Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  It came to her in that instant that Piero had saved the lions by immortalizing them on canvas. She saw in her mind’s eye the lioness who paces in the foreground of The Forest Fire, a look of outrage and defiance in her eye. Her consort, with his strong back turned, looks into the heart of the blaze. Why had it never struck her before that these lions were based on sketches he had likely made here in the Piazza? He has kept them achingly alive for five hundred years, just as he has the Medici giraffe, who once walked these streets, a living jewel in the ruling family’s parades and pageants.

  “I am searching for you.” As she addressed these silent words to Piero, she felt someone’s breath on her bare shoulder. She turned quickly around, but there was no one near her. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was now several minutes past four. She was going to be late for Ernesto. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  She had never been a runner. But now she half-trotted, half-jogged the route she believed was the shortest back to the train station. She had wanted to be presentable for her arrival at Villa Scimmia. Now haste has made her hair wild. A ragged ellipse of damp was darkening the blue cloth from between her breasts down to her midriff.

  When, finally, she reached the parked Land Rover, it was in time to see a large, prominent-veined hand flick a spent cigarette from the window. It joined a little pyramid of smouldering butts that told her she was already much later than she feared.

  She called through the open window on the passenger side. “Ernesto? Mi dispacie. Tarde.” Or should it be tardo? How graceless her Italian was. He made no response, and seemed deliberately to wait some seconds before turning his head toward her. When at last he did, she had to brace herself against the pitilessness of his assessing glare. His eyes were narrowed in a face whose folds of flesh hung heavily, like the runnels in plush drapery. He was absolutely bald. His huge, solid head, thick neck and massive shoulders reminded her of Mussolini. She grappled with the unsettling paradox that Ernesto’s features were simultaneously repugnant and sensual. She did not relish the idea of driving anywhere with this man, but what choice did she have?

  “Ernesto?”

  “Si. Agnuzz Vien?”

  She nodded. On his tongue, her name sounded like a character in a farce.

  He gestured to her to get in and she clambered up the step and sat with her backpack between her feet. He started the ignition and drove off before she had time to locate and fasten her seatbelt. The stench of the potent tobacco from his clothes and fingers penetrated right to the back of her throat. To distract herself, she concentrated on the elemental green of the stately cypresses bordering the road. From their height, she guessed they had stood for several centuries. Piero might have seen these same trees. It was a comforting thought.

  Ernesto remained ensconced in a bulky silence she felt compelled to break open.

  “Have you worked for Mr. Massinger-Pollux long?”

  She immediately regretted this stilted enquiry in a language he might not understand at all well. He might not even be an employee. Kit’s text referred to him only as Ernesto.

  In any case, he ignored her.

  “Kit,” she persisted. “Do you work with Kit?”

  The transformation was so extreme as to be almost comic. Ernesto swung his gigantic head around. He was beaming, his eyes alight. His bottom lip was wet.

  “Ah, Kit. Si. Bellissima.” He then performed the classic gesture, which Agnes had seen only in films, of touching his thumb and first finger to his lips and casting off an invisible kiss.

  “Kit,” he repeated, as if he could not help himself. Agnes pictured him breathing the name into his pillow. He hummed the first few bars of “Una furtiva lagrima,” his great head swaying in time on his enormous neck.

  Something despicably primitive scuttled across the floor of Agnes’s pelvis. She tried to scotch its progress by forcing herself to visualize this infantile emotion: a blind, lumbering crustacean about to spill its viscid eggs of rage. She detested its boiling malevolence. If only her envy really were an object, like a pincer she could pluck out of her flesh. Why was this happening? She hated the idea that jealousy of lovely women, like Kit and Phoebe, was written into her cells, and only slumbering till it woke.

  She thought she had outgrown this childishness; that the rigours of sobriety had somehow chastened her; that she had begun to surmount this disabling bitterness.

