Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  As they came up to the main door, of solid oak set in its own portico, Agnes exclaimed at the exquisite handle carved in the shape of a monkey’s head.

  “Oh, didn’t you know?” Kit said. “He’s there because of the name of the villa. Scimmia is Italian for monkey.”

  They entered a white-washed, high-ceilinged corridor with a taint of mould. “I was so happy, Agnes, when I saw your résumé in with the other candidates Hugh was considering. I said ‘Hugh, dear, I know this woman and I’m sure she would be perfect for the job.’ I was dreading the idea of sharing the house with a, you know,” she confided, “you know, one of those people who insist on displaying their brilliance at every possible instant. The ones who sneer at you if you can’t tell a Rembrandt from a Raphael. The ones you want to strangle by noon. So I twisted High’s skinny old arm. I mean, most of the other candidates had far better qualifications than you on paper: publications, fellowships and awards, that kind of thing.”

  What! — Cole perspicua. Cultivate clarity. Alberti’s pre-eminent dictum for artists came floating out of the Tuscan air and Agnes grabbed it greedily. She must remember that even if Kit had a hand in her getting this position, she was not the sole engineer. Paul’s recommendation would have carried considerable weight. And Paul had nothing whatsoever to do with Kit. Or did he?

  Agnes saw the whitewashed walls flood toward her, an inundating sea of milk — only sour. She could feel her hard-won self-esteem shrivelling; she pictured Kit liberally salting the remnant tail of a brittle, threadlike worm. Had she been always so tactless? Was this belittling deliberate? The floor turned spongy beneath Agnes’s feet. She registered with some alarm that her anxiety was in full spate as they stood just outside the door to the poet’s study.

  Kit said: “Paul is such a sweet man, isn’t he? And don’t you adore those lavender shirts?”

  The little chink of doubt widened; then it gaped. Agnes searched Kit’s face for some clue to her intent, but saw only brown eyes wetly gleaming, and a close-lipped smile that suggested unalloyed sweetness. Was it a game? And if so, to what purpose? There were certainly photos of Paul to be found on the Internet, in all of which he would doubtless be wearing a shirt in his favourite colour. Paul would have told her if he had ever met Kit, wouldn’t he? His uncharacteristic colloquialism replayed in her brain. The ducks are lining up. Had there been a hint of a malevolent undertone? She knew she could not afford to think so.

  She set quickly about dismantling her doubts. Paul was her dear mentor, who had vouchsafed her intimate details of his own degrading obsession with alcohol. He had trusted her enough to tell her of the visit he received from the Angel Doctor. He had gone out of his way to help her keep her scholarship and reputation at Bremrose. These were acts of faith on his part, and on them she must anchor herself. She had to persist, no matter how unnerving she found Kit’s machinations. With any luck, this was a mere passing mood; the residue of Kit’s morning migraine. Besides, it was not with Kit she had the contract, but Mr. Massinger-Pollux. She had never been so keen to meet him as at this moment. She had a crying need for a clear, unencumbered exchange; the assignment of a well-delineated task where innuendo and casual cruelties had no place.

  “Hugh, dear, this is Agnes Vane.”

  They had entered a long white-washed room, whose vaulted ceiling was ribbed with old timber. Glancing up, she saw that the wood was riddled and cracked. To her right, the wall was furnished floor to ceiling with books, packed tight in shelves varnished with the red-brown stain known as oxblood. Directly ahead, in front of a high window with a pointed arch, was a desk coated in black lacquer and inset with tesserae of rose and ruby-tinted mother of pearl.

  It was here the poet sat in a green and gold upholstered chair, whose high back completely obscured his figure. Agnes could see only his hands, covered in brown-spotted skin of startling transparency, as they toyed with a heavy-barrelled maroon fountain pen. She waited for him to acknowledge her presence, all the while trying to ignore an astringent odour that made her nostrils prickle. It was vaguely reminiscent of hospital rooms and sterilized instruments. She reminded herself that Mr. Massinger-Pollux was extremely elderly, well over ninety according to Paul, and therefore vulnerable to infection.

