Anne Rice - Violin

"I see you leapt to strength from love," I said, "love of the Maestro. But when did you start to drive them mad, to make them feel suffeting?" I asked. "Or did this turn of events come especially for me, Triana Becker, the unremarkable, talentless woman in the white cottage on the Avenue; surely I wasn't the first. Whom do you serve? Why do you wake me from dreams of the beautiful sea? You think you serve the man whose gravestone brought you such a harrowing pain that you gained material form?"

He moaned as if to beg me to stop.

I wouldn't break off.

"You think you served the God to whom you prayed? When did you start to make the grief if the grief didn't come sharp enough to make you?"

Another scene took shape. Trolleys clattered on their tracks. A woman in a long dress lay on a bed of sensuous curves-call it Art Moderne. The window was framed in that free-drawn leaded design that marked the time. A phonograph stood nearby, its bulbous needle stilled, its turntable dusty.

It was Stefan who played for her.

She listened with glistening tears, oh, yes, the requisite tears, the eternal tears, let tears be as frequent in this narrative finally as any common everyday word. Let the ink turn to tears. Let the paper be soft with them.

She listened with glistening tears and watched as the young man in the short, trim modern coat, sporting his lank satin hair, as if he would not give it up, though surely by now he knew he could change his shape, played the celestial instrument for her.

It was a lustrous song I couldn't name, perhaps his own, dipping into the dissonance that marks even the early music of our own century, a twist, a throb, a thundering protest of nature and of death. She cried. She lay her head against green velvet, a stylish creature, as if painted on stained glass in her frivolous gown, her pointed shoes, her soft ringlets of red hair.

He stopped. He lowered his fine weapons to his side. He looked tenderly at her, and came to her, and sat down on the curved couch beside her. He kissed her, yes, visible and palpable to her as he was to me, and his hair fell down on her as it did on me even now in the airily compassless gloom where we watched.

He spoke now to the woman on the couch in a fresher German more easy to my ear.

"Years ago," he said, "the great Beethoven. He had a grieving friend, a friend named Antoine Brentano. He loved her tenderly, most tenderly, as he loved so many people. Shhh. Don't believe the lies they tell of him. He loved many. And when she was in pain, Madame Brentano, he would come into her Viennese house, saying nothing to anyone. He would play and play for her-on the pianoforte-hour by hour to relieve her pain. These songs would drift up through the floors to her and comfort her and blunt her suffering. And then he would as silently take his leave without a nod to anyone. She loved him for it."

"As I love you," said this young woman.

Was she dead now, perhaps even long dead, or merely ancient?

"Did you drive her mad?"

I don't know! Watch. You don't admit the depth of it!

She reached up with naked arms and wrapped them around the ghost, around something solid and seemingly male and passionate for her, hot for her pampered flesh, for the tears which he licked with his spectral tongue in a gesture so monstrous suddenly that the whole picture went dark for me.

Licking her eyes, her salty tears, licking her eyes. Stop it!

"Let me go!" I said. I thrust against him. I kicked with my heels against his feet. I threw back my head and heard the sound of my sknll against his! "Let me go!" I said.

Give me my violin and I'll let you go! Eyes. Are Lily's eyes still in ajar? You let them cut her up, remember, and why, to be sure that you by some negligence or stupidity had not yourself murdered her? Eyes. Remember? Eyes, your Father's eyes; they were open when he died and your Aunt Bridget said to you, Do you want to close them, Triana, and she told you what an honor it was to close his eyes, and showed you how to put your hand...

I struggled but couldn't get loose.

There came music, replete with drums, something eerie and savage, yet behind it rose his violin.

Did you even look into your mother's eyes that day you let her go to her death, she died in a seizure, foolish girl she could have been saved, she was not worn out, she was only sick unto death of living and of you and all her dirty children and her childish frightened husband!

"Stop!"

I saw him suddenly, my captor. We were visible. There was light gathering around us. He stood apart from me. I held the violin and glared at him.

"Be damned with all your visions," I said. "Yes, yes, I confess, I killed them all, I did, I am to blame; if Faye is dead and lying on a slab, I did it! Yes, I did it! What would you do with it if I gave back this violin? Drive someone else crazy? Eat her tears? I loathe you. My music was my joy. My music was transcendence! What is yours but harm and meanness?"

"And why not," he said to me. He stopped close and clamped his hands on my neck, treacherously against my throat. I could scarcely bear to be touched there even by someone I loved, that tender place around the neck, but I wouldn't fall into his trick and try to throw him off.

"Have you the strength to kill me?" I said. "Did you bring that power too, into this void, the power to kill as you killed your Father? Do it then. Maybe we are at the door of death, and you are the god who holds the scales to weigh my heart. Is this the form of reckoning? All made up of things I cherished in my life?"

"No!" But he was shaken, crying again. "No. Look to me! Don't you see what I am? Don't you see what happened to me? Don't you understand! I am lost. I am alone.

And anyone who walks in the void at the same pace as I do walks alone as I do! We who are visible and powerful haunts, and surely there must be more, we cannot commune with each other-Bring you Lily? I'd do it if I could! Your Mother? In the snap of a finger, if I knew how, yes, come, comfort her daughter who has mourned her Mother all her life, and so uselessly. And with you, with you, traveling back into this pain, outside my Father's burning house, I saw for the first time the shade of Beethoven! His ghost! He came on your account, Triana!"

"Or to stop you, Ste fan," I said, making my voice soft. "To school your magic.

Yours in some naive and powerful sorcery. This violin is made of wood, and you are flesh and I am flesh, though one is living and the other made by unforgiving greed-."

"No!" he whispered. "Not greed. Never."

"Let me go. I don't care if this is madness, dream or witchcraft, I want to get away from you!"

"You can

I felt the change. We were dissolving. Only the violin had form in my arms. We vanished again. We had no selves. The scene descended; the eerie music beat on.

A man was on his knees, hands over his ears, but Stefan the fiddler left him no peace, drowning out the half-naked coffee-skinned drummers who pounded the drums, their eyes fixed on the evil violinist, whom they followed yet feared as they beat the rhythm.

Another moment shone bright, a woman banging his tenacious ghostly shape with her fist as on and on he played, a wailing dirge.

There came a school yard with great leafy trees where the children danced about him in a ring, the fiddler, as if he were the Pied Piper, and a teacher cried out and tried to draw them away, but I couldn't hear her voice over his incessant cantabile.

What did I see now? Figures embracing in the dark, whispers struck my face. I saw him smile and a proffered woman blot out the shimmer of his countenance.

Love them, drive them crazy, it was all the same in the end, because they died! And I did not. I did not. And this violin is my immortal treasure and I will tear you out of lift right into this Hell with me forever if you don't give it up.