The Vampire Lestat - Upstart
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The Vampire LestatByAnne RiceThis book is dedicated with love to Stan Rice, Karen O'Brien, andAllen Daviau"WONDERFUL . . . THE BEST NEWS IS THAT THIS IS THEMIDDLE BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES OF THE VAMPIRES. "Playboy"Where Rice excels is in evoking the elusive nature of vampiricsexuality, the urgency of the quest for self- knowledge, the thin linebetween arrogance and terror, the loneliness of what is necessarily asolitary existence. " Houston Post"Lestat is more than a sequel to Interview; it's also a prequel and asupplement, swallowing the earlier novel whole. Lestat is fiercelyambitious, nothing less than a complete unnatural history ofvampires. In Anne Rice's hands, vampires have come of age. Theynow have a history and a vital new tradition; instead of creeping aboutin charnel houses, they stand center stage, with a thousand spotlightson them. And they smile straight at the camera, licking without shametheir voluptuous lips and white, sharp teeth. " The Village Voice2
THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 1 Downtown Saturday Night In TheTwentieth Century 4 1984 4 The Early Education And Adventures OfThe Vampire Lestat 16 Part I - Lelio Rising 16 Part II - The Legacy ofMagnus 53 Part III - Viaticum For The Marquise 102 Part IV - TheChildren Of Darkness 140 Part V - The Vampire Armand 184 Part VI On The Devil's Road From Paris To Cairo 219 Part VII - AncientMagic, Ancient Mysteries 247Downtown Saturday Night In The Twentieth Century 1984I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light ofthe sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things mightdestroy me. But then again, they might not. I'm six feet tall, whichwas fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal man. It'snot bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, andrather curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes aregray, but they absorb the colors blue or violet easily from surfacesaround them. And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth thatis well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look verymean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. Butemotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. Ihave a continuously animated face. My vampire nature reveals itself inextremely white and highly reflective skin that has to be powdereddown for cameras of any kind. And if I'm starved for blood I look likea perfect horrorskin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours ofmy bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only consistentindication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with allvampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people noticethat when they don't notice anything else. Right now I am whatAmerica calls a Rock Superstar. My first album has sold 4 millioncopies. I'm going to San Francisco for the first spot on a nationwideconcert tour that will take my band from coast to coast. MTV, therock music cable channel, has been playing my video clips night andday for two weeks. They're also being shown in England on "Top ofthe Pops " and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, andin Japan. Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are sellingworldwide. I am also the author of an autobiography which waspublished last week. Regarding my English-the language I use in myautobiography-I first learned it from a flatboatmen who came downthe Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years ago. I1
learned more after that from the English language writers-everybodyfrom Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom Iread as the decades passed. The final infusion I received from thedetective stories of the early twentieth century in the Black Maskmagazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett inBlack Mask were the last stories I read before I went literally andfiguratively underground. That was in New Orleans in 1929. When Iwrite I drift into a vocabulary that would have been natural to me inthe eighteenth century, into phrases shaped by the authors I've read.But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between aflatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually. So I hope you'll bearwith me when my style is inconsistent. When I blow the atmosphereof an eighteenth century scene to smithereens now and then. I cameout into the twentieth century last year. What brought me up weretwo things. First-the information I was receiving from amplifiedvoices that had begun their cacophony in the air around the time I laydown to sleep. I'm referring here to the voices of radios, of course,and phonographs and later television machines. I heard the radios inthe cars that passed in the streets of the old Garden District near theplace where I lay. I heard the phonographs and TVs from the housesthat surrounded mine. Now, when a vampire goes underground as wecall it when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth hesoon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is adream state. In that state, I absorbed the voices sluggishly,surrounding them with my own responsive images as a mortal does insleep. But at some point during the past fifty-five years I began to"remember " what I was hearing, to follow the entertainmentprograms, to listen to the news broadcasts, the lyrics and rhythms ofthe popular songs. And very gradually, I began to understand thecaliber of the changes that the world had undergone. I began listeningfor specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, certainnew patterns of speech. Then a self-consciousness developed in me. Irealized I was no longer dreaming. I was thinking about what I heard.I was wide awake. I was lying in the ground and I was starved forliving blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I'dsustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had comeback. Maybe my strength had actually increased as it would have donewith time if I'd never been hurt. I wanted to find out. I started tothink incessantly of drinking human blood. The second thing thatbrought me back-the decisive thing really-was the sudden presencenear me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan'sNight Out. They moved into a house on Sixth Street-less than a block2
