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.’
Chapter 9. Heaven’s Plastic Fragrance
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.
As Volatore/Marco Renzetti I found life confusing. As a hippogriff I had been chaste, being only a means of transport; carnal pleasures were reserved for my heroic passengers. As a man I had been initiated into human practices by the frolicsome Giuseppina. She was generous in her praise of my performance; so I ought to have been easy in my mind with Doris Donner.
She was a hairstylist at Salon Angélique (the random irony of names!) and she took pride in having styled the hair of Lola Trotter, the film star.
‘The studio stylist got the credit,’ she said, ‘but all he did was add highlights to what I’d already done.’
More beautiful than the ‘supermodels’ who appeared in the news, Doris had only contempt for them.
‘These girls have arms and legs like sticks,’ she said, ‘and the fashion industry is run by faggots.’
The women whose looks she looked after, except for a few celebrities, did not fare much better in her opinion.
‘Some of them have had so many facelifts their ears meet at the back,’ she said, ‘and they want me to do some miracle with their hair so their husbands will look at them again. Meanwhile the husbands are shtupping their twenty-five-year-old secretaries. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you can make millions by telling the sows you can.’
Doris’s cynicism did not extend to sex. I was overwhelmed by the frequency of her demands; she was not so much chained to the rock of her beauty as rolling it after me so that I was in constant danger of being crushed by it.
Doris was what she was, coarse despite her physical refinement, definitely not my eternal time-and-space-transcending Angelica. Why, then, did I stay with her as long as I did?
Nobody’s perfect, as they say, and I admit to my shame that Doris for a time distracted me from the search to which I had dedicated myself. As Marco Renzetti I was only human and as Volatore I was equally susceptible to beauty. Doris was a head-turner, like the girl in the song who makes everyone say ‘Aah!’ when she passes. A trophy, and I was proud to be seen with her on my arm when we went out. Which Doris liked much more than staying in. She introduced me to what she called ‘the club scene’ and we went to the DNA Lounge to shake ourselves about in what they called dancing. As Marco I had done this before and Doris was pleased with how well I fitted into this pathetic hyperactivity.
I arranged our next outing: we went to the San Francisco Opera where I had the pleasure of hearing Madame Butterfly by my countryman Giacomo Puccini, sung in my native tongue by an excellent cast. Doris and I both had tears rolling down our faces when Cio-Cio San sang ‘Un bel di vedremo …’
‘That son of a bitch Pinkerton,’ said Doris. ‘He knocks her up and then it’s bye bye, Butterfly. Men are basically rotten.’
‘Unfortunately that’s the way of the world,’ I said. ‘Women aren’t much better but people are all there is to work with.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Doris. ‘I do their hair.’
When Cio-Cio San killed herself with her father’s sword in Act III Doris wept again, but more in anger than in sorrow.
‘I’d have used that sword on Pinkerton,’ she said.
‘He wasn’t there.’
‘I’d have tracked him down and cut his balls off,’ she said with a shake of her head.
‘How did you like the nusic?’
‘There were a couple of nice tunes but it was a long time between them and you don’t know what they’re saying unless you read the libretto. Opera isn’t really my kind of thing.’
Doris liked sports, so we went to Candlestick to see the heavily padded 49ers, protected by everything but airbags, play American football. But whatever we did we did as Marco and Not-Angelica. She said she loved me but her love was meaningless to me. To have before me a simulacrum of Angelica without her essence was a mockery and I enjoyed her body as one enjoys a whore.
By this time I had acquired a second baker, Luciano Strozzi, the man who had built my oven. My cousinly obligations with Giuseppe were few and far between, so I began to learn my adopted city, travelling by foot or public transport.
San Francisco, heroic city that sits on its tragic flaw, the San Andreas Fault! With my animal senses I could feel the play of the tectonic plates under my feet and the rasp of their constant shifting, smell the vapours beneath. I could hear the ghosts of the Barbary Coast cursing and shouting and singing lewd songs up through the restless stones.
Doris told me that there was a 62 per cent probability of a major earthquake between 2003 and 2032.
‘This really isn’t a safe place to be,’ I said.
‘No place is safe,’ she said. ‘You could get hit by a bus crossing the street. We could both be dead before the next quake. Anyhow, these people who make the predictions are wrong as often as they’re right.’
So we dropped the subject.
San Francisco is a city that Ariosto might have imagined, of impeachable reality, existing by enchantment and never to be taken for granted. Everything about San Francisco is metaphor, from the magic span of the Golden Gate Bridge to the up-and-downness of its streets where the cable cars, laden with passengers inside and out, clang their bells as the driver grasps the cable that hauls them up to the heights and down to the depths of their desires.
This metaphoric San Francisco has its own acoustic in the sun and the rain and the fog, in the lights of its nights and the darks. And it talks to itself constantly.
The voices! Sometimes I immersed myself in the exotic inflections of Chinatown, understanding nothing but taking in the music. At the Taquería Cancún in Mission Street I listened to the easy cadences of Spanish while tasting the language in a burrito.
By now I was spending more nights in solitary walks than I was with Doris. Clearly our time together was coming to an end but I thought that in all fairness I should consider if perhaps there was more to her than I gave her credit for. I decided to ask her the big question one night as we lay in bed after our usual embrace.
‘Doris,’ I said, ‘would you love me if I were a hippogriff?’
‘What’s a hippogriff?’ she said.
From the drawer of the bedside table I took a small print of the da Carpi painting and showed it to her.