by Rice, Anne
And in this unbearable state of agitation I commenced to do something I’d never done before. I turned to those around me and questioned them relentlessly.
“But do you believe in God?” I asked my brother Augustin. “How can you live if you don’t!”
“But do you really believe in anything?” I demanded of my blind father. “If you knew you were dying at this very minute, would you expect to see God or darkness! Tell me.”
“You’re mad, you’ve always been mad!” he shouted. “Get out of this house! You’ll drive us all crazy.”
He stood up, which was hard for him, being crippled and blind, and he tried to throw his goblet at me and naturally he missed.
I couldn’t look at my mother. I couldn’t be near her. I didn’t want to make her suffer with my questions. I went down to the inn. I couldn’t bear to think of the witches’ place. I would not have walked to that end of the village for anything! I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. “Go away!” I said at the thought of those who’d died like that without ever, ever understanding anything.
The second day it was no better.
And it wasn’t any better by the end of the week either.
I ate, drank, slept, but every waking moment was pure panic and pure pain. I went to the village priest and demanded did he really believe the Body of Christ was present on the altar at the Consecration. And after hearing his stammered answers, and seeing the fear in his eyes, I went away more desperate than before.
“But how do you live, how do you go on breathing and moving and doing things when you know there is no explanation?” I was raving finally. And then Nicolas said maybe the music would make me feel better. He would play the violin.
I was afraid of the intensity of it. But we went to the orchard and in the sunshine Nicolas played every song he knew. I sat there with my arms folded and my knees drawn up, my teeth chattering though we were right in the hot sun, and the sun was glaring off the little polished violin, and I watched Nicolas swaying into the music as he stood before me, the raw pure sounds swelling magically to fill the orchard and the valley, though it wasn’t magic, and Nicolas put his arms around me finally and we just sat there silent, and then he said very softly, “Lestat, believe me, this will pass.”
“Play again,” I said. “The music is innocent.”
Nicolas smiled and nodded. Pamper the madman.
And I knew it wasn’t going to pass, and nothing for the moment could make me forget, but what I felt was inexpressible gratitude for the music, that in this horror there could be something as beautiful as that.
You couldn’t understand anything; and you couldn’t change anything. But you could make music like that. And I felt the same gratitude when I saw the village children dancing, when I saw their arms raised and their knees bent, and their bodies turning to the rhythm of the songs they sang. I started to cry watching them.
I wandered into the church and on my knees I leaned against the wall and I looked at the ancient statues and I felt the same gratitude looking at the finely carved fingers and the noses and the ears and the expressions on their faces and the deep folds in their garments, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying.
At least we had these beautiful things, I said. Such goodness.
But nothing natural seemed beautiful to me now! The very sight of a great tree standing alone in a field could make me tremble and cry out. Fill the orchard with music.
And let me tell you a little secret. It never did pass, really.
6
What caused it? Was it the late night drinking and talking, or did it have to do with my mother and her saying she was going to die? Did the wolves have something to do with it? Was it a spell cast upon the imagination by the witches’ place?
I don’t know. It had come like something visited upon me from outside. One minute it was an idea, and the next it was real. I think you can invite that sort of thing, but you can’t make it come.
Of course it was to slacken. But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again. I mean the world looked different forever after, and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness.
Maybe it was a presentiment. But I don’t think so. It was more important than that, and frankly I don’t believe in presentiments.
But to return to the story, during all this misery I kept away from my mother. I wasn’t going to say these monstrous things about death and chaos to her. But she heard from everyone else that I’d lost my reason.
And finally, on the first Sunday night in Lent, she came to me.
I was alone in my room and the whole household had gone down to the village at twilight for the big bonfire that was the custom every year on this evening.
I had always hated the celebration. It had a ghastly aspect to it—the roaring flames, the dancing and singing, the peasants going afterwards through the orchards with their torches to the tune of their strange chanting.
We had had a priest for a little while who called it pagan. But they got rid of him fast enough. The farmers of our mountains kept to their old rituals. It was to make the trees bear and the crops grow, all this. And on this occasion, more than any other, I felt I saw the kind of men and women who could burn witches.
In my present frame of mind, it struck terror. I sat by my own little fire, trying to resist the urge to go to the window and look down on the big fire that drew me as strongly as it scared me.
My mother came in, closed the door behind her, and told me that she must talk to me. Her whole manner was tenderness.
“Is it on account of my dying, what’s come over you?” she asked. “Tell me if it is. And put your hands in mine.”
She even kissed me. She was frail in her faded dressing gown, and her hair was undone. I couldn’t stand to see the streaks of gray in it. She looked starved.
But I told her the truth. I didn’t know, and then I explained some of what had happened in the inn. I tried not to convey the horror of it, the strange logic of it. I tried not to make it so absolute.
She listened and then she said, “You’re such a fighter, my son. You never accept. Not even when it’s the fate of all mankind, will you accept it.”
