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July 7th, 1922
Spanish Steps.
It is warm here, but a different kind of heat rolls off the Tiber than the swampy humidity of the Mississippi at home. The stone is hot on the streets long after the sun is gone, but it doesn’t make you sweat in that same way. It’s good, it’s fresh.
It begins like this. He takes a leaf out of Claudia’s book. When there is nobody left to justify your actions to, writing seems as good an idea as any other.
And holiday journals –that’s something people do.
It would be nice to credit Lestat with organisational skills, but like so much of what he does, their journey to Rome relies largely on an extraordinary amount of money.
It’s not as difficult as Louis once imagined. They arrive in Civitavecchia on a deceptively named large boat claimed to be light and sleight as a feather on the water, and manage to reach port with only one clumsy escape from a questioning porter. Lestat had watched Louis’ turned back as he hauled the body over the rail of Il Passero. He’d felt it, as he always did.
In the days they haunted the dining car, in the nights watched the lights of varied coasts pass by under a clear sky.
“I wouldn’t have left an eighteen year old alone in a big house in my human life,” Louis had ventured one evening that he'd felt particularly bitter about their decision making. (As always, it was largely towards himself. But what spilled out onto Lestat was the bite that took the edge off, so to speak.)
“And what do you expect is the worst she can do while we are away? Kill somebody?” The lamplight on deck cast Lestat very yellow against the blue of the night. Louis looked over to him, hair whipping around his face like that painting of a girl in a meadow he’d seen once being carted through the quarter. He looked away.
“Oh, I dunno. Maybe kill a cop –oh, she did that already.” Louis flicked a dead cigarette butt into the dark ocean. “–Set fire to the house.”
Lestat pressed his lips together. “I did not force you to come. If this is how it’ll be the entire time we may as well turn this ship around ourselves.”
Louis sighed. He stared into the waves. He let a moment pass. “I miss her. You know that.”
Lestat offered his cigarette box. He said nothing. Always these little disagreements to show the jagged cracks between them.
July 8th, 1922
Via Sistina.
We’ve taken an apartment on the Via Sistina for the week. The balcony is intricate. It is not so different from New Orleans here –except the old people. It surprises me somewhat that we are part of the few, if only, vampires in the New World. I cannot imagine one perpetually young existing here without notice.
Lestat takes (back, Louis supposes) to Europe like a duck to water. He stalks and struts the streets as always, but there is an ease to him here that reeks of a kind of home. He’s been here before, Louis has been told as much. But there is something so suited to his manner when they lounge on the street cafes that it’s almost nice. To be with a version of him so at ease.
The first night they spend in Rome, Lestat takes his hand on the balcony and asks him if he likes the room. Louis kisses him and says yes. It’s beautiful, after all –they managed to get the box holding their coffin upstairs without much trouble from the workmen, and it sits squat at the end of the bed like a crouching animal.
The first place they visit is the Galleria Borghese. They arrive minutes before it closes and Lestat casts his strange magic to glaze all the late-night staff’s eyes over like milk. It’s entirely empty. Louis takes a little paper guide from the hands of one of the attendants.
“I’ve got that same feeling I did when I’d sneak out to the porch and smoke my father’s cigars after everyone else went to sleep,” Louis laughs as they stop in the doorway of the first room. It’s opulent, and gorgeous, and Lestat looks right at home. He grins.
“I stole my father’s whiskey every Saturday he would be away from home, beginning when I was fourteen. I would watch Auvergne pass by night.”
“You never tell me much of your memories before,” Louis says, and fixes his eyes on the statue at the centre of the room. Two figures, entwined in a struggle, stretch their arms up to the golden ceiling.
“I do not have many happy memories of then.” Lestat wanders from his side and towards the statue. “But this one connects us, does it not?” He looks back over his shoulder, tossing his hair like a great lion’s mane. Louis smiles.
“Yeah,” he says. “It does. I like to think of it. It’s a little funny, almost. That we were both boys at a certain time.”
“Yes,” Lestat says. “It is. Different centuries, an ocean away from each other. And here we are!”
“Here we are.” Louis approaches him, feeling a little sacreligious in this grand old house. Lestat puts an arm around him. It does not change the feeling –it’s an old friend. He’s had it times before. “...You want me to tell you about this statue?”
It’s a Bernini. The men struggling are angels.
Tonight, we have been happy. The gallery has been a tour of antiquity and the Renaissance. I have met Aeneas, Anchises & Ascanius , Apollo and Daphne. I think Lestat is kind for his fresh confidence in a place he knows better than I do. There is some illusion of liberation in that. And in this–
Lestat’s satisfaction does not free him from the mockery.
“Has the girl infected you so much that you talk to the books instead of me?” Lestat draws the thick curtains with a flourish. Louis looks up.
“Shut up. I don’t ask you to tell me every thought that runs through your head. I just want somewhere to put ‘em.”
“Ah –yes, but if you asked, I would give.”
“Mhm.” Louis stares up at him from where he lies on the bed and studies the fit of his green smoking jacket. “I’m not sure how true that is.”
Lestat turns around. “I will prove it to you.” He stalks over to the bed.
“Yeah.” Louis shuts the book. “I’d like to see it.”
July 9th, 1922.
