the fact that only extreme pain in me could ever wring from her the slightest warmth or interest.
Yet she’d been my savior. And there was no one but her. And I was as tired of being alone, perhaps, as a young person can be.
She was here now, out of the confines of her library, and she was attentive to me.
Finally I was convinced that she wouldn’t get up and go away, and I found myself speaking to her.
“Mother,” I said in a low voice, “there is more to it. Before it happened, there were times when I felt terrible things.” There was no change in her expression. “I mean I dream sometimes that I might kill all of them,” I said. “I kill my brothers and my father in the dream. I go from room to room slaughtering them as I did the wolves. I feel in myself the desire to murder . . . ”
“So do I, my son,” she said. “So do I.” And her face was lighted with the strangest smile as she looked at me.
I bent forward and looked at her more closely. I lowered my voice.
“I see myself screaming when it happens,” I went on. “I see my face twisted into grimaces and I hear bellowing coming out of me. My mouth is a perfect O, and shrieks, cries, come out of me.”
She nodded with that same understanding look, as if a light were flaring behind her eyes.
“And on the mountain, Mother, when I was fighting the wolves . . . it was a little like that.”
“Only a little?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I felt like someone different from myself when I killed the wolves. And now I don’t know who is here with you—your son Lestat, or that other man, the killer.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“No,” she said finally. “It was you who killed the wolves. You’re the hunter, the warrior. You’re stronger than anyone else here, that’s your tragedy.”
I shook my head. That was true, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t account for unhappiness such as this. But what was the use of saying it?
She looked away for a moment, then back to me.
“But you’re many things,” she said. “Not only one thing. You’re the killer and the man. And don’t give in to the killer in you just because you hate them. You don’t have to take upon yourself the burden of murder or madness to be free of this place. Surely there must be other ways.”
Those last two sentences struck me hard. She had gone to the core. And the implications dazzled me.
Always I’d felt that I couldn’t be a good human being and fight them. To be good meant to be defeated by them. Unless of course I found a more interesting idea of goodness.
We sat still for a few moments. And there seemed an uncommon intimacy even for us. She was looking at the fire, scratching at her thick hair which was wound into a circle on the back of her head.
“You know what I imagine,” she said, looking towards me again. “Not so much the murdering of them as an abandon which disregards them completely. I imagine drinking wine until I’m so drunk I strip off my clothes and bathe in the mountain streams naked.”
I almost laughed. But it was a sublime amusement. I looked up at her, uncertain for a moment that I was hearing her correctly. But she had said these words and she wasn’t finished.
“And then I imagine going into the village,” she said, “and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there—crude men, big men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one after another, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute release without a thought of what happens to your father or your brothers, whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely myself. I belong to no one.”
I was too shocked and amazed to say anything. But again this was terribly terribly amusing. When I thought of my father and brothers and the pompous shopkeepers of the village and how they would respond to such a thing, I found it damn near hilarious.
If I didn’t laugh aloud it was probably because the image of my mother naked made me think I shouldn’t. But I couldn’t keep altogether quiet. I laughed a little, and she nodded, half smiling. She raised her eyebrows, as if to say We understand each other.