The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [200]
It was played with an unusual ringing preciseness, indeed, a new languid cadence which gave it a powerful and ruby-red authority which I immediately loved.
So I hadn’t scared my little girl out of her mind. She was well and prospering and perhaps falling in love with the drowsy humid loveliness of New Orleans as so many of us have.
I sped at once to the location, and found myself standing, only a little mussed by the wind, in front of a huge three-story redbrick house in Metairie, a countrified suburb of New Orleans which is actually very close to the city, with a feel that can be miraculously remote.
The giant oaks which Marius described were all around this new American mansion, and, as he had promised, all his French doors of shining clean panes were open to the early breeze.
The grass was long and soft beneath my shoes, and a splendid light, so very precious to Marius, poured forth from every window as did the music of the Appassionata now, which was just moving with exceptional grace into the Second Movement, Andante con moto, which promises to be a tame segment of the work but quickly works itself into the same madness as all the rest.
I stopped in my tracks to listen to it. I had never heard the notes quite as limpid and translucent, quite as flashing and exquisitely distinct. I tried for sheer pleasure to divine the differences between this performance and so many I’d heard in the past. They were all different, magical and profoundly affecting, but this was passing spectacular, helped in slight measure by the immense body of what I knew to be a concert grand.
For a moment, a misery swept over me, a terrible, gripping memory of what I’d seen when I drank Lestat’s blood the night before. I let myself relive it, as we say so innocently, and then with a positive blush of pleasant shock, I realized that I didn’t have to tell anyone about it, that it was all dictated to David and that when he gave me my copies, I could entrust them to whomever I loved, who would ever want to know what I’d seen.
As for myself, I wouldn’t try to figure it out. I couldn’t. The feeling was too strong that whom I had seen on the road to Calvary, whether He was real or a figment of my own guilty heart, had not wanted me to see Him and had monstrously turned me away. Indeed the feeling of rejection was so total that I could scarce believe that I had managed to describe it to David.
I had to get the thoughts out of my mind. I banished all reverberations of this experience and let myself fall into Sybelle’s music again, merely standing under the oaks, with the eternal river breeze, which can reach you anywhere in this place, cooling me and soothing me and making me feel that the Earth itself was filled with irrepressible beauty, even for someone such as I.
The music of the Third Movement built to its most brilliant climax, and I thought my heart would break.
It was only then, as the final bars were played out, that I realized something which should have been obvious to me from the start.
It wasn’t Sybelle playing this music. It couldn’t be. I knew every nuance of Sybelle’s interpretations. I knew her modes of expression; I knew the tonal qualities that her particular touch invariably produced. Though her interpretations were infinitely spontaneous, nevertheless I knew her music, as one knows the writing of another or the style of a painter’s work. This wasn’t Sybelle.
And then the real truth dawned on me. It was Sybelle, but Sybelle was no longer Sybelle.
For a second I couldn’t believe it. My heart stopped in my chest.
Then I walked into the house, a steady furious walk that would have stopped for nothing but to find the truth of what I believed.
In an instant I saw it with my own eyes. In a splendid room, they were gathered together, the beautifid lithe figure of Pandora in a gown of brown silk, girdled at the waist in the old Grecian style, Marius in a light velvet smoking jacket over silk trousers, and my children, my beautiful children, radiant Benji in his white gown, dancing barefoot and wildly