22 June
Yesterday was wonderful. At about four in the morning, Rafa turned up with his gang of three. Margarida, who was on guard duty, saw them come in and warned us straight away. As we had rehearsed it so often, our performance was perfect and the thieves legged it, terrified but alive. While Andreu rushed to ring the police, Jacqueline recognized Rafa running across the garden like a madman. Luscious she may be, but she kept as quiet as a mouse. I don’t think the police will catch them.
They soon came and changed the lock on the door, and Andreu has changed the combination on his safe as well as the alarm code. Jacqueline, who is still under sedation, has spent the whole day in bed.
Tonight, we’re throwing a big party to celebrate.
We are the best!
15 July
Jacqueline and Andreu’s lovemaking has considerably improved, particularly since she’s putting more into it now. They still spend little time at home, but when they are here it’s one interminable, cloying declaration of love. It makes some of us feel queasy.
The other novelty is that they have contracted a foreign butler who sleeps in the house and is licensed to carry weapons. He is a giant of a man and looks every inch a retired marine. According to Antoni-heart-attack, who has finally decided to come out of the closet, the butler is sexy, which explains why he and the maid are now humping.
The gardener suspects something and is beginning to feel riled. Ah, nothing like a good attack of jealousy to keep us entertained …!
2 August
A spanner in the works. The gardener also has a pistol and is very angry. He has seen that they’ve locked the door on him and is wondering whether to dispatch the butler and the maid to the other side in true Spanish-jealous-lover style. Then he will shoot himself. Big-time melodrama. And, from our point of view, highly inconvenient.
Just in case the gardener’s threats weren’t merely hot air, we met last night and decided (though Antoni-heart attack was opposed to the plan) that we’d all pay the butler a polite visit tonight to see whether we can’t scare the pants off him, so he disappears before something tragic happens. We have rehearsed our sequence.
Sorry, Paquita, but it would be the last straw if we were forced to cohabit eternally with the servants!
I’m a Vampire
I’m a vampire. One of the old guard. I can’t even remember how long it’s been. Nine hundred years, at the very least. But I have no complaints. Considering I’m a vampire, I’m in really good shape despite the centuries I’ve been around.
The vampire I once was and the one I am now share nothing in common. We are two different beings. I won’t deny I’ve committed all kinds of excesses in the course of my lengthy career, but with time I’ve learned to curb my natural instincts. You could say I’ve become a very restrained vampire. It’s true, circumstances didn’t give me much choice. I’ve proved to be an adaptable beast.
When I first turned into a vampire, I did the usual: slept by day, went out by night and sucked the blood of virgins … Nowadays, ever since I discovered sunblock and can venture out whenever I feel like it, I’m more of a day person. I have greater freedom of movement, and that has helped me change my habits and enjoy new experiences; though, naturally, in the heat of high summer I don’t act the fool; I stay put, prostrate in my crypt. Sun creams are all well and good; they cost the earth and leave grease everywhere, but a vampire without a single gram of melanin in his skin had better not take any risks. I’ve had a couple of upsets and don’t want to end up being singed like a sausage.
I was born and became a vampire in Savall, a village that’s now become an upmarket residential estate around a huge golf course. In the Middle Ages, when I was a youngster, Savall was a prosperous town, with a castle, a lord of the manor and a vampire. The lord of the manor and the vampire were one and the same, and the vassals were accustomed to the local feudal big shot – that is, yours truly – paying a night-time visit to suck the blood of their daughters. I still feel nostalgia for an era when virgins were reasonably easy to find and relations with the Church were good because the clergy were too busy burning heretics and expelling Jews, and left me to my own devices. What’s more, a vampire in the locality was good for tourism: we pedigree, classy vampires were much in demand. The people of Savall couldn’t complain: thanks to the gloomy air of my castle and the horrific stories they recounted about my misdeeds, the town was sitting on a regular gold mine.
