The Nicolas de Lenfent post
I have been really, really into the Lestat musical lately. I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping because of stress -- five hours is a really good night -- and so there's been a lot of wee hours I've passed plugged into my mp3 player. It's not the kind of fixation that'll last any length of time (I'm guessing it'll be mostly gone in another week or so) but it really is a comfort to me right now.
Before I left for the land far, far away, I chanced to type in 'lestat' into a torrent search engine, looking for more files from the musical. What I found was the first ten of the Vampire Chronicles in pdf format, and a 'graphic novelization' of The Vampire Lestat from 1991.
Now, back in the day, I read the first five of the Chronicles. I remember the first three very well, the next two not so much. Without getting into the whole 'interrogating the text from the wrong perspective' stuff that happened towards the end of the books' run, the basic heart of the matter for me was that the focus of the stories shifted as the series went on, and some of the mythology and theology that was introduced was sufficiently distant from the elements which had originally drawn me in that I felt comfortable in walking away from the books. No value judgements; it just wasn't my thing.
Kind of like what's currently happening with me and some comics, but anyway. So I've had a quickie look at the later books, but my main interest is still in the earlier ones. When I was fourteen, I was SO FOND. Anyone who knew me then (which I think at this point in the shifting sands of time is limited to my family, but still) knows that the first two books in the series were really, really special to me. So I have no critical distance here, just affection.
Anyway! The really awesome thing about pdfs is how you can search 'em for keywords and then copy/paste, which made it extremely easy to pull quotes out and spam livejournal.
Right around the time I started googling for a photograph of a pop concert I went to a decade ago, I realised that my id was kind of out of control with this post. But, ha! Ha, ha, says I! It's my journal and... well, not my computer, but still!
Behind the cut is the story of Nicki, a character from The Vampire Lestat. It includes many, many quotes and a bunch of images from a bunch of places. I doubt you'll need to have read the books to follow the thread of the story, which ended up being as much about teenage-Mary as about a fictional vampire.
You'll gain pointless pop knowledge you'll never have a reason to know! THAT'S WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR.
Lestat and Nicolas were childhood friends in rural France, reunited now that Nicolas has come back to the town from Paris. Lestat wants nothing more than for the pair of them to go there together, to run away, to perform in the little theatres -- Lestat acting, Nicolas playing his violin. Lestat tells Nicolas this ambition:
"Ah, you are a dreamer!" he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.
"And I'll know people like you," I went on. "People who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we'll sit in cafes and we'll drink together and we'll clash with each other violently in words, and we'll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement."
He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk.
"My lord, the wolfkiller," he whispered. When the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I'd never done before-of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I couldn't see the towers of my father's house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. The words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother.
And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like "Yes, yes," and "Exactly," and "I know completely what you mean," and "And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it," etc. Another bottle, and a new fire. And I begged Nicolas to play his violin for me. He rushed home immediately to get it. It was now late afternoon. The sun was slanting through the window and the fire was very hot. We were very drunk. We had never ordered supper. And I think I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
I lay on the lumpy straw mattress of the little bed with my hands under my head watching him as he took out the instrument. He put the violin to his shoulder and began to pluck at it and twist the pegs. Then he raised the bow and drew it down hard over the strings to bring out the first note. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I couldn't believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I had never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it had all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. When he'd finished, I was staring at him and I realized I was gripping the sides of my head.
"Monsieur, what's the matter!" he said, almost helplessly, and I stood up and threw my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks and kissed the violin.
"Stop calling me Monsieur," I said. "Call me by my name." I lay back down on the bed and buried my face on my arm and started to cry, and once I'd started I couldn't stop it. He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn't tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now. I think he
carried me home that night. And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father's shop, tossing pebbles up at his window. When he stuck his head out, I said:
"Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?"
The thing about the Vampire Chronicles, especially the early ones, is that they can be rather opaque about sexuality -- everyone seems pretty queer, but you're never wholly sure if they're actually shagging.
