The Tale of the Body Thief (37 page)

I laughed. “Dearest Gretchen, you’re misunderstanding me in a crucial way. But then again, maybe you aren’t. If I believed in God, if I believed in salvation, then I suppose I would have to be a saint.”

She reflected for a long time, then she told me in a low voice that she had taken a leave of absence from the foreign missions only a month ago. She had come up from French Guiana to Georgetown to study at the university, and she worked only as a volunteer at the hospital. “Do you know the real reason why I took the leave of absence?” she asked me.

“No; tell me.”

“I wanted to know a man. The warmth of being close to a man. Just once, I wanted to know it. I’m forty years old, and I’ve never known a man. You spoke of moral abhorrence. You used those words. I had an abhorrence for my virginity—of the sheer perfection of my chastity. It seemed, no matter what one believed, to be a cowardly thing.”

“I understand,” I said. “Surely to do good in the missions has nothing to do, finally, with chastity.”

“No, they are connected,” she said. “But only because hard work is possible when one is single-minded, and married to no one but Christ.”

I confessed I knew what she meant. “But if the self-denial becomes an obstacle to work,” I said, “then it’s better to know the love of a man, isn’t it?”

“That is what I thought,” she said. “Yes. Know this experience, and then return to God’s work.”

“Exactly.”

In a slow dreamy voice, she said: “I’ve been looking for the man. For the moment.”

“That’s the answer, then, as to why you brought me here.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “God knows, I was so frightened of everyone else. I’m not frightened of you.” She looked at me as if her own words had left her surprised.

“Come, lie down and sleep. There’s time for me to heal and for you to be certain it’s what you really want. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you, of doing anything cruel to you.”

“But why, if you’re the devil, can you speak with such kindness?”

“I told you, that’s the mystery. Or it’s the answer, one or the other. Come, come lie beside me.”

I closed my eyes. I felt her climbing beneath the covers, the warm pressure of her body beside me, her arm slipping across my chest.

“You know,” I said, “this is almost good, this aspect of being human.”

I was half asleep when I heard her whisper:

“I think there’s a reason you took
your
leave of absence,” she said. “You may not know it.”

“Surely you don’t believe me,” I murmured, the words running together sluggishly. How delicious it was to slip my arm around her again, to tuck her head against my neck. I was kissing her hair, loving the soft springiness of it against my lips.

“There is a secret reason you came down to earth,” she said, “that you came into the body of a man. Same reason that Christ did it.”

“And that is?”

“Redemption,” she said.

“Ah, yes, to be saved. Now wouldn’t that be lovely?”

I wanted to say more, how perfectly impossible it was to even consider such a thing, but I was sliding away, into a dream. And I knew that Claudia would not be there.

Maybe it wasn’t a dream after all, only a memory. I was with David in the Rijksmuseum and we were looking at the great painting by Rembrandt.

To be saved. What a thought, what a lovely, extravagant, and
impossible thought … How nice to have found the one mortal woman in all the world who would seriously think of such a thing.

And Claudia wasn’t laughing anymore. Because Claudia was dead.

E
ARLY morning, just before the sun comes. The time when in the past I was often in meditation, tired, and half in love with the changing sky.

I bathed slowly and carefully, the small bathroom full of dim light and steam around me. My head was clear, and I felt happiness, as if the sheer respite from sickness was a form of joy. I shaved my face slowly, until it was perfectly smooth, and then, delving into the little cabinet behind the mirror, I found what I wanted—the little rubber sheaths that would keep her safe from me, from my planting a child within her, from this body giving her some other dark seed that might harm her in ways I could not foresee.

Curious little objects, these—gloves for the organ. I would love to have thrown them away, but I was determined that I would not make the mistakes I had made before.

Silently, I shut the little mirror door. And only then did I see a telegram message taped above it—a rectangle of yellowed paper with the words in pale indistinct print:

The date of the communication was very recent—only a few days before. And the origin was Caracas, Venezuela.

