Angelica Lost and Found

by Russell Hoban

  ‘No, I haven’t. He’s not a very nice man and I got away from him after that one time. I’ve had some gallery business to catch up with and since then I’ve been looking for you. Which hasn’t been that easy. Now that I’ve found you can you forgive me?’

  ‘If it was only the one time.’

  ‘It was. Listen to this.’ She had a book in her hand, and by the light of a little torch she began to read:

  ‘ “Non è finto il destrier, ma naturale,

  ch’una giumenta genero d’un grifo:

  simile al padre avea la piuma e l’ale …” ’

  A thrill ran through me like electricity, I felt the blood coursing through my body as my wings stiffened.

  ‘That’s the hippogriff in Orlando Furioso!’ I said. ‘That’s me! You’ve brought me Ariosto!’

  ‘So are we going to fly out of here or what?’

  It took me a moment to grasp the reality of this new situation.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we’re going to fly out of here.’

  ‘Where to?’

  I was taken aback by her direct question. I had given no thought to a destination. Back into the world of da Carpi’s painting? No, that was the reality I’d broken out of to get to San Francisco. Angelica had spoken of what we were allowed by ‘the story we are part of ’.

  ‘Here, then,’ I said to her, ‘is an anomaly: we purpose using Ariosto’s words to power our flight out of Ariosto’s story.’

  ‘But we’re already out of his story, aren’t we? San Francisco isn’t in Orlando Furioso. I’m having a hard time getting my head around this! What do you think we should do?’

  I closed my eyes and the golden sunlight of Rome, its seven hills and the ruins of the Colosseum flashed into my mind.

  ‘Rome!’ I said. ‘We’ll fly to Rome on the Maestro’s words and continue our own story there.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll get away with it?’

  ‘ “Dum spiro, spero,” baby, if I may speak classical and modern at the same time.’

  ‘Gimme an asterisk.’

  ‘ “While I breathe, I hope.” ’

  ‘You’re one ballsy guy, Vol.’

  ‘Hung like a hippogriff, piccina.’

  ‘It’s all very well to kid around but this thing we’re doing could be the end of us if it goes wrong.’

  ‘Let’s just do it, OK?’

  ‘Can you navigate in this fog? There’s no visibility at all.’

  ‘We’ll climb above it.’

  ‘Yes, but you must remember not to fly over the island where Angelica is chained to the rock.’

  ‘I’ll remember. It gets cold high up and it’s a wet night. Will you be warm enough?’

  ‘I’m wearing a heavy woollen sweater and foul-weather yachting gear, OK?’

  ‘You’ll have to hold on tight – there’s no saddle or bridle for you.’

  ‘Not to worry – I’ve got rope to tie myself on with.’

  ‘Do that and tell me when you’re ready for take-off.’

  ‘Ready now.’

  ‘Start reading again.’

  ‘ “Non è finto il destrier, ma naturale,

  ch’una giumenta genero d’un grifo:

  simile al padre avea la piuma e l’ale,

  li piedi anteriori, il capo è il grifo;

  in tutte l’altre membra parea quale

  era la madre, e chiamarsi ippogrifo;

  che nei monti Rifei vengon, ma rari,

  molto di là dagli aghiacciati mari …” ’

  I felt the power in my wings and there came a rush of air beneath me as we rose into the fog.

  ‘Yes, oh yes!’ said Angelica. ‘Welcome to Volatore Air!’

  Once above the fog I was able to see the North Star and the Wain and I set my course for Italy with a cold wind against us.

  ‘This is like a dream,’ Angelica shouted above the wind and the whoosh of my wingbeats. ‘I think we are in our own time which is outside of time.’

  ‘We are together, that is enough.’ I had some doubts about the outcome of our flight but I kept them to myself.

  ‘But there’s something you have to understand. Listen, Vol – is it OK if I call you Vol?’

  ‘It’s cool. I can speak modern but I must not lose altitude.’

