*Opening of a short story entitled ‘Camille’ focusing on a perceived vampire of the Victorian era, Camille Monfort.
Men flock to me as hungry birds, ravenous for otherness, an exotic morsel to devour. I’m a unique flower, one that grows on mountaintops, cast away from all others that pale in significance. I’m a scarlet gilia, the most stunning of mountain flowers. My bright red, trumpet-shaped blooms stand out against green foliage paralleling my puff crimson sleeves as I stand within the stage’s limelight. I’m different, set apart, difficult to find and harder to keep for my needs are feral just like the scarlet gilia.
Craving for alternative fruit, I am sought, both day and night, longed for in restless sleep and dreamed of during monotonous hours when ennui bleaches daylight. Seducing me with ghostly hands, rich men recline on chaise-longues, lost to the ether of expensive port which swirls in crimson ribbons, searching to tie themselves to me. Lost, they draw too deeply on cigars that burn at the tip, an angry red that flares for my touch – the hue of desire, blood, passion. Me. All things rare, other, apart, for I am the coveted bloom. An especial hatchling.
The streets of Belem in Brazil are my hunting ground where I dance naked in rain-soaked streets, knowing all eyes are fixed on me. Like a blurry mirage, I seduce from a watery lair – an act that no other will dare to perform. My otherness has provided me with the most sharpened, daring spirit, one which breathes free of Victorian convention that encompasses all other women, tightening them shut into breathless corsets and high-necked gowns that sigh in ruffles of despair. Yet, I am without rules, formatting my own pathways as a winged bird blessed with libertine feathers.
Not all, admittedly very few women, praise my misadventures, my unstoppable vivacity. In fact, my glowing beauty and vampiric cloak of power, make most women furious, causing them to feel inept when they compare themselves to me. I am boundless, feral and blood-driven as rivers searching for the sea, always yearning for a larger, ethereal outlet. I, too, course my own routes, ignorant of societal strictures that long to cover my wrists, throat, and ankles, stitching me into corset-rich dresses that stifle and repress my pulsating flesh. Perhaps, my heart beats too fiercely; perhaps my blood is laced with an energy even I cannot comprehend, no matter of any other doing so. For my identity has long been an enigma to all that meet me or hear of folklore tales where I bewitch men into dark snares at night, taunting souls, and drowning their morality with my deadliest weapon: an insufferable beauty.
Some of these tall tales are true, bearing semblances of lived experience, but I have to trust you more, before I can reveal my truths, stained and dank as they are, to you, a stranger.
But alas I sense that I must start somewhere…
Born in France in 1869 to Henri and Marie Montfort, I had a privileged upbringing due to my mother’s ties to the French aristocracy. My father worked as a French diplomat and held the position of consulate-general in Belem, Brazil. We moved to Brazil in 1876 alongside my two older brothers, Louis and Charles. I had a governess and was taught about both Brazilian culture and history. My brothers followed dutifully in my father’s diplomatic footsteps but for me, a completely different occupation awaited me: that of the theatre. The Theatro da Paz became my church, whilst my family mumbled devout prayers to Mary in a Roman Catholic Church, fumbling between rosary beads and sinful thoughts. I branched away from orderly life, straight lines of religion never being able to tame my wildness or quench my taste for delinquency. Yet, when I sang, all binds fell from me, like the untying of a gift, wrapped in endless layers of heavy brown paper.
Women faint from the sheer power of my voice when I perform and men swoon, drinking in notes of tragic sadness as laudanum drops. Bewitched by my alabaster skin and crimson cheeks, men, the newly rich especially, fall into my operatic world, becoming lost in webs that they shall never expunge. I am a black widow upon a stage, dressed in dainty silks and satins, mimicking a porcelain doll, yet, behind this veneer, hiding behind plum-rich lips, are the deadliest fangs. My killing weapons. Transfixed, none see past my hypnotising voice, reaching a sky-high pitch that mere humans could never hope to achieve. I survey the audience each night, row by row, as each member falls under my spell in waves of intoxication.
Some, mainly men, linger by my entrance door at the back of the theatre, offering me sweeping gifts of grandeur: new gowns, palatial homes, soiree dinners and baths full of champagne. Occasionally I indulge, taking them up on their offers, drenching my stone-cold skin within inebriated waters, where I drink from the necks of the unsuspecting, love drunk as they are by the sight of my naked flesh. I try not to kill, to drink beyond what is recoverable for any mortal to withstand, but often forget my limits, gulping with dalliance-kissed lips, draining them clean of life. Disposing of the evidence is never easy, it is dirty work, but a necessary evil to fully satiate my blood lust and ever-present craving to feed.
Ultimately, I seek corpses, not lovers. Male corpses are the veil that macabrely follow me home.
