When I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I
held in my arms the severed heads of my younger brother
and sister. They were quick still, and mute, with big
fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was
I that I could make no more of a sound than they could.
The dream came true.
But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been
buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest
tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was
born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most
beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.
By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most
powerful, having lived five hundred years from the great
days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even the angels will attest
to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be
cautious on that point.
I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven
of the Articulate," that band of strange romantic vampires
in and from the Southern New World city of New Orleans who
have regaled you already with so many chronicles and tales.
I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact
masquerading as fiction. I know nothing of their enticing
paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You will find no
new knowledge of them in these pages, not even, hereafter,
a mention.
I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the
story of my own beginnings--the fable of my making--and to
cast this fragment of my life in book form into the wide
world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or
destined contact with their well-published volumes.
I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever,
observant roaming and study, never provoking the slightest
danger from my own kind, and never arousing their
knowledge or suspicions.
But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.
It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings.
For I believe I have revelations within me which will be
wholly original to you. Perhaps when my book is finished
and gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow
a character in that grand roman-fleuve begun by other
vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I
cannot know or care about it.
As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown
stones of the place where I was so happy as a child, our
walls now broken and misshapen among the thorny blackberry
vines and fragrant smothering forests of oak and chestnut
trees, I am compelled to record what befell me, for it
seems that I may have suffered a fate very unlike that of
any other vampire.
I do not always hang about this place.
On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city
which for me is the queen of all cities--Florence-- which
I loved from the very first moment I saw it with a child's
eyes in the years when Cosimo the Elder ran his powerful
Medici bank with his own hand, even though he was the
richest man in Europe.
In the house of Cosimo de' Medici lived the great sculptor
Donatello making sculptures of marble and bronze, as well
as painters and poets galore, writers on magic and makers
of music. The great Brunelleschi, who had made the very
dome of Florence's greatest church, was building yet
another Cathedral for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo
was rebuilding not only the monastery of San Marco but
commencing the palazzo for Cosimo which would one day be
known to all the world as the Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo,
men went all over Europe seeking in dusty libraries long
forgotten the classics of Greek and Rome, which Cosimo's
scholars would translate into our native Italian, the
language which Dante had boldly chosen many years before
for his Divine Comedy.
And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a mortal boy
of destiny and promise--yes, I myself saw--the great
guests of the Council of Trent who had come from far
Byzantium to heal the breach between the Eastern and
Western church: Pope Eugenius IV of Rome, the Patriarch of
Constantinople and the Emperor of the East himself, John
VIII Paleologus. These great men I saw enter the city in a
terrible storm of bitter rain, but nevertheless with
indescribable glory, and these men I saw eat from Cosimo's
table.
Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no
history of the Medici. But let me only say that anyone who
tells you that they were scoundrels, these great men, is a
perfect idiot. It was the descendants of Cosimo who took
care of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and artists
without count. And it was all because a banker, a
moneylender if you will, thought it splendid and good to
give beauty and magnificence to the city of Florence.
I'll come back to Cosimo at the right point, and only for
a few brief words, though I must confess I am having
trouble being brief here on any score, but for now let me
say that Cosimo belongs to the living.
I have been in bed with the dead since 1450.
Now to tell how it began, but allow me one more preface.
Don't look here, please, for antique language. You will
not find a rigid fabricated English meant to conjure
castle walls by stilted diction and constricted vocabulary.
I shall tell my tale naturally and effectively, wallowing
in words, for I love them. And, being an immortal, I have
devoured over four centuries of English, from the plays of
Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to the abrupt and
harshly evocative words of a Sylvester Stallone movie.
You'll find me flexible, daring, and now and then a shock.
But what can I do but draw upon the fullest descriptive
power I can command, and mark that English now is no more
the language of one land, or even two or three or four,
but has become the language of all the modern world from
the backwoods of Tennessee to the most remote Celtic isles
and down under to the teeming cities of Australia and New
Zealand.
I am Renaissance-born. Therefore I delve in all, and blend
without prejudice, and that some higher good pertains to
what I do, I cannot doubt.
As for my native Italian, hear it softly when you say my
name, Vittorio, and breathe it like perfume from the other
names which are sprinkled throughout this text. It is,
beneath all, a language so sweet as to make of the English
word "stone" three syllables: pi-ea-tra. There has never
been a gentler language on earth. I speak all other
tongues with the Italian accent you'll hear in the streets
of Florence today.
And that my English-speaking victims find my blandishments
so pretty, accented as they are, and yield to my soft
lustrous Italian pronunciations, is a constant source of
bliss for me.
But I am not happy.
Don't think so.
I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire was
happy.
I have a brain as well as a heart, and there hovers about
me an etheric visage of myself, created most definitely by
some Higher Power, and entangled completely within the
intangible weave of that etheric visage is what men call a
soul. I have such. No amount of blood can drown away its
life and leave me but a thriving revenant.
Okay. No problem. Yes, yes. Thank you!--as everybody in
the entire world can say in English. We're ready to begin.
Except I want to give you a quote from an obscure but
wonderful writer, Sheridan Le Fanu, a paragraph spoken in
extreme angst by a haunted character in one of his many
exquisitely written ghost stories. This author, a native
of Dublin, died in 1873, but mark how fresh is this
language, and how horrifying the expression of the
character Captain Barton in the story called "The
Familiar":
Whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of
what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am
deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist
beyond this a spiritual world--a system whose workings are
generally in mercy hidden from us--a system which may be,
and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I
am sure--I know. . . that there is a God--a dreadful God--
and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most
mysterious and stupendous--by agencies the most
inexplicable and terrific; --there is a spiritual system--
great God, how I have been convinced!--a system malignant,
and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I
am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!
What do you think of that?
I am myself rather mortally struck by it. I don't think I
am prepared to speak of our God as "dreadful" or our
system as "malignant," but there seems an eerie
inescapable ring of truth to these words, written in
fiction but obviously with much emotion.
It matters to me because I suffer under a terrible curse,
quite unique to me, I think, as a vampire. That is, the
others don't share it. But I think we all--human, vampire,
all of us who are sentient and can weep--we all suffer
under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can
endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can
do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
At the end, we can take this up again. See what you make
of my story.
It's early evening here. The brave remnant of my father's
highest tower still rises boldly enough against the
sweetly star-filled heavens for me to see from the window
the moonlighted hills and valleys of Tuscany, aye, even as
far as the twinkling sea below the mines of Carrara. I
smell the flowering green of the steep undiscovered
country round where the irises of Tuscany still break out
in violent red or white in sunny beds, to be found by me
in the silky night.
And so embraced and protected, I write, ready for the
moment when the full yet ever obscure moon leaves me for
the hideaway of clouds, to light the candles that stand
ready, some six, ensconced within the thick ruggedly
worked silver of the candelabra which once stood on my
father's desk, in those days when he was the old-style
feudal lord of this mountain and all its villages, and the
firm ally in peace and war of the great city of Florence
and its unofficial ruler, when we were rich, fearless,
curious and wondrously contented.
Let me speak now of what has vanished.