Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 34. Some Kind of a Joke?

I settled back into my normal routine. I saw Dr Levy every week and took my extra-strength placebos when the stress was more than usual. I kept a simple journal, nothing more, and I tried to find a quiet place to put my head. I wasn’t giving up on Volatore but I needed to pull back from the front line for a little rest and rehabilitation. Whenever Clancy phoned I made it clear that our friendship was on hold. I went to the gallery every day and pretended that there was nothing else going on in my life.

Funny, how the mind brings up sights and smells from childhood. There was a day in April when the air seemed heavy with the impending season and there came to me the pungent odour of skunk cabbage and the clerical visage of Jack-in-the-pulpit. There was an old woman down the road who was versed in ‘herbs and simples’. I suppose the simple part of it was to do with simple cures. She was known to have helped Jane Wakeman get rid of her baby when she was three months gone. She used the Jack-in-the-pulpit seeds for divination and it was said that she could tell when people were going to die.

She grabbed me by the arm once and put her face close to mine. I was eleven at the time.

‘Ever dream of flying?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You will,’ she hissed. She made an obscene gesture and went away cackling to herself.

Remembering her I recalled my flights, waking and dreaming, with Volatore, the heat of his body between my legs and the funky animal smell of him.

On this April day in 2008 a man came into the gallery with a very wide canvas, six feet or so, wrapped in brown paper. His clothes, all paint-smeared, were new: black jeans, blue denim shirt, Timberland boots. He seemed clean enough but there was a strong smell about him, a funky animal smell that I recognised.

‘Why are you blushing?’ said Olivia.

‘I don’t know, maybe it’s early change of life.’

Hard to tell his age: forty maybe. He was tall, strongly built, clean-shaven. Odd expression on his face. High on something?

‘Have you made an appointment for us to see this man?’ I asked Olivia.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’

‘Are you Angelica Greenberg?’ said the man to me in a Tom Waits kind of voice. His English was all right but it sounded dubbed, as in a foreign film where the speaker’s lips aren’t shaping the English words you hear.

‘How do you know my name?’ I said.

‘It came to mind.’

‘Came to mind how? In a dream? In a Rolodex?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And how did you know to come here to the gallery?’

‘This is where my feet brought me.’

‘Oh really? And what’s your name?’

‘Volatore.’

I jumped back as if he’d grabbed me by the crotch.

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ I said in a voice that was not my normal one.

He reared back and showed the whites of his eyes like a half-broke horse.

‘What’s wrong with my name?’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘It came to me.’

‘Is it your first name?’

‘It’s my only.’

‘Who are your parents?’

‘No family, there’s just me.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Around.’

‘Have you exhibited anywhere?’

‘No. Are you going to look at the painting?’

‘OK, mystery man, unveil it.’

He tore off the brown paper and threw it on the floor. As he did so I caught a glimpse of a naked woman tattooed on his right wrist. Not the usual full-frontal thing but with the body slightly turned and the left arm raised. He removed a Michnik from a nearby easel and put up his painting.

Olivia and I stepped back to viewing distance. ‘Has it got a title?’ I said.

‘Tiny, Tiny Dancing Giants in the Dim Red Caverns of Sleep,’ he answered.

Olivia and I stood there taking it in. The thing was unsettling but hypnotic and difficult to turn away from. You wouldn’t call it figurative but it wasn’t abstract either. There was a lot of dimness and redness and the idea of the tiny, tiny dancing giants was perfectly clear but not spelled out. Looking at it made me woozy and I had to lean against a wall to keep from falling over. We mostly have music in the gallery and this afternoon it was the Emma Kirkby recording that had lifted Volatore to my window. ‘ “Voglio, voglio,” ’ she sang to Anthony Rooley’s lute. ‘ “Voglio morire,” ’ she sang, and the tiny, tiny dancing giants danced silently in the dim red caverns of the wide canvas.

‘Opera?’ said the man who called himself Volatore.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s “Olimpia’s Lament” when Bireno sails away and she’s left on the beach.’

He gave me a measured leer.

‘You ever get left on the beach?’

‘Don’t get smart with me,’ I said, ‘I’ve dealt with better leerers than you.’

‘Sorry!’

‘You know Orlando Furioso? Vivaldi did an opera with that title, based on Ariosto’s epic poem.’

‘It’s got plenty of operatic situations, like Orlando’s fury because he’s got the hots for Angelica but she wants no part of him. Happened because they drank from different fountains, kind of thing goes on every day in opera land.’

‘So you’ve read it.’

‘Guess I must have, since it’s in my head.’

I almost said that he didn’t look like a reader of sixteenth-century epic poetry, but decided not to.

Pause.

‘Well?’ he said, watching me with a condescending smile on his face.

‘Where’s this painting coming from?’ I said. ‘I mean the idea.’

‘A dream.’

‘Can you say a little more about it?’

‘Everything I had to say is up there on the canvas.’

‘What else have you painted?’ said Olivia.

‘Nothing.’

‘Can you leave it with us and come back tomorrow?’ I said. ‘We’d like to give this some thought.’

‘OK.’

‘There’s a shower here that you can use,’ said Olivia, ‘if you want to freshen up.’

‘I always smell like this,’ he said. ‘See you.’ He walked over the brown paper on the floor and out of the door.

The painting was still doing its thing on the easel but neither of us wanted to look at it. His smell lingered awhile.

About five minutes after he left I said to him, ‘Wait!’

‘What?’ said Olivia.

‘Never mind. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be.’

‘What were you going to say to him?’ said Olivia.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘His visit seems to have hit you kind of hard.’

‘It has.’

‘How come?’

I shook my head.

‘I’ll let you know when I find out.’