  ‘About our togetherness – I’m not a reincarnation of Ariosto’s Angelica, I’m Angelica Greenberg and I run a San Francisco art gallery in the year 2008. And I have to say I’m a lot nicer than Ariosto’s Angelica. He himself says, “She holds the world in such contempt and scorn,/No man deserving her was ever born.” She uses men when she needs help, she makes them think she’s hot to trot, then as soon as she’s safe she’s off without so much as a goodbye kiss. To put it crudely, she’s a cock-teaser.’

  ‘The ordinary rules do not apply to her. She is beyond such limitations.’

  ‘That may be but she’s nothing like me.’

  ‘No matter; the idea of Angelica may manifest itself in various ways but it persists and you are it.’

  ‘All right. Let’s talk about you for a moment. Apparently you’re making your own decisions now but in that part of Canto IV that I read you Atlante was your master.’

  ‘That necromancer! Although by artifice he made me do as I was bid, my heart’s desire from him I kept well hid.’

  ‘Vol, you’re speaking like the English version of Orlando Furioso.’

  ‘Sometimes emotion makes me slip into rhyme.’

  ‘Have you flown this route before?’

  ‘Probably. I don’t remember.’

  ‘Atlante used to do the navigating, right?’

  ‘Angelica, what are you getting at?’

  ‘The anomaly you spoke of earlier – we’re trying to get away to our own story by flying on the power of Ariosto’s words, right?’

  ‘Right. We talked this over and decided to chance it.’

  ‘I think our plan’s not working. Call it woman’s intuition. Keep on flapping your wings and we’ll find ourselves over that island where Angelica’s chained to her rock and Ruggiero’s riding to her rescue on your back.’

  ‘I won’t allow that. From this time forward I am my own hippogriff.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but there’s another thing that’s bothering me. Maybe this is the wrong time to bring it up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Vol, sweetheart, tell me, what sort of future can we have together, in or out of this story: an imaginary beast and an actual woman? You and I might couple from time to time but we don’t constitute a proper couple. I’m only human and I ought to have a human lover.’

  She was voicing the doubts that had long been lurking at the back of my mind but now I was too preoccupied to answer. Oceans and continents sped beneath me faster and faster. Something was pushing me in a new direction.

  ‘Well,’ shouted Angelica, ‘I’m waiting to hear your thoughts.’

  ‘We can’t go into that now. I’m being forced off my course.’

  ‘I was afraid this was going to happen. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Whatever I can. Don’t distract me.’

  ‘We’re over water – are you going to ditch?’

  ‘Quiet! I have no control whatever.’

  The water was behind us and the ground was coming up fast.

  ‘There’s that lousy island with Angelica chained to her rock and that monster with a hard-on,’ shouted Angelica. ‘Ugh, I can smell him from here. Oh God, are we going to crash?’

  ‘Worse, I fear. Try to prepare yourself.’

  Even as I spoke she found herself chained to the rock, clothing and foul-weather gear gone, naked as the day she was born. Orca’s roars took on a throaty note.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ she wailed. ‘Am I the original Angelica now?’

  I was too busy to answer, finding myself saddled and bridled with Ruggiero in charge of me. He put me into a dive but he was overly cautious and pulled me up too soon. His lance did little more than scratch Orca’s back, and
the monster laughed at us as we flew up out of harm’s way.

  ‘You’re some hero!’ I said to Ruggiero, lapsing into modern. ‘Why don’t you hit him with your handbag?’

  He, of course, did not understand a word I said.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted. ‘One more time!’ Another dive, another pull-up.

  ‘Maybe you should take up some other line of work,’ I said, ‘or maybe you’re hoping Orca will laugh himself to death.’

  Angelica, writhing in terror against her chain, chose this moment to assert her religious affiliation.

  ‘Hear, oh Israel!’ she cried. ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’

  ‘You’re a day late and a shekel short with Jehovah,’ I shouted to her. ‘Now we’re stuck with Ariosto.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’ she shouted back. ‘Is somebody going to rescue me or what? Right now Orca seems to be ahead on points.’

