by Anne Rice
"Where are you taking me?" he demanded. "For what?"
Silence.
He was walking fast, ignoring the pain in his wrist, his eyes fixed on the profile of the Maestro's face.
"Let go of me!" he said when they had all but reached the final door. But the Maestro gave him a furious pull and thrust him into this lighted room.
For a moment he could see nothing. He lifted his hand to shield himself from the glare of several lights. And then he saw a row of beds and an enormous crucifix hanging on the wall. There were cabinets by each bed. The floor was bare. And the smell of sickness hung over this long room, occupied as it was by two boys at one end, both of whom appeared to be asleep.
And there in the bed to the far left lay another figure, large and heavy under the coverlet, the face perfectly motionless as if in death.
Tonio could not move. The Maestro di Cappella gave him a sharp blow between the shoulders. Still he didn't move, not until he was dragged forward and made to stand over the foot of the bed.
It was Guido.
His hair was slicked away from his face as if very wet and the face itself was, even in this dim light, not the color of a living man's.
Tonio opened his mouth to speak, but then he pressed his lips together, and he found himself trembling with the lightest feeling in his head. It grew lighter and lighter. It was as if he were losing all of his bodily weight and would suddenly be lifted right out of this room, as if on the air. He tried to speak again. He could feel his mouth opening, he could feel it making the shape of a word. And before him the vision of this deathlike figure wavered as beyond a rain-drenched glass.
There were faces all around it, faces of those young instructors who had pushed him and pulled him through all the instruction in which he'd sought over and over to conceal himself and they were staring at him with mute accusation, and suddenly he heard a terrible moaning, an inhuman moaning that he realized was coming from himself.
"Maestro," he murmured. Bile had come up in his mouth.
Then before his eyes some small miracle revealed itself. The figure in the bed was not dead. The eyes had movement, and there was the smallest heave of breath.
He realized that he was standing over it, and if he wanted to he could touch the Maestro's face. No one was going to prevent it. No one was going to protect the Maestro, and again he spoke that one word.
The eyelids fell back and those immense brown eyes stared blindly up at him. And then slowly, they closed.
Then rough hands took hold of Tonio. They forced him down the length of the infirmary and into the hall. The Maestro di Cappella was cursing him.
"It was the fishermen who saw him, saw him under the moon, swimming out to the open sea, and if they had not seen him, if there had been no moon..."
The man's eyes glittered, his heavy jaw trembling.
"This child I reared as if he were my own, with a voice like the angels he could sing, and twice now from the very maw of death I've taken him back. Once when he lost that voice and nothing could give it back to him, and now again, on your account!"
He forced Tonio against the door to the cloister, and held him there, peering through the dark as if he must see Tonio's face.
"Do you think I don't know what was done to you! Do you think I have not seen it again and again?
"But, oh, it is high tragedy that it was done to you, a Venetian prince! Rich, handsome, on the verge of manhood with all of life before you as if it were but a series of amusements you could pluck if you wanted like fruit from the very trees!
"Oh, tragedy, tragedy!" He spit the words. "And what was it for him? And for all of those others here? Were they but ordinary monsters, severed in childhood, from that which was not worth having to begin with? Is that how it goes?
"And what were you, what was it you stood to become? A strutting peacock on the Broglio of that vain and imperious city which is rotten to its very core? A government of wigs and robes parading back and forth before its own mirrors, drunk on its own reflection, while beyond its tiny orbit the world...yes, the world...sighs and heaves and passes by.
"Well, what would you think, my proud elegant young prince, if I told you I care not one whit for your lost kingdom, for your blind and bloated nobility, for your saturnine men and painted whores. I have lain between those thighs, I have drunk my fill at that masked ball you have made of life itself, and I tell you it is not worth the dust at our feet.
"All my life I have know such idlers, arrogant, corrupt, full of nothing but vainglorious protection of the right to lives of utter worthlessness, the supreme privilege of doing nothing of any significance from the cradle to the grave.