  She turned her glaring flaw around and around, wanting to seize and obliterate it. What kept interfering was the image of Kit as she had first seen her: that day in Fergus’s class, mere moments after Campbell spoke to her, inviting her to the Ark’s next meeting. She had absorbed Kit’s beauty at that moment like a stab to the heart. Here was a woman who would make Phoebe look ordinary. Even if Kit never did or said a single remarkable thing in her life, she would still be legendary simply by virtue of looking as she did.

  Agnes relived the awkwardness that beset her that day as she took in Kit’s elegant leotard top and long A-line skirt. To salvage her dignity, she had clutched at Campbell’s “cute outfit” remark, repeating it to herself over and over; replaying the exact dazzle of his smile and the sensation of falling upward into those eyes of unearthly dark blue. She had slept in her Punjabi outfit that night because of what he said. Although she never wore either the tunic or the pants in public again, she often pictured herself in their lavishly embroidered paisley. It was as if these clothes had become inextricable from her identity. She wondered if that was because the day she first saw Campbell, and then Kit, would always stand out as fateful. She was certain she had been drastically changed by those encounters. The Agnes who went into that lecture hall was not the Agnes who came out.

  In large part, this transformation was due to her initiation into a heedless and exuberant infatuation. She was “in love” and her bones were rendered light as air. If Kit’s part in her metamorphosis was far less personal, it was nonetheless implacable. Kit made Agnes confront the truth that resplendent human beauty has an almost terrifying power. To see a face like Kit’s was to be set adrift in wonder, not quite believing — or in Agnes’s case, wanting to believe — that she was real. Kit was, Agnes thought with gritted teeth, the kind of sublime mortal the old Greek gods would have eagerly besieged in the form of bull or swan or a shower of gold, unable to contain their lust. She sensed that here was a woman for whom a man might commit murder in order to have her by his side.

  Quite unknowingly, Kit had injected Agnes with the scathing awareness that on the shifting, often subjective, scale of attractiveness, she would forever be on a bottom rung staring up at those paragons the gods loved best. The odd thing was that Agnes thought she had always known this; it was only that her enforced witness of Kit’s perfection and Campbell’s adulation stripped away any comforting notions she continued to nourish that a face “full of character” might on occasion trump the spellbinding meld of sensuality and refinement women like Kit had in such abundance.

  She had managed nevertheless to regenerate the anodyne self-deceit she required in order to function in the world. Yes, of course she was attractive, albeit in an idiosyncratic, wholly unconventional way. She had needed to believe this particularly after Campbell took her to his bed and then dropped her, without a word, the minute Kit returned from Boston. Alone again in her own narrow cot, she’d wept and writhed, deprived of his lovemaking. She thought of this loss as equivalent to being cast out of heaven. Oddly, this maudlin, aggrandized metaphor helped her bear it. She had tasted of glory and although the source had been withdrawn, she knew herself to be transfigured. She had never stopped loving Campbell. She was able readily to forgive him because he had bestowed on her something she had never expected to receive.

  On the other hand, she could not in all truthfulness say she had never hated Kit. She had done so intermittently, with an almost bloodthirsty ferocity. Envy was then a hot splurge in her throat, and all thoughts of Kit were mordant. Agnes dutifully fought these feelings, which she recognized as crude
and unspeakable. But she never totally succeeded.

  Then Campbell died and everything changed. Kit became the suffering widow, ravaged by grief inside and out. No one could envy the shorn, skeletal figure at Campbell’s graveside, Agnes least of all. After Zeke showed them that disturbing photo, she had sworn never to indulge in those vile feelings again. Now here she was, moments away from seeing Kit again, fighting the familiar gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach. How immature, she upbraided herself. And how dangerous.

  “Tread carefully.” Paul’s last words to her. He had not elaborated. She had assumed he meant she should be very cautious around drink. She wondered now if his admonition alluded to something far more personal, like her proclivity for self-denigration. She must at all costs hold fast to the disciplines. Sobriety. Clear thinking. The yielding of self-doubt to the Higher Power. Was the religious impulse behind art really her Higher Power? Where else did she find solace, and the surety that a life purged of malice was worth the effort, fraught with failure as her attempts might be?

