The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  “I’m not sure I agree with you. In fact, I’m fairly sure that I don’t. I have to spend my life trying to alleviate misery. Believe me, I have been through all these arguments many times before.”

  “Ah, but to choose nursing over music,” I said. “It’s unfathomable to me. Of course nursing is good.” I was too saddened and confused to continue. “How did you make the actual choice?” I asked. “Didn’t the family try to stop you?”

  She went on to explain. When she was sixteen, her mother took ill, and for months no one could determine the cause of her illness. Her mother was anemic; she ran a constant fever; finally it was obvious she was wasting away. Tests were made, but the doctors could find no explanation. Everyone felt certain that her mother was going to die. The atmosphere of the house had been poisoned with grief and even bitterness.

  “I asked God for a miracle,” she said. “I promised I would never touch the piano keys again as long as I lived, if God would only save my mother. I promised I would enter the convent as soon as I was allowed—that I would devote my life to nursing the sick and the dying.”

  “And your mother was cured.”

  “Yes. Within a month she was completely recovered. She’s alive now. She’s retired, she tutors children after school—in a storefront in a black section of Chicago. She has never been sick since, in any way.”

  “And you kept the promise?”

  She nodded. “I went into the Missionary Sisters when I was seventeen and they sent me to college.”

  “And you kept this promise never to touch the piano again?”

  She nodded. There was not a trace of regret in her, nor was there a great longing or need for my understanding or approval. In fact, I knew my sadness was obvious to her, and that, if anything, she felt a little concerned for me.

  “Were you happy in the convent?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with a little shrug. “Don’t you see? An ordinary life is impossible for someone like me. I have to be doing something hard. I have to be taking risks. I entered this religious order because their missions were in the most remote and treacherous areas of South America. I can’t tell you how I love those jungles!” Her voice became low and almost urgent. “They can’t be hot enough or dangerous enough for me. There are moments when we’re all overworked and tired, when the hospital’s overcrowded and the sick children are bedded down outside under lean-tos and in hammocks and I feel so alive! I can’t tell you. I stop maybe long enough to wipe the sweat off my face, to wash my hands, to perhaps drink a glass of water. And I think: I’m alive; I’m here. I’m doing what matters.”

  Again she smiled. “It’s another kind of intensity,” I said, “something wholly unlike the making of music. I see the crucial difference.”

  I thought of David’s words to me about his early life—how he had sought the thrill in danger. She was seeking the thrill in utter self-sacrifice. He had sought the danger of the occult in Brazil. She sought the hard challenge of bringing health to thousands of the nameless, and the eternally poor. This troubled me deeply.

  “There’s a vanity in it too, of course,” she said. “Vanity is always the enemy. That’s what troubled me the most about my … my chastity,” she explained, “the pride I felt in it. But you see, even coming back like this to the States was a risk. I was terrified when I got off the plane, when I realized I was here in Georgetown and nothing could stop me from being with a man if I wanted it. I think I went to work at the hospital out of fear. God knows, freedom isn’t simple.”

  “This part I understand,” I said. “But your family, how did they respond to this promise you made, to your giving up the music?”

  “They didn’t know at the time. I didn’t tell them. I announced my vocation. I stuck to my guns. There was a lot of recrimination. After all, my sisters and brothers had worn secondhand clothes so I could have piano lessons. But this is often the case. Even in a good Catholic family, the news that a daughter wants to be a nun is not always greeted with cheers and accolades.”

  “They grieved for your talent,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, they did,” she said with a slight lift of her eyebrows. How honest and tranquil she seemed. None of this was said with coldness or hardness. “But I had a vision of something vastly more important than a young woman on a concert stage, rising from the piano bench to collect a bouquet of roses. It was a long time before I told them about the promise.”

  “Years later?”

  She nodded. “They understood. They saw the miracle. How could they help it? I told them I’d been more fortunate than anyone I knew who had ever gone into the convent. I’d had a clear sign from God. He had resolved all conflicts for all of us.”

  “You believe this.”

  “Yes. I do,” she said. “But in a way, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. And if anyone should understand, you should.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you speak of religious truths and religious ideas and you know that they matter even if they are only metaphors. This is what I heard in you even when you were delirious.”

  I sighed. “Don’t you ever want to play the piano again? Don’t you ever want to find an empty auditorium, perhaps, with a piano on the stage, and just sit down and …”

  “Of course I do. But I can’t do it, and I won’t do it.” Her smile now was truly beautiful.

  “Gretchen, in a way this is a terrible story,” I said. “Why, as a good Catholic girl couldn’t you have seen your musical talent as a gift from God, a gift not to be wasted?”

  “It was from God, I knew it was. But don’t you see? There was a fork in the road; the sacrifice of the piano was the opportunity that God gave me to serve Him in a special way. Lestat, what could the music have meant compared to the act of helping people, hundreds of people?”

  I shook my head. “I think the music can be seen as equally important.”