I have a very vivid and very amusing memory of being fourteen years old, sitting in my Year 9 history class and reading Interview with the Vampire behind my textbook. I got up to the scene where the newly-made Louis has to share Lestat's coffin on his first night as a vampire; I turned to my friend in the seat beside me and said, strangely bothered in ways I wouldn't understand until I got the internet almost two years later, "I think they're kind of gay."
Luckily, a rare moment of non-coy recollection in the fourth book, Tale of the Body Thief gives us Lestat watching his friend David:
He took a deep swallow and winced slightly as the liquid obviously warmed his throat. Suddenly, vividly, I remembered that particular sensation. I remembered being in the loft of the barn on my land in France, and drinking cognac just like that, and even making that grimace, and my mortal friend and lover, Nicki, snatching the bottle greedily from my hand.
So Lestat and Nicki, very much in love and very much lovers, move to Paris and begin to live their dream. Then Lestat gets abducted by a vampire (as one, uh, does) and turned all immortal and stuff. He turns his mother into a vampire -- leading a friend of mine to recently remark "so Lestat's story is like Spike's?" -- and pines and pines and pines for Nicki.
Narratively, Nicki functions at this point as the Lana Lang to Lestat's Clark Kent; the young sweetheart who is lost because of larger circumstances and secrets. And this seems to be the element of the character which is most enduring in the basic narrative/mythological form of the Vampire Lestat story. No matter what the medium, this moment in their story is the important one.
One night Lestat sneaks up to hide on the roof just above Nicki's window. Nicki, somehow sensing he's there, steps up to the window and begins to play his violin.
Still the sound came. It came rising out of the instrument and cleaving the night as if it were some shining element, other than air and light and matter, that might climb to the very stars. He bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound. The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquery without a particle of truth.
Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony? I didn't know the answer. But the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew bigger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars.
Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. I didn't move. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me.
Nicki, if we could talk again ... If "our conversation" could only continue. Beauty wasn't the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art-the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases-beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
In 1996, a pop band from my hometown -- Brisbane, Australia -- released their first single. This band's name was Savage Garden, so I was interested from word go. As most readers of this journal probably know, I was/am somewhat fond of the band. I'm talking 'I have a tattoo' fond here. But the story of my Savage Garden love, and how it still shapes me even now, is a post for another time.
The reason I bring it up here -- apart from the name -- is because the band's debut album, in 1997 contained two tracks inspired by the Chronicles: the melodramatically awesome "Carry On Dancing" (Darren, the band's singer, once came onstage in a red frock coat to sing this. That pleased 15-year-old me a LOT) and "Mine". "Mine" is Lestat outside Nicki's window, being all yearny and stuff. Have an mp3!
Savage Garden -- Mine.mp3
The Broadway version of the Lestat musical also includes a song from Lestat's POV set in this moment, called "Right Before My Eyes".
Lestat Musical -- Right Before My Eyes.mp3
So between one song's 'kiss divine' and the other's 'savage kiss', I think we're getting the point that Lestat kind of wants to bite Nicki on the neck.
Armand -- you might remember him from such actors as Antonio Banderas and Matthew Newton in the movies -- the really meanie-head vampire, decides that kidnapping young men is obviously totally in fashion this season, and keeps Nicki in a cage until Lestat shows up and goes 'dude, UNCOOL!'.
Nicki is pissed right off at Lestat, as one would be. They have a 'I'm not biting you and turning you into an unholy creature of the night!'/'Yes you are!'/'No!'/'Yes!'/'Etc!' argument, which Nicki wins.
For one tiny second there flared a moment of us together in the garret, talking and talking as the moon glared on the snow-covered roofs, or walking through the Paris streets, passing the wine back and forth, heads bowed against the first gust of winter rain, and there had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery - the real eternity, the real forever - the mortal mystery of that. But the moment faded in the shimmering expression on his face. "Come to me, Nicki," I whispered. I lifted both hands to beckon. "If you want it, you must come..."
