Madonna of the Apes (4 page)

Chapter Seven

“A painting like that, you’d be a fool not to pay attention,” Fred said. Clay’s gesture toward the couch, inviting him to stay and reveal himself further, was ignored. “I’ll be off.” He turned, quickly enough that he could seem not to disregard the hand Clayton held out either in appeal, or in an effort to formalize their parting with a handshake.

Outside, the damp air blew in veils lit by the streetlamps. Fred walked down to the river and stood looking across black water. Cambridge, on the far bank, glittered with lights. The odd car moved on either side. No one was sleeping on the riverbank tonight, though it was warm. Either they’d been moved along, or they’d moved along on their own. It was a lot of real estate to be going so unused.

The ripples on the river carried light, and the river itself carried the reflections of lights. The river’s darkness was either its own darkness, or the reflected darkness of the sky. The landscape could use an ape or two to jazz it up and make this civilization seem less of a wasteland. Or were the apes intended to represent the spirit of the place? What did they mean to Leonardo? Even though the notions of evolution were far off in the late fourteen hundreds, and you’d be burned at the stake for entertaining such a theory, still, any fool could see the similarity between ape and human. The similarity between ape and God—that would have been a stretch, even for Darwin.

Fred lay on the grass for a while, but sleep eluded him. His senses had been too enlivened by the pheromones of danger, intrigue, greed, and by the compact web of emotions that clung to and emanated from the painting Clayton Reed had, so improbably, discovered and carried off with his assistance. There would be no sleep now. The situation the painting had come from—Franklin Tilley, the subterfuge, the gun and all that stage set, so elaborately arranged—it was just wrong. It worked at the edge of his brain like a blade that is sharp, but pitted with rust.

Fred walked back to Pekham Street and looked at the dark building from which the chest had come, and at its dark windows. It would have one apartment on each floor, with the exception that the first floor, with its own separate entrance, seemed to be given over to dental surgery. If it became important, or if it mattered, there would be people to ask about the tenant of the second floor. Or tenants, plural. That was a double bed.

Pekham Street rose at the same steep incline as did the rest of Beacon Hill. It was a hill too steep for comfortable grazing back in the days when it was farmed. It was also too steep for corn or wheat. But maybe an apple orchard?

Fred crossed the street and found a shadowed alley where he could stand looking over the building and consider the neighborhood. From old habit he made note of the vehicles parked in the area, and of their license plates. He made note of the time—3:47—when a light appeared on the second floor, burned for three minutes, and went out again. An answering impulse took him deeper into the alley for a similar amount of time.

“We apes,” he said, “why wouldn’t it be our instinct to offer the child a piece of fruit?” Or—here was potential fallacy. The action of the painting was frozen in time, and the human interpreter might well mistake in what direction the action had been tending. In so far as the picture had to be about a story, why would the narrative not be equally likely that the child had given his fig to the ape? And with success: the ape had taken the bait. What did the child want in return?

The painting was
about
the wilderness of divinity and, in turn, the wilderness of humanity. But what was the suggested narrative? It would fit a moment during the flight into Egypt. An angel having betrayed to Joseph Herod’s plan to massacre all the local boy children in order to exterminate the future Messiah, Joseph and Mary had slipped out of town with their child, leaving the other children to his fate. “Might have been nice to warn the other members of the nursery co-op,” Fred mused.

So, in the scene Leonardo had chosen to elaborate, Mary was either in an imagined Egypt, or on her way; the Messiah was taking entertainment where he could, and Joseph, off-camera stage left or right, was looking for more figs. The apes were not canonical. How many of them had there been? One either offered or accepted fruit. Two groomed each other. One scratched. Either two or three more climbed the rocks. Therefore five or six apes. The painting was not large enough to support more.

Suppose, under the Madonna’s robe, on the otherwise virgin arm, a snake tattoo?

What was that woman’s name? Candy? Angelica? Nobody is named Angelica. Paris? Maris? Ferriss? Nobody is named Ferriss either.

The Madonna in the painting might be expected to register alarm. But she would understand that the symbolic wilderness all around her conferred symbolic safety also. The child she held, all milky behind the ears, wasn’t going to be killed for another thirty-two years yet, and the apes, with their neatly parallel highlights of golden furry curls, had no interest in pulling her hair, tearing off her clothes, biting her buttocks, or stealing her baby away to raise him up as their Messiah. The painting invited thoughts of blasphemy—almost demanded them. But meanwhile, at the time of its creation, such thoughts were not to be thought. Therefore not to be imagined.

Still, the painter, by placing these elements together in this context, had allowed such grim imaginings any one of which, if spoken aloud in company, might lead to the stake. The collaboration between this human son of God and the most manlike of the animal kingdom felt perverse—an arrangement so wrong that it might contain even sexual implications.

