Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  She wondered if any of them appreciated how lucky they were and frowned at their blithe ignorance. Then she smoothed out the loose pleats of her red velvet skirt, which she wore with a black leotard top and dangly jet earrings, all charity shop purchases. In any case, hardly anyone was looking at her and she was content enough to fade into the background. She had resolved beforehand simply to look on quietly and be happy for Phoebe. She would work at subduing the childish envy that inevitably peaked whenever Phoebe was being feted or justifiably adored.

  There was one irksome element at the party undermining her resolve to behave as the gracious older sister, and that was Georges. He was not the sensuous brooder of the Vanity Fair ad she had imagined but quick and fine-boned, with a pointed chin that put her in mind of a Siamese cat. He had olive skin and thick black hair, sleeked back from a high brow. Even his eyebrows were gossamer-fine and so labile he could transform his face from clown to ardent young scholar in an eye-blink. What most unsettled her when they were first introduced were his eyes. They were so like Campbell’s, the same startling almost unreal dark blue. Looking into them, she felt the agony of loss reopen in her, as wide and raw as ever. She pulled her hand away from Georges’ firm dry clasp as soon as she decently could.

  Was that why he now persisted in staring at her, winking and grinning? She was not at all in a mood to be teased, even if it was meant to be purely playful. Around the room, the pretty children twirled and paraded and tried out silly voices and foreign accents. All the parents present smiled indulgently. She tried to do the same. But how hard it was to tolerate their foolish displays, particularly when she saw these young paragons popping little gobbets of spiced lamb — one of her mother’s specialties — into their mouths. She could not, for the sake of the occasion, forget the act of slaughter; the flaying, the hanging, the cold hell of the abattoir.

  Georges stepped across the room to her at that instant, holding Phoebe by the hand. She wore a dress of cream-coloured wool, with a close-fitting bodice and a skirt cut on the bias so that it flowed about her like sea foam as she moved.

  Georges swung his head back and forth, looking now at Phoebe and now at Agnes, in a faultless pantomime of astonishment.

  “Mais, je suis étonné,” he said. “That you two are sisters of the blood . . . it is amazing. Is this the right word? A-maz-ing? I am thunderbolted.”

  Agnes thought how much she would like to send a thunderbolt through his skull. And she found Phoebe’s silence incomprehensible. Surely she would say something to moderate her arrogant boyfriend’s insensitivity? But she went on smiling at Agnes and Georges as if nothing untoward had happened.

  “I’m feeling rather dizzy,” Agnes managed. She had to get out. An overly ripe scene of vengeance had possessed her: an imagined scenario so exactingly vivid, she would for years afterwards wake in the middle of the night, put her hand to her pounding heart and ask in a panic if she had indeed done these atrocious things.

  It begins with a simple twist of the narrow stem of her wineglass so that she holds a ready-made jagged weapon. Without a qualm, she digs the sliver of serrated glass into the smooth cheek of the peerless, mocking boy. Who is peerless no longer. Who stares back at her aghast, staggers and grabs a napkin to sop up the blood seeping from the long gash that reveals the whiteness of the fine bone beneath. It is the kind of deeply inflicted wound that will always leave a scar, even after the most costly laser treatment. She has utterly ruined his beauty, and this fact fills her with a childish glee.

  She moves then with such stealth, she is almost invisible. Her bloodlust — not to kill, but to desecrate loveliness — invests her with a malign magic. She strikes at will with her fang of glass until the faces of every one of the pretty young people in the room are scored and bloody. They all cry out of their little round mouths, like babies torn from their cribs and nakedly exposed to the stinging hail of a hateful world.

  How could you, Agnes? How could you? Even as she fled upstairs, the question tormented her; although she knew, in full waking clarity, that she had not really done these vengeful, unconscionable things. She had to face it. This latent desire to strike out, particularly at the self-adoring Georges, was the rank evidence of her resentment and terrible unhappiness. She did not want to be in this house. It was not only a cold and foreign place for her, but perilously undermining.

