by Rice, Anne
And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. Behind the image of the Blessed Virgin and her Infant Jesus, behind the image of the Crucified Christ, behind the remembered basalt image of Isis. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.
Above all, however, I see it in the very fashioning of the world which outshines all art, and cannot by sheer randomness have accumulated such beauty.
Love. But whence comes this love? Why is it so secretive about its source, this love that makes rain and trees and has scattered the stars over us as the gods and goddesses once claimed to do?
So Lestat, the brat Prince, woke the Queen; and we survived her destruction. So Lestat, the brat Prince, had gone to Heaven and Hell and brought back disbelief, horror and the Veil of Veronica! Veronica, an invented Christian name which means vera ikon, or true icon. He found himself plunged into Palestine during the very years that I lived, and there saw something that has shattered the faculties in humans which we cherish so much: faith, reason.
I have to go to Lestat, look into his eyes. I have to see what he saw!
Let the young sing songs of death. They are stupid.
The finest thing under the sun and the moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.
I have one more story to tell you. I don’t know why I want to record it here. But I do. Perhaps it’s because I feel you—a vampire who sees spirits—will understand this, and understand perhaps why I remained so unmoved by it.
Once in the Sixth Century—that is, five hundred years after the birth of Christ and three hundred years since I had left Marius—I went wandering in barbarian Italy. The Ostrogoths had long ago overrun the peninsula.
Then other tribes swept down on them, looting, burning, carrying off stones from old Temples.
It was like walking on burning coals for me to go there.
But Rome did struggle with some conception of itself, its principles, trying to blend the pagan with the Christian, and find some respite from the barbarian raids.
The Roman Senate still existed. Of all institutions it had survived.
And a scholar, sprung from the same stock as myself, Boethius, a very learned man who studied the ancients and the saints, had recently been put to death, but not before he had given us a great book. You can find it in any library today. It is, of course, The Consolation of Philosophy.
I had to see the ruined Forum for myself, the burnt and barren hills of Rome, the pigs and goats roaming where once Cicero had spoken to the crowds. I had to see the forsaken poor living desperately along the banks of the Tiber.
I had to see the fallen classical world. I had to see the Christian churches and shrines.
I had to see one scholar in particular. Like Boethius he had come from old Roman stock, and like Boethius he had read the classics and the saints. He was a man who wrote letters that went all over the world, even as far as to the scholar Bede in England.
And he had built a monastery there, some great flare of creativity and optimism, in spite of ruin and war.
This man was of course the scholar Cassiodorus, and his monastery lay at the very tip of the boot of Italy, in the paradisal land of green Calabria.
I came upon it in early evening, as I planned, when it looked like a great and splendid lighted little city.
Its monks were copying away ferociously in the Scriptorium.
And there in his cell, wide open to the night, sat Cassiodorus himself, at his writing, a man past ninety years of age.
He had survived the barbarian politics that doomed his friend Boethius, having served the Aryan Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric, having lived to retire from Civil Service—he had survived to build this monastery, his dream, and to write to monks all over the world, to share what he knew with them of the ancients, to conserve the wisdom of the Greeks and the Romans.
Was he truly the last man of the ancient world, as some have said? The last man who could read both Latin and Greek? The last man who could treasure both Aristotle and the dogma of the Roman Pope? Plato and Saint Paul?
I didn’t know then that he would be so well remembered. And I didn’t know how soon he’d be forgotten!
Vivarium, on its mountain slopes, was an architectural triumph. It had its sparkling ponds to catch and hold fish—the characteristic which gave it its name. It had its Christian church with the inevitable cross, its dormitories, its rooms for the weary guest traveler. Its library was rich in the classics of my time, as well as gospels which have now been lost. The monastery was rich in all the fruits of the field, all crops needed for food, trees laden with fruit, fields of wheat.
The monks cared for all of this, and they dedicated themselves to copying books day and night in their long Scriptorium.
There were beehives there, on this gentle moonlighted coast, hundreds of beehives from which the monks harvested honey to eat, and wax for sacred candles, and royal jelly for an ointment. The beehives covered a hill as big as the orchard or the farmland of Vivarium.
I spied on Cassiodorus. I walked among the beehives, and marveled as I always do at the inexplicable organization of bees, for the mysteries of the bees and their dance and their hunting for pollen and their breeding was all known to my eye long before it was understood by the human world.
