Music of the Night (21 page)

Looking up from my sewing I replied as steadily as I could, “Then what a good thing that now, by law, his surviving children must go to school where they can learn to be less brutal than their father and to use their votes intelligently.”

“You cannot teach an ass to sing,” he said scathingly, casting the newspaper down at his feet.

“Republicanism is no more than government by brutes representing brutes.”

I could not resist answering. “Yet some say that poor people are better off now, and that your ‘brutes’

do no worse than all the monarchs and dictators France has had in this century.”

“Precisely the problem!” he said triumphantly. “There has been no political stability since the Terror, and there never will be so long as the mob is encouraged in rebellion. Without public order no nation can prosper, but your common man hates nothing so much as the rule of law.”

I said, “Can
you
speak of the ‘rule of law’?”

Bending upon me a very knowing and ironic glance he said, “Why, I think I know a little about it.”

I saw that he referred to the rule of
my
law that he had accepted over his own conduct; and I had no ready answer.

He nodded approvingly. “Good, you had best not argue further. You are a fine student of music, but careless and ill-informed when it comes to other matters.”

“I do the best I can,” I responded, “having little education except in music.”

“Weak,” he said, “a very weak answer, Christine. But you are of the weaker sex, so I suppose I must allow it; which is how your weakness weakens me.” He held up his hand to check my objection. “This is implicit in our bargain, by which you secured the right to wind me ’round your little finger. I make no complaint. But do not imagine your authority to be absolute, however compliantly I may bend to your will; I am an ugly man, not a stupid one.”

“Erik,” I said, “you know perfectly well that the last word I would ever apply to you is ‘stupid.’ Will you tell me plainly what you mean?”

“No more than I have said,” he replied, and with that he got up and returned, humming to himself, to a project which he had recently begun behind locked doors.

A few days after this exchange, he invited me to accompany him to the public execution of a convicted murderer outside La Roquette Prison. I accepted. I had never witnessed this degrading spectacle but felt that I was sworn to share Erik’s life as fully as I might. And I did not like him saying that I was weak. As we joined the crowd of spectators (which was dismayingly large for such a happening, and on such a cold dawn), someone hissed, “Look, Death-mask is here!” and they all drew aside before us. Erik strode the path thus made for him with princely hauteur, and I saw people reach furtively to touch his cloak as he passed. We ended much nearer to the guillotine than I wished to be. Of what followed, the less said the better. The curious can still see such things for themselves. My companion offered no comfort. Erik’s scorn for the doomed criminal, the presiding officials, and the watching crowd was boundless, his approval of the execution itself unclouded by any hint of empathy or horror. He clearly did not imagine himself pinned beneath the roaring blade, for all that he was guilty of extortion, two killings at least, and, I was sure, much else.

On the way home, profoundly distressed by what we had witnessed, I said accusingly that the people had seemed to know him there as if by his repeated presence.

“Yes, the habitués see me often,” he replied, his mask gleaming pale as bone in the dimness of the carriage. “But they do not know me. No one knows me but you, Christine.”

“Yet I do
not
know,” I said, “why you join the mob you profess to despise in this depraved and disgusting diversion!”

“To see done such justice as is to be had in this world,” he said, “and to remind myself what death is. Also, I like to think that my presence lends some distinction to the proceedings. They miss me when I am absent, and sometimes call upon the executioners to wait a little in case I am only delayed.”

I never discovered whether he was joking about this. He was fully capable of it. After that I always went with him to La Roquette. I never grew used to it; yet I went. The satisfaction he took in these gruesome displays forced me to acknowledge that subjection of his crueler impulses to my ban was not the same thing as change in his own character. It is very tempting to overestimate one’s own influence upon another when it is passion that binds you to one another. It must also be said that disdaining everyone equally, Erik did not share the common prejudices of the time. He did not hate the English or the Germans more than citizens of other nations, and he taught me to recognize the ingrained anti-Semitism of the French (which I had taken for granted) for the spiteful, willful ignorance that it was and is.

But he was no champion of the downtrodden; his sympathies were reserved entirely for himself. He frequently worked up a keen resentment over the availability to others of advantages that he had never enjoyed. There was nothing to do but wait out these moods of bitter self-pity. Nor could I persuade him away from the vengefulness his life had taught him. Given the nature of that life, it was perhaps arrogant of me to have tried.

As for the secret project conducted behind locked doors, it proved to be his gift to me that Christmas. I gave him a dressing gown sewn of velvet patches I had cut from discarded costumes. He gave me a replica in miniature of the Taj Mahal that he had carved and painted in wood. He had once visited that monument to lasting love and had examined and memorized every detail, an adventure in itself that he recounted zestfully to me over our holiday meal.

Indeed, a whole lifetime of hitherto unshared incident was lavished upon me during my years with him, like fine wine eagerly poured only for my delectation and delight.

Had I been older and more experienced, I might have tried to reply in kind. This would have been an error. He did not need a
past
from me, having a rather over-rich one of his own. It was my
present
that he desired, all the immediate hours and days that I had promised him. And these I gave with open hands. No doubt some would rather hear that we fought incessantly, that I tired of him or he of me, that we failed each other and parted in mutual hatred and disillusion. Had we lived in some suburb or narrow street of Paris, or worse yet on some grand boulevard, we might have come to that. Many marriages are stoven and sunk on the rocks of Parisian life.

Now and again he reminded me that he had intended for us to vacate the Opéra cellars and lead a

“normal” life like everybody else. I was always quick to point out that he was not in the least like everybody else, and for that matter, on the evidence at hand, neither was I; and eventually these objections ceased.

* * *

As the end of our time together drew near, he became markedly morose and irritable. I saw that he was already grieving.

For my part, I walked through the streets and squares in the chilly rain and fitful sun of that last winter chafing unbearably for my freedom, now that it loomed so close. More than once I nearly flung the key to the Rue Scribe gate into the Seine. I longed to be borne quietly away on some gliding river-barge, empty-handed and friendless perhaps, but bound by no pledge or passion. At the same time I struggled to find some way to extend my life with Erik, for I could not imagine a life without him. Restless and distraught, I thought of every possibility a hundred times over and rejected them all as many times.

It seemed to me that any meddling with the deadline I had set would undercut and cheapen all that we had achieved together, making a liar of me and a fool of him. With our mutual respect thus diminished, sooner or later our hard-won mastery of ourselves must decline into a wretched and debasing struggle for mastery of each other.

Moreover, I had first pledged myself to him in ignorance; now I knew the enormity of the task, and the thoughtless self-confidence of youth was spent. How much longer could I trust myself to be bold enough, quick enough, steady enough, my instincts true enough, for both of us?

Whole lifetimes spun out in my mind as I searched for a different conclusion. But I could find nothing acceptable other than to keep to the terms of our bargain. It is when Faust tries to fix the transient moment beyond its natural term, saying, “Stay, thou art fair!” that he is lost. I wandered miserably through Erik’s rooms, touching papers and furniture and books when what I ached to do was to touch him, to press him close with feverish possessiveness. I often felt his gaze upon me now, scalding with similar, unspoken anguish.

He now began to suffer odd spells of lassitude, sitting for long periods with the newspaper in his hands yet scarcely turning a page, his face as white as marble and his forehead moistly gleaming. My questions about the nature of this unwonted fatigue were met with withering rebuffs. But when I came upon him mixing up a dose of laudanum for himself, I demanded an explanation. He admitted that for some time he had been experiencing severe pains in his teeth.

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?”