  Hold fast. Keep your head up. She was baffled as to why these musty clichés still held such galvanizing power. Perhaps because they evoked Nana who made all such hoary encouragements sound newly minted and wholly sincere. As if in tune with her resolve, the Land Rover was climbing, sometimes steeply, an undulating road to a hilltop house. She ducked her head to peer upward through the windshield; she could just make out its russet tiled roof. On either side of this private road she was watched by sentinel cypresses, immaculately spaced. As the Land Rover ascended, the house gradually revealed itself: three stories of dappled tawny stone flanked by two one-storey extensions, each twice the length of the main house structure.

  Agnes was surprised by how massive the villa was, far exceeding the needs of three or four people. Perhaps there was a live-in housekeeper or a whole contingent of houseguests. She had not even considered the possibility of having to deal with other people, apart from Kit and Mr. Massinger-Pollux. She quailed at the idea of a crystal-laden dining table where eight people of varying degrees of international fame traded witticisms and drank Chianti with impunity. Surely she will be able to secrete herself, take refuge in her work and station, like a dowdy governess in a Charlotte Bronte novel? She was still too emotionally raw to be always manufacturing a suitable social face, scant as her skills were in that regard. But if she was raw, what must Kit be?

  She saw again, and wished she did not, the woman with the flame-coloured hair struggling toward the headless figure on the motorcycle, while Horace gripped her waist, holding her back. This vision prompted the habitual admonition: she must keep a constant check on her self-centredness.

  Ernesto parked the Land Rover in front of a flagstone patio whose four corners were dominated by round-bellied terracotta jars large enough for a child to hide inside. A similar shade of terracotta banded the arced shuttered windows and the doors, of which Agnes counted three: one — by far the largest — in the main structure and one in each of the flanking wings.

  She was disconcerted at how cold her hands and feet felt, even though she stood now directly in the glow of the afternoon sun. To quell her anxiety, she turned fully around to study the view in all directions: first, down into the valley whose lush greens, emerald, olive and sage, soothed her, as did the faultlessly spaced farmhouses, their tiled roofs burnished in the clear light. It was a scene that might have been ordered by an artist’s hand. She understood that what she saw was the work of centuries of loving cultivation, of both the soil and of the architecture, whose sturdy grace fit the setting as much as did the birds the air. She turned next to her left and right, and then up; behind the house oak and umbrella pine rose thickly as if both to protect and display the ancient villa in its fastness.

  Her mother would love to stay in such a place. She smiled ruefully. This was the least acerbic thought she has had about either of her parents for some time. So it was with an expression caught between bitterness and regret that she turned to see Kit on the patio behind her. The sharp intake of breath felt barbed in her throat. How long had Kit been there, watching as she turned around, and then around again, like a schoolgirl in a game with her eyes scarfed?

  Kit seemed to open a cleft in earthly time as she commanded Agnes’s gaze. She was erect as a goddess. Her naked shoulders gleamed in a high-necked gown of sea-green gauzy stuff that gave the illusion of worshipping her body. Agnes was sure she heard Ernesto moan. How quickly Kit’s hair had grown back, thick and long enough to pile atop her head in a charmingly heaped mass, with tendrils licking at her temples and nape. Around the neck of her dress, Kit had looped beads the colour of blood oranges.

  It was Agnes who spoke first, determined to break through the numbing spell Kit’s beauty cast. “Kit,” she said. Only that, because she was at a loss as to how to allude to the events that had blighted their lives, the Ark’s ultimate deadly cargo.

  “Oh, Agnes.” Kit still had not moved from her invisible pedestal. It was as if she was waiting for ritual offerings fetched at great peril.

  Agnes approached, struggling with a self-image that rendered her squat, grubby and uncouth. None of these things are true, she chided herself. Hold fast. Keep your head up.

  Kit held out her arms.

  For one stunned instant, Agnes expected the mutually consoling embrace she had dared to imagine. Instead, she repressed a whimper of pain as Kit grabbed her upper arms, the long fingers digging into her flesh.