away from where I slumbered under my own house on Prytania nearthe Lafayette Cemetery-and they started to rehearse their rock musicin the attic some time in 1984. I could hear their whining electricguitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as the radio and stereosongs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was aromance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric pianosounded like a harpsichord. I caught images from the thoughts of themusicians that told me what they looked like, what they saw when theylooked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, andaltogether lovely young mortals-beguilingly androgynous and even alittle savage in their dress and movements-two male and one female.They drowned out most of-the other amplified voices around mewhen they were playing. But that was perfectly all right. I wanted torise and join the rock band called Satan's Night Out. I wanted to singand to dance. But I can't say that in the very beginning there was greatthought behind my wish. It was rather a ruling impulse, strongenough to bring me up from the earth. I was enchanted by the worldof rock music-the way the singers could scream of good and evil,proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up andcheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness.And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of theirperformance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don't thinkthe world of ages past had ever seen. Of course it was metaphor, theraving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how wellthey assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commediahad been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd. Yet it was entirely new,the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance-andthe way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to thevery poor. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. Itmust have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe inthe supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a singlenote forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony untilyou felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was,this music. The world just didn't have it in any form before. Yes, Iwanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the littleunknown band of Satan's Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the littleanimals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then Istarted clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. Fromthere it wasn't too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitablehuman victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kindI wanted-a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.3
One came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young malewith a grizzled beard who had murdered another, in some far-off placeon the other side of the world. True killer, this one. And oh, that firsttaste of human struggle and human blood! Stealing clothes fromnearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I'd hidden in theLafayette Cemetery, that was no problem. Of course I was scared fromtime to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. Thedrone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurtmy ears. But after the third night up, I was roaring around NewOrleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty ofnoise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I woregorgeous black leather clothes that I'd taken from my victims, and Ihad a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art ofthe Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans wasonce again my hunting ground. As for my strength, well, it was threetimes what it had once been. I could leap from the street to the top ofa four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I couldbend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices andthoughts, when I wanted to, for blocks around. By the end of the fastweek I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steelskyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, SocialSecurity card, and driver's license. A good portion of my old wealthwas on its way to New Orleans from coded accounts in the immortalBank of London and the Rothschild Bank. But more important, I wasswimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified voiceshad told me about the twentieth century was true. As I roamed thestreets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld: The dark drearyindustrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally,and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold onthe American mind. People were adventurous and erotic again theway they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-classrevolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had inthose times. The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie,gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumedthemselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it.They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; theywore it any length they desired. And the women-ah, the women wereglorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under theEgyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, orwearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodiesif they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and4
silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbedand without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair likeMarie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free. For the first time inhistory, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men. Andthese were the common people of America. Not just the rich who'vealways achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that themiddle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past. The oldaristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to thepromises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right tolove and to luxury and to graceful things. Department stores hadbecome palaces of near Oriental loveliness-merchandise displayedamid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-nightdrugstores, bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems onthe sparkling glass shelves. Waitresses drove sleek leather-linedautomobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at night to swim intheir heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed atthe end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes. In factthe poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of theearth since time immemorial were almost completely washed away.You just didn't see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in thealleyways. There weren't slums where people slept eight and ten to aroom. Nobody threw the slops in the gutters. The beggars, thecripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so diminished as toconstitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all. Even thedrunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches, and in the busstations had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, andclothes that were washed. But this was just the surface. I found myselfastounded by the more profound changes that moved this awesomecurrent along. For example, something altogether magical hadhappened to time. The old was not being routinely replaced by thenew anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me wasthe same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang ( "the coast isclear " or "bad luck " or "that's the thing ") was still "current. " Yetfascinating new phrases like"they brainwashed you " and "it's so Freudian " and "I can't relate toit " were on everyone's lips. In the art and entertainment worlds allprior centuries were being "recycled. " Musicians performed Mozart aswell as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one nightand a new French film the next. In giant fluorescent-lightedemporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play themon your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down thefreeway. In the bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with5
