Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Yes,” she told Paul immediately at their meeting the next day. “Thank you. It would be a wonderful opportunity. I deeply appreciate . . .”

  He waved his hand airily. She was reminded of Prospero. “I am most pleased at your decision, Agnes, and happy to assist you. I do not want to see you forfeit your scholarship. I have an email ready in my drafts to send to Mr. Massinger-Pollux. Why not send it now? It’s about four in the afternoon in Italy. Et voila.

  “I want to touch briefly on the risks involved in this undertaking . . . please do not look so worried. I am referring to the risks posed by alcohol. You will be offered drinks and you must stay resolute in your sobriety. If ever you are perilously tempted, if you feel you are in danger of a slip, call me. Here is my number.”

  The card he passed with the relevant contact information for Paul Otterly, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Art History, appeared hand-engraved. The font was teal blue on cream.

  “Well, Agnes, by tomorrow morning we should have his answer. I forgot to mention that there is a small honorarium goes with the position, plus room and board at the villa. He has a young companion staying with him, I understand the daughter of an old friend.”

  Agnes was relieved by this news, particularly given her concern about being alone with an elderly poet who might well be cantankerous. She was startled by a looping trill of birdsong emanating from under the table.

  “My phone,” Paul explained. “The Lark Ascending.”

  She waited while he checked his messages, thinking how apposite this title was to her present potential good fortune, and all it presaged for the proper completion of what she had come to think of as her “grief work.” In Tuscany, with a new slate of duties on which to focus, she could throw herself into the old labours Pinto had advised her were the best response to death. She could renew her vow to live in a way that carried on Campbell and Zeke’s ideals.

  Paul glanced up from reading his message. “It’s from Hugh Massinger-Pollux,” he told her. “He is certainly a little prolix. But it’s clear he’s enthusiastic about your credentials.”

  At last Paul closed his phone and smiled widely. “You are to go as soon as you ready, Agnes. Mr. Massinger-Pollux says he will have someone meet you at the Florence train station. You have only to call or text his companion to let her know the time of your arrival and she will make the arrangements.”

  He passed her the page from his notebook on which he had written out these details in a fine script.

  A shadow fell across the page as the light in the café was abruptly blotted out, and the whole building shuddered. Agnes looked out the window in alarm, the lurid image of the crumbling Twin Towers and its plunging bodies dominating her mind’s eye. What she saw was a huge garbage truck rumbling just outside, its mechanical jaws grinding the refuse tipped into its maw. If this rational explanation calmed her, it nonetheless gave her pause. She realized this was the first time since her arrival in New York that she had paid any mental homage to the people who died in the 9/11 attacks.

  She revisited her girlhood’s moral outrage at the photographer who had captured the image of those falling bodies, and the world’s media that promulgated it. At ten she was old enough to be revolted by the desecration of those last harrowing moments of life, where the only proper response should have been to bow one’s head and weep. She believed this still: that the photographer ought to have averted his eyes and left his camera dangling from his wrist. But then, did she not feel the same about most of the images of extreme suffering that were the media’s daily fare?

  “He shouldn’t have taken that photo,” Pinto had said of the picture Zeke snapped of Kit standing by Campbell’s graveside. At the time, she had thought his judgement a bit harsh. Zeke was always well-meaning, if impulsive. She agreed with Pinto nonetheless. The recollection of Kit as captured on camera, gaunt, haunted and shorn, still evoked the sensation of a hook caught in one’s flesh. Kit had looked like a muted cry of hysteria bound in human skin.

  As Agnes refocused on Paul’s logistic notations for Tuscany, she was startled to see the name Kit McCready beside the cell phone number. For a moment, she allowed herself to doubt what she saw. She closed her eyes, then opened them to see the gorgeous flourishes Paul had added to the capital K and M. Hadn’t Zeke told them at the May Day meeting that Kit was staying with friends in Tuscany? The coincidence was nonetheless so jarring she could feel the milky coffee beginning to curdle in her stomach.

