Angelica Lost and Found Read online

  Angelica Lost

  and Found

  Russell Hoban

  To the memory of Leon Garfield

  While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

  2 Corinthians 4:18

  They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,

  You do not play things as they are.’

  The man replied, ‘Things as they are

  Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

  ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’,

  Wallace Stevens

  Contents

  Preface

  1 I, Volatore

  2 Ravenously Seeking Angelica

  3 High-Mindedness of Volatore

  4 Stranieri Interlude

  5 Dame Fortune’s Decree

  6 Pizza in the Sky, Six Miles High

  7 A Bit of Strange

  8 Stairway to Heaven?

  9 Heaven’s Plastic Fragrance

  10 On Wings of Song

  11 The Buttocks of Giuseppina

  12 Figs with Cream!

  13 Extruded, Excluded and Bewildered

  14 Up, Up and Away, But …

  15 Yesterday’s Seguidillas

  16 For Whom the Bell Clangs

  17 From Verse to Bad

  18 The Eight O’Clock to Katerini

  19 A Little Way on the Tin Globe

  20 Home Thoughts from Aloft

  21 In Loco Wyatt Earpis

  22 Volatore’s Ghost Dance

  23 Isaiah’s Ghost Dance

  24 Pictures in the Sand

  25 Broad-Mindedness of Volatore

  26 Dim Red Taverns of Sheep

  27 Cigarettes and Heart Trouble

  28 Pheromonal

  29 Lap of Honour

  30 Vroom Vroom

  31 Ingress of Volatore

  32 Double or Nothing?

  33 A Place for Everything?

  34 Some Kind of a Joke?

  35 Animals with Men’s Eyes

  36 A Sudden Kind of Thing

  37 Every Valley

  38 Calamari, Hali But Not Really

  39 Lunarity of Volatore

  40 Once There Was a King

  41 Passing, Never to Return

  42 Mostly Like a Horse

  43 Farnesses of Tinyness

  44 Dos Arbolitos, Endlessly Rocking

  45 Random Passes, Wide Receivers

  46 Expectation

  47 Cometh the Hour

  48 Cold Water

  49 Death in the Afternoon

  50 Trained Perfection

  51 Faintness of Volatore

  52 All at Sea

  53 Hopefulness of Volatore

  54 42nd Street Buck-and-Wing

  55 Base Metal of Gold

  56 Where from Here?

  57 Shame and Blame

  58 Ars Longa, Cuddly Catering

  59 Jim on the Brim

  60 Paradise Lost

  61 Mental Jimnastics

  62 Between Jim and It

  63 Blondin Not

  64 Patience of Volatore

  65 Jimportantly, A Commitment

  66 Impatience of Volatore

  67 Jim-Jammed?

  68 Cautious Optimism of Volatore

  69 Jam Today

  70 Dancing in the Dark

  71 Passage to El Paso

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Volatore is a hippogriff. This animal is described by Ariosto in Canto IV, Verse 18 of Orlando Furioso:

  His [Atlante’s] horse was not a fiction, but instead

  The offspring of a griffin and a mare.

  Its plumage, forefeet, beak, wings and head

  Like those of its paternal parent were.

  The rest was from its dam inherited.

  It’s called a hippogriff. Such beasts, though rare,

  In the Rhiphaean mountains, far beyond

  The icy waters of the north, are found.

  It is on this steed that Ruggiero rides to the rescue of Angelica when she is menaced by Orca, the sea monster, as she stands naked, chained to a rock on the island of Ebuda where she has been offered up as a sacrifice.

  Volatore, the hippogriff, is fixated on this episode in Ariosto’s epic poem. Possibly he resents Ariosto’s evident delight in describing Angelica’s nude plight. Passionate creature that he is, he feels that Angelica is meant to be his prize, not Ruggiero’s.

