Pandora, Page 2

  You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last century, and you didn’t want to alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.

  I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat—against Marius’s injunction—had dared to make. I saw the components of you as a man: an immense human soul, fearless, yet half in love with despair, and a body which Lestat had almost injured himself to render powerful. He had given you more blood than he could easily give in your transformation. He had tried to give you his courage, his cleverness, his cunning; he had tried to transport an armory for you through the blood.

  He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother Akasha’s blood was mixed with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had given him blood as well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say, they say that he may even have drunk the blood of the Christ.

  It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to scan the world for knowledge is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.

  “Tell me the truth of it,” I said. “This story Memnoch the Devil. Lestat claimed he went to Heaven and to Hell. He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The face of Christ was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity, it cured alienation and succored bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to throw up their arms to the deadly morning light, as if the sun were in fact the fire of God.”

  “Yes, it’s all happened, as I described it,” you said, lowering your head with a polite but unexaggerated modesty. “And you know a few  . . . of us perished in this fervor, whilst newspapers and scientists collected our ashes for examination.”

  I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind dominated by an incalculable wealth of information, and quick of tongue with an intellect devoted to swiftness, synthesis, probabilities, and all this against the backdrop of horrid experiences, wars, massacres, the worst perhaps the world has ever seen.

  “It all happened,” you said. “And I did meet with Mekare and Maharet, the ancient ones, and you needn’t fear for me that I don’t know how fragile is the root It was kind of you to think so protectively of me.”

  I was quietly charmed.

  “What did you think of this Holy Veil yourself?” I asked.

  “Our Lady of Fatima,” you said softly. “The Shroud of Turin, a cripple rising from the Miraculous Waters of Lourdes! What a consolation it must be to accept such a thing so easily.”

  “And you did not?”

  You shook your head. “And neither did Lestat, really. It was the mortal girl, Dora, snatching the Veil from him, who took it out into the world. But it was a most singular and meticulously made thing, I’ll tell you that, more worthy of the word ‘relic’ perhaps than any other I’ve ever seen.”

  You sounded dejected suddenly.

  “Some immense intent went into its making,” you said.

  “And the vampire Armand, the delicate boylike Armand, he believed it?” I asked. “Armand looked at it and saw the face of Christ,” I said, seeking your confirmation.

  “Enough to die for it,” you said solemnly. “Enough to open his arms to the morning sun.”

  You looked away, and you closed your eyes. This was a simple unadorned plea to me not to make you speak of Armand and how he had gone into the morning fire.

  I gave a sigh—surprised and gently fascinated to find you so articulate, skeptical, yet so sharply and frankly connected to the others.

  You said in a shaken voice, “Armand.” And still looking away from me. “What a Requiem. And does he know now if Memnoch was real, if God Incarnate who tempted Lestat was in fact the Son of the God Almighty? Does anyone?”

  I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, these questions you posed.

  “They locked up the Veil, you know,” you said. “It’s in the Vatican. There were two weeks of frenzy on Fifth Avenue in St Patrick’s Cathedral in which people came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had it, gone, taken to their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even a glimpse of it now.”

  “And Lestat,” I said. “Where is he now?”

  “Paralyzed, silent,” you said. “Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans. He doesn’t move. He says nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her.”

  “Yes, I remember her.”

  “Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven and Hell, he doesn’t know the truth of it one way or the other—he tried to tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I’d written down the whole story for him, he passed within a few nights into this state.

  “His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietà, he and Gabrielle, in this abandoned convent and its chapel. His mind is closed, or worse—it’s empty.”

  I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off guard.

  “I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach,” you said. “And I must know if there are old ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of this world to which I’ve been admitted.”

  “You’re so forthright. You have no cunning.”

  “On the contrary. I conceal my keenest assets from you.” You gave me a slow, polite smile. “Your beauty rather confuses me. Are you used to this?”

  “Quite,” I said. “And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are old ones, ones no one knows or can explain. It’s rumored you’ve been with Maharet and Mekare, who are now the Eldest and the Fount from which we all spring. Obviously they’ve drawn back from us, from all the world, into some secret place, and have no taste for authority.”

  “You’re so very correct,” you said, “and my audience with them was beautiful but brief. They don’t want to rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the history of the world and her own physical descendants are in it—her own thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it—Maharet will never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of us.”

  “Yes,” I said, “in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has traced for thousands of years. I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn’t see us as evil—you, or me, or Lestat—she thinks that we’re natural, rather like volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike a man dead.”