  Nevertheless, when he turned his chair around to face her, she was unprepared for what she saw. It was as if she was in a museum staring at a totemic stone head that had been buried centuries underground to weather and seal in its power. The weathering showed in the countless tiny wrinkles that seamed his flesh. The power was manifest in the head’s small triangular shape and in the still-glittering eyes, perhaps once a dense emerald, and now a compelling malachite. His thick white hair was brushed back from his high brow and temples to create the illusion of a winged helmet of alabaster. His goatee tapered to a cruelly fine point. It was this feature as much as the eyes that transfixed Agnes as she strove to batter away associations she considered conditioned and banal: Mephistophelian, Satanic.

  “I am very pleased to meet you,” she said, thinking how much she sounded like a dutiful, well-trained child, mouthing empty syllables. In response, the poet made an odd grunting sound while continuing to scrutinize her face.

  She tried to neutralize the irrational unease his stony face seeded in her. Groping for a root cause, she came up against the word “pitiless.” He is old, she reasoned, that is why he appears inflexible, and as if incapable of anything but the most scathing instantaneous judgements. Then again, perhaps Hugh Massinger-Pollux’s character was exactly what he projected: a severe and malicious minor deity, in whose haughty, grim regard was distilled a lifetime of arrogant dealings.

  My brilliance coruscates, this face said. Why do you not shade your eyes?

  He leapt suddenly from his chair and extended his hand, which was cool and dry and soon retracted. Although shorter than the regally towering Kit, he was still some inches taller than Agnes. He was therefore looking down at her when he said: “Such a bizarre little phizog you have, Ms. Vane. I can see why you would be so drawn to di Cosimo and his outlandish hybrids.”

  “Hugh!” In Kit’s patently false cry of indignation Agnes detected a muted glee. Schadenfreude. How nasty. She was dismayed at the prospect of spending several weeks in this uncivil company. What has she done by coming here?

  In an instinctive reaction to the callous remark, she put on the impassive face she’d first manufactured at school, based on an image she’d found of a Kabuki mask that suited her purposes admirably. Projecting an iron-hardness, the mask was painted a thick chalk white, the mouth frozen in a slight twist of disdain. It was a face impervious to harm and yet capable of uttering curses to dire effect. She had hoped never again to have need of that brittle disguise, yet here she was, face to face with her venerable employer, pitting her iron against his stone.

  Iron won. Her unvoiced contempt appeared to move the poet to a quasi-apology. “Excuse me, Ms. Vane. I am sometimes excessively fond of hyperbole and indulging in outlandish statements. This stems from my unwarranted reputation as a ‘crank,’ foisted upon me by certain individuals uncomfortable with true genius. It amuses me on occasion to play upon this caricature. I ought not to have done so at your expense. “Indeed, you have a most distinctive and charming appearance. And Paul Otterly assures me that I will benefit from your refreshing insights into di Cosimo’s secular creations. There, am I forgiven?” He made her a mock bow from his chair.

  She could not bring herself to voice the polite lie that would excuse him. Nor was she ready to lay aside her wariness. She saw this caution justified when Kit began playfully to rumple Hugh’s hair; then leaned in toward him and whispered in his ear. As she did so, her right breast, covered in the sea-green foamy fabric, brushed his cheek. The two then exchanged a smile so intimate, Agnes averted her eyes. When she looked again, Kit was standing behind Hugh’s chair with a proprietary air. Stunned, Agnes scotched an automatic picture of their naked coupling, slack flesh against taut perfection. It was none of he
r business. Or were they toying with her again?

  “So, Ms. Vane, shall we begin at once? I appreciate that you are probably suffering jetlag and in need of a rest. But I will prevail on only a few minutes of your time. I want to introduce you immediately to our methodology, if you will. I will require from you no conventional scholarly research; no hunting out of recondite debates on the likely metallurgic composition of the pots and pans in the Bacchus canvas, or the preponderance of meadow-sweet in di Cosimo’s swathes of wildflowers. What I want is a frank account of your sensibility’s first flight when I pose you certain questions about the paintings that spark my interest. If you are as knowledgeable about the secular works as Mr. Otterly tells me, I am confident you will give me what I need. To encapsulate, I seek the mental jolt; the freshness of perception with which your eyes will endow me. Shall we begin?”