"But your voice! Ah, your voice, your voice which has become the nightly incubus of my beloved Guido and has driven him mad, that is another matter, your voice! Because had you but half the talent he described to me, but half the holy fire, you could have made dwarfs and monsters of ordinary men! London, Prague, Vienna, Dresden, Warsaw, you give the cities to me, was there not in some forgotten corner of your stinking city a world globe? Did you not know the size of Europe, had you never been told?
"And in all those capitals you could have brought them to their knees, thousands upon thousands would have heard you, carrying your name out of the opera houses and the churches into the very streets. They would have said it like a prayer from one end of the continent to the other, as they speak of rulers, of heroes, of the immortals.
"That is what your voice could have been, had you but let it rise out of the ruin of what you were, had you but forged it out of all your suffering and all your pain to give back to God that which He had given you!
"But you are of that ancient ilk that recognizes no other aristocracy save itself, the gilded maggots feeding on the corpse of the Venetian State, brave champions of the supreme privilege of doing nothing, nothing, nothing! And so you forfeit that one strength with which you could have bested any natural man!
"Well, I will not suffer you under my roof any longer. I have no pity for you now. I cannot help you. You are but a freak of nature without its destined gift, and there is nothing lower! Leave this place, go out of it. You have means to find a habitat for your misery somewhere else."
6
THE MOUNTAIN was talking again.
Its distant rumble rolled over the moonlit slopes, a faint and shapeless and horrible sound that seemed to rise out of the earth itself everywhere: a great sigh seeping from cracks and crannies in these ancient winding streets as if any moment the ground would commence to buckle and shake as it had so often in the past and bring down with it these hovels and palaces which for some reason or other, unknown to man, had survived all earlier holocausts.
Balconies and rooftops everywhere were crowded with dimly lit excited faces, turned to the lightning and smoke against the wide open sky, so brilliantly lit by this full moon that it seemed broad daylight as Tonio descended the hill, his feet leading him blindly into the wide piazzas and avenues of the lower city.
His back was straight; he walked slowly, gracefully, his heavy silk-lined cape over his shoulder, his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword, as if he knew in fact where he might go, what he might do, what might become of him.
But pain had numbed him. It had like a great blast of icy wind frozen his skin so that he was aware of every dimension of his body: cold face, cold hands, cold limbs that moved mindlessly towards the sea, and the Molo, thundering with carriages and plumed horses galloping before it.
Now and then a violent shudder swept over him, stopping him, lifting him for the moment off the balls of his feet so that he would sink down, disoriented, his unconscious moan lost in the crowd that everywhere jostled him and forced him forward.
He wove his way through vendors and hawkers of sweets, men offering fruit drinks and white wine, strolling musicians, and lovely women of the streets who brushed against him, their laughter like hundreds of little bells, all it seemed in an air of noonday fest as if before this volcano fi
nally burst and buried them all under its ash, they must live, live, live as if there were no hereafter.
But the volcano would bury no one tonight. It would roar and spit its hot stones and steam into the cloudless sky while the moon shone on the waves and those who swam in the warm sea, and those who played on the shore, in a miraculous flood of illumination.
This was merely Naples; this was merely paradise; this was earth and sky and sea and God and man, and none of it, none of it, could touch him.
Nothing could touch him but this pain, this pain like ice freezing his skin to his bones and closing the whole so that his soul lay seared and sealed within; and stumbling finally into the sand, into the waters of the Mediterranean itself, he crumpled down, bent double as if by one last fatal blow and felt this water with all its warmth wash against him.
It filled his boots; he splashed it to his face, and then he heard over the crash of the waves in the secret chamber of his own ears, his own crying.
