Thirst

Chapter 1

The afternoon I arrived in Buenos Aires, my ship glided across the endless surface of brown water the locals called a "river" and I gathered, speechless, that I had reached the end of my journey. The mariners shouted at one another across the deck, trying to keep us from running aground. The light was so strong that everything seemed to float in the air. It was only as we drew closer that I managed to glimpse, with heartbreaking clarity, the city's silhouette between the tall masts that interrupted my field of vision. Its low, rectangular buildings were exposed to the edge of this river that seemed like the open sea. Behind these rose the cupolas and bell towers of churches, but the scene was dominated by a semicircular, multistory building crowned by a lighthouse. This unfinished structure was the customs office, I later learned, and it gave the whole city the air of a historical neighborhood dropped by error into the newest reaches of the globe.

Facing the city, countless schooners and brigantines cluttered the river. Some still had their sails raised, others bobbed sluggishly. The port itself was nowhere to be seen. Buenos Aires extended in both directions, but mud eventually conquered the coastline and I felt as if, aside from the weeks-long journey from one place to another, I had traveled to a different time. To the past, perhaps, but also to something strikingly new. What was it? On the other side, the city crumbled into land, slaughterhouses, mudflats, and cemeteries, and after that came the endless plains where the bones of other eras lay.

There was ample time to absorb this scene as we awaited our turn to disembark in the waning afternoon light. In the distance, where the coastline was but mud and stone, a group of women engaged in labors I could not understand at first. I watched them move slowly, observing how some raised the hem of their skirts with one hand while the other bore something that looked heavy from the way they struggled to keep their balance on the rocks. The rustle of white cloth gave me the clue I needed: They were carrying clothes they had washed in the river and hung out to dry in the sun. As the ship drew nearer, dragging itself across the water, I could see that they were wearing aprons and bonnets in pale colors that stood out especially against the skin of the Black women, the likes of whom I had never seen before.

After a time, the moon, tinted like pale fire and softened by the clouds, took possession of the sky. Aboard the vessels and along the streets that waited on the shore, lamps and streetlights were being lit.

Ships, apparently, could not approach the land, and Buenos Aires lacked a pier to facilitate the unloading of persons and their luggage. Accustomed to European cities, I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen such a backward spectacle. The mariners set about hauling trunks and crates up to the deck from the hold; the travelers, about to become immigrants, conversed in Polish or German. Of the strange marks they bore on their necks, concealed by handkerchiefs and collars, I was certain none would say a word. Few remained on the ship, anyway; most had disembarked weeks earlier at equally unfamiliar ports, after a journey during which two storms and a broken mast had been the most noteworthy events.

I watched the scene through the window of an empty cabin, keeping well out of sight. Outside, passengers and crates packed with wares were unloaded into rowboats that took them to shore, where a few carts with enormous, unsteady wheels struggled to cross the shallows and return as the passengers inside tried desperately to protect their clothing and luggage from being flecked by the brown liquid. On solid ground, horse-drawn carriages waited to take them on the last legs of their journeys.

The tumult of arrival had allowed me to leave my dark corner of the hold one last time. I had only emerged a few times during the journey to feed. It had not been difficult to stalk and seduce my prey; the challenge had been waiting long enough between attacks that the passengers and crew would not notice that someone was eating them.

Now I needed to be careful and not let myself be seen. It would be imprudent to appear at the end of the voyage, a new passenger no one had laid eyes on during weeks at sea. After gazing upon the city for a few moments, I returned to the hold and chose the largest remaining trunk for a hiding place, first breaking its lock and depositing most of its contents in another sizeable case. All that remained was to wait in silence. I did not know what this unfamiliar land had in store for me. I tried to steel myself with the memory of the danger I had left behind, which I believed to have ended when my ship set sail from the port of Bremen. Here, at least, I had a chance of survival.

The past appeared before me like a drawing lit by flames. I did not want to see it: the persecution, the thirst. The screams. The unshakable awareness that something was ending, that I needed to leave. For centuries, I had fed to my heart's content, first in the isolation of the castle, then later in the forest. I was just a young girl when my mother, wild with hunger and in exchange for a few coins, dragged me to the enormous oak door that swung open before us with an infernal creak. Everyone in the village knew what went on up there, but no one dared to fight it. Children disappeared from their cradles or wandered into the forest, never to be heard from again. Their bodies were never found. I was to pass, trembling, through the towering doorway alone. My mother urged me on, making me promise not to turn and look at her. I did not.

I tumbled into a dark world, as if I had been swallowed by the pits of hell. There were many others like me, little girls and boys held captive in freezing rooms, steeped in our own filth; we would occasionally be thrown scraps of food to keep us alive. This sinister line between life and death was the territory over which he who would become my Maker reigned. Many were too weak to survive. We were at our Master's disposal, there to satisfy his impulses, all of which were murderous. He discarded some of us after draining their last drop of blood; he made others last. I was lucky. I grew up mad with fear and suppressed rage, my only consolation the other girls who would curl up with me at night to keep warm. I slept with their hair wrapped around my fingers and jumped out of my skin at the slightest noise. We clung to the sliver of humanity that remained to us as if it were a treasure. Until it was stolen. When our bodies became the bodies of women, one by one the Master turned us. We were supposed to be grateful: Serving him elevated us, it was a luxury to be his lover.

I hungered for revenge throughout those years. I howled in the night and stared from the heights of the castle at the village and the few houses glowing with firelight where, perhaps, still resided the woman I had once called "mother."

