I had anticipated success and had hired a pretty waitress who spoke both English and Italian and had a walk that stimulated the appetite. Giuseppina her name was, and when her lips formed her name it was almost impossible not to kiss them. I forbore during business hours but after closing time she exceeded my expectations. She was delightful but her charms were not to be compared to the immortal poignancy of the naked Angelica glistening with salt spray and chained weeping to her rock.
Chapter 7
A Bit of Strange
To be a homeless idea in a borrowed body, it is like being a hermit crab in a borrowed shell. No it isn’t, because that is the normal way of life for the hermit crab. This body of Marco Renzetti constricts me; I rub my borrowed shoulders, feeling for wings that are not there. Walking on my two legs I am afraid of overbalancing because I lack the other two behind me.
Ah, the sensations, the pictures in my mind! Centuries pass below me like continents, the cloud shadows race over hill and valley, mountain and sea. Above me the limitless arch of the sky, its infinite blue, and under my wings the stories of Ariosto bearing me up strongly. No, that is not now, it is a time not possible for me now. How long must this masquerade go on? When shall I find Angelica?
And when I find her must I woo her as a man? What I long for and lust for is Angelica under the real me, Angelica mounted by the hippogriff. Unlawful it may be but I am a fitter mate for her than Ruggiero or Medoro ever was and I mean to have her.
Always in my mind are the old hermit’s words, ‘the dream of reality’. This reality that I am living feels like a dream. The idea of it haunts me: to wake up from the dream of reality, this reality that is my life, would be to die, would it not? But sometimes I seem to come out of the dream, to be in another state of being, dim and red, and I do not die. Perhaps humans understand these things better than I who am only an animal. Not even a real animal but an imagined one, a fiction. Is it possible that I am mad? Can a figment of Ariosto’s imagination be mad? Or am I perhaps the repository of a madness that is thus prevented from tainting the whole of the poem of Orlando Furioso?
The passing faces look through the window at me and I look back. The world is full of pretty women but an Angelica is rare. Her beauty, like the idea of me, transcends time and space. When I find her the years of waiting will be as if they never were; the finding of her will be as if it has followed instantly on the thought of her.
In my borrowed body I took to walking in the night. I used to go to a place that overlooked the bay. Sometimes the fog rolled in and I felt myself to be nothing and nowhere while the foghorns hooted below me like sea monsters. On the way home I passed other late walkers whose faces were like faces in a dream, each face a mystery unknown even to itself.
Chapter 8
Stairway to Heaven?
One night, returning from a late walk, I chanced upon two figures struggling in a dimly lit alley. One was a man, the other a woman, and she was desperately trying to fight him off. He turned to me, reeking of vodka, and I knocked him unconscious with a single blow. She, suddenly released from his grasp, fell also. I helped her to her feet and she said, ‘Wow! The answer to a maiden’s prayer.’
‘A maiden!’ I said. ‘Chained to the rock of your beauty and beset by monsters!’
‘What?’
‘You are a maiden?’
‘Hold on, friend – that was a figure of speech, so let’s not get hung up on personal details, OK?’ She stood on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Thank you for saving me from that scumbag and you can walk me home if you like. He’s not getting up; you think he’ll be all right?’
‘Is he someone you know?’
‘No, he’s a total stranger.’
‘Then forget about him,’ I said as she took my arm and we went on our way.
Being a man I could not help mentally undressing her and I found her beauty unimpeachable. Ariosto flashed into my mind and my shoulders itched for my absent wings as the blackness of the crow filled me, and the redness of the dim red caverns of sleep. I waited for my head to clear, then, ‘Angelica!’ I said.
‘Who?’ she replied. ‘What?’
‘You are Angelica, eternally transcending time and space?’
‘Slow down, handsome. My name is Doris. What’s yours?’
‘Vola –’ Suddenly a wave of confusion swept over me. The ball was flying through the air, I stretched out my arms and found Doris in them.
‘You’re a fast worker, Vola,’ she said. ‘I like a man who knows what he wants. Is that your first name or your last name?’
I removed my arms.
‘Vola not! Name is Renzetti, Marco Renzetti.’ Although I wasn’t too sure of that just then.
‘I like your accent, Marco. Where are you from?’
‘Seven hills. Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf. Rome.’
‘Feral children! What happened to them?’
‘Founded Rome.’
‘Fast learners! Here we are at my place. Want to come up for a drink? I could sure use one.’ She kissed me again, longer this time. ‘Come on, don’t be bashful.’
She unlocked the street door and as I followed her up the stairs my head cleared. Her skirt was very short, her legs beckoned sweetly and her bottom, rising before me like a full moon, cheered me on.
‘Renzetti,’ I said to myself, ‘Marco Renzetti.’
Chapter 9
Heaven’s Plastic Fragrance
On entering I found myself outstared by framed prints of badly painted, miserable-looking children with huge sad eyes. The sofa was wrapped in clear plastic. From the ceiling hung a sphere made of glittering silver tesserae that spattered patterns of light on the huge-eyed children, the shelves full of tiny glass figurines, and the large television on which were plastic flowers that gave off a plastic fragrance. There were no books.
It would have been wiser on my part to go back down the stairs immediately but her going-up-the-stairs view was still imprinted on my vision.
Ah, the gulf between the real and the ideal! Ariosto’s Angelica had many flaws. Her intelligence was a sort of low cunning with which she evaded pursuers. She used her beauty unashamedly to manipulate men. She made promises she never kept but pursuing her was time well spent. To speak modern, she was a class act.
The portents were not favourable, my chance of success extremely doubtful. In my quest for the timeless and eternal Angelica I was well aware that Ariosto had married her off to Medoro who became King of Cathay. I persisted nonetheless.
As Volatore/Marco Renzetti I found life confusing. As a hippogriff I had been chaste, being only a means of transport; carnal pleasures were reserved for my heroic passengers. As a man I had been initiated into human practices by the frolicsome Giuseppina. She was generous in her praise of my performance; so I ought to have been easy in my mind with Doris Donner.
She was a hairstylist at Salon Angélique (the random irony of names!) and she took pride in having styled the hair of Lola Trotter, the film star.
‘The studio stylist got the credit,’ she said, ‘but all he did was add highlights to what I’d already done.’
More beautiful than the ‘supermodels’ who appeared in the news, Doris had only contempt for them.
‘These girls have arms and legs like sticks,’ she said, ‘and the fashion industry is run by faggots.’
The women whose looks she looked after, except for a few celebrities, did not fare much better in her opinion.
‘Some of them have had so many facelifts their ears meet at the back,’ she said, ‘and they want me to do some miracle with their hair so their husbands will look at them again. Meanwhile the husbands are shtupping their twenty-five-year-old secretaries. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you can make millions by telling the sows you can.’
Doris’s cynicism did not extend to sex. I was overwhelmed by the frequency of her demands; she was not so much chained to the rock of her beauty as rolling it after me so that I was in constant danger of being cru
shed by it.
Doris was what she was, coarse despite her physical refinement, definitely not my eternal time-and-space-transcending Angelica. Why, then, did I stay with her as long as I did?
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.’