Pandora Page 3

  We were both silent for a moment. You looked down, you rested your chin on your knuckles. I knew the whole weight of Armand’s going into the sun was on you, and I had so loved your recitation of the words, and the words themselves.

  Finally, I said, “And this gives me pleasure. Think of it, pleasure. That you recite these words to me now.”

  You smiled.

  “I want to know now what we can learn,” you said. “I want to know what we can see! So I come to you, a Child of the Millennia, a vampire who drank from the Queen Akasha herself, one who has survived two thousand years. And I ask you, Pandora, please will you write for me, write your story, write what you will.”

  For a long moment I gave you no answer.

  Then I said sharply that I could not. But something had stirred in me. I saw and heard arguments and tirades of centuries ago, I saw the poet’s lifted light shine on eras I had known intimately out of love. Other eras I had never known, wandering, ignorant, a wraith.

  Yes, there was a tale to be written. There was. But at the moment I could not admit it.

  You were in misery, having thought of Armand, having remembered his walking into the morning sun. You mourned for Armand.

  “Was there any bond between you?” you asked. “Forgive me my boldness, but I mean was there any bond between you and Armand when you met, because Marius had given you both the Dark Gift? I know no jealousy exists, that I can feel. I wouldn’t bring up the very name Armand if I detected a hurt in you, but all else is an absence, a silence. Was there no bond?”

  “The bond is only grief. He went into the sun. And grief is absolutely the easiest and safest of bonds.”

  You laughed under your breath.

  “What can I do to make you consider my request? Have pity on me, Gracious Lady, entrust to me your song.”

  I smiled indulgently, but it was impossible, I thought.

  “It’s far too dissonant, my dear,” I said. “It’s far too—”

  I shut my eyes.

  I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

  Suddenly your eyes moved upwards. Your expression changed. It was almost as if you were deliberately trying to appear to enter a trance. Slowly you turned your head. You pointed, with your hand close to the table, then let your hand go lax.

  “What is it, David?” I said. “What are you seeing?”

  “Spirits, Pandora, ghosts.”

  You shuddered as if to clear your head.

  “But that’s unheard of,” I said. Yet I knew that he was telling the truth. “The Dark Gift takes away that power. Even the ancient witches, Maharet and Mekare, told us this, that once Akasha’s blood entered them, and they became vampires, they never heard or saw the spirits again. You’ve recently been with them. Did you tell them of this power?”

  He nodded. Obviously some loyalty bound him not to say that they did not have it. But I knew they did not. I saw it in his mind, and I had known it myself when I had encountered the ancient twins, the twins who had struck down the Queen of the Damned.

  “I can see spirits, Pandora,” you said with the most troubled expression. “I can see them anywhere if I try, and in some very specific places when they choose. Lestat saw the ghost of Roger, his victim in Memnoch the Devil.”

  “But that was an exception, a surge of love in the man’s soul that somehow defied death, or delayed the soul’s termination-something we can’t understand.”

  “I see spirits, but I haven’t come to burden you with this or frighten you.”

  “You must tell me more about this,” I said. “What did you see right now?”

  “A weak spirit. It couldn’t harm anyone. It’s one of those sad sad humans who does not know he’s dead. They are an atmosphere around the planet. The ‘earthbound’ is the name for them. But Pandora, I have more than that in myself to explore.” You continued:

  “Apparently each century yields a new kind of vampire, or let us say that our course of growth was not set in the beginning any more than the course of human beings. Some night perhaps I will tell you everything I see—these spirits who were never clear to me when I was mortal—I’ll tell you about something Armand confided to me, about the colors he saw when he took life, how the soul left body in waves of radiating color!”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  “I too see this,” you said.

  I could see it hurt you almost too much to speak of Armand.

  “But whatever possessed Armand to believe in the Veil?” I asked, suddenly amazed at my own passion. “Why did he go into the sun? How could such a thing kill Lestat’s reason and will? Veronica. Did they know the very name means Vera Ikon, that there was never any such person, that she could not be found by one drawn back to ancient Jerusalem on the day Christ carried his cross; she was a concoction of Priests. Didn’t they know?”

  I think I had taken the two notebooks in hand, for I looked down and I saw that I did indeed hold them. In fact, I clutched both of them to my breast and examined one of the pens.

  “Reason,” I whispered. “Oh, precious reason! And consciousness within a void.” I shook my head, smiling kindly at you. “And vampires who speak now with spirits! Humans who can travel from body to body.”

  I went on with a wholly unfamiliar energy.

  “A lively fashionable modern cult of angels, devotion thriving everywhere. And people rising from operating tables to speak of life after death, a tunnel, an embracing love! Oh, you have been created perhaps in an auspicious time! I don’t know what to make of it.”

  You were obviously quite impressed by these words, or rather the way that my perspective had been drawn from me. So was I.