*SNIFFA*
I mean, um. As you can see, Nicki is very clearly The Representation Of The Ordinary Happy Life Lestat Could Have Had. Which naturally means that attempting to live happily ever after as vampires is going to turn out massively befucked.
Nicki goes crazy. This happens different in the books to the musical, and -- and what I'm about to say is RIGHT UP THERE with the fact that my favourite Star Wars is Phantom Menace -- I'm a lot more fannish about the musical. This is mostly because of how warm and emotive the two actors in the musical were; Roderick Hill (Nicki) and Hugh Panaro (Lestat) both brought a real sense of love and depth to the relationship. But it's also because of how things go down after Nicki gets chomped.
In the final version of the musical, Lestat begins a worldwide quest to find a way to heal Nicki. For ten years they travel together, Lestat refusing to give up hope despite Nicki's near-coma -- the only thing Nicki will do is play his violin. Whenever someone suggests that Lestat should give up, or that he has given up and is now playing out the quest for his own benefit, he reacts furiously.
In the novel, playing the violin rouses Nicki out of his catatonia completely the first time he does it, and he and Lestat clash bitterly.
"All a misunderstanding, my love," he said. Acid on the tongue. The blood sweat had broken out again, and his eyes glistened as if they were wet. "It was to hurt others, don't you see, the violin playing, to anger them, to secure for me an island where they could not rule. They would watch my ruin, unable to do anything about it. " I didn't answer. I wanted him to go on.
"And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down."
"Oh, Nicki..." I whispered.
"But you didn't go down, Lestat," he said, his eyebrows rising. "The hunger, the cold-none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!" The rage thickened his voice again. "You didn't drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasm and the passion coming out of you - and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from it!"
Lestat ventures off on his travels out of Paris, while Nicki stays and founds the Theatre des Vampires in Paris, which Louis and Claudia will find almost a century later and which you might remember from the 1994 Interview movie.
(On Savage Garden's 1998 tour, which had an awful lot of dress-ups in it, Darren wore a shiny black cloak of the kind worn by the movie version of the Theatre vampires for performances of Mine).
In the musical, after ten years together, Nicki finally breaks free of his mental prison long enough to beg Lestat to release him from his misery and kill him. Heartbroken, and with a reprisal of "Right Before My Eyes", Lestat does so by guiding him into a fire.
In the book, Lestat is sent a package from Paris while he's journeying through Cairo. The shape of the package is obviously a violin, and he stares at it for an hour before he can bear to open it.
It was important to open this, yes, to open it and find out what it was. Yet it seemed just as important for me to look around the barren little room and imagine that it was a room in a village inn in the Auvergne.
"I had a dream about you, " I said aloud, glancing at the package. "I dreamed that we were moving through the world together, you and I, and we were both serene and strong. I dreamed we fed on the evildoer as Marius had done, and as we looked about ourselves we felt awe and sorrow at the mysteries we beheld. But we were strong. We would go on forever. And we talked. `Our conversation' went on and on."
I tore back the wrapping and saw the case of the Stradivarius violin. I went to say something again, just to myself, but my throat closed. And my mind couldn't carry out the words on its own.
Armand, in a precursor to the cruelty he'll later show Claudia, cut Nicki's hands off to prevent him from playing his violin, and Nicki went into the fire to end his pain.
Eventually, hopeless, Lestat goes underground, which is what vampires do when they're too weary and unhappy to continue being 'alive'. There he dreams, often of Nicki.
Now and then, it seems, Nicki and I are engaged in our best conversations. "I am beyond all pain and sin, " he says to me. "But do you feel anything? " I ask. "Is that what it means to be free of this, that you no longer feel? " Not misery, not thirst, not ecstasy? It is interesting to me in these moments that our concept of heaven is one of ecstasy. The joys of heaven. That our concept of hell is pain. The fires of hell. So we don't think it very good not to feel anything, do we? Can you give it up, Lestat? Or isn't it true that you'd rather fight the thirst with this hellish torment than die and feel nothing?
