i can be anything, anything, anything
How Louis tells the story to a bright young reporter with a point of view: Armand leads him to a room off the Grande Galarie and shows him a painting, Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor. This is Amadeo. He’s twenty years, here.
Armand recalls it differently. “That’s you?” Louis says, dubious.
“Amadeo,” he agrees. Disagrees. “It was the custom to… idealize. Paler in the face, thicker in the arms…” Louis steps closer, dealer’s eye inspecting the boy kneeling in the dirt. Looking for imperfections, things to critique, as he does with his human friends, the artists and poets who are too good for Picasso, the ‘underground’, Louis says with particular relish, like something to aspire to. Armand feels laid bare, as if it is he who is oil on canvas, not Amadeo. He is glad—foolishly, for Louis has already seen him, touched him, had him—he thought to show Louis this painting, and not one of the nudes. That critical eye on Amadeo’s flesh—he could not bear it.
Louis lets out a breath, slow and hard. Not quite a whistle. “You couldn’t’ve been more than twenty here.”
“Something like that,” Armand says. L'adorazione was painted, if he recalled correctly, in 1522; he would have been twenty-nine or thirty years old, if one counted from the time of his birth. He would have been sixteen or seventeen. “Seven years later, Amadeo would become Armand—a vampire cannot be beloved by God, you see.”
He does not blame Louis for misremembering; on the contrary, if anything it is a comfort to have so successfully kept parts of himself hidden even from his beloved. Armand speaks of his past rarely and vaguely, and Louis has conflated his re-christening with his receipt of the Dark Gift. He does not know the name Santino, does not know anything except that the Rome coven sent Armand to Paris in 1556, that Amadeo was ill before he was turned, that Marius found a pathetic little creature called Arun in a brothel and deigned to turn him into a work of art. That Marius burned. Unavoidable details. How does a castrated dervish become the favorite muse of half the Venetian School become maître of a coven of Franks? Louis tells Daniel what he thinks he remembers, and Armand remains silent.
Two years later, Daniel’s book devotes less than a page to Armand’s history. ‘Allegedly’ appears thrice. The dates don’t line up. The resemblance is there, but hardly uncanny. Armand is a habitual liar. A sob story about growing up in slavery, Daniel muses, could frame controlling behavior as a need to feel safe, and a lot of people would hesitate to call bullshit. Daniel Molloy was not most people. When Louis told him to let me live, he said, “Are you asking me, or telling me?” with an artful waver in his voice. He’d contorted himself to seem smaller than he really was. Seconds from tearing out my throat with his teeth, and yet he was the victim here.
One night early on in their companionship-that-is-not—before L’adorazione—Louis and Armand are kissing with youthful abandon while the first rays of dawn reach up to touch the sky. Armand is caught between Louis’ body and the Murphy bed that hides his coffin, Louis’ thigh pressed up between his own, Louis’ cock hard and damp against his hip. “You not enjoying yourself?” Louis asks suddenly; Armand doesn’t understand why, at first. He cups Louis’ head and the back of his neck in both hands, pulls him back into the kiss. No, he assures with the Mind Gift, it’s good, it’s good, and lets his thoughts hum with the pleasure of it all. Being held, being desired, being good for Louis—the evidence that he is, the iron-rich smell of Louis’ dripping cock and the wetness Armand can feel in the hollow of his own hip. Have I done something to make you think otherwise? He has been making all the correct noises, and his self-control and skill with the Mind Gift is such he cannot imagine any trace of the brat’s hysterics have slipped through.
You ain’t hard, Louis pushes, impressionistic sensation seeping into Armand’s thoughts. What there is, what he feels there ought to be. For a moment Armand can feel the old, familiar weight of Lestat’s cock in the palm of his hand, and now he is the one to break the kiss. “I can’t.”
Louis frowns. “We don’t gotta.”
“No, I mean—I’m very old.”
“And elderly vampires’ dicks don’t work? I thought we’d be above all that.”
Armand swallows down frustration; tells himself that Louis’ wry little smirk is charming, not infuriating. “I am very old,” he repeats, “and when I was still human, it was not uncommon for boys who looked like me, in my circumstances, to be—” Armand does not know the word. English is his fifth language and still unwieldy on his tongue, new as it is. He shakes his head. “I cannot. That does not mean I do not want it.”
“In your circumstances?” Louis echoes.
“Croyez-vous que je viens d’une espèce de camp de tsiganes?”
“…Honestly? Yeah, Armand, that’s about what I been assuming.”
Armand scoffs. “I was a slave when my maker found me.”
“He freed you?”