  “Kit McCready,” she said, surprised that the words tasted bitter to her.

  “The young woman, yes?”

  “I believe I know her. Is she from Boston, do you know?”

  She watched Paul’s eyelashes flutter as he scrolled through the text. As she waited, she invented a host of Kit McCreadies, short and plump, blonde and muscular. They came from places like Kalamazoo or Toledo.

  “Yes,” Paul looked up triumphant. “ ‘My young companion from Boston’ is how he describes her. But Agnes! What on earth is wrong? You have gone quite white.”

  “Kit was at Bremrose. She was Campbell’s girlfriend.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  She stared fixedly at the backs of her hands, recalling how absurdly lily-like they had looked against the fine dark hair feathering Campbell’s chest. Kit does not know, she told herself. Of course, Campbell would not have told her. But what if . . .? Oh, why must fate stick this barb in its offering?

  “Has your risk in going just quadrupled, Agnes? Or is the factor even higher?”

  “Higher? — Yes, I think so. But I will go. It is too rare a chance to lose.”

  Unexpectedly, he laughed. She was uncertain whether it was an entirely happy sound.

  “Excellent!” he exclaimed.

  She searched his long brown eyes for their habitual reassurance and found instead a coolly clinical regard. His pupils had contracted. Under the table, she made her hands into fists, in a magical attempt to ward off the sickening notion that she had somehow been “set up.”

  The ducks are lining up. Had Paul unwittingly given himself away when he dropped that uncharacteristically colloquial phrase into their conversation? Were the ducks perhaps flesh and blood? A mother with her babies ranged behind her, unaware of the invidious presence encroaching silently?

  No, she told herself. I am being foolish. She deliberately loosened and flexed her fingers, then carefully folded the paper into quarters, smoothing the creases to a knife edge. Besides, Kit and I are no longer the people we were at Bremrose when Campbell was alive. Grief has battered and scoured and honed us and made us more attentive and responsive to everyone’s vulnerabilities.

  She gripped this consoling notion hard, and smiled in good faith at her mentor. For the moment, his fine, mobile, child’s puppet face showed her nothing but benevolence. Most assuredly, the ducks were wooden, and all manner of things would be well. She pictured how she and Kit would embrace in a spontaneous sisterly fellowship amidst the gentle round Tuscan hills.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Villa Scimmia

  AGNES ARRIVED IN FLORENCE WITH two hours to spare before the car came to take her to Villa Scimmia where her venerable employer waited with his “young companion.” It was not much time, but enough to absorb some small aspect of this celebrated city where Piero di Cosimo was born and spent most of his life. She would focus on him, as her lodestar and mainstay, whatever happened in the weeks ahead. For the moment, her apprehension about falling short in the execution of duties for the poet was exceeded only by her anxiety about seeing Kit again.

  As the hour of their re-encounter loomed, she saw clearly the empty fantasy behind that imagined consoling, sisterly embrace. She did not really know Kit, other than the obvious facts: the lapidary, almost incredible beauty; the genetic curse of early onset Alzheimer’s that had undone her grandfather’s competence and was now undermining her mother’s; the breakdown after Campbell’s death that had sent Kit first to hospital and then here to Tuscany to recuperate.

 
She sensed how reprehensible it would be to compare her own sense of loss with Kit’s. Wasn’t it impossible, in any case, to map one person’s suffering against another’s?

  As she exited Florence’s dispiritingly functional train station, she was jarred by the thought that Kit might not know about Zeke. Given her fragile state, wouldn’t her family have shielded her from all that went wrong in Arles? But the video of Zeke’s bungled descent into the bullring had gone viral, as the detestable phrase had it. Surely Kit would be aware of how badly the protest had failed and its fatal consequences?