The good folk of Savall soon accepted my nightly incursions and reacted phlegmatically. They never harassed me, and I in return sucked the blood of their daughters in moderation: very few died from my bites or were transformed into vampires. It’s a hassle when you have more than one sleeping in the same crypt, and as I’d had a couple of bad experiences, I made sure I stopped biting the girls the second they showed the first signs of transmuting. On the other hand, the peasants always struggled to get together the money to pay the dowries for their daughters, and in years when there was a bad harvest or taxes were hiked, they felt relieved when I took the odd one to the other side. Some were so grateful they even sent me a card and a basket of hams and fruit for Christmas.
Unfortunately, things changed in Savall with the onset of the age of industrialization and all that nonsense about Marxism, atheism and the death of God. Psychoanalysis also did its best to downgrade me; it dubbed me a childhood trauma or worse, and the townspeople began to lose their respect for me. As some had read the novel by Bram Stoker (an Irishman, I ask you!), one fine day they decided to set fire to the castle and crypt, and they’ve been in a shocking state ever since: I’m not what you’d call a handyman. In any case, since the time the Fascists decided I was an anarchist because of my cloak (which sported the traditional red and black), I’ve always been very wary. The bastards executed me and threw me in a common grave, but as we vampires only die when someone thrusts a stake through our hearts or if we expose our skin to the glare of the sun, I immediately revived and flew back to the crypt. I hid there, drinking rats’ blood and nibbling insects until the war ended. I survived the situation as best I could.
The fact is, I’ve become very refined over the centuries and have abandoned some unpopular practices. I’ve not sucked the blood of young girls for years, because I accept it’s not the done thing any more. It’s a barbaric custom. I survive by drinking the blood from the lambs and hens I keep in my yard, and, as all the small farmers have gone to live in the city after selling their land to the property developers, the Barcelona families who spend the summers and weekends here think I’m an eccentric and have invented a bunch of amusing anecdotes about me. That I run around stark naked when there’s a full moon – as if we vampires had nothing better to do. That I’m a crazy artist who fetches high prices in New York (I really should do something with those tubes of sun cream piling up in the kitchen garden). Some reckon I’m a failed fashion designer, no doubt because I’m still wearing the same clothes I wore a couple of centuries ago, and others think that I’m an ecologist. The yard and kitchen garden I had built next to the crypt when the Germans bombed the castle and I was left homeless are indeed misleading. The shed and kitchen garden are for show, since I sleep in the crypt and my stomach can’t cope with solids, but the yard and the animals are needed because I have to get my proteins from somewhere. All in all, my culinary habits aren’t as peculiar as you might think. Or what the hell do people think goes into their butifarra sausages?
Until quite recently, then, my non-life as a vampire was a tranquil affair, and mostly hassle-free. Nevertheless, it all almost went pear-shaped a few months ago, when something happened that really upset me and which, to tell the truth, I still find perplexing.
*
It all began one particularly hot August afternoon. It was almost twilight, and I’d gone out to fly because the crypt was like an oven and nobody could have stood it in there. As the chemist’s on the estate stays open till ten, I decided to pay a visit and buy a few tubes of sun cream. On my way to the
shop in the centre of the sparse collection of houses that the spin merchants like to call a “village”, I went down one of the avenues between the villas, which I like because the foliage of the plane trees is very thick and cool. While I was roaming, wondering what I should do next, I was surprised to see graffiti on the west-facing walls of one of the mansions and froze on the spot when I read it. Somebody had scrawled the word VAMPIRE in red paint.
I went around the house, scared stiff, and found a couple more bits of graffiti on the other garden wall. The first said SON OF A WHORE, and the second, YOU’RE A VAMPIRE, SORRIBES! My hair stood on end and I almost fainted. I could hardly believe my eyes: for the first time in many a century, a vampire from elsewhere had established himself in my territory (in fact, it’s not really mine, but I like to pretend it is).
