Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Hugh had not joined in his houseguest’s hollow merriment.

  “Kate,” he said. “Kate, be calm, my dear.”

  Kit swivelled to face him, the moth-wing eyebrows knotted to suggest an umbrageous mask. With her magnificent breasts still uncovered, and the dead-eyed stare, she was like a ship’s figurehead surging over a vast, black sea rife with alien creature life. Then she shrugged and pulled the russet merino shawl about her shoulders and clasped it in front of her chest.

  This restoration of simple decency to the room was a relief. If Kit were not ill, Agnes thought, I would never forgive her for this mockery of a portrait full of sacred intent. Or was this judgement priggish? She definitely felt contaminated by what she had just witnessed: an old man’s lust fixed on its shameless object. Why did they have to draw her into their tawdry erotic game?

  “Our little tableau has rather misfired, I fear.” Hugh deliberately weighted each word in a cadence at odds with his usual rapid speech. It was as if he was trying to repress an invasive sigh, or even a sob.

  “It was a shock,” Agnes said. She resisted any apology.

  Kit stood up, a proud beacon at the window, the baubles and fake pearls in the ornate hairdo played upon by the light. The snake dangled from her left hand.

  “Oh, Agnes, you are still so gullible. We used to laugh about it. It’s sweet really.” As she strode glittering and imperious from the room, she paused just long enough to rumple Agnes’s hair. “Sweet.”

  Such condescension packed into a single word and careless parting gesture left Agnes’s scalp feeling scalded. Sweet. Sour rather, like the acrid broth boiling in her stomach. But worst was the poison of that pronoun. “We used to laugh.” This loaded plural brought Campbell speeding back from the dead to lay his head between Kit’s breasts and join in the mockery of silly, pitiable Agnes. How subtle, as well as coarse, Kit’s unkindness could be.

  Kit is ill. Kit is traumatized. Kit is broken. So went the dutiful little chorus, which now had an appended refrain: I will survive this. I will see it through. Here again came the question that seemed always to be lurking, and which she dared consider only long enough to immediately refute it. Did Paul know he was sending her into an emotional minefield? Of course not. No. How could he?

  She sat on the chair she had used the previous day and asked the obvious question: “Is it the Simonetta portrait you want to focus on today?”

  Hugh looked at her in a stricken surprise, as if he had forgotten she was in the room, or indeed who she was at all.

  “She is the consummate Muse,” he said, “but her volatility, I hesitate to say ferocity, can take its toll.”

  Muse. It simply had not occurred to Agnes that Kit’s beauty would serve this function for him. And at what cost? Hugh still looked shrunken and somehow friable, the stone face of yesterday quite demolished.

  She tried again: “Do you have a question about the Simonetta portrait?” The book on his desk was open to the profile portrait of the girl-woman with the budding breasts, her gaze serene, despite the live viper twined in her necklace. If her smile was enigmatic, one could see nonetheless that her most secret thoughts were benevolent. It was the turned-up nose, so unexpected and idiosyncratic in the portrait of an iconic beauty, that made Agnes sure of this idealized woman’s essential kindness. There was no evidence of cruelty in this face, nor could it ever have been tainted by any malign thought.

  “The cloud,” Hugh ventured, his voice faint.

  “The brooding one directly behind her head?”

  “Yes. I see it offsets the flushed alabaster of her complexion. But why just there, massed around her high brow, and then again down to her chin?” She was relieved he sounded stronger now, more like the arrogant man she’d encountered yesterday.

  She had hoped not to talk about the strange cloud. She had seen it or one very like it — the day Campbell took her for the ride along the coast on the back of the Vulcan, the day she ceased to be a virgin. Whenever she looked at Piero’s portrait of Simonetta, she therefore tried to avoid looking for long at this sky-smirch with its louring threat of bitter wind and hail. It was burgeoning, even before her eyes, with a terrible power. This was the risible superstition which taunted her: that the appearance of the malformed, malign cloud that day foretold Campbell’s death, and if only she had been alert to its ominous message, she might have averted the disaster. Ludicrous.