  I ought to have texted her something far more personal, Agnes thought; not just the bald details of when I would arrive, and that I was looking forward to seeing her. I should have said what an amazing and happy coincidence it was to connect with her again. That would have been the “normal,” courteous thing to do. Once again, she was forced to confront her appalling lack of social niceties, and the unwitting petty offences to which it gave rise. She had yet to absorb the appropriate cues and responses of human interchange as second nature, as most people did by the time they were in their teens. The repellent armour she fashioned in adolescence had come at a high cost: a self-consciousness so metallically rigid, it exerted its own perverse magnetism. She has too often attracted contempt and opprobrium where she most desired invisibility.

  Of course, she was improving. She had changed immeasurably — not least in learning to extricate herself from that pit of inebriated despair she must spend the rest of her life circumventing. One day at a time. She must keep her various pledges to herself and to Paul.

  While she was here, she hoped as well to find some way to pay formal homage to Piero di Cosimo as an expression of her gratitude. She was still in the dark as to what shape such a tribute would take. Certainly something far more fitting than the standard trite gesture of a rose laid obliquely on a tomb. Besides, there was no physical tomb. The church where Piero had been buried no longer existed. Perhaps some clearer idea of a suitable offering would emerge from her work with Hugh Massinger-Pollux.

  She regretted she had no time today to visit Santa Maria Novella, which was Piero’s parish church. Instead, she headed straight for Via della Scala, and started walking down this narrow street, now home to many boutique hotels with glassed-in fronts and marble steps. Although there was no record of exactly where Piero’s house once stood, with its legendary vine-clotted garden, she lingered as long as she could. What was she hoping for, other than to murmur some quiet thanks to his prodigious, idiosyncratic spirit, long departed? Nevertheless, against all reason, she stayed alert for any fugitive scent of pigment ground fine in a mortar: madder, cinnabar, malachite, azurite or the rare and costly ultramarine fetched from the Hindu Kush. She stopped and stood stock-still, willing away all extraneous sound, straining to hear the swish of a paint-laden brush on canvas — the brush from whose tip all manner of marvellous beings flowed, including Laelaps, the chestnut-brown hound who was her saviour.

  She knew this was not strictly so, and that it was actually the dog’s creator to whom she owed her salvation. She has managed to prevail this far because the enigma at the heart of Piero di Cosimo’s secular works has lured her on. Without him, she might not be imbued with such a strong life purpose, or indeed have any life at all. Yet now that she was in this treasure-filled city, where he had lived and worked and died, she was newly aware how scant was her knowledge of the man, and of his beliefs. She knew he was a practising Roman Catholic. In his will, he left money for masses to be said for his soul for twenty-three consecutive years following his death. But was he also a fervent animist and someone who really did prefer the company of animals to humans? How can she ever know if her conjecture is correct?

  What if the Piero di Cosimo she has come to believe in, intense, mercurial, self-contained, watchful, shamanic, a devoted student of animals’ sacred nature, is mere projection? She has always tried in her study of his paintings to use as deft and light a touch as possible; not grappling with an artwork’s secrets so much as running metaphorical fingers over a beloved face. When she is lucky enough to have the insights come, they arrive somehow aslant her other thoughts, like spindrift. She feels then neither triumph nor self-regard; just a tremulous thrill of recognition that she is in the presence of a truth-bearing image, with all unbelief banished. At such moments, she seems to see through the eyes of the artist himself; the force and fuse of his creation move in her blood.

  She had experienced this thrill when she first saw the love in the sea monster’s eye. She’d felt it when she recognized the boar’s human face in The Forest Fire as Piero’s own. It had stirred in her spine when she saw in the elongated tongues of flame, and their destruction of the green woods, a mirror of the devastation wreaked by human words, incendiary or deliberately manipulative.

  “Take care not to give your insights about The Forest Fire to Massinger-Pollux,” Paul had counselled at their last meeting. His admonitory tone so took her aback she did not immediately reply.

  “Agnes!”

  “Yes. I understand.” She was half bemused, half proud that Paul thought she had some glimmering too valuable to divulge before she published it herself.

