The Vampire Lestat (10 page)

I didn’t care if we ever saw Nicolas’s friends again. The actors didn’t know about my family, and in favor of the very simple Lestat de Valois, which meant nothing actually, I’d dropped my real name, de Lioncourt.

I was learning everything I could about the stage. I memorized, I mimicked. I asked endless questions. And only stopped my education long enough each night for that moment when Nicolas played his solo on the violin. He’d rise from his seat in the tiny orchestra, the spotlight would pick him out from the others, and he would rip into a little sonata, sweet enough and just short enough to bring down the house.

And all the while I dreamed of my own moment, when the old actors, whom I studied and pestered and imitated and waited upon like a lackey,
would finally say: “All right, Lestat, tonight we need you as Lelio. Now you ought to know what to do.”

It came in late August at last.

Paris was at its warmest, and the nights were almost balmy and the house was full of a restless audience fanning itself with handkerchiefs and handbills. The thick white paint was melting on my face as I put it on.

I wore a pasteboard sword with Nicolas’s best velvet coat, and I was trembling before I stepped on the stage thinking, This is like waiting to be executed or something.

But as soon as I stepped out there, I turned and looked directly into the jam-packed hall and the strangest thing happened. The fear evaporated.

I beamed at the audience and very slowly I bowed. I stared at the lovely Flaminia as if I were seeing her for the first time. I had to win her. The romp began.

The stage belonged to me as it had years and years ago in that far-off country town. And as we pranced madly together across the boards—quarreling, embracing, clowning—laughter rocked the house.

I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace. Each gesture, each line brought a roar from the audience—it was too easy almost—and we could have worked it for another half hour if the other actors, eager to get into the next trick as they called it, hadn’t forced us finally towards the wings.

The crowd was standing up to applaud us. And it wasn’t that country audience under the open sky. These were
Parisians
shouting for Lelio and Flaminia to come back out.

In the shadows of the wings, I reeled. I almost collapsed. I could not see anything for the moment but the vision of the audience gazing up at me over the footlights. I wanted to go right back on stage. I grabbed Flaminia and kissed her and realized that she was kissing me back passionately.

Then Renaud, the old manager, pulled her away.

“All right, Lestat,” he said as if he were cross about something. “All right, you’ve done tolerably well, I’m going to let you go on regularly from now on.”

But before I could start jumping up and down for joy, half the troupe materialized around us. And Luchina, one of the actresses, immediately spoke up.

“Oh no, you’ll not
let
him go on regularly!” she said. “He’s the handsomest actor on the boulevard du Temple and you’ll hire him outright for it, and pay him outright for it, and he doesn’t touch another broom or mop.” I was terrified. My career had just started and it was about to be over, but to my amazement Renaud agreed to all her terms.

Of course I was very flattered to be called handsome, and I understood as I had years ago that Lelio, the lover, is supposed to have considerable style. An aristocrat with any breeding whatsoever was perfect for the part.

But if I was going to make the Paris audiences really notice me, if I was going to have them talking about me at the Comédie-Française, I had to be more than some yellow-haired angel fallen out of a marquis’s family onto the stage. I had to be a great actor, and that is exactly what I determined to be.

T
HAT
night Nicolas and I celebrated with a colossal drunk. We had all the troupe up to our rooms for it, and I climbed out on the slippery rooftops and opened my arms to Paris and Nicolas played his violin in the window until we’d awakened the whole neighborhood.

The music was rapturous, yet people were snarling and screaming up the alleyways, and banging on pots and pans. We paid no attention. We were dancing and singing as we had in the witches’ place. I almost fell off the window ledge.

The next day, bottle in hand, I dictated the whole story to the Italian letter writer in the stinking sunshine in les Innocents and saw that the letter went off to my mother at once. I wanted to embrace everybody I saw in the streets. I was Lelio. I was an actor.

By September I had my name on the handbills. And I sent those to my mother, too.

And we weren’t doing the old commedia. We were performing a farce by a famous writer who, on account of a general playwrights’ strike, couldn’t get it performed at the Comédie-Française.

Of course we couldn’t say his name, but everyone knew it was his work, and half the court was packing Renaud’s House of Thesbians every night.

I wasn’t the lead, but I was the young lover, a sort of Lelio again really, which was almost better than the lead, and I stole every scene in which I appeared. Nicolas had taught me the part, bawling me out constantly for not learning to read. And by the fourth performance, the playwright had written extra lines for me.

Nicki was having his own moment at the intermezzo, when his latest rendering of a frothy little Mozart sonata was keeping the house in its seats. Even his student friends were back. We were getting invitations to private balls. I went tearing off to les Innocents every few days to write to my mother, and finally I had a clipping from an English paper,
The Spectator
, to send her, which praised our little play and in particular the blond-haired rogue who steals the hearts of the ladies in the third and fourth acts. Of
course I couldn’t read this clipping. But the gentleman who’d brought it to me said it was complimentary, and Nicolas swore it was too.

When the first chill nights of fall came on, I wore the fur-lined red cloak on the stage. You could have seen it in the back row of the gallery even if you were almost blind. I had more skill now with the white makeup, shading it here and there to heighten the contours of my face, and though my eyes were ringed in black and my lips reddened a little, I looked both startling and human at the same time. I got love notes from the women in the crowd.

Nicolas was studying music in the mornings with an Italian maestro. Yet we had money enough for good food, wood, and coal. My mother’s letters came twice a week and said her health had taken a turn for the better. She wasn’t coughing as badly as last winter. She wasn’t in pain. But our fathers had disowned us and would not acknowledge any mention of our names.

We were too happy to worry about that. But the dark dread, the “malady of mortality,” was with me a lot when the cold weather came on.

