Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

I could feel that first encounter with Volatore becoming huge in me, wanting to burst like a watermelon dropped from a tenth-storey window. I knew I’d be sorry but I couldn’t stop.

‘You were saying?’ said Clancy.

‘I asked him in for a cup of tea.’

‘How’d he get in?’

‘Through the window.’

‘And him quite a big fellow with hooves and talons and wings and all.’

‘He thought small.’

Charlie brought my sandwich over and I sipped my beer.

Clancy waited until I had somewhat appeased my hunger and my thirst.

‘I’m all ears,’ he said then, looking prescient.

‘I gave him tea in a bowl, because of his beak.’

‘As one would. Go on.’

‘I don’t know what came over me …’

‘Take your time, choose your words carefully.’

‘I wanted him to kiss me.’

‘Not a very soft kisser, with that beak.’

‘He offered to change to a man-shape, but I told him I wanted him as he was.’

‘Wanted him as in “I want you”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on a moment,’ said Clancy.

He went to the bar, came back with a bottle of Bushmill’s and a glass, poured himself a stiff one, drank it down, and while catching his breath indicated to me that I should continue.

‘Well of course he was too big for me so I asked him to think himself and his business smaller.’

Why was I telling Clancy all this? Did I want to make it irrevocably real by reliving it before him? Did I want to word myself naked under a beast to excite him and myself? Was I compelled by some inner demon to commit this act of betrayal? Yes to all of the above as I continued, ‘And when the size was right I …’

‘You don’t have to say it all out.’

‘Yes, I do because we’re talking about a reality that’s not the usual thing. I was only wearing panties and a bra so I took those off and got down on all fours and he covered me the way his father the griffin had covered his mother the mare.’

‘His mother the mare …’ He lingered over the words. ‘How long ago was this?’

‘I don’t know what kind of time we’re talking about.’

‘What I mean is, did he make you pregnant?’

‘Not in any way that ends up in the maternity ward.’

‘What other kind of pregnant is there?’

‘Mental, Clancy. All in the mind.’

‘Leave any marks on you? I’d think his talons … unless they were all in the mind too.’

‘There were some scratch marks but they’ve faded by now so I can’t show you any evidence. Do you not believe me?’

A pause while Clancy Bushmilled himself again and I went on to my second boilermaker. The light through the window was very golden, and otherwise full of memories forgotten and remembered and there came to mind a Latin phrase from a book by Mircea Eliade, ‘ in illo tempore ’, ‘in that time’.

‘I believe you, Ange — it’s just that I don’t know how to get my head around this other reality. I keep seeing you naked on all fours and him on top of you …’ He trailed off into silence and he was blushing.

‘Does it excite you?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too.’

Nobody said anything for a moment while the tourist influx murmured and drank its drinks. Then we looked at each other, nodded, and went upstairs.

When we had our clothes off Clancy blushed again and I read his mind.

I got down on all fours and said softly, ‘Here I am. Take me.’

Afterwards, lying in his arms, I saw that he was crying.

‘What is it, Clance?’ I said, and kissed him.

‘I can’t describe it exactly,’ he said. ‘There’s a great sadness come over me, what a little short thing it is to be alive and so strange. Maybe it’s just the whisky.’

‘No, it’s the sense of loss, something lost so far back we can’t remember it.’

‘Were you thinking of Volatore while we were doing it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it better with him? Did it give you that thing that was lost so far back?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Clance. It was what it was.’

‘And you’re hugging the memory to yourself, not to lose the goodness of it, yes?’

‘Please, Clancy!’

‘What happened after he climbed off you? Did you fly away together?’ His face as he said that was not the face of anyone I wanted to be with and I felt thoroughly ashamed, as I had known all along I would be.

‘That’s as far as this conversation goes,’ I said.

I got dressed while he watched me in a dirty-minded way, and left.

‘Come back soon,’ he called to my departing back. ‘You can be on top next time.’

There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.

This time it is a woman in black who feeds the Wurlitzer. The mystic arm rises, descends, and an empty railway station arises in the November evening around Agnes Baltsa as she sings in her native Greek ‘ “ To treno fevgi stis okto ” ’, ‘The train leaves at eight’. The woman in black remembers, will never forget the eight o’clock to Katerini and a lost love. This is not Baltsa wearing the borrowed language of Bizet; here, giving her whole heart to this little story in the tongue she was born into, she sings me the empty platform, the gathering November night and the departure of love and I cry accordingly.

I phoned my partner Olivia to tell her that I’d not be at the gallery that day, and I went to the overlook at Fort Point to sit and think about things. The sky was blue, the sunlight danced on the water, ships and boats came and went. Round and round in my mind went this time, that time, all time. In illo tempore . My childhood. Telling the bees. My grandmother told me about that. Her husband had joined the International Brigade in 1936 and went off to the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes when she and I were alone and she’d had too much to drink she’d talk about that time.

‘He said it was something he had to do,’ she said. ‘I told him there were things he had to do right here, like fix the hole in the roof of the barn. He did it and then he went off to fight fascism.’

She was a good-looking old woman in a plough-that-broke-the-plains kind of way but her face became almost girlish as she called up the past.

‘Those days seem a long way back,’ she said. ‘The images were brighter, the smells and flavours stronger than now: the taste of honey in the comb, the smell of it and the feel of the wax on my tongue, the stickiness all around my mouth and on my fingers. Sweet, like the golden time that passes; the pink apple blossoms drifting down on the hives in the summer orchard.

‘Before he left he told me to tell the bees. “Be very careful to say that I’ve just gone away for a while but I’m not dead. If they think I’m dead they’ll leave our hives and swarm somewhere else.”

‘ “You’re very superstitious all of a sudden,” I said to him.

‘ “Traditions matter,” he said, “and bees are very serious people.”

‘We had a tin globe on the desk where we did the accounts,’ said my grandmother. ‘On it Spain was only a little way from North America but on the real globe it was a world away from Bakersfield where we lived then. I tried to imagine that war but I couldn’t, it was a whole different reality.’ Her face looked so young!