  She had been walking briskly, aware of the minutes speeding by. Checking her watch, she saw she had barely forty minutes left before she must return to the side street near the train station. There a man called Ernesto would be waiting for her in a Land Rover with a Union Jack decal on the bumper.

  There was no time even to glimpse the Duomo or the Baptistery, and so she headed directly for the Piazza della Signoria. Here she had vowed to perform a ritual of remembrance.

  She spied first the imposing crenellated front of the Palazzo, which was in Piero’s time the city’s seat of government. Then she stood and stared a moment, taking in the square’s ordered architectural elements, and the dramatically positioned statues of gods and ancient heroes. Her eye moved from doomed Laocoön with his sons to the copy of Michelangelo’s David, where the crowds clustered most thickly. Despite the bright clothes of the swirling tourists and embracing couples posing for photos, she could not abstract the Piazza from its cruel history. A year after Savonarola staged his Bonfire of the Vanities in this square, his body had twisted on a rope above a mammoth pyre. She circled the marble monument that marked the exact place of his execution, his neck already summarily snapped so that he would be spared the agony of death by fire. She tried not to dwell on the two monks condemned with him, to whom the Pope had not extended the same mercy. She hoped they had been very soon rendered insensible by the smoke.

  She was certain Piero would not have attended this gruesome public execution, regardless of how much he detested Savonarola’s Manichean reign. How could his inventive, anarchic spirit have endured those years of joyless constraint? She pictured him working in secret, producing his chalk drawings of pagan gods and mythic creatures whose images Savonarola forbade. Piero would perhaps have hidden these forbidden pieces under his bedding, lest they be discovered and his fingers broken or severed by Savonarola’s thugs.

  She was equally sure he would have shunned the spectacle of the Bonfire of the Vanities: the flaming tiered mountain, heaped first with wigs, mirrors, jewels, silks and carnival masks, and then, on top, the books of classical learning and works of art that Savonarola judged to be transgressive and corrupting to the human spirit.

  George Eliot’s novel showed Piero amongst the spectators, surveying the ludicrous destruction with a sardonic twist upon his lips. Agnes did not recognize this person; he was not her Piero, not least because he lacked innocence and an overtly questing sense of wonder.

  She had barely fifteen minutes left before she was due to meet Ernesto. She walked diagonally across the square, in heavy remembrance of the animals who suffered their death agonies here. It was the Medici who had staged the exotic animal fights, pitting lions against horses, tigers against bears, and panthers against bulls for the people’s amusement. How shocked she had been when
she first came upon a reference to these abhorrent “entertainments.” She simply could not reconcile this barbaric feasting upon pain with the Neoplatonic ideals the Medici princes cultivated in their respective elegant studiolo. Was this the first time she’d grasped how extremely thin was any civilization’s veneer, even one that had produced some of the most sublime art and architecture in human history? What lurks just beneath the skin? She studied the back of her own hand, recalling how she had fantasized these fingers wielding a piece of jagged glass and slashing all the pretty faces at her sister’s party.

  She had a last ritual stop to make in the square. In Piero’s time, the Signoria had kept a pair of caged lions as living augurs of the health of the Republic. If the lions grew listless or were afflicted with mange, Florence’s fortunes would suffer. Agnes was perplexed as to how these animals could ever be truly well. No matter how appetizing their meals or solicitous their care, they were captives in a wickedly small space that must have set a killing cramp on their spirits as much as their bodies. She stared into the void above the cobbles in front of the Palazzo where the cage once stood. Soon enough a numbing chill beset her legs and feet. She was rooted there, some minutes longer than she’d intended, her body locked in its own sympathetic response to the lions’ bewildered despair.

  Her thoughts turned to all flesh-and-blood creatures condemned to death-in-life behind iron bars and in laboratory cages and factory-farms. If only she could do something. Her mind churned with the familiar daily torment of the Ark’s calamitous failures: two deaths, immeasurable psychological damage, friendships in ruins and not a single animal saved.