by Rice, Anne
Curious moment. Some almost brutal sense of her as a human being quite removed from all that surrounded her. We did understand each other, and all my resentment of her didn’t matter too much.
She pulled the pin out of her hair and let it tumble down to her shoulders.
We sat quiet for perhaps an hour after that. No more laughter or talk, just the fire blazing, and her near to me.
She had turned so she could see the fire. Her profile, the delicacy of her nose and lips, were beautiful to look at. Then she looked back at me and in the same steady voice without undue emotion she said:
“I’ll never leave here. I am dying now.”
I was stunned. The little shock before was nothing to this.
“I’ll live through this spring,” she continued, “and possibly the summer as well. But I won’t survive another winter. I know. The pain in my lungs is too bad.”
I made some little anguished sound. I think I leaned forward and said, “Mother!”
“Don’t say any more,” she answered.
I think she hated to be called mother, but I hadn’t been able to help it.
“I just wanted to speak it to another soul,” she said. “To hear it out loud. I’m perfectly horrified by it. I’m afraid of it.”
I wanted to take her hands, but I knew she’d never allow it. She disliked to be touched. She never put her arms around anyone. And so it was in our glances that we held each other. My eyes filled with tears looking at her.
She patted my hand.
“Don’t think on it much,” she said. “I don’t. Just only now and then. But you must be ready to live on without me when the time comes. That may be harder for you than you realize.”
I tried to say something; I couldn’t make the words come.
She left me just as she’d come in, silently.
And though she’d never said anything about my clothes or my beard or how dreadful I looked, she sent the servants in with clean clothes for me, and the razor and warm water, and silently I let myself be taken care of by them.
3
I began to feel a little stronger. I stopped thinking about what happened with the wolves and I thought about her. I thought about the words “perfectly horrified,” and I didn’t know what to make of them except they sounded exactly true. I’d feel that way if I were dying slowly. It would have been better on the mountain with the wolves.
But there was more to it than that. She had always been silently unhappy. She hated the inertia and the hopelessness of our life here as much as I did. And now, after eight children, three living, five dead, she was dying. This was the end for her.
I determined to get up if it would make her feel better, but when I tried I couldn’t. The thought of her dying was unbearable. I paced the floor of my room a lot, ate the food brought to me, but still I wouldn’t go to her.
But by the end of the month, visitors came to draw me out.
My mother came in and said I must receive the merchants from the village who wanted to honor me for killing the wolves.
“Oh, hell with it,” I answered.
“No, you must come down,” she said. “They have gifts for you. Now do your duty.” I hated all this.
When I reached the hall, I found the rich shopkeepers there, all men I knew well, and all dressed for the occasion.
But there was one startling young man among them I didn’t recognize immediately.
He was my age perhaps, and quite tall, and when our eyes met I remembered who he was. Nicolas de Lenfent, eldest son of the draper, who had been sent to school in Paris.
He was a vision now.
Dressed in a splendid brocade coat of rose and gold, he wore slippers with gold heels, and layers of Italian lace at his collar. Only his hair was what it used to be, dark and very curly, and boyish looking for some reason though it was tied back with a fine bit of silk ribbon.
Parisian fashion, all this—the sort that passed as fast as it could through the local post house.
And here I was to meet him in threadbare wool and scuffed leather boots and yellowed lace that had been seventeen times mended.
We bowed to each other, as he was apparently the spokesman for the town, and then he unwrapped from its modest covering of black serge a great red velvet cloak lined in fur. Gorgeous thing. His eyes were positively shining when he looked at me. You would have thought he was looking at a sovereign.
“Monsieur, we beg you to accept this,” he said very sincerely. “The finest fur of the wolves has been used to line it and we thought it would stand you well in the winter, this fur-lined cloak, when you ride out to hunt.”
“And these too, Monsieur,” said his father, producing a finely sewn pair of fur-lined boots in black suede. “For the hunt, Monsieur,” he said.
I was a little overcome. They meant these gestures in the kindest way, these men who had the sort of wealth I only dreamed of, and they paid me respect as the aristocrat.
I took the cloak and the boots. I thanked them as effusively as I’d ever thanked anybody for anything.
And behind me, I heard my brother Augustin say:
“Now he will really be impossible!”
I felt my face color. Outrageous that he should say this in the presence of these men, but when I glanced to Nicolas de Lenfent I saw the most affectionate expression on his face.
“I too am impossible, Monsieur,” he whispered as I gave him the parting kiss. “Someday, will you let me come to talk to you and tell me how you killed them all? Only the impossible can do the impossible.”
