Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

‘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

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.