by Rice, Anne
“Amadeo, the evolution of law, of government, is different in each land and with each people. I chose Venice, as I told you long ago, because it is a great Republic, and because its people are firmly connected to the Mother Earth by the simple fact that they are all merchants and engaged in trade. I love the city of Florence because its great family, the Medici, are bankers, not idle titled aristocrats who scorn all effort in the name of what they believe has been given them by God. The great cities of Italy are made by men who work, men who create, men who do, and on account of this, there is a greater compassion to all systems, and infinitely greater opportunity for men and women in all walks of life.”
I was discouraged by all this talk. What did it matter?
“Amadeo, the world now is yours,” my Master said. “You must look at the larger movements of history. The state of the world will begin in time to oppress you, and you will find, as all immortals do, that you cannot simply shut your heart on it, especially not you.”
“Why so?” I asked a little crossly. “I think I can shut my eyes. What do I care if a man is a banker or a merchant? What do I care whether I live in a city which builds its own merchant fleet? I can look forever on the paintings in this palazzo, Master. I have not yet begun to see all the details in The Procession of the Magi, and there are so many others. And what of all the paintings in this city?”
He shook his head. “The study of painting will lead you to the study of man, and the study of man will lead you to lament or celebrate the state of the world of men.”
I didn’t believe it, but I was not allowed to change the curriculum. I studied as I was told.
Now, my Master had many gifts which I did not possess, but which he told me I would develop in time. He could make fire with his mind, but only if conditions were optimum—that is, he could ignite a torch already prepared with pitch. He could scale a building effortlessly with only a few quick handholds on its windowsills, propelling himself upwards with graceful darting motions, and he could swim to any depth of the sea.
Of course his vampiric vision and his hearing were far more acute and powerful than my own, and while voices intruded upon me, he knew how to emphatically shut them out. I had to learn this, and indeed I worked at it desperately, for there were times when all Venice seemed nothing but a cacophony of voices and prayers.
But the one great power he possessed which I did not possess was that he could take to the air and cover immense distances with great speed. This had been demonstrated to me many times, but almost always, when he had lifted me and carried me, he had made me cover my face, or he had forced my head down so that I couldn’t see where we went and how.
Why he was so reticent about it, I couldn’t understand. Finally, one night when he refused to transport us as if by magic to the Island of the Lido so that we could watch one of the nighttime ceremonies of fireworks and torch-lit ships on the water, I pressed the question.
“It’s a frightening power,” he said coolly. “It’s frightening to be unanchored from the Earth. In the early stages, it is not without its blunders and disasters. As one acquires skill, rising smoothly into the highest atmosphere, it becomes chilling not only to the body but to the soul. It seems not preternatural, but supernatural.” I could see he suffered over this. He shook his head. “It is the one talent which seems genuinely inhuman. I cannot learn from humans how best to use it. With every other talent, humans are my teacher. The human heart is my school. Not so with this. I become the magician; I become the witch or the warlock. It’s seductive, and one could become its slave.”
“But how so?” I asked him.
He was at a loss. He didn’t even want to talk about it. Finally he became just a little impatient.
“Sometimes, Amadeo, you grill me with your questions. You ask if I owe you this tutelage. Believe me, I do not.”
“Master you made me, and you insist on my obedience. Why would I read Abelard’s History of My Calamities and the writings of Duns Scotus of Oxford University if you didn’t make me do it?” I stopped. I remembered my Father and how I never stopped throwing acidic words at him, fast answers and slurs.
I became discouraged. “Master,” I said. “Just explain it to me.”
He made a gesture as if to say “Oh, so simple, eh?”
“All right,” he went on. “It’s this way. I can go very high in the air, and I can move very fast. I cannot often penetrate the clouds. They’re frequently above me. But I can travel so fast that the world itself becomes a blur. I find myself in strange lands when I descend. And I tell you, for all its magic, this is a deeply jarring and disturbing thing. I am lost sometimes, dizzy, unsure of my goals or my will to live, after I make use of this power. Transitions come too quickly; that’s it, perhaps. I never spoke of this to anyone, and now I speak to you, and you’re a boy, and you can’t begin to understand.”
I didn’t.
But within a very short time, it was his wish that we undertake a longer journey than any we’d made before. It was only a matter of hours, but to my utter astonishment, we traveled between sundown and early evening to the far city of Florence itself.
There, set down in a wholly different world than that of the Veneto, walking quietly amongst an entirely different breed of Italian, into churches and palaces of a different style, I understood for the first time what he meant.
Understand, I’d seen Florence before, traveling as Marius’s mortal apprentice, with a group of the others. But my brief glimpse was nothing to what I saw as a vampire. I had the measuring instruments now of a minor god.
But it was night. The city lay under the usual curfew. And the stones of Florence seemed darker, more drab, suggestive of a fortress, the streets narrow and gloomy, as they were not brightened by luminescent ribbons of water as were our own. The palaces of Florence lacked the extravagant Moorish ornament of Venice’s showplaces, the high-gloss fantastical stone facades. They enclosed their splendor, as is more common to Italian cities. Yet the city was rich, dense and full of delights for the eye.