As I left the hives, as I moved away towards the distant beacon of Cassiodorus’s lamp, I looked back. I beheld something.
Something collected itself from the hives, something immense and invisible and forceful that I could both feel and hear. I was not gripped by fear, merely sparked by a temporary hope that some New Thing had come into the world. For I am not a seer of ghosts and never was.
This force rose out of the very bees themselves, out of their intricate knowledge and their countless sublime patterns, as though they had somehow accidentally evolved it, or empowered it with consciousness through the means of their endless creativity, meticulousness and endurance.
It was like an old Roman woodland spirit of the forest.
I saw this force fly loosely over the fields. I saw it enter the body of a straw man who stood in the fields, a scarecrow which the monks had made with a fine round wooden head, painted eyes, crude nose and smiling mouth—a creature whole and entire who could be moved from time to time, intact in his monk’s hood and robe.
I saw this scarecrow, this man of straw and wood hurry whirling and dancing through the fields and the vineyards until he had reached Cassiodorus’s cell.
I followed!
Then I heard a silent wail rise from the being. I heard it and I saw the scarecrow in a bending, bowing dance of sorrow, its bundled straw hands over ears it didn’t have. It writhed with grief.
Cassiodorus was dead. He had died quietly within his lamp-lighted cell, his door open, at his writing table. He lay, gray-haired, ancient, quiet against his manuscript. He had lived over ninety years. And he was dead.
This creature, this scarecrow, was wild with suffering and grief, rocking and moaning, though it was a sound no human could have heard.
I who have never seen spirits stared at it in wonder. Then it perceived that I was there. It turned. He—for so it seemed in this ragged attire and body of straw—reached out to me. He flung out his straw arms. The straw fell from his sleeves. His wooden head wobbled on the pole that was his spine. He—It—implored me: he begged me for the answer to the greatest questions humans and immortal have ever posed. He looked to me for answers!
Then glancing back again at the dead Cassiodorus, he ran to me, across the sloping grass, and the need came out of him, poured from him, his arms out as it beheld me. Could I not explain? Could I not contain in some Divine Design the mystery of the loss of Cassiodo
rus! Cassiodorus who had with his Vivarium rivaled the hive of bees in elegance and glory! It was Vivarium which had drawn this consciousness together from the hives! Could I not ease this creature’s pain!
“There are horrors in this world,” I whispered. “It is made up of mystery and dependent upon mystery. If you would have peace, go back to the hives; lose your human shape, and descend again, fragmented into the mindless life of the contented bees from which you rose.”
He was fixed, and he listened to me.
“If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.
“But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history—is lies.”
The thing, whether it be male or female, drew up its bundled straw hands, as if to cover its mouth. I turned my back on it.
I walked away silently through the vineyards. In a little while the monks would discover that their Father Superior, their genius, their saint, had died at his work.
I looked back in amazement to discover that the figure of straw remained, organized, assuming the posture of an upright being, watching me.
“I will not believe in you!” I shouted back to this man of straw. “I will not search with you for any answer! But know this: if you would become an organized being as you see in me, love all mankind and womankind and all their children. Do not take your strength from blood! Do not feed on suffering. Do not rise like a god above crowds chanting in adoration. Do not lie!”
It listened. It heard. It remained still.
I ran. I ran and ran up the rocky slopes and through the forests of Calabria until I was far far away from it. Under the moon, I saw the sprawling majesty of Vivarium with its cloisters and sloped roofs as it surrounded the shores of its shimmering inlet from the sea.
I never saw the straw creature again. I don’t know what it was. I don’t want you to ask me any question about it.
You tell me spirits and ghosts walk. We know such beings exist. But that was the last I saw of that being.
And when next I drifted through Italy, Vivarium had been long destroyed. The earthquakes had shaken loose the last of its walls. Had it been sacked first by the next wave of ignorant tall men of Northern Europe, the Vandals? Was it an earthquake that brought about its ruin?
No one knows. What survives of it are the letters that Cassiodorus sent to others.
Soon the classics were declared profane. Pope Gregory wrote tales of magic and miracles, because it was the only way to convert thousands of superstitious uncatechized Northern tribes to Christianity in great en masse baptisms.
He conquered the warriors Rome could never conquer.