None of the merchants ever spoke to me like that. We were boys again for a moment. And I laughed out loud. His father was disconcerted. My brothers stopped whispering, but Nicolas de Lenfent kept smiling with a Parisian’s composure.
As soon as they had left I took the red velvet cloak and the suede boots up into my mother’s room.
She was reading as always while very lazily she brushed her hair. In the weak sunlight from the window, I saw gray in her hair for the first time. I told her what Nicolas de Lenfent had said.
“Why is he impossible?” I asked her. “He said this with feeling, as if it meant something.”
She laughed.
“It means something all right,” she said. “He’s in disgrace.” She stopped looking at her book for a moment and looked at me. “You know how he’s been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that men say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. He wants to be a musician. Can you imagine?”
“And his father is beside himself.”
“Exactly. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper.” I smiled.
“And so Nicolas has no violin now?”
“He has a violin. He promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his watch to buy another. He’s impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well.”
“You’ve heard him?”
She knew good music. She grew up with it in Naples. All I’d ever heard were the church choir, the players at the fairs.
“I heard him Sunday when I went to mass,” she said. “He was playing in the upstairs bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands.”
I gave a little gasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that.
“Of course he’ll never be anything,” she went on.
“Why not?”
“He’s too old. You can’t take up the violin when you’re twenty. But what do I know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil.”
&
nbsp; I laughed a little uneasily. It sounded tragic.
“But why don’t you go down to the town and make a friend of him?” she asked.
“Why the hell should I do that?” I asked.
“Lestat, really. Your brothers will hate it. And the old merchant will be beside himself with joy. His son and the Marquis’s son.”
“Those aren’t good enough reasons.”
“He’s been to Paris,” she said. She watched me for a long moment. Then she went back to her book, brushing her hair now and then lazily.
I watched her reading, hating it. I wanted to ask her how she was, if her cough was very bad that day. But I couldn’t broach the subject to her.
“Go on down and talk to him, Lestat,” she said, without another glance at me.
4
It took me a week to make up my mind that I would seek out Nicolas de Lenfent.
I put on the red velvet fur-lined cloak and the fur-lined suede boots, and I went down the winding main street of the village towards the inn.
The shop owned by Nicolas’s father was right across from the inn, but I didn’t see or hear Nicolas.
I had no more than enough for one glass of wine and I wasn’t sure just how to proceed when the innkeeper came out, bowed to me, and set a bottle of his best vintage before me.
Of course these people had always treated me like the son of the lord. But I could see that things had changed on account of the wolves, and strangely enough, this made me feel even more alone than I usually felt.
But as soon as I poured the first glass, Nicolas appeared, a great blaze of color in the open doorway.
He was not so finely dressed as before, thank heaven, yet everything about him exuded wealth. Silk and velvet and brand-new leather.
But he was flushed as if he’d been running and his hair was windblown and messy, and his eyes full of excitement. He bowed to me, waited for me to invite him to sit down, and then he asked me:
“What was it like, Monsieur, killing the wolves?” And folding his arms on the table, he stared at me.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s it like in Paris, Monsieur?” I said, and I realized right away that it sounded mocking and rude. “I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “I would really like to know. Did you go to the university? Did you really study with Mozart? What do people in Paris do? What do they talk about? What do they think?”
He laughed softly at the barrage of questions. I had to laugh myself. I signaled for another glass and pushed the bottle towards him.
“Tell me,” I said, “did you go to the theaters in Paris? Did you see the Comédie-Française?”
“Many times,” he answered a little dismissively. “But listen, the diligence will be coming in any minute. There’ll be too much noise. Allow me the honor of providing your supper in a private room upstairs. I should so like to do it—”
And before I could make a gentlemanly protest, he was ordering everything. We were shown up to a crude but comfortable little chamber.
I was almost never in small wooden rooms, and I loved it immediately. The table was laid for the meal that would come later on, the fire was truly warming the place, unlike the roaring blazes in our castle, and the thick glass of the window was clean enough to see the blue winter sky over the snow-covered mountains.
“Now, I shall tell you everything you want to know about Paris,” he said agreeably, waiting for me to sit first. “Yes, I did go to the university.” He made a little sneer as if it had all been contemptible. “And I did study with Mozart, who would have told me I was hopeless if he hadn’t needed pupils. Now where do you want me to begin? The stench of the city, or the infernal noise of it? The hungry crowds that surround you everywhere? The thieves in every alley ready to cut your throat?”
I waved all that away. His smile was very different from his tone, his manner open and appealing.
“A really big Paris theater …” I said. “Describe it to me … what is it like?”