“Hindustani boys were cheap. They could trade ten or fifteen for a decent horse. Only about half survived being cut, but you could make more than double back on the ones who did.” Bringing a hand up to cup his would-be lover’s face, Armand ghosts the pad of his thumb over Louis’ plush lower lip. “Please, Louis,” he murmurs, eyes cast downwards. Demure. “I am amenable.”
Even forewarned, Louis recoils to see him in the nude. “Hell, Armand,” he says, like the words are torn out of him. When he fucks him—every time, for the next seventy-seven years—it is from behind.
Marius thought him beautiful. He said so nearly every day, my beautiful Amadeo, my boy with the face of an angel. Even towards the end, when Amadeo was thin and ashen and too old, and the blood was the only thing preserving that fragile beauty against the encroachment of the French disease, still Marius told him how precious he was, how desirable. And certainly the artists of Venice thought the same, painting him as their saints, as the Christ, as the Devil—swarthy, in these—who tempted them to sin. Marius’ mastery of the Mind Gift assured his friends’ safety from consequence, and most of them indulged themselves in Amadeo’s mouth or between his thighs, even if they were too afraid of being sentenced to burn to properly have him.
Louis thinks him beautiful, too. Armand can hear his thoughts. Louis is enamored of his elegant hands, the way his lips wrap around a cigarette, his loose curls, his gilded eyes. But when Armand is nude, Louis’ mind goes taut with discomfort, and he averts his gaze. “It’s nothing against you,” he says once in an argument in 1961, “but I ain’t your maker, and I ain’t into little boy cocks.”
“Nor was he!” Armand cries, pointlessly for all Louis chooses to hear it. He has long made his judgements, and this thinking Armand a decade older in body than he really is. Though the decision was made with Claudia’s fate in mind, every time Louis brings up Marius, Armand’s belief he was right to let Louis go on in his misapprehension is reaffirmed. “Had I been free, I would have been a man already by the time I met him.”
Louis’ frustration burns bright. “But you weren’t! You aren’t! Look in the goddamn mirror, Armand, and tell me that’s the body of a man.” He takes one ragged breath in the sudden cold silence, and then another. Regret floods the air. “Shit. I didn’t mean that.”
But he did. Armand can hear his thoughts.
One morning in Dubai, after the sun has pulled an emotionally distant Louis down into syrupy dreams of Lestat’s embrace and Daniel Molloy has been left in the reading room to peruse a curated collection of archival materials, Armand looks in the mirror. Looks at his little boy cock, the one Louis tries not to touch. It’s soft, as it ever is—at best, when Armand is shaking apart with need, he is still only ever half-hard, four centimeters long and blood-damp at the tip. Behind his cock lies the angry stretch of scar tissue where hot tar was applied to the wound left behind by his castration, an affair Armand remembers only as a bitter smell and the taste of a leather strap between his teeth. Sometimes he thinks he might not remember it at all, that the sense-memory is just a figment of his imagination. So many of his early memories feel unreal and untethered.
Beautiful, Marius called him. My beautiful boy. Armand tips back his head, meeting his own eyes in the mirror from beneath long lashes. Arranges his limbs, imagining himself in the chill of the studio. Very good, Amadeo, Marius might say, when he were satisfied with the pose, and then: Touch yourself.
Is this the body of a man? Surely it isn’t a boy’s—not as tall and long-limbed as he is. Not with the contours of his figure, what little fat he carries all in his tits and low on his belly like a girl’s. Is that what Louis finds so distasteful?
Armand palms his cock, a rocking, upwards motion that drags the heel of his palm against the bare underside of the glans, and thinks of Louis’ teeth in his throat, Louis’ hand cradling his chin. Thinks of his maker’s praise, and the electric taste of his blood, fed to him one drop at a time. He used to pierce the pad of his finger and let Amadeo suckle at it.
Armand thinks of Louis saying I love you, choosing it even if it isn’t quite true. It can be. It can be. His little cock fills out as best it can. His mouth falls open. In the mirror, he looks debauched, begging to be taken apart. Isn’t he beautiful? His master excised every scar on his back and thighs with the loving caress of a razor-sharp fingernail and smoothed them away with the blood. He is temptation incarnate on his knees, and yet his lover will not look at him.
Blood wells up from the head of Armand’s cock, smears over the pad of his thumb. This is the closest he will come to orgasm, floating here in this liminal state of desire half hard and leaking pre until he can no longer bear his own touch. After that, still working his cock in his palm while tears prick at his eyes, imagining praise he will not hear. Imagining the cold-voiced order in Louis’ southern drawl: Keep going. Yes, maître. At least he spared the worst of Armand’s inadequacies in the retelling. Meeting his own eyes, Armand brings his hand to his lips. He makes a mess of himself and he tastes of nothing at all.