Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 97
Without apparent effort Erik produced long, flowing lines of thrilling richness, like molten gold pouring improbably from the mouth of a stony basilisk. Joyous, meditative, amorous, wild, or sad, his singing enraptured me; I could not hear enough of it. As we worked together, he increased the bolder, rougher, more dramatic capabilities of his own voice, producing song expressive enough to pierce a heart of steel.
Or to calm a heart in panic. I had been prey to night terrors from an early age; when I cried out in my sleep Erik would come to me with a candle to remind me that I lived with a veritable walking nightmare of flesh, so how could I allow mere dreams to trouble me? Then he would sit by my bed and sing to me. Often he chose “Cielo e Mar,” from Gioconda , which he rendered with a tender serenity that soon sent me drifting off again.
How his moisture-spraying travesty of a mouth could produce song of such precision, versatility, and lustre, I never understood. He ought not even to have sung tenor; tall men are almost always baritones. But he was anomalous in so many respects that I gave up trying to account for him. Every time I heard him sing I reminded myself that from the first I had named him an angel.
Sometimes he talked of traveling together, singing for our supper like gypsies as each of us had in our youth. He was fascinated by the resemblances in our respective upbringings, I as a child-performer accompanying my peripatetic father, he as a circus freak astonishing audiences with feats of legerdemain and song, and, of course, with his shocking appearance.
But I saw the differences, which were stark.
My father was a country fiddler with no education, a hard drinker, and a fanatical gambler. He had not hesitated to exploit my pretty face and voice at the fairs, fine homes, and festivals where we performed. He played, I sang. Ours was not a sentimental relationship. Yet while he lived I never went hungry or found myself thrown naked upon the spiny mercies of the world.
Erik, expelled from his childhood home like a leper, had ranged the earth in the isolation to which his repulsive face condemned him. Escaping the circus he had traveled eastward, hiring his talents out to despots who half the time would have murdered him instead of paying him for his services, had he not outwitted them like some branded Odysseus. He had taken the name “Erik,” he said, because he liked its bold, Viking sound.
Occasionally, wondering how I had come to this strange new life, I fantasized that he and I were magical siblings, the ugly one and the pretty one, the “bad” one and the “good” one, joined at the soul by music. Parted early through mischance, we were now drawn close again—voluptuously, unlawfully close—by that indissoluble bond.
I did not share such fancies with Erik. He was stubbornly conventional about some things, family among them. But I was mated to a monster: what better occasion for my most perverse imaginings?
Erik’s own imaginings were far more dangerous.
One day when I called him to our noon meal, he sprang up from his writing desk and made me come sit down in his place. Pressing a pen into my hand and closing my fingers hard upon it, he tried to force me to shape letters on the blank page before me.
“Write,” he said harshly in my ear. “Surely there is some message you wish to send? Write to Raoul, at Chagny. You let him kiss you that night on the roof. Don’t you think about those expert kisses of his? Of course you do—you think of them when my clumsy mouth kisses you. Write and tell him, make him glad!”
The wildness of his accusations, the painful grip of his fingers on mine, and the palpable heat of jealous rage pouring off him all combined to scare me half out of my wits.
“Let me go!” I cried. I managed to raise my hand a little and fling the pen away. My arm knocked down the inkwell, which fortunately was nearly empty and did not break.
Erik stooped to retrieve it, muttering furiously, “Now see what you have done!”
“See what you have done,” I answered, still trembling. “You have raised your hand.”
“Coward!” he spat. “I barely touched you!”
“Your words are blows, just as you intend them to be,” I said. “I have told you what I will do if you abuse me.”
“Go or stay, it is all the same!” he shouted. “Your promise is a sham! Do you think me such a fool? You lie in my arms and dream of your pretty Vicomte, and in your heart you mock me!”
His face was dark with hatred—hatred of me , for my power to cause him pain. It meant nothing that I intended him no ill and in truth had no such power, save what he himself assigned to me. I saw that I was lost, for his fury was fed not by any actions of mine but by his own inner demons, that only he could master.
Terror closed my throat; injustice drove me to speak.
“Now you have clenched your fist,” I choked out. “Very well. Hit hard, Erik, punish the fraud you wrongly say I am. But strike to kill, for living or dead I shall be lost to you for good.”
In his rage he may not have heard my words; but he heard their music (for it welled from the same dark sources as his own) and he could not help but stop and listen.
“Why do you prevent me?”He struck his fist hard upon his thigh. “It is the pretext you long for, the blow that will free you! Why do you thwart me? Why?”
Even as he spoke I saw the answer dawn upon him (as it dawned upon me at the same moment): that I did not wish to be freed, but to live out my commitment to the end.
The frenzied glare died from his face, leaving it pale and haggard. “Oh, Christine,” he said. “Sometimes I imagine horrible things, and now I have nearly made them come true.”
“Do you think you have not?” I said, savage in my turn. “I warned you!”
