The Vampire Armand
Page 9
9
IF I HAD THOUGHT my transformation into a vampire meant the end of my tutelage or apprenticeship to Marius, I was quite wrong. I wasn't immediately set free to wallow in the joys of my new powers.
The night after my metamorphosis, my education began in earnest. I was to be prepared now not for a temporal life but for eternity.
My Master gave me to know that he had been created a vampire almost fifteen hundred years ago, and that there were members of our kind all over the world. Secretive, suspicious and often miserably lonely, the wanderers of the night, as my Master called them, were often ill prepared for immortality and made nothing of their existence but a string of dreary disasters until despair consumed them and they immolated themselves through some ghastly bonfire, or by going into the light of the sun.
As for the very old, those who like my Master had managed to withstand the passage of empires and epochs, they were for the most part misanthropes, seeking for themselves cities in which they could reign supreme among mortals, driving off fledglings who attempted to share their territory, even if it meant destroying creatures of their own kind.
Venice was the undisputed territory of my Master, his hunting preserve, and his own private arena in which he could preside over the games which he had chosen as significant for him in this time of life.
"There is nothing that will not pass," he said, "except you yourself. You must listen to what I say because my lessons are first and foremost lessons in survival; the garnishes will come later on."
The primary lesson was that we slay only "the evildoer." This had once been, in the foggiest centuries of ancient time, a solemn commission to blood drinkers, and indeed there had been a dim religion surrounding us in antique pagan days in which the vampires had been worshiped as bringers of justice to those who had done wrong.
"We shall never again let such superstition surround us and the mystery of our powers. We are not infallible. We have no commission from God. We wander the Earth like the giant felines of the great jungles, and have no more claim upon those we kill than any creature that seeks to live.
"But it is an infallible principle that the slaying of the innocent will drive you mad. Believe me when I tell you that for your peace of mind you must feed on the evil, you must learn to love them in all their filth and degeneracy, and you must thrive on the visions of their evil that will inevitably fill your heart and soul during the kill.
"Kill the innocent and you will sooner or later come to guilt, and with it you will come to impotence and finally despair. You may think you are too ruthless and too cold for such. You may feel superior to human beings and excuse your predatory excesses on the ground that you do but seek the necessary blood for your own life. But it won't work in the long run.
"In the long run, you will come to know that you are more human than monster, all that is noble in you derives from your humanity, and your enhanced nature can only lead you to value humans all the more. You'll come to pity those you slay, even the most unredeemable, and you will come to love humans so desperately that there will be nights when hunger will seem far preferable to you than the blood repast."
I accepted this wholeheartedly, and quickly plunged with my Master into the dark underbelly of Venice, the wild world of taverns and vice which I had never, as the mysterious velvet-clad "apprentice" of Marius De Romanus, really seen before. Of course I knew drinking places, I knew fashionable courtesans such as our beloved Bianca, but I really didn't know the thieves and murderers of Venice, and it was on these that I fed.
Very soon, I understood what my Master meant when he said that I must develop a taste for evil and maintain it. The visions from my victims became stronger for me with every kill. I began to see brilliant colors when I killed. In fact, I could sometimes see these colors dancing around my victims before I ever even closed in. Some men seem to walk in red-tinged shadows, and others to emanate a fiery orange light. The anger of my meanest and most tenacious victims was often a brilliant yellow which blinded me, searing me, as it were, both when I first attacked and while I drank the victim dry of all blood.
I was at the onset a dreadfully violent and impulsive killer. Having been set down by Marius in a nest of assassins, I went to work with a clumsy fury, drawing out my prey from the tavern or the flophouse, cornering him on the quay and then tearing open his throat as if I were a wild dog. I drank greedily often rupturing the victim's heart. Once the heart is gone, once the man is dead, there is nothing to pump the blood into you. And so it is not so good.
But my Master, for all his lofty speeches on the virtues of humans, and his adamant insistence on our own responsibilities, nevertheless taught me to kill with finesse.
"Take it slowly," he said. We walked along the narrow banks of the canals where such existed. We traveled by gondola listening with our preternatural ears for conversation that seemed meant for us. "And half the time, you needn't enter a house in order to draw out a victim. Stand outside of it, read the man's thoughts, throw him some silent bait. If you read his thoughts, it is almost a certainty that he can receive your message. You can lure without words. You can exert an irresistible pull. When he comes out to you, then take him.
"And there is never any need for him to suffer, or for blood actually to be spilt. Embrace your victim, love him if you will. Fondle him slowly and sink your teeth with caution. Then feast as slowly as you can. This way his heart will see you through.
