We crossed the bridge and I noticed it was sparsely scattered with carriages and one-horse cabriolets. I looked at the skyline of the Left Bank and wondered what it was like to remember when each building had appeared in the river of time. Indeed, what a vision he was privy to. I felt another pang of envy for the insights immortality must have opened for him.
“So you want to know more of Lodovico,” he said at length. “You recall in my last account of him I was still a monk at the monastery of the Vosges. I had known of Lodovico only from his mythic reputation, but through the medium of the abbés I had received word of his approval of a discovery of mine, the discovery that the knowledge of the vampire was hidden in code and cipher in the common Gospel books. I have told you to be patient. You will appreciate it was more than two centuries after the ‘death’ of Sylvester II before I actually came face to face with the master, Lodovico. To be sure, much had passed. I had traversed the world. I had learned more than ten men, but still the identity and purpose of the Unknown Men was a mystery to me. I knew virtually nothing about the internal organiziation of the vampire culture.
“I must tell you what France was like in the twelfth century. Like most things, it covered a spectrum from one extreme to the other. On the dark side, it was the age of the Crusades, and all of Europe was united under the cause of the Holy War. It was the good fortune of the vampire of the Vosges that the war took place in the East. Nonetheless, it was a foreboding indication of the powers of history we were confronted with.
“On a more positive side, it was during these two centuries that French medieval civilization reached its zenith. Religions mingled in urbane amity. Great cathedrals rose from the ground. Women were imperiously beautiful and morals were loose. It was also the age of the troubadours. Do you know who the troubadours were? They were vagabond musicians. For a century and a half they scoured France singing and spreading ideas.
“The troubadours were odd characters. Many of them were wealthy, and yet they were homeless wanderers. They have been described as the most courteous men in the world, but advocated deception in love. They were proponents of lyric poetry, licentiousness, and paganism. They definitely were not proponents of the Church. Indeed, they were often anticlerical to the extreme.
“It thus came as some surprise in the middle of a blossom-laden spring when a troubadour arrived at the monastery. It was even more puzzling when the abbés took an unusual interest in this troubadour, and welcomed him into their secret chambers. I saw him briefly as he passed through the courtyard about an hour after sunset. He was richly dressed, like a noble, with a large hat trimmed in gold embroidery, and wore many costly furs. Strangely enough, he was on foot, like a common country juggler, and he carried his ancient violin or vielle nonchalantly under his arm.
“I caught but a glimpse of his countenance as he passed out of sight. His gleaming white face had a puckish quality to it. It was a mixture of foolishness and infinite wisdom. There was something most disarming about his smirk, his twinkling eyes.”
We passed the Asian dome of a street urinal or pissoir encrusted with cabaret posters.
“Good idea—those,” des Essientes interrupted. “There was a time when the sewers ran through the streets.”
He turned to me. “Well, as you might imagine the first thing I did was see if the troubadour was a vampire. I reached out with my senses. I determined the heat of that gleaming face; the beat of the hsart. To my surprise, his body temperature was the normal 37 degrees Centigrade, or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of a mortal, as opposed to the cool 20 degrees Centigrade, or 68 degrees Fahrenheit, of one of our kind. His heartbeat was around 78. A vampire’s beats a slow and healthy 35.
“I did not see much of the troubadour the first evening of his stay, but in the next couple of evenings I noticed him more and more. At first I thought these meetings were chance, but in time I resolved he was watching me. As I paced the windy parapets meditating on the deep purple mountains I would see him gazing from the tower. As I worked in my garden in the moonlight I would spy him on the balcony. He was not at all timid whenever I caught him at this, but would simply nod and continue that unsettling smile.
“Look,” my companion interrupted himself and wafted a hand at the window.
I saw that the carriage had circled west, and was now passing through Montmartre, that idyllic part of Paris with its quaint houses and hidden gardens.
“Just as day has a transition period into night, a twilight, so it is with the people of the streets,” he explained. “It is only an hour after sunset. If you are observant you’ll notice a distinct transition in their ebb and flow, an almost precise moment when the twilight people vanish, and that strange breed, the creatures of the Paris night, first begin to appear.”
I peered out the front window of the hansom at the street before us. In a narrow doorway a concierge sat in her loose blouse peeling vegetables. Next to a thick retaining wall shored up by balks of timber strolled a group of women in heavy carpet slippers and carrying baskets in their arms. In another doorway sat a girl trimming her bonnet; the girl was pale and exhausted from the heat. They seemed oddly oblivious to our presence, as if the silence of our carriage and horses made us unseen.
“In any case,” des Esseintes went on, “I was not frightened by the troubadour. What could a mortal do to me? I was perplexed. Why was he so special that the abbés would take him in? Why was he so interested in me?
“He had been there fully a fortnight when I finally heard him beneath my window. The words of his song came clearly to my ears:
‘Summer is a-coming in,
Loudly sing cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth mead.
And blossoms the woodland now:
Sing cuckoo!’
“I looked out into the courtyard. There he stood playing his vielle and looking up at me:
‘Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Loweth after calf the cow;
Bullock leapeth, buck turns off;
Merry sing cuckoo!’
