Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “She told me you had gone to Florence,” he murmured. His sigh hinted at a genuine sadness and perplexity. Agnes could not doubt the gravity of his expression, nor his solicitude as he steadied her when she stood up, his hands cupping her shoulders.

  “Kit? Hugh?” she pressed.

  “I got Hugh out in time,” Horace said. “He is in hospital on oxygen, but otherwise unscathed. Kit is sedated in the back of the van.” He pointed to the white vehicle parked below, his arm writing a smooth arc upon the air. She understood this gesture signalled his obeisance and complete fealty to the sleeping princess the vehicle contained. “What did you do to your hand, Agnes?”

  She tried to show him, but the cloth of her makeshift bandage was stuck to the raw flesh.

  “You need to get that treated. I’ll take you now. How did it happen?”

  When she told him, he looked at her severely, his narrow face etiolated in the moonlight. “Why?” he challenged. “What do you think their chances of survival are in the woods of Tuscany?”

  “Wasn’t it better than them burning alive?”

  He shrugged. Then something like a smile flitted across his face.

  She missed her footing getting into the van. Horace steadied her, with a firm grip under her elbow. She was struck by the almost professional assurance his touch conveyed, and understood then how thoroughly practised he was in dealing with frailty. His habitual charge so often faltered and fell.

  Once settled in the passenger seat, she turned her head to gaze at the recumbent Kit, who slept curled on her side in the back seat. She noted the gentle rise and fall of her breath. If one did not know, Kit would seem the embodiment of quiet virtue and undefiled mind. When Agnes turned away, she saw that Horace had also been watching Kit’s untroubled sleep. The beatific glaze upon his face told of a love that had no need whatsoever to explain itself.

  “The fire,” Agnes asked as Horace started the van. “Did Kit . . .?”

  His look was austerely assessing. “You have a right to know. But the price of that knowledge must be silence. Lifelong. You do understand that, don’t you, Agnes?” Did his tone carry an underlying threat? Or was this bizarre exchange all founded on pure reason, as his almost clinical calm implied?

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Yes, then. She set it — but to say she did it deliberately begs the question of agency.” He contorted his mouth in the sneer that had always accompanied his most caustic critiques of the Ark’s airy resolutions and schemes. “Hugh had a brocade canopy over his bed, and she put a candle to it while he slept. Fortunately, I was ready, anticipating a major incident. Her symptoms sometimes peak markedly. It never was Alzheimer’s. She has the behavioural variant of fronto-temporal dementia. This past week she had been particularly unstable, as you know. I did not get there quite soon enough to stop her. But the old man is largely unscathed, and perhaps ignorant as to the fire’s cause.

  “As for the house,” he gestured vaguely to the back window, “it was a rats’ nest, metaphorically at least. Not at all a good place for her. But her father has no clue what to do with her, none at all. He never did. Electroconvulsive therapy . . . did she tell you? Now how is that going to help her? I would hate him, if I had the energy. He put his wife in an institution . . .”

  It was as close as he had come to admitting how onerous his burden was. But she must ask. She had to know. The clawing pain in her hand intensified, the nearer she came to articulating the question.

  “She told me she murdered Fergus. Is that true?”

  He did not react, even with an audible breath. She scrutinized the prematurely wizened gnome-like profile, which appeared similarly unmoved. She might have made some facile comment on the weather.

  “Did she?” This insistence took all her courage.

  “Agnes, I will tell you only on the understanding that this exchange constitutes a pact between us. It goes no further. You are an intelligent woman. I do not need to spell out the terms of our agreement, do I?”

  There was no mistaking the threat this time. “I understand.”

  She recognized that in years to come she may find this affirmation burdensome. This was the price of forbidden knowledge. She had asked for the box to be opened and must live with the consequences.