  After a few more tries Ruggiero abandoned his Orca-killing charade and we swooped down for him to unchain Angelica and airlift her to safety, thus saving her life while imperilling her chastity. As we did so there came to me some half-memory of a legendary ring.

  ‘Keep your eye on her ring,’ I said as Ruggiero put Angelica on my pillion seat and we took off. As always he understood not a word.

  Enjoying the weight of her sweet buttocks on my back I resigned myself to whatever disappointment was coming next. Ruggiero’s mind was an easy one to read – he mostly had one thing on it. As Angelica clasped him from behind he could feel the heat of her breasts right through his armour and he was confident of claiming his reward for the rescue. As soon as he descried a suitable landing spot he put us down and began to struggle out of his armour, somewhat impeded by his erection. Cursing and sweating, inspired by Angelica’s nakedness and maddened by his heroic tumescence he strove to make himself available for the longed-for embrace.

  The ring? It was still in my mind but there was nothing I could do to prevent what would happen next. I could see Angelica waiting in fear and trembling for Ruggiero’s onslaught but then she looked at her hand and there it was, the golden ring to break all spells and render its wearer invisible. Immediately she put it in her mouth and disappeared from view.

  Ruggiero’s frustration was nothing to me but how was I to find her again? With my animal sense of smell I detected her fragrance lingering on the air, compounded with the salt-sea tang and the sharp scent of her fear. But she was for the present lost to me and I was in myself confused and lost; Ariosto’s words had left me!

  I was aloft but without focus and direction. Why did I not fall? Something was sustaining me, but what? On the screen of my mind there flickered, like summer lightning, scenes of battle and courtship, chivalry and treachery, life and death in rapidly changing colours, and with them came, as from a great distance, their sounds. I understood then that the story, not only of Ariosto but of Angelica and me, had moved away from me. I flew in aimless circles, asking questions of the air that gave no answers. I had broken rules not allowed to be broken; what new rules was I now bound by?

  Angelica Greenberg who is also Ariosto’s Angelica, you and I belong together; there is a mystery between us; I must find you!

  Chapter 15

  Yesterday’s Seguidillas

  On the screen of my mind there flicker, like summer lightning, scenes of battle and courtship, chivalry and treachery, life and death in rapidly changing colours, and with them come, as from a great distance, their sounds.

  Here am I, Angelica Greenberg of San Francisco, but at the same time I am Ariosto’s Angelica who was chained to a rock to await Orca’s pleasure. Shall I always be this double Angelica? I am for the present out of the action as the story moves elsewhere.

  There is a golden ring in my mouth. I put it on my finger and consider what to do next. I am in a clearing in a wood. There is a stream. I don’t want to go anywhere in particular and I really don’t want to do anything but think about Volatore, my imaginary lover who covered me as the griffin covered his mother. Bestiality. Why does my body thrill to the memory of it? I have had him as animal and I could have him as man but I can’t have him as both at once. Not only does my body crave him but my soul also; that’s the mystery of it and I am chained to that mystery as I was to my rock.

  I know that he longs for me as I long for him. Obviously we’ve been dropped from Ariosto’s story. What about our own story? We weren’t meant to have our own story, is that it? Against the rules evidently. So where does that leave us?

  My mind turned to my fifteen-years-gone father, and on impulse I rang up the KDFC Morning Show and got Hoyt Smith.

  ‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘How’s this day looking where you are?’

  ‘Backward.’

  ‘At?’

  ‘The past.’

  ‘ “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” ’

  ‘Don’t they just.’

  ‘Where in the present are you calling from?’

  ‘The Eidolon Gallery.’

  ‘That’s where there was a show with nudes on Harley Davidsons, right?’

  ‘Right. Ossip Przewalski.’

  ‘His paintings stay in the mind.’

  ‘Yes, and naked women have been moving off the shelves like hotcakes.’

  ‘I could talk to you all day but the clock is telling me to move on. What’s your pleasure?’

  ‘Would you play the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco?’