It was after all Florence—the capital of the man called Lorenzo the Magnificent, the compelling figure who dominated Marius’s copy of the great mural which I had seen on the night of my dark rebirth, a man who had died only a few years before.
We found the city unlawfully busy, though it was quite dark, with groups of men and women lingering about in the hard paved streets, and a sinister quality of restlessness hung about the Piazza della Signoria, which was one of the most important of all the many squares of the town.
An execution had taken place that day, hardly an uncommon occurrence in Florence, or Venice for that matter. It had been a burning. I smelled wood and charred flesh though all the evidence had been cleared before night.
I had a natural distaste for such things, which not everyone has, by the way, and I edged towards the scene cautiously, not wishing with these heightened senses to be jarred by some horrible remnant of cruelty.
Marius had always cautioned us as boys not to “enjoy” these spectacles, but to place ourselves mentally in the position of the victim if we were to learn the maximum from what we saw.
As you know from history, the crowds at executions were often merciless and unruly, taunting the victim sometimes, I think, out of fear. We, the boys of Marius, had always found it terribly difficult to cast our mental lot with the man being hanged or burnt. In sum, he’d taken all the fun out of it for us.
Of course, as these rituals happened almost always by day, Marius himself had never been present.
Now, as we moved into the great Piazza della Signoria, I could see that he was displeased by the thin ash that still hung in the air, and the vile smells.
I also noticed that we slipped past others easily, two dark-draped swiftly moving figures. Our feet scarce made a sound. It was the vampiric gift that we could move so stealthily, shifting quickly out of sudden and occasional mortal observation with an instinctive grace.
“It’s as though we’re invisi
ble,” I said to Marius, “as if nothing can hurt us, because we don’t really belong here and will soon take our leave.” I looked up at the grim battlements that fronted on the Square.
“Yes, but we are not invisible, remember it,” he whispered.
“But who died here today? People are full of torment and fear. Listen. There is satisfaction, and there is weeping.”
He didn’t answer.
I grew uneasy.
“What is it? It can’t be any common thing,” I said. “The city is too vigilant and unquiet.”
“It’s their great reformer, Savonarola,” Marius said. “He died on this day, hanged, and then burnt here. Thank God, he was already dead before the flames rose.”
“You wish mercy for Savonarola?” I asked. I was puzzled. This man, a great reformer in the eyes of some perhaps, had always been damned by all I knew. He had condemned all pleasures of the senses, denying any validity to the very school in which my Master thought all things were to be learnt.
“I wish mercy for any man,” said Marius. He beckoned for me to follow, and we moved towards the nearby street.
We headed away from the grisly place.
“Even this one, who persuaded Botticelli to heap his own paintings on the Bonfires of the Vanities?” I asked. “How many times have you pointed to the details of your own copies of Botticelli’s work to show me some graceful beauty you wanted me to never forget?”
“Are you going to argue with me until the end of the world!” said Marius. “I’m pleased that my blood has given you new strength in every aspect, but must you question every word that falls from my lips?” He threw me a furious glance, letting the light of nearby torches fully illuminate his half-mocking smile. “There are some students who believe in this method, and that greater truths rise out of the continued strife between teacher and pupil. But not me! I believe you need to let my lessons settle in quiet at least for the space of five minutes in your mind before you begin your counterattack.”
“You try to be angry with me but you can’t.”
“Oh, what a muddle!” he said as if he were cursing. He walked fast ahead of me.
The small Florentine street was dreary, like a passageway in a great house rather than a city street. I longed for the breezes of Venice, or rather, my body did, out of habit. I was quite fascinated to be here.
“Don’t be so provoked,” I said. “Why did they turn on Savonarola?”
“Give men enough time and they’ll turn on anyone. He claimed to have been a prophet, divinely inspired by God, and that these were the Last Days, and this is the oldest most tiresome Christian complaint in the world, believe you me. The Last Days! Christianity is a religion based on the notion that we are living in the Last Days! It’s a religion fueled by the ability of men to forget all the blunders of the past, and get dressed once more for the Last Days.”
I smiled, but bitterly. I wanted to articulate a strong presentiment, that we were always in the Last Days, and it was inscribed in our hearts, because we were mortals, when quite suddenly and totally I realized that I was no longer mortal, except insofar as the world itself was mortal.
And it seemed I understood more viscerally than ever the atmosphere of purposeful gloom which had overhung my childhood in far-off Kiev. I saw again the muddy catacombs, and the half-buried monks who had cheered me on to become one of them.
I shook it off, and now how bright Florence seemed as we came into the broad torch-lighted Piazza del Duomo—before the great Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
“Ah, my pupil does listen now and then,” Marius was saying to me in an ironic voice. “Yes, I am more than glad that Savonarola is no more. But to rejoice at the end of something is not to approve the endless parade of cruelty that is human history. I wish it were otherwise. Public sacrifice becomes grotesque in every respect. It dulls the senses of the populace. In this city, above all others, it’s a spectacle. The Florentines enjoy it, as we do our Regattas and Processions. So Savonarola is dead. Well, if any mortal man asked for it, it was Savonarola, predicting as he did the end of the world, damning princes from his pulpit, leading great painters to immolate their works. The hell with him.”
