Path of the Vampire forum

Posted: **10 Jun 2012, 11:40**

-- How old are you? Twelve, now?
-- Yes, Mama.
-- I think you’re old enough.
-- Old enough for what?
-- Old enough for me to tell you the true story of La Llarona.
-- . . .
-- You know about Weeping Woman.
She wasn’t, like people say, a whore. She wasn’t a self-sacrificing saint. She was just a woman, plain and simple. Sure, she was a beautiful woman. She was so beautiful that the men became suspicious of her; they said she was a witch, a sorceress—a siren. But you know how men are. They’re afraid of anything they don’t understand.
Her real name was Maria. She was your great, great, great, great, great, great…
-- I get it, Ma, she was really great.
-- … great, great, great, grandmother. Very funny. You have your father’s wit.
-- Go on.
-- Stop interrupting me, then.
-- Lo siento, Mama. Please go on.
-- Where was I? Yes, we’re related to her. And you know that means that the men were right about her: she was a witch. All the women in our family have been witches. We’ve never had a choice in it. Even your aunt Felicidad, she doesn’t want to be a witch, she never learned the prayers or anything, but she still gets those dreams about our Abuela Sacnite.
But Maria didn’t try to bewitch anybody. She was already beautiful; why would she waste all those spells and candles trying to bewitch everything with a penis?
-- Ma…
-- You already are menstruating. Don’t tell me you don’t know about these things.
-- …
-- One day, Maria while out in the forest by the river to gather wood for her stove, met a man in the forest. He was tall and handsome and strong. And he had a face like an Indio, but with a long nose like a Mestizo. There was a deer on his back, who had a pelt of stars and horns that were black like the night. It is said that Maria and this man, who is never named, lay together under the canopy of the forest that whole night, and in the morning the man was gone. But he left the deer, and Maria ate the deer’s meat and sold the deer’s pelt and horns in the market for a large sum.
She did not see the man again until nine months later, when she bore the fruit of their love, a beautiful boy. Maria was out again in the forest, by the river, having left her son in her mother’s care so that Maria could gather wood for her stove. And he was there again, just as strong and beautiful as he was before, and this time he had on his back a wild boar with the universe on its stomach and tusks as large as a deer’s antlers, white as polished ivory. Again they lay together, and again in the morning he disappeared.
As before, she did not see him again until nine months later, when Maria gave birth to another son. When she saw him again, he was carrying with him, on his shoulders, a cow. It carried in its stomach several universes and had the central sun on its forehead. They lay together as before, but this time Maria did not sleep and asked the man to stay.
The man, who Maria by now knew was a spirit of the river, said that he could not. But he said that he would visit her—his wife—and his three children after she gave birth to their daughter. And it was then that the spirit kissed her and disappeared, and left again with her the cow that made her rich for all the nine months that she carried the child in her womb.
A year passed. Then three. Then many more years passed and Maria soon forgot the spirit’s promise that he would visit her, and she never saw him again. The two boys grew big and strong like their father, sturdy like indios but with long noses like Mestizos. The girl was a witch like her mother, and beautiful too, with hair that grew to her waist and was black as the night.
Then one day, while Maria was out helping somebody give birth in the mountains, the rain started to fall. As the rain fell, the river started swelling. It swelled and swelled and swelled until it rose up and flooded half the village.
-- Then what happened?
-- The strange thing is that everybody was spared except for Maria’s three children, and when Maria learned of their deaths she wept and jumped after them. It’s said that somebody saw a man’s arms rise and catch her, and we don’t really know what happened, but nobody ever found a corpse and nobody ever saw any of them again.
-- …
-- …
-- Mama?
-- Yes?
-- How can she be our grandmother if all her children died with her?
-- Go to sleep.

