What can a vampire do under such circumstances, but be patient?
I know Morris is trying to help, and he even called me Honey Love, but still I can’t forgive him. I know he’s lying there, right beside me, still wearing one of his stupid ties.
* * * *
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Mattie Brahen C.Y.C. (Certified Yenta Consultant) with the idiom of this story.
A VAMPIRE, by Luigi Capuana
“No, don’t laugh!” exclaimed Lelio Giorgi, interrupting himself.
“What do you mean don’t laugh?” replied Mongeri. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I didn’t used to believe in them…and I didn’t want to believe in them, either,” Giorgi responded. “I’ve come to you precisely to get an explanation of certain facts which could destroy my happiness, facts that have already troubled my reason extraordinarily.”
“Facts? You mean hallucinations. It means you’re sick and you need to take care of yourself. Hallucinations, yes, are facts, too; but what they represent can’t be found outside of ourselves, in reality. They are, to explain myself better, sensations that move from inside to the outside; a kind of projection from our organism. And so the eye sees that which it really does not see; the ear hears that which it really does not hear. Previous sensations, often accumulated unknowingly, re-awaken inside us, and organize themselves as in dreams. Why? How? We still don’t know.… And we dream (that is the correct expression) with our eyes open. You must distinguish. There are momentary, rapid hallucinations, which don’t imply any kind of organic or psychic disorder. Then there are persistent ones, and then…but, this isn’t the case with you.”
“Yes; mine and my wife’s!”
“You’re not understanding. The hallucinations that lunatics have are what we scientists call persistent. I don’t believe it’s necessary to explain myself with examples…The fact then that both of you are suffering from the same hallucination, and at the same time, is a simple case of induction. It’s probably you that are influencing your wife’s nervous system.”
“No; first it was her.”
“Then that means that your nervous system is weaker or has greater receptiveness… Don’t make such a face, my dear poet, at the sound of such of horrible vocabulary, which perhaps does not exist in your dictionaries. We find it comfortable and it serves us well.”
“If you had let me speak—”
“It’s better not to stir certain things up. You wanted a scientific explanation? Well then, in the name of science, I tell you that, for now, there isn’t any sort of explanation to give you. We’re in the hypothesis stage. We make one each day; today’s isn’t the same as yesterday’s; tomorrow’s won’t be the same as today’s. You must resign yourself. And just let it go, what’s happening to you and your wife and has happened to many others. It will pass. Is it that you care to know why and how it could have happened? Perhaps your dreams worry you?”
“If you would allow me to speak…”
“Please, speak, since you want to unburden yourself; but I tell you in advance that you’ll make it worse. The only way to overcome certain impressions is to distract yourself, to impose stronger impressions over them, distancing yourself from the places that likely contributed to producing them. One devil drives out another: it’s a very wise proverb.”
“We’ve tried that; it was useless. The first phenomenon, the initial manifestations happened in the country, at our villa in Foscolara. We ran away. But the same night that we arrived in the city…”
“It’s natural. What kind of distraction could your house have given you? You should have stayed away, stayed in hotels, a day here, a day there; run around all day going to churches, monuments, museums, theaters, and returned to the hotel at night tired, dead tired…”
“We did that too, but…”
“The two of you alone, I imagine. You should have found some friends to keep you company, a party…”
“We did that; it was useless. We took part in their happiness, sincerely, we were carefree. But as soon as we were alone—for of course, we couldn’t get them to sleep with us…”
“But where did you sleep, then? Now I don’t understand whether you speak of hallucinations or just dreams…”
“Enough with the hallucinations, with the dreams! We were awake, with our eyes wide open, with our senses and our spirits clear, like I am right now, trying to reason with you, and you insist on not allowing me.”
“As you wish.”
“I at least want to tell you the facts.”
“I know them, I can imagine them; all of the scientific books are chock full of them. There might be insignificant differences in the smallest details…they don’t count. The essential nature of the phenomenon doesn’t change.”
“You don’t even want to give me the satisfaction…?”
“A hundred times, if it will make you happy.”
“Frankly, you seem afraid.”
“Afraid of what? Wouldn’t that be something!”
“Afraid of having to change your opinion. I’ve told you: I don’t believe in ghosts. And what if, afterward, you were forced to believe in them?”
