Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [49]
I never spoke to either of them idly. They were too grand for that. I addressed them only in prayer.
I was silent in the shrine as I worked, with my paint pots and brushes. I was silent as I sat there peering in frank disgust at what I’d done.
Then one night, after many years of diligence in the shrine, I stood back and tried to see the whole as never before. My head was swimming. I went to the entrance to take the stance of a man who was new to the place, and forgetting utterly the Divine Pair, I merely looked at the walls.
A truth came clear to me in painful clarity. I had painted Pandora. I had painted her everywhere. Each nymph, each goddess, was Pandora. Why hadn’t I known?
I was amazed and defeated. My eyes are playing tricks on me, I thought. I wiped them, actually wiped them as a mortal might do, to see all the better and looked again. No. It was Pandora, rendered beautifully everywhere that I looked. Dresses changed and style of hair, yes, and other adornments but these creatures were all Pandora, and I had not seen it until now.
Of course the never ending garden looked familiar. Never mind that. Pandora had little or nothing to do with those feelings. Pandora was inescapable and came from some different fount of sensations. Pandora would never leave me. That was the curse.
I concealed all my paints and brushes behind the Divine Parents as I always did—it would have been an insult to the Father and Mother to leave them—and I went back to Rome.
I had before me several hours before dawn in which to suffer, in which to think of Pandora as never before.
The drunken party was winding down a bit as it always did in the small hours, with a few guests asleep in the grass outside, and others singing together in a small group, and no one took notice of me as I went into my library, and sat at my desk.
Through the open doors I looked out at the dark trees and wished that my life were at an end.
It seemed I lacked the courage to go on in the existence which I’d made for myself, and then I turned and decided—simply out of desperation—to look at the paintings on the walls of the room. I had of course approved these paintings and paid to have them refreshed and changed many a time.
But now I took stock of them from my point of view not as Marius the rich man who can have whatever he wishes, but as Marius the monster painter who had rendered Pandora twenty-one times on the four walls of Akasha’s shrine.
I saw suddenly how inferior were these paintings, how rigid and pallid the goddesses and nymphs who peopled this world of my study, and quickly I woke my day slaves and told them that they must have everything covered over with fresh paint the following day. Also an entire supply of the best paints must be purchased and brought to the house. Never mind how the walls were to be redecorated. Leave that to me. Cover up all that was there.
They were used to my eccentricities, and after making certain that they understood me, they went back to their sleep.
I didn’t know what I meant to do, except I felt driven to make pictures, and I felt if I can cling to that, if I can do that, then I can go on.
My misery deepened.
I laid out vellum for an entry in my erstwhile journal and began to describe the experience of discovering my beloved everywhere around me, and how it seemed to contain an element of sorcery when suddenly I heard an unmistakable sound.
Avicus was at my gate. Indeed he was asking me with a strong current of the Mind Gift whether or not he might come over the wall and in to visit me.
He was leery of the mortals in my banquet room and in my garden. But might he come in?
At once I gave my silent answer that he could.
It had been years since I had so much as glimpsed him in the back streets, and I was not entirely surprised to see him dressed as a Roman soldier, and to see that he had taken to carrying a dagger and a sword.
He glanced fretfully at the door to the banquet room, but I gestured