T
HE
cold seemed worse in Paris. It wasn’t clean as it had been in the mountains. The poor hovered in doorways, shivering and hungry, the crooked unpaved streets were thick with filthy slush. I saw barefoot children suffering before my very eyes, and more neglected corpses lying about than ever before. I was never so glad of the fur-lined cape as I was then. I wrapped it around Nicolas and held him close to me when we went out together, and we walked in a tight embrace through the snow and the rain.

Cold or no cold, I can’t exaggerate the happiness of these days. Life was exactly what I thought it could be. And I knew I wouldn’t be long in Renaud’s theater. Everybody was saying so. I had visions of the big stages, of touring London and Italy and even America with a great troupe of actors. Yet there was no reason to hurry. My cup was full.

B
UT in the month of October when Paris was already freezing, I commenced to see, quite regularly, a strange face in the audience that invariably distracted me. Sometimes it almost made me forget what I was doing, this face. And then it would be gone as if I’d imagined it. I must have seen it off and on for a fortnight before I finally mentioned it to Nicki.

I felt foolish and found it hard to put into words:

“There is someone out there watching me,” I said.

“Everyone’s watching you,” Nicki said. “That’s what you want.”

He was feeling a little sad that evening, and his answer was slightly sharp.

Earlier when he was making the fire, he had said he would never amount to much with the violin. In spite of his ear and his skill, there was too much he didn’t know. And I would be a great actor, he was sure. I had said this was nonsense, but it was a shadow falling over my soul. I remembered my mother telling me that it was too late for him.

He wasn’t envious, he said. He was just unhappy a little, that’s all.

I decided to drop the matter of the mysterious face. I tried to think of some way to encourage him. I reminded him that his playing produced profound emotions in people, that even the actors backstage stopped to listen when he played. He had an undeniable talent.

“But I want to be a great violinist,” he said. “And I’m afraid it will never be. As long as we were at home, I could pretend that it was going to be.”

“You can’t give up on it!” I said.

“Lestat, let me be frank with you,” he said. “Things are easy for you. What you set your sights on you get for yourself. I know what you’re thinking, about all the years you were miserable at home. But even then, what you really set your mind to, you accomplished. And we left for Paris the very day that you decided to do it.”

“You don’t regret coming to Paris, do you?” I asked.

“Of course not. I simply mean that you think things are possible which aren’t possible! At least not for the rest of us. Like killing the wolves . . . ”

A coldness passed over me when he said this. And for some reason I thought of that mysterious face again in the audience, the one watching. Something to do with the wolves. Something to do with the sentiments Nicki was expressing. Didn’t make sense. I tried to shrug it off.

“If you’d set out to play the violin, you’d probably be playing for the Court by now,” he said.

“Nicki, this kind of talk is poison,” I said under my breath. “You can’t do anything but try to get what you want. You knew the odds were against you when you started. There isn’t anything else . . . except . . . ”

“I know.” He smiled. “Except the meaninglessness. Death.”

“Yes,” I said. “All you can do is make your life have meaning, make it good—”

“Oh, not goodness again,” he said. “You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness.” He had been looking at the fire and he
turned to me with a deliberately scornful expression. “We’re a pack of actors and entertainers who can’t even be buried in consecrated ground. We’re outcasts.”

“God, if you could only believe in it,” I said, “that we do good when we make others forget their sorrow, make them forget for a little while that . . . ”

“What? That they are going to die?” He smiled in a particularly vicious way. “Lestat, I thought all this would change with you when you got to Paris.”

“That was foolish of you, Nick,” I answered. He was making me angry now. “I do good in the boulevard du Temple. I feel it—”

I stopped because I saw the mysterious face again and a dark feeling had passed over me, something of foreboding. Yet even that startling face was usually smiling, that was the odd thing. Yes, smiling . . . enjoying . . . 

“Lestat, I love you,” Nicki said gravely. “I love you as I have loved few people in my life, but in a real way you’re a fool with all your ideas about goodness.”

I laughed.

“Nicolas,” I said, “I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness. Instead of mocking me for once, why don’t you tell me what you believe?”

“As I see it,” he said, “there’s weakness and there’s strength. And there is good art and bad art. And that is what I believe in. At the moment we are engaged in making what is rather bad art and it has
nothing
to do with goodness!”

“Our conversation” could have turned into a full-scale fight here if I had said all that was on my mind about bourgeois pomposity. For I fully believed that our work at Renaud’s was in many ways finer than what I saw at the grand theaters. Only the framework was less impressive. Why couldn’t a bourgeois gentleman forget about the frame? How could he be made to look at something other than the surface?

I took a deep breath.

“If goodness does exist,” he said, “then I’m the opposite of it. I’m evil and I revel in it. I thumb my nose at goodness. And if you must know, I don’t play the violin for the idiots who come to Renaud’s to make them happy. I play it for me, for Nicolas.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. It was time to go to bed. But I was bruised by this little talk and he knew it, and as I started to pull off my boots, he got up from the chair and came and sat next to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said in the most broken voice. It was so changed from
the posture of a minute ago that I looked up at him, and he was so young and so miserable that I couldn’t help putting my arm around him and telling him that he must not worry about it anymore.

“You have a radiance in you, Lestat,” he said. “And it draws everyone to you. It’s there even when you’re angry, or discouraged—”

“Poetry,” I said. “We’re both tired.”

“No, it’s true,” he said. “You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep that darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.”

“You’re the mad one,” I said. “If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music—which of course you play for yourself—you wouldn’t see darkness, Nicki. You’d see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.”

T
HE
next night the performance went especially well. The audience was a lively one, inspiring all of us to extra tricks. I did some new dance steps that for some reason never proved interesting in private rehearsal but worked miraculously on the stage. And Nicki was extraordinary with the violin, playing one of his own compositions.