I approached the bed, careful not to make a sound, and I laid the small safety devices on the table in readiness, and I lay with her again, and began to kiss her tender sleeping mouth.

Slowly, I kissed her cheeks, and the flesh beneath her eyes. I wanted to feel her eyelashes through my lips. I wanted to feel the flesh of her throat. Not for killing, but for kissing; not for possession, but
for this brief physical union that will take nothing from either one of us; yet bring us together in a pleasure so acute it is like pain.

She waked slowly under my touch.

“Trust in me,” I whispered. “I won’t hurt you.”

“Oh, but I want you to hurt me,” she said in my ear.

Gently, I pulled the flannel gown off her. She lay back looking up at me, her breasts as fair as the rest of her, the areolas of her nipples very small and pink and the nipples themselves hard. Her belly was smooth, her hips broad. A lovely dark shadow of brown hair lay between her legs, glistening in the light coming through the windows. I bent down and kissed this hair. I kissed her thighs, parting her legs with my hand, until the warm inside flesh was open to me, and my organ was stiff and ready. I looked at the secret place there, folded and demure and a dark pink in its soft veil of down. A coarse warm excitement went through me, further hardening the organ. I might have forced her, so urgent was the feeling.

But no, not this time.

I moved up, beside her, turning her face to me, and accepting her kisses now, slow and awkward and fumbling. I felt her leg pressed against mine, and her hands moving over me, seeking the warmth beneath my armpits, and the damp nether hair of this male body, thick and dark. It was my body, ready for her and waiting. This, my chest, which she touched, seeming to love its hardness. My arms, which she kissed as if she prized their strength.

The passion in me ebbed slightly, only to grow hot again instantly, and then to die down again, waiting, and then to rise once more.

No thoughts came to me of the blood drinking; no thought at all of the thunder of the life inside her which I might have consumed, a dark draught, at another time. Rather the moment was perfumed with the soft heat of her living flesh. And it seemed vile that anything could harm her, anything mar the common mystery of her—of her trust and her yearning and her deep and common fear.

I let my hand slip down to the little doorway; how sorry and sad that this union would be so partial, so brief.

Then, as my fingers gently tried the virgin passage, her body caught fire. Her breasts seemed to swell against me, and I felt her open, petal by petal, as her mouth grew harder against my mouth.

But what of the dangers: didn’t she care about them? In her new
passion, she seemed heedless, and completely under my command. I forced myself to stop, to remove the little sheath from its packet, and to roll it up and over the organ, as her passive eyes remained fixed on me, as if she no longer had a will of her own.

It was this surrender that she needed, it was what she required of herself. Once again, I fell to kissing her. She was moist and ready for me. I could keep it back no longer, and when I rode her now, it was hard. The little passage was snug and maddeningly heated as its juices flowed. I saw the blood come up into her face as the rhythm quickened; I bent my lips to lick at her nipples, to claim her mouth again. When the final moan came out of her, it was like the moan of pain. And there it was again, the mystery—that something could be so perfectly finished, and complete, and have lasted such a little while. Such a precious little while.

Had it been union? Were we one with each other in this clamorous silence?

I don’t think that it was union. On the contrary, it seemed the most violent of separations: two contrary beings flung at each other in heat and clumsiness, in trust and in menace, the feelings of each unknowable and unfathomable to the other—its sweetness terrible as its brevity; its loneliness hurtful as its undeniable fire.

And never had she looked so frail to me as she did now, her eyes closed, her head turned into the pillow, her breasts no longer heaving but very still. It seemed an image to provoke violence—to beckon to the most wanton cruelty in a male heart.

Why was this so?

I didn’t want any other mortal to touch her!

I didn’t want her own guilt to touch her. I didn’t want regret to hurt her, or for any of the evils of the human mind to come near her.

And only now did I think of the Dark Gift again, and not of Claudia, but of the sweet throbbing splendour in the making of Gabrielle. Gabrielle had never looked back from that long-ago moment. Clad in strength and certainty, she had begun her wandering, never suffering an hour’s moral torment as the endless complexities of the great world drew her on.