“At first I thought he was singing for his own enjoyment. When I glanced down at him he just happened to be looking up. But when I turned to walk away from the window, the intonation of his voice made it obvious he was trying to communicate something to me.
‘Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou cuckoo?’
“I looked at him again. He continued to smile and play. Who was this minstrel, this fool with such a knowing grin? He tossed me a final glance as he turned with vielle and arched bow in hand and started to leave the courtyard. It was a moonlit night and I could clearly see him kick the huge wooden doors aside as he left the enclosure.
“I could take the mystery no longer and was compelled to follow. When I had crossed the courtyard and reached the gate I could see him halfway down the hill. He was still fiddling that fey and whimsical song as he danced like an elf in the moonlight. Not that I wish to convey the size of an elf. In actuality he was quite tall for a man of that time, fully reaching 1.82 meters.
“Through the wooded valley he led me, through the katydids and the lacewings, the damp spring mists and the dewy ferns. When he reached the meadow and turned about merrily on the hill I could see only his silhouette against the starry sky. He was perhaps fifty meters away. I monitored him closely. There was no rapid change in his heartbeat to indicate he was tense and might be planning some secret attack. His body heat mirrored what might be expected of a mortal exerting such energy, even a little less than normal. His breathing was long and full/It was obvious he was completely relaxed, even ecstatic in his Pied Piper dance.
“We reached a rock promontory that extended out from the cliffs. Beyond were the cool gray and blue ripples of the distant mountains, and below a drop of a hundred meters. It wasn’t until he reached the very precipice that that man of flourish and wide gilt hat, that Fool of the Tarot deck, turned his eyes and froze them upon me with an almost demonic intensity.
‘Cease thou not, never now;
Sing cu
ckoo now, sing cuckoo,
Sing cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now!’
“He cried out the words, and with that he began to play upon the vielle even more madly than before. I watched in amazement as his hands moved faster and faster. The music changed. It was no longer pastoral and gay. Tones twisted and screeched. It was not just the dissonance of a clumsy player, but an expanding spectrum of strange and grinding vibrations that had a peculiar effect upon my vampire ear. I felt a shiver of electricity shoot down my spine. Here a muscle twitched. There a tingle.
“What was this sorcery of music that cut to such a visceral level of my being? I could not run or move. I was drained of all muscle strength as the vibrations shimmered through me like heat discolorations upon forged iron. It was as if a strange force, a genie of sound, had swept through my body, and was coursing along each nerve and tendon... searching... changing. It moved with pattern and intelligence, guided by the skilled hands of a master magician. And then it stopped.
“I slumped forward a little, as if released from another’s grip. The troubadour lowered his vielle and bow and strode quickly forward. He gazed at me penetratingly. ‘Do you see?’
“‘See what?’
“‘Look around,’ he commanded, gesturing at the forest and the meadow behind us.
“‘Do you see? Can you see?’
“‘I—’ I stammered and shrugged.
“With that he became completely agitated, and before I knew what had happened he had drawn his hand back and smacked me firmly, just above the center of my eyes and in the middle of my forehead.
“I must tell you that it is not easy to strike a vampire. No matter how unexpectedly, if you ever tried to hit me, before your fist reached the halfway point of its swing, my hand would be firmly around your wrist deflecting the force. This should give you some indication of the incredible deftness of the troubadour’s blow.
“I cannot tell you what a profound effect that blow to my forehead had upon me. It was as if I fell backward in slow motion, and broke through a mirror. There was a crystalline tinkle as shards of platinum light glistered about me and I imagined I was slowly plummeting to a placid moonlit lake far below. As I recovered from that vertigo, I immediately noticed everything had changed. The woods, the meadow, even the very air had acquired a faint but undeniable luminescence. It was as if the cataracts had fallen from my eyes. Yes. I possessed over five hundred years of wisdom and experience, and the cataracts had just fallen from my eyes. It was an overwhelming sensation, and yet oddly familiar. It was as if some part of me had always seen the luminescence. It had always been close and I had merely forgotten, like a memory hovering just below the threshold of one’s consciousness. It was the first time I completely experienced the quiver.
“The troubadour stepped back, pleased at the childlike wonder he saw in my face. I turned, slowly taking in the details of my new world. I ran down through the meadow. I pity you that you do not see the quiver, for oh, what a wondrous world it was. As I trudged through the waves of millet and timothy all the night insects hidden in the grass glowed like fairies and took to the air in a sheet of sparks. Vast luminous undulations moved through the very meadow itself, like wind through the grasses, or the shadow of clouds. I could see the circulation of the fluids through the leaves of the trees. I discerned the very movement of the stars. When I dropped to my knees beside a forest pond my vision plummeted through the microcosm of the water and I saw the microscopic protozoa as if they were immense glowing beings. I could see their rippling hairlike cilia and the cytoplasm flowing ghostly blue among the granules of their organs.
