Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  That incident had made very clear to her the insidious, seductive powers of the irrational. How gruelling it must be to have a family member in the grip of such illness — like Kit, who was forced to watch her mother’s mind unravel and her behaviour become increasingly bizarre. Did she ever wake up at night in a panic, fearing that next year or the year after, she would not recognize her own face in the mirror; or remember that urinating is something one does on a toilet in private?

  Of course, there was no sign that Kit had this cruel disease. According to Zebra, she was recuperating well at her friends’ villa in Tuscany. Agnes planned to go to Tuscany after the Ark’s protest was finished in Arles. She would take the train to Florence and stand in awe-filled silence before Piero di Cosimo’s painting of the sea monster that captured Andromeda. She would look deep into his eye where she was sure she would see evidence of profound love.

  To help exorcise the taint of the elderly tourist’s crude remarks, she decided to visit the hospital’s cloister first. The smooth, cool stone of the ambulatory induced a state of calm as she walked the passageways around the inner garden. The cloister’s walls, and the soothing greenery at its heart, would surely absorb a patient’s jagged hallucinations and put in their stead an inner well replenished by light and hope.

  Was this merely a willful, wishful notion? Hadn’t the phantasmagoria that colonized Van Gogh’s mind ultimately compelled him to shoot himself, ineptly, in the groin so that even his departure from life was hell-racked? He had four serious manic fits in his fifty-three-week stay at this hospital and, after each one, had to make the arduous climb back to a stability solid enough to allow him to work again. The director of the asylum was unfailingly supportive, giving Vincent a room for a studio and encouraging him to paint outside each day, as long as he was accompanied.

  Under his doctor’s sensitive care in that tranquil setting, he was able to produce one hundred and fifty paintings. The cool passageways of the cloister gave him easeful shade when he could no longer bear the sun’s fire. She had always wanted to see this place that afforded him interludes of peace in a life too often racked by self-loathing and a deranging despair.

  She was lucky to stumble on an interlude between tours when she could linger alone in his bedroom, which was preserved largely as it had been in his day. There was the same red tile floor, pale green wallpaper and metal-frame bed. She studied the view from the window he’d so often painted. Where he’d seen a flowing wheat field, there was now a kitchen garden. But the olive trees were there still, and the steadying, jubilant hills whose regnant character he’d celebrated with deepest blue or purple. She was so happy he’d had this respite, with the compassionate treatment of Doctor Peyron, who strove to treat his patient humanely through the healing powers of art.

  In the hospital’s gift shop, Agnes bought a booklet about Vincent and Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. On the return bus to Arles, she read, wincing, the list of common nineteenth-century therapies for mental illness: opening the patient’s jugular vein, applying leeches, pouring boiling water on the nape of the neck, flogging and — somehow the worst of all — ripping out the hair from the patient’s temples. All these little barbarities, it was believed, could shake the sufferer out of his or her symptoms. But at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, they had eschewed such cruelties, and thus Vincent escaped these barbaric assaults on his flesh. Agnes closed the booklet and put her fingertip to the temple of the self-portrait he had painted while at the hospital. The maimed ear was obscured by a blob of white. The eyes were fierce with knowing: both the ecstasy and the abyss.

  In Arles, the bus stopped close to the arena. Despite its prominence in the city centre, Agnes had thus far managed to avoid walking right beside its vast perimeter wall. Whenever she’d approached it from one of the radial streets, the massive building, with its two tiers of sixty arches, looked much like pictures she had seen of the Roman Coliseum. Now standing beside one of these huge arches, gazing up at the patchy grey surrounding columns, she felt absurdly small, as if the arena were an omnivorous maw that could swallow her whole. An image overtook her of the towers of bleeding carcasses that had amassed over the centuries inside these walls: the result of murderous spectacles; gladiators against lions, the staged hunts of creatures of all sorts, and now the bullfights. Distaste, and an irrational anxiety about contamination, prompted her to cross to the opposite side of the street. It hit her then how much she dreaded the idea of going inside this building dedicated to ritual killing. The sheer arithmetic of its history sickened her. If the arena could easily hold more than twenty thousand people, how many millions did that make over the years who had paid to see the blood of living creatures soak into the earth?