  “I am placing my trust in you, Agnes, because you are also an outsider and therefore expert in self-containment. So the answer to your question is, regrettably, yes. She called me after she’d done it. I had never thought she would go so far. I went to Fergus’s house and cleaned up, made sure all her fingerprints were obliterated. Not a hair left. Nothing. Complicity is not a moral issue for me, not at least, as far as she is concerned. She was the only member of her family to treat me humanely. They made me eat in the kitchen and when she was a child she took her meals with me. I am devoted to her. I am . . .” He stopped in order to control a quaver in his speech.

  “Her courtier?” She clumsily attempted a word that would elevate his servitude.

  “No, I am her dog.” He made this assertion with a touching pride. “And I am grateful to be so.”

  I also had a dog, thought Agnes, but he was of another time and made of paint.

  Two days later she stood, with her hand professionally salved and bandaged, in front of Piero’s sea-monster in the Uffizi. She was amazed by how small he was, set inside a scene of Andromeda’s rescue that resembled a jewelled miniature. When he had first arrested her attention so long ago, on a book cover on her mother’s desk, it was the magnified detail of his commanding portrait she’d seen: the tusked, grotesque head in whose ugliness she recognized herself. She approached the painting as closely as the guards would allow and saw the confirmation of her original girlhood intuition. It was love gleamed in the monster’s eye as he gazed at the captive princess, while the human hero Perseus mounted his back, making ready to stab deep into his heart’s blood. The monster’s passion for Andromeda was much-abraded and woefully misdirected, but it was love nonetheless. Like Horace’s love for Kit, she thought sadly, or the Ark’s for all the suffering species it sought to rescue. Even misbegotten passions have value, when the intent is pure.

  This too, Piero di Cosimo had taught her. She was newly astounded how far one could travel on the blessed conveyance of an extraordinary artist’s work. Her gratitude was without bounds. She had returned, thus far, such stores of it as she could.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Painter, April 12, 1522

  HE IS SOMETIMES GRANTED A few moments’ release from the clutch of delirium and fever-soaked dreams. It is then he becomes aware of the purple-red inflammation of the buboes in the armpits and groin. Madder. That would be the base pigment to catch the doom-filled hue plague has painted on his body. The swellings are hard and as large as chicken eggs. What they cook inside is an ever more rankling pain.

  Death crept nearer and nearer his bed, a skull-face shadowed by a hood, and long fingers of bone beating a soundless tattoo upon the air. This rhythm served to thicken the viscous fog that occluded Piero’s outer and inner eye. He feared he would go blind altogether and could conceive of no worse final curse upon an artist’s life, even one grown old and afflicted by a palsied hand.

  With so little earthly time left to him, his fiercest longing is that his inner eye clear long enough for him to see again the dear companions of his spirit. How often they have freed him from a petrifying despair. Their grace, speed and unparalleled idiosyncratic beauty manifest God’s glory more surely than do any human face or form.

  He wanted what was perhaps a sacrilege: to blend his spirit with theirs and apprehend the world through their senses and with their wisdom. What he most abhorred was to see them suffer. Thus where he could in his commissions, he set the animals loose, where they might wander at will and, when danger loomed, flee and escape the bloody cudgel, the knife and death by burning.

  Now he sees, with a vision so crystalline it verges on mystery, six more who have been liberated and by a hand other than his. Thei
r silvery capes shimmer in the moonlight as they race surely over the hill and into the sheltering canopy. Their excited chatter convey to him a fear-filled joy. What better perspective can there be on God’s creation? Teach me, he implored. In his lifetime, he wanted this above all. Teach me. Teach others.

  Their flight confirms it has begun at last. He has unknown cohorts dedicated to this peerless truth and quest: that the animals be free and cherished; that our human spirits await their coming, and the redemptive mingling of our souls with theirs.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Three Years Later

  THEY HAD ARRANGED TO MEET in the National Gallery in front of Piero di Cosimo’s Vulcan and Aeolus, a place that had fast become her favourite haunt since moving to Ottawa to do her master’s degree. The gallery guards were used to her now. There were no more perturbed or vaguely minatory looks when she sat, sometimes a full hour, engrossed in this masterwork almost exactly her height that contained some of her dearest friends on earth. She did not regard this assertion as in any way pathetic. She knew Paul would understand. Nothing in her life had sustained her like the figures, animal and human, that made their way from Piero di Cosimo’s brain to the brush in his hand and the wafer-thin layers of paint on his canvas.