Belem is a rich city, beyond its wildest dreams, due to the lucrative sale of rubber to the world. Many farmers turned into millionaires overnight; the type of men that watch me perform and crave to see me disrobed. Neatly vulnerable. Their grandiose mansions sprawl from the epicentre of Belem, a showcasing of newfound wealth and prestige, where wives fret in cauldrons of jealousy, cooking themselves to a frenzy, driven mad by my beauty. A beauty they can never wish to share for mine is otherworldly, vampiric. What chance do they have to seduce their husbands when set against me? I almost feel sorry for them, even though their spending habits border on being ridiculous. One such lunacy is importing mineral water from London to bathe in and sending their clothes oversees for washing. Money has corroded all sense from them, but it matters not to me as long as I can feed from their flesh, drink my fill of wealthy blood.
Some claim I am the lover of Francisco Bolonha, him having imported me from Europe. The rumours grow in stature day by day, yet this one alongside others is true. He, above any other man, has given me the most. Besotted my me, perhaps the most besotted man that I have seduced, he has become a valuable asset, of sorts. I make sure not to drink my fill of him, for he washes me in imported champagne. Bathing in his mansion is an indulgence that I have now come to expect, not only from him but others who also offer such frippery. He made me a queen and I happily sit atop a velvet cushion, allowing him to stroke my icy skin, admiring me as a rare Arctic goddess or Egyptian feline.
As years dwindle as spent flames, my taste grows tired of men, their predictable, foretold allure of me, secures them only the very dimmest fate. Yet women have become more interesting, captivating my stare as they sit in private boxes of the opera, nervously fiddling with lace gloves or weaving silky curls of their hair around fingers, lost in intrigue. Intricacies of women are complex, deeper, a harder puzzle to solve, never quite knowing the obvious answers. One in particular, a married woman, christened Maid, visits my changing room after every operatic performance. She observes me from my dressing table, appraising my radiance in its reflected image as she stands behind me, threading her feeling fingers through the dark rivers of my hair. She wishes to get lost there, submerged by watery love that pants quicker than her own breath. A rose, every visit, the darkest damask petals, soaked in her floral perfume are placed on my dressing table before she leaves me, summoned by her husband within an awaiting carriage. I inhale the last scent of her, already pining for the warmth of her hands and intensity of her burning eyes that see who I really am. She loves me regardless, never trembles at my frozen touch, but admires me boldly, absorbing my passion for her in heady gulps.
To escape the monotony of men and their carnal needs, I take solitary walks at night, absenting myself from their calls. Instead of champagne-filled tubs, I traverse the banks of the Guajará River, remembering her slightest touch as ripples of the river unravel a watery fill into the lost hours of the night, pitch black under the changing tides of the metallic moon.
Of late, I have accrued the title of ‘streetwalker’, with all of its salacious overtones being applied to my character. The Victorian judge, far too harshly. To add to their disparagement, sometimes I attract attention by standing in long, black and vaporous dresses under a full moon; it is always too tempting not to howl, so I do, allowing my supernatural cries to reach hands towards the true sun in my life: the nocturnal moon. I undress, standing on the riverbanks on hot summer nights, unfurling each layer, thinking only of Maud, my married, female lover. I reach my fingers towards the orbital sphere, full and omniscient, kneeling to pray to a nocturnal god of stars and grey velvet skies. Cast by moonlight as a spotlight on stage, I bask, allowing my pale skin to dance with moonlit reflections, missing her touch, her scent, her.
Maud.
Charged by silvery rays of the moon, I sliver into deep waters of the river, allowing watery hands to hold me as a lover. Naked. Exposed. A true vampire. Its fluid folds, I imagine are her skin, as I blend into each rivulet, making love with a flowing body with no face, neck or eyes to drown myself within. Love-drunk, I float, dreaming of her, allowing the river to determine my course, giving up my own power to its elemental strength.
I gaze upwards, searching for traces of Maud in a star-studded sky, reaching my hands upwards, bathing them in iridescent light, a baptism of the night. Her eyes hone on me, emerging from the face of the moon; her beauty drips as blood from star-lit clouds that flock to her as driven sheep. I love her. Here. Now. Always. I sense her delicate caress in each ripple of water beneath my exposed flesh, yearning for her arms to embrace me, pulling me under to a place where I cannot breathe nor see.
“I am yours, Maud,” I mouth to a soundless sky, knowing, in truth, that this is the closest that I shall ever reach to true love.
I drift further, not caring for anything other than Maud. My skirts billow, drenched in tepid waters of the river, pulling me downwards within its hotbed swell. A ruby glint attracts my attention, a lone scarlet flower, swaying in the musical lilts on the riverbed. As my lungs fill, dilating themselves free, I reach for its bloom, reminiscent of a pendant stone necklace that Maud wears to the theatre; I so enjoy becoming mesmerised by its shifting glimmers as she caresses me, reflected in my dressing room mirror.
As consciousness starts to wane, I reach downwards for the hell-streaked floral head, reminding me of my past and the singular drop of red blood, my blood, that danced on the lower lip of Maud after she had drunk from my vein, transforming me to a perpetual creature of the night. My maker. My love. My darkest desire.
