Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 99
The condition must have begun years before. Still, I blamed myself. If I had not got in the habit of bringing down the dainties left me by the dancers and chorus girls, he might not have indulged so immoderately his taste for sweets.
Now abscesses had developed, this much I could determine; and I was very worried. But Erik flatly refused to go to a dentist, who must of necessity see his face. So these sieges of toothache came and went, borne by him with his customary fortitude.
We continued our studies although I was in poor voice, being easily brought to tears by emotional music (and there is no other kind in opera). The last piece which he sang through for me was “Why do you wake me?” from Werther (we had been discussing the French insistence upon verbal articulation at the expense of beauty of tone when singing in that language).
At the end, he rose abruptly from the piano and clapped shut its lid. The spell of Werther’s plaint was cut off as if Erik had cracked the neck of a living thing between his hands.
“When you know that I am dead,” he said, “—and I will make certain that you learn of it, Christine—I beg you to come back here to bury me. I hope you will continue to wear my ring until that time, when I ask that you be good enough to return it to me with your prayers before you cover me over.”
He meant his mother’s ring, a wreath of tiny flowers in pale gold which I had worn since the night of Lohengrin . I turned the ring on my finger, trying to take comfort from the fact that he spoke as though he meant to go on living in my absence. But living in what manner? I could no longer avoid that question, which had been burning in my thoughts.
“When I have gone, will you keep to your promise to be good?”
“Why should I?” he growled, shooting me an evil look. Then he quoted the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a book he had read many times over by the look of its pages), “ ’Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.’ ”
My heart pounded. Suddenly we stood at the edge of a precipice. “Erik, you gave your word!”
“I am not some titled nobleman,” he sneered. “I have no honor to preserve.”
I said, “You wrong yourself to say so. You have held to our agreement as only an honorable man would.”
He turned away without replying, dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief, and fell to moodily rearranging the porcelain flowers on their shelf. I heard every tiny tick and brush of sound of these small actions, for I was listening harder than I ever had in my life. In my mind a cowardly voice said, Fool, have you forgotten that he is a monster? Look at him! He will never let you go! You should have fled when you had the chance!
“So you think I have behaved honorably?” he said at length, his back still turned to me. “Well, if I have I am sorry for it.”
Stung out of my fearful reverie I answered heatedly, “You have no right to be! You have been happier these past years than most men are in a lifetime. Deny it if you can!”
“I do not deny it!” He swung sharply ‘round to face me, eyes inflamed and hands clenched at his sides. “For pity’s sake, Christine, must I beg?Don’t leave. I love you. I need you. Stay with me!”
I had been braced for sarcasm and threats; this naked entreaty pierced me through. I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Set new terms, make any rules you like,” he urged. “I will keep to them, you know I can!”
“No,” I said, “no, Erik. It is time for you to see how you get along without your Angel of Conscience. I want my freedom, which I have won fairly.”
He stared at me with those burning eyes. The walls of his house pressed in upon me like dungeon walls and I felt a fierce passion for my liberty, sparked by the dread of losing it again before ever regaining it. In my fear, I hated him.
He said, “What if I say you must return to live here with me for six months of every year? It is a nice, classical solution.”
“It is no solution at all!” I cried, my mouth as dry as ashes.
“I don’t care.” His voice rose toward the loss of control that I—and perhaps he, too—dreaded. “I want more !”
“Erik,” I said, with all the steadiness I could command, “you are above all a musician, and musicians know better than anyone that at some point there is no ‘more’—no more beats to the measure, no more notes to the phrase, no more loudness or softness or purity or vibrato—or else music becomes mere noise, incoherent, worthless, and ugly.”
I saw him flinch, as I did, inwardly, but he said nothing.
“You know this to be true,” I finished desperately.
Of course he knew it. On this principle was based all his instruction and all our achievement together, and I saw him trapped and struggling in his own inescapable awareness of it. I wished to Heaven that he had been wearing his mask, for it was torture to watch his face.
At length he said bitterly, “You have had too good a teacher.” He shielded his eyes with his hand, as he did when he wished to listen closely to my singing without visual distraction. “Have you been happy here, Christine?”
“I have been happy,” I answered. “I am not happy at this moment, but I have been happy.”
“Well, that is a good thing,” he said in that same bleak and distant tone, still keeping his eyes hidden from me; and I went away to weep my tears of victory alone.
We spent those last nights stroking and kissing one another between fitful sleeps, pressed so tight together that we bruised each other. He stayed till the mornings in my bed instead of withdrawing to his own room. I would have held him back had he tried to go, but once he slept I quickly put the candle out. I dared not look long at his face, open and unguarded in sleep (his utmost, cleverest plea and offering), for fear that my resolve would crumble to nothing.
He was a wise child too, but I was wiser. I had learned how to defend us from each other and protect us from ourselves.
