He sat down in a chair and looked at it. He wasn’t in a fit state to begin a dissection now. All his senses had to be keen. At the moment he could hardly think. In addition he should have a witness. Someone who could vouchsafe that the organs really did belong to an angel. That it really was an angel’s anatomy he’d sketched. At the same time, it had to be someone who wouldn’t get any credit for it. Someone from the village, perhaps, he thought.
It couldn’t stay there at any rate.
He rose and picked up the angel again, carried it down to the ground floor, and then descended into the cellar. He laid it down on the floor and lit a candle. He threw some bucketfuls of ice into one corner, smoothed them out with his foot so that they formed a kind of bed, and laid the angel on it. Then he pushed four crates of apples against the side of its body that wasn’t next to the wall, placed two by its feet, so that it was shut into a small, coffinlike space, and emptied a few more buckets of ice over it. He carefully avoided looking at the angel all this time.
Back on the ground floor again, he had a bite to eat, opened the door onto the courtyard several times, without seeing anything except snow and darkness, drew the bolt at last, and went up to his bedroom, got into bed, and closed his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep, the thought of the angel lying down in the cellar was too disquieting. His emotions vacillated the whole time between feelings of extreme triumph and an equally profound remorse.
He went to the window and looked out, the courtyard was as empty as before, and then downstairs, stood poised with his hand on the handle of the cellar door, but changed his mind, it would only make things worse, he thought, and sat down at his desk, but he couldn’t sit there, it was where the angel had so recently been lying, he realized that he’d touched it, and washed his hands in the bowl in the kitchen, before fetching a sheaf of paper and going to another table, in the sitting room, where he sat down and began to write, something he always did when he was plagued by anxiety. He began by writing out the strange dream he’d had, continued with his ramble to the mountain, the fire he’d seen, the tracks he’d followed, the place by the river he’d recognized. He wrote about the angel that had flown above him in the mist, its eerie cry, he wrote about the angel he’d seen in the oak tree, the strange contortions of its face, of how he’d followed it. He told of the burning wheel in the snow, and of the two angels who’d come dragging a roe deer calf. He wrote of the blood that had welled out onto the snow and of the roe deer’s eyes that had gone on living for a few seconds after its head had been severed from its body. He wrote of the angel that had snarled and the blood it had had on its chin and chest, the whirring of its wings as it spread them out and attacked the other one. He mentioned the irony of getting lost again, that all the time he’d been up there he was both eleven years old and fifty-four, and the footsteps of the two angels that had walked past him. He wrote about the convulsions that had racked it, he wrote about the unendurable scream and the look it had given him. He wrote of the fear in its eyes as it died and about the other angel that had propped it up against a rock face. It was almost as if it had done the same thing before, he wrote. It strikes me now that there was something customary about what it did, like a mother following her routines when she puts her children to bed. Then he writes a bit about what his mother did with him when he was small, and then, while he’s still writing, he realizes what he’s just said.
It looked as if Raphael had done it before. There was no grief there. Michael, God’s general, the foremost among the archangels, immortal — shouldn’t his death induce a little more than these simple hand gestures? That single glance?
Raphael had looked at him the way a mother looks at a sleeping child. She goes out, and then she comes back the next morning.
But its brow was cold, Antinous wrote. And there was no pulse.
What did he know about an angel’s body temperature?
What did he know about an angel’s heart rhythms?
He knew nothing about them, he realized, as he sat there writing. He’d always regarded his writing as a sort of friend, a friend who would always listen to him, and this time was no exception, for the very last thing Antinous Bellori wrote in his notebooks, was, triflingly enough, that unfortunately he’d have to stop there, he had to check up on something, and it couldn’t wait.
NO SEARCH was ever made for Antinous Bellori for the simple reason that no one noticed he was missing. In the town people were used to him disappearing, sometimes for several years at a time. He was a loner, he didn’t talk to anyone, and it was several weeks before they discovered he wasn’t at home, which in turn didn’t cause any reaction whatever.
If Guido Bergotti was right, and it was Antinous Bellori’s corpse that the landowner Donati had found later that year, it means that either he went out there right after his last diary entry, or that someone else carried him there. What actually happened during the last few hours of his life, no one can say. Nor what became of his manuscripts until their sudden reappearance in London in 1859.
But we do know what happened to the angels. Only a few months after Bellori vanished without trace, angels began to reveal themselves to human beings again. But these angels, which can be seen in great numbers in paintings from the seventeenth century, bore little resemblance to the angels depicted in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These angels appeared in the guise of chubby toddlers. The fact that they gradually became known as cherubs is merely another example of the extent of historical irony. Such child-angels have no basis in either the Old or the New Testaments, they were unknown to people of olden times and only began to manifest themselves in the medieval period, but then only in very small numbers. So, what happened at the start of the seventeenth century is therefore remarkable in more ways than one. Were these small, chubby angels a different breed? And if so, why did they suddenly pop up in such huge numbers? And why just then? Was it coincidental that this happened at the same time as angelic revelations in their previously known form ceased all together?
The possibility of its being accidental is small, because where would the old angels have gone to in that case? The way back was closed to them, they were imprisoned here, and this makes only one explanation, as incomprehensible as it is awful, possible. Were these the divine pure? Were these the most lovely of all beings? Were these the heavenly host? Were these the feared angels?
They must have been. Exactly what happened is obviously difficult to say with any certainty, but the little that is known points in the same direction. When Bellori saw the angels at the start of 1606, their situation was untenable. They’d become deeper and deeper rooted in earthly things, they’d lost their divineness, almost nothing of their old dignity remained. If their condition had been discovered by mankind, and others besides Bellori had glimpsed their hunger, lust, and savagery, they would surely have been hunted, caught, and burned at the stake like any common witch or heretic. So they’d retreated, when the worst of their lust had taken them, and held their orgies away from human beings, and this went on for a considerable time; for a long time they were able to sustain man’s ancient image of them, but finally their new terrestrial state had such a firm grip on them, even down to their souls, that they could control its manifestations by willpower no longer. At that, the angels had moved out into the wildernesses, where they tried to conceal themselves as best they could. It isn’t certain that Bellori’s discovery was instrumental, even though it was much more dangerous for them than if an ordinary person had chanced to see them, because Bellori actually knew they were fallen, and that God was dead. Presumably they would have done what they did anyway. They had no choice. There was only one way out, and they must have agreed to follow it. Although they were stuck here, and the way back to heaven was barred to them, there was still one way forward. The angels could still change their outward appearance. But in contrast to previous times, any change must have been fatal, in the sense that there was now no way back. If they changed, they could no longer return to what they’d been. The process was irreversible. But change they must, if they were to survive the new age. Why they chose the exact form that they did, and transformed themselves into human, babylike beings, isn’t difficult to understand. Their fear was that their barbarity and appetite and terrible rage would show themselves, and so it was innocence they sought, and as man was created in their image, they selected man at his most innocent as their new model.