Angelica's Grotto

by Russell Hoban

  ‘The words you mutter, the words you write – are you hearing or seeing anything unusual?’

  ‘Unusual compared to what I ordinarily say or write but nothing remarkable – mostly rude words and sexual thoughts of the sort that might slip out when I’m drunk; it’s pretty much what was described in the Times piece: there’s no censor on duty.’

  ‘Would you say, Mr Klein, that when your inner censor’s working it has to work pretty hard? Or not?’

  ‘What would be your guess, Dr DeVere? Would you expect the inner censor of a little old man to have to work harder than that of a large young man? Or not?’

  ‘I see your point but I’d like to hear you spell it out for me if you would.’

  ‘All right. I have a certain reputation in the world of the arts but in the streets of daily life I am an object of no significance to anyone.’ He told DeVere what he had told Mrs Lichtheim about his apparent invisibility. ‘I won’t bore you with more examples,’ he said, ‘but my inner censor used to be kept pretty busy.’

  ‘So you’ve got a lot of anger in you. What about the rude words and sexual thoughts?’

  ‘I sometimes think a dirty old man might be the only kind of old man there is.’

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘My interest in women has become obsessive; one of these days I’ll be hit by a car while crossing the road with my eyes on a female bottom. I marvel at the action of hips and thighs, the articulation of knees and ankles. I love to see good flesh over good bones, women walking around in really classy skeletons and moving like thoroughbreds. The streets are full of beauties and I can’t stop looking and wanting.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘I was. Her name was Hannelore. She was eighteen years younger than I when she moved in with me in 1970; I was forty-five; she was twenty-seven. She’d been my editor on the Daumier book I did for Hermetica. She was with me for seven years, then one day when I was at the British Library Reading Room she set the timer clock to start Die Schöpfung on the record player about the time I was expected home. Then she emptied a bottle of Tomazipan tablets and half a bottle of gin. When I got there she’d been dead for about three hours and the chorus were belting out ‘Und es ward Lichf. She was a very methodical person.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a few moments of silence, ‘Do you know why she did it? Was there a note?’

  ‘No. She was a mystery to me, and as time passes I know less and less about her. I think about her all the time; now that I have no words in my head I see her face and I talk to myself. I was never her kind of person; she liked to go out and I like to stay in; she liked parties and I like to work. I got her by being a good wooer but I never properly recognised the uniqueness of her. She was a handsome woman and tall. People wanted to be thought well of by her.’

  Dr DeVere paused for another sympathetic silence, then he said, ‘Any children?’

  ‘No. She had two miscarriages, then a hysterectomy.’

  ‘Was she very depressed after the hysterectomy?’

  ‘Very. Actually she never got over it.’

  ‘You’ve been alone since she died?’

  ‘There’ve been women from time to time but nothing that lasted. I’ve never been a whole lot of fun to be with except at the beginning when I was courting Hannelore. What I had with her only happens once.’

  ‘How do you feel about your life right now?’

  ‘I’m afraid I might lose control altogether.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Touch the woman ahead of me on the escalator in the Underground, or start making indecent proposals.’

  ‘Do you think you’re a danger to the public at large?’

  ‘More to myself. As you see.’

  ‘I know this is a difficult time for you, Mr Klein. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to live without the constant companion of an inner voice but it must be a terrifying kind of aloneness. And I can understand how frightened you are of what you might do or say. What we categorise as normal behaviour is an unbelievably complex and fragile system of the most intricate checks and balances. I’m always amazed that it doesn’t break down more often than it does. Let’s go back to the moment when you lost your inner voice: can you remember the very last thing it said? After you read the Times piece, did it say something before it went silent?’

  ‘It said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

  ‘Some might say that your It wanted to plunge you into inner voicelessness.’

  ‘My It?’

  DeVere opened a desk drawer, took out The Book of the It by Georg Groddeck, and handed it to Klein.

