by Anne Rice
“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 you.”
“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.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of this world.”
“Ah, you are a dreamer!” he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.
“And I’ll know people like you,” I went on, “people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we’ll sit in cafés and we’ll drink together and we’ll clash with each other violently in words, and we’ll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement.”
He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk.
“My lord, the wolfkiller,” he whispered.
When the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I’d never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I couldn’t see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted.
The words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother. And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like “Yes, yes,” and “Exactly,” and “I know completely what you mean,” and “And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it,” etc.
Another bottle, and a new fire. And I begged Nicolas to play his violin for me. He rushed home immediately to get it.
It was now late afternoon. The sun was slanting through the window and the fire was very hot. We were very drunk. We had never ordered supper. And I think I was happier than I had ever been in my life. I lay on the lumpy straw mattress of the little bed with my hands under my head watching him as he took out the instrument.
He put the violin to his shoulder and began to pluck at it and twist the pegs.
Then he raised the bow and drew it down hard over the strings to bring out the first note.
I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I couldn’t believe the sound I was hearing.
He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument.
I had never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it had all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote.
When he’d finished, I was staring at him and I realized I was gripping the sides of my head.
“Monsieur, what’s the matter!” he said, almost helplessly, and I stood up and threw my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks and kissed the violin.
“Stop calling me Monsieur,” I said. “Call me by my name.” I lay back down on the bed and buried my face on my arm and started to cry, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop it.
He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn’t tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now.
I think he carried me home that night.
And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father’s shop, tossing pebbles up at his window.
When he stuck his head out, I said:
“Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?”
5
ROM then on, when I was not hunting, my life was with Nicolas and “our conversation.”
Spring was approaching, the mountains were dappled with green, the apple orchard starting back to life. And Nicolas and I were always together.
We took long walks up the rocky slopes, had our bread and wine in the sun on the grass, roamed south through the ruins of an old monastery. We hung about in my rooms or sometimes climbed to the battlements. And we went back to our room at the inn when we were too drunk and too loud to be tolerated by others.
And as the weeks passed we revealed more and more of ourselves to each other. Nicolas told me about his childhood at school, the little disappointments of his early years, those whom he had known and loved.
And I started to tell him the painful things—and finally the old disgrace of running off with the Italian players.
It came to that one night when we were in the inn again, and we were drunk as usual. In fact we were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, “I can’t follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment’s passed.”
On this night, looking out the window at the m
oon over the mountains, I said that at the Golden Moment it was not so terrible that we weren’t in Paris, that we weren’t at the Opéra or the Comédie, waiting for the curtain to rise.
“You and the theaters of Paris,” he said to me. “No matter what we’re talking about you bring it back to the theaters and the actors—”
His brown eyes were very big and trusting. And even drunk as he was, he looked spruce in his red velvet Paris frock coat.
“Actors and actresses make magic,” I said. “They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.”
“Wait until you see the sweat streaming down their painted faces in the glare of the footlights,” he answered.
“Ah, there you go again,” I said. “And you, the one who gave up everything to play the violin.”
He got terribly serious suddenly, looking off as if he were weary of his own struggles.
“That I did,” he confessed.
Even now the whole village knew it was war between him and his father. Nicki wouldn’t go back to school in Paris.
“You make life when you play,” I said. “You create something from nothing. You make something good happen. And that is blessed to me.”
“I make music and it makes me happy,” he said. “What is blessed or good about that?”
I waved it away as I always did his cynicism now.
“I’ve lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,” I said. “Actors and musicians—they’re saints to me.”
“Saints?” he asked. “Blessedness? Goodness? Lestat, your language baffles me.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“You don’t understand. I’m speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I’m speaking of those who won’t accept a useless life, just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things …”
He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I’d said it. Yet I felt I had hurt him somehow.
“There is blessedness in that,” I said. “There’s sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.”
He looked sad for me. And he looked hurt still. But for the moment I didn’t think of him.
I was thinking of the conversation I had had with my mother and my perception that I couldn’t be good and defy my family. But if I believed what I was saying …
As if he could read my mind, he asked:
“But do you really believe those things?”
“Maybe yes. Maybe no,” I said. I couldn’t bear to see him look so sad.
And I think more on account of that than anything else I told him the whole story of how I’d run off with the players. I told him what I’d never told anyone, not even my mother, about those few days and the happiness they’d given me.
“Now, how could it not have been good,” I asked, “to give and receive such happiness? We brought to life that town when we put on our play. Magic, I tell you. It could heal the sick, it could.”