the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on thesame tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Sometimes thewealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like anhallucination. I thought I was going out of my head. Through shopwindows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure inform and color as nature's most exotic shells. Gargantuan silverlimousines navigated the narrow French Quarter streets likeindestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers pierced the night skylike Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old CanalStreet. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow ofimages into every air-cooled hotel room. But it was no series ofhallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense.And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curiousinnocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and theirwealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s.And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of theold. On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by avigorous secular morality as strong as any religious morality I had everknown. The intellectuals carried the standards. But quite ordinaryindividuals all over America cared passionately about "peace " and "thepoor " and "the planet " as if driven by a mystical zeal. Famine theyintended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy nomatter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution ofcondemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threatsof "environmental pollution " and "holocaustal war " they battled asfiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past. Asfor sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. Thelast religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why thepeople went around half naked. That was why they kissed and huggedeach other in the streets. They talked ethics now and responsibilityand the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they hadunder control. Ah, the twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the greatwheel. It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It hadmade fools of grim prophets of ages past. I did a lot of thinking aboutthis sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lightedworld where the value of human life was greater than it had ever beenbefore. In the amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room I watchedon the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war calledApocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was, and itsang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. "You mustmake a friend of horror and moral terror, " says the mad commanderin the savage garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers6
as he has always answered: No. No. Horror and moral terror cannever be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no realplace. And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place. Except,perhaps, the art that repudiates evil-the vampire comics, the horrornovels, the old gothic tales-or in the roaring chants of the rock starswho dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights withinhimself. It was enough to make an old world monster go back into theearth, this stunning irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things,enough to make him lie down and weep. Or enough to make himbecome a rock singer, when you think about it . But where were theother old world monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires existin a world in which each death was recorded in giant electroniccomputers, and bodies were carried away to refrigerated crypts?Probably concealing themselves like loathsome insects in the shadows,as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they talkedor how many covens they formed. Well, when I raised my voice withthe diode band called Satan's Night Out, I would bring them all intothe light soon enough. I continued my education. I talked to mortalsat bus stops and at gas stations and in elegant drinking places. I readbooks. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins of thefashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safarijackets, or lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdereddown my face so that I could "pass " beneath the chemical lights of theall-night supermarkets, the hamburger joints, the carnivalthoroughfares called nightclub strips. I was learning. I was in love.And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon werescarce. In this shiny world of innocence and plenty, of kindness andgaiety and full stomachs, the common cutthroat thieves of the past andtheir dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone. And so I hadto work for a living. But I'd always been a hunter. I liked the dimsmoky poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as thetattooed ex-convicts gathered around it as much as I liked the shinysatin-lined nightclubs of the big concrete hotels. And I was learningmore all the time about my killers-the drug dealers, the pimps, themurderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs. And more than ever,I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood. Finally it wastime to call upon my old neighbors, the rock band called Satan's NightOut. At six t
the Pops " and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, and in Japan. Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are selling . I began listening for specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, certain . I wanted to sing and to dance. But I can't say that in the very beginning there was great
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soube cultivar o savoir-vivre ao longo dos tempos. Nesse livro, segundo volume das crônicas vampirescas, Lestat narra suas incríveis experiências na busca incessante do êxtase e do significado de sua sombria imortalidade. O vampiro Lestat é o
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