  Klein held the book in his hands. It was a hardback, small and compact, heavy for its size. There came into his mind the Big Little Books of his small-town childhood in Pennsylvania. He used to buy them at the local Woolworth’s, called ‘the five-and-dime’. They were perfectly square little hardbacks about six by six inches and three inches thick with board covers. They were printed on coarse paper with text on one side and a black-and-white picture on the other of each spread: Mickey Mouse at Blaggard Castle; Terry and the Pirates; Dick Tracy. Unlike modern comic books, they had only the occasional speech balloon. He recalled the feel of them in the hand: pleasantly chunky.

  ‘Have you read this?’ said DeVere.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ He turned the pages, came to LETTER II, and read:

  I hold the view that man is animated by the Unknown, that there is within him an ‘Es’, an ‘It’, some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does, and what happens to him.

  ‘OK, I’m animated by the Unknown,’ said Klein as he closed the book. ‘What else is new?’

  ‘Groddeck was contemporary with Freud and Freud was so impressed by the It idea that he developed his theory of the Id from it. It’s the sort of book that got passed around when Ronnie Laing was doing his thing and lecturing barefoot in the seventies. A lot of what Groddeck says is utter bollocks but this idea of the mysterious It is a useful one, I think.’

  ‘What’re you leading up to, and should we burn some incense?’

  ‘I’m leading up to asking you if you’ve been friends with your It.’

  ‘I’ve been friends with my head, or I thought I was.’

  ‘All right – forget about Groddeck for now; do you think of your inner voice as coming from you or is there another entity that speaks those words?’

  ‘There’s nobody in my head but me, and the me in my head has gone silent.’

  DeVere found nothing to say for a few moments while he rubbed the back of his skull as if to stimulate that part of his brain. Presently a light bulb appeared over his head.

  ‘What?’ said Klein.

  ‘If you were now to visualise a speaker in your head other than yourself, who or what would it be?’

  Now it was Klein’s turn to rub his head. After a time he said, ‘I’ve just been looking at Oannes. Do you remember Number 14 in Redon’s lithographic series. Tentation de Sainte-Antoine? The god who’s half fish and half human: “I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.” He’s hovering half-seen in a sea of black, wearing a pharaonic headdress, observing us from the dimness. I think he’s the one I’d like to hear from.’

  ‘Oannes was the Babylonian god of wisdom.’

  ‘That’s what it says in the mythology books – science, writing, the arts, all that sort of thing, but Redon’s Oannes, the one that I visualise, is deeper and darker than wisdom – he’s nothing safe, nothing explicable.’

  ‘Is it possible that you’ve already heard from him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you remember anything your inner voice said in the time shortly before it said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

  ‘OK, the afternoon before that morning I was walking down the Fulham Road and a good-looking young woman passed me walking a lot faster than I was: statuesque, c
lassy walk, black suit, short skirt, great ass, wonderful legs, black stockings, shiny black high heels. I say stockings rather than tights because I imagined a suspender belt. I tried to keep her in good viewing distance but she kept pulling farther away and I was getting angina; so I had to stop and do some glyceryl trinitrate and rest a little while she got smaller and smaller and finally turned a corner and disappeared. And I said to myself or it said or he said, “One day you’ll drop dead while something like that walks away from you and out of sight.”’

  ‘What do you mean by “something like that”?’

  ‘I mean everything that I can’t have. I’m an old man but I want what I wanted when I was young and I want it maybe more than when I was young. And there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

  ‘Did the inner voice say anything more after that first observation?’

  ‘It said, “Well, that’s life, innit.”’

  Dr DeVere scratched his head, massaged his face, cleared his throat. ‘Might that have been a more Oannes sort of utterance?’

  ‘Maybe; I don’t know. I hadn’t really been thinking about an Oannes voice until you asked me about a speaker in my head.’

  ‘Things change, you know. The fact that you visualised Oannes makes me think there might be an Oannes element in you that wants to be heard, an aspect of you that you haven’t been in good touch with. Maybe you’re going to have to meet it halfway. What do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ said Klein, ‘that if I hang out with you too long I could get more confused than I am now. Just tell me, do you think I’ll ever have an inner voice again?’

