She cared still less once she was many thousands of feet in the air and the plane’s cabin pressure performed its perilous alchemy in her blood, doubling the effects of the five whiskies she’d drunk in a row. The nearness of the clouds, at once solid and ethereal, the pure white of freshly laundered, downy bedding, intensified her conviction she had utterly escaped the strictures of earth. Freed from rational bounds, she began to nurture the idea that Campbell, Zeke and Fergus would all come back to life — literally, in the flesh. Why not?
It did not then occur to her that she was sliding into a state wholly self-absorbed and infantile. But eventually she slept, to be jarred awake when the plane landed, and made sharply aware of the thick, sour coating on her tongue, and a headache like an axe blade cleaving her brow. She managed to retrieve her bag from the dizzying carousel and then proceeded through security and customs and immigration in a dogged, mechanistic fashion. She kept telling herself she must be patient in line-ups and answer all questions politely and calmly, no matter how much her head hurt.
Her goad throughout was the vision of the immaculate, Unitarian-blessed room awaiting her, where she would lie down, and drink copious amounts of water. She was badly dehydrated and afflicted by alternating rushes of vertigo and nausea. She had only just manoeuvred through a press of people toward the taxi sign when her phone began to pulse urgently in her hip pocket. There was a little flutter of joy in her chest. Could it be Pinto? She frowned when she saw the message was from Phoebe. She turned off the phone then changed her mind. What if something was really wrong, if one of them was seriously ill?
Indeed, when she opened the message she was confronted by a stark “Urgent!!” in the subject line. The double exclamation mark struck her as accusatory, as did the cryptic text: Agnes, call home right away!
It wasn’t “home,” she reacted petulantly, even as she keyed in the number. Three times she made a mistake because of her trembling hands.
“Phoebe?”
“Agnes! Where are you? Are you in jail?”
“What? What are you talking about, Phoebe?”
“We saw you on TV, holding up the banner at the bullfight in France, where the little boy was hurt. They said the protestors were from Bremrose. You and your friends could have killed somebody, Agnes. How could you get involved in such a stupid dangerous stunt?”
“I wasn’t there, Phoebe.”
“Don’t make things worse by lying, Agnes. We all saw you: Mummy, Daddy and me. It was one of Daddy’s colleagues saw it first and told him. ‘I think your eldest daughter may be in a bit of trouble.’ You can imagine how mortified and worried poor Daddy was.”
There was a second’s silence. Agnes suspected Phoebe was deliberately staging one of the tricks from her acting class.
“And then . . . he had an accident, Agnes. Because he was upset, he wasn’t paying attention . . .”
Agnes’s chest was tight. Surely not killed? No, Phoebe would have told her right way.
“He dislocated his shoulder, Agnes. Daddy’s in a lot of pain. And it’s very hard for both Mummy and Daddy at work. People talk, Agnes.”
“People always talk, Phoebe. So what? I’m sorry about Daddy’s shoulder, but I’ve already told you I wasn’t there, although it’s true my friends were. My friend Minnie was wearing a chimpanzee mask.” This was all Agnes could deduce, although it smarted to voice it.
“Agnes! How can you? How can you lie bare-faced like that? We saw you, Agnes.”
“It was Minnie, I tell you, in a latex mask.”
Phoebe sighed in exasperation. “I’m finished with you, Agnes. I really am. I won’t stick up for you any more. It’s like Mummy says. You’re self-obsessed. You have this stupid, self-pitying idea you look like a monkey. And you don’t, Agnes. You don’t. It’s all in your head. We saw you, Agnes. You. Not someone in a mask . . . So, where are you, Agnes? Where are you?”
Agnes closed the phone, and then looked at it in surprise, thinking how much it resembled a sleek miniature black coffin. A new bout of dizziness besieged her. She had been leaning against a wall while talking to Phoebe. Now she slid down and sat on the floor with her head between her knees.
“Are you all right?” It was man’s voice. She tried to raise to raise her head, but it swam so that she saw only his bright blue T-shirt emblazoned with an emerald dragon.
“I’m fine. Thank you. Just a bit dizzy.”
“You sure?”