  She stood glaring at the grotesque mammoth structure across the street. Then she recalled the bullet holes in the wall of the Basilica in Marseilles, and the suffering stone. This was no different, she realized. The stone of the arena, on which she had irrationally fixed her distaste, was also suffering on account of the deaths it had been made to witness and contain. It was not the fault of the edifice, but of the men who shaped its purpose.

  The Ark would help redeem that blood-soaked history. When Zebra alighted in the ring like a resilient angel to stop the killing, when they all held up their blazoned banners in salute, they would be purifying the past as well as the way ahead. This peerless vision clarified her resolve and she started walking briskly back toward her hotel. She had barely gone a block when she had a serendipitous encounter that seemed to validate her renewed purpose. What she saw was a little two-storey stone house with a sign declaring it to be “The Museum of Van Gogh’s Room.” A reproduction of the famous bedroom in the Yellow House hung in the window. Agnes was perplexed. The house in which the museum was lodged was certainly not yellow. Nevertheless, she decided to visit it, not today, but in the hour just before they were to go into the arena and take their respective positions. She knew she would be very anxious. A good dose of art history — perhaps the museum had the actual bed and the rush-seat chairs? — will help settle her nerves and nullify her tendency to obsess about the risks: the possibility that Zebra might seriously injure himself when he rappelled down from the upper tier, or that they will all be arrested and expelled from college in disgrace in consequence.

  Tomorrow morning at ten, the Ark protest participants will meet at Sarcophagus Alley in the Alyscamps. There they will go over the details of their bold undertaking scheduled for two that afternoon. They will inspirit each other. They will speak of Campbell. Agnes was surprised just how keenly she was looking forward to seeing them. My friends, she thought. When she was seventeen she had not believed it possible she would ever voice these words with such justification and fervour.

  When she arrived at the Alyscamps, she spied Minnie standing beneath one of the huge plane trees lining Sarcophagus Alley. In her scant scarlet T-shirt that showed off the muscularity of her bronzed arms and exposed two inches of solid, toned midriff, Minnie looked indecently out of place amidst the empty stone coffins. She was smoking, staring off into the middle distance.

  Agnes hoped Minnie would not unthinkingly use the empty sarcophagi as an ashtray. These vacant eroded stone boxes, stretching in double rows on either side of the alley, made her skin crawl. Their edges were raggedly chipped. They all looked filthy and hulking and sad — like long-abandoned, ill-conceived boats awaiting ghostly rowers. What most disturbed her were the missing coffin lids. Where had these gone? Had the Barbarians smashed them when they plundered whatever grave goods they could find? What had happened then to the bones left naked to the sky in their individual boxes? Did wolves enter the cemetery at night and drag them away? Or had each skeleton simply turned to dust, begriming its coffin’s interior?

  In picturing the Ark’s meeting at the Alyscamps, Agnes had imagined a spacious Elysium where some pulse of the sacred lingered. Once it had been the most famous cemetery in Christendom, a place of pilgrimage where people came to gaze and ponder upon the tiny Biblical figur
es who acted their stories on the carved faces of majestic funerary monuments. There was even a legend that Christ had visited the Alyscamps and knelt to pray, leaving the imprint of his knee on a stone. The reality before her, however, was broken and desecrated. The gaping sarcophagi were open mouths bemoaning their fate in tones too low for the human ear, but disturbing nonetheless.

  “Ag. Hi! Great to see you.” Minnie ground her spent cigarette under her heel and wrapped her arms around Agnes.

  She felt small and frangible in this embrace. It struck her that the last person to hold her this tightly was Campbell. She sniffed.

  Minnie let her go. “Got a cold?”

  Agnes shook her head.

  “Maybe you’re allergic to this mouldy old bone-yard. God, I hate ruins. But I guess Perdita picked it right. The place isn’t exactly crawling with tourists, is it? When’d you get here, Agnes?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “Whew! What did you find to do in this town? I’ll be so glad to leave. In and out like a surgical strike. Do the deed and depart. That’s my plan. I’ve got a welder refresher course on the fourteenth. Did you know I’m starting up an all-female garage with a couple of friends? There’s a lot of women who are sick up to here” — Minnie delivered a symbolic karate chop mid-throat — “with being patronized and cheated by male mechanics. So if you’re ever thinking of buying a car, Agnes . . .”