  ‘I doubt very much that the shutdown will be permanent. You can borrow Groddeck if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll stay on standby for Oannes.’

  ‘That’ll have to be it for today. Good luck, mind how you go and watch your mouth.’ He made a note in Klein’s folder: Inner-voice shutdown – buffer lost?

  11

  Angelica’s Grotto

  ‘Evening shadows make me blue,’ sang Connie Francis, ‘when each weary day is through. How I long to be with you, my happiness.’ The honey of her voice, the sweet sadness of the words and melody made his throat ache. Pictures riffled in his mind: rain streaming down windows; night roads unwinding in the headlamps’ beams; sunpoints dazzling on the sea; nakedness and firelight, glimpses, sounds and smells of youth and love and sorrow.

  ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ was the next track on the CD. Klein sang along with it as he went to the bookshelves and took out Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. He turned to the Oannes lithograph with its caption, ‘I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.’ In the blackness where he hovered Oannes coiled and uncoiled the serpentine length of himself. Under his pharaonic headdress his face was dark in the dimness. Were his eyes open?

  ‘Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘can you see me? I know you can hear me because you live in my mind. Are you a god or are you something else? Will you speak to me?’

  No answer.

  Klein went back to his desk, where he sat facing the bookshelf-blocked fireplace. On the white wall above and to the left of the Meissen figure on the mantelpiece hung one of the few original works of art that he owned, a 1910 Pegase Noir by Redon, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm. Thirty years ago he’d brokered several profitable deals for a Swiss collector and this painting had been his fee. In earlier works Redon had shown his winged horses variously as captives and victims, unable to fly, defeated by forces that drained their energies and crippled their wings; but this Pegasus was a triumphant creature whose primal darkness contained the light of its resurgent vitality. Its black was suffused with purple, ultramarine blue, cerulean, crimson, subtleties of rose, and it reared up in an effulgence of reds and oranges, its wings full of lift and the gathered power of its haunches recalling Redon’s sun horses and hippogriffs. Hannelore had said, looking at it after the making-up that followed one of their rows, ‘It’s like our marriage – full of darkness but it flies.’ Klein shook his head and went to pour himself a drink.

  Returning to his desk and the computer he called up:

  NAKED MYSTERIES

  The Nudes of Gustav Klimt

  No additional words had appeared since the last time he’d looked at the screen. He opened one of his Klimt books and looked at the painting of Pallas Athene wearing the mask of the Gorgon on her breast. ‘Wisdom,’ he said. He considered Medusa’s dread rictus and her loosely hanging tongue. He quit the word processor program, switched on the modem, double-clicked on the Internet icon, and clicked once on Connect. The modem chirped its dial-up and trilled, twanged, and roared through its connection sequence. He watched impatiently as the computer logged on to the network, and when he arrived at the Internet homepage he went to the Yahoo search engine.

  ‘Everybody’s somebody’s fool,’ he said. ‘There’s no fool like an old fool and there’s a first time for everything.’ He took a deep breath, typed SEX in the box, and clicked on Search. Scrolling down the results he clicked on Sexuality, clicked again on Oral Sex, and found a page of text with instructions for performing cunnilingus. ‘Give me a break,’ he said, and closed the page. Ignorantly but determinedly he pressed on until he found websites with free samples showing a whole range of sexual activities in clinically detailed photographs. Videos, live performers, telephone fantasists and other services and goods were also available, demotically described and payable by cheque or credit card, sometimes to be invoiced under names like Opticom and Allegro and sometimes more straightforward ones.

  ‘Oannes, you strange fish,’ said Klein, ‘is this your kind of thing?’ Website after website offered free samples and previews and promised the earth if he would sign up. The women were young and pretty, some of them beautiful; many of the men were heroically endowed. Several times he was on the point of signing up but shrank back at the thought of giving his credit card details and e-mail address to whatever might be lurking out in cyberspace.