  The canvas in this case had its own idiosyncrasies and these, too, she seized on with the intense pleasure of familiarity and because the endearing quirks brought the artist nearer. First, there was the evident lozenge pattern in the weave still visible beneath the meticulously applied tempera and oils after almost six centuries. Then there was the noticeable seam that ran through the sky just above the giraffe’s horns, where the artist had obviously stitched two pieces of cloth together. He had used what was at hand, perhaps a linen tablecloth or even a shroud. She pictured him seated near a window in his studio, the swathe of white fabric enveloping his knees, and his small, quick hands, like swallows in their harmonious busyness, darting in and out of the snowy folds.

  It still struck her as miraculous that he had conjured, from materials as inert as cloth, wood and pigment, these beings, who in their ever-present life, appeared to breathe the same gallery air as did she. But the sources of the linen, frame and pigments were also once alive, she realized. In this earthly paradise he had made, where the aged gods laboured in their corner to teach humankind the metallurgical arts, and the beautiful youth sat astride the white horse with a light grace that spoke of love bestowed and returned, there was nothing at all forced or artificial.

  She saw, always with the same joyous pang, how it might have been — a holy consonance among species that had been the Ethical Ark’s dream. It was this vision Piero made manifest, today and forever, and she fed upon its truth with the hushed respect due a mystery whose profundity defied words. She had learned to temper her bewildered disappointment when gallery visitors skirted this lovely, ever-freshening world with scarcely a glance. However, very young children were often drawn by the white and brown horses, the luminous giraffe and the tiny camels in the background and she was grateful for their unsullied wonder.

  Today when she passed through the European gallery’s steel and glass doors in search of Peter, she was delighted to see a group of Buddhist monks in maroon robes clustered at the base of Piero’s paradise. They were in the company of a docent who was just finishing up an account that would no doubt have highlighted the artist’s most egregious eccentricities as perpetrated by Vasari: the curmudgeonly reclusiveness, the unvaried repasts of hard-boiled eggs, and the terror of lightning.

  Five of the monks were tall, robust young men with immaculate shaven heads. The sixth was an elderly man Agnes assumed was their teacher, who bent down to examine a detail in the painting’s bottom right corner. When he turned around to look up at his charges, his face was beaming; then he pointed, drawing their attention to the cricket on its stone. He was still smiling, caught in rapt communion with this tiny, winged fellow-creature, as the group filed out after the beckoning docent.

  One man remained behind, staring up at the painting. Although his head was shaven like the others, he did not wear the brightly declarative monk’s garment but a long-sleeved shirt and loose-fitting slacks in neutral cotton. He must, she thought, have newly joined the order. Perhaps he had not yet attained the level of discipline that merited a robe.

  Then he turned around and she registered, with an anguished surprise, that the man was Peter. She was spun in a momentary confusion as the light in the gallery shuddered and the years since she had last seen him contracted. They were standing, not in the National Gallery of Canada, but outside the forbidding stone wall bounding the Alyscamps. The despair that had tainted that last encounter was with her again. It had exactly the weight of Zeke’s corpse multiplied by a guilt of monstrous proportion. She had failed Zeke and the entire Ark by not being present at the protest. And she had failed Peter who had been forced to fulfill, without her support, the grim duty of identifying Zeke’s shattered remains in a frigid morgue in a foreign land.

  She swayed a little where she sat, on a low bench covered with black, padded leatherette, whose yielding sturdiness was such a familiar aspect of her weekly vigils in this room. She dug her fingers in, seeking anchorage. As the man took a step toward her, she wondered if she was mistaken; if perhaps this was not Peter but someone who resembled him in height and in the breadth of his shoulders and cheekbones. If it was Peter Dervaig, he was changed in some way she could not immediately grasp.