  I want Campbell, she thought recklessly. I want to be in his arms. I want to be myself again.

  She recognized she had only the one option for reclaiming who she was, and that was to get out right away. She sat at her old desk for what she knew would be the last time and hastily wrote a little note of apology to her parents and Phoebe: “I am sorry to leave without saying good-bye, but I am still very upset by my friend’s death. Good luck to Phoebe.”

  She left this minimal missive on her bed, together with three wrapped Christmas gifts. Now all she had to do was pack her bag quickly and get out of the house without anyone spotting her. Luck was on her side. When she crept downstairs, there was no one in the hallway and the living room door of hammered glass was shut. She waited until she was on the front step to put on her boots, coat, hat and gloves, shivering all the while.

  She found a room for the night at the Y and an Indian restaurant where she ordered a blissfully spicy chick pea curry. It pleased her to think that the dramatic heat of the tumeric and charred red chilies was scouring away her vile and brooding thoughts, along with the bitterness she had fortunately left unspoken.

  She was very glad in retrospect there had been no hard liquor at Phoebe’s soirée. In that case, she might have overindulged and said or done something irreparably damaging. As it was, she believed she had made a lucky escape. Tomorrow morning, she would be on her way back to Bremrose. The dorm would be open to her, even if there were few other students around. The coming solitude was like a balm. Why did her parents insist on diminishing her, and try to strip away the gains she had made? As for Georges, he was so noxiously self-centred and immature she hoped Phoebe would soon drop him.

  She was at the bus station by seven the next morning, anxious to depart. She thought it was unlikely her parents would come searching for her. They would be annoyed; perplexed at best, and ultimately relieved she had gone, if only because her presence at the Christmas feast evoked the unwanted spectre. Her slices of tofu turkey were somehow accusatory, despite her efforts to join in the traditional meal with as much nonjudgemental grace as she could muster. She sat tense as a captive throughout this meal, unable to forget the bird’s suffering, as much in its cruelly confined life as in its murder.

  The gap between her and her family was just too wide now. Her communion with the other members of the Ark, and the dazzling clear sense of purpose they shared, had transformed that gap into a gulf that was unbridgeable. Unless her parents and Phoebe saw the light at last.

  No, they would not come looking for her. And yes, she was elated that her facile, counterfeit bond with them had been healthfully severed. This definitive break gave her courage. She marvelled again at all that happened in the past three months: events both tragic and sublime that had reshaped her as completely as the transformed protagonists in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. If she had been a tree before, her roots trapped in the familial soil, she was now most certainly a river.

  Agnes smiled to herself at this strange thought and found an elderly lady with a tiny face under a Prussian blue knitted tam smiling and nodding back at her from across the aisle. Of everyone in the waiting room, this old lady seemed most alert and alive. Agnes wondered if she was also a traveller or if she was waiting for a son or a daughter or a grandchild coming to spend the holiday with her. It struck her then that there was someone in the family who would be pleased to see her. She had not visited her grandmother for over a year, when their father had driven her and Phoebe down to Gloucester. Nana was in a residential home now, but it was an airy and pleasant place with friendly staff and a huge perennial garden that encircled the building.


  Eleven hours later, after several bus rides and a lucky train connection from Boston, Agnes sat in her grandmother’s cozy room in the very same rocker in which she had been privileged to hold Cecilia on her lap. She had gotten over her initial shock at how much more fragile and achingly thin-skinned her grandmother was, compared with fourteen months ago. Her eyes, however, were even more questing and percipient.

  “Dear child,” she exclaimed. “What a delightful surprise. And Agnes, you are prettier than ever.” The wonder was that her grandmother genuinely meant this.

  As a holiday treat for the residents, volunteers had brought in some kittens to visit the cat-lovers in the home. Agnes and her grandmother got to spend a half-hour with a very active, two-month-old Siamese seal point. The little cat’s black diamond face and fine litheness lit up and enlarged the room. Eventually, he decided to climb the curtains and then perched, peering down at them from the top of the pelmet.