“Okay, yes; that would annoy me. You’re putting my back against the wall. Go ahead. Let’s hear these famous facts.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Lelio Giorgi with a huge sigh. “You are already aware of the unfortunate circumstances that forced me to seek my fortune in America. Luisa’s family opposed our marriage; they didn’t have faith in my talent; they even doubted that I was a poet. The one little volume of juvenile verses then published was my biggest disgrace. Not that I have published, or written anything, since then; but you yourself, just now, called me ‘my dear poet’! The label has been stuck to me ever since, almost as if it were written in indelible ink. Enough. They say there’s a God for drunks and for children. They need to add: And one for poets, too, since I have to pass for a poet.”
Mongeri said, “Just look at how literary the lot of you are. We always begin with the egg!”
“Don’t get impatient. Listen. During the three years that I lived in Buenos Aires, I never heard from Luisa. An inheritance from an uncle I had never met dropped out of the sky, I returned to Europe, ran to London…and with two hundred thousand lire from the Bank of England flew here…where the saddest disappointment awaited me. Luisa had been married for six months! The poor thing had had to give in to the pressures of her family. I swear I wasn’t far from doing something crazy. These details, you see, are not superfluous…I made the foolish mistake of writing a hot-headed letter and mailed it to her. I hadn’t foreseen that it might end up in her husband’s hands. The next day he presented himself at my house. I understood immediately the enormity of my act and told myself to be calm. He was calm, too.
“‘I’ve come to return your letter,’ he said. ‘I opened the envelope by mistake, not indiscretion; and it’s good that it happened this way. I have been assured that you are a gentleman. I respect your pain, but I hope you don’t wish to uselessly disturb my family’s peace. If you can find the strength to reflect on it, you will see that no one meant to cause you harm on purpose. We can’t escape certain destinies in life. You understand by now what your fate is. I tell you then, without arrogance, that I will defend my domestic happiness at any cost.’
He had gone pale while speaking, and his voice shook.
“Please forgive my imprudence,” I answered. “And, to reassure you, I tell you that I will leave for Paris tomorrow.”
“I must have been even paler than him; the words left my mouth with difficulty. He held out his hand to me; I shook it.
“And I kept my word. Six months later, I received a telegram from Luisa: ‘I am a widow. I still love you. And you?’ Her husband had been dead for two months. That’s how the world is: one man’s misfortune is another man’s happiness. At least, that’s what I selfishly thought.
“I felt like I had touched the sky on the night of my wedding and duri
ng the first few months of our marriage. We avoided, by tacit agreement, speaking of him. Luisa had destroyed all traces of him. Not out of ingratitude, since he would have done anything to make her happy; but because she feared that even a shadow of a memory, however insignificant, might upset me.
“She guessed right. At certain times, the thought that the body of my darling had been in full possession, however legitimate, of another, wrung my heart so that I shuddered from head to toe. I forced myself to hide it from her. Feminine intuition, however, often clouded Luisa’s beautiful eyes with melancholy. And so I saw her beaming with joy when she was sure of being able to announce that the fruit of our love was within her. I was to be a father. I remember it perfectly: we were drinking coffee, I was standing, she was sitting with a posture of sweet weariness. It was the first time a nod to the past escaped her lips. ‘I’m so happy,’ she exclaimed, ‘that this has only now happened!’
“I heard a loud knock at the door, as if someone were beating at it with his fist. We were startled. I ran to see, suspecting the heedlessness of a maid or servant; there was no one in the room next door.”
Mongeri said, “A crash, perhaps produced by the loss of heat in the wood, due to the season, would have sounded like the knock of a fist.”
“I gave such an explanation, seeing that Luisa was very troubled; but I wasn’t convinced. A strong sense of embarrassment, I don’t know how else to define it, had gotten a hold of me and I couldn’t succeed in hiding it. We waited for a few minutes. Nothing.
“From then on, however, I noticed that Luisa avoided being alone; the disturbance persisted in her, although she didn’t dare confess it to me, nor did I to ask her.”
Mongeri said, “And so, now I understand, you influenced each other unknowingly.”
