Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “How?” she asked. Then: “What d’you mean?”

  Pinto wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Zeke panicked. He ran out of the arena as if he was possessed. I think he may have believed he killed the boy. Then he drove to that cliff he told us about. Do you remember? The stone with the black and white stripes where he said he felt so much at home? He jumped off the cliff, Agnes. Zebra jumped down into the chasm.”

  “Stop,” she implored. “Please, stop. This is a nightmare, isn’t it? I am going to wake up soon in a sweat and shaking.”

  “Agnes,” he said sternly. “This is a living nightmare. We made it with our arrogance; with our foolish self-delusion that any action we took would be blessed and flow faultlessly from conception to completion. Because we knew we were right, nothing could go wrong. No little barbs or tricks of fate to trip us up. Nothing could impede us. Do you see now how benighted and doomed that notion was? We are no better than zealots. No better than terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests blowing themselves up in a crowded market place. We could easily have killed that child, Agnes. Look at what we’ve made — a human abattoir. First Campbell, and now Zebra.”

  “Stop it, Pinto!” She put her fingers in her ears. Why was he being so harsh? She wanted them to cry together, to be gentle with each other in their grief.

  “Do you know for sure?” It was a child’s voice issued from her throat, small and shrill.

  “I had to identify him, Agnes. Pablo and I had to identify him at the morgue. All his bones were broken. He didn’t look like Zeke anymore . . .” A shudder passed through his shoulders. He struggled to stand. “I have to get out into the air, Agnes. I have to get out.”

  It hit her that something was out of joint in what he had told her. How could all this have happened in the space of a few hours? How could Pinto have been to the morgue. Perhaps Zeke miraculously survived. Such things happened.

  Pinto was almost at the door when she plucked urgently at his sleeve. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How can all this have happened in just a few hours?”

  He looked at her blankly. “What day do you think this is, Agnes?”

  “Wednesday,” she answered.

  “It’s Thursday, Agnes,” he told her. “Thursday.”

  She looked at him aghast. Could she really have slept for twenty-four hours?

  She followed him outside where she saw the guard ambling toward them, swinging his key, then making a show of pointing at his watch.

  They were silent all the way back down Sarcophagus Alley. It was not until they were outside the gates that Pinto spoke again.

  “Did you sleep all that time, Agnes? You weren’t drinking?”

  “No.” She was still stunned. It did not occur to her to be indignant at his question.

  “Consider yourself fortunate to have been spared, Agnes. You are lucky not to have been there to witness the debacle, to see the Ark shatter. We are all broken now and we don’t even have the pieces of the Ark to cling to. We don’t have one another any more. I’m going away, Agnes. I mean I won’t be returning to Bremrose. I have to start over. I’ve so badly lost my way. I have to go somewhere I can purge myself of wrongful pride. I have been thinking all day. I have to beat my ego flat on some metaphorical last; hammer it and hammer it until it is thin and transparent enough for me to bear it. I have to go somewhere huge where I can disappear and then start to see myself clearly: see how tiny and negligible my own life is; and then I must strive to purify that remnant. I know I must sound self-obsessed to you. But how else am I to begin unless I judge myself severely and take my own measure?”

  They were standing facing each other now, the day waning. She couldn’t stop shivering. How frightened his word “disappear” made her feel.

  “I very much want to see you again, Agnes — when and if I can change and find a far better way to help stop animals’ suffering. If I send you a message in a year, or however long it takes me to sort myself out, Agnes, I hope you’ll respond. That’s one of the reasons why I waited for you here today, in the hope you would come; so that I could ask you if you will answer me. I won’t be Pinto any longer. Perhaps these names have cursed us as another form of our arrogance. I am Peter now, and it is from Peter that you will hear. Will you answer me then?”

  “Yes,” she said, “of course.” She knew that her affirmation mattered intensely, both to him and to her. Nevertheless, she felt she was speaking into a vacuum; that her words had been rendered insubstantial by a vacancy infinitely beyond the control of mind and eye and tongue.