Parco Savello
His conversation is as sweet as his blood when he is content. We can talk for hours. We would talk for days. Once, I remember, we spoke for so long we had to race to close the curtains before daybreak. I get the sense that if we had met here it could have become like that every day. (He loves New Orleans but he does not like that I know it better.)
In another world, we begin here and we might be happy. Even in another world, though, I am always myself –who was spat at yesterday. There is no feasible world to me in which I am not spat at yesterday, even if in some of them we don’t drain that man of his blood afterwards.
There is also no world in which I do not go back to Claudia.
There is also no world in which he will not follow me home.
Even after the years spent together, I find myself entirely enraptured in the smallest things: his hands, the way he rakes his nails over my scalp when he’s feeling generous.
They are sat in a garden.
“Everything is so biblical here,” Louis looks up from the little pocketbook. “Gardens, big trees, the statues of gods and angels. Everything’s made of marble.”
“Catholics,” Lestat pulls a face. “Drama queens.”
“Hey.” Louis nudges him. “Aren’t- weren’t you also?”
Lestat grins wolfishly. “I’ve got a few more centuries of lapsing on you, mon cher. ”
Louis rolls his eyes.
They love the art, both of them. Louis reads aloud every informative plaque under every statue, remarks on the colours of every painting. Lestat never cuts him down, always agrees or remarks in parallel.
It takes this for him to realise that essentially, they are sprung from the same root: for Louis, immortality does nothing to dent a great adoration for what it means to live. Lestat loves life the way he loves anything else –with great devotion and a scrambling, wild struggle for control over it. Music, with its beats and rhythms and distinct pitches up and down, was measured livelihood for him –echoes of the tempos he had lived, would come to live in, and would attempt to conjure by some sly crook of a ringed finger. That it largely worked –this great piano-playing of humanity into some self-glorifying harmony– was perhaps the reason he has been the way he is for so long.
Lestat always laughs at the images of temptation. Louis cannot.
It strikes Louis somewhere between Carravaggios that always, the cruellest figures are painted with the most lithe wrists and brightest eyes. It occurred to him before to think on this strain: growing up, he had been told –-he knew– the devil had to be beautiful when he was tempting. How else would he draw sinners to the fruit?
He knows now, though. He knows how it is to be not an observer of an image of temptation, not to be the child expecting to face beauty in trial-by-god, but one who has come nose to nose with it. Watching a serpent whisper in Eve’s ear is quite the different experience to the hot breath of a lover on your cheek.
After all: his new life began with a kiss.
July 15th, 1922
The Vatican.
As much as I might resist, my coming back to Lestat will always be inevitable. He pushes and pokes me to prove to himself that he has me on a tight enough string. I unravel for him. When he kneels before me is the only time I might believe that we were made in the shape of God, once.
Lestat has to almost drag him into the Sistine Chapel.
In the dark, it’s terrifying. There are few people walking the streets, they pass a crowd of nuns and Lestat laughs, and Louis feels like stepping into a beam of raw sunlight. Lestat takes his arm –more aggressive than loving– and pulls him through the doors.
“Why should this beauty not be yours to behold? Hm? You feel like you don’t deserve it?”
“Stop tryna get a read on me.” Louis pulls his arm aggressively from Lestat’s grasp and looks around. “I don’t wanna be here because –isn’t it obvious why? I don’t.” Lestat steps back, assesses him. He turns. The doors lock with a click. He gestures around and smiles in that way he does when he’s pinned a victim precisely where he wants them.
“Look around. Nobody is here to witness you. Just those –paintstrokes. They're divine. Aren’t they exactly the kind of beauty you worship? Or the marble?”
Louis looks around. He can hardly see the cherubic figures without sunlight coming from the windows. They form grotesque shapes against a stark blue sky on the wall. The fear that runs through him is a warm thrill he will never admit to.
“I don’t wanna be here. It’s fucking weird.” Always this way.
This rhythm between them is a familiar beat. Louis says he hates it. He doesn’t leave. He can hardly move. He shuffles back against the nearest ornate column and presses against it without (he hopes,) looking too desperate to disappear. Lestat gives him a look that’s halfway towards a snarl. He slides his hands into his pockets and marches across the mosaic floor to the centre of the chapel.
“Who are you scared of?” he asks. His voice echoes off the walls, something like the sound of the earth quaking. “The nuns outside? The pope? He’s not here.” Lestat spreads his arms. “He’s just another human, you know.”
Louis stares and says nothing. Lestat saunters back towards him, places his hands carefully on either side of Louis’s head. They’ve been here before. Another church, another night.
Louis is silent, perhaps because that one dark night in the church of his childhood, he had screamed for salvation. He is not eager to ask again, because God had not answered. Lestat had.
“What do you say? I find and kill the stupid old man in his big hat now, and we crown ourselves head of the church? I think it would suit you, Saint Louis. I think this might be the only place of worship that is worthy of you.” He’s very close. The dark shapes of angels on the wall look like nothing but wallpaper against the shine of his strange eyes.
Always, this: his most seductive speeches in the places they should not be made. Louis shakes his head in Lestat’s hands.
“Then what?” he asks, grip firm. “Should I make it up to you? Show them how to worship you properly?”
Louis stares. The night air is thick, and hot, and there is no world in which he can fathom anything but saying yes to him.
Lestat kisses him under the painted eyes of God, and the earth does not shudder, the chapel does not fall. Instead, their breath finds its way to the ears of Adam.