  Now she must look again, cleansed of these childish thoughts. She saw that the swollen storm cloud was a contorted mimicry of the woman’s profile, bulging behind the markedly high forehead, and again in a bulbous protrusion adjacent to her nose and mouth. Its entire mass was the intense plum of a new-laid bruise. To study it was to see it throbbing; to acknowledge its tangible ache to explode and do its worst.

  The sheer contrast between the smooth, cool plane of the woman’s brow and the turbulent cloud revealed what she had missed thus far: that it was Simonetta’s high-mindedness and her purity of thought and speech that was holding the storm at bay. The evils of the world were seething in that cloud, like Pandora’s box flung skyward, and Piero’s Simonetta was stilling it by means of her virtue, reflected in every thought and word and deed.

  All this she explained to Hugh, who listened while tracing the immaculate lines of the lady’s profile with the tip of his bony forefinger.

  “Good!” he said. “And the snake. How do you read its symbolism? Not surely as a foreshadowing of Simonetta’s death at twenty-three? That would be too tritely transparent for di Cosimo, would it not?”

  She tried for a moment to inhabit the painting’s dramatic counterpoise: to be the woman wholly calm and clear of gaze, while the snake’s scaly gold belly rasps against the thin flesh covering her breastbone. The barest millimetre separated the threadlike darting tongue and the infinitesimally tapering tail. Should the two touch, the resulting charge might well jolt the woman’s heart into fatal spasms.

  Electric, venomous and with a stealth and quickness surpassing any creature’s on earth. Its slightest torque could mean instant death and who knew where a serpent would strike next? This meditation led her to the certainly it was the embodiment of quivering fate that Simonetta wore looped about her neck; the facets of emerald on the rippling body flashed now here, now there. Agnes confronted again, with a sore heart, the slight contingencies on which destiny depended.

  If Simonetta had not been born with a genetic predisposition to pulmonary disease.

  If the doctors Lorenzo de Medici sent to her bedside had managed to save her.

  If the wire had been an inch lower and sliced Campbell’s leatherette jacket and not his neck.

  If he had zipped the collar up to his chin.

  If at the Ark’s frenetic May Day meeting, they had not tumbled upon the idea of the bullfight protest.

  If Zeke had not been enthralled by Brigitte Bardot and the example of her relentless activism.

  If they had heeded Horace’s warning. Mayday! Mayday!

  If she had not gone to the Aardvark Bar. (But then she might never have sought sobriety.)

  “Fate,” she told Hugh, “the absolute arbitrariness of its twists and turns.”

  He nodded. There was even a flicker of a smile.

  “But for this instant, frozen in time,” he said, “her serenity and spotless character stay its tortuousness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet we know the actual Simonetta will suffer a strike and be cut down far too young.”

  “Yes, and thousands will line the streets of Florence to pay her homage as her funeral cortege passes.”

  “With di Cosimo among them?” Hugh asked.

  “He would have been only a child. It is possible he never saw the real Simonetta.”

  “And did the actual woman look at all like this one, do you think? Hers is a charming face, of course, but hardly the kind of beauty that makes one catch one’s breath and gaze in silent awe.”

  Like Kit’s. She could almost hear his unspoken thought
.

  She told him what no doubt he already knew. “Many scholars believe that Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell and Flora in his Primavera are portraits of Simonetta, drawn from life. So, yes, Piero’s Simonetta is wholly imagined; she is not meant to resemble the actual woman whom he perhaps never saw. Botticelli, on the other hand, likely saw her often, given his favoured position in the Medici court.”

  Hugh said, “The first time I saw Kate, her resemblance to Botticelli’s sea-born Venus astounded me. I never thought to see that paragon alive and striding into a room whose air I also breathed. Kate’s hair is a richer, more arresting red than Sandro’s goddess, in keeping with her passionate nature. Exposure to the peaks and valley of her moods can nonetheless be draining. On that note, I must admit to being wearied today, Agnes, and I have a nurse coming shortly to give me one of the injections that, regrettably, I have come to require. So we will close now. Once again, your insights have had a most freshening effect on my perception of the painting and will serve me well, I am sure.”