He shook his head. And I knew there were things he wanted to say, which out of respect for me he was leaving to silence.
“You don’t understand, do you?” I asked.
“Lestat, sin always feels good,” he said gravely. “Don’t you see that? Why do you think the Church has always condemned the players? It was from Dionysus, the wine god, that the theater came. You can read that in Aristotle. And Dionysus was a god that drove men to debauchery. It felt good to you to be on that stage because it was abandoned and lewd—the age-old service of the god of the grape—and you were having a high time of it defying your father—”
“No, Nicki. No, a thousand times no.”
“Lestat, we’re partners in sin,” he said, smiling finally. “We’ve always been. We’ve both behaved badly, both been utterly disreputable. It’s what binds us together.”
Now it was my turn to look sad and hurt. And the Golden Moment was gone beyond reprieve—unless something new was to happen.
“Come on,” I said suddenly. “Get your violin, and we’ll go off somewhere in the woods where the music won’t wake up anybody. We’ll see if there isn’t some goodness in it.”
“You’re a madman!” he said. But he grabbed the unopened bottle by the neck and headed for the door immediately.
I was right behind him.
When he came out of his house with the violin, he said:
“Let’s go to the witches’ place! Look, it’s a half moon. Plenty of light. We’ll do the devil’s dance and play for the spirits of the witches.”
I laughed. I had to be drunk to go along with that. “We’ll reconsecrate the spot,” I insisted, “with good and pure music.”
It had been years and years since I’d walked in the witches’ place.
The moon was bright enough, as he’d said, to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after the burnings. The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness.
A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I’d felt as a child when I’d heard those awful words “roasted alive,” when I had imagined the suffering.
Nicki’s white lace shone in the pale light, and he struck up a gypsy song at once and danced round in a circle as he played it.
I sat on a broad burned stump of tree and drank from the bottle. And the heartbreaking feeling came as it always did with the music. What sin was there, I thought, except to live out my life in this awful place? And pretty soon I was silently and unobtrusively crying.
Though it seemed the music had never stopped, Nicki was comforting me. We sat side by side and he told me that the world was full of inequities and that we were prisoners, he and I, of this awful corner of France, and someday we would break out of it. And I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I couldn’t bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything.
Yes, that’s what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur-lined cape and threw back my head to look at the moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches’ place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains.
We were closer for all this in the days that followed.
BUT a few nights later, something altogether extraordinary happened.
It was late. We were at the inn again and Nicolas, who was walking about the room and gesturing dramatically, declared what had been on our minds all along.
That we should run away to Paris, even if we were penniless, that it was better than remaining here. Even if we lived as beggars in Paris! It had to be better.
Of course we had both been building up to this.
“Well, beggars in the streets it might be, Nicki,” I said. “Because I’ll be damned in hell before I’ll play the penniless country cousin begging at the big houses.”
“Do you think I want you to do that?” he demanded. “I mean run away, Lestat,” he said. “Spite them, every one of them.”
Did I want to go on like this? So our fathers would curse us. After all, our life was meaningless here.
Of course, we both knew this running off together would be a thousand times more serious than what I had done before. We weren’t boys anymore, we were men. Our fathers would curse us, and this was something neither of us could laugh off.
Also we were old enough to know what poverty meant.
“What am I going to do in Paris when we get hungry?” I asked. “Shoot rats
for supper?”
“I’ll play my violin for coins on the boulevard du Temple if I have to, and you can go to the theaters!” Now he was really challenging me. He was saying, Is it all words with you, Lestat? “With your looks, you know, you’d be on the stage in the boulevard du Temple in no time.”
I loved this change in “our conversation”! I loved seeing him believe we could do it. All his cynicism had vanished, even though he did throw in the word “spite” every ten words or so. It seemed possible suddenly to do all this.
And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.
I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness. In fact, it came to me that my mother dying soon was meaningless and I confided in Nicolas what she had said. “I’m perfectly horrified. I’m afraid.”
Well, if there had been a Golden Moment in the room it was gone now. And something different started to happen.
I should call it the Dark Moment, but it was still high-pitched and full of eerie light. We were talking rapidly, cursing this meaninglessness, and when Nicolas at last sat down and put his head in his hands, I took some glamorous and hearty swigs of wine and went to pacing and gesturing as he had done before.
I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don’t find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he’ll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won’t be anything at all.
“But that’s just it,” I said, “we don’t make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.” I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.
“Do you realize that! We’ll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it’s over!” I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. “We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!”