I did not truly mean to leave him, now that his fury was in retreat. But I did mean to hurt him, and I succeeded. He stared at me with a stricken look.
Then he cast himself down before me, stretched prostrate upon the floor in a posture of such limitless submission that in the West it is only ever displayed before God. At one stroke he had transformed himself from a cultured, willful man of my own world (albeit outcast in it) into a faceless beggar groveling before some barbarian conqueror or the lawless caprice of Fate.
It was a vertiginous moment, appalling, piteous, and thrilling. I longed to stoop at once, all merciful forgiveness, and lift him up again; or else to grind my heel into the nape of his neck until he writhed at my feet. Paralyzed, I stared down at him, scarcely breathing.
In a muffled voice he begged my pardon. I stammered that I would pardon him when I could, for he had wronged me very deeply. He accepted this, rising without a word and withdrawing from the room.
He would not look me in the face or touch even the sleeve of my dress afterward. Two dismal days passed thus. Then I bade him to my bed, where we fell desperately upon one another as if deprived for two years, not two nights.
Resting beside him while our hearts’ tumult slowed, I said, “You were thinking of someone just now, Erik; who?”
“I thought of you,” he whispered. “There is no other.”
With the lightest touch I cupped my hand to his twisted cheek, encompassing as much as I could of what his mask normally concealed. “It is just the same for me. If you can believe me when I say so, then you are forgiven.”
He groaned and pressed his face blindly into my palm, wetting my fingers with his tears.
Raoul’s name was never spoken between us again.
Otherwise (and apart from his run-of-the-mill sulks and fits of spleen), Erik continued to show me the most constant and ardent regard. This was not as pleasant as it sounds. Worship from afar is flattering, but to be loved with consuming intensity by a person who lives cheek by jowl with all one’s frailties and failings is not only exhilarating but tremendously exhausting.
For my part, I continually reminded him what a triumph of character it was (his character as well as mine, since he managed for the most part to fulfill his side of our agreement) for me to keep my word and stay with him. Even when his deformity had acquired a strange beauty of its own in my eyes, I still called upon him (while we fervidly plundered each other’s bodies) as my disgusting incubus, my foul and greedy gargoyle, my lecherous ogre.
I must have been a wise child. I knew that love worthy of the name gives not what the beloved needs, but what the beloved wants.
What Erik needed was recognition of his full humanity, in spite of his repulsive looks and criminal behavior, from another human being who addressed him as an equal. What he wanted was to worship a woman exalted by both quality and attainment who could be repeatedly persuaded to descend to the level of his own base and hideous physicality, thus demonstrating again and again her exceptional love for him.
As for me, I exulted in each leap from my pedestal. What lesser achievement could be worth such a plunge into the bestial, ecstatic depths?
Well, we were opera folk. Only extremes would do.
So I continued to merit his devotion and my own self-respect, despite and because of the fact that I lived for that shudder of delicious horror when he laid his hand on me, and the exquisite creeping of my skin into tiny peaks at the touch of his wet, misshapen lips. In my eager body he took his revenge many times over on all the well made men in the world. I suppose I had my vengeance too, although I do not know upon whom.
Perhaps I harp on this “distasteful” subject. Perhaps I should refer more circumspectly to the craving of my ghastly Caliban for the delights of the flesh. Or is Caliban’s craving acceptable but not his gratification? And what of my desires and delights? I can guess what Raoul de Chagny would have said had I begged of him certain kisses thought in his world to be proper only between men and their whores.
Between the Opéra Ghost and myself nothing was “proper” or “improper.” “Morality” meant my dictum that he must not express his artistic judgment by murdering people who annoyed him.
For the rest, we consumed each other with willful abandon, two starvelings at a feast.
* * * *
After an early phase of keeping me close (I had expected this and endured it patiently), he began to open his world to me. He showed me the trapdoors and passages he used to get quietly about the Opéra. The Phantom patrolled “his” theatre often, omnipresent, watchful, and intensely critical of all that occurred there. He seemed pleased that I found my own uses for his private pathways.
He routinely helped himself to fresh clothes from the costume racks, altering garments to fit and returning them to be cleaned with the rest (the wardrobe mistress, grown weary of constantly undoing his tailoring, now left a selection of clothing at the very back of the racks to be worn only by the Opéra Ghost).
Taking a leaf from his book, I filched the more tattered costumes of the little chorus and ballet rats, mended them in my leisure time (for I had been taught that idleness is both wasteful and a sin), and stealthily returned them again.
The Opéra girls, struggling along in their difficult and demanding world, took to leaving chocolates for their “good fairy” as well as the occasional pretty ribbon or fresh-cut bloom. If they guessed my secret, they kept it.
I pitied their passions and their pains. They had no potent Angel of Music to inspire and encourage them. There was only one such being, and he devoted himself to me alone.