She nodded and caught sight of his running shoes, maroon and white, as he hurried off. It was a human encounter without a face, but nonetheless an unexpected kindness that helped spur her to her feet.
During the taxi drive to the guesthouse, she repeatedly prodded this new wound her family had inflicted on her. She was unsure which aspect of Phoebe’s attack rankled the most — that she was a liar, or that her sister really did see her as the “monkey-girl.” She thought I was Minnie in the chimpanzee mask. The self-image at which she had laboured so hard since leaving St. Catharines and her family was in shreds, just a laughable confection. In truth, she would be the monkey-girl forever. That was really how people saw her. Perhaps even Campbell. Was it pity he had felt for her, then? She needed a drink.
The reception desk at the guesthouse was every bit as pristine as she had envisioned. What was not in evidence was the unconditional welcome.
“We don’t allow alcohol here, miss.” The receptionist pointed to the transparent bag containing the Laphroaig.
“Pardon?”
“We don’t allow alcohol or drugs in our guesthouse. And I believe you’ve been drinking.”
Agnes was seized by two conflicting impulses: one was to stand and weep; the other to pound the desk in a fury. She did neither, opting instead for entreaty.
“You don’t understand what I’ve been through.” Even she was disgusted with her tone, querulous and thick with self-pity.
“Everyone who stays with us is shouldering a burden,” the woman responded, “or coping with uncertainty. Our goal is to provide an environment with the right supports to help them. And that means no alcohol. The alcohol is undermining your clarity and your strength. Eventually, I hope you will see this. We have programs open . . .”
“Don’t patronize me!” What right did this sanctimonious woman have to preach to her? It was not as if she had shown up at their precious hotel drunk, with dried spittle on her chin, her eyes wandering in her head. She was not stinking or inarticulate.
“I must ask you to leave, miss. There are other hotels in the vicinity that will allow you to bring in your bottle.”
Agnes bridled at the opprobrium in the phrase, as if “her bottle” were a louche and obviously diseased companion. She bit back the urge to say something cutting, although she had no idea what that might be. Her entire body was swollen with rage, which at any second might burst out in a way she would regret. She grabbed her backpack in one hand, her bottle in the other, and went back to the street where she staggered a moment under the assault of steamy, heavily polluted air. The raw sunlight hurt her eyes. Squatting on the sidewalk, she took several minutes rummaging before she located her sunglasses in her bag. She put them on, took a deep breath, and began to walk, not at all unsteadily. No, not at all.
Half an hour later, she sat on a double bed covered with a lurid gilt-woven spread, in a hotel equipped with its own bar on the ground floor. It was a soulless room, with its laminate surfaces, plasticized curtains and constant rustle of white noise. But she was free to drink, which she did liberally and often, pouring the dark whisky into a glass tumbler “sanitized” for her personal use.
She continued until only a third of the bottle remained. The Edenic lilt of peat and malt had fled many hours ago and she was left with a numbness of body and mind. Her mouth was so slack she drooled, and then used a corner of the bed sheet to mop herself. There was a box of tissues in the room but it was too far away and, besides, her fingers had turned thick and ungainly. Numb, she thought, was a word that sounded like th
e unfeeling flesh it described. Numb. Benumbed. She tried speaking the words aloud but an unsavoury mix of sweetness and bile spilled from between her lips. Lie still and let the numbness come. If she pricked herself with one of the needles in the package of threads they had left her in the bathroom, she would feel nothing. How did one numb the mind completely so as to obliterate all thought? It was the onrush of “devil” words she wanted most to keep at bay and the bleak, unendurable world they presaged. Depression. Despair. Debility. Depravity.
She must not think at all. But a question worried at the edge of her consciousness, tugging and tugging, as if she had left a thread loose there on which her persistent wakefulness must pull. Until she listened. And so she did.
What if she had hurtled here, to this sterile room, following the same fatal trajectory as Zeke’s down the cliff? What if they had both been flung out of the same whirling centre of chaos and this was their fitting damnation? Then she cursed herself because she was alive and he was dead. She tried to sit up but the effort was too much and she fell back onto a pillow that was too yielding and gave off a mocking sigh. She had the remnant of sense, or a grace sent from elsewhere, to turn on her side rather than lie on her back. For she knew if she was sick in the night, she might choke. There was that sliver of rationality left in her.