Posted: **21 Jul 2012, 03:23**

Even when he was a young boy in Barrie, Michael Seguin was too large for the world around him. At the age of fifteen he had achieved, with the aid of protein-laden breakfasts that his mother piled on his plate, a massive six feet and a linebacker’s physique. George Seguin, his father, a man of equally Herculean proportions, exhorted him to join some kind of sport team: hockey, football, basketball—anything, son! Out of love and respect for his father Michael tried, but soon found that although he didn’t lack the vigor and the competitive temperament of athletes, he didn’t really enjoy athletics. Instead, after a fiery argument he had with his football coach, Michael Seguin discovered an early penchant for debate.
On the stage, he proved to be as much a powerful presence as he was on the field. His opponents were intimidated by his towering height and his massive girth; it distracted them and made them stutter. It was an advantage he carried with him through law school and his profession, all the way to his retirement.
The progress was not, contrary to appearances, completely linear. Michael at thirteen did not wake up one morning and decide that he was going to wear a suit his entire life; he wanted to be a writer. At fifteen he had his literary career planned out: by the time he was twenty he would have written his first novel; he would be published in several journals all around Canada and the United States; he would be the next Hemmingway and win awards left and right.
But when at twenty years old Michael acquired his idol’s alcohol habit but none of his laureates, he journeyed into Mexico to find inspiration in the sun-drenched idylls he had read of in Neruda and Esquivel’s phantasmagoric books. There was a gnawing hunger in his stomach and in his pocket, so it was not for want of passion or practice that he failed to become a writer. His imagination was as arid as the deserts he passed to get to Mexico, so later in his life he resigned himself to become that corporate lawyer with the suit, the tie, the briefcase.
Though at the time, twenty years old, he hadn’t yet given up. He ventured into Texcoco with his typewriter and his bright blue eyes, and there the locals crowed over the giant gringo. Michael Seguin lived there for a year and there met Dolores Sarmiento, who would become the love of his life and the mother of his two children.

She was the second of three sisters, the youngest of whom remained an old maid. The eldest, Fatima, married and gave birth to four sons: tall, sturdy boys that looked like their grandfather, Rene, who was, in his time, a notorious Don Juan. Their grandmother, Felisa, was a great beauty, revered like the Lady of Guadalupe throughout Texcoco for her inviolate looks. They remained inviolate forever, as Felisa died when she was twenty-five, trampled to death by a horse that had gone mad with the heat. It’s said that they picked the youngest, Estrella, out of the wreckage of Felisa’s torn body, which had squashed like a pumpkin and opened to reveal the mewling infant, then as small as a kitten. Fifty people swore that they saw Abuela Sacnite pick the child up and put it to her bosom to feed it, until it grew into a proper baby. Rene swore up and down that it was true, but Estrella herself never believed her supposedly magical origins; her father was old and so was given to fancy.
Dolores’ birth wasn’t as widely mythologized as Estrella’s. In fact, the only remarkable thing about Dolores as a child was that when she came out of the womb, the doctor didn’t have to strike her bottom at all to make her cry. Dolores was already weeping bitter tears, as if she already knew her lot in the world, or that of her children.
Michael Seguin met her in the marketplace, where he often wandered aimlessly, trying to find a jewel of inspiration among the rosaries of onions and sausage links, or in the shell of a clam, like a pearl. What he found that day was no less precious. Dolores was arguing fiercely with a fish vendor about his exorbitant prices; her hair was wild and there was a precocious blush on her cheeks, and it was then that Michael Seguin had a prophetic vision—his first and last. This, he instantly knew, was the woman he was to marry, and this was how they would argue, with complete, engulfing passion, for the rest of their days.
For weeks, he followed her around like a lost and lovesick puppy. He wrote her poem after poem, promised her the world and everything in it. Rene Sarmiento didn’t like the overgrown gringo, although he was civil whenever Michael came around to visit, bringing flowers and chocolates for Dolores and sweets for her sisters, cigarillos for their father.
At first, Rene vehemently resisted the idea of one of his daughters being married to a gringo: What would the rest of the clan say, after all? And everybody knew what those crazy Norte Americanos were up to, all that debauchery and ******** with their convertibles and loose women! But it was the year 1990. Dolores was smitten, and Hurricane Diana hit earlier that year, to add to the constant economic crisis that Mexico lived in. Even with that new contingencies fund in place—a last ditch attempt to resolve the liquidity problems of their banking system—Mexico was well and truly fucked as a country, or at least that was what Rene Sarmiento and his friends all thought.
So, yes, he agreed to their marriage, so long as they returned to Canada and Dolores could get a green card.