When Lestat comes back above ground, he eventually makes his way to America. As I have mentioned in a previous post about the musical, Lestat has A Type.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas. He had Nicki's grim intensity, his rebelliousness,his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.
Which I'm sure totally worked out for Lestat on the second try.
Um.
Right?
Oh.
If I feel so inclined, I'll do a follow-up post of this same kind of thing about Louis and Claudia. Mostly Claudia, because I'm extremely interested in her and the different interpretations of her character, and I have a big document of excerpts I've pulled.
But for now, a final quote. When Lestat journeys to Hell (don't ask), he searches the multitudes for those he hopes to see again.
"Claudia, where are you? Where are you, the one I wronged! Claudia! Nicolas, help me!"
But were they here, lost in this torrent, or gone, long gone through the Tunnel to the blazing glory above, to the blessed songs that wove the silence into their very chords and melodies? Pray gone, pray there, above.
And thus ends the story of Nicki and Lestat.
-
A note on Queen of the Damned:
Because Lestat's possession of Nicki's violin plays a fairly important role in the story of Queen of the Damned, an equivalent to the character had to be included in the movie. If you've seen the movie, though, you'll know that the Lestat in it is Very Very Straight. For a mesh-wearing rockstar vampire. Uh.
Marius, one of the movie's biggest redeeming features, is the only one of the vampires that's remotely queer. Lestat is done as straight as possible, with a romance with the young paranormal detective Jesse included for Obligatory Het Content (this is especially annoying as Jesse-in-the-books is possibly even gayer than Lestat, and ends up jaunting off with Lestat's mother).
So, what to do with Nicki?
In Nicki's place is a young gypsy violinist Lestat meets on the beach after already becoming a vampire (thereby sidestepping the most important/enduring aspect of the Nicki figure; that of mortal-Lestat's lost love). The gypsy violinist was played by Mandie Vieira, a young Australian musician. Here's a picture of her with the actors who played Lestat and Marius in the film:
Before I left for the land far, far away, I chanced to type in 'lestat' into a torrent search engine, looking for more files from the musical. What I found was the first ten of the Vampire Chronicles in pdf format, and a 'graphic novelization' of The Vampire Lestat from 1991.
Now, back in the day, I read the first five of the Chronicles. I remember the first three very well, the next two not so much. Without getting into the whole 'interrogating the text from the wrong perspective' stuff that happened towards the end of the books' run, the basic heart of the matter for me was that the focus of the stories shifted as the series went on, and some of the mythology and theology that was introduced was sufficiently distant from the elements which had originally drawn me in that I felt comfortable in walking away from the books. No value judgements; it just wasn't my thing.
Kind of like what's currently happening with me and some comics, but anyway. So I've had a quickie look at the later books, but my main interest is still in the earlier ones. When I was fourteen, I was SO FOND. Anyone who knew me then (which I think at this point in the shifting sands of time is limited to my family, but still) knows that the first two books in the series were really, really special to me. So I have no critical distance here, just affection.
Anyway! The really awesome thing about pdfs is how you can search 'em for keywords and then copy/paste, which made it extremely easy to pull quotes out and spam livejournal.
Right around the time I started googling for a photograph of a pop concert I went to a decade ago, I realised that my id was kind of out of control with this post. But, ha! Ha, ha, says I! It's my journal and... well, not my computer, but still!
Behind the cut is the story of Nicki, a character from The Vampire Lestat. It includes many, many quotes and a bunch of images from a bunch of places. I doubt you'll need to have read the books to follow the thread of the story, which ended up being as much about teenage-Mary as about a fictional vampire.
You'll gain pointless pop knowledge you'll never have a reason to know! THAT'S WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR.
