Read The Tale of the Body Thief Online
Authors: Anne Rice
The Tale of the Body Thief (6 page)
“Vampires with such faces?” I responded. “David, that is unfair. There are no
men
with such faces. There never were. Look at any of Rembrandt’s paintings. Absurd to believe that such people ever existed, let alone that Amsterdam was full of them in Rembrandt’s time, that every man or woman who ever darkened his door was an angel. No, it’s Rembrandt you see in these faces, and Rembrandt is immortal, of course.”
He smiled. “It’s not true what you’re saying. And what a desperate loneliness emanates from you. Don’t you see I can’t accept your gift, and if I did, what would you think of me? Would you still crave my company? Would I crave yours?”
I scarce heard these last words. I was staring at the painting, staring at these men who were indeed like angels. And a quiet anger had come over me, and I didn’t want to linger there anymore. I had forsworn the assault, yet he had defended himself against me. No, I should not have come.
Spy on him, yes, but not linger. And once again, I moved swiftly to go.
He was furious with me for doing it. I heard his voice ring out in the great empty space.
“Unfair of you to go like that! Positively rude of you to do it! Have you no honor? What about manners if there is no honor left?” And then he broke off, for I was nowhere near him, it was as if I’d vanished, and he was a man alone in the huge and cold museum speaking aloud to himself.
I was ashamed but too angry and bruised to go back to him,
though why, I didn’t know. What had I done to this being! How Marius would scold me for this.
I wandered about Amsterdam for hours, purloining some thick parchment writing paper of the kind I most like, and a fine-pointed pen of the automatic kind that spews black ink forever, and then I sought a noisy sinister little tavern in the old red-light district with its painted women and drugged vagabond youths, where I could work on a letter to David, unnoticed and undisturbed as long as I kept a mug of beer at my side.
I didn’t know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts.
You are right. It was despicable the way I left you. Worse, it was cowardly. I promise you that when we meet again, I shall let you say all you have to say.
I myself have this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us believe.
This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. And this accommodation used to be the measure of the elegance of theories … before the word “science” came to mean what it means today.
I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end.
But Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of men.
His skill was such—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole.
With each portrait he understood the grace and goodness of mankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and for wisdom which resides in every soul. His skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person himself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work.
At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become.
This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God’s saints.
But nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these.
Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God.
Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. He did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions, gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other animal in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire.
Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love.
Finally he lay on his deathbed. The Devil pranced about, gleefully,
ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. But the angels and saints cried to God to intervene.
“In all the world, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.”
And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage.
Well, he would bury the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man’s personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt’s true life, or what sort of person he was.
But the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, or set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artists. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time.
That is my theory of Rembrandt and those faces.
Now if I were mortal, I would write a novel about Rembrandt, on this theme. But I am not mortal. I cannot save my soul through art or Good Works. I am a creature like the Devil, with one difference. I love the paintings of Rembrandt!
Yet it breaks my heart to look at them. It broke my heart to see you there in the museum. And you are perfectly right that there are no vampires with faces like the saints of the Drapers’ Guild.
That’s why I left you so rudely in the museum. It was not the Devil’s Rage. It was merely sorrow.
Again, I promise you that next time we meet, I shall let you say all that you want to say.
I scribbled the number of my Paris agent on the bottom of this letter, along with the post address, as I had done in the past when writing to David though David had never replied.
Then I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, revisiting the paintings of
Rembrandt in the great collections of the world. I saw nothing in my travels to sway me in my belief in Rembrandt’s goodness. The pilgrimage proved penitential, for I clung to my fiction about Rembrandt. But I resolved anew never to bother David again.
Then I had the dream.
Tyger, tyger
… David in danger. I woke with a start in my chair in Louis’s little shack—as if I’d been shaken by a warning hand.
Night had almost ended in England. I had to hurry. But when I finally found David, he was in a quaint little tavern in a village in the Cotswolds which can only be reached by one narrow and treacherous road.
This was his home village, not far from his ancestral manor, I quickly divined from scanning those around him—a little one-street place of sixteenth-century buildings, housing shops and an inn now dependent upon the fickleness of tourists, which David had restored from his own pocket, and visited more and more often to escape his London life.
Positively eerie little spot!
All David was doing, however, was guzzling his beloved single-malt Scotch and scribbling drawings of the Devil on napkins. Mephistopheles with his lute? The homed Satan dancing under the light of the moon? It must have been his dejection I had sensed over the miles, or more truly the concern of those watching him. It was their image of him which I had caught.
