by Rice, Anne
I stopped listening to him. I merely lay on the roof.
But I knew he was moving below. I knew it when he lifted the violin from its place on the pianoforte, and I knew he was again at the window.
And I put my hands over my ears.
Still the sound came. It came rising out of the instrument and cleaving the night as if it were some shining element, other than air and light and matter, that might climb to the very stars.
He bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound.
The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquery without a particle of truth.
Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn’t beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony?
I didn’t know the answer. But the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew bigger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars.
Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close.
I didn’t move.
I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me. Nicki, if we could talk again … If “our conversation” could only continue.
Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good.
In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and un-trusting?
Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden.
But maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice.
But we could never discuss these things now with each other. We could never again be in the inn. Forgive me, Nicki. Good and evil exist still, as they always will. But “our conversation” is over forever.
* * *
Yet even as I left the roof, as I stole silently away from the Ile St.-Louis, I knew what I meant to do.
I didn’t admit it to myself but I knew.
The next night it was already late when I reached the boulevard du Temple. I’d fed well in the Ile de la Cité, and the first act at Renaud’s House of Thesbians was already under way.
12
I’d dressed as if I were going to Court, in silver brocade with a lavender velvet roquelaure over my shoulders. I had a new sword with a deep-carved silver handle and the usual heavy, ornate buckles on my shoes, the usual lace, gloves, tricorne. And I came to the theater in a hired carriage.
But as soon as I paid the driver I went back the alley and opened the stage door exactly as I used to do.
At once the old atmosphere surrounded me, the smell of the thick greasepaint and the cheap costumes full of sweat and perfume, and the dust. I could see a fragment of the lighted stage burning beyond the helter-skelter of hulking props and hear bursts of laughter from the hall. A group of acrobats waited to go on at the intermezzo, a crowd of jesters in red tights, caps and dagged collars studded with little gold bells.
I felt dizzy, and for a moment afraid. The place felt close and dangerous over my head, and yet it was wonderful to be inside it again. And a sadness was, swelling inside me, no, a panic, actually.
Luchina saw me and she let out a shriek. Doors opened everywhere on the cluttered little dressing rooms. Renaud plunged towards me and pumped my hand. Where there had been nothing but wood and drapery a moment before, there was now a little universe of excited human beings, faces full of high color and dampness, and I found myself drawing back from a smoking candelabra with the quick words, “My eyes … put it out.”
“Put out the candles, they hurt his eyes, can’t you see that?” Jeannette insisted sharply. I felt her wet lips open against my face. Everyone was around me, even the acrobats who didn’t know me, and the old scene painters and carpenters who had taught me so many things. Luchina said, “Get Nicki,” and I almost cried No.
Applause was shaking the little house. The curtain was being pulled closed from either side. At once the old actors were upon me, and Renaud was calling for champagne.
I was holding my hands over my eyes as if like the basilisk I’d kill every one of them if I looked at them, and I could feel tears and knew that before they saw the blood in the tears, I had to wipe the tears away. But they were so close I couldn’t get to my handkerchief, and with a sudden terrible weakness, I put my arms around Jeannette and Luchina, and I pressed my face against Luchina’s face. Like birds they were, with bones full of air, and hearts like beating wings, and for one second I listened with a vampire’s ear to the blood in them, but that seemed an obscenity. And I just gave in to the hugging and the kissing, ignoring the thump of their hearts, and holding them and smelling their powdered skin, and feeling again the press of their lips.
“You don’t know how you worried us!” Renaud was booming. “And then the stories of your good fortune! Everyone, everyone!” He was clapping his hands. “It’s Monsieur de Valois, the owner of this great theatrical establishment …” and he said a lot of other pompous and playful things, dragging up the new actors and actresses to kiss my hand, I suppose, or my feet. I was holding tight to the girls as if I’d explode into fragments if I let them go, and then I heard Nicki, and knew he was only a foot away, staring at me, and that he was too glad to see me to be hurt anymore.
I didn’t open my eyes but I felt his hand on my face, then holding tight to the back of my neck. They must have made way for him and when he came into my arms, I felt a little convulsion of terror, but the light was dim here, and I had fed furiously to be warm and human-looking, and I thought desperately I don’t know to whom I pray to make the deception work. And then there was only Nicolas and I didn’t care.
I looked up and into his face.
How to describe what humans look like to us! I’ve tried to describe it a little, when I spoke of Nicki’s beauty the night before as a mixture of movement and color. But you can’t imagine what it’s like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that’s what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn’t really “see” in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon.
