Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

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!

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.

‘Listen to that mezzo,’ he would say. ‘It’s like silk but Baltsa puts a razor edge on it when the scene calls for it. If I could draw and paint the way she sings I’d draw and paint much better than I do.’ And he’d sing the seguidilla off-key:

“ Près des remparts de Seville ,

Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia …”

and dance me around with a lot of stamping and a rose in the buttonhole of his shirt if one was available. While Mom ran the vacuum cleaner to drown out the noise. So they each got some satisfaction.

Dad took nothing with him when he left, so I ended up with the tottering stacks. I listened through the operas and indexed them. It was nothing from Carmen that attached itself to my AWOL father, but the famous chorus from Nabucco , ‘ Va, pensiero …’ ‘Fly, thought, on wings of gold …’ as the Jews, all of them named Greenberg, were led away into captivity. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows and tried to figure out whose fault it was.