  She nodded. Hugh then fetched a chair which he drew up to his desk, gesturing her to sit. Kit, to her relief, moved to the tall window where she stood looking out at the haze of green. Any distance was a blessing. Agnes sank down, grateful for the apparent normality these small courtesies evoked. Hugh set off briskly toward the book-lined wall. “I will be back presently with the plate,” he told her. She puzzled over his choice of word. Was her head to be served upon one? Oh, poor Campbell. She did not want her thoughts to run to death and decapitation. She was terribly on edge, too weary and stressed to summon cogent remarks on demand. She felt as if she had stumbled far too close upon a thrumming hive; she must tread with the utmost care lest she be stung, not once or twice but countless times, and with a venom for which there was no antidote.

  Then Kit disrupted the stillness, pulling the bands from her hair so that it fell around her shoulders like a ripe-red cape. She assumed a histrionic pose, pressing her upper body and face to the window glass, and stretching her arms wide and as high above her head as she could reach. Each of her long nails was clearly visible against the glass. The out-flung arms, long legs and torso created the strange illusion she was the letter Y made flesh. So disquietingly still, Agnes was reminded of a bare-bones drawing of a hanging tree. She put her hand automatically to her throat and touched the ridged remnants of her scar, opening the sensation of hot blood spurting under Guam’s knife.

  The air in the room started to thrum and press at her temples. She has been thrust inside the lethal hive now, into an atmosphere thickly malevolent. Meanwhile, Kit strained harder against the glass, as if she must break it, bend it, or turn it into some new element conformable to her will. Kit crooked a single finger of her right hand and with the very tip of her tapered nail, she began to tap lightly and repeatedly. Why was Hugh not reacting? Was he part deaf or had he learned to seal out his houseguest’s annoying tics?

  Then again, might she be the cause of Kit’s bizarre behaviour? Did her mere presence trigger memories, unbearably vivid and bloodied, that Kit had worked vigilantly to expunge? Did Kit know she slept with Campbell? Was this her punishment — this disconcerting display of Kit’s body straining against an invisible force, her sharpened nail tapping on and on as if to summon a primal power to her service? Or was this merely the prelude to a punishment yet to come?

  Kit assaulted the window with her nail-tip at a more rapid beat. If she started to scratch at the glass, like a clawed, caged creature seeking a way out, Agnes would find it hard to hold her tongue. Mercifully, Hugh returned to his desk with an old friend: a copy of the book on di Cosimo Agnes had first seen on her mother’s desk. He opened it at a place marked by a tasselled cord. Before her was a picture whose details she knew as intimately as she would the body of a husband. She thought of this painting as “the Ottawa canvas” because it belonged to the National Gallery of Canada. Its actual name was Vulcan and Aeolus and was the only masterpiece by Piero to be found in her country of birth.

  Every living creature in the painting’s pastoral world emanated a gentleness that always made her want to step inside, if only for an hour. As she looked down at the familiar scene laid open on his desk, she was restored to herself. No barbed remark from either Kit or Hugh could touch her. Here was the aged Vulcan she knew so well, his dark hair receding and the flesh of his exposed back no longer firm. But he was strong enough still to wield the hammer and smite the molten metal on his anvil. Opposite him sat grizzled Aeolus, god of the winds, pumping the bellows that kept alive the fire to make the metal labile.

  She was pulled, as ever, by the benignly curious look of the long-haired young man on the white horse who leant forward to study this new miracle the gods had brought. He and his horse were so easily companionable as to seem one being. In a feat of painterly counterpoise, Piero showed the horse inclining his head at an angle exactly opposite his rider’s. Together they composed a living scale: an untrammelled balance that spoke of the harmony that could exist between species. It could have been like this. So Agnes always thought when she studied this sublime pair.

  The horse bent his head to smile (she knew no better description of his expression) at the man and woman seated on the grass with their baby. Her eye went next to the young man who slept upon the grass in the centre foreground, looking almost as if he might tumble out of the bottom of the painting. His nakedness was prelapsarian. He had bundled his dark green cloak to make a pillow and slept upon his side like a child, his arms folded over his midriff and his legs drawn up to meet them. His evident trust, that he could sleep upon the ground naked and unharmed, confirmed this was a world innocent of crime, deceit and predation.