The history of Italy for one hundred years falls into absolute darkness after Cassiodorus. How do the books put it? For a century, nothing is heard from Italy.
Ah, what a silence!
Now David, as you come to these final pages, I must confess, I have left you. The smiles with which I gave you these notebooks were deceptive. Feminine wiles, Marius would call them. My promise to meet with you tomorrow night here in Paris was a lie. I will have left Paris by the time you come to these lines. I go to New Orleans.
It’s your doing, David. You have transformed me. You have given me a desperate faith that in narrative there is a shadow of meaning. I now know a new strident energy. You have trained me through your demand upon my language and my memory to live again, to believe again that some good exists in this world.
I want to find Marius. Thoughts of other immortals fill the air. Cries, pleas, strange messages …
One who was believed gone from us is now apparently known to have survived.
I have strong reason to believe that Marius has gone to New Orleans, and I must be reunited with him. I must seek out Lestat, to see this fallen brat Prince lying on the chapel floor unable to speak or move.
Come join me, David. Don’t fear Marius! I know he will come to help Lestat. I do the same.
Come back to New Orleans.
Even if Marius is not there, I want to see Lestat. I want to see the others again. What have you done, David? I now contain—with this new curiosity, with this flaming capacity to care once more, with reborn capacity to sing—I now contain the awful capacity to want and to love.
For that, if for nothing else, and there is indeed much more, I shall always thank you. No matter what suffering is to come, you have quickened me. And nothing you do or say will ever cause the death of my love for you.
THE END
Final: July 5, 1997
DEDICATED
TO
STAN, CHRISTOPHER AND MICHELE RICE
TO
SUZANNE SCOTT QUIROZ
AND
VICTORIA WILSON
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN PRESTON
TO
THE IRISH OF NEW ORLEANS
WHO, IN THE 1850S,
BUILT ON CONSTANCE STREET
THE GREAT CHURCH OF ST. ALPHONSUS,
WHILE PASSING ON TO US
THROUGH FAITH, ARCHITECTURE AND ART
A SPLENDID MONUMENT
TO
“THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE
AND
THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME”
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1999 by Anne O’Brien Rice
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-57594-4
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Dedication
Selected and Annotated Bibliography
This novel is
dedicated
by
Vittorio
to the people of
Florence, Italy.
1
WHO I AM, WHY I WRITE, WHAT IS TO COME
When I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my arms the severed heads of my younger brother and sister. They were quick still, and mute, with big fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was I that I could make no more of a sound than they could.
The dream came true.
But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.
By anyone’s standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful, having lived five hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de’ Medici, and even the angels will attest to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be cautious on that point.
I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the “Coven of the Articulate,” that band of strange romantic vampires in and fr
om the Southern New World city of New Orleans who have regaled you already with so many chronicles and tales.
I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as fiction. I know nothing of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You will find no new knowledge of them in these pages, not even, hereafter, a mention.
I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of my own beginnings—the fable of my making—and to cast this fragment of my life in book form into the wide world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or destined contact with their well-published volumes.
I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant roaming and study, never provoking the slightest danger from my own kind, and never arousing their knowledge or suspicions.
But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.
It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I believe I have revelations within me which will be wholly original to you. Perhaps when my book is finished and gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow a character in that grand roman-fleuve begun by other vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I cannot know or care about it.
As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones of the place where I was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and misshapen among the thorny blackberry vines and fragrant smothering forests of oak and chestnut trees, I am compelled to record what befell me, for it seems that I may have suffered a fate very unlike that of any other vampire.
I do not always hang about this place.
On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city which for me is the queen of all cities—Florence—which I loved from the very first moment I saw it with a child’s eyes in the years when Cosimo the Elder ran his powerful Medici bank with his own hand, even though he was the richest man in Europe.
In the house of Cosimo de’ Medici lived the great sculptor Donatello making sculptures of marble and bronze, as well as painters and poets galore, writers on magic and makers of music. The great Brunelleschi, who had made the very dome of Florence’s greatest church, was building yet another Cathedral for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo was rebuilding not only the monastery of San Marco but commencing the palazzo for Cosimo which would one day be known to all the world as the Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo, men went all over Europe seeking in dusty libraries long forgotten the classics of Greece and Rome, which Cosimo’s scholars would translate into our native Italian, the language which Dante had boldly chosen many years before for his Divine Comedy.