Angelica Lost and Found (5 page)

Nobody’s perfect, as they say, and I admit to my shame that Doris for a time distracted me from the search to which I had dedicated myself. As Marco Renzetti I was only human and as Volatore I was equally susceptible to beauty. Doris was a head-turner, like the girl in the song who makes everyone say ‘Aah!’ when she passes. A trophy, and I was proud to be seen with her on my arm when we went out. Which Doris liked much more than staying in. She introduced me to what she called ‘the club scene’ and we went to the DNA Lounge to shake ourselves about in what they called dancing. As Marco I had done this before and Doris was pleased with how well I fitted into this pathetic hyperactivity.

I arranged our next outing: we went to the San Francisco Opera where I had the pleasure of hearing
Madame Butterfly
by my countryman Giacomo Puccini, sung in my native tongue by an excellent cast. Doris and I both had tears rolling down our faces when Cio-Cio San sang ‘
Un bel di vedremo
 …’

‘That son of a bitch Pinkerton,’ said Doris. ‘He knocks her up and then it’s bye bye, Butterfly. Men are basically rotten.’

‘Unfortunately that’s the way of the world,’ I said. ‘Women aren’t much better but people are all there is to work with.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Doris. ‘I do their hair.’

When Cio-Cio San killed herself with her father’s sword in Act III Doris wept again, but more in anger than in sorrow.

‘I’d have used that sword on Pinkerton,’ she said.

‘He wasn’t there.’

‘I’d have tracked him down and cut his balls off,’ she said with a shake of her head.

‘How did you like the nusic?’

‘There were a couple of nice tunes but it was a long time between them and you don’t know what they’re saying unless you read the libretto. Opera isn’t really my kind of thing.’

Doris liked sports, so we went to Candlestick to see the heavily padded 49ers, protected by everything but airbags, play American football. But whatever we did we did as Marco and Not-Angelica. She said she loved me but her love was meaningless to me. To have before me a simulacrum of Angelica without her essence was a mockery and I enjoyed her body as one enjoys a whore.

By this time I had acquired a second baker, Luciano Strozzi, the man who had built my oven. My cousinly obligations with Giuseppe were few and far between, so I began to learn my adopted city, travelling by foot or public transport.

San Francisco, heroic city that sits on its tragic flaw, the San Andreas Fault! With my animal senses I could feel the play of the tectonic plates under my feet and the rasp of their constant shifting, smell the vapours beneath. I could hear the ghosts of the Barbary Coast cursing and shouting and singing lewd songs up through the restless stones.

Doris told me that there was a 62 per cent probability of a major earthquake between 2003 and 2032.

‘This really isn’t a safe place to be,’ I said.

‘No place is safe,’ she said. ‘You could get hit by a bus crossing the street. We could both be dead before the next quake. Anyhow, these people who make the predictions are wrong as often as they’re right.’

So we dropped the subject.

San Francisco is a city that Ariosto might have imagined, of impeachable reality, existing by enchantment and never to be taken for granted. Everything about San Francisco is metaphor, from the magic span of the Golden Gate Bridge to the up-and-downness of its streets where the cable cars, laden with passengers inside and out, clang their bells as the driver grasps the cable that hauls them up to the heights and down to the depths of their desires.

This metaphoric San Francisco has its own acoustic in the sun and the rain and the fog, in the lights of its nights and the darks. And it talks to itself constantly.

The voices! Sometimes I immersed myself in the exotic inflections of Chinatown, understanding nothing but taking in the music. At the Taquería Cancún in Mission Street I listened to the easy cadences of Spanish while tasting the language in a burrito.

By now I was spending more nights in solitary walks than I was with Doris. Clearly our time together was coming to an end but I thought that in all fairness I should consider if perhaps there was more to her than I gave her credit for. I decided to ask her the big question one night as we lay in bed after our usual embrace.

‘Doris,’ I said, ‘would you love me if  I were a hippogriff?’

‘What’s a hippogriff?’ she said.

From the drawer of the bedside table I took a small print of the da Carpi painting and showed it to her.

‘That’s an animal,’ she said.

‘But could you love it?’

‘You mean, like a pet?’

‘No, I mean the way you love me in my present form.’

‘You mean, have sex with it?’

‘Yes.’

‘No way! You’re talking perversion.’ She made sounds of disgust, kissed me goodnight, rolled over and went to sleep.

There was nothing more to be said. I slipped out of bed and in less than an hour I was gone.

Chapter 10

On Wings of Song

What now? I had no idea. I was walking the streets aimlessly when I heard singing. In my mind there opened the skies and the seas of
Orlando Furioso
in which Olimpia, left on the beach, laments her abandonment as Bireno sails away from her. ‘
Voglio
,
voglio morire
…’ she sings. ‘
Oh Bireno
,
Bireno
!’ Here, now, on a street in San Francisco! Her voice rose in me and lifted me above the centuries that passed beneath me. Once more I was the animal of me, Volatore the hippogriff! Like a snake shedding its old skin the idea of me slid up out of Marco Renzetti.