“Master, look, the Baptistery, let’s go, let’s look at the doors. The piazza’s almost empty. Come on. It’s our chance to look at the bronzes.” I tugged on his sleeve.
He followed me, and he stopped his muttering, but he was not himself.
What I wanted so to see is work that you can see in Florence now, and in fact, almost every treasure of this city and of Venice which I’ve described here you can see now. You have only to go there. The panels in the door which were done by Lorenzo Ghiberti were my delight, but there was also older work done by Andrea Pisano, portraying the life of St. John the Baptist, and this, I didn’t intend to overlook.
So keen was the vampiric vision that as I studied these various detailed bronze pictures, I could hardly keep from sighing with pleasure.
This moment is so clear. I think that I believed, then, that nothing ever could hurt me or make me sad again, that I had discovered the balm of salvation in the vampiric blood, and the strange thing is, that as I dictate this story now, I think the same thing once more.
Though unhappy now, and possibly forever, I believe again in the paramount importance of the flesh. My mind wanders to the words of D. H. Lawrence, the twentieth-century writer, who in his writings on Italy, recalled Blake’s image of the “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night.” Lawrence’s words are:
This is the supremacy of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.
This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh.
But I have done a risky thing here for a storyteller. I have left my plot, as I’m sure The Vampire Lestat (who is more skilled perhaps than I am, and so in love with the image of William Blake’s tiger in the night, and who has, whether he cares to admit it or not, used the tiger in his work in the very same way) would point out to me, and I must speedily return to this moment in the Piazza del Duomo, where I left myself of long ago standing, side by side with Marius, looking at the burnished genius of Ghiberti, as he sings in bronze of Sybils and saints.
We took our time with these things. Marius said softly that next to Venice, Florence was the city of his choice, for here so much had magnificently flowered.
“But I can’t be without the sea, not even here,” he confided. “And as you see all around you, this city hugs her treasures close with shadowy vigilance, whereas in Venice, the very facades of our palaces are offered up in gleaming stone beneath the moon to Almighty God.”
“Master, do we serve Him?” I pressed. “I know you condemn the monks who brought me up, you condemn the ravings of Savonarola, but do you mean to guide me by another route back to the Very Same God?”
“That’s just it, Amadeo, I do,” said Marius, “and I don’t mean as the pagan I am to admit it so easily, lest its complexity be misunderstood. But I do. I find God in the blood. I find God in the flesh. I find it no accident that the mysterious Christ should reside forever for His followers in the Flesh and Blood within the Bread of the Transubstantiation.”
I was so moved by these words! It seemed the very sun I had forever forsworn had come again to brighten the night.
We slipped into the side door of the darkened Cathedral called the Duomo. I stood gazing over the long vista of its stone floor, towards the altar.
Was it possible that I could have the Christ in a new way? Perhaps I had not after all renounced Him forever. I tried to speak these troubled thoughts to my Master. Christ … in a new way. I couldn’t explain it, and said finally:
“I stumble with my words.”
“Amadeo, we all stumble, and so do all those who enter history. The concept of a Great Being stumbles down the centuries; His words and those principles attributed to Him do tumble after Him;
and so the Christ is snatched up in His wandering by the preaching puritan on one side, the muddy starving hermit on the other, the gilded Lorenzo de’ Medici here who would celebrate his Lord in gold and paint and mosaic stone.”
“But is Christ the Living Lord?” I whispered.
No answer.
My soul hit a pitch of agony. Marius took my hand, and said that we go now, stealthily to the Monastery of San Marco.
“This is the sacred house that gave up Savonarola,” he said. “We’ll slip into it unbeknownst to its pious inhabitants.”
We again traveled as if by magic. I felt only the Master’s strong arms, and did not even see the frame of the doors as we exited and made our way to this other place.
I knew he meant to show me the work of the artist called Fra Angelico, long dead, who had labored all his life in this very Monastery, a painter monk, as I perhaps had been destined to be, far away in the lightless Monastery of the Caves.
Within seconds, we sat down soundlessly on the moist grass of the square cloister of San Marco, the serene garden enclosed by Michelozzo’s loggias, secure within its walls.
At once I heard many prayers reach my inner vampiric hearing, desperate agitated prayers of the brothers who had been loyal or sympathetic to Savonarola. I put my hands to my head as if this foolish human gesture could signal to the Divine that I had had more than I could bear.
My Master broke the current of thought reception with his soothing voice.
“Come,” he said, grasping my hand. “We’ll slip into the cells one by one. There is enough light for you to see the works of this monk.”
“You mean that Fra Angelico painted the very cells where monks go to sleep?” I had thought his works would be in the chapel, and in the other public or communal rooms.