  ‘Gladly.’

  ‘From Carmencita.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Whoever’s listening.’

  ‘Now for a little Rossini: “Una voce poco fa” from Il barbiere di Siviglia with Maria …’

  I switched off. I know it was callas of me but I wasn’t in the mood for anything that light-hearted. I had left my number and Smith promised to phone me to say when Nabucco’s Greenbergs would be hanging their harps on the airwaves.

  Thinking my thoughts I drifted through the morning with nothing much doing at the gallery but wandering lookers who didn’t know their ass from third base. In the afternoon I set off for my weekly session with Professor Beard. Not my idea. I had told my doctor, Dr Sugarman, that personal problems were getting me down and he referred me to Beard.

  ‘He’s English,’ he said. ‘Very advanced. He studied with Karl Kleinkopf who had his analysis with Wilhelm Gutschnerz who had his with Sigmund Freud.’

  From what I’d heard, the last time Freud was at the cutting edge of shrinkage was back when Model Ts were rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line. But I didn’t want to disillusion Doc Sugarman so I said OK I’d give Beard a try. Which is why I found myself watching the beardless Prof Beard’s prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall as he spoke. Beard had a weak chin, rimless glasses, no wings.

  ‘And when did you last see your father, heh heh?’ said the (no) Beard.

  ‘Why the heh heh?’ I said.

  ‘Nervous tic, ignore it. When did you?’

  ‘Last see my father? When I was fifteen, the day before he took off with a lap dancer.’

  ‘A dancer from Lapland? Where did he find her?’

  ‘In his lap, where else? What’s this got to do with my reality problems?’

  ‘I have in mind your fascination with sexual intercourse with animals.’

  ‘Only my hippogriff, and he’s imaginary.’

  ‘Quite: an imaginative displacement of your sexual longings for your father,’ said the Prof. ‘We’ve talked about this.’

  ‘You have,’ I said, ‘but you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘Which tree would you suggest?’

  By then I was no longer listening.

  ‘Carmencita’, my father used to call me, ‘Zingarachen’ and ‘My little gypsy’. He loved opera and his favourite was Carmen. He had an album with Agnes Baltsa in the title role and when Mom got sick of hearing it – he always played it so the windows rattled – she threw it out, knowing he’d know he hadn
’t lost it but ready to charge him with making it disappear if he said he couldn’t find it. There were tottering stacks of LPs and books in the studio; he had no indexing system, plus treacherous hands that did make things disappear. Regularly. About a third of his working time was spent in searching through the tottering stacks for the urgently needed opera, cantata or book, with cursing, whimpering and shouting. Then he’d buy again the lost treasure. He never lost Carmen though, always kept it on top of the opera stack. He knew Mom had thrown it out so he bought another one that cost three times as much as the one the garbage men had taken away. It was a recognised form of warfare between the two of them and they both knew the rules of engagement.

  ‘Listen to that mezzo,’ he would say. ‘It’s like silk but Baltsa puts a razor edge on it when the scene calls for it. If I could draw and paint the way she sings I’d draw and paint much better than I do.’ And he’d sing the seguidilla off-key:

  “Près des remparts de Seville,

  Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia …”

  and dance me around with a lot of stamping and a rose in the buttonhole of his shirt if one was available. While Mom ran the vacuum cleaner to drown out the noise. So they each got some satisfaction.

  Dad took nothing with him when he left, so I ended up with the tottering stacks. I listened through the operas and indexed them. It was nothing from Carmen that attached itself to my AWOL father, but the famous chorus from Nabucco, ‘Va, pensiero …’ ‘Fly, thought, on wings of gold …’ as the Jews, all of them named Greenberg, were led away into captivity. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows and tried to figure out whose fault it was.

  ‘Shit happens,’ said my best friend Rosie Margolis. ‘It’s called a mid-life crisis. My dad did the same thing.’

  ‘Lap dancer?’ It was Rosie’s mother who had reported the breaking news of Dad’s Entführung from the domestic hearth.