"As for the visions, and these colors you speak of, seek to learn from them. Let the victim in his dying tell you what he can about life itself. If images of his long life trip before you, observe them, or rather savor them. Yes, savor them. Devour them slowly as you do his blood. As for the colors, let them pervade you. Let the entire experience inundate you. That is, be both active and utterly passive. Make love to your victim. And listen always for the actual moment when the heart ceases to beat. You will feel an undeniably orgiastic sensation at this moment, but it can be overlooked.
"Dispose of the body after, or make certain that you have licked away all sign of the puncture wounds in the victim's throat. Just a little bit of your blood on the tip of your tongue will accomplish this. In Venice dead bodies are common. You need not take such pains. But when we hunt in the outlying villages, then often you may have to bury the remains."
I was eager for all these lessons. That we hunted together was a magnificent pleasure. I came to realize quickly enough that Marius had been clumsy in the murders he had committed for me to witness before I'd been transformed. I knew then, as perhaps I've made plain in this story, that he wanted me to feel pity for these victims; he wanted me to experience horror. He wanted me to see death as an abomination. But due to my youth, my devotion to him and the violence done me in my short mortal life, I had not responded as he hoped.
Whatever the case, he was now a much more skilled killer. We often took the same victim, together, I drinking from the throat of our captive, while he fed from the man's wrist. Sometimes he delighted in holding the victim tightly for me while I drank all of the blood.
Being new, I was thirsty every night. I could have lived for three or more without killing, yes, and sometimes I did, but by the fifth night of denying myself-this was put to the test-I was too weak to rise from the sarcophagus. So what this meant was that, when and if I were ever on my own, I must kill at least every fourth night.
My first few months were an orgy. Each kill seemed more thrilling, more paralyzingly delicious than the one which had gone before. The mere sight of a bared throat could bring about in me such a state of arousal that I became like an animal, incapable of language or restraint. When I opened my eyes in the cold stony darkness, I envisioned human flesh. I could feel it in my naked hands and I wanted it, and the night could have no other events for me until I had laid my powerful hands on that one which would be the sacrifice to my need.
For long moments after the kill, sweet throbbing sensations passed through me as the warm fragrant blood found all the corners of my body, as it pumped its magnificent heat into my face.
This, and this alone, was enough to absorb me utterly, young as I was.
But Marius had no intention of letting me wallow in blood, the hasty young predator, with no other thought but to glut himself night after night.
"You must really begin to learn history and philosophy and the law in earnest," he told me. "You are not destined for the University of Padua now. You are destined to endure."
So after our stealthy missions were completed, and we returned to the warmth of the palazzo, he forced me to my books. He wanted some distance between me and Riccardo and the others anyway, lest they become suspicious of the change that had occurred.
In fact, he told me they "knew" about the change whether they realized it or not. Their bodies knew that I was no longer human, though it might take their minds some time to accept the fact.
"Show them only courtesy and love, only complete indulgence, but keep your distance," Marius told me. "By the time they realize the unthinkable is the fact, you will have assured them that you are no enemy to them, that you are indeed Amadeo still, whom they love, and that though you have been changed, you yourself have not changed towards them."
I understood this. At once I felt a greater love for Riccardo. I felt it for all of the boys.
"But Master," I asked, "don't you ever become impatient with them, that they think more slowly, that they are so clumsy? I love them, yes, but surely you see them in a more pejorative light even than I do."
"Amadeo," he said softly, "they are all going to die." His face was charged with grief.
I felt it immediately and totally, which was always the way with feelings now. They came on in a torrent and taught their lessons at once.
They are all going to die. Yes, and I am immortal.
After that, I could only be patient with them, and indeed, I indulged myself in the manner in which I looked at them and studied them, never letting them know it, but glorying in all the details of them as if they were exotic because ... they were going to die.
There is too much to describe, too much. I can't find a way to put down all that became clear to me in the first few months alone. And there was nothing made known to me in that time which was not deepened afterwards.
I saw process everywhere I looked; I smelled corruption, but I also beheld the mystery of growth, the magic of things blossoming and ripening, and in fact all process, whether towards maturity or towards the grave, delighted and enthralled me, except, that is, the disintegration of the human mind.
My study of government and law was more of a challenge. Though reading was accomplished with infinitely greater speed and near instantaneous comprehension of syntax, I had to force myself to be interested in such things as the history of Roman Law from ancient times, and the great code of the Emperor Justinian, called the Corpus Juris Civilis, which my Master thought to be one of the finest codes of law ever written.
"The world is only getting better," Marius instructed me. "With each century, civilization becomes more enamored of justice, ordinary men make greater strides towards sharing the wealth which was once the booty of the powerful, and art benefits by every increase in freedom, becoming ever more imaginative, ever more inventive and ever more beautiful."
I could understand this only theoretically. I had no faith or interest in law. In fact, I had a total contempt in the abstract for my Master's ideas. What I mean is, I didn't have contempt for him, but I had an underlying contempt for law and for legal institutions and governmental institutions that was so total that I did not even understand it myself.
