Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Agnes put on as sage a face as she could. She had no idea whatsoever as to where the Bronx was in relation to Manhattan or SoHo or any of the other boroughs. “Thank you. And can you please tell me if there is a restaurant with a vegetarian menu nearby, or maybe a bar with snacks?”

  “Snacks,” the woman repeated, as if the word were new to her. “Well, you could try the Aardvark. If you turn right when you go out, you’ll find it about two blocks down. It has a lime green sign.”

  It was lucky there was somewhere suitable so close by. She would be able to get back to the guesthouse well before dark. The street was both busier and quieter than she expected. The traffic, although constant, did not halt and snag as it did in Manhattan; nor was there the relentless din of blaring horns. She passed plenty of people on the sidewalk, many of them young couples, but she felt far less hurried and buffeted about in this part of the city. Perhaps the A-1 Guesthouse and South Bronx were godsends after all.

  In contrast to its external lime green sign, the Aardvark was predominantly red inside. The walls were cochineal. The hammered tin ceiling had crimson mouldings and the table tops were a shade she could only describe as “ketchup.” Because the place was small, Agnes found this mono-scheme overpowering. She decided to sit at the bar so that the vast tract of red was behind her. The bartender was a young man with closely clipped silver-blue hair and a matching earring. Among the bottles on display behind him were two Islay whiskies. She ordered a double shot of Laphroaig, and baba ganoush, the only vegetarian option on the menu. Of this she managed to eat very little; the simple business of chewing and swallowing fatigued her. The whisky, on the other hand, slipped down her throat with its habitual silky burn and sweet promise of transfiguring joy. Soon her tension dissolved. She was caught up in the play of light upon the shining amber stuff in her glass, but her mind’s eye was on the departed and, most especially, on Campbell. Inside her head, he leapt to life again, straddling the Vulcan on the wonderful morning he turned up to take her on the ride to the sea. She rode behind him again in the sun, and inhabited those ecstatic moments as tendrils of his hair escaped his helmet and blew against her lips.

  Then suddenly he was there, pushing open the door of the bar. He stood still a moment while she drank his image in. She thought perhaps her heart had stopped and started again. She had to set her glass down because her hands were shaking so. He was wearing a white T-shirt and his face and bare arms were more tanned than she remembered. His lovely black hair was longer too, cascading thickly, almost to his shoulders.

  He came in and sat at the opposite end of the bar. It was then she saw that of course it was not Campbell. This man was older, perhaps thirty. He had a hawkish profile. The long nose and high cheekbones were both bolder and sharper than Campbell’s. But if she focused only on his hair and the proud way he carried himself, the likeness was astonishing — so much so that she had to retreat. She ordered another double and moved to the table in the back right corner. There were still very few customers: only the man and an older couple with two large shopping bags at the table near the juke box. She wondered if the machine still functioned or was only a prop. In fact, there was music coming from the corner speaker above her head, saxophone riffs intertwined with a smoky-voiced tenor half-singing and half-talking the lyrics. “Deep sea,” she heard. “Deepest love.” She was with Campbell again on the bike, en route to their cave, the whisky strongly powering the vision.

  “I didn’t drive you away, did I?” It was the man with the hair like Campbell’s standing by her table, smiling down at her. His teeth looked very strong and white. She was briefly dazzled, then immediately on edge. Was he making fun of her? Was he some kind of con artist?

  “I just wanted to move to a table,” she told him coldly.

  “Can I join you?” His smile was beginning to work on her. It was so broad and clean. She perceived no duplicity in his face, which was very lean and striking. His dark olive complexion made him look exotic. Could he be Eastern European? She did not like to ask. On instinct she decided she would like to have his company. It seemed like weeks since she had had a normal conversation with anyone. Her last real exchange was with Pinto at the Alyscamps, and that had been more a dual lamentation than anything else.

  His name was Juan. Or was it Guam? Or even Gone? Each time she tried to repeat it after him he laughed so that she knew she had it wrong. He told her he was an artist. When she asked what kind, he would not say. “Maybe later,” he teased her. She was already inebriated enough to feel honoured he might yet make her this confidence.