  Three things surprised her in these remarks: for the first time, he had addressed her familiarly as Agnes; he had been disarmingly frank about his current fatigue and frailty; and he had implied that the vagaries of Kit’s moods might be harmful to his health.

  “I regret I am unable to drive you to Florence for the art appreciation I am sure you are eager to undertake. And Kate, I fear, is not likely in any state to take you. But by all means, walk. Explore our lush and classic Tuscan countryside. You will be quite safe, too, if you choose to wander in the woods behind the house. Only keep watch for the vipers, identifiable by their diamond pattern in gold and black.”

  This warning and formal show of concern were also unexpected. Perversely, she thought she preferred Hugh’s rebarbative manner of the previous day, perhaps because she could not help mistrusting kind remarks.

  Paul’s attitude toward me was not kind, she reflected, but steely and pragmatic. “I abhor waste,” he had grimaced at one of their sessions. “It would pain me to see you squander your talents.”

  Later today, also thanks to Paul and his swift, privileged diplomacy with the Bremrose administration, she would be able to register online for her courses and get the reading lists. When she returned to college she would, with any luck, not be too hopelessly far behind. Apart from her mandatory art history and iconography classes, she needed a language and had decided on Italian, plus Modernism for her literature option. Because Fergus had left his rabid taint on the subject, she was hesitant to take another ethics course. Nevertheless, she felt a strong compulsion to do so.

  When she tugged at the obscure roots of this inclination, what she found was a desire to imitate Peter. She wanted genuinely to understand what it meant to be selfless and good and then follow through, even if she repeatedly stumbled on a path of her choosing. Peter was the only person she knew who had made his dedication to this quest explicit. They shared a common guilt for their part in the wrongs perpetrated by the Ark. She wondered if he had succeeded in expiating his, or hammering its corrosive power into a new and productive element of character.

  When she pictured Peter, it was now always from the back, as she had last seen him, walking away from her in Arles: a huge man of uncommon strength who contained his own forge, its operation ceaseless, as he smote and refined and perfected, casting off arrogance and self-regard. He made everyone else she knew seem crude and infantile. Yes, even Paul, with his inveterate academic rivalries and dilettantish habits. It seemed a wrenching betrayal to admit this, yet she saw it was so. On the other hand, this made her realize just how rare a person was Peter Dervaig and that she would probably never again meet his like.

  It was late afternoon by the time she ventured out for a walk under a tyrannical sun. Its spear-like heat would soon fell her without the broad-brimmed green hat of cloth imbued with its own UV protection. Her drawstring pants were fine-weave azure Indian cotton. Her loose, long-sleeved shirt was a shade of terracotta. Mindful of the vipers, she had put on fawn canvas shoe, rather than sandals. She was halfway down the hill on which Ernesto nearly tumbled before it registered that she was dressed in the constituent colours of this perfect world, so long husbanded and cherished it had become a prototype of Rustic Paradise. She removed her sunglasses the better to take in the sweep of vineyards and amply spaced hilltop farmhouses, all with their attendant rows of sky-skimming cypresses. There was not a single false note for miles — no crass dazzle from a conspicuous electric blue swimming pool cut into the hillside, despoiling the view, nor any of the gaudy orange beach umbrellas, or lemon and purple deck chairs, of which she had seen several examples on the drive with Ernesto. She thought these excrescences terrible, part of the awful move to turn Tuscany into a consumable. Here, thankfully, there was none of that sad spoilage, and the barking dogs, alert to her presence from their hilltop lookouts, told her these were still working farms.

  She walked for just under an hour before she decided to return, mindful of the small quantity of water left in her bottle. Turning sharply around, she stirred up the dust of the road with her foot. When it cleared, she noticed a network of fissures, some spidery and some actual cracks, which the sun had opened in the hard-baked ground. The soles of her feet prickled at the idea of all the secret life teeming deep in those crevices: the slithering coils of the vipers’ nests and the hosts of beetles relentlessly feeding; perhaps even some centuries-old miasma, the remnant viral matter of the plagues that periodically had stilled Florence’s throbbing life, the people either fleeing or bolting themselves in.