  Afterwards her grandmother asked: “Do you remember Cecilia?”

  “Oh, yes. So very well.”

  On the evening of Christmas Day, it was therefore a silver grey female tabby, empathetic and sweet-faced, who filled both women’s thoughts. She had been a bright lodestar, an unstinting giver of comfort and grace. They sat on a while together quietly, keeping her memory strong and green and giving thanks for her life among them.

  Agnes did not check her email until she was back in her room in the dorm. She was reluctant to view any message from her parents, or from Phoebe. She did not want to read that she had been rude or immature; or that she had spoiled their Christmas by her abrupt departure.

  Her mother’s message was in fact less accusatory than she had anticipated. It was a shock to find your note, honey. Daddy and I are very sorry we didn’t realize how hard the death of your friend hit you. It’s so difficult when a young person dies. It seems so unfair. But time heals. The old cliché really does hold true. On the issue of your professor, Daddy and I are just concerned for your safety. Take good care of yourself, honey. And PLEASE keep in touch. We love you.

  Her mother’s circumlocution was infuriating. She could not even write the word “murder,” but in typical fashion, reduced the killing of a living being and all his attendant suffering to an “issue.” She was always doing this. My mother is always shrinking away from humankind’s dark core, Agnes thought. She simply won’t look and her denial is all of a piece with her caustic reaction to Piero di Cosimo, and her infatuation with Botticelli’s bland perfect goddesses. My mother is a naïve and self-protecting girl who wants everything in her immediate world tamed and prettified. And that’s probably the real reason they offered me the cosmetic surgery. It was for her sake, not mine.

  How she hated her mother’s hypocrisy and willful blindness.

  Phoebe’s email made Agnes question whether duplicity was endemic in her family.

  Oh Agnes, I was so worried you left because you misinterpreted what Georges was saying. He kept telling me how sexy he thinks you are. Allurante. Magnétique. I can’t remember all the words he used. He goes much too fast for me sometimes. I felt quite jealous really. I mean about the way he went on about you.

  I hope you’re okay, Agnes. I’m sorry about your friend. I’m sorry we didn’t talk about him. I’ll look forward to seeing you in the spring. I’m really sorry you can’t see the play and I do hope you believe me about Georges.

  The clumsiness of her sister’s fabrication both moved and enraged her. Sexy. Did Phoebe really think she was gullible enough to swallow that?

  She meant well. Phoebe always meant well. But what she wrote was a lie nonetheless, a naked abuse of language just as unscrupulous as her mother’s. It was horrible how people contorted and perverted words to make them cover up a host of hurts and sins and evils. Like “renditions” and “friendly fire” and “ethnic cleansing.” Like “humane slaughter” and “experiments for the common good.” She wondered how many human and animal lives had been extinguished because of twisted and clotted language.

  From a very early age, Agnes had bridled at the precept that humans’ ability to speak made them superior to animals. She sensed something badly awry with this self-serving proposition. And what a grim irony if this astounding facility became so corrupted that words were bled dry of their meaning, or became purely a medium for one human being to control another, or a host of others.

  Words in the mouths of dictators and demagogues, priests and popes, and misguided, mesmerizing cultists, became lethal, shaping instruments. An entire people could be swayed, by words alone, to regard another as subhuman and therefore ripe for extermination. Under the grip of a spellbinding orator, they would gladly go out and burn their enemies alive in their homes, or tear them apart limb by limb.

  Savonarola, whom they’d studied in her Renaissance history class, was reputed to have been one of these compelling, grandiloquent orators. His battering sermons transformed Florence from a highly cultured, questing and exuberant city into a place grim, fearful and sin-obsessed. Agnes was certain Piero di Cosimo had withstood Savonarola’s propaganda. He was far too idiosyncratic and self-contained to let another being control his thoughts. Unlike Botticelli, Piero would never willingly have thrown one of his paintings into Savonarola’s raging Bonfire of the Vanities.