That unknown vampire and I had something in common – my mother had also earned an honest crust exercising the oldest trade in the world – but that was our only similarity. To begin with, this fellow lived in an upmarket mansion and not in a crypt where you could have baked bread at noon. Secondly, this Sorribes was a nomadic vampire, or at least a vampire who liked to travel, which was in itself intriguing, because everyone knows we vampires are territorial creatures and that, other than in exceptional circumstances, we don’t like moving far, let alone going on holiday. We think that’s very vulgar. Besides, as tradition forces us to sleep inside a coffin and directly above the land of our ancestors, travelling is real torture, not to mention the fact we end up paying a fortune in excess baggage. If this guy Sorribes decided to spend his cash this way, that was his choice, but I was worried by the fact that the people living on the Savall golf complex had flushed him out.
The presence of a self-styled vampire in the area could be a problem that would have an impact on me and my routine non-existence. I didn’t know the habits of my colleague, and thus didn’t know if he was a New Vampire or if he implanted his fangs and donned his cloak at twilight before flying off in search of a maiden’s fresh blood. In any case, someone in Savall was clearly on the case. I decided to investigate, to be on the safe side.
As it was dinnertime and I was hungry, I forgot the sun cream and went back to the crypt and drank a lamb. While I was lying in my coffin digesting my meal, I thought up a strategy that would enable me to find out something without attracting too much attention or arousing the suspicions of my neighbours. I hadn’t assumed the shape of a bat for years, but after carefully weighing up all the options I concluded that the best strategy would be to try to slip discreetly in through a window and take a look around. Right away. Thinking I’d take advantage of the fact it was night and that the vampire must have abandoned his nest, I donned my cloak and flew off in the direction of the villa.
I soon discovered I had a problem. Getting my bearings wasn’t at all easy: there were too many aerials, satellite dishes and mobile phones sending out waves left, right and centre. We bats have very sensitive hearing, and my head soon felt like a football with all those waves bouncing around. After crashing into an electricity pole that knocked me out for a while, I decided to forget about flying and walk there like a normal person. As soon as I reached the mansion, I transformed myself back into a bat and started to look for a window so I could fly inside. After circling around and around, I was forced to accept that it was impossible to get in that way. The cunning bastard had air conditioning.
People used to sleep with their windows open in the summer, making it easy to creep in. New technology means that everyone sleeps with their windows shut when it’s hot, so there’s no way to get inside. Yet again defeated by the wonders of progress, I had to recover my human form and force an entry, a delicate operation that’s never been one of my fortes. What’s more, the mansion was full of alarms and security cameras, and finally I had to beat it before the police arrived. I clearly needed to try a different tactic.
The next morning, after I’d consulted my silk-lined pillow, I decided to speak to my friend Sebastià. Sebastià is a local Catalan policeman and we’ve known each other almost forever. As the residential estate has changed Savall into a desirable luxury golf complex and the wealthy are a bunch of paranoids, Sebastià drops by now and again on the pretext that he wants to see if I need anything and to check that all is in order. In fact, I know the summer holiday crowd think I’m rather offbeat and send Sebastià to keep tabs on me. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned.
Sebastià is a fine fellow. He may not be very bright, but he’s pleasant enough and full of common sense, a quality that’s been lacking in these parts recently. He usually comes in his jeep once a week, about 9 a.m., and eats breakfast with me. When he finishes his filled roll and beer (he’s theoretically on duty and isn’t allowed to drink, but he knows I won’t let on), we walk round the garden putting the world to rights. While he gossips, or complains that his wife spends too much with her credit card, I get him a bag of home-grown vegetables, which he says are very tasty because they’re so obviously organic. He insists on paying, I refuse to take his money, though I finally relent. To tell the truth, if it weren’t for Sebastià and his fondness for my vegetables, I don’t how I’d afford my tubes of sun cream.
Thanks to our conversations, I know that he usually goes to Barbes’s bar for a late-morning aperitif. Sebastià had already paid me his regular visit, so I decided to go and see him in the bar and try out my own skills as a detective.