Well, I saw all this when I saw Nicki, and I smelled the blood pumping in him, and for one heady moment I felt love and only love obliterating every recollection of the horrors that had deformed me. Every evil rapture, every new power with its gratification,
seemed unreal. Maybe I felt a profound joy, too, that I could still love, if I’d ever doubted it, and that a tragic victory had been confirmed.
All the old mortal comfort intoxicated me, and I could have closed my eyes and slipped from consciousness carrying him with me, or so it seemed.
But something else stirred in me, collecting strength so fast my mind raced to catch up with it and deny it even as it threatened to grow out of control. And I knew it for what it was, something monstrous and enormous and natural to me as the sun was unnatural. I wanted Nicki. I wanted him as surely as any victim I’d ever struggled with in the Ile de la Cité. I wanted his blood flowing into me, wanted its taste and its smell and its heat.
The little place shook with shouts and laughter, Renaud telling the acrobats to get on with the intermezzo and Luchina opening the champagne. But we were closed off in this embrace.
The hard heat of his body made me stiffen and draw back, though it seemed I didn’t move at all. And it maddened me suddenly that this one whom I loved even as I loved my mother and my brothers—this one who had drawn from me the only tenderness I’d ever felt—was an unconquerable citadel, holding fast in ignorance against my thirst for blood when so many hundreds of victims had so easily given it up.
This was what I’d been made for. This was the path I had been meant to walk. What were those others to me now—the thieves and killers I’d cut down in the wilderness of Paris? This was what I wanted. And the great awesome possibility of Nicki’s death exploded in my brain. The darkness against my closed eyelids had become blood red. Nicki’s mind emptying in that last moment, giving up its complexity with its life.
I couldn’t move. I could feel the blood as if it were passing into me and I let my lips rest against his neck. Every particle in me said, “Take him, spirit him out of this place and away from it and feed on him and feed on him … until …” Until what! Until he’s dead!
I broke loose and pushed him away. The crowd around us roared and rattled. Renaud was shouting at the acrobats, who stood staring at these proceedings. The audience outside demanded the intermezzo entertainment with a steady rhythmic clap. The orchestra was fiddling away at the lively ditty that would accompany the acrobats. Bones and flesh poked and pushed at me. A shambles it had become, rank with the smell of those ready for the slaughter. I felt the all too human rise of nausea.
Nicki seemed to have lost his equilibrium, and when our eyes met, I felt the accusations emanating from him. I felt the misery and, worse, the near despair.
I pushed past all of them, past the acrobats with the jingling bells, and I don’t know why I went forward to the wings instead of out the side door. I wanted to see the stage. I wanted to see the audience. I wanted to penetrate deeper into something for which I had no name or word.
But I was mad in these moments. To say I wanted or I thought makes no sense at all.
My chest was heaving and the thirst was like a cat clawing to get out. And as I leaned against the wooden beam beside the curtain, Nicki, hurt and misunderstanding everything, came to me again.
I let the thirst rage. I let it tear at my insides. I just clung to the rafter and I saw in one great recollection all my victims, the scum of Paris, scraped up from its gutters, and I knew the madness of the course I’d chosen, and the lie of it, and what I really was. What a sublime idiocy that I had dragged that paltry morality with me, striking down the damned ones only—seeking to be saved in spite of it all? What had I thought I was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit every day?
Strong wine I’d had, in chipped and broken vessels, and now the priest was standing before me at the foot of the altar with the golden chalice in his hands, and the wine inside it was the Blood of the Lamb.
Nicki was talking rapidly:
“Lestat, what is it? Tell me!” as if the others couldn’t hear us. “Where have you been? What’s happened to you? Lestat!”
“Get on that stage!” Renaud thundered at the gaping acrobats. They trotted past us into the smoky blaze of the footlamps and went into a chain of somersaults.
The orchestra made its instruments into twittering birds. A flash of red, harlequin sleeves, bells jangling, taunts from the unruly crowd, “Show us something, really show us something!”
Luchina kissed me and I stared at her white throat, her milky hands. I could see the veins in Jeannette’s face and the soft cushion of her lower lip coming ever closer. The champagne, splashed into dozens of little glasses, was being drunk. Some speech was issuing forth from Renaud about our “partnership” and how tonight’s little farce was but the beginning and we would soon be the grandest theater on the boulevards. I saw myself decked out for the part of Lelio, and heard the ditty I had sung to Flaminia on bended knee.
