Blood Sacraments (38 page)

And yet I never could have said no to him. No one has ever done so, I think. Garcia has that much power, his desire is that enveloping, he is that incalculably charismatic. Who would have believed that the tales I had heard as a child were true, anyway? Who would have thought that there were indeed beings who traversed this world who had come from another? Who would have thought that men could drink each other in so many different ways?

Which story should I tell you now? The one where I contracted the disease that led me to Carville or the one where I became what I am now—vampire?

No one really knows when they first learn of lepers. The term itself has become a commonplace, a moniker for any despised individual or group. It is almost archetypal, this term. And yet there are real people, real lepers, who die the slow and awful death the disease brings them.

As I said, I was not sure how I acquired it—the leprosy. But I believe it was from Nikolos. And if it came from my dalliances with him, so be it. For those were remarkable and I would not have chosen otherwise. He brought me to a new and different level of my desire. We were equals on those nights in Crete—I was not his protégé, nor he mine. And our discourse traversed theology as well the sensual. We lay entangled and spent and he would talk of Damien and Molokai and I would talk of Aquinas. In that regard we were both novitiates to a religion of our own making—we were Catholic and also degenerate. Except with Nikolos I never felt a degenerate as I had with my mentor. Instead I felt alive, as if this were the better part of myself.

I think sometimes I should have stayed in Crete, stayed with the young man who brought me back to life from the brink of my soul’s death. For leaving my mentor had left me adrift and devastated and wondering if I should have stayed and let him take me wherever it was he thought we could go. But Nikolos had opened other avenues to me. Alas, he was pledged to Spinalonga and nurturing the souls of the poor lepers there where he had already been doing spiritual duty. And so we parted—not as I had done with my mentor, but as friends, as companions, as two men who had shared something lasting. We assured each other we would write, but I knew enough by then to know that was a promise never to be kept.

When did I discover that Nikolos had infected me? I am unsure. It was nearly a year before I returned to Louisiana after traveling on from Crete. There were other men—not nameless, nor faceless, but fleeting. A night here, a stolen afternoon there. I was always amazed at how many men stood in the doorways of holy places with their hats over their cocks, waiting for another man to ask them to walk down the Via Dolorosa or some other darker, less public place.

It had become clear to me that I could not break myself of the habit of other men, the habit of an almost daily debauchery with them or lying in my room, wherever I was, thinking of them as I debauched myself.

And so I returned home. One night on the voyage back I had spent time with a member of the captain’s table who had led me off to have an aperitif and to quaff something equally heady port side. As I buttoned up my trousers I noticed a small pink spot on my thigh that I knew should not be there.

A family friend confirmed the diagnosis upon my return to Louisiana. It was then I determined to head to Carville, to take the place of the priest retiring—uninfected. My status was never disclosed—even my uncle was unaware. I had thought to write to Nikolos, but presumed it was he from whom I had contracted the dread disease.

Two full years passed at Carville before Garcia arrived one day with a veritable caravan of things with which to do his work. If I said I was not smitten immediately, I would be lying. He was everything my mentor had been and more, and I had never managed to quell that desire that only men can fulfill for each other.

I knew right away that he wanted me as well, despite the disease which had not yet spread beyond that small spot on my thigh—and thanks to Garcia, never would.

There is no lack of certainty in how I became what I am now: vampire. Although from a metaphoric perspective, it could be said I was merely waiting to be crossed over. I was certainly preying upon innocents long before Garcia sank his teeth deep into my thigh, draining my femoral artery as he stroked my cock.

It’s not always the neck, you know. It’s not always a young, female virgin lying demurely on a bed, sleeping the sleep of innocence while the vile and be-fanged Nosferatu beats through her open window on the wings of a shape-shifted bat.

Garcia arrived at Carville at dusk one day in a wholly different guise: as artist and also as tutor to the unfortunate. He had come, as I noted, at the request of the government to paint the leper home in all its fading magnificence before it changed to a wholly different place than it had been in the years I had spent there.

There were a few days of pretense, of course. We were introduced by the director and I was asked to acquaint him with all of Carville. You see, even the staff did not know of my condition, so I was among the elite of the place. Only I knew I did not really have carte blanche to leave.

How to describe Raul Garcia? He was what was called in those days a man’s man—an irony that bears noting. He was tall and well-built and his skin was a bronze hue because of his Mexican origins and his hair and eyes were deeply black. He exuded an air of confidence and also of sensuality. I noted the nuns would blush when he was about. That charisma was not lost on anyone.

But it was men Garcia preferred, and he told me as much a mere three days after his arrival. We were walking at dusk—he was never around much in the day, saying that he’d never acquired an ability to tolerate the heat, despite his birthright. We had gone through the arbor of live oaks and were coming round the old charnel house, long since abandoned. The air was thick with the late-day heat and we both had a film of sweat on us. I suggested we stop and sit on a nearby bench as the moon rose and then go back to the main building.

He did not speak for a time. Nor did I. Then he said, with shocking bluntness, “I haven’t been with a man since well before I left New York. I suppose that could be called a confession,
padre
.”

The comment had the requisite effect, which no doubt he had already calculated. My cassock strained at the crotch. He looked squarely at me there and for a moment I was certain he would reach out to touch me. There can be no question that I hoped he would.

But instead he stood and spoke, his accent somewhat thicker with what I presumed to be a desire of his own, for my eyes strayed as well and saw him hard against his trousers.

“I am glad to see that I have not shocked you,
padre
. That is good to know. As no doubt I will be revealing other aspects of myself to you during my visit that others might find”—he waved his hand in the still air—“unsettling.”