  “Agnes.” The voice left her in no doubt. She stood to greet him and they clasped hands in a spontaneous move they just as quickly abandoned.

  “I thought,” she blurted out, “that you were with the monks; I mean, that you were one of them.” As soon as she spoke these words, which she had no conscious intention of uttering, their import struck her a heavy blow. Could she have found him only to lose him again for good? She felt unaccountably cold, picturing him sealed away in his crystalline quotidian virtue.

  “I might have been,” he murmured as they sat side-by-side on the bench. “I considered the monastic life very carefully. But in India, I was shown a sign, and I mean a literal sign that told me the obvious; that I should become a vet. So now I am in my third year at Guelph. I’ll do another year specializing in feline and canine neurological disease.”

  “India,” she echoed, in the dazed understanding this was where he had gone after the wreckage in Arles, the “huge place” he’d sought in which to lose himself.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was doubly blessed there. Unexpectedly blessed.” He put his hand to his cheek and she saw then why it was he looked so different. The unusual patches of pigmentation had disappeared and his complexion was now uniformly pale. She wondered what new freedoms this change had brought him and if he was at ease with them all. “My mother thinks it is a miracle,” he said, “and perhaps it was, although in that case I do not think I was deserving.”

  She was about to say something trite yet heartfelt, along the lines that no one could be more so, but stopped herself in time.

  “I have also been blessed,” she told him. “I have a wonderful mentor who was my guide when I stopped drinking — a professor of art history in New York. He is supporting my application to do a doctorate there under the world’s foremost scholar on my painter.” She worried that this sounded boastful and fell silent. Then she gestured to the painting on the wall in front of them, forgetting as she did so, that she would expose to him the livid circular white scar that marred her palm.

  “What happened to your hand, Agnes?”

  She recounted, as concisely as she could, the bitter tale of Kit’s immolation of the Villa Scimmia and Horace’s rescue of Hugh.

  He listened attentively, and in complete silence. Only when she was finished did he say, “That poor troubled woman. But it is Horace who probably has the hardest life of any of us. His love for her is like a devoted parent’s for a damaged child incapable of returning affection.”

  The peculiar emphasis he gave the word “dama
ged” alerted Agnes that he was aware of the worst of Kit’s crimes. “Did you know . . .?” She turned to him with the naked question in her eyes.

  “About what she did to Fergus? Yes. Horace confided in me after the May Day Ark meeting. ‘I know you can be trusted, Jolly Green Giant,’ he said. I suppose he felt he had to tell someone. He swore me to secrecy. Then about three years ago, I got an email from him that said simply: ‘Agnes knows.’ That was all. But I think Zeke knew the whole story too, or at least he guessed. Do you remember when we three talked in the crypt in the Alyscamps? You and I were trying to dissuade him from attempting that foolish stunt and he said ‘There’s something about the wire . . .’ Do you remember that? I think he had found out it was Fergus strung up the wire for Campbell.”

  “If only we had managed to stop Zeke.”

  “We blundered badly,” he answered. “It was a kind of group megalomania.”

  “And we will spend the rest of our lives making restitution,” she said.

  “Yes, but it will become habitual — through small, discrete acts of goodness, day by day.”

  “I walk dogs for the Humane Society,” she told him, “and I have applied to foster cats.” Small indeed, she thought, if not pitiably meagre.

  “And we will both make monthly donations to PETA and WSPA until we die,” he laughed.

  “And even afterwards,” she added.

  He asked: “Did your painter ever have lions in his work?”

  “Yes, magnificent, contemplative lions.”

  “Do you know what Wittgenstein said about lions?”

  She shook her head.

  “He said that if lions could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand what they were saying. I don’t believe that,” he declared with a hushed gravity.

  “No,” she told him, “nor do I.”

  “Roar,” he whispered. “Roar,” again.

  She laughed, thinking what a marvel these seamless thoughts were, his fitting into hers and hers into his, like the cricket into its stone, and the stone to the cricket.