‘What’s in the player now?’ I asked Olivia.
‘Act I of the one you’re looking at,’ she said. ‘My uncle Leon died and left me his collection. I was just starting to listen to it when I picked you up. It’s on track 3 now.’
I took the booklet out of the box and found track 3:
CENERENTOLA
(con fono flemmatico}
Una voltac’era un re
che a star solo annoio …
CINDERELLA
(singing to herself)
Once there was a king
who was bored with being all alone …
‘Oh!’ I said. Because those words all at once seemed to be talking to me. I pushed the start button and the voice of the poor daughter, motherless and discarded by her father, humble among the ashes, came to me pensive and slow. The song, with its little story of a lonely king who searched and searched until he found the pure and innocent girl he wanted — why did it make me cry? To me it was a Volatore song of heartbreak and hopeful longing, the essence of it not the comedic lightness that Rossini was famous for but something deep and sad that slipped past him. Was Volatore my lonely king? Of course I may be knitting with one needle, that certainly can’t be ruled out. Olivia tactfully made no comment and kept her eyes on the road.
At Ocean Beach we climbed the hill to Cliff House. Next to the bar there were stairs that went around back and there was the Giant Camera, a structure looking like a huge 35-mm camera lying on its back with its lens pointing at the sky.
‘It’s a camera obscura,’ said Olivia. ‘Leonardo da Vinci invented it. Vermeer and Canaletto used little ones, just a box with a lens in front and a ground-glass screen at the back.’
We waited with other obscurophiles and paid three dollars each as we came out of the sunlight into the camera body. We went through a door and into the dark chamber; before us on the round viewing table was a brilliant circle of brightness in which there were seals basking on a large rock by the dazzling blue Pacific. The camera operator told us what we were seeing as he rotated the lens to the marine headland and back to Cliff House.
We came blinking out into the sunlight.
‘OK, Olivia,’ I said, ‘we went into a dark chamber and saw the world around us very bright. Is that it?’
‘The clarity of the view was terrific!’ she insisted. ‘Maybe you have to go into a dark chamber to see the world clearly.’
I didn’t say anything. I had found the contrast between the darkness and the brightness aggravating, like the tongue going into the cavity of an aching tooth. Unreasonable of me but then I’m not an altogether reasonable person.
‘Now that we’ve had the metaphor,’ I said, ‘maybe we could get some lunch?’
We went to Sutro’s at the Cliff House where we had beer-braised black mussels with frites and Veuve Clicquot which made the world a little easier to take.
As we drove back to town the sky was not yet dark but the street lights were on and the lights in the houses. That time of day always brings an ache to my throat. I feel that all those, now gone, who have known this gentle goodbye from the day that is passing, never to return, are seeing it through my eyes. Volatore also seeing it through my eyes. ‘ “Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour …” ’ I sang under my breath, like Cinderella crouching in the ashes.
Olivia notices everything.
‘I think you need to pull yourself together, Angie,’ she said. ‘Maybe you just need to get laid. Didn’t you have something going with Clancy?’
‘Been there, done that,’ I said. ‘It didn’t work for me.’
‘OK, maybe Clancy didn’t float your boat. But this Volatore shit is going to drive you crazy if you don’t let go of it.’
‘You’re right, Liv — I’ll try to do better.’
When she dropped me off I stepped wearily into the bleakness of the street lamps, the shadows and the mica sparkles on the pavement. In the past, easing through those lamps and shadows and sparkles, I used to wish I had a cat waiting for me. Now Irene was waiting. She’d rub against my leg and purr, then she’d keep me company and dab at the foam while I had a hot bath. There’d be a large Jack Daniel’s beside the tub, and on the Bose, warm and golden and shadowy, the strings of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe.
Chapter 41. Passing, Never to Return
‘Passing, never to return!’ These words have come into my mind like some melancholy refrain that refuses to go away. Passing, passing, never to return! What? Everything? Angelica and Volatore both? Shall we cease to be imagined? Shall we pass like the fading of the day, like breath upon a mirror, suddenly gone?
Chapter 42. Mostly Like a Horse
He calls himself Volatore and he is not my Volatore. But he smells like him. An olfactory mystery. I went to the Mission Police Station on Valencia and 17th. Once there I stood looking at the Seven Dancing Stars for a while. I don’t like to miss meaningful signs of any kind, and these boulders set in the floor, representing the Pleiades, might well have some significance for me. These seven sisters of mythology, daughters of Atlas, are named in Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary as Alcyone, Merope, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Sterope and Celeno. Merope’s star is dim because she married a mortal. A warning about mixed marriages? The constellation is near the back of Taurus in the zodiac.
There was a sort of bank teller’s window in the wall behind the elevator.
‘I want to report a missing person,’ I said.
This got me to a Sergeant Hennessy, a large bear of a man whose look and manner made me want to climb into his lap and tell him everything that was troubling me. I think he sensed this because he remained standing at a safe distance.
‘OK,’ he said after I had identified myself. ‘Who’s missing?’
‘A man who calls himself Volatore.’
‘Sounds like an opera. Is that his first name or his last name?’
‘He says it’s his only name.’
‘Relation of yours?’
‘No.’
‘Friend?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Where and when did you last see him?’
‘At the Eidolon Gallery in the Mission four or five days ago. I’m not sure — it’s been a confusing time for me.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Over six feet tall, strongly built; long black hair, long face, high cheekbones, blue eyes. Wearing black jeans, blue denim shirt, Timberland boots, all new. Paint smears on everything.’
‘Any identifying marks?’
‘A naked-woman tattoo on his right wrist and a hippogriff on his left wrist.’
‘You don’t have to explain what a hippogriff is — I read sci-fi fantasy.’
‘Plus he’s got a smell.’
‘What kind of smell?’
I almost said. ‘A hippogriff smell,’ but I caught myself in time and said, ‘Mostly like a horse.’
‘Mostly like a horse. Anything else in his smell?’
‘Some other kind of animal I didn’t recognise. But you can’t mistake the smell.’
‘Right: mostly like a horse. That narrows it down. OK, we’ll give you a call when we have anything to report.’
At home I got my big Maps of the Heavens off the shelf and turned to Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Northern Hemisphere’. I searched for Taurus but couldn’t find him, let alone the Pleiades. No luck with anyone else’s ‘Northern Hemisphere’ either. ‘OK,’ I said. I went to my PC and googled for Seven Sisters Road, figuring there probably was one somewhere in San Francisco. This took me by devious routes to some beautiful Victorian houses in Alamo Square. At that point my search frenzy left me and I went to the gallery where I spent the rest of the day cataloguing Alyosha Zhabotinsky.