“Not at all. A few days later I laughed at that foolish impression; and I attributed Luisa’s interesting state to the excess of nervous excitement in her actions. Then she seemed to calm down, too. She gave birth. After a few months, however, I realized that that sense of fear, even terror, had returned.
“One night, all of a sudden, she clutched at me, icy, trembling. ‘What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick?’ I asked her anxiously. ‘I’m scared. Didn’t you hear that?’ she said. ‘No.’ I replied.
“‘You didn’t hear that?’ she asked again the following night. ‘No,’ I said. But this time I did hear the faint sound of footsteps in the room, up and down, around the bed. I lifted my head, looked.
“She said, ‘I’m scared!…I’m scared!’
“For many nights, at exactly midnight, the same shuffling, that inexplicable coming and going, up and down, of an invisible person, around the bed. We expected it.”
Mongeri suggested, “And your heated fantasies did the rest.”
“You know me well; I’m not a man who excites easily. I was good, indeed, for Luisa; I tried giving factual explanations: echoes, reverberations of far-away sounds; idiosyncrasies in the construction of the house that made it strangely resonant…
“We returned to the city. But the next night, the phenomenon reproduced itself with greater force. Twice the foot of the bed was shaken violently. I jumped down to better observe it. Luisa, curled up under the blankets, stammered: ‘It’s him! It’s him!’”
“Excuse me,” Mongeri interrupted. “I’m not saying this to put any hard feelings between you and your wife, but I wouldn’t marry a widow for all the gold in the world! Some part of the dead husband always remains, despite everything, inside the widow. Yes. ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ Not, as your wife believes, the ghost of the dead man. It’s that him, that is that sensation, that impression of him that remains indelibly inside her body. We’re talking basic physiology.”
“It could be. But,” responded Lelio Giorgi, “what does your physiology have to do with me?”
“You’ve been influenced; now it’s clear, clear as day.”
“Only influenced at night? At a fixed hour?”
“Expectant attention, oh! You’re a prodigy.”
“And how come the phenomenon changes each time, with unexpected details, when my imagination doesn’t work to that extent?”
“So it seems to you. We’re not always aware of what goes on inside us. The unconscious! Eh! Eh! You’re a prodigy again.”
“Let me continue. Save your explanations until I’ve finished. Note that in the morning, during the day, we thought over the facts with relative tranquility. Luisa reminded me of what she had heard, to compare it with what I had heard, precisely to convince ourselves, as you say, that our overexcited imaginations had invented it, that awful joke. It turned out that we had heard the same identical sound of footsteps, in the same direction, now slow, now fast; the same shaking at the foot of the bed, the same tug at the blankets and under the same circumstances, that is when I tried, with a caress, or a kiss, to soothe her fear, to keep her from crying out: ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ it was almost as if that kiss, that caress were provoking anger in the invisible person.
“Then, one night, Luisa, clutching her neck, bringing her lips to my ear, whispered, in a tone of voice that startled me, ‘He spoke!’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘I couldn’t hear well…’ ‘What did you hear?’ ‘He said: “You’re mine!”’
“And even as I held her tightly to my chest, I could feel Luisa’s arms being pulled back violently by two powerful hands, someone interfering between me and her, someone who wanted to obstruct, at all costs, contact between us. I saw my wife thrown backwards, shoved. Then we heard the bars that the cradle hung from creaking, and the cradle rocked and wobbled, and the covers went flying across the room, thrown into the air…that wasn’t a hallucination. We gathered the covers; Luisa, trembling, put them back in place; but not long after they flew into the air again, and the baby, roused by the shaking, cried.
“Three nights ago, it got worse. Luisa seemed overpowered by his evil charm. She no longer heard me; if I called for her, she didn’t realize that I was in front of her. She talked to him and, from her responses, I understood what he was saying. ‘What fault is it of mine if you’re dead? Oh! No, no!… How can you think it? Me, poison you?… To rid myself of you?… How shameful! And the baby, what fault is it of his? You’re suffering? I’ll pray for you, I’ll have Masses said… You don’t want Masses?… You want me?… But how? You’re dead!…’
“In vain I shook her, I called to her to rouse her from her fixation, her hallucination. All of a sudden Luisa recomposed herself. ‘Did you hear that?’ she said to me, ‘They’re accusing me of poisoning him. You don’t believe it… You wouldn’t think me capable…oh God! And what will we do about the baby? He’ll kill him! Did you hear him?’ I hadn’t heard anything, but I understood perfectly well that Luisa wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t delirious. She cried, taking the baby out of the cradle and holding it very tightly to protect it from his evil. ‘What will we do? What will we do?’”