  Volatore has until now resided in the sixteenth-century painting by Girolamo da Carpi which hangs in the Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas. In this story he will leave the painting and travel through 2008, sometimes as idea, sometimes in human form, sometimes even as his animal self, determined to find the eternal Angelica and win her for himself. It won’t be easy: Volatore is an imaginary animal but the Angelica of his choice is a flesh-and-blood woman who lives in San Francisco. How in the world – and who can say for certain exactly what this world is? – can this problem be resolved?

  Chapter 1

  I, Volatore

  Who, you may ask, is this that speaks? It is I, Volatore the hippogriff, yes! I, Volatore. I have outlived the man who imagined me into being. I have outlived centuries of little mortals who are born and die. While there are printed books and when there will be only the memory of books I shall live. What reality can compare to that? Mountains crumble, the sea is poisoned and the air but I live, Volatore, the flyer! Those others born of Ariosto’s pen, Orlando, Astolfo, Ruggiero – they live also. And Angelica. Angelica! But I alone have broken through the membrane of literary reality into that of mortals. And there again I find Angelica, chained to the rock of her beauty.

  Reality! What is it? Who can define it? Not those who are in it. Flying over a village I saw a little boy sitting in a toy wagon. Reaching behind him with his hand he tried to push the wagon in which he sat. When it didn’t move he shook his head in disbelief.

  Some have called reality a dream. The dream of reality? Who or what is dreaming it? Is it the primordial blackness that dreams reality with its colours and motion, its joys and its pains? Its sorrows? Does the blackness sleep?

  Chapter 2

  Ravenously Seeking Angelica

  Always has she been in my mind: naked Angelica chained to that so cruel and brutal rock in da Carpi’s painting. Ah! her terror as she shrinks from the monster rising from the waves breaking below her. Even now I hear the screaming of the gulls, the sea-wind’s moan, the roar of the great scaly Orca as he heaves himself up out of the sea. Naked Angelica, glistening with salt spray, howling into the wind, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, let me die, I beg you, before this great beast takes me!’

  How had she come to be chained to that rock from which we freed her? A homeless wanderer since the slaying of her father, the King of Cathay, she was riding on one of the shore roads not visible from the front of the picture, making for Gascony, when she had the ill luck to attract the attention of a hermit whose eyes were bigger than his shrunken member. This solitary hoper had a few demons at his disposal and he sent one to possess the horse Angelica was riding. This sort of thing was not unusual in the world of Ariosto: travellers could take nothing for granted. Angelica’s demonised steed plunged into the sea with her, swam far out with his terrified passenger, then, remotely controlled by the shrivelled satyr, brought her to a bleak strand where the hermit welcomed her with offers of shelter and refreshment.

  Needless to say, once she was in his cave, also not visible from the front of the picture, he drugged her drink and attempted to perform that manly office which Ruggiero in his turn would
aspire to. But, though the hermit’s mind is tumescent, his manhood is quiescent. He is too embarrassed to call on demonic aid when a galley manned by an Ebudan press gang, cruising for new virgins to serve up to Orca (this is an arrangement of long-standing with the sea god Proteus which Ariosto describes in Canto VIII) carry off the frustrated ancient and his still-intact victim.

  Now, while Angelica’s rescue kept happening in da Carpi’s painting, I went to that rocky shore deep in the distant background of da Carpi’s vision and found the failed holy man, back from Ebuda, toying idly with spells and potions that gave him no satisfaction.

  Holding him down with my talons I said, ‘Old man, there is too much ugliness in the world and you have contributed more than your fair share. Your conduct with Angelica violated every sacred tradition of rendering aid and comfort to travellers, and even worse, showed no aesthetic appreciation. The world would be a better place without you but I’ll let you live if you tell me how to move beyond the limits of time and space and take human form when needful.’

  ‘You don’t know what you ask,’ said the old sorcerer.

  ‘I know exactly what I ask and your demons will not help you if you don’t answer to my satisfaction. Speak!’

  ‘To do what you desire you must go back, back, back!’

  ‘Back to what?’

  ‘The beginning!’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The dream that is called reality.’

