Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

‘Here I am,’ she said softly. ‘Take me.’

So seductive she was! So delicious, so full of desire as I mounted her! She gasped and cried out when I entered her but soon she was moving with me and voicing her pleasure. And I! This was the happiest moment of my life. To how many of us is it given to be wanted for what we truly are! And to be loved for our true selves! And she did love me, I could feel the very soul of her in my embrace. Her orgasm went on and on until she was exhausted. When I withdrew she remained on her hands and knees, swaying a little.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

She turned her face to me. She was smiling with tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘When you came, when I felt your seed spurt into me, I saw the shadows of great wings on a sunlit meadow; I seemed to be remembering it from a long way back.’

‘I come from a long time back, my love.’

‘Yes, I am your love and you are mine. You’re an imaginary beast from an epic poem by Ariosto. You were an imaginary beast when you mounted me and you’re the same talking to me now. Volatore, how is it that a real woman can mate with a poetic invention?’

‘Everything is real, Angelica. Reality is a house of many rooms, and sometimes we can enter more than one. Ariosto’s words put real wind under my wings, made me fly. It was not only words on paper — I remember the air rushing past me, remember looking down on plains and forests, mountains and oceans. I lived, I flew over the sea in a painting by Girolamo da Carpi in a time long past. You and I are both in the world of that picture which lives even now and waits for us here in this country, in El Paso. And in the same Now here I am in your mind or in a dream, I don’t know. But you felt my weight on you, felt me inside you in our dream of reality.’

‘If we could couple as we did, mind and matter, waking and dreaming, might we produce an offspring?’

‘I don’t know, Angelica. I don’t know the boundaries of this reality.’

‘Maybe our child …’ she started to say. She was still on her hands and knees. Then, ‘The figures in the carpet are dancing all around me.’

‘Our child, Angelica?’

‘Maybe our child will be a story,’ she murmured. ‘A story will be our only child.’ And she began to weep.

I tried to comfort her.

‘We have each other,’ I said. Lamely.

‘I want you to hold me and kiss me and cuddle me,’ she said. ‘Can you put on a human shape for me?’

‘Tell me something first, Angelica …’

‘What?’

‘Tell me again that you are my love.’

‘Yes, Volatore, I am your love.’

‘And you truly love me, heart and soul?’ As the words left my beak I felt the swoop of a great blackness.

‘It’s all so strange!’ she cried. ‘Please!’ she said again, ‘I need you to kiss me and cuddle me before I can be sure.’

‘Wait here and I’ll leave my hippogriff shape and find a man body and come back to you.’

‘I’ll come with you; after all, I should have the choosing of the man I’m going to be intimate with. When you beome a man, how shall I know it’s you?’

‘I’ll say, “Here is Volatore.” ’ I became the idea of me with no visible form and we set out.

Angelica was of course chained to the rock of her beauty and monsters of all shapes and sizes came thick and fast, some with honeyed words and some with lewd proposals. She rejected one after another; when any became offensive I showed them my full hippogriff self and they left pretty quickly. We wandered up and down and by winding ways and eventually came to the place that overlooks the bridge and the bay.

A man was standing there with his back to us.

‘You’ve come at last,’ he said to Angelica.

Was there something? What?

‘You were expecting me?’ she said, looking him up and down critically.

‘Yes, I was. Sometimes I get a little crazy. I told myself that if I come and stand here night after night a beautiful stranger will appear.’ His breath. Vodka.

‘Maybe,’ said Angelica, ‘I won’t always be a stranger.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘Wait!’

‘Whoosh!’ says Marco. He suddenly feels as if something has gone out of him, leaving him in some way a new man, light and easy, refreshed and invigorated. ‘Wow!’ he adds.

‘ Che ?’ says Strozzi as he slides a pizza in to bake.

‘Where?’ says Marco, standing in the pizzeria that bears his name.

‘Where what?’ says Strozzi.

‘Who?’ says Marco as Giuseppina, pizza-laden, sways past him. Coming back to himself in a flash, he affectionately squeezes her left buttock.

‘What’s this?’ she says. ‘You’ve just now rediscovered my natica sinistra ? I have one on the other side also. They’re a matched pair.’

Marco bilaterally embraces her bottom and draws her to him.

‘ Piano, piano ,’ says Giuseppina, ‘the pizza’s getting cold. See me after closing time.’

‘Sweet Pina!’ cries Marco as the joy of life and the vital sap of the vernal season rise in him and he follows her into the dining room. ‘I feel as if I’ve been away for a long time but now I’m back, and only now do I realise all that you are to me! You are my basil and my oregano! You are my mozzarella!’

The diners look up from their pizza classica and give the couple their full attention.

‘I’ve seen nothing of you and heard nothing from you for weeks,’ says Giuseppina with the colour mounting to her cheeks, ‘and do you mock me now?’

‘I do not mock, Giuseppina! I love you!’

‘You’re embarrassing me! Be serious, padrone !’

‘But I am serious!’

Her eyes narrow as she serves the pizzas.

‘How serious?’

Marco goes down on one knee and there is a collective intake of breath from the onlookers.

‘Go for it!’ urge the assembled upholders of traditional family values.

Marco goes for it.

‘Marry me!’ he demands in ringing tones that make passers-by in the street turn their heads and smile.

‘You hear this?’ says Giuseppina to the breathless pizzagoers. ‘What answer shall I give the padrone ?’

‘Yes!’ they shout as one.

Giuseppina raises Marco to his feet, kisses him soundly, places his hands firmly where they have been longing to go, and breathes softly into his ear, ‘What’s mine is yours.’

Cheers and applause. It’s like something in a movie.

Vassily, his name is. A big man and no gentleman, reeking of Stolichnaya the same as on the night he attacked Doris. I knocked him out then, so why don’t I become my hippogriff self now and let him feel the weight of my talons?

Right! Here I go. Nothing happens, I’m still an invisible idea. Only a little while ago I was seeing off unwelcome suitors with my full self but suddenly I don’t know how to do it. Was there a magic word? Meanwhile Angelica was breathing in his stinking breath and looking at him with desire in her eyes.

All I could do was climb into his mind, and it was so swollen with his single intention that it was a tight squeeze.

‘Here I am,’ I gasped to Angelica. ‘Here is Volatore.’

‘What’s your name, handsome?’ she said playfully, as if sharing a joke with me.

‘Volatore, Volatore!’ I tried to say, but the name that came out was ‘Vassily’.

‘Sure you are, but you’re my Volatore, yes?’

‘Who’s Volatore?’ said Vassily.

‘ You are, aren’t you?’ said Angelica.

‘I’ll show you who I am pretty quick as soon as we get out of the weather,’ said Vassily.