Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

How to begin? I let the idea of me wander to find a useful body with a receptive mind. Wandering, wandering, no hurry, let it happen. Did the time pass slowly or quickly? Time is so various in its textures, densities, and flavours! I flowed with it, swam in it, tasted it, rose through it into the next scenes of my dream of reality.

Ecco ! Here is a fine big fellow, very strong, I sense. Pictures in his mind, men locked in a struggle for a ball that is not round. On a field that is formally marked off. Wing, he’s thinking. Wing is what he is. Rugby. Rugby is his game. Marco Renzetti is his name. OK, Marco! Andiamo !

What is this? Roma Ciampino. Being in this man’s mind I think ‘airport’ but in my animal mind it is a monstrous thing, braying light and colour, black with noise, stinking of sweat and un-nature, ceiled and carpeted with footsteps. Here one may eat, drink, buy every possible thing. I, Marco Renzetti, drawn in by the glittering array of shops, buy perfume, six silk shirts, four neckties, a bottle of grappa and a little model of the Colosseum.

Now we stand behind other people. A desk. A woman takes from us what? Passport. Ticket. San Francisco is the name in our mind. San Francisco in America! Why San Francisco? No matter, this is what Dame Fortune has decreed and I must obey. Walking, walking, many people. Sitting, sitting. Through glass we see great machines. Flying soon, we think. A large voice tells us that passengers will now embark. We descend stairs and go through a little door. ‘ Buon giorno .’ Walking, walking, people, people. Sitting down. Fastening, with a click, a heavy belt. Music, music. A uniformed woman demonstrates what to do if the machine falls out of the sky. Waiting, waiting. Noise, vibration. We are moving, moving. My stomach lifts. We are airborne.

Very good, I have a big strong man body and I’m in a machine that flies. It’s not like real flying; the wings don’t move and the machine is loud and shaky as it crawls laboriously through the sky. White cloud-castles pass beneath us. Volatore, the flyer, in this unnatural flying machine. How strange to be us, living in words above the clouds. But the strangeness is all there is. There is no other place to live. From a sea of nothingness we are washed up on its empty shore, there to build our palaces on sand and dress up as whatever we think we might be.

A very pretty woman comes with drinks and little packets of nuts. The scent of her flesh lingers in my nostrils, her perfume and her woman-smell. I hear the rustling of her underwear, her stockinged thighs. Short skirt but I stop my hand from sliding up. Not now. Not here. Later, if Fortune smiles on me, there will be Angelica.

In my mind something with a big oven, round slabs of dough, a long wooden paddle, an illuminated signboard, Marco’s Pizzeria , changing to Pizzeria Renzetti , changing to Pizzeria Classica . OK, Pizzeria is cool, I suppose, yes? Plain white flour in my mind, salt, dried yeast, sugar, olive oil and polenta — these are things I seem to know. Ovens, what kind of ovens are there where I am going? In my mind there is a smell of baking.

This kind of flying was very slow. We ate, we drank, we saw pictures that moved: for this a screen appeared and the aeroplane was darkened. From first being seated we had been provided with a little apparatus that fitted on the head and fed voices and music into both ears. My Volatore mind was bemused by the constant presence of music everywhere. How, I wondered, did modern humankind find mental space for thought? The moving pictures before us had music and the sound of voices and large and small explosions. I removed the hearing apparatus and for a while I watched the screen on which a man ran, jumped, and drove various machines while being pursued by other men who ran, jumped, and drove other machines. Sometimes the single man stopped and fought with the other men, then he would go to a room where he had a box in which were many passports and sheaves of various kinds of banknotes. I understood that the pictures formed some kind of story imagined by whoever made up the story. But it seemed strange to me to be deprived of the pleasure of imagining one’s own pictures to a story told in words. I fell asleep, awoke, consumed food and drink served on a little tray, slept and woke again. After a long time the windows tilted, I saw a great bridge over sparkling water, little sailing boats.

‘First time in SF?’ said the man next to me.

‘What is SF?’ I asked him.

It was not something I found in Marco Renzetti’s mind, a mind I was not consistently in possession of; perforce I leapt from tussock to tussock of knowledge through a wide swamp of ignorance.

My neighbour laughed.

‘Good question. San Francisco is just about anything you want, plus maybe some things you don’t want.’

‘Named for a saint, yes? A holy place?’

‘Let’s just say it’s wholly a place, OK?’

‘This is the New World?’

‘It’s slightly used by some not very careful owners but it’s all there is. The flight attendant is coming with landing cards. Do you need one?’

‘I need to land, yes.’

‘Italian passport?’

‘Yes.’

In my tussock-jumping I found that things I knew a moment ago were not always there in the present moment; new information appeared and disappeared and left me with no firm ground under my feet.

‘Raise your hand,’ said my neighbour, ‘and they’ll give you a landing card.’

I raised my hand, got a landing card, and he helped me with it.

‘Occupation,’ he said. ‘What do you do?’

‘I was rugby, now I am pizzeria.’

‘Rugby what? Player?’

‘Yes.’

‘But now you are pizzeria. You work in one?’

‘I own one.’ I had a picture in my mind of a case in the overhead compartment in which were important documents. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have to get quotes on ovens and everything must be perfect because her beauty is the rock I am chained to.’

‘Whose beauty? What rocks and chains? You Italian guys must be into some really kinky S and M!’

‘Sorry, I am a little deranged just now.’

‘Don’t apologise, there’s always room for a little more derangement in SF. Myself, I like a good spanking every now and then. Does wonders for the circulation.’

‘A brick oven is what I need,’ I said as I felt rising in me from my feet to my brain the self-awareness of Marco Renzetti. I must have spoken that name aloud.

‘Clancy Yeats,’ said my companion, and shook my hand.

‘The poet Yeats said that words alone are certain good,’ I said.

‘He was probably drunk when he said it. I wouldn’t have figured you for a poetry reader.’

‘It could even be that there are poets who play rugby.’

‘I doubt it. Poker maybe, but nothing as rough and dirty as rugby. Where’s your pizzeria?’

‘In the Mission. Not open yet, just getting set up.’

‘I know the best places for restaurant supplies,’ said Yeats as we separated at Passport Control, ‘being the owner of Clancy’s Bar. Let me know if I can help with your business. Or your pleasure. Here’s my card. Call me.’

I didn’t think I would. In my human form I still retained some animal instincts and something about this man made me not want him for a friend. My passport and visa were in order and as Marco Renzetti I knew my way around the airport. I collected my luggage, passed through Customs, and boarded a shuttle for town.

On the bus I reviewed my position. My name was Marco Renzetti. I was thirty years old. I had been a professional rugby player, a wing with Viadana until a year ago, when I decided to leave sport and go into business while my knees were still in working order. On the advice of my cousin Giuseppe in San Francisco I bought a restaurant called Il Fornello from its owner on his retirement. On a previous trip I had looked the place over thoroughly. It was close to the thriving Delfina restaurant near Valencia in the Mission. It was Giuseppe’s opinion that being a neighbour to Delfina would do us good on this busy street. The fixtures and fittings were immaculate, even to the mural of the Bay of Naples, and the price, though high, was fair. It included the apartment over the restaurant into which I could move immediately and from where I could supervise the conversion of the kitchen.