  “Precisely,” you said. “There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one other immortal, and that’s your lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid down the strict rule before he left the others that no more blood drinkers could be made. I’m base-born in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman, those would be his words.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe he would harm you. Hasn’t he come to Lestat? Did he not come to see the Veil with his own eyes?”

  You said No to both questions.

  “Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as you have to me. Begin a conversation which he won’t have the confidence to bring to a close.”

  You smiled again. “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” you said.

  “But I don’t think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth, you’d be gone. What we have to fear is the same things humans fear—that there are others of our same species, of varying power and belief, and we are never entirely sure where they are or what they do. That’s my advice to you.”

  “You are so kind to take your time with me,” you said.

  I could have wept. “On the contrary. You don’t know the silence and solitude in which I wander, and pray you never know it, and here you’ve given me heat without death, you’ve given me nourishment without blood. I’m glad you’ve come.”

  I saw you
look up at the sky, the habit of the young ones.

  “I know, we have to part now.”

  You turned to me suddenly. “Meet me tomorrow night,” you said imploringly. “Let this exchange continue! I’ll come to you in the Café where you sit every night musing. I’ll find you. Let us talk to each other.”

  “So you’ve seen me there.”

  “Oh, often,” you said. “Yes.” You looked away again. I saw it was to conceal feeling. Then your dark eyes turned back to me.

  “Pandora, we have the world, don’t we?” you whispered.

  “I don’t know, David. But I’ll meet you tomorrow night. Why haven’t you come to me there? Where it was warm and lighted?”

  “It seemed a far more outrageous intrusion, to move in on you in the sanctified privacy of a crowded café. People go to such places to be alone, don’t they? This seemed somehow more proper. And I did not mean to be the voyeur. Like many fledglings, I have to feed every night. It was an accident that we saw each other at that moment.”

  “That is charming, David,” I said. “It is a long time since anyone has charmed me. I’ll meet you there . . . tomorrow night.”

  And then a wickedness possessed me. I came towards you and embraced you, knowing that the hardness and coldness of my ancient body would strike the deepest chord of terror in you, newborn as you were, passing so easily for mortal.

  But you didn’t draw back. And when I kissed your cheek, you kissed mine.

  I wonder now, as I sit here in the café, writing . . . trying to give you more with these words perhaps than you ask for . . . what I would have done had you not kissed me, had you shrunk back with the fear that is so common in the young.

  David, you are indeed a puzzle.

  You see that I have begun to chronicle not my life here, but what has passed these two nights between you and me.

  Allow this, David. Allow that I speak of you and me, and then perhaps I can retrieve my lost life.

  When you came into the café tonight, I thought nothing much about the notebooks. You had two. They were thick.

  The leather of the notebooks smelled good and old, and when you set them down on the table, only then did I detect a glimmer from your disciplined and restrained mind that they had to do with me.

  I had chosen this table in the crowded center of the room, as though I wanted to be in the middle of the whirlpool of mortal scent and activity. You seemed pleased, unafraid, utterly at home.

  You wore another stunning suit of modern cut with a full cape of worsted wool, very tasteful, yet Old World, and with your golden skin and radiant eyes, you turned the head of every woman in the place and you turned the heads of some of the men.

  You smiled. I must have seemed a snail to you beneath my cloak and hood, gold glasses covering well over half my face, and a trace of commercial lipstick on my lips, a soft purple pink that had made me think of bruises. It had seemed very enticing in the mirror at the store, and I liked that my mouth was something I didn’t have to hide. My lips are now almost colorless. With this lipstick I could smile.

  I wore these gloves of mine, black lace, with their sheared-off tips so that my fingers can feel, and I had sooted my nails so they would not sparkle like crystal in the Café. And I reached out my hand to you and you kissed it.

  There was your same boldness and decorum. And then the warmest smile from you, a smile in which I think your former physiology must have dominated because you looked far too wise for one so young and strong of build. I marveled at the perfect picture you had made of yourself.

  “You don’t know what a joy it is to me,” you said, “that you’ve come, that you’ve let me join you here at this table.”

  “You have made me want this,” I said, raising my hands, and seeing that your eyes were dazzled by my crystalline fingernails, in spite of the soot.

  I reached towards you, expecting you to pull back, but you entrusted to my cold white fingers your warm dark hand.

  “You find in me a living being?” I asked you.

  “Oh, yes, most definitely, most radiantly and perfectly a living being.”

