The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [94]
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 sat 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