Lestat and Nicolas were childhood friends in rural France, reunited now that Nicolas has come back to the town from Paris. Lestat wants nothing more than for the pair of them to go there together, to run away, to perform in the little theatres -- Lestat acting, Nicolas playing his violin. Lestat tells Nicolas this ambition:
"Ah, you are a dreamer!" he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.
"And I'll know people like you," I went on. "People who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we'll sit in cafes and we'll drink together and we'll clash with each other violently in words, and we'll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement."
He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk.
"My lord, the wolfkiller," he whispered. When the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I'd never done before-of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I couldn't see the towers of my father's house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. The words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother.
And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like "Yes, yes," and "Exactly," and "I know completely what you mean," and "And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it," etc. Another bottle, and a new fire. And I begged Nicolas to play his violin for me. He rushed home immediately to get it. It was now late afternoon. The sun was slanting through the window and the fire was very hot. We were very drunk. We had never ordered supper. And I think I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
I lay on the lumpy straw mattress of the little bed with my hands under my head watching him as he took out the instrument. He put the violin to his shoulder and began to pluck at it and twist the pegs. Then he raised the bow and drew it down hard over the strings to bring out the first note. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I couldn't believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I had never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it had all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. When he'd finished, I was staring at him and I realized I was gripping the sides of my head.
"Monsieur, what's the matter!" he said, almost helplessly, and I stood up and threw my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks and kissed the violin.
"Stop calling me Monsieur," I said. "Call me by my name." I lay back down on the bed and buried my face on my arm and started to cry, and once I'd started I couldn't stop it. He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn't tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now. I think he
carried me home that night. And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father's shop, tossing pebbles up at his window. When he stuck his head out, I said:
"Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?"
The thing about the Vampire Chronicles, especially the early ones, is that they can be rather opaque about sexuality -- everyone seems pretty queer, but you're never wholly sure if they're actually shagging.
I have a very vivid and very amusing memory of being fourteen years old, sitting in my Year 9 history class and reading Interview with the Vampire behind my textbook. I got up to the scene where the newly-made Louis has to share Lestat's coffin on his first night as a vampire; I turned to my friend in the seat beside me and said, strangely bothered in ways I wouldn't understand until I got the internet almost two years later, "I think they're kind of gay."
Luckily, a rare moment of non-coy recollection in the fourth book, Tale of the Body Thief gives us Lestat watching his friend David:
He took a deep swallow and winced slightly as the liquid obviously warmed his throat. Suddenly, vividly, I remembered that particular sensation. I remembered being in the loft of the barn on my land in France, and drinking cognac just like that, and even making that grimace, and my mortal friend and lover, Nicki, snatching the bottle greedily from my hand.
So Lestat and Nicki, very much in love and very much lovers, move to Paris and begin to live their dream. Then Lestat gets abducted by a vampire (as one, uh, does) and turned all immortal and stuff. He turns his mother into a vampire -- leading a friend of mine to recently remark "so Lestat's story is like Spike's?" -- and pines and pines and pines for Nicki.
Narratively, Nicki functions at this point as the Lana Lang to Lestat's Clark Kent; the young sweetheart who is lost because of larger circumstances and secrets. And this seems to be the element of the character which is most enduring in the basic narrative/mythological form of the Vampire Lestat story. No matter what the medium, this moment in their story is the important one.
One night Lestat sneaks up to hide on the roof just above Nicki's window. Nicki, somehow sensing he's there, steps up to the window and begins to play his violin.
Still the sound came. It came rising out of the instrument and cleaving the night as if it were some shining element, other than air and light and matter, that might climb to the very stars. He bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound. The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquery without a particle of truth.
Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony? I didn't know the answer. But the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew bigger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars.
Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. I didn't move. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me.
Nicki, if we could talk again ... If "our conversation" could only continue. Beauty wasn't the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art-the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases-beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
In 1996, a pop band from my hometown -- Brisbane, Australia -- released their first single. This band's name was Savage Garden, so I was interested from word go. As most readers of this journal probably know, I was/am somewhat fond of the band. I'm talking 'I have a tattoo' fond here. But the story of my Savage Garden love, and how it still shapes me even now, is a post for another time.