My Master said that he understood it.
"You were born in a dark savage land," he said. "I wish I could take you back two hundred years in time to the years before Batu, the son of Genghis Khan, sacked the magnificent city of Kiev Rus, to the time when indeed the domes of its Santa Sofia were golden, and its people full of ingenuity and hope."
"I heard ad nauseam of that old glory," I said quietly, not wanting to anger him. "I was stuffed with tales of the olden times when I was a boy. In the miserable wooden house in which we lived, only yards from the frozen river, I listened to that rot as I shivered by the fire. Rats lived in our house. There was nothing beautiful in it but the ikons, and my Father's songs. There was nothing but depravity there, and we speak now, as you know, of an immense land. You cannot know how big Russia is unless you have been there, unless you have traveled as I did with my Father into the bitter-cold northern forests to Moscow, or to Novgorod, or east to Cracow." I broke off. "I don't want to think of those times or that place," I said. "In Italy one cannot dream of enduring such a place."
"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 invisible," 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."
"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 set 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.
"That's why I want you to see this," said my Master. He led me up a stairs and into a wide stone corridor. He made the first door spring open, and gently we moved inside, fleet and silent, not disturbing the monk who lay curled on his hard bed, his head sweating against the pillow.
"Don't look at his face," said my Master gently. "If you do you'll see the troubled dreams he suffers. I want you to look at the wall. What do you see, now, look!"
I understood at once. This art of Fra Giovanni, called Angelico in honor of his sublime talent, was a strange mixture of the sensuous art of our time with the pious and forswearing art of the past.
I gazed on the bright, elegant rendering of the arrest of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. The slender flattened figures resembled very much the elongated and elastic images of the Russian ikon, and yet the faces were softened and plastic with genuine and touching emotion. It seemed a kindness infused all beings here, not merely Our Lord Himself, condemned to be betrayed by one of His own, but the Apostles, who looked on, and even the unfortunate soldier, in his tunic of mail, who reached out to take the Lord away, and the soldiers watched.
I was transfixed by this unmistakable kindness, this seeming innocence that infected everyone, this sublime compassion on the part of the artist for all players in this tragic drama which had prefaced the salvation of the world.
Into another cell I was taken immediately. Once again the door gave way at Marius's command, and the sleeping occupant of the cell never knew that we were there.
This painting showed again the Garden of Agony, and Christ, before the arrest, alone among His sleeping Apostles, left to beg His Heavenly Father for strength. Once again I saw the comparison to the old styles in which I, as a Russian boy, had felt so sure. The folds in the cloth, the use of arches, the halo for each head, the discipline of the whole-all was connected to the past, and yet there shone again the new Italian warmth, the undeniable Italian love of the humanity of all included, even Our Lord Himself.
We went from cell to cell. Backwards and forwards through the Life of Christ we traveled, visiting the scene of the First Holy Communion, in which, so touchingly, Christ gave out the bread containing His Body and Blood as if it were the Host at Mass, and then the Sermon on the Mount, in which the smooth pleated rocks around Our Lord and His listeners seemed made of cloth as surely as his graceful gown.
When we came to the Crucifixion, in which Our Lord gave over to St. John His Blessed Mother, I was heart-struck by the anguish in the Lord's face. How thoughtful in her distress was the face of the Virgin, and how resigned was the saint beside her, with his soft fair Florentine face, so like that of a thousand other painted figures in this city, barely fringed with a light brown beard.
Just when I thought I understood my Master's lessons perfectly, we happened upon another painting, and I would feel yet a stronger connection with the long-ago treasures of my boyhood and the quiet incandescent splendor of the Dominican monk who had graced these walls. Finally we left this clean, lovely place of tears and whispered prayers.
We went out into the night and back to Venice, traveling in cold and noisy darkness, and arriving at home in time to sit a while in the warm light of the sumptuous bedchamber and talk.
"Do you see?" Marius pressed me. He was at his desk with his pen in hand. He dipped it and wrote even as he talked, turning back the large vellum page of his diary. "In far off Kiev, the cells were the earth itself, moist and pure, but dark and omnivorous, the mouth that eats all life finally, that would bring to ruin all art."
I shivered. I sat rubbing the backs of my arms, looking at him.
"But there in Florence, what did this subtle teacher Fra Angelico bequeath to his brothers? Magnificent pictures to put them in mind of the Suffering of Our Lord?"
He wrote several lines before he resumed.
"Fra Angelico never scorned to delight your eye, to fill your vision with all the colors God has given you the power to see, for you were given by him two eyes, Amadeo, and not to be ... not to be shut up in the dark earth."