He was there, at the foaming edge of the sea, staring back now and then at the rush of gilded wheels, those footmen dashing like specters over the stones, their feet scarcely touching down to earth, horses bridled with jingling bells, feathery plumes, fresh flowers, when suddenly out of that stream of traffic that ran the length of the wide arc of the road from one end of the city to the other, a calash came rocking towards him, its driver jumping down to shake Tonio's cape, to gesture with wild concern, to offer the little padded seat inside his carriage.
Tonio stared at him for the longest while, vaguely amazed by all of this Neapolitan jargon.
The sea rolled in at his feet. The man pulled him back with a great gesture of alarm for these fine clothes, the sand smeared on Tonio's breeches, the water sparkling all over his lace shirtfront.
Tonio suddenly started laughing. Then he drew up, and over the roar of the sea and the clatter of the traffic said in the little of the dialect he knew:
"Take me up on the mountain."
The man drew back. Now? At this hour? It was best to go by day when...
Tonio shook his head. He had two gold coins out of his purse and pressed them into the man's hand. He had that eerie smile of one who feels he can get anything he wants because he cares about nothing. He said:
"No. As high as you can go, now. On the mountain."
They moved fast through the suburbs of the city; yet it was a long drive before they started up the gentle slope itself, its orchards and olive groves laid beautifully open by the giant moon, the rumble of the volcano growing steadily louder.
Tonio could already smell the ash. He could feel it on his face, and in his lungs. He covered up his mouth, convulsed with coughing. Little houses meantime revealed themselves in the bluish night. Their occupants, seated at the open doors, rose at the sight of the jogging lantern, only to shrink back as the driver whipped the horse onward.
But the climb was becoming steeper and more difficult, and finally they reached the point where the horse could go no higher.
They came to a halt among a tangle of olive trees, and here and there Tonio could glimpse far below the great glittering crescent of Naples.
Then there came a faint roar, so diffused and alarming that Tonio found himself clutching the side of the calash, and the sky lit up revealing an immense column of smoke rent perfectly in two by a glaring flash as the roar culminated in a deafening bellow.
Tonio jumped down and told the driver to leave him. It seemed there were protests. And as he attempted to get away, two other dark figures emerged from the tangled growth of the rocky slope. These were the guides who took men by day to the cone, and they were now ready to haul Tonio up behind them.
The driver didn't want him to go; and one of the guides himself seemed reluctant. But before an argument could ensue, Tonio paid one of these men and, taking the stick offered him as a crutch, grabbed onto the leather thong that hung from the back of this man's belt and, thus braced, commenced to be drawn up into the darkness.
Another bellow sounded from the earth, and again that flash of light that brought midday to the struggling trees, and in it a small house above distinguished itself. Yet another figure appeared just as from above a shower of small stones filled the air, raining down with thumps and thuds everywhere. One rock struck Tonio's shoulder but with no force. He shouted for the guide to continue.
The man who had just appeared was waving his arms.
"You cannot go higher!" he declared, and drawing near to Tonio, he let the moon discover him through the olive branches. His face was gaunt, his eyes bulging as if with some wasting sickness. "Go back down. Can't you see you're in danger?" he cried out.
"Go on," said Tonio to the guide.
But the guide had stopped.
And then the man pointed to a great mound that stood before him.
"Last night that was a grove of trees as flat as this," he said. "I saw it rise and buckle within a matter of hours. I tell you, you are courting death to go higher."
He ducked as the rain of stones came flying again, and this time Tonio felt the trickle of blood on the side of his face though he didn't hear or feel the weight of the stone that had struck him.
"Go on," he said to the guide.
The guide dug in his staff. He pulled Tonio a few yards farther up the slope. Then he stopped. He was gesturing, but over the noise of the mountain Tonio couldn't hear what he was saying. Again he shouted go on. But he could see now the man was finished and nothing would make him continue. In Neapolitan, he begged Tonio to stop. He released him from the leather thong, and when Tonio started up the slope hand over hand, his fingers digging into the dirt, the man cried out in Italian that Tonio could understand:
"Signore, it spills lava tonight. Look, above. You cannot go farther!"
