Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “We were . . . are . . . very young.”

  “Yes. Please do not misunderstand me. I consider your group’s cause to be admirable and just. Few human aspirations are more worthy than the desire to alleviate the suffering of living creatures. But the fact is that the extent and scope of suffering on this planet far exceeds our ability to moderate it definitively. We do what we can, by increments, and in accord with accepted moral practice. To dwell exclusively on suffering, whether of animals or humans, is unthinkable, perhaps even for the greatest mystics and saints. For most of us such a fixation would drive us mad. It is a question of self-preservation, Agnes, and not moral cowardice. We do what we can, as I said, to lessen the total burden of suffering in the world. But we cannot eradicate it, just as we cannot fathom why those who are most vulnerable, including beings without language, are suffering now, even as we speak. The reasons why there is so much pervasive suffering are beyond our ken, beyond the reach of mortal understanding. But here is what I do know, and I may sound to you like a fusty schoolmaster: we must nurture our talents and use them to add to the store of good in the world. You have exceptional gifts, Agnes, an extraordinary natural insight into the moving spirit alive in certain works of art. This is no small thing, believe me. I recommended you for the scholarship because your talents are remarkable and because I sense you grasp the salvific powers of art. I hold that these powers benefit not just those who practise and study the arts, but the world at large by adding to the store of good. This is our discipline: those of us who are fortunate enough to have the talents and the inclinations.”

  He switched so suddenly, she was unprepared for the question: “Are you returning to Bremrose?”

  Confusion numbed her tongue. “I can’t,” she managed. “Not now.”

  “I think you must, my dear. For your mind’s sake and your soul’s. Do you think me old-fashioned, Agnes? In this theory-driven, secular age, what professors dare speak of souls? Well, I do and I shall. What do you say? Shall we meet again here on Thursday at two? And in the meantime, will you keep going to the AA meetings?”

  She agreed eagerly, thanked him and sat on for some minutes after he left. She marvelled at the good fortune that had delivered her to a listener as sensitive and generous as Paul Otterly. When they next met, he would very likely ask her to recount her lowest point, that knot in every alcoholic’s story by which salvation hangs. She must tell him how her rampant vanity and drunken delusions had fed the urges of a killer. Can she also tell Paul about Laelaps? Or would he begin to doubt her sanity? She did not want to lose either his interest, or his faith in her. Would she believe such a story? She pondered this question throughout the evening, and all the next day, and decided she would be very dubious indeed.

  He surprised her by asking, not about the nadir of her alcoholic history, but why she had chosen to come to New York.

  “To lose myself in something huge,” she said, wholly aware she was parroting Pinto. Once again she wondered where he might be. Most often, she pictured him surrounded by an immensity of space, sitting cross-legged on a sacred mountain. He was communing quietly with God while a warm rain washed him clean of the taint of despair occasioned by the Ark’s failures. Sometimes she saw him removing three blood-encrusted barbs from his chest, and then laying them with immaculate precision on a square of white linen. One for Campbell. One for Zeke. She was uncertain about the third.

  “And to see the Piero di Cosimos at the Met,” she added, although her tongue tripped over the last word. She was putting off telling Paul about her hysterical outburst in front of the paintings; how she had flailed and cursed as the guards bundled her out. To say it aloud would be like admitting to defecating beside the font in a cathedral. She must, of course, tell him. She could not be worthy of his experience and advice unless she lay the most despicable and shaming of her deeds before him.

  She determined not to take the cowardly option. She will not stare into her cup as she speaks, but look at him, bearing fully any disapproval or distaste he manifests. Yet as she recounted her disgraceful behaviour in gallery 607, she observed no change in him. He inhabited the same quietude, and his expression was as impenetrable and smooth as glass. It occurred to her then that his composure must be deliberately cultivated: it was his way of reassuring her, without recourse to words, that he was unshockable. He will have brought this same coolly reflective countenance to his sponsorship of Clarisse and all the others he has helped.

  The insight flashed upon her that his untroubled face was a mirror; he was letting her see the structural AA principle at work; that, as alcoholics, they shared the same basic story. The plot of his testimony was also hers and every other alcoholic’s ever born. Powerlessness in the grip of the addiction; the plummet to a place so black and thick with self-hatred you must either change or die. And then this juncture at which she was now fortunate to find herself: the chink of light revealed; the possibility of renewal and transformation that she might keep and cultivate, if she held as fast to the disciplines as did the fastidiously elegant scholar sitting opposite. Today Paul Otterly wore a shirt the mauve of the violas Nana had favoured in her garden. His narrow tie was a sleek band of silk, a yellow identical to the viola’s centre.

  “You will not have been the first,” he commented when she described the guards depositing her on the stone steps. “You’ve been back to the Met since, haven’t you?”

  She caught, for the first time in any of his questions, an urgent undertone. “Yes, every day since I stopped drinking. I went this morning.”

  “Do you know why you had the outburst in that particular place, Agnes?”

  “My mother . . .” This unpleasant word was out of her mouth before she could retract it. Now it was far too late because her mother had inserted herself into the banquette beside her. Even though this was a mere imagined presence, Agnes felt an immediate blight: she was dispirited, her energy pooling away.