Then she passed out into a blackness that was total. Even the Underworld would have afforded her more light.
She woke late the next morning to find she had slept in her clothes, which stank of travel and the night’s accumulated acrid sweat. There was a taste of stale licorice in her mouth. In the shower, the vertigo was so intense she had to brace herself with two hands planted against the wall as the water thundered down. From room service she ordered tea and dry toast, of which she ate as much as could, only to be violently ill shortly thereafter. She told herself she would be all the better for this involuntary purging. She will stick to her plan and make her pilgrimage to the Met. She will pay her homage to the turbulent power, ethical shriek and superb technical mastery of The Hunt. She will look fearlessly and with a schooled appreciation at this painted scene that made her mother quail and faint.
The painting was even smaller than she had imagined, its ornate frame at odds with the roiling carnage it contained. She stood as close as one was allowed, marvelling at the fineness of the execution: the palpable miracle by which oils and tempera applied centuries ago with a brush of squirrel hair could create this heaving, chaotic scene still so densely present; one that gripped her nerves and blood and conscience as much as it did her eyes. They looked so real to her — these brutish hunters with their grotesquely muscular arms and faces hectic with blood-lust. So real that she felt an urge to strike out at them, to stop the slaughter, to save the small grey bear from its inevitable fate, to liberate the strangled horse and give sure refuge to all the animals fleeing to the west, out of the picture’s confines. She looked long into the eyes of the solitary monkey high in the blasted tree and saw there what she had never caught in any reproductions of the painting: a despairing quietude, a primordial, abiding knowledge that what was enacted here was both eternal and inevitable.
As long as humans had breath and bodily strength, they would go on murdering animals for their flesh and fur, or for their horns and claws, which they invested with magical potencies. And their tongues, she thinks. Even their tongues. Ox tongues and peacock’s tongues, and God only knows what other creatures’ tongues.
She became aware that the ominous shadow-work of the painting was steadily seeping out to infect her just as it had her mother years ago. She saw, with a startling clarity, how she had deluded herself as a girl when she first looked at what was happening in the painting. The fact was the animals in flight to the west hadn’t a shred of hope. They were all doomed, as doomed as the strangled horse and the massive bear, who lay with its chest ripped open and its heart exposed for whoever wanted to pluck it out.
Even their tongues. Even that. Unbidden, her own tongue and throat begin to shape sounds whose agency she does not recognize. Strange whooping cries loop together mirthless laughter and sobs pulled from deep in the chest. She has a moment’s delusional grace when she actually feels sorry for whoever is disturbing the respectful silence of the gallery. Then she knows exactly who it is, and the knowledge is leaden and bitter, but still she cannot stop.
Two security guards seized her by either arm and attempted to lift her from the floor where she knelt and rocked and carried on with her hysterical plaint.
“Calm down, miss, and come with us.”
She lashed out at them, catching one of them on his cheek with her nails. Then someone tackled her from behind. She was bundled out feet first, half-carried, half-propelled. She struggled, trying helplessly to kick out at her purveyors, enraged they were treating her like an offensive package that must be disposed of.
“Cooperate, if you don’t want us to call the police.”
This warning made her quiescent. The police would be bullet-headed and carry nightsticks. She squeezed her eyes tight shut to block out the indignity of what was happening to her. When she opened them, she was sitting on the stone steps outside.
“Go home and sober up.” Who was it whispered this in her ear? She’d caught the tone of disgust.
She looked down at her lap and saw she was still clutching her bag. There was money in it. She walked until she found a bar with a sign in the window advertising specialty whiskies. She ordered a Bowmore, for its honeyed, revivifying powers. As the barman poured, she focused on the bottle’s label with its familiar picture of Bowmore’s iconic white church. It was a round church, built without corners so that there was nowhere the devil could hide. Inside, one was safe, therefore, in a place sacrosanct and pure. All these things she drank down, and the hot disgrace of the recent scene she had made in such a public place, her brush with a precipitous madness, all slid away.