I reflected for a long time. To know these things theoretically had been one thing. To have passed through the hushed and sleeping rooms of the Monastery, to have seen my Master's principles there emblazoned by a monk himself-this was something else.
"It is a glorious time, this," Marius said softly. "That which was good among the ancients is now rediscovered, and given a new form. You ask me, is Christ the Lord? I say, Amadeo, that He can be, for He never taught anything Himself but love, or so His Apostles, whether they know it or not, have led us to believe ..."
I waited on him, as I knew he wasn't finished. The room was so sweetly warm and clean and bright. I have near my heart forever a picture of him at this moment, the tall fair-haired Marius, his red cloak thrown back to free his arm for the pen he held, his face smooth and reflecting, his blue eyes looking, beyond that time and any other in which he had lived, for the truth. The heavy book was propped on a low portable lectern for him, to give it a comfortable angle. The little ink pot was set inside a richly embellished silver holder. And the heavy candelabra behind him, with its eight thick melting candles, was made up of numberless engraved cherubs half-embedded in the deeply worked silver, with wings struggling, perhaps, to fly loose, and tiny round-cheeked faces turned this way and that with large contented eyes beneath loose serpentine curls.
It seemed an audience of little angels to watch and listen as Marius spoke, so many, many tiny faces peering indifferently forth from the silver, quite immune to the falling rivulets of pure, melted wax.
"I cannot live without this beauty," I said suddenly, though I had meant to wait. "I cannot endure without it. Oh, God, you have shown me Hell and it lies behind me, surely in the land where I was born."
He heard my little prayer, my little confession, my desperate plea.
"If Christ is the Lord," he said, returning to his point, returning us both to the lesson, "if Christ is the Lord, then what a beautiful miracle it is, this Christian mystery-." His eyes filmed with tears. "That the Lord Himself should come to Earth and clothe Himself in flesh the better to know us and to comprehend us. Oh, what God, ever made in the image of Man by His fancy, was ever better than one who would become Flesh? Yes, I would say to you, yes, your Christ, their Christ, the Christ even of the Monks of Kiev, He is the Lord! Only mark forever the lies they tell in His Name, and the deeds they do. For Savonarola called on His Name when he praised a foreign enemy bearing down on Florence, and those who burnt Savonarola as a false prophet, they too, as they lit the faggots beneath his dangling body, they too called on Christ the Lord."
I was overcome with tears.
He sat in silence, respecting me perhaps, or only collecting his thoughts. Then he dipped his pen again and wrote for a long time, much faster than men do, but deftly and gracefully, and never marking out a word.
At last, he set down the pen. He looked at me and he smiled.
"I set out to show you things, and it's never as I plan. I wanted you tonight to see the dangers in this power of flight, that we can too easily transport ourselves to other places, and that this feeling of slipping in and out so easily is a deception of which we must beware. But look, how differently it has all gone."
I didn't answer him.
"I wanted you," he said, "to be a little afraid."
"Master," I said, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, "count on me to be properly frightened when the time comes. I'll have this power, I know it. I can feel it now. And for now, I think it's splendid, and because of it, this power, one dark thought falls over my heart."
"What is that?" he asked in the kindest way. "You know, I think your angelic face is no more fit for sad things than those faces painted by Fra Angelico. What's this shadow I see? What is this dark thought?"
"Take me back there, Master," I said. I trembled, yet I said it. "Let us use your power to cover miles and miles of Europe. Let us go north.
Take me back to see that cruel land that has become a Purgatorio in my imagination. Take me back to Kiev."
He was slow in giving his answer.
The morning was coming. He gathered up his cloak and robe, rose from the chair and took me with him up the stairs to the roof.
We could see the distant already paling waters of the Adriatic, twinkling under the moon and stars, beyond the familiar forest of the masts of the ships. Tiny lights flickered on the distant islands. The wind was mild and full of salt and sea freshness, and a particular deliciousness that comes only when one has lost all fear of the sea.
"Yours is a brave request, Amadeo. If you really wish it, tomorrow night we'll begin the journey."
"Have you ever traveled so far before?"
"In miles, in space, yes, many times," he said. "But in another's quest for understanding? No, never so very far."
He embraced me and took me to the palazzo where our tomb lay hidden. I was cold all over by the time we reached the soiled stone stairway, where so many of the poor slept. We picked our way among them, until we reached the entrance to the cellar.
"Light the torch for me, Sir," I said. "I am shivering. I want to see the gold around us, if I may."
"There, you have it," he said. We stood in our crypt with the two ornate sarcophagi before us. I lay my hand on the lid of the one which was mine, and quite suddenly there came over me another presentiment, that all I loved would endure for a very brief time.
Marius must have seen this hesitation. He passed his right hand through the very fire of the torch, and touched his warmed fingers to my cheek. Then he kissed me where this warmth hovered, and his kiss was warm.