  You did what, Agnes? — In a public place, one of the great art galleries of the world, you make a total show of yourself! Daddy will be mortified when he hears this. What if someone we know saw you? I am appalled that any daughter of mine could indulge in this kind of vulgar, aberrant display. Haven’t your antics in France caused us enough harm already? Daddy and I can hardly hold our heads up when we meet the neighbours, and as for our situation at work . . .

  To cut off this debilitating train of thought, which all too uncomfortably mimicked her mother’s accusatory style, Agnes jerked her elbow sideways. This childlike magical gesture served its purpose. She pictured her mother sliding gracelessly off the banquette and onto the floor, her pink lips parted in a look of surprise.

  “My mother told me that when she was shown The Hunt on a school trip, it made her feel so queasy she fainted. That’s how she sees Piero di Cosimo’s works featuring the animals and hybrid creatures. She thinks they are bestial and coarse and brutal, the product of a diseased mind. She loves Botticelli. She has a huge reproduction of The Primavera on the wall over her desk. I wanted . . . how can I say this? I wanted to stand in front of that canvas in particular and bear a kind of silent witness to all it conveys to me. I wanted to do the complete opposite of what my mother had done. She saw a painted scene that was vile and grisly and blood-soaked. What I wanted to testify to, simply by standing and looking, was the painter’s moral outrage and hope.”

  “Hope?” Paul looked perplexed.

  “Hope. Yes.” She described for him the intently determined androgynous rescuer, the animals that race away from the bloodbath toward a place of sheltering safety and how they are watched by the guardian treetop monkey whose round eyes emanate creaturely fellowship and concern.

  “Hmmm . . .” Paul fussed with his already flawlessly vertical tie. “The moral outrage I can see, Agnes. As for these signs of hope, are you perhaps not grasping at some rather flimsy straws?”

  “No, I don’t believe that. The more I look at the painting, the more certain I become.”

  �
��I would advise you strongly to stay with the iconography of the forest fire, Agnes. You are still working on that, are you not?”

  She nodded, but self-protectively drew back from telling him about the consonance she saw between Piero’s painted tongues of flame and human tongues that spoke words devastating, dangerous and vile. This idea mattered to her intensely on both a scholarly and personal level. She must protect it, building the case solidly and painstakingly. She must convey convincingly how Piero used the destructive ravaging fire to symbolize the unconscionable damage humans did in their “evolved” form as the “language animal.”

  She considered again how Fergus had betrayed his students by inflaming them with ideals so rigid, they were unlivable in practice. She pictured a world overrun by the rats Fergus refused to harm. They swarmed the beds of children, the elderly and infirm. She thought too of how, in Florence, Piero witnessed Savonarola’s firebrand eloquence turn the city into a police state. Neighbour spied zealously on neighbour and the Prior’s band of armed boys roamed the streets, seeking out miscreants to bloody and maim. She was sure George Eliot was wrong when she depicted Piero di Cosimo in the stands watching the Bonfire of the Vanities with a wryly cynical smile on his lips. Agnes knew he could not have borne the sight, not just because of the wanton conflagration of many lovely things, but because of what was yet to come. He had foreseen the killing fields and the crematoriums. Whether past or future, it was all the work of incendiary tongues.

  “Agnes.” Paul’s tone told her their time was running short. “We have strayed a bit,” he said. “Can we go back to the day at the Met? Do you know what triggered the hysteria? Were you thinking of the death of your friend in Arles?”

  “Yes, of course Zeke was on my mind. But I think what set off the hysteria was shock. I was looking at the painting of the hunt and I realized all I could see was the horror. I was looking at the scene in just the way my mother had. The treetop monkey wasn’t watching benevolently over the escapees. He was up there because he was frantic and terrified. The animals fleeing to the left weren’t going to elude the hunters because there were more waiting for them just out of view. I couldn’t even see a vestige of Piero’s moral outrage; just a doom-filled scene by a cold-hearted technician who showed off his skills by painting a superbly foreshortened human cadaver of ghastly hue.”

  Paul made a sour face. “Had you been drinking before you went to the gallery, Agnes?”

  “No, but I was very hungover, and shaky.”

  “So you’d drunk heavily the night before, after you got off the plane?”

  “Yes.” She described the raw interchange with her sister in LaGuardia. How she had stood afterwards clutching the smart phone, the sleek black coffin shape pulsing with yet another message from her sibling, insistent in her righteousness. She had gone on clutching the phone because it was suddenly the only solid thing about her. Muscle, bone and blood had all turned to water. That was why her back slid so readily down the wall where she had stationed herself for the fatal exchange with Phoebe. She was deliquescing. The kind man with an emerald dragon on his T-shirt had asked if she was all right and she had lied; then she’d continued sitting on the floor until she had re-materialized enough to stand up.