“I can’t!” I said miserably.
“I love you for it,” she said. “It’s all too like you that you should see this in a tiny bedroom in the inn late at night when you’re drinking wine. And it’s entirely like you to rage against it the way you rage against everything else.”
I started to cry again though I knew she wasn’t condemning me. And then she took out a handkerchief and opened it to reveal several gold coins.
“You’ll get over this,” she said. “For the moment, death is spoiling life for you, that’s all. But life is more important than death. You’ll realize it soon enough. Now listen to what I have to say. I’ve had the doctor here and the old woman in the village who knows more about healing than he knows. Both agree with me I won’t live too long.”
“Stop, Mother,” I said, aware of how selfish I was being, but unable to hold back. “And this time there’ll be no gifts. Put the money away.”
“Sit down,” she said. She pointed to the bench near the hearth. Reluctantly I did as I was told. She sat beside me.
“I know,” she said, “that you and Nicolas are talking of running away.”
“I won’t go, Mother …”
“What, until I’m dead?”
I didn’t answer her. I can’t convey to you my frame of mind. I was still raw, trembling, and we had to talk about the fact that this living, breathing woman was going to stop living and breathing and start to putrefy and rot away, that her soul would spin into an abyss, that everything she had suffered in life, including the end of it, would come to nothing at all. Her little face was like something painted on a veil.
And from the distant village came the thinnest sound of the singing villagers.
“I want you to go to Paris, Lestat,” s
he said. “I want you to take this money, which is all I have left from my family. I want to know you’re in Paris, Lestat, when my time comes. I want to die knowing you are in Paris.”
I was startled. I remembered her stricken expression years ago when they’d brought me back from the Italian troupe. I looked at her for a long moment. She sounded almost angry in her persuasiveness.
“I’m terrified of dying,” she said. Her voice went almost dry. “And I swear I will go mad if I don’t know you’re in Paris and you’re free when it finally comes.”
I questioned her with my eyes. I was asking her with my eyes, “Do you really mean this?”
“I have kept you here as surely as your father has,” she said. “Not on account of pride, but on account of selfishness. And now I’m going to atone for it. I’ll see you go. And I don’t care what you do when you reach Paris, whether you sing while Nicolas plays the violin, or turn somersaults on the stage at the St.-Germain Fair. But go, and do what you will do as best you can.”
I tried to take her in my arms. She stiffened at first but then I felt her weaken and she melted against me, and she gave herself over so completely to me in that moment that I think I understood why she had always been so restrained. She cried, which I’d never heard her do. And I loved this moment for all its pain. I was ashamed of loving it, but I wouldn’t let her go. I held her tightly, and maybe kissed her for all the times she’d never let me do it. We seemed for the moment like two parts of the same thing.
And then she grew calm. She seemed to settle into herself, and slowly but very firmly she released me and pushed me away.
She talked for a long time. She said things I didn’t understand then, about how when she would see me riding out to hunt, she felt some wondrous pleasure in it, and she felt that same pleasure when I angered everyone and thundered my questions at my father and brothers as to why we had to live the way we lived. She spoke in an almost eerie way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being the organ for her which women do not really have.
“You are the man in me,” she said. “And so I’ve kept you here, afraid of living without you, and maybe now in sending you away, I am only doing what I have done before.”
She shocked me a little. I never thought a woman could feel or articulate anything quite like this.
“Nicolas’s father knows about your plans,” she said. “The innkeeper overheard you. It’s important you leave right away. Take the diligence at dawn, and write to me as soon as you reach Paris. There are letter writers at the cemetery of les Innocents near the St.-Germain Market. Find one who can write Italian for you. And then no one will be able to read the letter but me.”
When she left the room, I didn’t quite believe what had happened. For a long moment I stood staring before me. I stared at my bed with its mattress of straw, at the two coats I owned and the red cloak, and my one pair of leather shoes by the hearth. I stared out the narrow slit of a window at the black hulk of the mountains I’d known all my life. The darkness, the gloom, slid back from me for a precious moment.
And then I was rushing down the stairs and down the mountain to the village to find Nicolas and to tell him we were going to Paris! We were going to do it. Nothing could stop us this time.
He was with his family watching the bonfire. And as soon as he saw me, he threw his arm around my neck, and I hooked my arm around his waist and I dragged him away from the crowds and the blaze, and towards the end of the meadow.
The air smelled fresh and green as it does only in spring. Even the villagers’ singing didn’t sound so horrible. I started dancing around in a circle.
“Get your violin!” I said. “Play a song about going to Paris, we’re on our way. We’re going in the morning!”
“And how are we going to feed ourselves in Paris?” he sang out as he made with his empty hands to play an invisible violin. “Are you going to shoot rats for our supper?”
“Don’t ask what we’ll do when we get there!” I said. “The important thing is just to get there.”