Before me, little mortals flipflopped heavily and the audience was howling as the leader of the acrobats made some vulgar movement with his hind end.
Before I even meant to do it, I had gone out on the stage.
I was standing in the very center, feeling the heat of the footlights, the smoke stinging my eyes. I stared at the crowded gallery, the screened boxes, the rows and rows of spectators to the back wall. And I heard myself snarl a command for the acrobats to get away.
It seemed the laughter was deafening, and the taunts and shouts that greeted me were spasms and eruptions, and quite plainly behind every face in the house was a grinning skull. I was humming the little ditty I’d sung as Lelio, no more than a fragment of the part, but the one I’d carried in the streets afterwards with me, “lovely, lovely, Flaminia,” and on and on, the words forming meaningless sounds.
Insults were cutting through the din.
“On with the performance!” and “You’re handsome enough, now let’s see some action!” From the gallery someone threw a half-eaten apple that came thumping just past my feet.
I unclasped the violet roquelaure and let it fall. I did the same with the silver sword.
The song had become an incoherent humming behind my lips, but mad poetry was pounding in my head. I saw the wilderness of beauty and its savagery, the way I’d seen it last night when Nicki was playing, and the moral world seemed some desperate dream of rationality that in this lush and fetid jungle had not the slightest chance. It was a vision and I saw rather than understood, except that I was part of it, natural as the cat with her exquisite and passionless face digging her claws into the back of the screaming rat.
“ ‘Handsome enough’ is this Grim Reaper,” I half uttered, “who can snuff all these ‘brief candles,’ every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall.”
But the words were really beyond my reach. They floated in some stratum perhaps where a god existed who understood the colors patterned on a cobra’s skin and the eight glorious notes that make up the music erupting out of Nicki’s instrument, but never the principle, beyond ugliness or beauty, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Hundreds of greasy faces peered back at me from the gloom. Shabby wigs and paste jewels and filthy finery, skin like water flowing over crooked bones. A crew of ragged beggars whistled and hooted from the gallery, humpback and one eye, and stinking underarm crutch, and teeth the color of the skull’s teeth you sift from the dirt of the grave.
I threw out my arms. I crooked my knee, and I began turning as the acrobats and dancers could turn, round and round on the ball of one foot, effortlessly, going faster and faster, until I broke, flipping over backwards into a circle of cartwheels, and then somersaults, imitating everything I had ever seen the players at the fairs perform.
Applause came immediately. I was agile as I’d been in the village, and the stage was tiny and hampering, and the ceiling seemed to press down on me, and the smoke from the footlights to close me in. The little song to Flaminia came back to me and I started singing it loudly as I turned and jumped and spun again, and then gazing at the ceiling I willed my body upwards as I bent my knees to spring.
In an i
nstant I touched the rafters and I was dropping down gracefully, soundlessly to the boards.
Gasps rose from the audience. The little crowd in the wings was stunned. The musicians in the pit who had been silent all the while were turning to one another. They could see there was no wire.
But I was soaring again to the delight of the audience, this time somersaulting all the way up, beyond the painted arch again to descend in even slower, finer turns.
Shouts and cheers broke out over the clapping, but those backstage were mute. Nicki stood at the very edge, his lips silently shaping my name.
“It has to be trickery, an illusion.” The same avowals came from all directions. People demanded agreement from those around them. Renaud’s face shone before me for an instant with gaping mouth and squinting eyes.
But I had gone into a dance again. And this time the grace of it no longer mattered to the audience. I could feel it, because the dance became a parody, each gesture broader, longer, slower than a human dancer could have sustained.
Someone shouted from the wings and was told to be still. And little cries burst from the musicians and those in the front rows. People were growing uneasy and whispering to one another, but the rabble in the gallery continued to clap.
I dashed suddenly towards the audience as if I meant to admonish it for its rudeness. Several persons were so startled they rose and tried to escape into the aisles. One of the hornplayers dropped his instrument and climbed out of the pit.
I could see the agitation, even the anger in their faces. What were these illusions? It wasn’t amusing them suddenly; they couldn’t comprehend the skill of it; and something in my serious manner made them afraid. For one terrible moment, I felt their helplessness.
And I felt their doom.
A great horde of jangling skeletons snared in flesh and rags, that’s what they were, and yet their courage blazed out of them, they shouted at me in their irrepressible pride.
