Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  In his view, this violation of the lions’ freedom to roam ranked among the most heinous of all his city’s sins. It was an affront to their very essence.

  He wondered if the young foreigner grasped why the lions’ cage sat where it did, outside the city’s seat of government; if she knew of the callous tradition that the health of these creatures augured the city’s fortunes. So if the female lion whelped, there was great rejoicing. And if the lions appeared feeble and their appetites failed, people became fearful of what disaster might befall them: whether plague, or famine, or the arrival of invading armies who pillaged and raped and left the streets slick with blood.

  Conjuror’s toys, he reflected bitterly. Such crude usage of the lions’ natural majesty enraged him and he often nursed doomed notions of freeing them. But the bars of the cage were as thick as his wrist and he lacked the strength to break them, even with an axe. As to the keys for the padlock, the lions’ keeper had them always on his person. This keeper was a man of probity, proud of his office. He clutched the keys as fast to himself as he did his young wife. He would not be parted from them except by violence, and for that option Piero had no stomach.

  And so he gave the lions back their liberty the only way he knew how — by sketching them in the wild where they belonged, descending a mountain path to keep company with Saint Jerome in his cave; or in the forest outside the city walls where the male stretched languorously to show off his mane and sinuous waist and the female stalked with teeth bared so that all might be aware of her dauntless heart.

  The young women’s frown darkened. She clenched her fists; she swayed a little where she stood as if the ignominy of their incarceration dragged upon her spirit. He had an uncharacteristic urge to go and speak with her, even if they must converse in dumb-show. He had just started toward her when someone in the crowd jostled his elbow. He wheeled sharply around, clutching his cloak to himself, for he had ten florins in his purse for the purchase of cinnabar and ultramarine, and the Piazza was a ripe ground for thieves.

  Reassured he still had his purse, he turned around again, determined to approach her. But that spot where she had stood was empty and he could not spy her anywhere in the throng. Vanished. But how so quickly? He was impelled to go and stand where she had stood and fancied he felt there a particular softness in the air as if it had absorbed the compassionate heat of her observant spirit.

  In the weeks that followed, he began to wonder whether the young woman might have been an apparition, some new species of his fantasia. Had he imagined her because he yearned, despite his reclusive inclinations, to commune with another who perceived these truths to which the mass of men were blind?

  Once, he saw her in his back garden where she stood quietly smiling at the riot of tangled vines and profusion of wild mint. But of course that was impossible. No one could scale his high stone wall. Nevertheless, his heart leapt in his chest to see her there.

  “Here I am!” he nearly cried out to her — he who would flee around a corner rather than have to speak to his own brother if he encountered him by chance in the street.

  He addressed her silently and with a laboured courtesy: “Would you come in and meet this handsome rabbit whose portrait I am painting? Come and admire the incomparable silkiness of his fur, the ebony tips on his ears of purest white.” He picked up the rabbit, cradling him in his arms and stroking him all the while to soothe him and calm his quivering as he went into the garden. But by the time they stood amidst the twined emerald cordage of his grapevines, she had gone. He remained there for some minutes, in that cool, green, familiar place which gloried in its own unrestraint. He could perceive a faint glow upon the air where she had been, a sort of living sfumato of her form. He went to stand in that place and felt all about him the warmth of her absent self, as if she still watched, in respectful wonder, all this rampant, untamed verdancy that others mocked.

  “If she returns, we will be quicker to welcome her in,” he told the rabbit. “Whether she be made of flesh-and-blood or spirit, we will greet her as an ally.”

  He had a most irrational desire to taste the air she had so lately inhabited. By its density on his tongue, he gathers she has not come by her wisdom easily. Her way has been toilsome, beleaguered, and sorely pricked by a Fate pitiless and capricious.

  SIXTEEN

  May Day

  AT THEIR MID-APRIL MEETING, THE Ark members settle on the first of May for their brainstorming session as to what and where their major demonstration will be. They are all to come armed with ideas.

