by Anne Rice
"And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some window so that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, because I'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take me away from you."
He made a study of me for the longest time. I never had such an unbroken feast on his eyes myself, and had never been let to touch his mouth with my prying fingers for such a spell.
Finally he rose up next to me and pressed me gently down. His lips, always softly pink like the inner petals of blushing white roses, turned slowly red as I watched. It was a gleaming seam of red that ran between his lips and then flowed through all the fine lines of which his lips were made, perfectly coloring them, as wine might do, only it was so brilliant, this fluid, that his lips shimmered, and when he parted them, the red burst as if it were a curled tongue.
My head was lifted. I caught it with my own mouth.
The world moved out from under me. I listed and drifted, and my eyes opened and saw nothing as he shut his mouth over mine.
"Master, I die from this!" I whispered. I tossed under him, seeking to find some firm place in this dreamy intoxicating void. My body churned and rolled with pleasure, my limbs tightening then floating, my whole body issuing from him, from his lips, through my lips, my body his very breath and his sigh.
There came the sting, there came the blade, tiny and sharp beyond measure, puncturing my soul. I twisted on it as if I'd been skewered.
Oh, this could teach the gods of love what love was. This was my deliverance if I could but survive.
Blind and shaking I was wed to him. I felt his hand cover my mouth, and only then heard my cries as they were muffled away.
I wrapped my hand around his neck, pressing him against my throat all the harder, "Do it, do it, do it, do it!"
When I awoke, it was day.
He was long gone, as was his infallible custom. I lay alone. The boys had not yet come.
I climbed out of bed and went to the high narrow window, the kind of window which is everywhere in Venice, locking out the fierce heat of summer and sealing off the cold Adriatic winds when they inevitably come.
I unbolted the thick glass panels and looked out on the walls across from my safe place as I had often done.
A common serving woman shook her cloth mop from a far balcony above. Across the canal, I watched her. Her face seemed livid and crawling, as if some tiny species of life covered her, some rampage of ants. She didn't know! I laid my hands on the sill and looked ever more keenly. It was only the life inside her, the workings of the flesh in her that made the mask of her face seem to move.
But horrid her hands seemed, knuckled and swollen, and the dust from her broom engraving every line.
I shook my head. She was too far from me for these observations.
In a faraway room, the boys talked. Time for work. Time to get up, even in the palazzo of the night Lord who never checks or prods by day. Too far away for me to hear them.
And this velvet now, this curtain made of the Master's favorite fabric, this was like fur to my touch, not velvet, I could see each tiny fiber! I dropped it. I went for the looking glass.
The house had dozens of them, great ornate mirrors, all with fancified frames and most replete with tiny cherubs. I found the tall mirror in the anteroom, the alcove behind warped yet beautifully painted doors where I kept my clothes.
The light of the window followed me. I saw myself. But I was not a seething corrupt mass, such as this woman had seemed. My face was baby smooth and starkly white.
"I want it!" I whispered. I knew.
"No," he told me.
This is when he came that night. I ranted and paced and cried out to him.
He didn't give me long explanations, no sorcery or science, either of which would have been so easy for him. He told me only I was a child still, and there were things to be savored which would be lost forever.
I cried. I didn't want to work or paint or study or do anything in the world.
"It's lost its savor for a little while," he said patiently. "But you'd be surprised."
"At what?"
"At how much you'll lament it when it's gone utterly, when you are perfect and unchangeable like me, and all those human mistakes can be triumphantly supplanted by a new and more stunning series of failures. Don't ask for this, not again."
I would have died then, curled up, black and furious and too bitter for words.
But he wasn't finished.
"Amadeo," he said, his voice thick with sorrow. "Say nothing. You don't have to. I'll give it to you quickly enough when I think the time has come."
At that I went to him, running, childlike, flinging myself at his neck, kissing his icy cheek a thousand times despite his mock-disdainful smile.
At last his hands became like iron. There was to be no blood play this night. I must study. I must make up the lessons I had scorned by day.
He had to see to his apprentices, to his tasks, to the giant canvas on which he'd been working, and I did as he said.
But well before morning, I saw him change. The others had long gone to bed. I was turning the pages of the book obediently when I saw him staring, beastlike, from his chair, as if some ravener had come into him and banished all his civilized faculties and left him thus, hungry, with glazed eyes and reddening mouth, the glittering blood finding its myriad little paths over the silky margin of his lips.
He rose, a drugged thing, and came towards me with a rhythm of movements that was alien and struck the coldest terror in my heart.
His fingers flashed, closed, beckoned.
I ran to him. He lifted me in both hands, clutching my arms ever so gendy, and tucked his face against my neck. From the soles of my feet up my back through my arms and my neck and scalp, I felt it.
Where he flung me I didn't know. Was it our bed or some hasty cushions he found in another closer salon? "Give it to me," I said sleepily, and when it came into my mouth, I was gone.
5
HE SAID that I must go to the brothels, learn what it meant to couple properly-not merely in play, as we did among the boys.