I was looking through an open window at a beautiful young woman in her underwear. She was doing exercises, her long red hair swinging with her movements. Ah, the beauty of her! How it pierced my heart! At once imperious and vulnerable, demanding to be protected, to be saved. Chained, yes, chained to the rock of her beauty.

Be careful, I told myself. Remember Doris.

Heedless, I called out, ‘Angelica!’

She looked up and gave a little shriek but made no move to cover herself.

‘Holy smoke!’ she said. ‘Am I hallucinating you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m real.’

‘That’s one hell of a real smell you’ve got!’

‘That’s how a hippogriff smells.’

‘A hippogriff. That’s what you are?’

‘Yes. Have you read
Orlando Furioso
?’

‘Give me a moment to compose myself. Your head, your eyes and your beak are very unsettling to look at, and with the smell you take some getting used to.’

I gave her a moment. She composed herself and seemed to be getting used to me.

‘Does my smell offend you?’ I asked her.

She stood there wordlessly, taking deep breaths, then she said, ‘No, but it’s having a strange effect on me.’ She poured herself a large whisky, arranged herself on a sofa so that her near-nakedness and her graceful limbs showed to best advantage, drank about half of the whisky, sighed, and said with as much aplomb as if she entertained hippogriffs every day, ‘How do you know my name?’

‘Is your name really Angelica?’

‘Not an uncommon name, actually.’

‘Ah, but this is a fated meeting!’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘But I speak from the heart!’

‘That too. You mentioned
Orlando Furioso
.’

‘Have you read it?’

‘Yes, but more than that, I have dreams where I’m chained to that rock on the isle of Ebuda with Orca rearing up out of the water and coming at me.’

‘Then you
are
Angelica!’

‘Angelica Greenberg, not the one in
Orlando Furioso
.’

‘Angelica is more than the words of Ariosto, she goes beyond time and space and the boundaries of language; her story is in you, and in your dream you know that you will be saved by me and Ruggiero.’

‘No, I don’t. Nobody saves me.’

‘What happens?’

‘I wake up. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

‘Yes! You need have no fear of that dream, Angelica! Always I’ll be there to save you! With Ruggiero in the saddle, of course.’

‘Yes, but that’s in a story, an epic poem, and this is real life, I think. How’d you break out of the story and get to my window?’

‘It would take a long time to tell you.’

‘Did you fly here? I’m three storeys up.’

‘The singing lifted me, the voice of Olimpia lamenting her abandonment by Bireno.’

‘Emma Kirkby. She’s remarkable. I listen to that recording a lot.’

‘Olimpia is so sad. Are you sad?’

‘Isn’t that the human condition?’

‘Olimpia is sad because she’s been abandoned by Bireno. Has someone abandoned you?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact someone has.’

‘Who could sail away from
you
?’

‘Even with the smell you’re a real smoothie, aren’t you?’

‘How did it happen, this abandonment?’

‘I don’t believe this: I’m hallucinating a hipposhrink.’

‘You mock me. You are the eternal Angelica and you tell me that your life is sad. Are there no intervals of joy?’

‘Is that what you are, an interval of joy?’

‘May I speak modern?’

‘Please do.’

‘Are you coming on to me?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You were almost naked when I arrived and you have not covered yourself since; rather you offer yourself as a feast for my eyes.’

‘Because I want you to keep looking at me. As long as I feel your eyes on me I think we’re both real. Maybe.’

‘You doubt your reality?’

‘Constantly. Don’t you, being imaginary as you are?’

‘I am as real as Ariosto imagined and that is enough for me. I try not to question it.’

‘How strange this is!’

‘Strangeness is all there is. May I come in? I feel rather exposed out here. My name is Volatore.’

‘How do you do. I’m Angelica Greenberg. But I’ve already told you that.’

‘I ask again, may I come in?’

‘First tell me where you’re coming from.’

‘Geographically, or are you speaking modern?’

‘Either, both, whatever.’

‘I’m coming from the isle of Ebuda.’

‘But you didn’t fly here out of
Orlando Furioso
, did you? That’s literature; this is San Francisco.’

‘I walked from the Mission.’

‘How come?’

‘That’s a long canto and I’m still outside here for all the world to see.’

‘Sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. Come in and have a cup of tea.’

‘If I can get through the window.’

‘Think small.’

I folded back my wings, thought small, and squeezed through the window.

‘I’m afraid my talons will tear up your rug,’ I said.

‘Not to worry, hippogriffs are scarcer than kelims.’ She stared at me for a few moments, then went to the kitchen and put the kettle on.