It was blood that saved me. Blood that drove me mad from my first taste and that turned me, little by little, into a beast. The past shrank from me. I even forgot my own name; in due time, I was given another in a cursed tongue. There was but one truth, and that was my need to sate myself, over and over, and the generosity with which our Maker offered his own victims to me. Naked, our skin caked with dried blood, my sisters and I dragged ourselves through the shadows, awaiting those nights when our Maker would invite us to partake in his orgies of blood and ravenous couplings. We could feed, as long as we were his. I lived for the moment when my teeth would sink into a throbbing neck and I would feel its red warmth fill my mouth.

But centuries passed, and the humans down below lost their fear of us. When they took our Maker, his head cleaved from his body by a sword, it was time to go into hiding. They were coming for us, and we followed our instinct deep into the forest. We howled like wolves. We had never learned to hunt because our meals had always been served to us. Women, children, and sometimes men would appear at our door. We needed only to wait for the signal from our Master that would permit us to encircle, to bite. Without restraint, until we collapsed. That abundance made us lazy, we understood later as we starved in the forest. We had to learn the movements of the hunt for the very first time, as if we were inventing them. The patience, the absolute silence, the stealth. The speed of the attack and the strike. How to sink our fangs in while the surprise was still fresh, sometimes watched by eyes wide with terror.

They were chaotic killings; we left the remains scattered on the ground. If some villager who, like us, had gone into the forest to hunt happened upon them, he would think it the site of a wolven feast. But we still bore intact, in the fog of our minds, visions of the massacre we had witnessed: the clash of swords, bare breasts pierced by stakes, the river of blood that had nearly carried us away. We could no longer feed ourselves according to the laws and customs our Maker had followed for centuries, during his long rule of silence and terror, high in his castle. If we wanted to survive, we would need to blend in among the humans.

We gradually perfected our technique, adding seduction to violence. We no longer looked like animals. My sisters and I braided one another's hair, cultivated aristocratic manners, learned how to dress. We mastered the tongue of men everywhere we went; we understood their languages in an instant. We passed through towns and villages, never staying long enough to arouse suspicion. We quenched our thirst, and disconsolate mothers could only weep at the strange ailment their children suffered. We fed, and the doctors had no name for the affliction that so quickly led to an improvised casket on its way to the cemetery. Then the townspeople began to hear strange noises coming from the tombs and stories began to spread. They called us by many names. They tried to protect themselves with amulets and crucifixes, with garlic strung above thresholds that we crossed laughing.

Over the years, we learned it was possible to consume our victims little by little, to weaken them without killing, to extract just enough and wait for the blood to renew itself. But everything began to change. The legends became news. They began to believe in our existence, and while we struggled to understand what had happened, I lost my sisters.

We were hidden in the forest, where we returned sometimes to remember, naked, the beast within us. The branches stretched above us like blackened bones, like skeletons reaching out in supplication; the ground was covered with snow. There was no trace of the moon in the sky when the fires appeared in the darkness. By the time we saw them, it was too late. We tried to escape, but we were surrounded. They cast the light of their torches on us and before we could attack, they grabbed us by the hair and dragged us to where a man of the church, a priest, was waiting. His mission was to save us or cast us into the depths of hell. I could not fathom it. He was dressed all in black, with a black cap on his head and a gold cross hanging from his neck. His eyes were black as coal above his long white beard, and when he raised his arms he looked like a vulture about to descend on us. He was the one behind the hunt; frenzied, his eyes burned with the desire to destroy us. They threw my sisters to the ground and the strongest among the men bound their arms and legs. As my sisters thrashed about, the men barely managing to control them, I watched the priest make the sign of the cross on his own body and then drive stakes into their breasts. Then he took an axe to their necks. I looked upon my sisters' faces one last time, their hair now wet with mud and snow, shock chiseled into their open eyes. As their decapitated bodies stained the ground red, I surmised my end was near. I felt no sadness. I wanted to die with them, my only family. But the men tied me up and brought me into the town.

The poor fools wanted to study one of my kind. It was still night when we reached the doctor's house. They forced me into a candlelit room and tied me to the bed. As the brutes who had brought me there were leaving the room, I ran my eyes over the scene. The crucifix on the wall, the table where an open notebook awaited observations about me, the Bible. Suddenly the door swung open and the black figure of the priest who had killed my sisters appeared. He glared at me haughtily and approached the bed. He informed me that the Holy Church had exterminated thousands like me, creatures of Satan, and that it was time to save my soul. I screamed that his Church had protected my Maker for decades, concealed hundreds of crimes. There had been neither salvation nor mercy for the bodies of the children cast to the vultures from a precipice at the foot of the castle. I reminded him of the priests who would visit humble cottages and offer mothers tormented because they could not feed their children a solution that would benefit the whole family. Of their instructions to remain strong and steadfast when the women learned the fate in store for their young ones.

At this, the priest raised his arms, the sleeves of his black tunic forming the wings of a bat, and he began to pray in a vibrato that filled the room, so loudly my own words were lost. He untied me, wanting to prove the effect his powers and authority had on me. Perhaps he really did believe in his god. I laughed at him. I stood and brought my naked body close to his; he kept reciting his prayer, but his eyes widened and I could see him grow more and more agitated, until he realized the futility of his efforts and grabbed me by the neck, strangling me. He was strong and full of hatred, but so was I. My eyes flashed with rage as I struggled against his grip; with my thumbnail, which I kept filed sharp as a claw, I opened a deep gash across his face.