How could you have kindled in me this longing to go back, two thousand years, almost 
exactly - to tell of my mortal days on Earth in Rome, and how I joined Marius, and what 
little chance he had against Fate.
  How could origins so deeply buried and so long denied suddenly beckon to me. A door 
snaps open. A light shines. Come in.
  I sit back now in the cafe.
  I write, but I pause and look around me at the people of this Paris cafe. I see the 
drab unisex fabrics of this age, the fresh American girl in her olive green military 
clothes, all of her possessions slung over her shoulder in a backpack; I see the old 
Frenchman who has come here for decades merely to look at the bare legs and arms of the 
young, to feed on the gestures as if he were a vampire, to wait for some exotic jewel of 
a moment when a woman sits back laughing, cigarette in hand, and the doth of her 
synthetic blouse becomes tight over her breasts and there the nipples are visible.
  Ah, old man. He is gray-haired and wears an expensive coat. He is no menace to anyone. 
He lives entirely in vision. Tonight he will go back to a modest but elegant apartment 
which he has maintained since the last Great World War, and he will watch films of the 
young beauty Brigitte Bardot. He lives in his eyes. He has not touched a woman in ten 
years.
  I don't drift, David. I drop anchor here. For I will not have my story pour forth as 
from a drunken oracle.
  I see these mortals in a more attentive light. They are so fresh, so exotic and yet so 
luscious to me, these mortals; they look like tropical birds must have looked when I was 
a child; so full of fluttering, rebellious life, I wanted to clutch them to have it, to 
make their wings flap in my hands, to capture flight and own it and partake of it. Ah, 
that terrible moment in childhood when one accidentally crushes the life from a 
bright-red bird.
  Yet they are sinister in their darker vestments, some of these mortals: the inevitable 
cocaine dealer - and they are everywhere, our finest prey - who waits for his contact in 
the far corner, his long leather coat styled by a noted Italian designer, his hair shaved 
dose on the side and left bushy on the top to make him look distinctive, which it does, 
though there is no need when one considers his huge black eyes, and the hardness of what 
nature intended to be a generous mouth. He makes those quick impatient gestures with his 
cigarette lighter on the small marble table, the mark of the addicted; he twists, he 
turns, he cannot be comfortable. He doesn't know that he will never be comfortable in 
life again. He wants to leave to snort the cocaine for which he burns and yet he must 
wait for the contact. His shoes are too shiny, and his long thin hands will never grow 
old.
  I think he will die tonight, this man. I feel a slow gathering desire to kill him 
myself. He has fed so much poison to so many. Tracking him, wrapping him in my arms, I 
would not even have to wreathe him with visions. I would let him know that death has come 
in the form of a woman too white to be human, too smoothed by the centuries to be 
anything but a statue come to life. But those for whom he waits plot to kill him. And why 
should I intervene?
  What do I look like to these people? A woman with long wavy dean brown hair that covers 
me much like a nun's mantle, a face so white it appears cosmetically created, and eyes, 
abnormally brilliant, even from behind golden glasses.
  Ah, we have a lot to be grateful for in the many styles of eyeglasses in this age - for 
if I were to take these off, I should have to keep my head bowed, not to startle people 
with the mere play of yellow and brown and gold in my eyes, that have grown ever more 
jewel-like over the centuries, so that I seem a blind woman set with topaz for her 
pupils, or rather carefully formed orbs of topaz, sapphire, even aquamarine.
  Look, I have filled so many pages, and all I am saying is Yes, I will tell you how it 
began for me.
  Yes, I will tell you the story of my mortal life in ancient Rome, how I came to love 
Marius and how we came to be together and then to part.
  What a transformation in me, this resolution.
  How powerful I feel as I hold this pen, and how eager to put us in sharp and dear 
perspective before I begin fulfilling your request.
  This is Paris, in a time of peace. There is rain. High regal gray buildings with their 
double windows and iron balconies line this boulevard. Loud, tiny, dangerous automobiles 
race in the streets. Cafes, such as this, are overflowing with international tourists. 
Ancient churches are crowded here by tenements, palaces turned to museums, in whose rooms 
I linger for hours gazing at objects from Egypt or Sumer which are even older than me. 
Roman architecture is everywhere, absolute replicas of Temples of my time now serve as 
banks. The words of my native Latin suffuse the English language. Ovid, my beloved Ovid, 
the poet who predicted his poetry would outlast the Roman Empire, has been proved true.
  Walk into any bookstore and you find him in neat, small paperbacks, designed to appeal 
to students.
  Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of 
computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.
  It is easy here - as always - to find an embraceable evil, a despair worth tender 
fulfillment.
  And with me there must always be some love of the victim, some mercy, some 
self-delusion that the death I bring does not mar the great shroud of inevitability, 
woven of trees and earth and stars, and human events, which hovers forever around us 
ready to close on all that is created, all that we know.
  Last night, when you found me, how did it seem to you? I was alone on the bridge over 
the Seine, walking in the last dangerous darkness before dawn.
  You saw me before I knew you were there. My hood was down and I let my eyes in the dim 
light of the bridge have their little moment of glory. My victim stood at the railing, no 
more than a child, but bruised and robbed by a hundred men. She wanted to die in the 
water. I don't know if the Seine is deep enough for one to drown there. So near the Ile 
St.Louis. So near Notre Dame. Perhaps it is, if one can resist a last struggle for life.
  But I felt this victim's soul like ashes, as though her spirit had been cremated and 
only the body remained, a worn, disease-ridden shell. I put my arm around her, and when I 
saw the fear in her small black eyes, when I saw the question coming, I wreathed her with 
images. The soot that covered my skin was not enough to keep me from looking like the 
Virgin Mary, and she sank into hymns and devotion, she even saw my veils in the colors 
she had known in churches of childhood, as she yielded to me, and I - knowing that I 
needn't drink, but thirsting for her, thirsting for the anguish she could give forth in 
her final moment, thirsting for the tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me 
feel human for one instant in my very monstrosity - I gave in to her visions, bent her 
neck, ran my fingers over her sore tender skin, and then it was, when I sank my teeth 
into her, when I drank from her - it was then that I knew you were there. You watched.
  I knew it, and I felt it, and I saw the image of us in your eye, distractingly, as the 
pleasure nevertheless flushed through me, making me believe I was alive, somehow 
connected to fields of clover or trees with roots deeper in the earth than the branches 
they raise to the welkin above.
  At first I hated you. You saw me as I feasted. You saw me as I gave in. You knew 
nothing of my months of starvation, restraint, wandering. You saw only the sudden release