They looked astounded when I walked in, because they know I never set foot in there. It’s a place I avoid, basically because it annoys me that I can’t drink alcohol and because Barbes has a huge mirror hanging over the counter and I’m afraid someone will notice I don’t have a reflection. He also has a few strings of garlic hanging up next to the mirror, either to spice up his cooking or to add a rustic touch, but that’s really not a problem, because all those stories they tell about vampires and garlic are pure supposition. It’s true we’re allergic to the sun, holy water and crosses, but garlic makes no odds. The only drawback is that if you sink a fang into the carotid artery of someone who’s been eating aioli or a garlicky gazpacho it’s really disgusting. The blood of garlic aficionados tastes awful and, what’s more, makes you belch something awful.
I ordered vermouth and olives as routinely as possible and sat next to Sebastià, who was also surprised to see me. I justified my presence by saying I was on my way to the chemist’s to buy painkillers because my back was hurting. We argued for a while about whether lumbago was more painful than kidney stones; the latter finally won out. Sebastià started talking about the water restrictions that locals were having to suffer because of the golf course, and the conversation immediately turned to the holiday crowd, their residential estate and the nuisance they caused. I easily steered it to what was concerning me and whether my friend knew anything about the new vampire who’d set up in town.
“Sebastià, what’s the meaning of the graffiti on the wall of the villa next to the duck pond?” I asked, as deadpan as can be.
“Ah, yes … The Sorribes family!” Sebastià sighed. “A vampire’s moved in, old boy!”
“You already know he’s a vampire?”
“Of course! As soon as he bought the villa, we knew what he was. What gets me,” Sebastià added, chewing an olive, “is that I now have to catch the idiots who painted the graffiti!”
“But if you know he’s a vampire, why not simply kick him out?” I asked, even more perplexed.
“I’d like to, you bet …” he chuckled. But then he suddenly got all serious and shouted, “These sons of bitches have no right to suck our blood!”
“What’s more, you’ve found him out. You know what he is. And thanks to the graffiti, everybody does.”
“I tell you, forget the fucking graffiti!” Then, lowering his voice to a whisper, Sebastià leaned forward. “I’d personally string him up by his balls in the middle of the town square. That would teach him and his ilk a lesson!”
I nodded. I understood how Sebastià was f
eeling, because in my heyday I used to drive people crazy and stir up similar feelings. Anyway, I decided not to tell him it wasn’t a good idea to string him up by the balls because he’d simply fly off.
“And is this fellow sucking your blood as well?” I’d heard of cases of vampires attacking sturdy, muscular men, but I’d always thought it must be a myth.
“Mine and the blood of everyone who’s got a mortgage!” He sighed yet again. “And if only it were just him! But you’re all right with your little house and garden. You’re set for life!”
“Are you sure there’s nothing you can do?” I insisted. “There must be a way to stop him in his tracks …”
Sebastià shrugged his shoulders and chewed another olive. “The Russians had a bash with their revolution, and look what happened! And the less said about Cuba the better.”
So this Sorribes had wrought havoc in Russia and Cuba, and I was totally oblivious. That was only to be expected; I read Cosmopolitan rather than the broadsheets.
“Do you reckon his wife and children are vampires as well?” I asked, determined to leave the bar as well informed as possible.
“You bet!” Sebastià responded, apparently totally convinced. “You’ve only got to see his wife strutting around the golf club, as if she were a duchess … And their children are vile. If I told you what they get up to at night …”
“I think I can imagine …”
“Those kids will be worse than their parents, you mark my words,” Sebastià concluded.
I conspicuously ate an olive and realized the whole bar was looking at us. I judged it sensible to change tack and talk about more mundane matters while pouring my vermouth on the sly into the pot with the rubber plant, which immediately perked up. When it came to the bill, Sebastià insisted on paying, and, as I’m always broke, I made a token protest but let him do the honours.
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories Page 6