The reason I bring it up here -- apart from the name -- is because the band's debut album, in 1997 contained two tracks inspired by the Chronicles: the melodramatically awesome "Carry On Dancing" (Darren, the band's singer, once came onstage in a red frock coat to sing this. That pleased 15-year-old me a LOT) and "Mine". "Mine" is Lestat outside Nicki's window, being all yearny and stuff. Have an mp3!
Savage Garden -- Mine.mp3
The Broadway version of the Lestat musical also includes a song from Lestat's POV set in this moment, called "Right Before My Eyes".
Lestat Musical -- Right Before My Eyes.mp3
So between one song's 'kiss divine' and the other's 'savage kiss', I think we're getting the point that Lestat kind of wants to bite Nicki on the neck.
Armand -- you might remember him from such actors as Antonio Banderas and Matthew Newton in the movies -- the really meanie-head vampire, decides that kidnapping young men is obviously totally in fashion this season, and keeps Nicki in a cage until Lestat shows up and goes 'dude, UNCOOL!'.
Nicki is pissed right off at Lestat, as one would be. They have a 'I'm not biting you and turning you into an unholy creature of the night!'/'Yes you are!'/'No!'/'Yes!'/'Etc!' argument, which Nicki wins.
For one tiny second there flared a moment of us together in the garret, talking and talking as the moon glared on the snow-covered roofs, or walking through the Paris streets, passing the wine back and forth, heads bowed against the first gust of winter rain, and there had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery - the real eternity, the real forever - the mortal mystery of that. But the moment faded in the shimmering expression on his face. "Come to me, Nicki," I whispered. I lifted both hands to beckon. "If you want it, you must come..."
*SNIFFA*
I mean, um. As you can see, Nicki is very clearly The Representation Of The Ordinary Happy Life Lestat Could Have Had. Which naturally means that attempting to live happily ever after as vampires is going to turn out massively befucked.
Nicki goes crazy. This happens different in the books to the musical, and -- and what I'm about to say is RIGHT UP THERE with the fact that my favourite Star Wars is Phantom Menace -- I'm a lot more fannish about the musical. This is mostly because of how warm and emotive the two actors in the musical were; Roderick Hill (Nicki) and Hugh Panaro (Lestat) both brought a real sense of love and depth to the relationship. But it's also because of how things go down after Nicki gets chomped.
In the final version of the musical, Lestat begins a worldwide quest to find a way to heal Nicki. For ten years they travel together, Lestat refusing to give up hope despite Nicki's near-coma -- the only thing Nicki will do is play his violin. Whenever someone suggests that Lestat should give up, or that he has given up and is now playing out the quest for his own benefit, he reacts furiously.
In the novel, playing the violin rouses Nicki out of his catatonia completely the first time he does it, and he and Lestat clash bitterly.
"All a misunderstanding, my love," he said. Acid on the tongue. The blood sweat had broken out again, and his eyes glistened as if they were wet. "It was to hurt others, don't you see, the violin playing, to anger them, to secure for me an island where they could not rule. They would watch my ruin, unable to do anything about it. " I didn't answer. I wanted him to go on.
"And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down."
"Oh, Nicki..." I whispered.
"But you didn't go down, Lestat," he said, his eyebrows rising. "The hunger, the cold-none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!" The rage thickened his voice again. "You didn't drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasm and the passion coming out of you - and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from it!"
Lestat ventures off on his travels out of Paris, while Nicki stays and founds the Theatre des Vampires in Paris, which Louis and Claudia will find almost a century later and which you might remember from the 1994 Interview movie.
(On Savage Garden's 1998 tour, which had an awful lot of dress-ups in it, Darren wore a shiny black cloak of the kind worn by the movie version of the Theatre vampires for performances of Mine).
