Angelica Lost and Found (8 page)

‘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.