The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

But there was a brooding to him as he walked; a pronounced dissatisfaction; and hour after hour passed during which he wandered as if time were of no importance at all.
    It was very clear to me soon that David was reminiscing, and now and then I did manage to catch some pungent image of his youth inthe tropics, even flashes of a verdant jungle so very different from this wintry northern city, which was surely never warm. I had not had my dream of the tiger yet. I did not know what this meant.
    It was tantalizingly fragmentary. David’s skills at keeping his thoughts inside were simply too good.
    On and on he walked, however, sometimes as if he were being driven, and on and on I followed, feeling strangely comforted by the mere sight of him several blocks ahead.
    Had it not been for the bicycles forever whizzing past him, he would have looked like a young man. But the bicycles startled him. He had an old man’s inordinate fear of being struck down and hurt. He’d look resentfully after the young riders. Then he’d fall back into his thoughts.
    It was almost dawn when he inevitably returned to the Motherhouse. And surely he must have slept the greater part of each day.
    He was already walking again when I caught up with him one evening, and once again there seemed no destination in particular. Rather he meandered through Amsterdam’s many small cobblestoned streets. He seemed to like it as much as I knew he liked Venice, and with reason, for the cities, both dense and darkly colored, have, in spite of all their marked differences, a similar charm. That one is a Catholic city, rank and full of lovely decay, and the other is Protestant and therefore very clean and efficient, made me, now and then, smile.
    The following night, he was again on his own, whistling to himself as he covered the miles briskly, and it soon came clear to me that he was avoiding the Motherhouse. Indeed, he seemed to be avoiding everything, and when one of his old friends—another Englishman and a member of the order—chanced to meet him unexpectedly near a bookseller’s in the Leidsestraat, it was plain from the conversation that David had not been himself for some time.
    The British are so very polite in discussing and diagnosing such matters. But this is what I separated out from all the marvelous diplomacy. David was neglecting his duties as Superior General. David spent all his time away from the Motherhouse. When in England, David went to his ancestral home in the Cotswolds more and more often. What was wrong?
    David merely shrugged off all these various suggestions as if he could not retain interest in the exchange. He made some vague remarkto the effect that the Talamasca could run itself without a Superior General for a century, it was so well disciplined and tradition bound, and filled with dedicated members. Then off he went to browse in the bookseller’s, where he bought a paperback translation in English of Goethe’s
Faust
. Then he dined alone in a small Indonesian restaurant, with
Faust
propped before him, eyes racing over the pages, as he consumed his spicy feast.
    As he was busy with his knife and fork, I went back to the bookstore and bought a copy of the very same book. What a bizarre piece of work!
    I can’t claim to have understood it, or why David was reading it. Indeed it frightened me that the reason might be obvious and perhaps I rejected the idea at once.
    Nevertheless I rather loved it, especially the ending, where Faust went to heaven, of course. I don’t think that happened in the older legends. Faust always went to hell. I wrote it off to Goethe’s Romantic optimism, and the fact that he had been so old by the time he wrote the end. The work of the very old is always extremely powerful and intriguing, and infinitely worth pondering, and all the more perhaps because creative stamina deserts so many artists before they are truly old.
    In the very small hours, after David had vanished into the Motherhouse, I roamed the