Hunting Piero Read online

  ©Wendy MacIntyre, 2017

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacIntyre, Wendy, 1947–, author

  Hunting Piero / Wendy MacIntyre.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77187-147-1 (softcover).–ISBN 978-1-77187-148-8 (HTML).–ISBN 978-1-77187-149-5 (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.I68H86 2017 C813'.54 C2017-905318-3

  C2017-905319-1

  Cover painting: Piero di Cosimo, Vulcan and Aeolus, c. 1490

  Author photo: Robert Woodbridge

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial assistance while writing this novel.

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.

  HUNTING PIERO

  For Robert Duncan

  CONTENTS

  ONE. A Renaissance Monster

  TWO. The Painter (1492)

  THREE. Out with the Toads

  FOUR. Pinto

  FIVE. The Punjabi Pyjamas

  SIX. The Painter (1495)

  SEVEN. An Incident in the Ark

  EIGHT. The Vulcan

  NINE. Piero and the Snake Necklace

  TEN. Pinto Reflects on a Soldier

  ELEVEN. The Demonstration

  TWELVE. The Wire

  THIRTEEN. The Rack

  FOURTEEN. The Christmas Break

  FIFTEEN. The Foreigner

  SIXTEEN. May Day

  SEVENTEEN. The Alyscamps

  EIGHTEEN. The Video

  NINETEEN. A Soured Bacchanal

  TWENTY. Laelaps

  TWENTY-ONE. On the Fatehpur Sikri Road

  TWENTY-TWO. A Familiar Face

  TWENTY-THREE. Villa Scimmia

  TWENTY-FOUR. The Midnight Visit

  TWENTY-FIVE. The Flight

  TWENTY-SIX. The Painter, April 12, 1522

  TWENTY-SEVEN. Three Years Later

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  A Renaissance Monster

  AGNES VANE WAS CERTAIN SHE heard the actual thump of a heart coming from the first work of Piero di Cosimo’s she ever saw. This was a close-up detail, on the cover of a book in her mother’s study, showing the monster from whose clutches Perseus rescued Andromeda. He was magnificently grotesque: part crocodile, part rhinoceros, part duck-billed platypus. She was trying hard not to think about the dreaded consultation later that day, so it was a relief to stare enthralled for some minutes at this fantastic, multihued sea beast with his piebald copper and sea-green flesh, and the great lacy, coral-coloured ruff that was either his ear, or some bizarre fungus he had sprouted from living so long in the ocean. His long curving tusks were beaded with fine bubbles. His eyebrows were erect little thickets. His spiralling, armoured tail culminated in a graceful pennant.

  The portrait amazed and confused her. This picture was such a contrast to the flawless angelic faces and bodies her mother usually studied. Was there really a Renaissance artist who specialized in monsters? What on earth was the book doing here?

  Agnes’s mother was a university lecturer in art history, and her grand passion was for the works of Sandro Botticelli. For as long as Agnes could remember, the fair-haired goddesses and dryads of Botticelli’s Primavera had stared out smugly from the wall above her mother’s desk. Agnes found all these female paragons chilling in their perfection. They had no depth, complexity or surging blood, no quirk of character that made them memorable. They might as well be fashioned of Perspex, or something thoroughly bland, like cream cheese. She did not think she would want to touch them.

  On the other hand, were she to reach out, she was convinced the sea monster’s flesh would feel warm despite his ocean habitat. His loose upper lip drooped like an old hound’s, and his upturned pig-like snout shot a jet of clear water. But more than anything else, it was his visible anguish that made him so terribly real to her. The hurt evident in his eye and in his open, sorrowing mouth, was one she recognized. She had seen this look in her own mirrored pupils so often: the molten core of pain and bewilderment at the countless ways she could still be made to suffer because of her ugliness. As yet, she had failed to grow the “thicker skin” which her parents and the school counsellor were always urging upon her. And here — in the slashes the sea-beast bore on his shoulder and in the blood that streamed down his mottled neck — she saw that not even he had skin coarse enough to deflect the strikes of the little human assailant who stood on his back hewing at his flesh with a curved sword. Agnes now imagined her tormentors straddling her, squashing her lungs, driving their rapiers into the moist, pink chambers of her heart. Hey Monkey-girl! Freak-face. Do us a favour and put a bag on your head, baboon baby. In the monster’s doom, she saw her worst fears realized: others found him so repulsive, they must kill him.

  She knew his pain, and yearned to tell him so. As she bent closer over the image, she saw something else that surprised and thrilled her. Along with the hurt, there was the unmistakable glow of love in the animal’s eye. The look he directed at the half-naked woman, bound with scarlet ties to a dead tree on the shore, was unquestionably tender and adoring. The monster had captured and bound this young woman because he was in love. And she understood perfectly, having indulged in such a foolish notion herself. How else would she ever get a good-looking guy into her bedroom, except to kidnap him, or even more degrading perhaps, pay him for sex? “I understand,” she whispered, as if the creature in the picture was indeed alive and might take comfort from her words.