  She thought for a long while before she answered. “I couldn’t continue with it,” she said. “Perhaps I used the crisis of my mother’s illness, I don’t know. I had to become a nurse. There was no other way for me. The simple truth is—I cannot live when I am faced with the misery in the world. I cannot justify comfort or pleasure when other people are suffering. I don’t know how anyone can.”

  “Surely you don’t think you can change it all, Gretchen.”

  “No, but I can spend my life affecting many, many individual lives. That’s what counts.”

  This story so upset me that I couldn’t remain seated there. I stood up, stretching my stiff legs, and I went to the window and looked out at the field of snow.

  It would have been easy to dismiss it had she been a sorrowful or mentally crippled person, or a person of dire conflict and instability. But nothing seemed farther from the truth. I found her almost unfathomable.

  She was as alien to me as my mortal friend Nicolas had been so many, many decades ago, not because she was like him. But because his cynicism and sneering and eternal rebellion had contained an abnegation of self which I couldn’t really understand. My Nicki—so full of seeming eccentricity and excess, yet deriving satisfaction from what he did only because it pricked others.

  Abnegation of self—that was the heart of it.

  I turned around. She was merely watching me. I had the distinct feeling again that it didn’t matter much to her what I said. She didn’t require my understanding. In a way, she was one of the strongest people I’d encountered in all my long life.

  It was no wonder she took me out of the hospital; another nurse might not have assumed such a burden at all.

  “Gretchen,” I asked, “you’re never afraid that your life has been wasted—that sickness and suffering will simply go on long after you’ve left the earth, and what you’ve done will mean nothing in the larger scheme?”

  “Lestat,” she said, “it is the larger scheme which means nothing.” Her eyes were wide and clear. “It is the small act which means all. Of course sickness and suffering will cont
inue after I’m gone. But what’s important is that I have done all I can. That’s my triumph, and my vanity. That’s my vocation and my sin of pride. That is my brand of heroism.”

  “But, chérie, it works that way only if someone is keeping score—if some Supreme Being will ratify your decision, or you’ll be rewarded for what you’ve done, or at least upheld.”

  “No,” she said, choosing her words thoughtfully as she proceeded. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. Think of what I’ve said. I’m telling you something that is obviously new to you. Maybe it’s a religious secret.”

  “How so?”

  “There are many nights when I lie awake, fully aware that there may be no personal God, and that the suffering of the children I see every day in our hospitals will never be balanced or redeemed. I think of those old arguments—you know, how can God justify the suffering of a child? Dostoevsky asked that question. So did the French writer Albert Camus. We ourselves are always asking it. But it doesn’t ultimately matter.

  “God may or may not exist. But misery is real. It is absolutely real, and utterly undeniable. And in that reality lies my commitment—the core of my faith. I have to do something about it!”

  “And at the hour of your death, if there is no God …”

  “So be it. I will know that I did what I could. The hour of my death could be now.” She gave a little shrug. “I wouldn’t feel any different.”

  “This is why you feel no guilt for our being there in the bed together.”

  She considered. “Guilt? I feel happiness when I think of it. Don’t you know what you’ve done for me?” She waited, and slowly her eyes filled with tears. “I came here to meet you, to be with you,” she said, her voice thickening. “And I can go back to the mission now.”

  She bowed her head, and slowly, silently regained her calm, her eyes clearing. Then she looked up and spoke again.

  “When you spoke of making this child, Claudia … when you spoke of bringing your mother, Gabrielle, into your world … you spoke of reaching for something. Would you call it a transcendence? When I work until I drop in the mission hospital, I transcend. I transcend doubt and something … something perhaps hopeless and black inside myself. I don’t know.”

  “Hopeless and black, yes, that’s the key, isn’t it? The music didn’t make this go away.”

  “Yes, it did, but it was false.”

  “Why false? Why was doing that good—playing the piano—false?”

  “Because it didn’t do enough for others, that’s why.”

  “Oh, but it did. It gave them pleasure, it had to.”

  “Pleasure?”

  “Forgive me, I’m choosing the wrong tack. You’ve lost yourself in your vocation. When you played the piano, you were yourself—don’t you see? You were the unique Gretchen! It was the very meaning of the word ‘virtuoso.’ And you wanted to lose yourself.”

  “I think you’re right. The music simply wasn’t my way.”

  “Oh, Gretchen, you frighten me!”

  “But I shouldn’t frighten you. I’m not saying the other way was wrong. If you did good with your music—your rock singing, this brief career you described—it was the good you could do. I do good my way, that’s all.”

  “No, there’s some fierce self-denial in you. You’re hungry for love the way I starve night after night for blood. You punish yourself in your nursing, denying your carnal desires, and your love of music, and all the things of the world which are like music. You are a virtuoso, a virtuoso of your own pain.”

  “You’re wrong, Lestat,” she said with another little smile, and a shake of her head. “You know that’s not true. It’s what you want to believe about someone like me. Lestat, listen to me. If all you’ve told me is true, isn’t it obvious in light of that truth that you were meant to meet me?”

  “How so?”

  “Come here, sit with me and talk to me.”

  I don’t know why I hesitated, why I was afraid. Finally I came back to the blanket and sat down opposite, crossing my legs. I leaned back against the side of the bookcase.