“Through all of this the troubadour followed me and slowly I became aware of something else. There was heat rising off his body. I didn’t notice it at first, but at length I realized he was becoming cooler. His heart was slowing down. The throbbing filled my eardrums, dwindling more and more until it reached a familiar rhythm. He continued to smile, but the twinkle shifted in his eyes, and at last I saw the true depth of those impermeable orbs, the tomblike hush of inconceivable age.
“Like a stone dropped off a cliff... those eyes.
“‘So you are a vampire after all,’ I said.
“He nodded.
“‘Then who are you?’
“‘Lodovico....’ he said.”
Des Esseintes paused for breath.
Even though I was attending most carefully to his words, for some inexplicable reason my eye was drawn to the carriage window. To my surprise, all of the twilight people had vanished. On the street corner stood a lone figure, a woman, eyes painted with kohl, fat and red-haired, with a powdered face, black satin blouse, and red scarf. Her painted eyes blinked. Her hair and blouse fluttered, not unlike plumage as she proudly stood the wind, this first creature of the night.
“I asked him how he had done it.”
I continued to gaze out the window as des Esseintes spoke.
“He shrugged.”
The woman looked in our direction.
“I asked him what he wanted.”
We drew closer.
“‘You,’ he said.”
We rolled slowly by the woman, as if on a strange carousel. For a fleeting instant, as her face was closest to the carriage window, she stared right into my eyes. She blinked again and I saw the iridescence of her sedate and heavy lids, like fly’s wings, heavy with antimony.
I turned quickly to my companion. “You? What did he want with you?”
“To tell me something.”
“And what was that?”
“To tell me there were more things in the world to see than I had ever imagined. To help me enter a new realm of perception.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He told me the Unknown Men were engaged in a very special work. He said someday I might help in that work, but I would have to prove myself.”
“How would you prove yourself?”
“He would not say. All he would tell me was that the time had come for me to leave the monastery of the Vosges permanently. He said I was to move to Paris and there further instruction would be given. When i asked what sort of instruction, he said to look for a flower. The true flower. The veri floris. Then he recited an ancient poem. He told me, ‘Under the figure of the true flower that the pure root produced, the loving devotion of our clergy has made a mystical flower constructing an allegorical meaning beyond ordinary usage from the nature of a flower.’”
“What does that mean? What is the true flower?”
Des Esseintes smiled as he tapped on the window and gave the boy in livery a nod. “I will show you.”
The hansom turned south and we headed back toward the Seine.
“So that is when I first came to Paris, at the very height of the Middle Ages. Surprisingly, the flavor and soul of Paris have not changed all that much, lo these many years. Oh, the skyline has altered. The city has spread and grown, but it is still magnificent. It is still dirty. And it is still a mecca for many learned men and women. In 1331 Petrarch described it as ‘a great basket in which are collected the rarest fruits of every country.’ You have no idea just how true those words are.”
My gentleman companion lapsed into silence as we sped on.
It was well into the night now. Stars twinkled overhead. We passed little parks and small-waisted women standing with their lovers in the shadows, and still we moved with the hush of a ghostly Black Maria. We crossed the bridge leading to the Île de la Cité. We rolled by the huge eighteenth-century complex of administrative buildings, and an occasional agent until at last the Gothic outline of Notre-Dame loomed across a spacious square, flanked by leather-green trees. The horses slowed before the ancient cathedral.
“Closer,” des Esseintes directed.
We crossed the square until at last we stood before the spireless towers of the West Façade.
“Let us get out,” he directed.
He opened my door and I stepped down onto the pavement Again it was an odd sensation to be standing up
on solid ground and in the open air. My captor slipped out behind me and placed a white hand upon my shoulder. He allowed the other to drift up toward the somber and majestic giant.
“Behold the true flower,” he said with a reverent calm.
I looked up at the profusion of Gothic ornament, the towers, the innumerable angels and saints, the stone quatrefoils. The granite shimmered blue-gray in the moonlight. Unavoidably my vision was drawn to the elaborate cartwheel of tracery in the great rose window. A rose. A great stained-glass flower.
“The veris floris,” I whispered in realization.
I recalled Lodovico’s poem. “Under the figure of the true flower that the pure root produced. Under the flower. I looked beneath the rose window at the three sets of massive iron doors.
“Very good, Monsieur le Docteur,” des Esseintes complimented. “You are quite correct. It is the doors. I am sure you do not see what I see when I gaze at those doors.”
I looked at the magnificently ornamented portals. I turned back to the vampire questioningly.
“Do you know who built the doors of Notre-Dame?” he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
My ancient friend smiled. “If you look it up in your history books you’ll discover a demon is matter-of-factly given the credit.” He threw his head back and laughed. “A demon! A demon named Biscornet!” He spun about, oddly amused by it all. “And it is true, mon ami, if you examine the doors you’ll discover they are incredible achievements. In all their ironwork it is impossible to perceive any break in continuity, any trace of brazing or welding. This complete lack of seams indicates each door was formed from a single sheet of iron. I suppose that is partly why the humans of the Middle Ages assumed Biscornet was a demon. They knew their human ironworkers were incapable of such an achievement. In their minds, only the fires of hell could have forged such doors.
The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life Page 27