  “Were you with him?”

  Was there a hiss beneath the words? Agnes tried to break away. A winged panic was loose in her chest, and something worse was at work in her belly, rancid and churning. Surely Kit did not mean Campbell?

  “Kit, you’re hurting me.” She spoke each word deliberately, as one would to a child trapped in a fit of temper. The change was breathtaking. The grim rigidity set upon Kit’s features dissolved. The repellent glaze left her eyes. Her arms dropped to her sides, limp against the gauzy fabric.

  “Zeke,” she said, “poor, dear Zeke. Were you with him when it happened?”

  “No. He drove to the cliff by himself. Pinto — I mean, Peter — went to the police station to do the identification.” She could not bring herself to say “morgue” or the simple word “body”. Nevertheless, she winced inwardly again as she pictured the macabre duty Peter had to perform.

  “Pinto is a good man,” Kit murmured. “Campbell always said he was the Ark’s moral compass.” She clutched at Agnes’s hand. It was a gesture so completely void of tenderness that Agnes instinctually made a fist inside the vise-like grip. Kit’s eyes were unfocused as she asked, “Do you think some people are born with a gene for goodness, and some have one for evil?”

  Agnes heard the shrill note of desperation, and could find no words with which to respond. If she found the question naïve, it was also undeniably heartbreaking. In her mind’s eye, she saw Peter grimace at the suggestion his virtue was innate. She recalled the swift war of light and shadow she had more than once witnessed on his face as he struggled to hold back vitriol and proffer instead some diplomatic emollient to calm the Ark’s often-troubled waters. When, the morning after Campbell’s death, he halved the chipboard table with a single blow, it was not so much the act that had shocked her as the dawning awareness this huge, gentle man carried within him such a fund of molten rage.

  What could she do thereafter but admire him all the more? She had been made privy to a secret recess of his character that revealed how relentless his daily disciplines of self-mastery must be. And in the Alyscamps, when they lamented together the human wreckage the Ark had left in its wake and their own part in that heedless destruction, he had made clear he was equally capable of a lacerating self-contempt. She hoped, beyond all measure, he had not become irretrievably lost in whatever vastness he was seeking.

  None of these things about the “real” Peter Dervaig was she willing to confide to Kit. To do so would feel like a betrayal of his private realm. More pressingly, she sensed K
it’s mind was still far too tender to readily absorb facts she might construe as harsh. On instinct, Agnes knew she must leave intact Kit’s notion of Peter as unwavering moral compass, particularly since it was an image of Campbell’s making.

  Kit had at last let go the fierce grip on her hand and was gliding toward Ernesto, who waited beside the Land Rover. “Grazie, Ernesto.” She spoke the words from a queenly distance. Ernesto’s head bobbed, his face aglow with a mix of adulation and lust so raw, Agnes had to turn away. Kit said something else in Italian which she did not understand. In response, the large man executed an ungainly bow. Agnes half-expected him to drop to his knees and lay his head by Kit’s naked toes, on delicate display in her silvery openwork sandals. It was only when he set off on foot down the hill that she grasped at last that he was not an employee, but a neighbour whom Kit had pressed into most willing service.

  “Thank you, Ernesto,” Agnes called out. When he turned around, he looked not at her but at Kit, eager to seize a last opportunity to drink her peerless image down. Kit fluttered her fingers prettily in the air. Unable to pull his eyes away, Ernesto tried to walk backwards and so tangled one foot in another and stumbled.

  “What an oaf,” Kit said. “But he’s a really useful neighbour, a farmer and a handyman. We get fresh eggs and vegetables from him and he’s the only person who can fix the ancient plumbing in this place. I asked him to pick you up,” she added, “because I got one of my horrible headaches this morning.”

  “Has the headache gone?”

  “What?” Kit looked at her blankly.

  “Your headache.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s under control. Now, do come and meet Hugh. Then I’ll show you the house or at least as much of it as you’ll need.”