  “My sister would not believe me,” she told Paul. Warily she set her espresso cup in its saucer. She could not trust her hands. “I told her I wasn’t at the protest; that the image they saw in the video must have been Minnie in a chimpanzee mask. We were all supposed to wear animal masks, you see, and that was Minnie’s. Phoebe called me a liar and said that I was self-obsessed and that I clung to the stupid idea I look like a monkey.” There, she had said it. She had exposed her tortured, grotesque teenage self to this meticulously thoughtful man whose respect she craved. She uttered a little sound that compounded disgust and sorrow, overcome by pity and frustration at the child she had been and continued to be. It distressed her that this impulse to self-loathing was still dormant in her, feeding on her vulnerability.

  Phoebe saw her as the monkey-girl. That was the core of her sister’s betrayal; not her resistance to accepting Agnes’s word. She looks at me and sees all the names I was ever called. She sees my nights of hot tears and my isolation. She sees a lonely little freak with a most unfortunate combination of features. Whose fault is this situation? Is it mine?

  “Agnes!”

  She was confused as to why Paul looked so angry.

  “Who first put this foolish idea in your head?”

  She shook her head vaguely. “I was called names in school. It just went on and on.”

  “What did your parents do to help you?”

  “They told me to toughen up, put on a brave face. Ultimately, they offered to pay for cosmetic surgery to make me look more normal.”

  “What!” His characteristic repose was momentarily undone as he plucked at his hair and tie. “Wait a moment . . . was this something you had asked for?”

  “No. The idea was theirs. Because I was so unhappy at school, I suppose.”

  “Agnes, my dear, your parents should have been horsewhipped.”

  She looked at him wonderstruck. The extreme passion of his astringent judgement on her parents was so unexpected she was at first emptied of thought. This state was swiftly succeeded by the sensation she was being filled with a golden light, poured by a steady hand. She felt absurdly weightless and unencumbered.

  “You are probably surprised by my vehemence,” Paul said. “Perhaps it is because your story reminds me of my own, except that my parents’ planned intervention was pharmaceutical. My ‘perversity’ was to be corrected with the right combination of drugs. I once overheard my mother use the term ‘chemical castration’ somewhat wistfully in conversation with my psychiatrist. She was a very stupid woman, I am sorry to say, and incapable of distinguishing homosexuality from pederasty. My father simply announced that he found me repugnant. Thereafter he refused to sit at the same table or even be in the same room with me.”

  Agnes was shaken by this chilling account of familial cruelty. She tried, and failed, to enter imaginatively the vast continent of pain through which the adolescent Paul had laboured.

  “What saved me was a teacher . . . well, several, but one in particular. She praised my talent. I drew well. I saw things in the reproductions she showed us of great artworks, and particularly Renaissance artworks, that others in the class did not see: those beautiful, humane, glowing faces of Fra Angelico, and Ghirlandaio and Raphael, where the spirit is visible in the flesh. I was caught up in the mysteries and the riddles of their narratives painted on wood and canvas and walls. It did not matter to me if the subject was religious or a secular myth; I saw the same miracle happen every time. A world sprang up before me, vibrant and full of a perfect, tremulous light where my eye was gladdened and my mind free and healed. I was rescued from my parents, from their noxious, maiming household, by artists whose physical bodies had long turned to dust. I was rescued by these painters’ rigorous discipline, and by their faith in God and their own talent. Like you, I got a scholarship. I was given the opportunity to escape and I was jubilant at the prospect. I am the prodigal who never returned. There can be no forgiveness for the kind of hateful bigotry in which my parents specialized. I would not sully myself, or risk the self-damage of going near them again. I left them behind, and by that I mean totally. Once away from their miasma, I recreated myself. This was easily done, given that as Renaissance art scholars, we are immersed in stories of transformation all the time. We are fortunate to have such mythic materials at hand to help us become who we are. Of course I would never suggest you break as irrevocably with your parents as I did with mine. But there is no doubt in my mind they did you harm, and that they will continue to try to cut you off, albeit quite unknowingly, from your gifts. You know this intuitively, I am sure. You are well on your way. You have escaped the hunters — and unfortunately our families are often our enemies, intent on hobbling us or worse. You have already entered some other dark corners
of human experience, bitter, despairing places that left you vulnerable to the seductions of alcohol. Staying sober is mandatory for you now if you are to survive to use your talents wisely and engage in this work of self-creation. Your concern for animals’ welfare can come into this work. You will find a practical, legitimate way if you persevere.

  “Here ends the lesson, Agnes. I have run on rather more than I intended, and you have not yet told me the incident that made you realize the alcohol had taken control of your life. It was not the scene in the Met, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we can talk of it next time.”

  She was relieved to have this respite. She still recoiled from relating even the bare bones of the sordid embroilment with Guam and her near death. As for the dog? If she told him, would Paul assume she was hallucinating? Would she alienate his trust by such a revelation? Was that the quality he extended to her so generously? Trust, or a galvanizing faith in her abilities? She could not presume that what he offered her was affection, although she very much wished it were.

  His brusque touch of her hand on parting seemed proof of the professional distance he preferred to maintain. She was the neophyte and he was far and away her superior, in both scholarship and sobriety.

  “I may have some news for you next time, Agnes . . . about Bremrose and how we can justify buying you some time and so save your scholarship. Let’s meet here Tuesday at two.”