Music of the Night (22 page)

“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. During the Great War I volunteered as a nurse. Not surprisingly, I dealt calmly with the most frightful facial wounds. Erik’s awful countenance would not have been out of place on those wards, just as his music would suit perfectly the emerging character of the new century. Perhaps he was a true phantom after all, as well as a brilliant, cruel, afflicted man: a phantom of this brilliant, cruel, afflicted future. My hospital work brought me to the admiring attention of a doctor several years my junior, and I married late in life for the first time, or so it seemed. The marriage was good, being founded in the shared trials and mutual respect of wartime service. To the day he died, René never knew the truth of my life before. If God holds that deception against me, I stand ready to answer for it along with everything else. Nowadays I coach voice at the Opéra, although my own instrument has of course decayed with time. A gratifying number of well-known singers have trained with me over the years. My students are like my children and I help them as I can, awarding to the needier ones small stipends out of Erik’s money. He would not approve.

Does it seem incredible, to have gone from such a bizarre, outlaw existence to a placid one indistinguishable from millions of others? Yet many people walk through the world hiding shocking memories. I look sometimes at a man or a woman in a shop or a gallery, at a friend or a student sitting over a coffee with me, and I wonder what towering joys and howling depths lie concealed behind the mask of ordinary life that each one wears.

Even extraordinary lives are not entirely as they seem. Recently I discovered that Erik’s spaniel inkwell (into which I have just now dipped my pen) contains a secret drawer. Inside I found a sheaf of receipts all dated early in April 1881, made out to “Erik Rouen” for large cash payments from him to various men, in settlement of the formidable debts of a third party: Raoul de Chagny. Underneath lay a pile of bank drafts running from that time until June 1885, four or five of them per year, for considerable amounts of money. Each had been signed by Erik in Paris, and some weeks later cashed by Raoul de Chagny in the city of New Orleans.

Finally, my shaking fingers drew out an envelope, posted from New Orleans and addressed to Erik. It contained a yellowed news clipping in English, dated July 17, 1885, announcing the marriage of Raoul de Chagny, a rising young dealer in cotton, and Juliet Ravenal, daughter of a prominent local broker and businessman. With this notice was enclosed a final bank draft (for yet another of those large sums which Erik had been in the inexplicable habit of mislaying), returned uncashed. There was no letter. The message was clear enough: Raoul did not come back for me because Erik paid him not to. My Vicomte had gone to America as a Remittance Man! At least he had had the decency (or pride or whatever it was) to refuse further bribes once financially established in his new country. I wept over those papers and all that they implied. But I smiled, too, at the resourcefulness, the cunning, and the sheer determination of my incomparable monster, who had thus firmly secured his victory without breaking his promise to me.