I heard him outside my room later that night. I could hear his breathing outside my door and wondered why he didn’t just come in, for I had been thinking of him rather than immersing myself in prayer. I had been yearning for him to come and confess more to me, reveal whatever else it was he had suggested needed revelation. But he left without even knocking.

It was the thirteenth day after his arrival that he finally took me. One might say he courted me prior to that day. We talked a great deal in those early days—I imagine that he wanted to be certain that I would acquiesce and also that I would want to be taken over, to leave the life I had and become part of his. No doubt he also wanted to know if I would be a worthy companion.

When I had traveled abroad, the places I could always be assured of finding like-minded men seeking the pleasures I could no longer live without had been churches and other holy sites. I had often wondered how they could stand so near to God and pleasure themselves openly while waiting for a similarly inclined companion. And yet this was almost
de rigeur
. The hat over the exposed cock thrust through the unbuttoned trousers, the sussurations that could have been mumbled prayers as easily as they could have been obscenities meant to excite and tease and lure. I had found it as surprising as it was tantalizing.

And so it was with Garcia, then. He sought out the priest, the one creature at Carville most likely to fend him off, holding up his crucifix and sending him screaming away.

Except, of course, I never ran, never held up any religious artifact to ward him off. Rather with each passing day, each moment I spent nurturing our growing friendship—if that is what it was—I was opening myself more and more to him. Until one evening I told him about Nikolos. And then, temptation girding me onward, about my mentor. And about the blood.

That was to be the night when Garcia and I would become one, companions in the semi-afterlife that is where we vampires inhabit the world. No longer fully living, yet decidedly not dead.

My mentor had taught me well about how to exploit the tension of repressed desire. Throughout our dinners together I would be hot with the anticipation of what was to follow. Yet he would keep me at the table, sometimes stroking my trousered thigh beneath, even when the servants were about, and I would have to control myself as he watched me. He wanted to see the tension build in me, for that is what built it in him. And so I played the same game with Garcia—and found in him an appreciative respondent.

Each evening at dusk we would walk together, sometimes in silence but most often sharing tales of our previous lives, the life before we met.

Garcia looked to be a man of about forty. He was quite tall—more than six feet—and he was, as we said then, darkly handsome. We did not speak of such things as sensuality and virility in those days, but he was both sensual and virile and he exuded a palpable sexuality that was almost unseemly. It was only his casual air and his—I thought—pretense of not knowing he had this affect on others (for women were lured by him as well) that made it possible to even be in his presence.

Yet I was mesmerized by him and needed to be with him as much as he and my own work would allow. He was a cultured, well-traveled, and educated man, of course. An intellectual as well as a political vanguard, although we did not speak of politics much at Carville. His work, his paintings, were, even to the unschooled eye, remarkable. He had followed what would later become known as a neo-realist stance with his work. The sketches and preliminary
gouaches
that he did in his first days at Carville were stunning. They had both an epic quality and a tragic one, which imbued them with poignancy, but not sentimentality. I was in awe of his skill and talent.

I’m not sure what it was that Garcia was taken by in me. He was not shallow enough to have been merely attracted by my looks, although I knew I was handsome and false modesty in that regard would be a lie. And I had told enough of those.

I knew Garcia liked the look of me, of course. He’d actually said so in a strangely offhand manner when he had said one evening at Carville that I was far too attractive a man to have devoted myself to celibacy. To which I had blurted, unthinking, that I hadn’t always.

 “Ah, women,” he had noted, nodding. Then I had said simply, looking directly at him with a boldness that shocked even me, “No. Not women.”

Garcia had raised an eyebrow and murmured something in Spanish, an idiomatic phrase I did not know, but which I presumed to be sexual in nature. It was then that our mutual attraction became apparent to us both and the game of sexual tension, repression, and ultimately, release, began in earnest between us.

I wonder if I would have run from Garcia had I known what he was then. I have pondered this over and over and can come to no honest conclusion. We were what we were: I an irrepressible sodomite and he a blood-lusting vampire. It would be impossible for either of us to change such entrenched identities. Surely I had tried to change mine and had been wholly unsuccessful. And once one has been turned to the lust for blood, one cannot switch off those desires. They are more than just mere wanting, they are need. Blood is more than sensuality incarnate—it is sustenance.

Each night Garcia and I had our walks around the grounds. This went on every evening for the first week. Then Garcia told me he needed to paint at that time, but I could either come by the rooms he had engaged as his studio and sleeping quarters or we could meet for a late supper and conversation in the refectory.

I had chosen supper at first. But on the thirteenth day I decided to go by his studio. He had previously shown me sketches which he had carried in a case on our walks. Now I saw the paintings—large, almost gigantic, canvases. Four different ones, each of them in varying stages of progress, which hardly seemed possible given he had been at Carville barely a fortnight. Tacked to boards near each canvas were sketches, an abundance of them. Some were of the haunting place itself, others of the denizens in various stages of their illness. There was a poignancy to Garcia’s interpretation that imbued me with respect for him. He had portrayed this place of horror as somehow ordinary—a world within a world where the creatures who lived here were as vital as in the world we knew outside this place. He had featured them engaged in normal daily tasks or in pensive contemplation. He had taken them from the realm of the reviled and resituated them as something other than the lepers that they were. There was no voyeuristic content here, only respect.

I was impressed by his work and told him so. I said he had humanized these women and men and that he saw them as I did—as merely people who had been dealt a grim hand not of their own choosing. I told him this was what I was attempting to do also, with my work at Carville. But that my work would leave no legacy of the lepers, while his would.