A week before I was to leave I came in from a long, troubled walk and saw him slumped at his writing desk. When I spoke to him, he answered faintly in a language that I did not know. Alarmed, I hurried to him and caught hold of his arm to bring him to himself again.
Involuntarily, my hand flew back: his whole body quaked with massive, deep-seated shudders. At my touch he collapsed, seized by such violent chills that I thought he was having convulsions.
I held him close to keep him from injuring himself and to warm him as best I could; and because I had to do something and could think of nothing else. When the shaking subsided, I helped him to his bed. I saw that the infection in his jaws had attacked again with terrifying virulence: his face was swollen, his skin was searingly hot, and it was evident that he did not know me.
In his first lucid moment I implored him to let me fetch a doctor. He was adamant against it, made me swear to bring no one, and would not be persuaded otherwise by anything I said.
He had committed no crimes since my taking up residence with him, of that I am certain; but he still had old deaths to answer for, and he was absolutely unwilling to risk exposure to the claims of the law. Perhaps now he could imagine his own goblin-head under the blade at La Roquette, before the greedy eyes of the crowd.
I imagined it; and I could not bear the thought.
So I nursed him as best I could, with drugs, folk remedies, and treatments which I found described in the medical texts on his shelves. It was not enough.
He had no pain, the nerves in his teeth being destroyed by then, but fever devoured him before my eyes. He ate nothing and kept down little of the medicines I prepared for him. At last he sank into a heavy sleep from which he rarely roused.
Late one afternoon he said, “I am so thirsty, Christine; the Devil is coming for me, and his fires are very hot!”
“No,” I said, “God is coming to apologize to you for your afflictions. It is His burning remorse that you feel.”
“What angel shall I send to comfort and befriend you when I am gone?” he asked. “The Angel of Death?”
“Don’t talk, it only tires you.” I poured him some water, spilling more than went into the cup.
“Never mind,” he muttered when he had taken a few dribbling sips, “that angry angel has not done my bidding for some time now. But I should curse you somehow before I die.”
“Curse me?” I cried. “Oh, Erik, why?”
His febrile gaze fastened hungrily upon my face. “Because you will be alive and abroad in the world, and I will be dead, down here. Your hair will glow like polished chestnuts in the sunlight when at last you throw off your hat and veil. If I had had such hair, I would have ventured onto the stage despite everything. With careful makeup, would it have been so bad?”
“I hate my hair!” I said. “I’ll cut it off.”
“It will grow back,” he answered dreamily. “As many times as you cut it, it will grow back more beautiful than ever, for the delight of other men.”
I answered, “Well, go on and curse me, then!” But other words echoed in my thoughts: I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me. Fresh, amazing tears flooded my eyes; I had thought myself drained dry as the Gobi by then.
“Oh, don’t cry,” Erik said with feeble exasperation. “What have you to cry about? You have won all, for now I cannot fail my promise. Look, I will make you another: should this ‘honor’ you have required of me earn me a few hours’ respite from Hell, I will spend them singing for you. Stop and listen sometimes and you may hear me.” Then he exclaimed, “My opera! Where is my Don Juan ?”
He struggled to sit up, gazing around the candle-lit room with that huge-pupiled stare which I remembered from my father’s deathbed. It is an unmistakable look, and seeing it again all but drove the heart right out of me.
“Your work is safe,” I rushed to assure him. “I will get it published—”
“No, no,” he broke in, with some force. “Leave it. I have told you, that music is not for this epoch. You will not let them come picking and clucking over my miserable carcass, will you? Be as kind toward my music. Bury it with me; bury it all.”
He caught my hand and pressed it to his malformed cheek, and only when I agreed to do as he asked did he release me. Then he sank back, white-faced and panting, on his pillows. I saw that his time was near, and that he knew it.
“Let me at least fetch you a priest,” I said, for I knew that he had been born into a Catholic household.
He said, “What for? I would only frighten him to death, adding to my burden of sins. You be my priest, Christine.”
So I lay down beside him in his bed, and he breathed new, horrific details of his past into my ear. I told him that I had no power to absolve him, but that if he truly repented of the evil he had done he must surely be forgiven.
He said, “Just listen , Christine.” So I did; though I dozed through much of this grim catalog, being very tired by then.
The chiming fugue of his clocks all striking woke me (it was eight at night). I opened my eyes to find him quietly watching me, his face—that freakish face which was now better known to me than my own—mere inches from mine. His lips were crusted from the fever and his poisoned breath fouled the air between us.
“Good, you are awake in time to see a wonder,” he whispered. “This hideous monster, the Phantom of the Opéra, will make himself vanish before your very eyes; and before the eyes of everyone else there will appear, as if out of nowhere, a beautiful young woman of passion, talent, and valiant character.”