  “May first. Cool! We’ll be drawing on the most sacred roots of activist history,” Zebra said, waxing oddly poetic. “Solidarity. The international workers’ movement. The many joining as one to overthrow the system.”

  He looked so boyish and excited, Agnes felt her spontaneous skepticism to be disloyal. But she could not stop her thoughts turning automatically to the thousands of sweatshops around the world where men, women and children were as good as enslaved, their blood leeched by fatigue, unconscionably long workdays, industrial-strength chemicals and fetid air. Where was their workers’ revolution? When would it come?

  She liked and admired Zebra immensely, but he did tend to get carried away with lofty abstractions. Or was it naivety? If Horace were here, he would already have injected several snide, leavening remarks. And it did seem to her that Zebra was enthusing about an ultimately empty vision. Hadn’t the international workers’ movement shown itself to be tragically doomed? All those radiant young faces she had seen in archival film footage, marching shoulder to shoulder, singing the “Internationale”. Of course, she wanted to believe. Of course, she found their conviction moving, as she did the bold symbols and slogans on their bright, waving banners. But when one looked at the facts of history — the gulags, engineered famines, censorship, paranoia, the omnipresence of brutalized secret police — hadn’t those beaming optimistic youths simply exchanged one form of tyranny for another?

  She did not want any such associations polluting their plans for the demonstration dedicated to Campbell’s memory. Everything about this exercise must be pure and true and good. It must be nothing at all like the debacle outside the animal laboratory that had culminated in Campbell’s pointless death and then the gag of silence Clement Semple had imposed on them. She still found something distinctly dirty about that demand. Weren’t they all colluding in a cover-up that would obscure forever what actually happened that night? She could not banish altogether the suspicion that someone had betrayed them. Why else had there been so many security guards, armed and ready for a confrontation?

  She wondered if these questions continued to throb in the others’ brains as they did in hers. Or were they able to explain it all away as simply appallingly bad luck? What she did know was that nothing like this must ever happen again for the Ark. No blood spilled, either animal or human. Not the least bruise on flesh. There must be a way to make their demonstration a holy act; a ritual untainted by the botched, the tawdry and the impure.

  Recently, in her reading about the Ancient Greek mystery religions, she had come upon a phrase that continued to spill its peculiar revelatory light. To rage correctly. She saw in these three words an imperative for the Ark’s work ahead. Every member of the group, except Horace, shared this rage. When they discussed the barbarities done to animals worldwide and then sat in silence imagining, and shrinking from imagining, the actuality of that suffering, the rage she felt inside her was like a live ticking bomb. Her breath got shorter and faster under its pressure. She often felt physically ill. She clawed unconsciously at the worn fabric of the armchair, or at the cloth of her skirt. She was alert now to the particular signs of this rage in the others: the blanched discs that suddenly appeared on Perdita’s cheeks; Pablo’s clenched fists; Pinto’s barely audible moans; Zebra’s pummeling at his thighs; and Minnie’s sitting hunched on the floor, drawing her knees ever closer to her chest, then rocking a little to soothe herself. Campbell used to pluck distractedly at his
own hair, tugging on the long tendrils at his temples in a way she imagined caused him real pain.

  Agnes had not had enough opportunity to observe how Kit’s rage manifested itself. Besides, only two primal images of Kit remained to her now: the distraught maenad running, her hair a blood-red veil streaming, her mouth wide open, blaring its single, shrill, unbearable note; and the shorn, gaunt, hollow-eyed Kit, who leaned upon Horace at Campbell’s graveside, her beauty seemingly destroyed by an evil spell.

  Kit was recuperating at some sort of “rest home.” She was still very fragile, Zebra told them. He had spoken with her mother in one of her own more lucid moments. There were plans to send her to stay with family friends who had a villa in Tuscany. Zebra received a single text from her: Please tell everyone I will be with them in spirit at the demo. He relayed this message with a formality verging on reverence, sitting particularly erect, his bony face beaming his delight.