  Nevertheless, living under that repressive regime must have taken its toll, not just on his freedom of expression, but on his mind and body. Savonarola’s spies were everywhere. Piero, like every other Florentine, must surely have lived in a constant state of tension, anxious lest his peculiar sins or indulgences be discovered. What dedication and courage it must take to keep one’s thoughts one’s own; to keep the dance of one’s soul alive, in the presence of that all-pervasive power whose very words dealt death.

  Once again, Agnes was seized by the conviction this was the real secret behind Piero’s magnificent Forest Fire. The ludicrously long, vaguely obscene tongues of flame that protruded from the densely green and lacy bush at the near-centre of the painting had an odd rigidity that drew the eye. She saw this as a deliberate ploy on the artist’s part, so that we look again and see in these flames the tongues of despots and consummately manipulative men. From this bush at the painting’s heart, Piero depicted the tongue of Savonarola at its inflammatory work; and because he was prescient, here also were the tongues of the dictators of the future: Robespierre, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Milosevich. How long was the list? Agnes would personally add the magnates of the meat industry and of pharmaceutical companies whose cunning lies perpetuated the agonies of animals worldwide.

  She was more and more certain that Piero meant this bush to be understood as the source of the forest blaze; it was these very tongues that have generated the devastation visible to the farthest horizon where herds of tiny deer flee to the east and to the west.

  In the painting’s foreground, the remarkable miscellany of animals the painter had assembled — the male and female lions, the mother bear and her three cubs, the boar with the human face, the deer with the human profile, the ox, the heron — all seemed to speak, not just of terror and wrenching confusion, but also of a bond of trust broken. Agnes accepted their judgement with the gravity it warranted. We spurred you on to speech, the animals told her. It was our infinite variety, our sleek lustre, our iridescence, our speed, our agility and our beauty that made you cry out in wonder. Human speech began when you looked at us. But what was pure in origin you have made foul.

  Agnes wished, perhaps more than anything else on earth, that she might one day do the impossible and converse with Piero di Cosimo. Is this the secret? she would ask. And he would answer yes or no. Or keep silent, only pointing to the one clearly delineated human figure on the canvas: the ploughman who bore on his shoulder the heavy yoke he had removed from the two oxen, so that they could run free and save themselves.

  FIFTEEN

  The Foreigner

  THE FIRST TIME HE SAW the young woman, she was looking at the caged lions in the Piazza della Signoria.
Two things about her immediately arrested his attention. The first was her exotic garb: a tapered tunic and belled leg coverings gathered in at the ankle. They were of a fabric whose whirling arabesques almost dizzied him, a filigree mesh of silver and black. He supposed she must be a foreign servant acquired by one of the noble houses — a Tartar perhaps, or out of Egypt. She wore over her hair a gauzy black scarf, tied at the nape.

  Her features had a most peculiar leggiadria — a charm due in no small part to the strangeness of their proportions. This was most marked in the distance between her nose and upper lip and slight forward thrust of her lower jaw. It was a face that suggested above all a wide and tender sympathy.

  The second thing about her that compelled his gaze was her expression, so jolting in its familiarity. For what he saw upon her features, the shading of grief on the cheek and brow, the lips tightened in bitter indignation, was the very cast of his own countenance whenever he beheld the caged lions. Never before had he seen another being react just as he did to their naked misery and debilitation. The raw blend of compassion and fury on her face was also his, and he felt his blood rush faster to witness her fellow feeling.

  She perceived, as did he, how the confining cage crushed the lions’ strength and even their will to live. Most days they slept as if drugged and, when they woke, barely roused themselves, only laid their great heads leadenly upon their paws and sighed. It pained him that their eyes were so dull. Worse still was when a fit of restlessness drove them to pace back and forth in a frenzied fashion, a pitiable ritual that made evident how cruelly limited was the compass of their motion upon the earth.