Venice had many such places, very well run and devoted to pleasure in the most luxurious environment. It was firmly held that such pleasures were little more than a venial sin in the eyes of the Christ, and the young men of fashion frequented these establishments without hiding it.
I knew of a house of particularly exquisite and skilled women, where there were tall, buxom, very pale-eyed beauties from the North of Europe, some whose blond hair was' almost white, deemed to be somewhat different from the shorter Italian women's which we saw every day. I don't know that difference was such a high priority with me, as I'd been somewhat dazzled by the beauty of Italian boys and women since I had come. Swan-necked Venetian girls in their fancy cushion-head dresses with abundant translucent veils were very nearly irresistible to me. But then the brothel had all kinds of women, and the name of the game was to mount as many as I could.
My Master took me to this place, paid for me, a fortune in ducats, and told the buxom enchanting mistress that he would collect me in a matter of days.
Days!
I was pale with jealousy and on fire with curiosity, as I watched him take his leave-the usual regal figure in his familiar crimson robes, climbing into the gondola and giving me his clever wink as the boat took him away.
I spent three days, as it turned out, in the house of the most voluptuous available maidens in Venice, sleeping late in the morning, comparing olive skin to blond skin and indulging myself in leisurely examinations of the nether hair of all beauties, distinguishing the more silken from the wiry and more tightly curled.
I learned little niceties of pleasure, such as how sweet it was to have one's nipples bitten (lightly, and these weren't vampires) and to have the hair under one's arms, of which I had just a little, tugged affectionately at the appropriate moments. Golden honey was painted on my nether parts only to be
licked away by giggling angels.
There were other more intimate tricks, of course, including bestial acts which were strictly speaking crimes but which were in this house merely various extra accouterments to overall wholesome and tantalizing feasts. All was done with grace, the steamy hot perfumed baths came frequently in large deep wooden tubs, flowers floating on the surface of the rose-tinted water, and I lay back sometimes at the mercy of a bevy of soft-voiced women who cooed over me like birds in the eaves as they licked me like so many kittens and combed my hair around their fingers to make curls.
I was the little Ganymede of Zeus, an angel tumbled out of Botticelli's more ribald paintings (many of which by the way were in this brothel, having been rescued from the Bonfires of the Vanities erected in Florence by the adamant reformer Savonarola, who had urged the great Botticelli to just. . . burn up his beautiful work!), a little cherub fallen off the ceiling of a Cathedral, a Venetian prince (of which there were none in the Republic technically) delivered into their hands by his enemies to be rendered helpless with desire.
I grew hotter in desire. If one had to be human for the rest of one's life, this was great fun, tumbling among Turkish cushions with nymphs such as most men only glimpse through magical forests in their dreams. Each soft and downy cleft was a new and exotic envelope for my romping spirit.
The wine was delicious and the food quite marvelous, including sugared and spiced dishes from the Arabs, and being altogether more extravagant and more exotic than the fare served by my Master at home.
(When I told him, he hired four new chefs.)
I wasn't awake, apparently, when my Master arrived to collect me, and I was spirited home by him, in his mysterious and infallible manner, and found myself again in my bed.
I knew I wanted only him when my eyes opened. And it seemed the fleshy repasts of the last few days had only made me more hungry, more inflamed and more eager to see if his enchanted white body would respond to the more tender tricks I'd learned. I threw myself on him when he finally came in behind the curtains, and I unloosed his shirt and sucked his nipples, discovering that for all their disturbing whiteness and coldness they were soft and obviously intimately connected in a seemingly natural way to the root of his desires.
He lay there, graceful and quiet, letting me play with him as my women teachers had played with me. When he finally gave me the blood kisses, all memories of human contact were obliterated, and I lay helpless as always in his arms. It seemed our world then was not merely one of the flesh, but of a mutual spell to which all natural laws gave way.
Towards morning on the second night, I sought him out where he was painting by himself in the studio, the scattered apprentices fallen asleep like the unfaithful Apostles in Gethsemane.
He wouldn't stop for my questions. I stood behind him and locked my arms around him and, climbing on tiptoe, I whispered my questions in his ear.
"Tell me, Master, you must, how did you gain this magic blood inside you?" I bit his earlobes and ran my hands through his hair. He wouldn't stop painting. "Were you born into this state, am I so wrong about this as to suppose that you were transformed ... "
"Stop it, Amadeo," he whispered, and continued to paint. He worked furiously on the face of Aristotle, the bearded, balding elder of his great painting, The Academy.
"Is there ever a loneliness in you, Master, that pushes you to tell someone, anyone, to have a friend of your own mettle, to confide your heart to one who can comprehend?"
He turned, startled for once by my questions.
"And you, spoiled little angel," he said, lowering his voice to maintain its gentleness, "you think you can be that friend? You're an innocent! You'll be an innocent all of your days. You have the heart of an innocent. You refuse to accept truth that doesn't correspond with some deep raging faith in you which makes you ever the little monk, the acolyte-."