  “Don’t you see?” she asked. “I represent a contrary way, a way you haven’t ever considered, and one which might bring you the very consolation you seek.”

  “Gretchen, you don’t believe for a moment that I’ve told the truth about myself. You can’t. I don’t expect you to.”

  “I do believe you! Every word you’ve said. And the literal truth is unimportant. You seek something that the saints sought when they renounced their normal lives, when they blundered into the service of Christ. And never mind that you don’t believe in Christ. It’s unimportant. What is important is that you have been miserable in the existence you’ve lived until now, miserable to the point of madness, and that my way would offer you an alternative.”

  “You’re speaking of this for me?” I asked.

  “Of course I am. Don’t you see the pattern? You come down into this body; you fall into my hands; you give me the moment of love I require. But what have I given you? What is my meaning for you?”

  She raised her hand for quiet.

  “No, don’t speak of larger schemes again. Don’t ask if there is a literal God. Think on all I’ve said. I’ve said it for myself, but also for you. How many lives have you taken in this otherworldly existence of yours? How many lives have I saved—literally saved—in the missions?”

  I was ready to deny the entire possibility, when suddenly it occurred to me to wait, to be silent, and merely to consider.

  The chilling thought came to me again that I might never recover my preternatural body, that I might be trapped in this flesh all my life. If I couldn’t catch the Body Thief, if I couldn’t get the others to help me, the death I said I wanted would indeed be mine in time. I had fallen back into time.

  And what if there was a scheme to it? What if there was a destiny? And I spent that mortal life working as Gretchen worked, devoting my entire physical and spiritual being to others? What if I simply went with her back to her jungle outpost? Oh, not as her lover, of course. Such things as that were not meant for her, obviously. But what if I went as her assistant, her helper? What if I sank my mortal life into that very frame of self-sacrifice?

  Again, I forced myself to remain quiet, to see it.

  Of course there was an added capability of which she knew nothing—the wealth I could bestow upon her mission, upon missions like it. And though this wealth was so vast some men could not have calculated it, I could calculate it. I could see in a large incandescent vision its limits, its effects. Whole village populations fed and clothed, hospitals stocked with medicines, schools furnished with books and blackboards and radios and pianos. Yes, pianos. Oh, this was an old, old tale. This was an old, old dream.

  I remained quiet as I considered it. I saw the moments of each day of my mortal life—my possible mortal life—spent along with every bit of my fortune upon this dream. I saw this as if it were sand sliding through the narrow center of an hourglass.

  Why, at this very minute, as we sat here in this clean little room, people starved in the great slums of the Eastern world. They starved in Africa. Worldwide, they perished from disease and from disaster. Floods washed away their dwellings; drought shriveled their food and their hopes. The misery of even one country was more than the mind could endure, were it described in even vague detail.

  But even if everything I possessed I gave to this endeavor, what would I have accomplished in the final analysis?

  How could I even know that modern medicine in a jungle village was better than the old way? How could I know that the education given a jungle child spelt happiness for it? How could I know that any of this was worth the loss of myself? How could I make myself care whether it was or not! That was the horror.

  I didn’t care. I could weep for any individual soul who suffered, yes, but about sacrificing my life to the nameless millions of the world, I couldn’t care! In fact, it filled me with dread, terrible dark dread. It was sad beyon
d sad. It seemed no life at all. It seemed the very opposite of transcendence.

  I shook my head. In a low stammering voice I explained to her why this vision frightened me so much.

  “Centuries ago, when I first stood on the little boulevard stage in Paris—when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause—I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.

  “Oh, there were other actors, worse and better; other singers; other clowns; there have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the mind of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment I can really understand: the kind of accomplishment in which the self—this self, if you will—is utterly whole and triumphant.

  “Yes, I could have been a saint, you are right, but I would have had to found a religious order or lead an army into battle; I would have had to work miracles of such scope that the whole world would have been brought to its knees. I am one who must dare even if I’m wrong—completely wrong. Gretchen, God gave me an individual soul and I cannot bury it.”

  I was amazed to see that she was still smiling at me, softly and unquestioningly, and that her face was full of calm wonder.

  “Better to reign in hell,” she asked carefully, “than to serve in heaven?”

  “Oh, no. I would make heaven on earth if I could. But I must raise my voice; I must shine; and I must reach for the very ecstasy that you’ve denied—the very intensity from which you fled! That to me is transcendence! When I made Claudia, blundering error that it was—yes, it was transcendence. When I made Gabrielle, wicked as it seemed, yes, it was transcendence. It was a single, powerful, and horrifying act, which wrung from me all my unique power and daring. They shall not die, I said, yes, perhaps the very words you use to the village children.

  “But it was to bring them into my unnatural world that I uttered these words. The goal was not merely to save, but to make of them what I was—a unique and terrible being. It was to confer upon them the very individuality I cherished. We shall live, even in this state called living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy those who would judge us and destroy us. That was my transcendence. And self-sacrifice and redemption had no part in it.”