They were very happy for about two years, living in a small one room apartment in Quebec. Or at least, as happy as they could be, with Michael’s tiny salary as a secretary and the microscopic royalties he received for getting published in women’s magazines; stories about swooning heroines and the Byronic heroes he fashioned himself out from, written under the pseudonym Laura Warren. They weren’t the kind of stories he wanted to write, but they at least got him some money. The emasculation of writing under a female pseudonym didn’t bother him much, or at all; Seguin was an open-minded man and believed in some of the theories thrusted by feminism. In fact, he always told Dolores that a role of a woman in a relationship was equal to a man’s, and that she shouldn’t be afraid to go out and find a job of her own.
Soon, the possibility of that disappeared as Dolores Seguin gave birth to their first child, who they named Lydia. Lydia, in contrast to her garrulous parents, was a quiet child. For a while they thought that she was deaf. She didn’t laugh when they tried to play peek-a-boo with her, or any of the other baby-games that the doctors recommended. In fact, although the specialists maintained that there was nothing wrong with Lydia or her cognitive skills, she didn’t speak until her fourth year, and then it was a complete sentence:
“Mama, tell Juan Pablo not to pull my pigtails!”
By that time, Michael Seguin was a few months away from his law school diploma, and then a few more from finally passing the exam and getting his license (which would take a concerted effort from him and several saints, approximately two hundred thirty five cups of coffee from Dolores, and three cracks at the board exam). Michael had begged Dolores to take Lydia to Mexico with her, because he couldn’t stand to try and study and at the same time look at his daughter and wonder why she wouldn’t talk. Maybe it was out of a curious obstinacy, or lack of desire to speak. But with her cousins, Lydia soon became as noisy a child as any, and twice as combative.

Lydia Seguin was not at all like her cousins. They spoke the same languages—a spattering of Spanish and a little English—but aside from that, there was no comparison. Lydia didn’t look like them. She didn’t have their beautiful brown complexions or their limpid, dark eyes that reflected everything. It was something that bothered her and she would in later years spend hours trying to correct through the Aztec-inspired tattoos and the heavy kohl around her eyes, the “ethnic” and “tribal” jewelry she made, the feathers and bones she hung in her hair to pay tribute to the majestically violent culture her ancestors had been part of but she, because of her skin, would never be identified with. She didn’t even look like her mother, although they shared the same inherent grace; Lydie would later become a belly dancer, even before the eve of her esoteric rebellion.
Rene Sarmiento looked at his granddaughter with the pity one feels for a three-legged dog. Lydia didn’t look like his Felisa, or anybody else for that matter. Her skin was so white; it reminded him of milk. “Get her some sun,” he would tell Dolores, but no matter how much they tried to bake her she would remain the color of sour dough. In the ocean she would pink like a crab dipped in hot water, and she would stay up for days agonizing about the sunburned pain in her back when she tried to lie down, but the resulting burn—a sweet, golden sheen that made the sallow child almost pretty—would never stay for long.

Lydia’s first brush with rebellion came late, as far as teenage rebellion goes. She tried her first cigarette when she was sixteen, which evolved into her first beer, and then her first toke of marijuana—all in the span of the same night. When the sun rose on Lydia Seguin, she was no longer the bookish child that her teachers and her classmates knew. She had evolved, expanded. She ran around with self-confessed revolutionaries and communists, artists, people who were too old for her but she had met at a poetry reading in a café in Barrie.
Before that, Lydia Seguin had been an unassuming presence in the community. She harbored secret desires to become like Holiday Golightly, but had no courage to be anything like her. She tried to pattern herself after that pixie-whimsy, but instead was more inclined to speak in monotone—like Daria, one of her classmates said. She read too much, drew too much, had her head in the clouds, and dressed like a grunge ascetic. After the poetry reading, she shed her plaid jumpers and her ill-fitting jeans for swirling gypsy skirts she sewed herself, clunky earrings and bones in her hair that she made and collected herself, and in the year she turned eighteen and graduated high school left in a caravan of nouveau gypsies, headed away from Barrie to the great land of Quebec.
From there, she traveled Canada extensively, swearing time and again to get a visa so she could get out and see the world. Meanwhile, she fell for the traps of charming, cruel men, the last being David Cave, who invited her to Harper Rock with him, align their chakras in the forest. It worked well for a while, until Lydie found David Cave “aligning his chakras” with Lisa Solod. Unwilling to leave Harper Rock for the wealth of raw material for her jewelry, Lydia Seguin moved into a different apartment and found a job among the granola bar inhabitants of Harper Rock and the Voodoo Café, where she would meet Oleksander Whateverhislastnamewas and Jameson Hamlet.
And completely **** up her life.

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