I stepped backwards, as angry as I'd ever been with him. "No, I won't be such!" I declared. "I'm a man already in the guise of a boy, and you know it. Who else dreams of what you are, and the alchemy of your powers? I wish I could drain a cupful of your blood from you and study it as the doctors might and determine what is its makeup and how it differs from the fluid that runs through my veins! I am your pupil, yes, your student, yes, but to be that, I must be a man. When would you tolerate innocence? When we bed together, you call that innocence? I am a man."
He burst into the most amazed laughter. It was a treat to see him so surprised.
"Tell me your secret, Sir," I said. I put my arms around his neck and laid my head on his shoulder. "Was there a Mother as white and strong as you were who brought you forth, the God-Bearer, from her celestial womb?"
He took my arms and moved me back away from him, so that he could kiss me, and his mouth was insistent and frightening to me for a moment. Then it moved over my throat, sucking at my flesh and causing me to become weak and, with all my heart, willing to be anything he wished.
"Of the moon and the stars, yes, I'm made, of that sovereign whiteness which is the substance of clouds and innocence alike," he said. "But no Mother gave birth to me, you know that's so; I was a man once, a man moving on in his years. Look-." He lifted my face with both hands and made me study his face. "You see here remnants of the lines of age which once marked me, here at the corners of my eyes."
"Merely nothing, Sir," I whispered, thinking to console him if this imperfection troubled him. He shone in his brilliance, his polished smoothness. The simplest expressions flashed in his face in luminescent heat.
Imagine a figure of ice, as perfectly made as Pygmalion's Galatea, thrown into the fire, and sizzling, and melting, and yet the features all wondrously intact still... well, such was my Master when human emotions infected him, as they did now.
He crushed my arms deliciously and kissed me again.
"Little man, manikin, elf," he whispered. "Would you be so for eternity? Haven't you lain with me often enough to know what I can and cannot enjoy?"
I won him over, captive to me, for the last hour before he was off.
But the next night he dispatched me to a more clandestine and even more luxurious house of pleasure, a house which kept for the passions of others only young boys.
It was got up in Eastern style, and I think it blended the luxuries of Egypt with those of Babylon, its small cells made up of golden latticework, and colonnettes of brass studded with lapis lazuli holding up the salmon-colored drapery of the ceilings over tasseled couches of gilt wood and damask-covered down. Incense made the air heavy, and the lights were soothingly low.
The naked boys, well fed, nubile, smooth and rounded of limb, were eager, strong, tenacious, and brought to the games their own rampant male desires.
It seemed my soul was a pendulum that swung between the hearty pleasure of conquest and the swooning surrender to stronger limbs, and stronger wills, and stronger hands that tossed me tenderly about.
Captive between two skilled and willful lovers, I was pierced and suckled, pummeled and emptied until I slept as soundly as ever I had without the Master's magic at home.
It was only the beginning.
Sometime in my drunken sleep, I woke to find myself surrounded by beings that seemed neither male nor female. Only two of them were eunuchs, cut with such skill they could raise their trusty weapons as well as any boy. The others merely shared the taste of their companions for paint. All had eyes lined in black and shaded in purple, with lashes curled and glazed to give their expressions an eerie fathomless aloofness. Their rouged lips seemed tougher than those of women and more demanding, pushing at me in their kisses as if the male element which had given them muscles and hard organs had given them as well a virility to their very mouths. They had the smiles of angels. Gold rings decorated their nipples. Their nether hair was powdered with gold.
I made no protest when they overcame me. I feared no extreme, and even let them bind my wrists and ankles to the bed, so they could better work their craft. It was impossible to fear
them. I was crucified with pleasure. Their insistent fingers would not even allow me to close my eyes. They stroked my lids, they forced me to look. They brought soft thick brushes down over my limbs. They rubbed oils into all my skin.
They sucked from me, as if it were nectar, the fiery sap I gave forth, over and over, until I cried out vainly that I could give no more. A count was kept of my "little deaths" with which to taunt me playfully, and I was turned over and cuffed and pinioned as I tumbled down into rapturous sleep.
When I awoke I knew no time or worry. The thick smoke of a pipe rose into my nostrils. I took it and sucked on it, savoring the dark familiar smell of hemp.
I stayed there for four nights.
Again, I was delivered.
This time I found myself, groggy and in dishabille, barely covered by a thin torn cream-colored silk shirt. I lay on a couch brought from the very brothel, but this was my Master's studio, and there he sat, not far away, painting my picture obviously, at a small easel from which he took his eyes only to dart glances at me.
I asked the time of day and what night it was. He didn't answer.
"And so you're angry that I enjoyed it?" I asked.
"I told you to lie still," he said.
I lay back, cold all over, and hurt suddenly, lonely perhaps, and wanting like a child to hide in his arms.
Morning came and he left me, having said nothing else. The painting was a gleaming masterpiece of the obscene. I was in my sleeping posture cast down on a riverbank, a fawn of sorts, over which a tall shepherd, the Master himself, in priestly robes stood watch. The woods around us were thick and richly realized with the peeling tree trunks and their clustered dusty leaves. The water of the stream seemed wet to the touch, so clever was the realism of it, and my own figure appeared guileless and lost in sleep, my mouth half-open in a natural way, my brow obviously troubled by uneasy dreams.
