Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

On my arrival from the airport I installed myself in the apartment and sat down to work out the details of my new venture. The kitchen conversion was the biggest expense and would be the most trouble. The picture in my mind was from my childhood in the Abruzzi: the brick oven and the wooden paddle. The next thing was to find someone who could make it a reality.

It took me three weeks to locate a man who had knowledge of such things. He was old and he wept when I told him what I wanted but he said it made him feel young again and he could do the job. When it was finished I wept remembering my childhood.

In a month I was ready to open. The blue lettering outlined in gold on the window said MARCO’S PIZZERIA CLASSICA and the tables and chairs waited for what the future would bring. The oven was placed so that passers-by could see me through the window as I shaped the dough and put it in to bake. Soon there were lines outside and the tables began to fill up with people waiting for my classic pizza while drinking Chianti Classico. Others came in full of nostalgia, just to shake my hand and wish me well.

I had anticipated success and had hired a pretty waitress who spoke both English and Italian and had a walk that stimulated the appetite. Giuseppina her name was, and when her lips formed her name it was almost impossible not to kiss them. I forbore during business hours but after closing time she exceeded my expectations. She was delightful but her charms were not to be compared to the immortal poignancy of the naked Angelica glistening with salt spray and chained weeping to her rock.

To be a homeless idea in a borrowed body, it is like being a hermit crab in a borrowed shell. No it isn’t, because that is the normal way of life for the hermit crab. This body of Marco Renzetti constricts me; I rub my borrowed shoulders, feeling for wings that are not there. Walking on my two legs I am afraid of overbalancing because I lack the other two behind me.

Ah, the sensations, the pictures in my mind! Centuries pass below me like continents, the cloud shadows race over hill and valley, mountain and sea. Above me the limitless arch of the sky, its infinite blue, and under my wings the stories of Ariosto bearing me up strongly. No, that is not now, it is a time not possible for me now. How long must this masquerade go on? When shall I find Angelica?

And when I find her must I woo her as a man? What I long for and lust for is Angelica under the real me, Angelica mounted by the hippogriff. Unlawful it may be but I am a fitter mate for her than Ruggiero or Medoro ever was and I mean to have her.

Always in my mind are the old hermit’s words, ‘the dream of reality’. This reality that I am living feels like a dream. The idea of it haunts me: to wake up from the dream of reality, this reality that is my life, would be to die, would it not? But sometimes I seem to come out of the dream, to be in another state of being, dim and red, and I do not die. Perhaps humans understand these things better than I who am only an animal. Not even a real animal but an imagined one, a fiction. Is it possible that I am mad? Can a figment of Ariosto’s imagination be mad? Or am I perhaps the repository of a madness that is thus prevented from tainting the whole of the poem of Orlando Furioso ?

The passing faces look through the window at me and I look back. The world is full of pretty women but an Angelica is rare. Her beauty, like the idea of me, transcends time and space. When I find her the years of waiting will be as if they never were; the finding of her will be as if it has followed instantly on the thought of her.

In my borrowed body I took to walking in the night. I used to go to a place that overlooked the bay. Sometimes the fog rolled in and I felt myself to be nothing and nowhere while the foghorns hooted below me like sea monsters. On the way home I passed other late walkers whose faces were like faces in a dream, each face a mystery unknown even to itself.

One night, returning from a late walk, I chanced upon two figures struggling in a dimly lit alley. One was a man, the other a woman, and she was desperately trying to fight him off. He turned to me, reeking of vodka, and I knocked him unconscious with a single blow. She, suddenly released from his grasp, fell also. I helped her to her feet and she said, ‘Wow! The answer to a maiden’s prayer.’

‘A maiden!’ I said. ‘Chained to the rock of your beauty and beset by monsters!’

‘What?’

‘You are a maiden?’

‘Hold on, friend — that was a figure of speech, so let’s not get hung up on personal details, OK?’ She stood on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Thank you for saving me from that scumbag and you can walk me home if you like. He’s not getting up; you think he’ll be all right?’

‘Is he someone you know?’

‘No, he’s a total stranger.’

‘Then forget about him,’ I said as she took my arm and we went on our way.

Being a man I could not help mentally undressing her and I found her beauty unimpeachable. Ariosto flashed into my mind and my shoulders itched for my absent wings as the blackness of the crow filled me, and the redness of the dim red caverns of sleep. I waited for my head to clear, then, ‘Angelica!’ I said.

‘Who?’ she replied. ‘What?’

‘You are Angelica, eternally transcending time and space?’

‘Slow down, handsome. My name is Doris. What’s yours?’

‘Vola —’ Suddenly a wave of confusion swept over me. The ball was flying through the air, I stretched out my arms and found Doris in them.

‘You’re a fast worker, Vola,’ she said. ‘I like a man who knows what he wants. Is that your first name or your last name?’

I removed my arms.

‘Vola not! Name is Renzetti, Marco Renzetti.’ Although I wasn’t too sure of that just then.

‘I like your accent, Marco. Where are you from?’

‘Seven hills. Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf. Rome.’

‘Feral children! What happened to them?’

‘Founded Rome.’

‘Fast learners! Here we are at my place. Want to come up for a drink? I could sure use one.’ She kissed me again, longer this time. ‘Come on, don’t be bashful.’

She unlocked the street door and as I followed her up the stairs my head cleared. Her skirt was very short, her legs beckoned sweetly and her bottom, rising before me like a full moon, cheered me on.

‘Renzetti,’ I said to myself, ‘Marco Renzetti.’

On entering I found myself outstared by framed prints of badly painted, miserable-looking children with huge sad eyes. The sofa was wrapped in clear plastic. From the ceiling hung a sphere made of glittering silver tesserae that spattered patterns of light on the huge-eyed children, the shelves full of tiny glass figurines, and the large television on which were plastic flowers that gave off a plastic fragrance. There were no books.

It would have been wiser on my part to go back down the stairs immediately but her going-up-the-stairs view was still imprinted on my vision.

Ah, the gulf between the real and the ideal! Ariosto’s Angelica had many flaws. Her intelligence was a sort of low cunning with which she evaded pursuers. She used her beauty unashamedly to manipulate men. She made promises she never kept but pursuing her was time well spent. To speak modern, she was a class act.

The portents were not favourable, my chance of success extremely doubtful. In my quest for the timeless and eternal Angelica I was well aware that Ariosto had married her off to Medoro who became King of Cathay. I persisted nonetheless.