  It is because of this hollowness, she thought, this place where Zeke has been and is no more; a vast, gusty hollowness, painfully and paradoxically full of the dust of the dead, of the debris of their shattered dreams. Zeke is dead and so too, is the Ethical Ark.

  “We must each find our own way now, Agnes,” Pinto said.

  He kissed her on the forehead and she closed her eyes a moment, savouring this human touch in a new time of mourning. When she looked up to ask him where it was he was going, he had disappeared. She could not even catch sight of the green of his shirt, although she stared long and hard down the street.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Video

  SHOT ON SOMEONE’S PHONE-CAMERA, THE video was shown every hour on the French national news program which Agnes watched obsessively in her hotel room. She found it poignant, verging on pitiable, to see Minnie in her chimpanzee mask, and Pinto, whose chow disguise was a smudge of russet, struggling to hold up the banner of Saint Francis. It was simply too large for two. Had Agnes been there, as she ought to have been, she could have helped Minnie hold it steady. She had let them down, and the result was this risible scene, so ripe for mockery, of the North American college kids who could not even manage the simple physical task of displaying their protest sign.

  The camera then lurched to focus on Zebra’s doomed leap and caught him dangling a moment, his guy wire twisted on some impediment they had not anticipated — a guard rail or perhaps the metal base of the bench. They had been so opaquely arrogant in not studying the details of the amphitheatre’s interior beforehand. It was horrible to see Zeke trapped so, vulnerable and humiliated, but, at least at that instant, still alive. He flailed his arms and jerked his upper body, and then he fell, colliding with the seated mother and child. The camera swung to fix on Zeke hastily dropping the harness and racing off the down the steps. But it was the final image, which zeroed in on Zebra’s face, lead-white and tight, his mouth and nostrils like holes ripped in a stretched sheet, that made her feel she was impaled on a rusty spike.

  She still could not wholly grasp that he was gone. Yet his harrowing expression in this last image told her, as clearly as if he’d spoken, that the Zeke she’d known was already extinct. He could never have recovered his guileless enthusiasm or his unsullied drive for the cause after this ignominious failure, which for all he knew might now encompass a child’s severe injury or death.

  She could not help but question his craven irresponsibility in fleeing, but sought refuge in the rationalization that his failure had sucked him dry. He’d had no moist vital energy or moral fibre left in him. It was not a man who ran from the arena, but an automaton programmed to carry out its own destruction. Had he already decided on this course when she saw him at the Alyscamps? All that time he was pacing like a frenetic puppet, was he elaborating the contingency plan for his suicide? If he could not make Campbell the perfect ritual offering of a flawless demonstration, then he would give him his own death. Was that his line of thinking? Or could he simply not bear life any longer?

  Her hands shook at the invasive image of Zebra poised on the edge of the black and white striped cliff. Did he hesitate at all? Or did the mess they’d made generate a fatal weight that pulled him down? The impact would have broken all his bones. There was a sharp stab behind her eyes as she entered Pinto and Pablo’s ordeal of identifying the body. Zebra’s lovely angular face would have been demolished, flat
tened and dehumanized. How she ached for them having to go through that obscene act of witness. No wonder Pinto wanted to go away and try to remake himself on — what did he say? — his metaphorical last? But she could not sustain this idea of beating something flat because it ran too near Zeke’s pulverized bones inside a flaccid bag of skin.

  She gritted her teeth hard then looked at her watch, amazed to see an hour had passed. And here again, on the news channel she had unwisely left on, Zeke’s drained visage loomed. This time she fixed on his eyes. How hollow they looked, as if there was no operative brain behind them, or what brain there was had somehow been corrupted. She flashed back to the conversation at her first Ark meeting about the plaque invading the coils of Kit’s grandfather’s brain. A thick, toxic paste. She had read a disturbing article some months ago about the brain’s potential to turn “toxic” when people witness an event so traumatic they cannot quite take it in.