Tonio lay on the ground, his right arm up to shield his eyes, his left cupped loosely over his mouth, and dimly through the particles of ash that hung in the air, he could see the faint glimmer of a stream defining the slope to his right as the lava poured down and away, disappearing into the amorphous shapes of the overgrowth. Tonio stared at it without moving. More ash belched from above, and there came the stones again falling on his back and his head. He covered his head with both hands.
"Signore!" screamed the guide.
"Get away from me!" Tonio cried out. And without looking back to see if he was obeyed, he rose on all fours and ran up the incline, gaining speed as he grabbed for roots and scorched tree limbs, digging the toes of his boots into the soft crush beneath him.
Again came the shower of rocks; it was in a rhythm that these bursts were occurring, but he could not time it, nor did he care, dropping down again and again to protect his face and rising as soon as he could, the fire above lighting up the sky even through the haze of the ash which had become a veritable cloud over him.
A fit of coughing stopped him. He ran on. But now he had his handkerchief over his mouth and he was going slower. His hands were bruised, so were his knees, and when the rocks showered down on him this time, they cut his forehead and his right shoulder.
The mountain gave another roar, the rumble collecting into a greater and greater sound until it was once more that appalling bellow. The night was again fully illuminated.
And he saw beyond the half dead trees that lay ahead that he had reached the foot of the giant cone itself. He was almost to the summit of Vesuvius.
He reached out for the earth above, taking it in tight handfuls as it fell away, pebbles and rocks rolling back into his mouth, and suddenly he felt the ground itself moving! It was heaved upward. The raging bellow deafened him. And the smoke and ash swirled about the great blinding flash that showed the high barren cone slanting heavenward. Again he went forward. He groped for the tree that he could see only a few yards ahead, a last gnarled and tortured sentinel. But falling down, he felt himself thrown up again as with a tremendous crack, the tree itself split open.
Half the trunk swung to the right, seemed to catch itself. And then it crashed
in a thunderous crackling. A seething steam rose from the cracks opening everywhere. And he found himself scrambling desperately backwards.
He slid against the earth. He felt the dirt in his mouth, the dead leaves caked against his eyelids. And even blinded as he was, he still saw the red flash as if from an explosion. But he clung fast. The ground carried him up, shifted him to the side, but he lay motionless. The bellow rose again, shattering him. And though his throat convulsed with cries, though his hands clawed into the rubble, he heard no sound from himself, felt no life in himself as he became part of the mountain and the roaring cauldron within it.
7
THE SUN WAS WARM on his face.
Smoke hung in the air in thousands upon thousands of tiny particles. Yet far off the birds were singing. And it was not early morning. It was noon, he could tell by the slant of the sun, by the feel of it on his face and his hands. And the mountain gave off but a faint murmuring.
He had just opened his eyes. For a long moment he lay very still, and then he realized that a man was standing before him. The figure wavered against the blue sky, and so consumptive was it, so pale, so wild of eye, it seemed the very visage of death itself, while behind it lay the lush green slopes, knotted with trees, that melted down to the fertile plain in which lay the jumbled facets of color and light that were Naples.
But it wasn't the figure of death. It was only that man who had come out of his hut the night before to warn Tonio to go no higher.
And mutely, he extended his hand. He caught Tonio up out of the dirt and led him slowly down the mountain.
As soon as Tonio reached the city, he went to one of the better alberghi on the Molo, and rented for himself an expensive suite of rooms in which he could bathe, after sending a servant to purchase fresh linen.
When he was finished with the bath, he had the tub taken out and he stood alone for a while, naked, in front of the mirror. Then he put on his clean shirt, arranging the lace neatly at the collar and at the cuffs, and having had his frock coat brushed, he put that on too and his breeches and stockings and went out onto the veranda.
Fruit and chocolate were brought to him for his breakfast, and the Turkish coffee he had liked so much all his life in Venice.