The rocks in the background, superimposed upon a blue of Mediterranean tranquility, recalled Capri, that playground of Tiberius, Caligula and their pals. It was even now a watering spot for persons without visible moral ties. Who were the moral equivalents of Tiberius and Caligula in Leonardo’s day? Whoever they were, they certainly existed. They always exist.

Should he sleep at Bernie’s? It would be soft, and dry, and not that far away.

No, there was cardboard stacked in the alley, only slightly damp. Fred made a mattress of it and slept. If something moved on Pekham Street, he’d wake and see it.

Chapter Eight

Dogs woke him early, an inquisitive pair who sniffed at him half-heartedly until, concluding that he was not dead, they lost interest. It was almost six o’clock. He’d been here longer than he intended. He must have found a place the police were unused to checking for sleeping strangers who did not belong here, and probably nowhere else.

“Nothing for you today,” Fred told the dogs. Fourteen Pekham, almost opposite his alley, was still. It wasn’t his business. He had no business. No, wrong. Fred had an urgent, almost pleasant desire for coffee.

The drugstore at the foot of Charles Street let him buy coffee in a paper cup to drink by the river while the advancing daylight slowly replaced sleep. The river in the early morning steamed in a frankly bucolic way. It served as the common reference point for gulls, cormorants, a pair of mallard ducks, and swallows. Nothing commercial had any business on this river. But by seven the first of the institutional sculls, rowed by students, streaked slowly past, followed by the odd kayak.

Wind, blowing upstream at the same rate as the current flowed against it, seemed to hold the ripples steady, keeping the odd bits of floating material, leaves, sticks, or crumpled paper, in such ambivalence that they could not decide whether to obey the force of the current, give up, and move toward the Atlantic, or to give in to the wind and use it as an excuse to sail upstream. Since it was May the grass, though it was kept cut short, was struggling to bloom along with the clover. A few wild yellow irises bloomed against the bank, in places the mower could not reach. In the same protected areas milkweed was sending up its spikes. Swallows, swooping in swags after insects too small for anyone else to see, were too busy to make a sound.

The city was fully awake, with traffic bustling along the parkway separating the riverbank from the city. The river continued running against the wind. The wind continued blowing against the river. Two sculls from rival universities, happening to find themselves in the same stretch of water at the same time, moving upstream, started an improvised race too suddenly serious for the women in one boat and the men in the other to shout things at each other.

“Though it’s not my business,” Fred went on, “what’s Tilley doing this far from Atlanta, with a queen’s ransom in paintings he can’t understand?”

The coffee was sweet and black. It no longer held even the memory of heat. Fred took a sip and rolled it around his mouth. A thin man, wearing jeans and a Red Sox jacket and hat, wandered down the bank from the paved footpath, slapping a folded
Herald
against his thigh. He stood looking up and down the expanse of grass. The sun, burning out from the early mist, made a long shadow lurch away from the man’s feet so suddenly, with such visual violence, that the shadow should have made noise: a ripping or tearing sound.

“The box he sold us, was it inherited or stolen?” Fred said.

The thin man glanced at him as if he’d spoken aloud. Maybe he had. Being alone so much, perhaps he’d gotten into the habit.

The thin man with the paper began the elaborate calculations by which a single male on an expanse of public green decides the right place to sit and read his paper, given that the space is already occupied by another single male holding a paper cup and occasionally drinking from it. If the newcomer sits too close, it is a challenge, suggesting hostile intent. If he sits too far away that also is a challenge, suggesting that he suspects hostile intent on the part of the already established tenant.

“Correction. Nobody sold
us
anything,” Fred added, quietly this time.

The thin man moved three paces upstream and made his decision. He sorted through the paper, held out the Sports section to read, and used the news sections to keep the night damp from his skinny rump.

“Nice day,” Fred observed, gesturing toward the river. “Nice day for almost anything.”

“Nice day for being eaten alive by ants?” the man asked, not looking up from his paper. “Maybe. Nice day to drown in dung. Or lose your money then get home and find your house on fire. I see your point.”

Fred sipped at his cold coffee. “Thinking more about the weather,” he said. “Not globally.”

The man looked up from his paper. A screech and a honk behind them signaled trouble, but not trouble enough to make them turn around. “Nice day I grant you,” he said. “You said nice day for almost anything. That’s where you lost me. For example, say a taxi jumps the curb and takes us out like that.”

“That would be ironic,” Fred agreed. “Especially while we’re having this pleasant conversation.”

“Or the shooting war starts and there’s thirty-nine dead just in the next block, in the first hour.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Fred admitted.

“You see how many dogs shit on this grass?” the man said. “Nice day for that, too. And the birds, the geese, the insects. I keep something between me and the grass, I’ll tell you.” He patted the paper he was sitting on.

Two joggers passed on the worn path next to the water, a man and a woman, wearing the outfits, talking in a jerky way.

