‘Why have you brought me here?’ I said, and on a keyboard my fingers of Guglielmo Stranieri tapped out, ‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘I need you to be my friend,’ said Stranieri on the screen.
I was startled by this; the idea of a friend had not so far occurred to me.
‘Maybe I can make you famous,’ he said.
‘Ariosto has already done that.’
‘But I can write a whole book about you.’
‘Why are you in my dream of reality?’
‘I don’t know. Reality is a mystery to me and that’s how I like it; an understood reality can only be an illusion.’
There was music coming from a machine. Among the voices I heard the name Alcina.
‘What is that?’ I asked him.
‘Vivaldi,’ he said. His opera Orlando Furioso. Do you know the poem?’
‘Too well. You have read it, have you?’
‘Of course. I am not ignorant.’
‘So this is the connection between us.’
‘I know where you live,’ he said. He/I did something with a little device and da Carpi’s painting appeared on the screen. ‘There you are in action,’ he said.
At that moment I found myself in the picture which came to life around me with the wind, the waves, the crying of the gulls, the bellowing of Orca and the weeping of Angelica. Da Carpi was standing close to her as she watched Orca with fascination and dread. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ she wailed. ‘That monster must have a thing on him like a barge-pole! Don’t let him deflower me, he’ll split me in two!’
‘He doesn’t want to deflower, he wants to devour you,’ said da Carpi. ‘He’s not after your virginity.’
‘He’s a male, isn’t he?’ said Angelica. ‘And that’s what all males are after. If one of them has to have me, let it be Ruggiero or the hippogriff.’
‘Is sex all you think of ?’ said da Carpi.
‘That’s all the males of this world think of,’ snapped Angelica. ‘My beauty is the rock that I am chained to, my juiciness, my sweet flesh, my firm young breasts and bouncy buttocks, Ah!
‘ “La fiera gente inospitale e cruda
alla bestia crudel nel lito espose
la bellissima donna, cosi ignuda
come Natura prima la compose.
Un velo non ha pure, in che richiuda
i bianchi gigli e le vermiglie rose,
da non cader per luglio o per decembre,
di che son sparse le polite membre.”*
‘That’s what Ariosto wrote about my “lily-whiteness and my blushing roses” and all the rest of what you’re staring at, that these cruel people are offering up to Orca.’
‘You know Orca doesn’t get you in Ariosto’s story,’ said da Carpi, ‘so what’s all the fuss about?’
Angelica was not to be pacified.
‘I don’t know that he doesn’t get me until it doesn’t happen,’ she said. ‘That’s how real you made this picture.’
‘I got beyond myself,’ said da Carpi, ‘I painted realer than I knew how. I never did anything this strong before and I never did anything this strong after. That’s why I keep coming back to it and shaking my head in bafflement.’
‘And that’s why I came here to talk to you,’ I said (I was speaking only as the idea of me, so I was not visible to da Carpi). ‘How do you account for the power of this painting?’
‘Where is that voice coming from?’ he said, looking all around.
‘I’m a disembodied thought. Don’t let this bother you – after all, you’re not quite the usual thing either, loitering in your painting centuries after your death.’
‘Very well, I suppose one must make allowances. You were saying?’
‘How do you account for the power of this painting?’
‘I can’t,’ said da Carpi, shrugging his shoulders and turning up the palms of his hands.
‘Try to remember who was uppermost in your mind while you worked: was it Angelica, Ruggiero, the hippogriff or Orca?’
‘Volatore,’ said da Carpi.
I was surprised to hear him use the name I had given myself.
‘Who’s Volatore?’ I said.
‘The hippogriff. That’s what I named him.’
‘Strong name.’
‘Strong flier, more heroic than the hero he carried. Look at him, fearless as he swoops on the monster, carrying Ruggiero to the attack. Orca will try to bring Volatore down so he can get to Ruggiero but the hippogriff dares all. Look at him!’
As I looked, the smell of the sea and all the sounds came to me and I saw myself as the strange flying beast in the painting.
‘Volatore,’ said Angelica. ‘I like that name and he’s so big and strong and he’s not afraid of anything. A woman would be safe with him.’
Keep thinking that, Angelica, I said to myself. Just give me a little time to find the right body. I tensed the muscles of my shoulders and back and they felt weak and flabby.
‘Forgive me,’ I said as these words appeared and the da Carpi scene dissolved.
‘No offence taken,’ said Stranieri. ‘I know that my body isn’t suitable; the bond between you and me is a different sort of thing: I shall be with you always to live your story into words. And after all, words alone are certain good.’
‘Says who?’
‘Yeats, top poet.’
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
‘Never mind,’ we said. ‘Let’s get corporeal.’
* The harsh, inhospitable islanders
Exposed the lovely maiden on the strand.
So absolute a nakedness washers.
She might have issued then from nature’s hand.
No veil or flimsiest of gossamers
Had she to hide her lily whiteness and
her blushing roses which never fade or die.
But in December bloom as in July
Chapter 4
Stranieri Interlude
I have given some thought to the Naked-Woman-Menaced-by-Monster theme, of which Angelica and Orca are a prime example.