* * *
I think we stayed in that room for four solid hours and all we did was drink and talk.
He drew plans of the theaters on the tabletop with a wet finger, described the plays he had seen, the famous actors, the little houses of the boulevards. Soon he was describing all of Paris and he’d forgotten to be cynical, my curiosity firing him as he talked of the Ile de la Cité, and the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Louvre.
We went on to more abstract things, how the newspapers reported events, how his student cronies gathered in cafés to argue. He told me men were restless and out of love with the monarchy. That they wanted a change in government and wouldn’t sit still for very long. He told me about the philosophers, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau.
I couldn’t understand everything he said. But in rapid, sometimes sarcastic speech he gave me a marvelously complete picture of what was going on.
Of course, it didn’t surprise me to hear that educated people didn’t believe in God, that they were infinitely more interested in science, that the aristocracy was much in ill favor, and so was the Church. These were times of reason, not superstition, and the more he talked the more I understood.
Soon he was outlining the Encyclopédie, the great compilation of knowledge supervised by Diderot. And then it was the salons he’d gone to, the drinking bouts, his evenings with actresses. He described the public balls at the Palais Royal, where Marie Antoinette appeared right along with the common people.
“I’ll tell you,” he said finally, “it all sounds a hell of a lot better in this room than it really is.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said gently. I didn’t want him to stop talking. I wanted it to go on and on.
“It’s a secular age, Monsieur,” he said, filling our glasses from the new bottle of wine. “Very dangerous.”
“Why dangerous?” I whispered. “An end to superstition? What could be better than that?”
“Spoken like a true eighteenth-century man, Monsieur,” he said with a faint melancholy to his smile. “But no one values anything anymore. Fashion is everything. Even atheism is a fashion.”
I had always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reason. No one in my family much believed in God or ever had. Of course they said they did, and we went to mass. But this was duty. Real religion had long ago died out in our family, as it had perhaps in the families of thousands of aristocrats. Even at the monastery I had not believed in God. I had believed in the monks around me.
I tried to explain this in simple language that would not give offense to Nicolas, because for his family it was different.
Even his miserable money-grubbing father (whom I secretly admired) was fervently religious.
“But can men live without these beliefs?” Nicolas asked almost sadly. “Can children face the world without them?”
I was beginning to understand why he was so sarcastic and cynical. He had only recently lost that old faith. He was bitter about it.
But no matter how deadening was this sarcasm of his, a great energy poured out of him, an irrepressible passion. And this drew me to him. I think I loved him. Another two glasses of wine and I might say something absolutely ridiculous like that.
“I’ve always lived without beliefs,” I said.
“Yes. I know,” he answered. “Do you remember the story of the witches? The time you cried at the witches’ place?”
“Cried over the witches?” I looked at him blankly for a moment. But it stirred something painful, something humiliating. Too many of my memories had that quality. And now I had to remember crying over witches. “I don’t remember,” I said.
“We were little boys. And the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the blackened ground.”
“Ah, that place.” I shuddered. “That horrid, horrid place.”
“You began to scream and to cry. They sent someone for the Marquise herself because your nurse couldn’t quiet yo
u.”
“I was a dreadful child,” I said, trying to shrug it off. Of course I did remember now—screaming, being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Lestat, wake up.”
But I hadn’t thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burnt alive.
Nicolas was studying me. “When your mother came to get you, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales.”
I nodded.
The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our own village, that they had been innocent. “Victims of superstition,’ ” she had said. “There were no real witches.” No wonder I had screamed and screamed.
“But my mother,” Nicolas said, “told a different story, that the witches had been in league with the devil, that they’d blighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children—”
“And won’t the world be better if no one is ever again burnt in the name of God?” I asked. “If there is no more faith in God to make men do that to each other? What is the danger in a secular world where horrors like that don’t happen?”
He leaned forward with a mischievous little frown.
“The wolves didn’t wound you on the mountain, did they?” he asked playfully. “You haven’t become a werewolf, have you, Monsieur, unbeknownst to the rest of us?” He stroked the furred edge of the velvet cloak I still had over my shoulders. “Remember what the good father said, that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times. They were a regular menace.”
I laughed.
“If I turn into a wolf,” I answered, “I can tell you this much. I won’t hang around here to kill the children. I’ll get away from this miserable little hellhole of a village where they still terrify little boys with tales of burning witches. I’ll get on the road to Paris and never stop till I see her ramparts.”
“And you’ll find Paris is a miserable hellhole,” he said. “Where they break the bones of thieves on the wheel for the vulgar crowds in the place de Grève.”