  “For sure, Minnie, I’d come to you.” She was astounded by Minnie’s sang-froid. In and out like a surgical strike. Did she have no doubts at all about their protest proceeding flawlessly?

  “Hey!” Minnie waved brightly. “It’s Pablo and Perdita. Do you ever look at them and think they’re just too cute to believe?” she whispered in Agnes’s ear. “Sweet though; really good people. How are you guys doing?”

  The couple, floating in loose cream cotton shirts and pants, wore identical broad-brimmed straw hats.

  After hugs and hand-clasps all around, they all four retreated to the shade of the spreading plane tree and stood watching the entrance to the cemetery. There were still no other visitors in evidence. Agnes hoped it would stay that way, particularly since Minnie’s forceful voice carried so far.

  Next to arrive were Ewan and Gerhard, ambling with their arms linked and apparently totally at ease. Then Zebra appeared, wearing a black-and-white striped baseball cap, black jeans and a white T-shirt with a silk-screened image of two zebra standing nose to nose. As he came nearer, Agnes felt a stab of alarm. He looked gaunt and the stains under his eyes were the colour of overripe plums.

  “Well met, guys.” He greeted them all with a grin. “No Pinto yet? I hope the big guy hasn’t got stuck in a doorway somewhere. I mean height-wise,” he added quickly. “Some of the doors in this town are really low. Anybody else notice that?”

  He made no effort to conceal his agitation, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to another; then setting it at his feet; then heaving it up on to his right shoulder again.

  “Zeke,” Minnie said, “do you want a smoke?”

  He looked at her blankly, then shook himself. “No, better not. I didn’t sleep well. That’s all. But, thanks Minnie. Yeah, thanks . . .”

  He dropped his backpack at his feet again and abruptly left them to pace up and down the avenue between the rows of box tombs. Agnes noticed how his shoulder-blades stuck out like rigid little wings under his T-shirt; how he kept having to hitch up his jeans. Or was this gesture a tic? How much weight had Zebra lost? Was the idea of tomorrow’s dramatic undertaking, which he had conceived with such upwelling confidence just three months ago, now proving too much for him? “Mayday! Mayday!” She heard again Horace’s derisive parting shot, his acerbic tone almost visible, like scissors flashing in the air.

  They had staked everything on the purity of their intent, and their unshakeable belief that they were morally in the right. How, then, could anything go wrong? She had unfolded their magisterial schema so often, with such keen appreciation of its component parts and impact. First, the spectators will undergo the emotional and aesthetic shock of witnessing Zebra’s acrobatic descent. The angel will suddenly appear and open a tiny aperture in their consciousness into which will flow a wholly nourishing enlightenment. They will see at last, oh glory, and the Ark’s banners will rise, reinforcing this adulterated truth: “He Has Rights Too,” over the close-up of a bull. “Are We Barbarians?” with the image of a matador holding aloft the severed bleeding ear. And Pinto’s choice, “They Are Our Brothers and Sisters” emblazoned over Saint Francis shaking hands with the wolf.

  It was all so simple and so perfect. But watching emaciated Zeke pace neurotically like one of his beloved totem creatures held captive in a compound, Agnes was assailed by misgivings. It was too much to ask of him. The banner-holders’ part was puny by comparison. Yes, of course, the abseiling into the ring and the body armour had been Zebra’s idea in the first place. But when he had ardently embraced this perilous role, he’d been half-blinded by a grief so violent, it battered all reason. He had groped in his churning pain for a ritual gesture large enough to redress the senselessness of Campbell’s death. She began to question whether their foray was really about animals’ rights at all. What if Zebra’s plunge was actually a sacrificial leap into the aching void Campbell left behind? Like inconsolable lovers who threw themselves into the mouths of volcanoes.

  This insight, at once trenchant and terrifying, rocked Agnes bodily. She put her hand on the plane tree to steady herself. The touch of the cool, smooth exposed bark calmed her. The unusual mottling of the bark — pale grey and orange and green — was not unlike Pinto’s complexion. And he was as steadfast and strong as this tree. Where was he? They were in desperate need of his moral weight and reassurance. Minnie lit another cigarette. Perdita coughed quietly.