  What if that had happened to Zeke, indeed to all of them, the instant they saw Campbell’s head roll away from his body? If that toxicity had eaten into their capacity for reason, just as plaque consumed the brain cells of people suffering from Alzheimer’s? Fergus’s murder had followed so soon after with the gruesome coincidence of his wire-sliced windpipe. She did not want to think about the torture. Had death been toxic for them and warped their brains in some unalterable way? And the result was the total desecration they’d made of what was supposed to be a salutary and illuminating act: to save the bull and focus the world’s attention on cruelty to animals of all kinds. Instead, they had birthed this reprehensible piece of folly, and shamed Zeke into killing himself.

  It was painful nonetheless to see how thoroughly the news channel had recast their protest as pure farce. There was no mention of Zeke’s suicide, and only a terse statement that the demonstrators had been released without charge. Gradually, the subtlety of the newscast’s propaganda dawned on her: how the police, the city of Arles and indeed the entire nation of France, had been magnanimous and all-forgiving of the youthful, bumbling and misguided activists. The city of Arles, with its ancient tradition of bullfighting and Roman monuments, shone as a paragon of civility and right reason. She found this twisting of the truth unendurable and her heart ached anew for Zeke and for the sunken Ark.

  She prayed the video would not spawn itself on other television networks around the world and on the Internet, yet another gobbet feeding people’s insatiable Schadenfreude. Global derision: such an end for the Ark struck her as cruel past belief, and at last she turned the television off. She must lie down; her body was so heavy with the weight of unshed tears. When they came, soaking the pillow, coursing and coursing, she remembered King Lear’s curse upon his unregenerate daughter that she would one day weep until there were deep runnels in her cheeks. And what would such a deformity matter, Agnes thought, in light of the Ark’s accumulated loss? Campbell, and now dear Zeke, who had only ever wanted kindness and respect for his beloved zebras, and every other four-footed, webbed and winged creature.

  When she woke at three in the morning, her face was salt-encrusted, rather than scored. She opened the shutters and searched longingly, but could see no stars. Nevertheless, the black night sky demanded an answer of her, as much as would the blinding morning sun. She knew she must leave France. The question was where she would go. She did not feel ready, neither porous nor alert nor innocent enough, to travel on to Florence as she had intended, to seek out and pay homage to Piero’s works in galleries and churches.

  If there were only a wrinkle of starlight to lighten and hearten her. She wondered under what night sky Pinto was travelling or sleeping. Where on earth could such a man go big enough in which to lose himself? It came to her then where she must go herself — to a city of millions; to the place her mother had gone as a girl and so shamefully passed out in the Met when the docent pointed out to her school group the macabre details of The Hunt. In New York City, Agnes could reclaim what her mother had reviled, and look fearlessly on the ripe-red slaughter of beasts, and at the greenish corpse of the hunter, so cunningly foreshortened, with its upturned, rigid toes.

  She felt welling in her a desperate need to reclaim her own first principles. That meant, above all, demonstrating how completely she was her mother’s opposite. Her insipidly pretty, cosseted mother was a foolish girl; whereas she, Agnes, was a woman who had witnessed terrors and known the kind of shuddering sublime beauty at which her mother would doubtless flinch and then cover her eyes.

  How could we bear it, if life were like that? Her mother’s obtusely offensive remark when they had looked together at the reproduction of Piero’s The Hunt had ultimately transformed Agnes’s existence and delivered her from her family’s grip. She had been hunting in the thickets of Piero’s imagery ever since: looking at the mystery of the fleeing animals and the fire, the loyal hound and the slain nymph, and the radiant soul-life so evident in the faces of the gentlest of his hybrid creatures.

  What her mother found repellent and bizarre, Agnes embraced. She was by far the stronger, more adventurous and perceptive. She could barely repress a smirk as she pictured what her mother was likely doing at that instant — hemming Phoebe’s newest costume or party dress, or seeking out just the right shade of dye for a pair of silk-covered pumps, or tilting her chin upward a fraction so that her little heart-shaped face was displayed to best advantage. How shallow her mother was. It was a great relief to think she would never have to see her parents or Phoebe again. The only home in which she had ever felt truly welcome was the Ark, and it was smashed now, “to smithereens,” as Nana used to say.