“Not to mention the wolves,” Fred said.

The skinny man was interested enough to put his paper down and give Fred his full attention. “What about the wolves? What wolves?”

“I don’t think we should disregard them,” Fred said. “Wolves hate that.”

Chapter Nine

Once his companion had moved off, Fred read the day’s news, which had been influenced by the damp impressions made by the man’s bony backside pressing the newsprint into the night dew.

“Hey, Fred!” The woman’s voice lifted his head. Anne? Janice? Annie? Fanny? Pamela? She’d dressed to run in red shorts and a white sleeveless top and she, with a female companion similarly dressed but with green shorts, halted and ran in place next to him, the river running behind them. Fred struggled to his feet. “Can’t stop,” she panted. Martha? Bertha? Paula? Marcelle? “Call me.”

“Great to meet you, Fred,” the other woman said and the two ran on, leaving behind the scents of soap and bed and effort. The snake moved with her arm, its swaying head poised on the back of her left shoulder, keeping track, like a bird riding an antelope. She turned and called back something else, but she was too far away to hear. Long hard legs she had; dark skin, dark hair. And she was funny, though she did not smile; at least in Fred’s presence she had not smiled, not that he’d seen, not even when something pleased her, or when she said something funny.

“As if it’s all work,” Fred said.

Clear five hundred years away and put Leonardo here, with his monkeys, his model, and the chubby baby. Who was the model for that Virgin? Was it a person? A comely boy? A genuine red-blooded woman with moving parts who, come eleven o’clock, protested, “Lenny, if you don’t let me get out from under this stuffed baby and take a leak, and maybe grab a cup of coffee…”

A woman tied into a whole world of worlds you couldn’t guess at or predict. Not that it mattered, and it wasn’t his business anyway. But, if there was a woman involved, who was she? It was still an interesting question. How much did Leonardo’s images (if the painter
was
Leonardo. Since it wasn’t Fred’s painting, it wasn’t Fred’s problem), how much did Leonardo’s images depend on being records of what he saw? With talent like his, could he not just up and draw whatever he wanted, measuring it against his memory of something he’d seen no matter how long ago?

The folds of the Virgin’s robe had been so sculpted and precise, they might have been carved from wood. The composite landscape, whose foreground came from a different country than its background, read more like the dreams of two different people pasted together, than like any places actually experienced. Those toppling rocks—gravity would not permit them to poise like that even long enough for a man to draw them. The world behind the Madonna was collapsing.

Was the whole thing not invention?

The baby didn’t look like anybody’s kid. But it wouldn’t. In those Renaissance pictures Jesus never looked like a real person, much less like a real baby. You’d be in trouble with the armed and dangerous forces of theology if you said, Looks just like his Mom. Even, Just like his Dad. But the apes, on the other hand, were observed. That painter had not only seen, he had studied apes. He knew how they spent their time, how similar they were to humans and, once you had acknowledged the similarity, how disquietingly different.

The fig, also, was observed. Its split, and the seeds exposed there, had been depicted with an almost pornographic care. Was the boy circumcised? Did anyone—woman, ape, or child—throw a readable shadow onto the rocky ground? The plants in the foreground were clearly enough differentiated to have names, but even so they were too perfect, their leaves and tendrils too symmetrical and parallel, to be found in nature.

This painter was pretending a world whose skin was perfect, though its elements were hostile. You wouldn’t trust the apes more than you would the rocks. You would not trust the colors, or the fine sheen of the paint, so glossy—was it oil paint or tempera?

Fred pulled clover out of the greenery next to him and looked at its clumsy, homely, serviceable lines. Once drawn by a Leonardo, it would be subverted into elegance. You might say that he studied nature. If Fred recalled his drawings, he was informed by nature. But he wouldn’t leave it alone. The curl of any stem he drew was guided by mathematical aesthetics rather than, as it was in natural fact, by the conflict between gravity and hydraulics or—maybe more accurately—by the conflict between life on one hand, and the combined forces of gravity and hydraulics on the other. Because gravity and hydraulics are on the same team. Would a da Vinci bother with as humble a flower as this little fist of white tassels?

“We’re assuming it is a Leonardo, aren’t we?” Fred said, standing again and folding the paper. He’d leave it on a bench, or somewhere where the next reader could find it.

Fred sauntered to the Boston Public Library’s main branch in Copley Square and stood with the others on Boylston Street until the main revolving doors to the new wing were opened at nine o’clock. He gave a cordial nod to the guard at the desk, glanced briefly at the exhibition concerning Artists of the Book in Boston, laid out in glass cases where the books could not be read, and took the stairs to the basement facilities.

When he found himself on the street floor again, he said to himself, “It’s not my business, but I’m interested,” and spent the rest of the day in the Fine Art department until, at eight o’clock, he noticed both that he was hungry and that the building would close in an hour anyway.