Soon enough she was in that much-desired place where her dear friends rose from the dead; the white horse was freed from the strangler’s grip; the hole in the great bear’s chest was healed; and the hunters laid down their barbarous clubs for all time. Then the capuchin monkey crept down from the treetop and put out its arms to her to be held. Stay, she whispered, stay.
NINETEEN
A Soured Bacchanal
PIERO RECEIVED A COMMISSION FROM Giovanni Vespucci to illustrate two scenes out of Ovid’s Fasti—the first: when Bacchus and his followers discovered honey and its transporting sweetness; and the second: when the eternally drunken Silenus, ancient progenitor of all the satyrs, seized greedily on a hornets’ nest instead, causing his fellow revelers great merriment. His instructions were to make both scenes overtly comic and visually arresting, full of vivid and unexpected detail and cunningly hidden allusions to Ovid’s text that would afford the family’s learned guests fine intellectual sport. Above all, these two spalliera were to serve as windows opening onto a fabled world whose strange inhabitants had such distinctive character, they would charm the viewer into believing they were real.
He seized upon the first scene with a robust delight, on occasion laughing aloud at the odd things that spilled out of his fantasia and onto the tip of his brush. Where had they come from — these fire tongs and common kitchen pots and pans the boisterous company banged upon to rouse the bees from their hive and leave the precious honey unattended? Or the weird codpieces certain of the male satyrs sported: a black feathered concoction that looked like the face of an owl, and a huge scallop shell slung low from a looped waist-cord? What was the origin of their ears, often half the size of the satyrs’ faces? — some with the magnificent whorls of rams’ horns and others like newly unearthed fungi.
His favourites among the band who circled the tree with its thrumming hive were the contemplative male, who carried a curious baby satyr on his shoulder, and the female satyr who lay on her side in languorous ease in the foreground, giving her infant suck. It surprised him that the god Pan turned out to have the features of a d
isreputable peddler. Pan sat splay-legged, his outward gaze full of lascivious promise. In his right hand he dangled a bunch of onions. Come, he seemed to cajole the viewer, taste my peerless aphrodisiacs.
The naked Silenus, who entered the throng on his long-suffering jackass, resembled an obscenely overgrown baby. The lardy rolls of his belly drooped over his plump thighs. The excess sagging flesh on his chest created the unseemly illusion of woman’s breasts. Yet despite his grotesquerie, the dissolute old god was ebullient and florid-faced. He raised his arm in a general salute, while his followers crowded in close at his donkey’s sides to keep him from falling. His expression was doltish, his eyes unfocused.
That he had succeeded so well in depicting this reprobate’s stupor gave Piero pause. In reality, he found the spectacle of public drunkenness repugnant. Since the downfall of Savonarola, the streets of Florence were more than ever before coarsened by such dehumanizing displays; it was as if once the Prior’s iron grip had dissolved, License must leap from its long confinement with its force redoubled. Piero shrank from the sourly reeking breath of the inebriated, who always had some urgent matter they must impart. But what most appalled him was the vacancy in their eyes. To lose all sure clarity of vision — not to see the dear particulars of nature that could lift a troubled mind, and give evidence of the world’s holiness — what worse damnation could there be?
As a young man, he had once foolishly overindulged in an ill-considered attempt to banish a disabling bout of melancholia. He recalled still the horror of his smeared vision, succeeded by an occlusion tantamount to blindness. Perhaps it was his recollection of this shameful incident that infected his fantasia when he began work on the second of the commissioned panels. For here, Silenus, with his bald pate and his paunch, was not one character among many, but the prime focus of the painted narrative. He must show the arch debauchee in three successive plights: falling from his pack-ass when he was repeatedly stung by the hornets he has mistaken for honey bees; being rescued by his attendants who used planks of wood to leverage his great bulk; and finally, having mud applied to his numerous stings while he sat squat and disconsolate. He must also convincingly convey the Bacchic band’s reaction to these various difficulties; in every case, an obvious and vulgar enjoyment of the ungainly god’s pain.
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