  She knew it was her own “freakishness” that pulled her to the monster and made her pity his plight. Any normal-looking girl would automatically identify with the captive maiden, and cheer on her handsome rescuer as he slit the sea-beast’s vital tendons. The artist showed this smug little hero in his elegant green and gold attire three separate times: first, arriving on the scene, flying through the air with the help of his sleek winged boots; in the centre, slashing away at his prey; and finally, in the lower right corner, being fawned upon by the liberated glowing girl and her friends and family in their elaborate headdresses. How very clever of the artist to depict all these successive incidents, together, inside the one frame: the maiden abducted and bound and her relatives’ lamentation, the rescue, the supposed triumph.

  But the painter’s master stroke was the way he had set the fantastic monster at the very centre of the canvas, so that all the little human figures seemed to whirl around him, as did the circle of events, and time itself. Agnes was certain the artist loved the sea beast best. That was why he showed the creature clinging so tenaciously and nobly to life. The longer she looked at the picture, the more certain she was of the artist’s intentions. This was the portrait of a creature he cherished, who had come to him perhaps in a dream or in a waking vision. All the human figures, despite their pretty profiles, intense emotions, and elegant hats and cloaks, were secondary. They swirled around the monster as planets do around the s
un.

  “Isn’t he hideous?”

  Agnes was so wrapped in the picture’s spell she had not heard her mother come into the room. An astonishing rage flamed in her head. She had been so happy caught up in the mystery of the painting. Her mother had ruined it.

  “The publisher sent me this book to review,” her mother sighed. “But there is nothing I can do, I’m afraid. Or not with any degree of objectivity.”

  “Why?”

  “Piero di Cosimo has always made me uneasy; I mean his art illustrating ancient myths, the paintings he is best known for. His religious works don’t bother me, or rather, they leave me indifferent. But paintings like this one,” her mother gestured to the book’s cover, “with Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the repugnant monster, they leave me unsettled. In fact, I find his secular paintings repellent. There are some really nightmarish images that are best avoided altogether.”

  Agnes felt her mind buzzing, a frenzied bee trapped in a glass jar. “You’re wrong,” she kept thinking. “You’re not looking at this picture properly.” She was about to say this aloud when her mother spoke again.

  “It’s as if Piero di Cosimo was out of step with the humanism of the Renaissance, its very light and hope. Or perhaps he was simply perverse or a misanthrope. Look, I’ll show you what I mean . . .”

  She flipped through the book until she found the reproduction she wanted. “Steel yourself,” she told Agnes, “to look at something brutal and despairing. I saw this canvas when I was about your age, at the Met in New York. It was a school trip and this di Cosimo, God knows why, was part of the set gallery tour.

  “When the guide gathered us in front of this painting and started pointing out details, I felt my knees wobble. I came very close to fainting. Our teacher helped me to a bench and told me to put my head between my knees. I was so embarrassed.”

  Agnes had not been listening for some seconds. She had entered a shrouded wood, where cruel-looking satyrs and men wearing animal skins about their hips were slaughtering forest creatures with pronged wooden clubs and their own naked, murderous hands. A man was strangling a wolf, which he had hoisted up and gripped against his chest. A satyr, his enormous muscular back striped in shadow, swung his cudgel overhead, about to bring it down upon the head of a lion that had torn open the chest of a large grey bear and was chewing on its heart. A smaller bear, perhaps the dead bear’s mate, had sunk its claws into the lion’s head and back, and at the same time, turned around to snarl at a human figure who gripped the bear from behind. This figure, Agnes registered with some dismay, was a woman. She could make out the shape of her breasts under the tunic of fur.

  The entire scene shocked her, and was at the same time deeply familiar. The animals in the painting were so beautiful, even in death. Her heart cheered on all those who were managing to escape, beyond the borders of the painting, toward the west. Among the animals fleeing she recognized an ox, a wild cat, another bear, a stag, a white wolf, and two small monkeys, one dark brown and one slate grey.

  Monkeys in fifteenth-century Italy! How astounding. And these two were so lifelike, she knew the artist must have studied the actual animals closely to recreate the steadiness of their bright, round gaze. Run, her heart cried out to all the creatures in flight. Escape the killing ground. Go quickly.

  She scanned the whole grim death-pageant again, forcing herself to look hard at details that had doubtless sickened her mother twenty years ago when she’d stood face-to-face with this canvas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She saw a dead dog, on its back, its legs contorted by rigor mortis. She abruptly perceived what was actually happening with the naked man who knelt on the back of a rearing white horse; he was choking the horse to death. She had to look away from the animal’s twisted neck and bared teeth. It was then she spied the third monkey, clinging to the top of a tree in the painting’s foreground. It had its little face turned around in the direction of the fleeing animals. Was he yearning to clamber down and join them, or was he a symbol of persistent innocence, clinging to his tree-mast high above the slaughter?

  “Appalling,” she heard her mother say. “How could we bear it, if life were like that?”

  The look Agnes turned on her mother was incredulous. Did she really not know? The last desperate kick of the strangled horse, the frantic effort of the little female bear to save her dying mate, the tiny monkeys screeching in terror as they ran — weren’t all these things happening now, and forever, and to human animals as well? So stunned was she by her mother’s mental and emotional retreat, she felt dizzy. Then it hit her, with a devastating intensity, just how insulated her extremely pretty mother was: adored and protected by her husband, cherished by her two daughters; admired, even adulated, by her students. The sole blot on her mother’s existence was the face of her eldest daughter, the “little freak” who spoiled the family’s perfection.