  He was sipping his beer slowly. She was drinking her whisky fast. She did not notice this disparity until it was far too late. A wonderful haze formed around his head as if he were holy. She wondered at this; then she decided she was most fortunate that someone so exceptional had chosen to be with her. The more she drank, the more the hard lineaments of his face softened. His brown eyes became larger and more lucent. She imagined she saw in them an extraordinary compassion. She started to tell him about Campbell’s death and Zeke’s suicide. She persisted in the illusion he was listening patiently, and ventured to describe for him the rawness of her pain.

  “Stupid!” His fist hit the table hard enough that the bartender shot him a warning glance.

  Agnes smarted under what she assumed was a reproof for her self-indulgence. She got ready to go, vacillating as to whether or not she should apologize for imposing upon him. As she stood up, he put his hand over hers. It was a large, strong, warm hand. She could not help but think immediately of Campbell’s touch; of how his bodily heat and strength enveloped and excited her. This man, whose name she could neither capture nor speak, had a touch that aroused rather than comforted her. There was a swirl of something winged and wild in her belly and a fierce heat that spread dangerously downward to her thighs. Take care. The tiny inner voice was shrill and insistent. You are out of your depth.

  “Stay,” he said, and the look in his eyes, which glowed with some inscrutable compound of vulnerability and danger, held her fast. She wavered a split-second; the internal admonition was clamorous now. She silenced it as irrevocably as if she had clapped her hand over the mouth of a wailing child. Once the nagging voice was stilled, her mind was blissfully, drunkenly free to imagine in sumptuous detail the sensuous patterns this artistic man would draw upon her skin. Not of course like Campbell. No one would ever make her feel like Campbell had. But she might come near ecstasy again nonetheless.

  She sat gazing at the fine sharp contours of this man’s face, and when she could bear it, into his eyes. Her body hummed with desire. As if he caught this vibration, he suddenly gripped her bare calf between his legs. This swift, surreptitious claim astonished her. Her legs parted. This opening too he seemed to sense by means of a sexual radar with which she has had little experience. Under the table, he began to make teasing, feathery strokes on her inner thigh. A rush of delight and fear ran through her. The tormenting idea assaulted her that this same amalgam of contradictory emotion might have seized Zeke as he’d stood swaying at the cliff’s edge.

  “Don’t, Zeke.” She entered the picture as she so often did these days, to grasp him around the waist and pull him back. This imagined scene, with all its pathetic revisionism, almost made her pull back herself. She did not know this man with whom she was about to plunge into a darkness aglitter with danger. She very nearly retreated, but the enticements — most particularly of the protective circle of his strong arms and the perfect oblivion she would find there — were too much for her.

  Suddenly they were outside her room in the A-1 Guesthouse. She had no recollection of how they’d got there. She managed, after much fumbling during which he swore under his breath, to unlock the door. Despite her befuddlement, she remembered to slide the bolt and put the chain on the door once they were safely inside. She turned to face him then, expectant, her arms loose at her sides, as if she were making a gift of herself.

  He seized her roughly around the waist a
nd threw her on to the bed. She lay looking up at him, her legs and her lips parted. He sat on the side of the bed and yanked up her T-shirt. He looked angry when he saw her bra. She sat up to unhook it and tossed it on the floor. With her breasts exposed, she greedily expected that his mouth would soon fasten on one nipple, while his fingers caress the other. It was what Campbell had done to her. Already she shuddered as the blood-red cord pulled taut inside her. She closed her eyes to ready herself for the surfeit of pleasure that was about to come, but the world lurched sickeningly as soon as she lowered her lids and she was forced to open them again. His face was very close to hers. His expression had nothing at all to do with desire. His features were contorted either by hatred or disgust.

  She sat bolt upright and pulled her T-shirt down to cover herself. He seized her hair and pushed her head back onto the pillow. He put his mouth next to her ear and whispered: “I feel really sorry for you because you are stupid like an animal.”

  She was stunned, humiliated and enraged. But, as yet, she was not terrified. Then she heard a flicking sound that turned her stomach. He was pressing the tip of a very cold, sharp blade into the base of her throat. She tried to cry out but the pressure he was exerting impeded her speech. She gasped and, as he dug the point deeper, she felt her skin yield and the seep of warm blood begin to trickle around her neck.

  “I feel really sorry for you,” he repeated, this time between gritted teeth, “because you are stupid like an animal.”

  She lay rigid, certain that if she moved even slightly, he would plunge the knife in with all his might. If only she could lunge at him or grab something heavy to hit him. She did not want to die in this squalid hotel room. She was tortured too by the idea that the last words she would ever hear from another human being were a calumny. What could be more evil than the assumption that animals were stupid?

  Abruptly he removed the knife. She was just summoning her breath to scream when he clapped his hand over her mouth and then straddled her, pinning her arms down with his knees. He made a slashing motion in the air and she understood he was miming the cut he was about to make in earnest across her windpipe.

  She pictured Pinto’s face and thought how sorry he would be if ever he learned of her death. It was at this instant that the man froze. A look of alarm shadowed his face.

  “What the fuck?”

  She heard it too then: the low rumbling growl of a dog that was about to strike. Stunned, and disbelieving, she still had sufficient presence of mind to get off the bed and grab the bedside lamp, the nearest object to hand.

  The man yelped as the dog, a huge chestnut-brown hound, clamped its jaws into his knife hand. “Get off, you damned bastard.”

  The hound loosened its hold and took up a position between Agnes and her attacker. Its teeth were bared. Its entire body was tensed in readiness to leap at his throat.

  Agnes watched with a kind of crazed joy as the man staggered to the door and undid both locks. She felt faint and had to right her balance by putting her hand on the dog’s back. The animal seemed to sense her legs were shaking and kept close as she made her way to the door to refasten the bolt and the chain. Then she slid to the floor and sat with her back against the door. She put her finger to the wound in her throat. It came away red and sticky, but by blind touch alone the hole did not seem large.

  The dog sat opposite, watching her sorrowfully.

  “Laelaps?” she asked in wonder. “Is that who you are?”

  The hound bent his head so that his nose brushed her knee. She stroked his head, worshipfully, and rightly so. Then she struggled to her feet and went to wash out the wound before collapsing on the bed. The dog sat on the floor beside her. His presence steadied her. When she began to shake or feared she would succumb to the hysteria coiled in her chest, she reached out to run her fingers along his silky back.

  In the morning there was not the least sign a dog was ever in the room. She scrutinized the bedside mat and the bed cover and found not a single hair. I did not imagine it, she told herself over and over. The wound at the base of her throat was real enough, as was the taint of self-disgust. She stared unflinchingly into the mirror over the stained and pitted sink and admitted the fullness of her folly. She was indeed a drunk, just as Ines had said as casually as if it were a given. She was grateful to be still alive; to be made to see through her squalid brush with death how her heedless drinking had degraded and demeaned her, and imperilled her intelligence.

  No one will ever believe her if she tries to tell them how she was saved. A brown hound named Laelaps, who exists solely in two dimensions in a painting on wood in London’s National Gallery, leapt to life and drove a murderer from her bed. What happened defies and vaults over reason. It is both mystery and wonder and she is reconciled to leaving it there. She has never before received such a gift. She has grave doubts she is worthy.

  An hour later, she stood at the reception desk at the Wayfarers’ Hotel, asking about a program to help her overcome her addiction.

  “What is your presenting problem?” It was the same woman with iron-grey curls who had last time barred her entry.

  “Alcohol,” she said. “Whisky.”

  This time they took her in.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the Fatehpur Sikri Road

  WHEN HE CUPPED HIS HAND over the dog’s head, Pinto smiled in amazement at how perfectly it fit the cradle of his palm. His was a very large hand, but then this was a very large dog — a Labrador, the colour of well-aged ivory. For each of the three nights Pinto had eaten in this simple restaurant in Pokhara-Lakeside, the dog had come to his side when he was nearing the end of his meal. Not to beg, as other dogs might, but to sit silent and composed, letting Pinto stroke him. Now and then, the dog looked up at him and held his gaze. The lustrous brown eyes conveyed an unmistakable benevolence. He was struck, most happily, by the idea the dog had an ancient soul, continually refined by the holy, rarefied air of Nepal.

  All three evenings he had felt a great contentment in the dog’s vastly companionable presence. Although it was he who was stroking the dog, he felt it was the dog touching him, and somehow speaking to him, in a language either just above or below the range of human hearing.

  “Be well,” the dog seemed to say. “You have come through. Now continue on.”

  “His name is John,” the restaurant owner told him as he settled his bill. “He likes tourists.”

  Pinto thought John a wonderful name for a dog: unexpected, yet strong, straightforward and noble. He was grateful to have it, to hold in remembrance because he knew he was unlikely ever to see the dog again. By noon tomorrow he would be crunched into the too-small seat of the two-prop plane taking him back to Kathmandu. From there he would fly to Delhi where his immersion in something huge, which he had described so fumblingly for Agnes, would begin in earnest. He had wanted to begin his journey with the calmer, emptier space of Nepal; to have the clear-limned might of the mountains clarify his mind for what was to come. For how could India be anything but overwhelming?

  Perhaps the dog sensed his anxiety and by his proximity sought to reassure him. In that case, how superbly well John had communicated his good wishes. As Pinto left the restaurant, he looked back to where John still sat by the empty chair. His eyes, fixed on Pinto’s face, were benign rather than sorrowful. “Goodbye.” He resisted the urge to rush back and throw his arms about John’s neck, and bury his face in the thick fur as he used to do with Yangtze. It would not be seemly.

  “Goodbye,” he said again, only silently this time. He turned quickly away and began walking back to his hotel with its rooftop view of the Annapurnas. They were invisible now, swallowed by the humid black night. At 4:00 AM a taxi would come to drive him up the perilous, rutted roads to Sarangkot so that he could have an ideal view of the sunrise over the mountains.

  When he woke to the din of the mechanical alarm clock he had used since he was a boy, Pinto found Pokhara afflicted by one of its regular power cuts. He groped about and m
anaged to find and light the candle the hotel management provided for these situations and dressed as quickly as he could in the murk. Then he carried the candle to the bathroom where he applied a liberal pasting of sun block. He did not want to risk a severe burn once the sun was up. It had not occurred to him when he booked his flight in such haste that he was coming to the subcontinent at the worst possible time for his sensitive flesh. Now he would be stuck with fierce heat and monsoons, particularly when he entered India. But it had to be now. He was compelled, as if by the chart of a ritual dance laid out at his feet, to follow this journey through step-by-step. Or be damned.

  His driver was waiting with a flashlight outside. Pinto followed, letting the little pool of light guide his feet on the path to the parking lot. When he got into the car, he was enveloped by the scent of burning incense. He told the driver how good the jasmine smelled. “Every morning I am burning incense and praying to my god,” the man replied. Pinto detected not the least hint of self-regard or soured duty in this statement. He had to soothe away an unworthy prickle of envy.

  Once out of the city, the car began to climb the switchback mountain road, sometimes veering sharply right or left to avoid foundering in potholes at least a foot deep, and several wide. The driver negotiated all these literal pitfalls with calm expertise. When they reached Sarangkot, the driver parked the car under a canvas canopy and then led Pinto several hundred feet along the village road with its tiny, open-front shops and two-storey houses of pale unadorned stone. He stopped at the base of some steps leading up to a rooftop terrace. “You can watch the sunrise from up there,” he said. When he reached the roof, Pinto saw a dozen other watchers, all apparently tourists like him. Several of them were smoking, which seemed to him disrespectful and sullying of the occasion. He sat, toward the back of the group, in one of the moulded plastic chairs set in rows facing the still-invisible mountains. Was he expected to pay his host? Or was this vantage point for the sunrise included in the fee he had already paid his driver? A beautiful, wiry Nepalese woman of about Agnes’s height brought him a cup of tea and offered him a woolen wrap of sea green and blue to put around his shoulders. “It is cold in the mountains in the morning,” she said.