But who could say what the Dark Blood would give to any one human soul? And this, a virtuous woman, a believer in old and merciless deities, drunk on the blood of martyrs and the heady suffering of
a thousand saints. Surely she would never ask for the Dark Gift or accept it, any more than David would.

But what did such questions matter until she knew the words I spoke were true? And what if I could never prove their truth to her? What if I never had the Dark Blood again inside me to give anyone and I remained forever trapped in this mortal flesh? I lay quiet, watching the sunlight fill the room. I watched it strike the tiny body of the crucified Christ above her bookshelf; I watched it fall upon the Virgin with her bowed head.

Snuggled against each other, we slept again.

N
OON. I was dressed in the clean new clothes which I had bought on that last fateful day of my wandering—soft white pullover shirt with long sleeves, fashionably faded denim pants.

We had made a picnic of sorts before the warm crackling little fire—a white blanket spread out on the carpet, on which we sat having our late breakfast together, as Mojo dined sloppily and greedily in his own fashion on the kitchen floor. It was French bread and butter again, and orange juice, and boiled eggs, and the fruit in big slices. I was eating hungrily, ignoring her warnings that I was not entirely well. I was plenty well enough. Even her little digital thermometer said so.

I ought to be off to New Orleans. If the airport was open, I could have been there by nightfall, perhaps. But I didn’t want to leave her just now. I asked for some wine. I wanted to talk. I wanted to understand her, and I was also afraid to leave her, afraid of being alone without her. The plane journey struck a cowardly fear in my soul. And besides, I liked being with her … 

She’d been talking easily about her life in the missions, of how she’d loved it from the very beginning. The first years she’d spent in Peru, then she’d gone on to the Yucatán. Her most recent assignment had been in the jungles of French Guiana—a place of primitive Indian tribes. The mission was St. Margaret Mary—six hours’ journey up the Maroni River by motorized canoe from the town of St. Laurent. She
and the other sisters had refurbished the concrete chapel, the little whitewashed schoolhouse, and the hospital. But often they had to leave the mission itself and go directly to the people in their villages. She loved this work, she said.

She laid out for me a great sweep of photographs—small rectangular colored pictures of the crude little mission buildings, and of her and her sisters, and of the priest who came through to say Mass. None of these sisters wore veils or habits out there; they were dressed in khaki or white cotton, and their hair was free—real working sisters, she explained. And there she was in these pictures—radiantly happy, none of the brooding melancholy evident in her. In one snapshot she stood surrounded by dark-faced Indians, before a curious little building with ornate carvings on its walls. In another she was giving an injection to a wraith of an old man who sat in a brightly painted straight-back chair.

Life in these jungle villages had been the same for centuries, she said. These people had existed long before the French or Spanish ever set foot on the soil of South America. It was difficult to get them to trust the sisters and the doctors and the priests. She herself did not care whether or not they learnt their prayers. She cared about inoculations, and the proper cleaning of infected wounds. She cared about setting broken limbs so that these people would not be crippled forever.

Of course they wanted her to come back. They’d been very patient with her little leave of absence. They needed her. The work was waiting for her. She showed me the telegram, which I had already seen, tacked to the wall above the bathroom mirror.

“You miss it, obviously you do,” I said.

I was studying her, watching for signs of guilt over what we had done together. But I didn’t see this in her. She did not seem racked with guilt over the telegram either.

“I’m going back, of course,” she said simply. “This may sound absurd, but it was a difficult thing to leave in the first place. But this question of chastity; it had become a destructive obsession.”

Of course I understood. She looked at me with large quiet eyes.

“And now you know,” I said, “that it’s not really so very important at all whether or not you sleep with a man. Isn’t that what you found out?”

“Perhaps,” she said, with a faint simple smile. How strong she seemed, sitting there on the blanket, her legs demurely folded to one
side, her hair loose still, and more like a nun’s veil here in this room than in any photograph of her.