  Eventually he stumbled on to a website called Angelica’s Grotto. The homepage, to Klein’s astonishment, featured the Ingres painting, Angelica Saved by Ruggiero. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, responding as always to the Ingres Angelica’s blonde attractions. ‘O God! the tastiness, the marzipan, the utter confection of her goodies and her sweeties and her rosebuds. Angelica, yes! Her nudity and her bondage – what more could a hero ask for! The tight little crease of her firm young flesh where her right arm crosses her bosom! “How long?” says her expression. “How long must I await the hero’s pleasure?”’

  Turning away from the chocolate-box Angelica on the screen he got one of the Redon books off the shelf and looked at the Roger and Angelica pastel, so intense in colour, so full of danger and unknowing. He took a magnifying glass to the tiny figure of Angelica who seemed more than a story, who seemed the heart of a mystery, chained to her rock and awaiting death or rescue.

  ‘Lost and helpless,’ he said. ‘Lost and helpless and seductive in the darkness and obscurity, in the purpureality of her rock, her body glistening with spray as the sea-wind moans, the waves crash on the rock, the monster bellows, the hippogriff shrieks. The rock is like a face islanded in darkness; Ruggiero on the hippogriff is almost lost in the murk, battling against the darkness and the monster Orca. So much lostness!’

  He went back to the computer and Angelica’s Grotto. CLICK HERE TO ENTER, said the screen. Klein clicked and got a beautiful naked young woman with long dark hair crouching in the shadowy opening of a cave by the sea. ‘Another naked Angelica,’ said Klein. ‘No chains, but is anyone without chains? Her face – what is it saying? Is she waiting in her grotto for a rescuer?’

  YOU HAVE FOUND ANGELICA, said the screen. THIS SITE IS ABSOLUTELY FREE. ENJOY IT! BROWSE MY GALLERIES TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT. RING ME UP AT THIS NUMBER IF YOU WANT TO CHAT.

  There were seven galleries in Angelica’s Grotto, each containing twenty to thirty thumbnail photograp
hs which could be enlarged by clicking on them. Klein scanned them thoroughly, entranced by Angelica’s beauty, the suppleness of her body, and the expressions on her face as she was penetrated in every orifice. From picture to picture she was by turns pensive, shy, coquettish, dreamy, surprised, but always submissive and eager to please. She looked no more than eighteen, with little pointed mermaid-breasts and the face of a Waterhouse nymph. ‘How can she want to do this?’ demanded Klein. ‘Can she possibly enjoy it? Has she read Ariosto? Does she want to be rescued?’

  In the first gallery Angelica and her colleagues performed in rocky and sandy places by the sea but after that they moved indoors. Sometimes she was nude, sometimes in white knickers and bra, suspender belt and stockings. She was active with single partners of both sexes and with groups, using her hands for whomever she could not accommodate more intimately. Klein regretted that she had removed her pubic hair; the baldness of her genitalia seemed degrading. He examined each photograph carefully, looking at many of them several times, but the one he returned to most often was the one on her homepage where she crouched alone in her shadowy grotto, her face thoughtful.

  ‘Angelica,’ he said, ‘what are your chains and what is your rock?’ With his eyes inches from the screen he went over the pictures hour after hour. ‘Probably I’m on the edge of madness,’ he said. ‘On the other hand,’ noting the counter that showed him to be Visitor No. 973,472 to the site, ‘I’ve got a lot of company.’ Lamenting that he was no longer a player, he consoled himself manually. ‘And there are no exceptions to the rule …’ sang Connie Francis (afraid of silence, he had put the CD on REPEAT) ‘Yes, everybody’s somebody’s fool.’

  12

  The Gorgon Smile

  Many of the views of Angelica in action were confined to the sexual organs, seen from only a few inches away and suitable for gynaecological study. After a time these images became abstract; a kind of visual dyslexia set in, and Klein didn’t always know what he was looking at. He was confused, disoriented, and baffled in his quest for solitary satisfaction; nonetheless he persevered, achieving tiny climaxes that were little better than footnotes referring him to the op. cit. of his youth. ‘Ibid,’ he said. ‘q.v. Call me Ozymandias.’