Always will she be there, naked on her rock, her beauty luminous in the stormy ocean dusk as she awaits the monster. Men lick their lips as the monster in each of them rises, roaring and whimpering, tasting the salt spray on her cool and trembling flesh. Angelica! Always will there be a hero to save her as the artist monsters take up their brushes.
Ingres does a chocolate-box version of the scene with a dainty hippogriff that couldn’t carry two bags of groceries, let alone a hero in full armour. Doré depicts a working hippogriff that still isn’t big enough. Redon gives us Angelica’s tiny glowing nudity in the heart of an empurpled chaos but fudges the hippogriff. Painter after painter takes the ball hoping to score a try with this subject. Some lose it in the scrum and others fumble a pass and end up with their faces in the mud. But Girolamo da Carpi scores with Ruggiero mounted on a hippogriff that will do the job and get him there and back. Here da Carpi has abandoned the smoothness of his Virgin and Child – this is a different matter altogether, a he-man picture for he-men. A bit of rough, this painting, with the emphasis on Ruggiero’s attack and Orca’s defiance, while Angelica, relegated to the outermost corner of the picture, cowers behind her rock.
Beauty in mortal peril! Why is this theme so dear to writers and painters and film-makers? Because such beauty as remains in our world always is in mortal peril. And the beauty is intensified by the terror that lives in it.
The hero, of course, gets the male lead in this part of the story; he has to. But my hero is the hippogriff, that burly flyer as reliable as a Lancaster to bomb the shit out of Orca and get Ruggiero on to the next instalment of Ariosto’s epic.
I, Guglielmo Stranieri, at my desk in the agency where I file and send out press cuttings, am not very strong and I am easily intimidated by anyone at all. And yet in some way Volatore and I are brothers. In my free time I live his life with him and word it on to the pages of this story. We need each other.
/> Chapter 5
Dame Fortune’s Decree
How to begin? I let the idea of me wander to find a useful body with a receptive mind. Wandering, wandering, no hurry, let it happen. Did the time pass slowly or quickly? Time is so various in its textures, densities, and flavours! I flowed with it, swam in it, tasted it, rose through it into the next scenes of my dream of reality.
Ecco! Here is a fine big fellow, very strong, I sense. Pictures in his mind, men locked in a struggle for a ball that is not round. On a field that is formally marked off. Wing, he’s thinking. Wing is what he is. Rugby. Rugby is his game. Marco Renzetti is his name. OK, Marco! Andiamo!
What is this? Roma Ciampino. Being in this man’s mind I think ‘airport’ but in my animal mind it is a monstrous thing, braying light and colour, black with noise, stinking of sweat and un-nature, ceiled and carpeted with footsteps. Here one may eat, drink, buy every possible thing. I, Marco Renzetti, drawn in by the glittering array of shops, buy perfume, six silk shirts, four neckties, a bottle of grappa and a little model of the Colosseum.
Now we stand behind other people. A desk. A woman takes from us what? Passport. Ticket. San Francisco is the name in our mind. San Francisco in America! Why San Francisco? No matter, this is what Dame Fortune has decreed and I must obey. Walking, walking, many people. Sitting, sitting. Through glass we see great machines. Flying soon, we think. A large voice tells us that passengers will now embark. We descend stairs and go through a little door. ‘Buon giorno.’ Walking, walking, people, people. Sitting down. Fastening, with a click, a heavy belt. Music, music. A uniformed woman demonstrates what to do if the machine falls out of the sky. Waiting, waiting. Noise, vibration. We are moving, moving. My stomach lifts. We are airborne.
Very good, I have a big strong man body and I’m in a machine that flies. It’s not like real flying; the wings don’t move and the machine is loud and shaky as it crawls laboriously through the sky. White cloud-castles pass beneath us. Volatore, the flyer, in this unnatural flying machine. How strange to be us, living in words above the clouds. But the strangeness is all there is. There is no other place to live. From a sea of nothingness we are washed up on its empty shore, there to build our palaces on sand and dress up as whatever we think we might be.
A very pretty woman comes with drinks and little packets of nuts. The scent of her flesh lingers in my nostrils, her perfume and her woman-smell. I hear the rustling of her underwear, her stockinged thighs. Short skirt but I stop my hand from sliding up. Not now. Not here. Later, if Fortune smiles on me, there will be Angelica.
In my mind something with a big oven, round slabs of dough, a long wooden paddle, an illuminated signboard, Marco’s Pizzeria, changing to Pizzeria Renzetti, changing to Pizzeria Classica. OK, Pizzeria is cool, I suppose, yes? Plain white flour in my mind, salt, dried yeast, sugar, olive oil and polenta – these are things I seem to know. Ovens, what kind of ovens are there where I am going? In my mind there is a smell of baking.