  “I’ve only started,” you said, “and will keep company alike with brilliant Children of the Millennia and street-corner fortune tellers who deal out the cards of the Tarot. I’m eager to gaze into crystal balls and darkened mirrors. I’ll search now among those whom others dismiss as mad, or among us—among those like you, who have looked on something that they do not believe they should share! That’s it, isn’t it? But I ask you to share it. I’m finished with the ordinary human soul. I am finished with science and psychology, with microscopes and perhaps even with the telescopes aimed at the stars.”

  I was quite enthralled. How strongly you meant it. I could feel my face so warm with feeling for you as I looked at you. I think my mouth was slack with wonder.

  “I am a miracle unto myself,” you said. “I am immortal, and I want to learn about us! You have a tale to tell, you are ancient, and deeply broken. I feel love for you and cherish that it is what it is and nothing more.”

  “What a strange thing to say!”

  “Love.” You shrugged your shoulders. You looked up and then back at me for emphasis. “And it rained and it rained for millions of years, and the volcanoes boiled and the oceans cooled, and then there was love?” You shrugged to make a mock of the absurdity.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at your little gest. Too perfect, I thought. But I was suddenly so torn.

  “This is very unexpected,” I said. “Because if I do have a story, a very small story—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, my story—if I have one—is very much to the point. It’s linked to the very points you’ve made.”

  Suddenly something came over me. I laughed again softly.

  “I understand you!” I said. “Oh, not that you can see spirits, for that is a great subject unto itself.

  “But I see now the source of your strength. You have lived an entire human life. Unlike Marius, unlike me, you weren’t taken in your prime. You were taken near the moment of your natural death, and you will not settle for the adventures and faults of the earthbound! You are determined to forge ahead with the courage of one who has died of old age and then finds himself risen from the grave. You’ve kicked aside the funeral wreaths. You are ready for Mount Olympus, aren’t you?”

  “Or for Osiris in the depths of the darkness,” you said. �
��Or for the shades in Hades. Certainly I am ready for the spirits, for the vampires, for those who see the future and claim to know past lives, for you who have a stunning intellect encased beautifully, to endure for so many years, an intellect which has perhaps all but destroyed your heart.”

  I gasped.

  “Forgive me. That was not proper of me,” you said.

  “No, explain your meaning.”

  “You always take the hearts from the victims, isn’t it so? You want the heart.”

  “Perhaps. Don’t expect wisdom from me as it might come from Marius, or the ancient twins.”

  “You draw me to you,” you said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written—behind your silence and your suffering.”

  “You are too romantic, friend,” I said.

  You waited patiently. I think you could feel the tumult in me, the shivering of my soul in the face of so much new emotion.

  “It’s such a small story,” I said. I saw images, memories, moments, the stuff that can incite souls to action and creation. I saw the very faintest possibility of faith.

  I think you already knew the answer.

  You knew what I would do when I did not.

  You smiled discreetly, but you were eager and waiting.

  I looked at you and thought of trying to write it, write it all out . . .

  “You want me to leave now, don’t you?” you said. You rose, collected your rain-spattered coat and bent over gracefully to kiss my hand.

  My hands were clutching the notebooks.

  “No,” I said, “I can’t do it.”

  You made no immediate judgment.

  “Come back in two nights,” I said. “I promise you I will have your two notebooks for you, even if they are completely empty or only contain a better explanation of why I can’t retrieve my lost life. I won’t disappoint you. But expect nothing, except that I will come and I will put these books in your hands.”

  “Two nights,” you said, “and we meet here again.”

  In silence I watched you leave the Café.

  And now you see it has begun, David.

  And now you see, David, I have made our meeting the introduction to the story you asked me to tell.

  2

  PANDORA’S STORY

  WAS born in Rome, during the reign of Augustus Caesar, in the year that you now reckon to have been 15 B.C., or fifteen years “before Christ.” All the Roman history and Roman names I give here are accurate; I have not falsified them or made up stories or created false political events. Everything bears upon my ultimate fate and the fate of Marius. Nothing is included for love of the past.

  I have omitted my family name. I did this because my family has a history, and I cannot bring myself to connect their ancient reputations, deeds, epitaphs to this tale. Also Marius, when he confided in Lestat, did not give the full name of his Roman family. And I respect this and that also is not revealed.

  Augustus had been Emperor for over ten years, and it was a marvelous time to be an educated woman in Rome, women had immense freedom, and I had a rich Senator for a father, five prosperous brothers, and grew up Motherless but cherished by teams of Greek tutors and nurses who gave me everything I wanted.

  Now, if I really wanted to make this difficult for you, David, I’d write it in classical Latin. But I won’t. And I must tell you that, unlike you, I came by my education in English haphazardly, and certainly I never learnt it from Shakespeare’s plays.

  Indeed I have passed through many stages of the English language in my wanderings and in my reading, but the great majority of my true acquaintance with it has been in this century, and I am writing for you in colloquial English.

  There’s another reason for this, which I’m sure you’ll understand if you’ve read the modern translation of Petronius’s Satyricon or Juvenal’s satires. Very modern English is a really true equivalent to the Latin of my time.

  The formal letters of Imperial Rome won’t tell you this. But the graffiti scratched on the walls of Pompeii will make it obvious. We had a sophisticated tongue, countless clever verbal shortcuts and common expressions.