7
Not even a fortnight passed before I stood in the midst of the noonday crowds in the vast public cemetery of les Innocents, with its old vaults and stinking open graves—the most fantastical marketplace I had ever beheld—and, amid the stench and the noise, bent over an Italian letter writer dictating my first letter to my mother.
Yes, we had arrived safely after traveling day and night, and we had rooms in the Ile de la Cité, and we were inexpressibly happy, and Paris was warm and beautiful and magnificent beyond all imagining.
I wished I could have taken the pen myself and written to her.
I wished I could have told her what it was like, seeing these towering mansions, ancient winding streets aswarm with beggars, peddlers, noblemen, houses of four and five stories banking the crowded boulevards.
I wished I could have described the carriages to her, the rumbling confections of gilt and glass bullying their way over the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame, streaming past the Louvre, the Palais Royal.
I wished I could describe the people, the gentlemen with their clocked stockings and silver walking sticks, tripping through the mud in pastel slippers, the ladies with their pearl-encrusted wigs and swaying panniers of silk and muslin, my first certain glimpse of Queen Marie Antoinette herself walking boldly through the gardens of the Tuileries.
Of course she’d seen it all years and years before I was born. She’d lived in Naples and London and Rome with her father. But I wanted to tell her what she had given to me, how it was to hear the choir in Notre Dame, to push into the jam-packed cafés with Nicolas, talk with his old student cronies over English coffee, what it was like to get dressed up in Nicolas’s fine clothes—he made me do it—and stand below the footlights at the Comédie-Française gazing up in adoration at the actors on the stage.
But all I wrote in this letter was perhaps the very best of it, the address of the garret rooms we called our home in the Ile de la Cité, and the news:
“I have been hired in a real theater to study as an actor with a fine prospect of performing very soon.”
What I didn’t tell her was that we had to walk up six flights of stairs to our rooms, that men and women brawled and screamed in the alleyways beneath our windows, that we had run out of money already, thanks to my dragging us to every opera, ballet, and drama in town. And that the establishment where I worked was a shabby little boulevard theater, one step up from a platform at the fair, and my jobs were to help the players dress, sell tickets, sweep up, and throw out the troublemakers.
But I was in paradise again. And so was Nicolas though no decent orchestra in the city would hire him, and he was now playing solos with the little bunch of musicians in the theater where I worked, and when we were really pinched he did play right on the boulevard, with me beside him, holding out the hat. We were shameless!
We ran up the steps each night with our bottle of cheap wine and a loaf of fine sweet Parisian bread, which was ambrosia after what we’d eaten in the Auvergne. And in the light of our one tallow candle, the garret was the most glorious place I’d ever inhabited.
As I mentioned before, I’d seldom been in a little wooden room except in the inn. Well, this room had plaster walls and a plaster ceiling! It was really Paris! It had polished wood flooring, and even a tiny little fireplace with a new chimney which actually made a draft.
So what if we had to sleep on lumpy pallets, and the neighbors woke us up fighting. We were waking up in Paris, and could roam arm in arm for hours through streets and alleyways, peering into shops full of jewelry and plate, tapestries and statues, wealth such as I’d never seen. Even the reeking meat markets delighted me. The crash and clatter of the city, the tireless busyness of its thousands upon thousands of laborers, clerks, craftsmen, the comings and goings of an endless multitude.
By day I almost forgot the vision of the inn, and the darkness. Unless, of course, I glimpsed some uncollected corpse in a filthy alleyway, of which
there were many, or I happened upon a public execution in the place de Grève.
And I was always happening upon a public execution in the place de Grève.
I’d wander out of the square shuddering, almost moaning. I could become obsessed with it if not distracted. But Nicolas was adamant.
“Lestat, no talk of the eternal, the immutable, the unknowable!” He threatened to hit me or shake me if I should start.
And when twilight came on—the time I hated more than ever—whether I had seen an execution or not, whether the day had been glorious or vexing, the trembling would start in me. And only one thing saved me from it: the warmth and excitement of the brightly lighted theater, and I made sure that before dusk I was safely inside.
Now, in the Paris of those times, the theaters of the boulevards weren’t even legitimate houses at all. Only the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre des Italiens were government-sanctioned theaters, and to them all serious drama belonged. This included tragedy as well as comedy, the plays of Racine, Corneille, the brilliant Voltaire.
But the old Italian commedia that I loved—Pantaloon, Harlequin, Scaramouche, and the rest—lived on as they always had, with tightrope walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and puppeteers, in the platform spectacles at the St.-Germain and the St.-Laurent fairs.
And the boulevard theaters had grown out of these fairs. By my time, the last decades of the eighteenth century, they were permanent establishments along the boulevard du Temple, and though they played to the poor who couldn’t afford the grand houses, they also collected a very well-to-do crowd. Plenty of the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie crowded into the loges to see the boulevard performances, because they were lively and full of good talent, and not so stiff as the plays of the great Racine or the great Voltaire.