“But the baby was fine. This should have calmed you down.”
“What do you want? Even the most solid-headed person can’t witness something of that nature without being shaken. I’m not superstitious, but neither am I a free thinker. I’m the type that either believes or doesn’t believe, the type that isn’t interested in religious matters that I don’t have the time or the desire… But in my situation, and under the influence of my wife’s words, naturally I thought of having a priest intervene.”
“You had an exorcism?”
“No, but I had him bless the house, with lots of holy water scattered around…to make an impression on poor Luisa’s imagination, too, as if it were a case of exaggerated imagination, of upset nerves. Luisa is a believer. You laugh, but I’d like to have seen you in my shoes.”
“And the holy water?”
“Useless. As if it hadn’t been used.”
“It wasn’t a bad idea. At times science, too, resorts to similar methods in cases of nervous illness. We had a case of someone who believed his nose had grown enormously long. The doctor pret
ended to operate on him, with all of the instruments, tying up of veins, bandages…and the patient healed.”
“The holy water, instead, made it worse. The next night…Oh! I feel a shudder just thinking about it. Now all of his hatred was directed towards the baby… How to protect him? Soon Luisa saw…”
“Or she thought she saw…”
“She saw, my friend, she saw… I saw too, almost. Since my wife couldn’t get any closer to the cradle; a strange force blocked her…I trembled at the sight of her with her arms desolately reaching towards the cradle, while he—Luisa told me—stooped over the sleeping baby, was doing something terrible, mouth to mouth, as if he were sucking out its life, its blood… Three nights in a row the same nefarious operation was repeated and the baby, our dear little boy…he was no longer recognizable. Pale white, when he had been such a rosy child! As if he had really sucked out his blood; so incredibly wasted, in just three nights! Is this my imagination? Is it my imagination? You come and look.”
Mongeri was pensive for a few minutes, his head down, knitting his eyebrows. A somewhat sarcastic, somewhat compassionate smile had appeared on his lips while Lelio Giorgi spoke, but it had suddenly disappeared. Then he raised his eyes, looked at his friend, who was watching him and anxiously waiting, and repeated:
“Listen closely. I’m not going to explain anything to you, because I’m convinced that I can’t explain anything. It’s hard to be any more frank than this. But I can give you advice…empirical advice that might make you laugh, especially coming from me. Use it how you wish.”
“I’ll follow it today, right away.”
“It will take a few days, for several steps are required. I’ll help you get through them as quickly as possible. I don’t doubt the things that you have told me. I must add that, while science is reluctant to get involved with phenomena of such a nature, it has for a while now been less contemptuous than in the past: it is trying to restore these things to the realm of natural phenomena. For the past three years I have been studying the folk remedies of old women, peasants, to explain to myself what their value is. Quite often they heal what science doesn’t know how to heal. Do you know my opinion? These folk remedies are the remains, the fragments, of an ancient, secret science. These old women have retained some tips from natural medicine; and I think science should be paying attention to this fact, because in every superstition hides something that is not just a deceptive observation of ignorance… Please excuse my long digression. Some scientists now admit, that is, that with the apparent death of the individual, the functioning of individual existence doesn’t really cease until all of the elements have completely disintegrated. Popular superstition—for this is the word we use—has already divined it, in part, with its belief in Vampires, and it had divined the remedy. Vampires have a more persistent individuality than others… Don’t look at me like that! It’s a fact, and not so uncommon, that so-called popular superstition—or, better said—primitive divination could find itself in agreement with science. And do you know what the defense against the evil actions of Vampires is, these persistent individualities who believe they can prolong their existence by sucking the blood or vital essence from healthy people? To accelerate the destruction of their bodies. In the places where this happens, the old women run to the cemetery, dig up the corpse, and burn it. It’s proven then that the Vampire has really died; and in fact the phenomenon ceases. You say that your child…”
The Vampire Megapack Page 18