  We ordered our coffee, as mortals expect us to do, deriving more pleasure from the heat and aroma than they could ever imagine, even stirring our little cups with our spoons. I had before me a red dessert. The dessert is still here of course. I ordered it simply because it was red—strawberries covered in syrup—with a strong sweet smell that bees would like.

  I smiled at your blandishments. I liked them.

  Playfully, I mocked them. I let my hood slip down and I shook out my hair so that its fullness and dark brown color could shimmer in the light.

  Of course it’s no signal to mortals, as is Marius’s blond hair or that of Lestat. But I love my own hair, I love the veil of it when it is down over my shoulders, and I loved what I saw in your eyes.

  “Somewhere deep inside me there is a woman,” I said.

  To write it now—in this notebook as I sit here alone—it gives architecture to a trivial moment, and seems so dire a confession.

  David, the more I write, the more the concept of narrative excites me, the more I believe in the weight of a coherence which is possible on the page though not in life.

  But again, I didn’t know I meant to pick up this pen of yours at all. We were talking:

  “Pandora, if anyone does not know you’re a woman, then he is a fool,” you said.

  “How angry Marius would be with me for being pleased by that,” I said. “Oh, no. Rather he would seize it as a strong point in favor of his position. I left him, left him without a word, the last time we were together—that was before Lestat went on his little escapade of running around in a human body, and long before he encountered Memnoch the Devil—I left Marius, and suddenly I wish I could reach him! I wish I could talk with him as you and I are talking now.”

  You looked so troubled for me, and with reason. On some level, you must have known that I had not evinced this much enthusiasm over anything in many a dreary year.

  “Would you write your story for me, Pandora?” you asked suddenly.

  I was totally surprised.

  “Write it in these notebooks?” you pressed. “Write about the time when you were alive, the time when you and Marius came together, write what you will of Marius. But it’s your story that I most want.”

  I was stunned.

  “Why in the world would you want this of me?” You didn’t answer.

  “David, surely you’ve not returned to that order of human beings, the Talamasca, they know too much—”

  You put up your hand.

  “No, and I will never; and if there was ever any doubt of it, I learnt it once and for all in the archives kept by Maharet.”

  “She allowed you to see her archives, the books she’s saved over the course of time?”

  “Yes, it was remarkable, you know . . . a storehouse of tablets, scrolls, parchments—books and poems from cultures of which the world knows nothing, I think. Books lost from time. Of course she forbade me to reveal anything I found or speak in detail of our meeting. She said it was too rash tampering with things, and she confirmed your fear that I might go to the Talamasca—my old mortal psychic friends. I have not. I will not. But it is a very easy vow to keep.”

  “Why so?”

  “Pandora, when I saw all those old writings—I knew I was no longer human. I knew that the history lying there to be collected was no longer mine! I am not one of these!” Your eyes swept the room. “Of course you must have heard this a thousand times from fledgling vampires! But you see, I had a fervent faith that philosophy and reason would make a bridge for me by which I could go and come in both worlds. Well, there is no bridge. It’s gone.”

  Your sadness shimmered about you, flashing in your young eyes and in the softness of your new flesh.

  “So you know that,” I said. I didn’t plan the words. But out they came. “You know.” I gave a soft bitter laugh.

  “Inde
ed I do. I knew when I held documents from your time, so many from your time, Imperial Rome, and other crumbling bits of inscribed rock I couldn’t even hope to place. I knew. I didn’t care about them, Pandora! I care about what we are, what we are now.”

  “How remarkable,” I said. “You don’t know how much I admire you, or how attractive is your disposition to me.”

  “I am happy to hear this,” you said. Then you leaned forward towards me: “I don’t say we do not carry our human souls with us, our history; of course we do.

  “I remember once a long time ago, Armand told me that he asked Lestat, ‘How will I ever understand the human race?’ Lestat said, ‘Read or see all the plays of Shakespeare and you will know all you ever need to know about the human race.’ Armand did it. He devoured the poems, he sat through the plays, he watched the brilliant new films with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo DiCaprio. And when Armand and I last spoke together, this is what he said of his education:

  “ ‘Lestat was right. He gave me not books but a passage into understanding. This man Shakespeare writes,’—and I quote both Armand and Shakespeare now as Armand spoke it, as I will to you—as if it came from my heart:

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle.

  Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more; it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.

  “ ‘This man writes this,’ said Armand to me, ‘and we all know that it is absolutely the truth and every revelation has sooner or later fallen before it, and yet we want to love the way he has said it, we want to hear it again! We want to remember it! We want to never forget a single word.’ ”