  When they were children, kindly, sweet-tempered Phoebe had always tried to keep Agnes from eavesdropping on the comments that would inevitably start up among the less sensitive of her parents’ party guests.

  “What a pity!”

  “She will have a hard time of it, poor child.”

  “Handsome parents, and the other girl such a stunner. Well, one never knows, does one? Is she adopted, by any chance? But surely . . .?”

  “A regular little monster.”

  This last remark, which admittedly Agnes heard only once inside her parents’ home, was the one she could never eradicate. The word lodged with her forever, scored, she was sure, deep into the tissue of her heart and brain.

  Was that the reason her parents had offered her the “option” of cosmetic surgery? Because they were ashamed of the way she looked? Or was it because they were sick of being asked if she was adopted, given the fact she looked so utterly unlike them and her blonde, breathtakingly pretty sister, Phoebe?

  “Please eat something, Agnes,” her mother said, closing the book and pushing it away with a little shudder. “You can’t go to your appointment on an empty stomach.”

  Agnes ignored this stupid remark. “If you don’t want it,” she said, speaking as calmly as possible to control her quickening breath, “may I have this book?”

  The look of doubt that shadowed her mother’s face was so fleeting Agnes was not quite certain she had actually seen it. Or perhaps it was a look of foreboding? Whatever, the peculiar expression was gone in a flicker. “Yes, of course. Take it.”

  Agnes immediately clutched the book to her chest.

  “Be careful,” her mother called out. “There is a black . . .”

  The rest of the sentence was lost to her as she sped along the hall and up the stairs to the sanctuary of her room. He was hers now. She hid the book beneath Granny’s quilt in her battered toy chest, as if she were afraid her mother might take it back from her, just as they were threatening to take away her known face.

  The day her parents had broached the idea of having her features surgically remade, she’d been utterly unprepared.

  “Just for a consultation, honey,” her father said.

  “We’ll be with you, Agnes darling,” her mother said.

  Agnes had sat still, with the floor lurching up at her. She’d gripped the arms of her chair convulsively and pushed her mother’s hand away. She’d flushed hotly; then had felt terribly cold. If her own parents could not accept her face as it was, what hope was there that she might one day find sexual love, freely and willingly given?

  She’d begun to sob, soundlessly, but so compulsively her chest grew tight and sore. Her mother and father both had assumed the tears signalled relief. The consultation with the surgeon, they kept reassuring her, would give her all the information she needed to make her decision. They passed her the glossy pamphlets they had collected, with the seductive before-and-after photos of transfigured clients. Her nose could be lengthened and narrowed, her jaw reshaped, and her upper lip shortened. She could not be made into a beauty, but by submitting to scalpel and laser, the chances were ver
y good that she would look “normal”. She would know the great joy of passing unnoticed in a crowd.

  After the operations, she would undergo a long period of healing. She’d set herself to imagining the pull and throb of new skin knitting together, and the worse agony of waiting for the bandages to be removed and a startling truth revealed. And here her thoughts would stick badly. Would her new “created” face really be true?

  As she had expected, Agnes could eat nothing for breakfast. Even sipping milky coffee was an effort because her throat felt so constricted. Every muscle in her body shrank from the looming interview. The word “sacrifice” kept coming to her, its harsh sounds so uncomfortably like the sharpness and hardness of the cutting implements the surgeon would wield. She saw herself, only half-anaesthetized, splayed on a stone slab. Her body was wrapped in a white cloth, but her face was quite naked. Her face was to be the sacrifice. She would offer up her “ugliness” to the chill purity of the knife.

  At the consultation, she was relieved that the surgeon’s hands were cool, rather than cold. His name was Dr. Carruthers. He touched her face softly, with immaculate fingertips, here on the brow, there on the nose, then on the upper lip, indicating where the incisions would be made. Once he had finished speaking, she felt tears flowing. She had the small consolation that she was managing to cry quietly. The surgeon passed her a box of facial tissue. He smiled as he did so, a smile she understood he intended to be compassionate. But she perceived no warmth whatsoever in his eyes.

  “Take your time,” were his parting words to her.

  She was grateful that he did not push her to accept this offer of another face. Nor did her parents. “Let us know when you have made your decision,” they told her. And then they let her be.

  Over the weeks that followed, Agnes had a recurring dream that left her restless and questing after its meaning. She was striding through a landscape she did not recognize. This place had the atmosphere of a desert, yet on either side there were great-shouldered mountains. They looked like sleeping beasts who might suddenly wake and walk with her, keeping her company. Some of the mountains sprouted crags in grotesque shapes like hunched and grimacing gargoyles, yet these ones too seemed companionable rather than frightening. Despite the fact she walked alone in this craggy world, she had the distinct feeling she had been preceded; that thousands upon thousands had travelled this way before her. Ahead, where the mountains parted, she glimpsed a blue so clear she thought it must be the gathering place of kindly spirits.