  Her message through Zebra is like a shower of gold, Agnes thought. It was amazing how she still managed to wield her goddess powers, despite her illness and debility. But it was Campbell’s, and not Kit’s spirit, that Agnes yearned to have with them, helping them give their rage the correct form. What they needed was the inspiriting energy of a terrible anger, but not its violence. They had to purge themselves of the crude urge to seek vengeance for all the suffering innocents. Their goal was rather to save — animals from suffering and people from the loss of their souls. The Ark had to find a way to open people’s eyes at last. To a peerless clarity.

  Nevertheless, in the weeks leading up to the May Day meeting, Agnes found it far easier to think of all the kinds of demonstrations she did not want than to come up with practical suggestions. She sometimes worried that the others might opt for a protest somewhere abroad. Her limited funds simply would not stretch to plane fare to Europe or Africa, let alone money for accommodation and food once she got there.

  Then everything changed — for the worse and for the better. In the third week of April she received an official-looking communication from a legal firm in Gloucester. The smooth linen grain of the long envelope, its substantial weight in her hand, the firm’s name and address set in a fluid embossed italic, all bespoke a gravity of purpose. She assumed the letter contained the document her grandmother had alluded to, with a quick, almost surgical precision, when she’d visited her on Christmas Day. Should she have a debilitating stroke, or accident, she did not want to linger in a vegetative state, so would Agnes promise to intercede on her behalf so she could be spared the indignity of a living death? “I cannot trust your father to do this for me, Agnes. He has never really listened to my wishes. Will you do this for me? It is only a matter of signing a power of attorney. Then you can tell them exactly what I want.”

  Agnes had swiftly agreed. She’d seen her grandmother swept away from her by an inexorable wind while she was then transplanted, like Orpheus in the underground, to a narrow, black passage, its walls compacted by dense love, fear and proleptic grief. All this in an instant. The little Siamese cat clung to the curtain, the potently dark triangular face turned toward her beseechingly. She had held him gently with one hand while extracting his nails from the fabric. He had allowed her to take him on her knee and stroke his fine fur, and this little ritual bonded her again to the earth, and to hope.

  When she opened the lawyer’s letter, she was sped back to Orpheus’s cold tunnel, except this time death was wholly present. She read the words over and over, seeing and not seeing them, because what they told her was impossible. Nana was dead. The lawyer’s communication assumed she was already apprised of this cold, incontrovertible fact. He was writing to tell her that her grandmother had willed her a substantial amount of money. Agnes sat, her head swimming, and bit her knuckles. Not Nana. No. She had looked fragile, but well. How could it have happened? Had there been a funeral? Why hadn’t her parents got in touch?

  She was momentarily furious with them for this callous omission until she remembered that she had been blocking all emails from her mother and Phoebe since Christmas. Now she hastened to her Delete box where she found several unopened messages from her mother. She opened the one with the subject line “Granny” and learned that her grandmother had died peacefully in her sleep (how Agnes hoped the adverb was true and not a lying euphemism) on February 18. Daddy is going to the service, her mother wrote. I can’t because of work and Phoebe is busy learning her part for her new play. She’s Nora in The Doll’s House. I know how much you loved Nana and that this will be a hard loss for you, Agnes. But just remember that she had a long and fulfilling life. Get in touch soon, honey. These long silences can fester.

  Agnes shook her head all through this vapid missive. She decided to reply, albeit two months late. She wrote simply: I visited Nana on Christmas Day. Am extra glad now I did. She then deleted all the other emails from her mother without reading them. She had been tempted to add a line thanking her parents for being so callous and judgemental on her visit home. If their attitude hadn’t forced her out, she wouldn’t have visited Nana and had those precious hours with her. Her parents were of no consequence. Nana had mattered. Nana cared.