I said something, “Oh, don’t,” or “Please.” It makes no difference what I said.
His eyelids drooped and the shallow rasping of his breathing grew more regular. Unable to keep my own aching eyes open, I slept. At some later point I heard him remark in a surprised and drowsy tone, “Do you hear birds singing, Christine? Imagine, songbirds, in a cellar! Open a door, let them out.”
That night he died.
Left alone with the cooling remains of the singular creature with whom I had spent a lifetime’s passion in a handful of incandescent years, I thought I would die myself. I wished that I might, stretched out beside his corpse in that damp and fetid bed with its curtains of fresh forest green.
In a while I rose, and found that I could scarcely bear to look at him. Absent the faintest animation, his face was a repulsive parody of a human face in a state of ruin and decay. I closed his eyes and set his mask in place to hide the worst.
I said no prayers then; I was too angry and too weary and could barely drive myself to do what needed doing. I washed him and dressed him in the formal attire that he had always favored and put the ring of little flowers on his finger.
My choice would have been to turn him adrift on the lake in his boat, a hundred candles flaming on the thwarts; or to build him a pyre on the bank, like Shelley’s pyre. But by then I was exhausted from tending to him, from grief, and from the not inconsiderable labor of preparing his lifeless body for its last rest.
So, with strength drawn from I know not where, I disposed him decently upon his fresh-made bed with his musical manuscripts piled ‘round him as he had wished. I covered him with his opera cloak and used the patchwork robe that I had given him to cushion his head. Against his lunar skin the velvet folds glowed rich and deep, like a sumptuous setting for some pale, exotic gem.
Seeing his face so remote and stony on that makeshift pillow, I understood that we touched no longer, he and I. We sped on invisible, divergent trajectories, driven farther apart by every passing instant. Nothing remained to keep me there.
In a trance of exhaustion I packed a few belongings and keepsakes, left the underground house, and tripped the concealed triggers he had shown me. A long, deep thundering sound followed, and I tasted stone-dust in the air.
Panic flooded me: how like him it would be, to contrive beforehand to bring the whole Paris Opéra crashing down in ruins upon his grave!
But all was as he had told me, according to his design: granite blocks placed within the walls rumbled down into their chiseled beds, sealing off every entrance and air-shaft of the Phantom’s home. Erik slept in a tomb more secure than Pharaoh’s pyramid.
I paced beside the underground lake, spent and weeping. Now I prayed. I was afraid for him. Apart from everything else, if he had somehow willed himself to die then that was the sin of suicide, which grows from the sin of despair.
Yet this possibility is implicit in every strong union. Someone departs first, and the one left behind decides whether to die, or to stay on awhile chewing the dusty flavor of words like “desolate,” and “bereft.”
In the end, fearing that somebody had heard the noise or felt the reverberations and was even now descending through the cellars to investigate, I roused myself to the final task of sinking the little boat in the lake. Then I let myself out by the Rue Scribe gate for the last time, five years and eleven days from the night of my debut in Faust .
Rain had fallen overnight; puddles gleamed on the cobblestones. A draggled white cat sheltering in a doorway watched me go.
* * * *
Of my life since there is little to tell. My aged guardian having died, I was able to make arrangements to live quietly in Paris under my own name. Hardly anyone remembered the Phantom of the Opéra and the deeds attributed to him, for great cities thrive on novelty and their citizens’ memories are short (that is why M. Leroux felt free to publish his nonsense later on).
I tried to avoid knowledgeable or inquisitive people. To those who knew me I said that I had been driven away by the family of a noble admirer, and had been singing since in opera houses in distant lands (Raoul, I learned, had emigrated to America in the spring of 1881, shortly after my own disappearance).
While reestablishing myself I found I could live well enough. During my years underground I had had published a number of vocal pieces under my father’s name. I continued to sell new compositions, and drew investment income as well from the remains of Erik’s fortune.
But singing on the stage again disappointed me. My own voice seemed dull, and audiences—no matter how they applauded—even duller. Without an edge of fear and a need for approval, no singer can bring an audience, or a performance, to life. Having resumed my career with some success, I retired early and advertised for students. I found that I loved teaching and did it well.
Thus, I did not go on to become a great diva (one whose name has quietly dropped out of operatic history); sometimes I regret this, most often I do not. Must a life be so publicly celebrated to be accounted worthy? Besides, I had already been distinguished enough by Fate for a hundred lifetimes, even if that distinction was unknown to anyone, now, but myself. How I relished my ordinary days, my calmly unexceptional nights!
Rejoicing daily in my freedom, I was nonetheless lonelier than I could bear all by myself. I took comfort where I could; there are good men from that time of whom I still think fondly. But none ever came to me trailing the clouds of sinister and turbulent glory in which the Opéra Ghost had enfolded me.
