. “So you did know him?”

  “I was in his Animal Ethics course.”

  Her father groaned softly.

  “What?” Agnes was nearing total exasperation.

  “Agnes, from what I’ve been told by a colleague who met Professor Jonquil, this man is . . . was . . . dangerous. ‘Rabid’ is the word Bill Whiterose used and Bill is not the kind of person to make such a judgement lightly. He is a scrupulously fair individual. Did you know this Jonquil was dismissed from one college for inciting his students
to get involved in a questionable and highly volatile demonstration? Did you know that one of those students — a young woman — is in a wheelchair today because at Jonquil’s urging she joined in a protest outside an abattoir that turned very ugly indeed?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I heard that story.”

  “It’s not a story, Agnes.” Her father’s face was stern.

  “I’m too tired for this,” she told them. “What is it you want? Do you want me to give up my scholarship and crawl back here because some insane person tortured poor Fergus and choked him to death with a wire?”

  “Tortured!” Her mother’s eyes were wide.

  Her father grimaced. “I tried to spare your mother the unsavory elements of the crime, Agnes.”

  “Then why bring it up at all?” Agnes snapped. “Do you know what I think? I don’t think you’re concerned about my safety at all. I think you want to pull me out of Bremrose because having a daughter at a college with a potential scandal brewing might pose problems for your career. You’re afraid you’ll be contaminated by implication.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Agnes. That’s wild, hurtful talk.”

  “Hurtful.” Jagged fragments of white light splintered her vision. She knew she should desist. She should just excuse herself, tell them firmly how badly she needed to put her head down and sleep. Then she could get up and have a bath to wash away the stink of the bus and the sourness of this inquisition. But she could not leave it. She could not let them demean and sully Fergus’s memory in that way.

  “I’ll tell you what’s hurtful. It’s sitting here listening to you tell me that a man for whom I had the greatest respect, and for whom I’m still grieving, was rabid and irresponsibly callous, a virtual psychopath. Neither of you have any idea about his kind of integrity. He lived his beliefs. And I mean literally lived them. He was electrifying. He cared about animals’ suffering with an intensity you can’t begin to imagine. Being at his lectures was like listening to an archangel.”