  I’m going to write, therefore, in the English which feels equivalent and natural to me.

  Let me say here quickly—while the action is at a halt—that I was never, as Marius said, a Greek Courtesan. I was living with such a pretense when Marius gave me the Dark Gift, and perhaps out of consideration for old mortal secrets he so described me. Or maybe it was contemptuous of him to style me this way. I don’t know.

  But Marius knew all about my Roman family, that it was a Senatorial family, as purely aristocratic and privileged as his own mortal family, and that my people dated back to the time of Romulus and Remus, the same as Marius’s mortal line. Marius did not succumb to me because I had “beautiful arms,” as he indicated to Lestat. This trivialization was perhaps provocative.

  I don’t hold anything against either of them, Marius or Lestat. I don’t know who got what wrong.

  My feeling for my Father is so great to this very night, as I sit in the café, writing for you, David, that I am astonished at the power of writing—of putting words to paper and bringing back so vividly to myself my Father’s loving face.

  My Father was to meet a terrible end. He did not deserve what happened to him. But some of our kinsmen survived and re-established our family in later times.

  My Father was rich, one of the true millionaires of that age, and his capital was invested widely. He was a soldier more often than required of him, a Senator, a thoughtful and quiet man by disposition. And after the terrors of the Civil War, he was a great supporter of Caesar Augustus and very much in the Emperor’s good graces.

  Of course he dreamed that the Roman Republic would come back; we all did But Augustus had brought unity and peace to the Empire.

  I met Augustus many times in my youth, and it was always at some crowded social function and of no consequence. He looked like his portraits; a lean man with a long thin nose, short hair, average face; he was rather rational and pragmatic by nature and not invested with any abnormal cruelty. He had no personal vanity.

  The poor man was really blessed that he couldn’t see into the future—that he had no inkling of all the horrors and madness that would begin with Tiberius, his successor, and go on for so long under other members of his family.

  Only in later times did I understand the full singularity and accomplishment of Augustus’s long reign. Was it forty-four years of peace throughout the cities of the Empire?

  Alas, to be born during this time was to be born during a time of creativity and prosperity, when Rome was caput mundi, or capital of the world. And when I look back on it, I realize what a powerful combination it was to have both tradition and vast sums of money; to have old values and new power.

  Our family life was conservative, strict, even a little dusty. And yet we had every luxury. My Father grew more quiet and conservative over the years. He enjoyed his grandchildren, who were born while he was still vigorous and active.

  Though he had fought principally in the Northern campaigns along the Rhine, he had been stationed in Syria for a while. He had studied in Athens. He had served so much and so well that he was being allowed an early retirement in the years during which I grew up, an early withdrawal from the social life that whirled around the Imperial Palace, though I did not realize this at me time.

  My five brothers came before me. So there was no “ritual Roman mourning” when I was born, as you hear tell of in Roman families when a girl comes into the world. Far from it.

  Five times my Father had stood in the atrium—the main enclosed courtyard, or peristyle, of our house with its pillars and stairs and grand marblework—five times he had stood there before the assembled family and held in his hands a newborn son, inspected it and then pronounced it perfect and fit to be reared as his own, as was his prerogative. Now, you know he had the power
of life and death over his sons from that moment on.

  If my Father hadn’t wanted these boys for any reason, he would have “exposed” them to die of starvation. It was against the law to steal such a child and make it a slave.

  Having five boys already, my Father was expected by some to get rid of me immediately. Who needs a girl? But my Father never exposed or rejected any of my Mother’s children.

  And by the time I arrived, I’m told, he cried for joy.

  “Thank the gods! A little darling.” I heard the story ad nauseam from my brothers, who, every time I acted up—did something unseemly frisky and wild—said sneeringly, “Thank the gods, a little darling!” It became charming goad.

  My Mother died when I was two, and all I recall of her are gentleness and sweetness. She’d lost as many children as she had birthed, and early death was typical enough. Her Epitaph was beautifully written by my Father, and her memory honored throughout my life. My Father never took another woman into the house. He slept with a few of the female slaves, but this was nothing unusual. My brothers did the same thing. This was common in a Roman household. My Father brought no new woman from another family to rule over me.

  There is no grief in me for my Mother because I was simply too young for it, and if I cried when my Mother did not come back, I don’t remember it.

  What I remember is having the run of a big old rectangular palatial Roman house, with many rectangular rooms built onto the main rectangle, one off another, the whole nestled in a huge garden high on the Palatine Hill. It was a house of marble floors and richly painted walls, the garden meandering and surrounding every room of it.

  I was the true jewel of my Father’s eye, and I remember having a marvelous time watching my brothers practice outside with their short broadswords, or listening as their tutors instructed them, and then having fine teachers of my own who taught me how to read the entire Aeneid of Virgil before I was five years old.

  I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them. I couldn’t have told you that nights ago, David. You’ve brought back something to me and I must make the admission. And I must not write too fast in this mortal café, lest human beings notice!