  “Yeah. Sorry, Perdita.” Minnie plucked the cigarette from her mouth and stubbed it out on the lip of the sarcophagus nearest her right hand.

  Perdita’s lips tightened but she said nothing. She looked away, focusing again, as they all did, on Zebra. The distance he covered in his compulsive pacing was getting shorter all the time, as if his tension was contracting the space in which he could move. In a minute or two, he would be treading a single point on the path, frenetically, like a child possessed.

  “Zeke!”

  “Zebra!”

  Agnes and Minnie both called out to him at once. He had begun to wring his hands.

  “We can cancel,” Perdita said. “He doesn’t have to do the leap. We can still do a protest with the banners outside the arena. We simply can’t let him go though with it.”

  “Get over here, Zeke!” Minnie commanded. “We need to talk.”

  They all looked at one another, perturbed and pitying, as Zebra approached.

  “Maybe it always was a crazy idea,” Pablo said. “We got stupidly carried away, wanting something hugely dramatic. Perdita’s right. A demo outside will serve our purposes.”

  “Wimps!” said Zebra. “I’ve been practising. Lots. From the top of the stands in the gym in my old school. I paid the janitor to let me do it at night. I’m not nervous about the jump. It’s just . . .” He stopped. “It’s just that I hate waiting. And where the hell is Pinto?”

  As if on cue, Pinto’s gigantic form appeared between the massive columns of the entrance to the grounds. His dark green shirt hung halfway out of his belt. A barefoot black-haired child wearing a pink tank-top and grubby shorts more holes than cloth clutched the end of Pinto’s shirt-tail. A second child — a girl in a mud-spattered yellow dress far too large for her — kept circling him as he walked, badly slowing his progress.

  Pinto raised his hand in greeting. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Gawd!” exclaimed Minnie. “Please don’t tell me he gave them money. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.”

  When Pinto joined them under the plane tree, the two children retreated to stand side by side on the path. They seemed particularly wary of Minnie, who glowered, then darted toward them, baring
her teeth. “Vamoose, you little shits!”

  Pinto stared glumly at the children’s backs as they sped out of the grounds.

  “They looked so hungry,” he said. “I gave them a few Euros. But then they wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “Pinto, Pinto, Pinto,” Minnie sighed. “It’s a good thing we all love you.”

  “Sorry, guys.” He was sweating profusely and took off his sunglasses so that he could wipe his face and eyes. The tissues he pulled out of the slot in the blue cellophane package looked ridiculously small against his moon-broad face. Agnes wished she had a proper linen handkerchief to offer him — the kind her grandmother always used to send her father for Christmas and which he would then promptly donate to the local charity shop.

  Pinto smiled at her widely, as if he could read her unvoiced wish for a piece of linen worthy of his brow. “Agnes. So good to see you, to see all of you.” He took in the whole group with a sweep of his head. “And you . . . come here, Zeke.”

  They all watched, with a relief verging on joy, as Pinto put his arms around Zebra, engulfing him. He patted Zebra gently on the back and held him a full minute.

  Once Zebra emerged from Pinto’s embrace, his face was smooth and his eyes clear, his agitation quelled. Pinto had somehow neutralized or absorbed all that chaotic, bristling energy that had made even the muscles around Zeke’s eyes twitch.

  “He’s here with us, Pinto,” Zebra declared. “Can you feel Campbell here?”

  Pinto’s smile was kindly.

  “I felt him first yesterday,” Zebra continued. He was speaking more slowly and naturally now, Agnes noticed, even given the passionate undercurrent. “I drove out to see some of the troglodyte homes,” he enthused. “I mean, how cool is that — to make your home in a cave? And the amazing thing was the colour of the stone on the cliff face where the cave-homes are set high, high up. They must have had to rappel down to get into their front doors, you know? I mean how else could they get into them? But the thing is — the stone is black and white stripes. Beautiful. And I could hear Camel saying: ‘Looks like you’ve found the perfect home, Zeke.’ Clear, clear as a bell I heard him. So we’ve got his blessing for this demonstration. I know we have.”