I wanted so to talk to him. I didn’t dare to do it. I would have created too much of a stir in the little tavern, where the concerned old proprietor and his two hulking and silent nephews remained awake and smoking their odoriferous pipes only on account of the august presence of the local lord—who was getting as drunk as a lord.
For an hour, I had stood near, peering through the little window. Then I’d gone away.
Now—many, many months later—as the snow fell over London, as it fell in big silent flakes over the high facade of the Motherhouse of the Talamasca, I searched for him, in a dull weary state, thinking that there was no one in all the world whom I must see but him. I scanned the minds of the members, sleeping and awake. I roused them. I heard them come to attention as clearly as if they had snapped on their lights on rising from bed.
But I had what I wanted before they could shut me out.
David was gone to the manor house in the Cotswolds, somewhere, no doubt, in the vicinity of that curious little village with its quaint tavern.
Well, I could find it, couldn’t I? I went to seek him there.
The snow was falling ever more heavily as I traveled close to the earth, cold and angry, with all memory of the blood I’d drunk now wiped away.
Other dreams came back to me, as they always do in bitter winter, of the harsh and miserable snows of my mortal boyhood, of the chill stone rooms of my father’s castle, and of the little fire, and my great mastiffs snoring in the hay beside me, keeping me snug and warm.
Those dogs had been slain on my last wolf hunt.
I hated so to remember it, and yet it was always sweet to think I was there again—with the clean smell of the little fire and of those powerful dogs tumbled against me, and that I was alive, truly alive!—and the hunt had never taken place. I’d never gone to Paris, I’d never seduced the powerful and demented vampire Magnus. The little stone room was full of the good scent of the dogs, and I could sleep now beside them, and be safe.
At last I drew near to a small Elizabethan manor house in the mountains, a very beautiful stone structure of deep-pitched roofs and narrow gables, of deep-set thick glass windows, far smaller than the Motherhouse, yet very grand on its own scale.
Only one set of windows was lighted, and when I approached I saw that it was the library and David was there, seated by a great noisily burning fire.
He had his familiar leatherbound diary in his hand, and he was writing with an ink pen, very rapidly. He had no sense at all that he was being watched. Now and then he consulted another leatherbound book, on the table at his side. I could easily see that this was a Christian Bible, with its double columns of small print and the gilt edges of its pages, and the ribbon that marked his place.
With only a little effort I observed it was the Book of Genesis from which David was reading, and apparently making notes. There was his copy of
Faust
beside it. What on earth interested him in all this?
The room itself was lined with books. A single lamp burned over David’s shoulder. It was as many a library in northern climes—cozy
and inviting, with a low beamed ceiling, and big comfortable old leather chairs.
But what rendered it unusual were the relics of a life lived in another clime. There were his cherished mementos of those remembered years.
The mounted head of a spotted leopard was perched above the glowing fireplace. And the great black head of a buffalo was fixed to the far right wall. There were many small Hindu statues of bronze here and there on shelves and on tables. Small jewel-like Indian rugs lay on the brown carpet, before hearth and doorway and windows.
And the long flaming skin of his Bengal tiger lay sprawled in the very center of the room, its head carefully preserved, with glass eyes and those immense fangs which I had seen with such horrid vividness in my dream.
It was to this last trophy that David gave his full attention suddenly, and then taking his eyes off it with difficulty, went back to writing again. I tried to scan him. Nothing. Why had I bothered? Not even a glimmer of the mangrove forests where such a beast might have been slain. But once again he looked at the tiger, and then, forgetting his pen, sank deep into his thoughts.
Of course it comforted me merely to watch him, as it had always done. I glimpsed many framed photographs in the shadows—pictures of David when he’d been young, and many obviously taken of him in India before a lovely bungalow with deep porches and a high roof. Pictures of his mother and father. Pictures of him with the animals he’d killed. Did this explain my dream?
I ignored the snow falling all around me, covering my hair and my shoulders and even my loosely folded arms. Finally I stirred. There was only an hour before dawn.
I moved around the house, found a back door, commanded the latch to slide back, and entered the warm little low-ceilinged hall. Old wood in this place, soaked through and through with lacquers or oil. I laid my hands on the beams of the door and saw in a shimmer a great oak woodland full of sunlight, and then only the shadows surrounded me. I smelled the aroma of the distant fire.