  At present, she could not afford the indulgence of wondering if she might one day find new friends, particularly those who might share her most sacred beliefs. What she must do now was emerge from the wreckage and stand on her own feet.

  Who was Agnes? Who was she?

  Her mother’s opposite. That was the answer that kept bombarding her. And where better to affirm that truth than in front of Piero’s canvas in the Metropolitan Gallery that had made her mother blanch?

  At Marseille airport she managed to book a seat on a plane leaving for New York City in five hours. The fare was exorbitant and, as she paid with her credit card, she was grateful anew for her grandmother’s generous bequest that allowed her to do these things without hardship. She was too agitated to sit and read and so passed the time searching on her new smart phone for a place to stay. By some lucky labyrinthine route, she came upon the website of the Wayfarers and Seekers House, located in Manhattan, a name she associated with safety as much as sophistication. The guesthouse welcomed travellers from all corners of the world, particularly those who had been labouring under trying circumstances and sought “a transformative respite in the heart of New York.” It was as if cyberspace had made her a gift of just the kind of warm, responsive accommodation she needed now. The guesthouse was run by Unitarians who obviously had a clear ethical imperative, “called upon to provide travellers in emotional or spiritual crisis with a sure anchorage in the city.”

  She was amazed to find such language from a hotel in one of the world’s most pitiless metropolises. “Called upon” had such a solid, round sound.

  She sent an email enquiring about a vacancy. Once again, she was lucky. Yes, they had a single room available. She quickly conjured up these wonderful Unitarians: a man and woman with clear, far-seeing eyes standing with calm, folded hands behind an uncluttered, stripped pine reception desk. They will smile at her as she comes through the door, and understand, without her telling them, all that she has been through. They will show her to her small, clean room where, under their benign influence, she will be healed and find her way, like thousands of sojourners before her.

  She twitched as it dawned on her she was picturing her own parents transformed into a fairytale mummy and daddy. It was not just galling but frightening, because this childish fantasy starkly revealed how alone and vulnerable she was, every inch of her bruised, inside and out, by one b
attering loss after another. Zeke came again, as he kept coming, as a mere a bag of skin full of pulverized bones; and then came the headless Campbell. Gone, and worse than gone, because it was sometimes so hard for her now to remember them whole. It took such an unwavering act of faith, such a transcendental leap, to fetch them back to memory as they had once been. With the wreck of the Ark and its great vaulting vision, she was uncertain she would ever again negotiate such a leap or forge such an act of faith.

  What she needed was a stiff drink. “Stiff” was so very apt. Wasn’t that exactly what whisky did for her? It stiffened her spine and her resolve; reinvigorated her hope, and took her up, up, up, into a lovely, lofty, glowing empyrean. Sometimes, too, there was a finely erotic undertone, a sensual excitement that played along her nerves and quickened her most secret flesh. And why not? Where else was she to find an erotic charge these days?

  In the airport bar she had to settle for Johnny Walker. The French seemed to know very little about good whisky. However, in the duty-free shop she was elated to find a decent selection of Single Malts. She bought a bottle of Laphroaig, whose peat-flavoured elixir she now knew intimately and craved: a roar, rather than Johnny Walker’s mundane murmur. She wished she could open the bottle right there, and rehearsed how its sweet burn would feel in her mouth and throat; how, after three or four drinks, she would revel in the sensation of being made new and perfect: like being licked into strength and surety by the warm tongue of a mythical mothering lion. When she reached that blissful inebriated state, not even death had any dominion. I am the resurrection and the life. That was what whisky accomplished in her psyche. It resurrected her and breathed new life in her. Was her pillaging of Christ’s declaration sacrilegious? She did not care.