  How far away this world was from the unpleasant atmosphere of Hugh’s villa. She had to remind herself that Piero’s imagined pastoral was inspired by the landscape in which this very house sat, and that he had painted it mere miles from here, albeit over five centuries ago. He had brought his full panoply of skill, observation and inspired fancy to its creation, paying particular loving attention to the painting’s generative source: the creature with the flowerlike head and astonishing neck that stood so quietly on four slim spotted legs in the upper-right quadrant. There was only one possible model for this exquisite animal — the Medici giraffe, whom Piero would have often seen as it was led through the streets of Florence, a living jewel in the ruling family’s pageants.

  She knew this extraordinary gift to Lorenzo de Medici from the Sultan of Egypt had met a terrible and senseless end when a servant led him beneath an archway too low to accommodate his height. The giraffe’s fatal accident was in 1492. Experts dated Vulcan and Aeolus to 1495 at the earliest. Agnes therefore believed the gem-like portrait to be the painter’s personal memorial to an animal whose idiosyncratic beauty would have thrilled him and primed his spirit as moral being and maker. Of all the living creatures at peace within the painting’s green and golden world, it was the giraffe who most palpably embodied the unifying power of Eros. It was his singular glow that caught up and connected the diversity of creation the picture contained, linking the solitary black cricket on his flat stone to the sleeping youth, the mortals to the immortals, the birds of the air to the dromedary emerging from behind a craggy boulder in the far distance, each life joined to life, with Love as Prime Mover.

  So when Hugh jabbed his finger at several of the painting’s diverse inhabitants — the youth on the white horse, the old gods busy in the corner with their metal work, the builders in their loincloths raising the second storey of a wood frame for a dwelling, and said: “It ought to be jumble. It shouldn’t cohere. But it does. Why?” she was ready. She was surprised, first, by her own eloquence; then by the look of delight that made his eyes as bright as she had imagined they had been in his youth.

  “Marvellous,” he said as she concluded. “I had not known about the Medici giraffe. Very fine,” he nodded at her. “That is a deft and inspired reading of the composition.”

  Kit heaved a histrionic sigh. The layers of her gauzy skirt whispered, gauze catching on gauze, as she glided from the window to stand once more behind Hugh’s chair. She looked down at the book with an expressi
on Agnes interpreted as a sneer. It gave her mouth a most unpleasing shape. For the first time, Agnes saw that Kit had very long eye teeth.

  “So, Ms. Vane,” Hugh continued, “you have already exceeded my expectations of our intellectual forays together. If we progress thus, all shall be well. You can see now how our methodology will unfold. My concise, brisk question followed by your equally brisk response that draws, above all, on your exceptional instincts. Are we agreed?” Once again, he extended his hand.

  This time his clasp felt firm and sincere to her, if such a sentiment can be gleaned from touch. At least now he was civil. Nevertheless, she had no intention of letting down her guard. Something was sorely out of joint in this domestic situation and no amount of praise of her “inspired reading” of Piero’s works could justify setting a self-protective wariness aside.

  “But I have kept you long enough,” Hugh said. “Our most beloved and beauteous Kate will show you your room and the other facilities. Won’t you, my dear?”

  “Of course, Hugh.”

  The face Kit presented to Agnes was glacial. She lifted her right hand, cupping it in a beckoning gesture and led the way without a word. Agnes followed, newly aware of her heavy weariness and of an unwanted mental porousness which was a side effect of the jetlag. Sensations crowded in, ripe and overripe: the lure of Kit’s fire-bright hair, the sea green of her skirt and the silvery sheen of her sandals. The idea came that she was caught up in the slipstream of a goddess, tall, proud and chillingly indifferent to her fate. Or was Kit indifferent? Her taciturnity, her rapid stride, as if she could not get this duty over fast enough, suggested rather that she held Agnes in contempt. Better contempt than hate, she thought, as Kit braked and swirled around to confront her with a face that brought to mind the phrase “a terrible beauty.” In her bleariness, Agnes could not recall either the name of the poet or the poem; only that it was a famous lament about a country riven from within, where the young would soon lie bleeding in one’s another’s arms because they loved their land too well. Kit was riven from within, Agnes reminded herself. She has been broken. I am not. Compassion is in order. Peter would advise me so.