In the musical, after ten years together, Nicki finally breaks free of his mental prison long enough to beg Lestat to release him from his misery and kill him. Heartbroken, and with a reprisal of "Right Before My Eyes", Lestat does so by guiding him into a fire.
In the book, Lestat is sent a package from Paris while he's journeying through Cairo. The shape of the package is obviously a violin, and he stares at it for an hour before he can bear to open it.
It was important to open this, yes, to open it and find out what it was. Yet it seemed just as important for me to look around the barren little room and imagine that it was a room in a village inn in the Auvergne.
"I had a dream about you, " I said aloud, glancing at the package. "I dreamed that we were moving through the world together, you and I, and we were both serene and strong. I dreamed we fed on the evildoer as Marius had done, and as we looked about ourselves we felt awe and sorrow at the mysteries we beheld. But we were strong. We would go on forever. And we talked. `Our conversation' went on and on."
I tore back the wrapping and saw the case of the Stradivarius violin. I went to say something again, just to myself, but my throat closed. And my mind couldn't carry out the words on its own.
Armand, in a precursor to the cruelty he'll later show Claudia, cut Nicki's hands off to prevent him from playing his violin, and Nicki went into the fire to end his pain.
Eventually, hopeless, Lestat goes underground, which is what vampires do when they're too weary and unhappy to continue being 'alive'. There he dreams, often of Nicki.
Now and then, it seems, Nicki and I are engaged in our best conversations. "I am beyond all pain and sin, " he says to me. "But do you feel anything? " I ask. "Is that what it means to be free of this, that you no longer feel? " Not misery, not thirst, not ecstasy? It is interesting to me in these moments that our concept of heaven is one of ecstasy. The joys of heaven. That our concept of hell is pain. The fires of hell. So we don't think it very good not to feel anything, do we? Can you give it up, Lestat? Or isn't it true that you'd rather fight the thirst with this hellish torment than die and feel nothing?
When Lestat comes back above ground, he eventually makes his way to America. As I have mentioned in a previous post about the musical, Lestat has A Type.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas. He had Nicki's grim intensity, his rebelliousness,his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.
Which I'm sure totally worked out for Lestat on the second try.
Um.
Right?
Oh.
If I feel so inclined, I'll do a follow-up post of this same kind of thing about Louis and Claudia. Mostly Claudia, because I'm extremely interested in her and the different interpretations of her character, and I have a big document of excerpts I've pulled.
But for now, a final quote. When Lestat journeys to Hell (don't ask), he searches the multitudes for those he hopes to see again.
"Claudia, where are you? Where are you, the one I wronged! Claudia! Nicolas, help me!"
But were they here, lost in this torrent, or gone, long gone through the Tunnel to the blazing glory above, to the blessed songs that wove the silence into their very chords and melodies? Pray gone, pray there, above.
And thus ends the story of Nicki and Lestat.
-
A note on Queen of the Damned:
Because Lestat's possession of Nicki's violin plays a fairly important role in the story of Queen of the Damned, an equivalent to the character had to be included in the movie. If you've seen the movie, though, you'll know that the Lestat in it is Very Very Straight. For a mesh-wearing rockstar vampire. Uh.
Marius, one of the movie's biggest redeeming features, is the only one of the vampires that's remotely queer. Lestat is done as straight as possible, with a romance with the young paranormal detective Jesse included for Obligatory Het Content (this is especially annoying as Jesse-in-the-books is possibly even gayer than Lestat, and ends up jaunting off with Lestat's mother).
So, what to do with Nicki?
In Nicki's place is a young gypsy violinist Lestat meets on the beach after already becoming a vampire (thereby sidestepping the most important/enduring aspect of the Nicki figure; that of mortal-Lestat's lost love). The gypsy violinist was played by Mandie Vieira, a young Australian musician. Here's a picture of her with the actors who played Lestat and Marius in the film: