Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

Here is that world of light, he thought, this place which he can readily believe took form when a lotus petal dropped from the hand of a god. Could one call this a sublime happenstance, then? Since Campbell’s accident and the imbroglio at Arles he has flinched at the idea of contingency. But of course it can go both ways: a petal loosed from a lotus becoming a beautiful lake is as much an accident as a head sliced from a body resulting in a corpse.

  How he wished he could banish such thoughts, which were interfering with his absorption of the scene — the sheer web of light and mist; the trio of Indian women in saris of maroon and gold and emerald who walked down the steps of the ghat to his right, and slid silently and fully dressed into the water; the row of young Hindu priests to his left, stripped to the waist, who bowed their shaved heads and moved their lips in prayerful unison. He wished only that he might partake of their guiltlessness for a moment.

  Then Pradeep appeared on the step below him, with a short, round-faced man dressed in an immaculately pressed, open-neck indigo shirt and white slacks. Pradeep introduced him simply as the holy man who will give Pinto the blessing. This “priest” was so unlike the lean-limbed Sadhu in a loincloth Pinto had been expecting, he was both embarrassed and wary. Was he being made a fool of? Would the two men demand two thousand rupees?

  In fact the fee for which the man asked was a nominal two hundred. Pinto relaxed, dipping again into the warm current of Mr. Mohindra’s good intent. After he paid, the man asked him to remove his shoes and sit on the step facing the lake. Around Pinto’s right wrist he fastened a string, a twist of dull red and beige. Then he gave him a bevelled brass bowl heaped with rose petals to hold in both hands.

  Pinto tried not to dwell on the fact the purveyor of his blessing looked so glossily well-fed and had such plump, moist lips. Yet why would he assume only someone gaunt and self-denying could bestow a blessing?

  The man explained that he would translate the words as they went along. Pinto must repeat the Hindi words after each phrasing; or rather, duplicate the sounds he heard as best he could. The unknown phonemes washed over him. He registered many long and short “a” sounds and had an overall impression of potent incisiveness. He could picture the warrior Arjuna speaking this language, or even mighty Ganesha. But so intent was he on properly reproducing the tones and inflexion that he missed much of the English equivalent. He caught, and was automatically oppressed by, the frequent references to prosperity, which he would far rather forego given the inevitable moral pitfalls. Besides, he considered it grotesque to ask for such a thing in a country where starving children begged passersby for a pittance.

  Good health, he heard. Well, yes, of course. This part of the blessing made sense to him. At least, armed with good health one might do something useful in the world. But it was the “good karma” for friends and family with which his desires and thoughts were most closely aligned and here, above all, he hoped that he was speaking the relevant sounds correctly.

  It dawned on him that this was as close as he had come to participating in a formal ritual since the deaths of his friends. He had not attended Campbell’s funeral, and by the time Zeke’s body was flying home in a casket decently sealed, he was already on his way to India. He certainly was not seeking “closure,” a word he detested for its shallow, quasi-magical allure, and essential dishonesty. He was convinced that no pain or trauma worth its instructive weight was ever fully closed. One’s agony might abate or be transformed into good works or art, but it could never be eradicated.

  “Good karma,” he heard again. He saw Campbell and Zeke transfigured in Henry Vaughan’s “world of light,” where their largely unsullied souls could take new and wonderful shapes. Oh, yes, bless them and dear, lovely Agnes, and his mother, and Pablo and Perdita and frank, fearless Minnie.

  He tried and failed, as he had failed so often, to generate some small fund of benevolent feeling for Fergus. Of course, he was appalled by what had happened to the man and wished, with all his heart, the grisly murder were undone. It was only . . . he tripped in his own thoughts . . . that the rabid seam in Fergus’s lectures had always deeply unsettled him, as had something inflexible and nastily autocratic in the professor’s manner. What was it in Fergus that made him push worthy precepts to such extremes they became obscene? Why his ludicrous emphasis on the lives of rats and cockroaches? Ultimately, Pinto had begun to find Fergus’s sincerity questionable, if not suspect.

  Worse, after the disaster at Arles, he had even wondered if Fergus’s dogma had in some very real way polluted their plans, or at the very least, muddied their thinking. Or was he shamefully offloading responsibility here?

  The fact was the man had been killed in a manner unbearable to contemplate. Why, then, could he not draw him into this circle of souls he wanted blessed? So tangled was he in his self-reproach that it took him some moments to grasp his “holy man” had finished the ceremony. He instructed Pinto to cast the rose petals in the bowl onto the surface of the lake. When he did so, the look of their crimson splashes on the water distressed him, his mind’s eye seeing there the burns the torturer had made on Fergus’s body. He shook himself, wishing this foul image banished from this holy place. It was then he remembered he had omitted Kit from his imagined circle.

  This was neither the time nor the place to confront himself for this lapse. Unsavoury, he thought. He would leave it there for now, with that single word. Later, perhaps on the bus to Ranakpur, or even on the flight home, he would pluck its syllables apart and face up to his feelings about Kit. He turned to thank the man in white pants and young Pradeep but they had already gone. When he bent to retrieve and put on his shoe, his fingers fumbled with the tying of both laces.

  He had ample time on the two buses — first to Jodphur, thence on to Ranakpur — to examine the root of his unease with Kit. He wanted above all to excise any possibility he was doing her a disservice by falling far short in either tolerance or compassion. What if he had misheard her that night she had returned to Campbell’s bed after her time away with her ailing mother?

  That night his unabated fury at Campbell’s callousness kept pricking him awake. At times he seemed to inhabit Agnes’s humiliation; the flesh of his face burned hotly with her shame; he twisted on his bed to escape the sensation he was being crushed by something heartless. To undo his swelling indignation, he decided to go out and walk. A determined motion through the night air, and a disciplined yogic breath, might help the anger dissipate.

  Given the frequency of his nocturnal rambles, he was well practised at exiting the house soundlessly. He knew every betraying board in the upstairs hallway and upon the wooden stairs. Campbell’s room was at the opposite end of the hall from his. He could see as he made his way forward, his toes up-curled in an exaggerated parody of stealth, a light spilling from under Campbell’s door. As he reached the top of the stair, he was aware of a kind of breathy hum emanating from the room. Then came a sound like a stifled laugh.

  He remembered exactly how he was standing when the assault began — his right hand gripping the top newel post with its extraneous little carved nipple, his left already in the air, and his depth perception exactly attuned to where he would set it on the first of twenty steps downward. He swayed where he stood. So foul were the words Kit was speaking and so detestable their intent, that the little supper he had eaten curdled in his belly. He knew that if he did not immediately sit down, he was in danger of falling headlong. He no longer cared if they heard him. Had he been a different kind of man, he might have barged into their room unthinking and put the flat of his hand over Kit’s face to stop her mouth. Every word she spoke was common and ugly, and every one was applied to some intimate part of Agnes’s body.

  If he was sickened and shocked by what he heard, he was also dangerously enraged. He recalled cautioning himself, somewhat absurdly — “I am not an Old Testament prophet,” and this was enough to keep him sitting where he was. He cradled his head with his hands as if to protect his brain from her contaminating spee
ch. He wanted many impossible things at once: to make her stop, to wash himself clean of the overheard filth, and to protect Agnes. It was all so horrible and deplorable. He simply could not comprehend how one human being could speak of another’s body in this disgusting and disrespectful way.

  Sexually inexperienced though he was, Pinto grasped readily enough that Kit was plundering Campbell’s deflowering of Agnes for prurient detail that would arouse them both. “Little Aggie,” Kit called her. The sneering condescension repulsed him all the more and, at that instant, he hated Kit as much as he had hated the boys who crucified Mrs. Eatrides’ cat. His sole consolation, if one could call it that, was Campbell’s apparent reluctance to play along. “Cut it out, Kit.” Still, his tone seemed to Pinto more cajoling than cautionary.

  “Come on, Cammy baby. Tell me everything. Make me hot, honey.”

  Pinto managed to stand, pulling himself up with both hands gripping the stair rail. He made his way down the steps slowly, a man in a daze, feeling that he had himself been deflowered. He ached for Agnes, whom he prayed would never discover the louche uses Kit had made of her seduction.

  He had previously seen Kit as a somewhat tragic figure, given her family history and her dutiful care for Horace and her mother. Now he thought her repellent. As he slipped on his shoes and then out the door and into the night, he knew what he wanted most would elude him: to have her vulgar words purged from his memory. He tried playing devil’s advocate with himself. Was he perhaps being priggish and puritanical? Hadn’t he overheard remarks intended for Campbell’s ears alone? What did he, with his basically ascetic life, know about lovers’ tricks to stimulate each other? Maybe this kind of dirty talk about people they knew was the norm.

  This line of interrogation had yielded him nothing. He had heard Kit befouling the woman he loved and, by extension, the sacred nature of love itself. He would never be able to look at her again without a wary and frank disgust. This he would endeavour to hide for Campbell’s sake.

  He’d had little opportunity to put this feigned composure to the test. Three weeks later Campbell was dead and Kit had become the gaunt and ghastly creature in Zeke’s photograph from the funeral. She looked like an escapee from a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum. That recalled image still moved him to anguish and an uneasy pity for her.

  Why uneasy, he asked himself, as his bus rolled on toward the hills where the ancient Jains had raised a temple inspired by a celestial chariot glimpsed in a holy man’s dream. The answer was inescapable. He simply could not forget, or forgive, her sordid remarks about Agnes. The only possible excuse would be mental instability. Perhaps when she spoke those words, Kit was already suffering, as her grandfather and her mother before her, a disease that was undermining her judgement and deadening her sensibility. This was as far as he could stumble toward excusing her. He resolved to let his mind touch on her no more, but only wish her well and healed.

  He wondered, and not for the first time, if he put far more store on the moral implications of language than did most people. Shouldn’t words, and the sentences we made of them, ideally serve enlightenment and compassion? But of course it was so very difficult when even the simplest exchange between two people could be rife with misunderstanding. The English language — in truth, the only one he knew — often struck him as notoriously slippery. Like the word “cleave,” which had two exactly opposite meanings; or “misprision” which could convey either “misunderstanding” or “the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a crime.”

  He was jolted by the awareness it was on these two horns of “misprision” that his own conscience was impaled. Had he not totally misapprehended where the rarefied abstraction of animal rights would ultimately take him? Had he not also deliberately concealed his part in the crime that had unfolded in Arles? Did the others all have criminal records now, Minnie and the pacificnatured Pablo and Perdita? — whereas he had escaped, if not unscathed, then at least without the stigma of wrongdoing in the eyes of the law. He could never make amends to the others, not even if he had several lifetimes in which to try. Yet he might, through his burgeoning and daily more cherished plan, find some measure of absolution.

  Certainly he found nothing of the kind as he wandered disconsolately among the plethora of marble columns that crowded the interior of the ornate, turreted temple at Ranakpur. Neither his eye nor his spirit responded to the teeming idiosyncratic shapes of the plants and animals and gods carved into the fourteen hundred and more lofty trunks of marble. He acknowledged, but could not absorb, the wonder of it. All these roiling forms, and the way the way the columns clogged the temple’s inner space, went athwart his notion of the pure precept at the heart of Jainism: to avoid harming even the least form of life, the microscopic and invisible.

  The wearing of any form of leather was forbidden inside the temple. He was pleased there was this injunction to remind tourists of the Jains’ most sacred principles. Otherwise the temple and its famous columns might well degenerate into just another “Disneyfied” experience. He was put out nonetheless by the obtrusive whirring and clicking cameras, as foreigners with showily expensive equipment homed in on particular carvings, whether a sinuous snake or a god’s torso, or positioned themselves to commandeer a panoramic view of the columnar forest.

  He withdrew to the temple’s inner perimeter wall where the marble effigies of Jain saints sat within their separate alcoves. He climbed some steps so that he could walk the raised platform over which the saintly figures presided. Almost immediately he was assailed by a bearded priest in a pleated white robe who asked if he would like to purchase a blessing. The priest’s manner was blatantly importuning and the look in his eyes so nakedly avid that Pinto winced in embarrassment. Once he’d politely declined, the priest’s face hardened. The effect was chilling. Pinto had had enough.

  Outside the temple, he retrieved his shoes and gave the young man assigned to guard them twenty rupees. He had some time before catching the bus travelling on to Udaipur, where he’d get a flight back to Delhi and then home. He decided to meander around the pathways of the temple complex. So it was that he saw, as he turned left off the main thoroughfare, a small temple of red-brown marble whose simplicity of form calmed his perturbation. It was perhaps one-fiftieth the size of the sprawling main temple. Its gentle rounds reminded him of a beehive. Everything about this building beckoned him inside, including the jasmine-scented smoke that commingled with the purple shadows beneath the arced entranceway.

  Inside, a small, wiry man in olive green greeted him with the pressed palms of the traditional Namaste. The man stood beside a central stone table on which was set the bowl of burning incense and a brass plate containing some rupee notes and few coins. He gestured expansively to the shallow, shadowy space behind him, the perimeter alight with the sheen of the marble deities. Pinto now saw that these gods ringed the temple’s entire inner circumference. As he moved deeper within, he had the sensation he was being held, cradled even, in the warm cup of an open palm. Up close, he recognized the benevolent visage of the Buddha — not the corpulent grotesque of bad Western lawn art, but a strong young man whose chest gleamed. “Buddha?” he asked the attendant.

  “Balek,” the man answered or so the name sounded to Pinto’s ear. He could not be sure. He assumed this was the name of a Jain saint.

  “Buddha.” The man pointed to a recessed figure on Pinto’s left.

  Pinto could see little difference between this statue and any of the others in the room. They all had a kind of soft ivory patina, and seemed to emanate a long-steeped wisdom and humility. Their temple-house, by its very diminutiveness, spoke to him of the power of small, discrete acts of goodness. He touched the notebook in his back pocket, which contained the four words he’d written down on the Fatehpur Sikri Road, words that would lead him to just such a life of small actions that would work to alleviate suffering. Not the banners or the demonstrations with their sprawling hubris. Not the mammoth abstractions about rights and dignity; but
simple practical deeds and work.

  “Mahatma Gandhi Veterinary College.” This was what India had given him: a purposeful way to dedicate his life. As soon as he got home, he’d see what prerequisites he needed to get into a Canadian veterinary school.

  “Thank you,” he told the attendant, as he put the most generous offering in the bowl he had given to date.

  Through the bus window the langur monkeys stared back at him from the edges of the jungle they roamed at will. He marvelled at their long wise faces. He wondered how it might be to touch one, and stroke its fur as one would a domestic cat. He knew too, beyond any doubt, that he would soon enough be nursing his own split flesh, struck through by adamantine claws. It was foolhardy and reprehensible to sentimentalize animals’ beauty and essential nature. It was right and fitting to hold them in proper awe and understand that the working of their minds and spirits would be forever unknowable. In this way, he saw, they taught us the fullness of the mystery of God.

  In the washroom of Udaipur Airport he came face to face with the second transformation India had worked in him. Under the glare of the industrial-strength lighting, he caught sight in the mirror of a tall, broad-shouldered man. At first he did not recognize himself and for a moment he was afraid. He leant close in to his reflection, touching his forehead, cheeks and chin and confirmed the astounding truth that his abnormal pigmentation had so much ameliorated as to be barely noticeable. He had no idea how this had come about. He wondered if this change was permanent and, more particularly, whether he was deserving. He had no doubt this unexpected transfiguration would gladden his mother’s heart. This knowledge helped to quiet his shock and niggling misgivings about a change he had neither sought nor prayed for.

  In Delhi airport, he purchased a New York Times which happened to feature an article on the parlous state of traffic regulation in India. He read that each year thousands of people die in road accidents, many of them children. In spinning his fantasy about India’s spiritual legacy subduing chaos on the roads, he had succumbed to a spell that was also a willful blindness; just as he shrank from thinking about Gandhi’s failings, the man’s egocentric obsessions, like sleeping with his virgin nieces to test his vow of chastity. Is this what he had learned from his pilgrimage, that there was no civilization or human being that was wholly exemplary? How despairing and simplistic that sounded. He opened his notebook to study again the evidence of the revelation that had been gifted him on the Fatehpur Sikri Road. How was he to explain this, or his new face, except through ideas like mystery or grace?