  Piero had died of plague. He was sixty and therefore likely less than robust. She always resisted picturing him old. The person who came to her imagination was at most middle-aged, consistently quick of movement and thought, sometimes literally awhirl with his brush as he worked to keep pace with the speeding visions before they vanished. On the other hand, he must have been capable of such watchful stillness that his figure could turn spectral, transparent as leaf shadow.

  When she entered the woods behind Villa Scimmia, she found her way often blocked by bramble thickets. She had not expected the forest to be so dense and unkempt. Once, she had to get down on her hands and knees to crawl beneath the slant limb of an oak, newly cleaved by a summer storm. She was looking for a path she could follow farther tomorrow, but if one existed it continued to elude her. What she did find unnerved her: a ring of stones with a heap of warm ash at its centre. Had some wayfarer camped here for the night? Or was Villa Scimmia and one or more of its inhabitants being watched? Kit was the most obvious attraction and Ernesto the most likely candidate for voyeur. But surely, even for Ernesto, such surveillance would be excessive?

  She decided to let Hugh know what she had discovered. But his study was empty. After a light supper, she wrote him a quick note, which she left on the kitchen table. She then checked that both the back and front doors were securely locked. She pushed away the paranoid idea that the villa was now as unsettled without as within. The campfire was likely made by a wanderer passing through.

  Sitting gingerly at her laptop set on her spindly-legged table in her room, she retrieved some of the required texts for her Modernism course. She began, perhaps unwisely, with the first of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, written while he was imprisoned by the American military in post-war Italy, on charges of treason. She recalled Paul telling her that Hugh had deliberately modelled himself on this uncompromising literary maverick, right down to the goatee and the jewel in his earlobe. But surely Hugh’s admiration did not extend to any facsimile of Pound’s radio broadcasts made throughout the war extolling Mussolini’s achievements?

  She found the poem almost impenetrably difficult until she decided simply to yield to its grand rush of imagery. The striking juxtapositions brought her a finely tuned sensuous pleasure. Fragments entered her like discrete prayers: the smell of mint under tent flaps in the rain, and the sight of a lizard upholding his spirit. This simple acknowledgement that a wild creat
ure had sustained the elderly man confined in his wire cage moved her and quickened her respect for his ordeal. Then she went back to the poem’s opening and discovered, with the help of the editor’s annotations, the historic truth behind the ghastly human abattoir depicted in the first few lines. Pound’s vituperation centred on the indignities done to the corpses of the executed Mussolini and his mistress Carla Petacci, hung by the heels in a public square in Milan.

  She wondered if Hugh ever delved into iniquity in his work. If they looked together at the bloodthirsty protagonists of The Hunt, would he see the dark stain of sin on their naked arms and straining backs? Or would he find the hunters’ physiques magnificent, just as Mussolini would have done, when he extolled the youthful male body as consummate death machine?

  For the rest of the evening she read an essay on Russian Orthodox icons. She spent a long time looking into the eyes of Andrei Rublev’s Virgin Mary, which were doleful yet consoling. Mary’s head, covered in a hood of indigo and gold, inclined to the right and the tiny Christ Child touched his face to hers. The scene in the bullet-riddled church in Marseille returned to her, with the line-ups of the faithful waiting their turn to kneel and kiss the image of their favoured saint. She had been hungover, she remembered. At least she was no longer doing that daily damage to herself, although she must take nothing for granted. The fact was she still dreamt of whisky, where its peat-scented fumes and promise of bliss were enticing as ever. Such dreams woke her in a panic. It always took some minute before the sick anxiety subsided. No, she had not actually had a drink. She was still sober, thank God.

  That night she was cursed with a whisky-dream so realistic she could taste as well as smell the lovely, ultimately ruinous spirits. It was a Skye whisky, the Talisker. How soon she had forgotten its sensuous numbing of the lips. In her haste, she had spilled her drink, as she so often had in life. There were drops on her chin which she wiped away and the front of her nightgown was wet. How could this have happened? She cried out at the gravity of her self-betrayal. Had she raided Hugh’s drinks cabinet in her sleep? Who could help her now? She threw out arms in an operatic gesture of despair.