  ‘How am I to get to that beginning?’ Although I am fearless the idea of such a venture filed me with uncertainty.

  ‘You must go through the eye of the great raven.’

  ‘How do I find that raven and his eye?’

  ‘He must find you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He must come to you in a dream.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Then you can’t go back to the beginning.’

  ‘Has he come to you?’

  ‘Nobody comes to me. I live out my days alone.’

  ‘Now, yes, but did he ever come to you?’

  The hermit ignored my question.

  ‘I haven’t even got a name,’ he said piteously. ‘Jerome had a name. Also a tame lion. I have nothing, even my demons have left me. Do you have a name?’

  ‘I am Volatore.’

  ‘Ariosto gave you that name?’

  ‘I gave it to myself.’

  ‘How full of yourself you are! Ariosto didn’t bother to name me because my part was only to get Angelica from my bleak shore to the rock she is now chained to. He also imposed on me the humiliation of making an attempt on her virginity and coming up short.’

  I was unable to offer the sympathy he craved.

  ‘You should have been mindful of your limitations,’ I observed. ‘You can’t break down a door with a rotten banana.’

  ‘That comedy wasn’t my idea! The Maestro, curse him! gave me lines to speak and things to do and I was obliged to speak the lines and do the things or be written out of the story.’

  ‘I speak my own lines.’

  ‘You can do that because the Maestro gave you, animal that you are, no lines to speak.’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever, old sinner. I want to know if the great raven has never come to you, how you were able to tell me how to go back, back, back to the beginning of the dream that is called reality?’

  ‘These things are known even to those members of the sorcery community who have no importance, but we lack the virtue necessary to make use of the knowledge.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll release you now but if you have lied to me you won’t enjoy my next visit.’

  The hermit shook himself feebly when I let him go. He wandered off with no word of farewell and I departed to seek a suitable dreaming place.

  I flew over sea and land, still in the world of da Carpi’s painting, until I came to a sort of natural amphitheatre at the foot of a black escarpment which seemed to resound with echoes of silence under the arch of the sky.

  ‘This will be my dreaming place,’ I said. I landed in the centre of the amphitheatre and lay down to sleep. Day became night and I dreamed many things: ships and battles, knights on horseback, beautiful women, music and song. I awoke when the sun rose behind the escarpment and the second day began.

  I remained where I was, fasting to clear my mind for the great raven. When night came I slept and I dreamed of sieges and towers, battles and blood, stormy seas and ships driven on to rocks where some people died by drowning, others by the sword, and the screaming of women was heard.

  On the third day when night came I dreamed of blackness, only that. I dreamed of blackness every night after that, and on the eighth night the blackness swooped and became the great raven.

  The great raven looked at me and blinked, showing me a clear bluish-white disc like a little round mirror in which I saw only blankness.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he said, and his voice rebounded in massed echoes from the black escarpment.

  ‘To the beginning of the dream that is called reality,’ I whispered.

  ‘Why?’ said the raven.

  ‘I want to go beyond time and space to rescue Angelica always.’

  ‘There are heroes for that. To me speak only truth.’

  ‘I want her for myself.’

  I was looking into the raven’s left eye when I said that. Then the mirror flashed and I was in the eye looking out. Around me the vast blackness of the bird opened and lifted and the earth fell away below us, all the flimsy contrivances of humankind and the clamour of its voices blurring into dimness and distance as we rose above the grey sky and into the brilliant clarity of the blue dome in which the present curved endlessly upon itself to compass past and future.

  Up we flew, high, high into the blue dome, then whistling down in a dizzying black-winged rush we shot the long, long curve past faces huge and tiny on the flickering screen of memory, faces in the shadows, in the light, lips shaping words remembered and forgotten in the moving gleams of time, the wavering of candlelight, the pattering of ghostly feet, the boom of tower clocks, the fading ink of letters tied with faded ribbons; faces wheeling with horsemen and battles and cannon, marching with armies, screaming in burning cities, drowning in shipwrecks and the thunder of the wild black ocean; palimpsested voices, distant figures and the changing colours of processions, plagues, migrations, ruins, standing stones, cave drawings, jungles, deserts, dust, volcanoes, floods, ages shuffling into silence.