  The first thing she asked the lawyer was about the two cats whom Nana had left with a friend when she moved to the residence. He assured her they were in a good home and that Nana had left them well provided for. “As she did you,” he said, “$500,000.” This was an amount so huge she found it difficult to take in. He explained the majority of the money would be held for her in a trust fund until she was twenty-one. But she could have up to $25,000 now, should she wish. It was a windfall with which she felt both uncomfortable and altogether undeserving. But she was grateful of course, not least because there was now absolutely no obstacle to her participation in the demonstration. Wherever the Ark decided to carry it out, she could go. To the ends of the earth, if need be.

  At the May Day meeting, all the Ark members were present, with the exception of Kit and Harriet and Lupo, who pled ill health and conveyed their “best wishes to their brave brothers and sisters.”

  “Lilly-livered old farts,” said Horace, after Pinto read their message aloud.

  “That’s uncalled for, Horace,” Zebra said, a clipped censure with which they all concurred. No one had expected Horace, who had come at Kit’s behest to announce that Kit was contributing several thousand dollars to help defray members’ expenses if they decided to go on a demonstration abroad.

  “That is very generous,” Pinto said.

  He looked relieved, Agnes thought.

  For the next hour, they vented their moral outrage about the squalid conditions of unregulated petting zoos; captive zoo animals of all kinds; the degrading use of animals in television and other advertising; the deliberate murder of South African baboons that were invading human communities built on their traditional territory; the deliberate extermination of kangaroos in Australia for similar reasons; organized cock fights and dog fights; bear baiting in Pakistan; wolf poisonings and, of course, the tortures endured by millions of laboratory animals worldwide every minute of every day.

  This hideous litany of crimes overwhelmed Agnes and made her a little frantic. The atmosphere in the room was highly charged, but it was the wrong charge, dispersed like scattershot. They weren’t “raging correctly.”

  Perdita held up a picture of a baby orangutan whose left hand had been slashed off by palm oil plantation workers wielding machetes. “A baby in his forest home who happened to be in the way of progress,” Perdita said, obviously trying hard not to cry.

  “The difficulty is the rampant choice,” Pinto interjected sagely.

  The brainstorming session had already gone on for hours. They all agreed this was sickeningly the case, given the countless situations where the treatment of animals was unconscionable and their lives hellish.

  Agnes poured herself another drink from the bottle of Bowmore she had brought to the gathering. She relished the steely confidence the taste of the whisky left on her tongue,
and then spread so rapidly and mysteriously throughout her body and brain.

  “We’re losing our way here,” she said, far more assertively than she would have done without the single malt priming her. “It’s like we’re going farther and farther into an awful carnage, wading through blood, through just heaps and heaps of dead creatures. We have to focus on how we protect their lives; how we make the conscious and unconscious abusers see their wrongs and totally transform their attitudes.”

  They all looked at her in surprise.

  “Agnes is right,” Zebra said. “We have to focus, guys. What would Campbell want?”

  “Do we know who inspired Campbell?” Minnie asked. “I mean, was there someone in particular whose activism fired him up?”

  “Hah!” Zebra struck his forehead with the flat of his hand. “Of course!”

  They all wait expectantly.

  “Brigitte Bardot,” Zebra says, his mouth momentarily mimicking the actress’s famous pout.

  “Brigitte Bardot!” Horace let loose one of his mirthless laughs. “That’s priceless. That’s . . . what’s the word? That’s gerontophilia. Even when he was a kid, she would have been old enough to be his grandmother. In fact, it’s darned close to necrophilia.”

  Zebra leapt to his feet, with his fists bunched. “That’s totally offensive, Horace. She’s an icon in the movement and she’s still beautiful.” He advanced on the little man, who continued to sit cross-legged on the floor, smirking, looking as if he could happily be nursing a nest of vipers beneath his shirt.

  Zebra seized Horace by the shoulders, pulled him to his feet and begun to shake him.

  “Calm down, Zeke,” Pinto said. “Ignore him. Rise above it.”