Chapter 6
Pizza in the Sky, Six Miles High
This kind of flying was very slow. We ate, we drank, we saw pictures that moved: for this a screen appeared and the aeroplane was darkened. From first being seated we had been provided with a little apparatus that fitted on the head and fed voices and music into both ears. My Volatore mind was bemused by the constant presence of music everywhere. How, I wondered, did modern humankind find mental space for thought? The moving pictures before us had music and the sound of voices and large and small explosions. I removed the hearing apparatus and for a while I watched the screen on which a man ran, jumped, and drove various machines while being pursued by other men who ran, jumped, and drove other machines. Sometimes the single man stopped and fought with the other men, then he would go to a room where he had a box in which were many passports and sheaves of various kinds of banknotes. I understood that the pictures formed some kind of story imagined by whoever made up the story. But it seemed strange to me to be deprived of the pleasure of imagining one’s own pictures to a story told in words. I fell asleep, awoke, consumed food and drink served on a little tray, slept and woke again. After a long time the windows tilted, I saw a great bridge over sparkling water, little sailing boats.
‘First time in SF?’ said the man next to me.
‘What is SF?’ I asked him.
It was not something I found in Marco Renzetti’s mind, a mind I was not consistently in possession of; perforce I leapt from tussock to tussock of knowledge through a wide swamp of ignorance.
My neighbour laughed.
‘Good question. San Francisco is just about anything you want, plus maybe some things you don’t want.’
‘Named for a saint, yes? A holy place?’
‘Let’s just say it’s wholly a place, OK?’
‘This is the New World?’
‘It’s slightly used by some not very careful owners but it’s all there is. The flight attendant is coming with landing cards. Do you need one?’
‘I need to land, yes.’
‘Italian passport?’
‘Yes.’
In my tussock-jumping I found that things I knew a moment ago were not always there in the present moment; new information appeared and disappeared and left me with no firm ground under my feet.
‘Raise your hand,’ said my neighbour, ‘and they’ll give you a landing card.’
I raised my hand, got a landing card, and he helped me with it.
‘Occupation,’ he said. ‘What do you do?’
‘I was rugby, now I am pizzeria.’
‘Rugby what? Player?’
‘Yes.’
‘But now you are pizzeria. You work in one?’
‘I own one.’ I had a picture in my mind of a case in the overhead compartment in which were important documents. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have to get quotes on ovens and everything must be perfect because her beauty is the rock I am chained to.’
‘Whose beauty? What rocks and chains? You Italian guys must be into some really kinky S and M!’
‘Sorry, I am a little deranged just now.’
‘Don’t apologise, there’s always room for a little more derangement in SF. Myself, I like a good spanking every now and then. Does wonders for the circulation.’
‘A brick oven is what I need,’ I said as I felt rising in me from my feet to my brain the self-awareness of Marco Renzetti. I must have spoken that name aloud.
‘Clancy Yeats,’ said my companion, and shook my hand.
‘The poet Yeats said that words alone are certain good,’ I said.
‘He was probably drunk when he said it. I wouldn’t have figured you for a poetry reader.’
‘It could even be that there are poets who play rugby.’
‘I doubt it. Poker maybe, but nothing as rough and dirty as rugby. Where’s your pizzeria?’
‘In the Mission. Not open yet, just getting set up.’
‘I know the best places for restaurant supplies,’ said Yeats as we separated at Passport Control, ‘being the owner of Clancy’s Bar. Let me know if I can help with your business. Or your pleasure. Here’s my card. Call me.’
I didn’t think I would. In my human form I still retained some animal instincts and something about this man made me not want him for a friend. My passport and visa were in order and as Marco Renzetti I knew my way around the airport. I collected my luggage, passed through Customs, and boarded a shuttle for town.
On the bus I reviewed my position. My name was Marco Renzetti. I was thirty years old. I had been a professional rugby player, a wing with Viadana until a year ago, when I decided to leave sport and go into business while my knees were still in working order. On the advice of my cousin Giuseppe in San Francisco I bought a restaurant called Il Fornello from its owner on his retirement. On a previous trip I had looked the place over thoroughly. It was close to the thriving Delfina restaurant near Valencia in the Mission. It was Giuseppe’s opinion that being a neighbour to Delfina would do us good on this busy str
eet. The fixtures and fittings were immaculate, even to the mural of the Bay of Naples, and the price, though high, was fair. It included the apartment over the restaurant into which I could move immediately and from where I could supervise the conversion of the kitchen.
On my arrival from the airport I installed myself in the apartment and sat down to work out the details of my new venture. The kitchen conversion was the biggest expense and would be the most trouble. The picture in my mind was from my childhood in the Abruzzi: the brick oven and the wooden paddle. The next thing was to find someone who could make it a reality.
It took me three weeks to locate a man who had knowledge of such things. He was old and he wept when I told him what I wanted but he said it made him feel young again and he could do the job. When it was finished I wept remembering my childhood.
In a month I was ready to open. The blue lettering outlined in gold on the window said MARCO’S PIZZERIA CLASSICA and the tables and chairs waited for what the future would bring. The oven was placed so that passers-by could see me through the window as I shaped the dough and put it in to bake. Soon there were lines outside and the tables began to fill up with people waiting for my classic pizza while drinking Chianti Classico. Others came in full of nostalgia, just to shake my hand and wish me well.