  Down, down we arrowed blackly through the silence to a dim and smoking red that seethed and crackled and bubbled and was veined with golden rivulets of lava. Down, down through that red to a dimmer red, a deeper silence, an older stillness. We were in a cavern dimly lit by the red and flickering light of our mind, the raven’s and mine.

  Here, we said.

  What?

  Here, here, here. Our voice had become many voices, voices without number, tiny and great. The raven was no longer a raven, raven, raven, raven. Nor was I what I had been; we were without form, we were not yet alive: tiny, tiny dancing giants looming greatly in uncertain shapes and dwindling in the shadows; fast asleep and dancing in the dim red caverns of sleep.

  Through age-long dimnesses of red we danced and sang incessantly the long song of our sorting: yes and no, we sang in silence, grouping and dispersing and regrouping in the circles and the spirals of the sleep-dance. Through aeons we danced while the mountains cooled under the long rains and the deeps filled up with oceans. We danced through all the colours of the years while, unseen and unknown by us, the world danced with us into the dream of reality.

  The dancing continued in my mind but the raven was gone. I awoke in the centre of the amphitheatre and I knew that I could now go through time and space and assume whatever form was necessary.

  Chapter 3

  High-Mindedness of Volatore

  My aeons-long sojourn with the tiny, tiny dancing giants in the dim red caverns of sleep had made me realise how provincial my outlook had bee
n before. How little the works of man and the hopes of man mattered and how little our dream of reality itself mattered! Still, that’s all there is and we must make the best of it.

  The place in which I awoke was not far from Ebuda, the Isle of Tears. Leaving my corporeality in the world of da Carpi’s painting I took my leave of the amphitheatre and the black escarpment and as the naked idea of me without visible form I took to the air. No sooner had I done so than I felt a pull, as though a line connecting the centre of me to the centre of something else had grown taut. Land and sea unrolled beneath me as naked, bodiless, invisible, I was flying, flying, the cool air streaming past me until there appeared below me a noble city that I recognised at once: Rome!

  When I saw the eternal city on her seven hills beneath me all gilded in the afternoon sunlight a thrill ran through me. It was springtime, the sky was blue, the world seemed beautiful. The Colosseum appeared, and from it rose the ghostly roar of the crowd as gladiators killed each other for their entertainment. This is how Nero and his Romans used their little mortal span, their little dream of reality. SPQR, SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS, said the standards borne by the legions. Certainly they represented the senate but what about the populace? Rome civilised the world but its roads were perhaps straighter than its politicians. From high up one looks down on what those below look up to.

  I was being drawn towards the Baths of Caracalla. There seemed no danger in it as I descended to a quiet street near the ruins of the Baths. With no transition I found myself in a human mind. This was my first experience of this sort in the world of the present and ‘Wow!’ said who? ‘You’re here!’ I or someone else said in white letters advancing across a blackness. It came to me that I was in the mind of someone who called himself Guglielmo Stranieri. Although I was taking in the world through his senses I found it necessary to make constant adjustments: my eyes were side by side on the front of my head so that I had to give conscious thought to the act of seeing; as an animal I had viewed things mostly from a distance; now I had to refocus; my human senses of smell and hearing lacked the sharpness I was used to, so that I was always straining to smell and hear more. The air in the room where I sat was smoky and stale, with an underscent of garlic and sweat; beyond the room I heard engines, footsteps, voices. I was/we were looking at a small free-standing illuminated window. There was no wall around it. It was on a desk beyond which were bookshelves and a wall. On this illuminated window were white letters on a black background. They formed the words you are reading now; this is how I first saw my name spelled out. There was a feeling in me as of the sap rising in a tree. ‘I am part of the present world,’ I said. ‘I am no longer confined in a book,’ and saw my words appear in this window that is called a screen.