In time Erik ventured outside with me. I always wore a veil and he went masked and covered in cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Some evenings he would hire a carriage and take me driving in the Bois de Boulogne to hear the gypsy music played in the restaurants there. Or we would take a night train out of town for a country walk. An eager amateur astronomer, he taught me to recognize not only the constellations but many stars by name.
In the city we spent fine evenings strolling the grandes boulevardes . We even attended, anonymous in costume, the lavish masquerade balls given at the Opéra itself, although for us these were not precisely social occasions.
We always came late, and left early to avoid the midnight supper after the gala. As we danced together in the crush or looked on from some quieter vantage point, Erik would murmur in my ear a stream of comments on the flirtations, machinations, and vendettas that he claimed to observe transpiring around us. These vitriolic, often scurrilous remarks always made me laugh, despite my resolve not to encourage the exercise of his more malevolent humor.
On our first anniversary he gave me my own key to the iron gate of the passage to the Rue Scribe. I made frequent use of it, for living as we did we needed time out of each other’s company.
Most of the daily marketing he did himself, being very pleased with his skill at passing unremarked (as he imagined) among ordinary folk. Closely muffled even in warm weather, he was not, I am sure, so inconspicuous as he thought. But he was both proud and jealous of his self-sufficiency, and I took care not to intrude upon it. He often returned with a gift for me—a book of poetry, a pair of gloves, a pretty bit of Meissen, or fresh flowers.
For my part, I brought back reports of the day and what occurred in it, and perhaps a colorful poster to replace one of the dreary pictures on his walls, a book from the stalls along the Seine, or a box of the little sweet meringues that he loved.
I took upon myself the task of posting the mail. I wrote to no one, but Erik was an enthusiastic, if menacing, correspondent to whoever caught his attention in the world of music. We attended most Opéra performances, seated in a sort of blind he had built in the shelter of a large, carved nymph on the wall (I always noted with a pang the strangers seated in Raoul’s old box). Afterward, Erik often addressed pages of venomous criticism to the managers, the newspapers, and to composers and artists as well.
Many of these missives I intercepted. But sometimes he mailed a letter himself while he was out, for there were occasional replies to be picked up addressed to “Erik Rouen,”Poste Restante . He did not share their contents with me.
We were always replenishing our stocks of candles and coal oil; it took great quantities of fuel to heat and light Erik’s home. He could well afford it; we lived on the spoils of years of extortion from the Opéra managers. In fact, by means of threats enforced by ingenious acts of sabotage, Erik had accumulated a small fortune.
He exhibited a lordly carelessness about money, mislaying sizable sums with evident unconcern; but in the normal course of things he spent modestly on books, wine, and other minor luxuries. It was apparent that he had extracted large payments from the managers primarily to demonstrate his power over them. Thus, I was always free to draw what cash I needed for my errands abroad.
Herbs and medicines were staples on my shopping list. Erik was prey to recurrent fevers contracted during his youthful travels, and to other ailments stemming perhaps from distortion of his internal organs. He had learned, of necessity, to doctor himself.
A deformity of the pelvic bones affected his carriage and his gait. His sinewy body was prodigiously strong, but the strain of holding himself straight and moving with a fluidity not natural to him caused him severe muscular tension and cramping. To quell his most intractable pains I kept a supply of laudanum, which he hated because it clouded his mind; but he accepted it from me when all else failed.
Thinking to help ease his lesser, chronic discomforts, I brought home one day an almond-scented rubbing oil. But I had hardly begun gliding my slippery palms down the long muscles on either side of his spine when he began to tremble, then to shake with dreadful, racking sobs. I was bewildered that I could have hurt him so. My touch was light, and in any case he was normally stoical, being accustomed to chronic aches and pains.
Now he gasped, “No, don’t!” and twisted desperately away. He sat rocking and crying, his clenched hands wedged tight between his knees as if to prevent even his own touch on his body.
This was not pain. It was grief.
I saw that while in my bed sheer lust carried him triumphant on its tide, the everyday intimacy of casual contact was more than he could bear. Even as an infant he must have been rarely touched by anyone, let alone touched kindly. The undemanding pressure of my hands had wakened in him the vast, deep-rooted anguish of that irremediable loss.
I could no more withstand this upwelling of sorrow—a child’s sorrow, ravaging a man’s body—than he could. All childhoods leave scars. Old hurts of my own throbbed in bitter sympathy with his. I fled to walk by the lake, filled with impotent rage against the common cruelty and indifference of humankind. And I cursed my own deficiency in that same cruelty and indifference; placed as I was, how much pity could I afford?
But I could not let the matter rest. The next day, with great difficulty, I persuaded him to let me try again on the understanding that he must stop me when his emotions threatened to overpower him. He did so, saying in a strained whisper, “Thank you, Christine!” Persevering in this fashion we extended his endurance to well over an hour at a time. Rubbing him down became a welcome routine for which I searched out fine oils and salves in my forays above ground.
