Between us we sustained a steep pitch of passion despite the muting effects of familiarity, I think because of the time limit I had set. “Never repeat even the prettiest melody more than thrice at a go,” my father used to say. “Knowing it must end enhances its beauty and prevents boredom in its hearers.”
* * *
Domestic chores gave Erik’s life a sense of normality; he yielded them only reluctantly to me. Nor did I wish to become his drudge.
However, his standards of housekeeping and cooking (two areas in which he had no talents whatsoever) were far below mine; and I did not expect him to wait upon me as he had when I was his guest. I had chosen a life (albeit a truncated one), not an escapade.
We wrangled cautiously over household duties and came to a rough arrangement, with many exceptions and renegotiations as circumstances required. When his compositional impulse flagged, if he could not relieve his frustration by prowling the upper floors of the opera house, I did not hesitate to assign him extra chores down below. More than once I sent him out of the house with a dusty carpet, a beater, and instructions to vigorously apply the latter to the former.
Having had none of the normal social experience that matures ordinary people, he could behave very childishly. This lent him an air of perennial youthfulness at once attractive and extremely trying. His emotions, when tapped, poured from him like lava, and he had great difficulty mastering the molten flow once it began. Physical work, like the demands of operatic singing, helped to bleed off at least some of his ungovernable energy.
In our leisure time I ventured to inquire about his past. His answers surprised me. I had thought him an aristocrat, but his arrogance was that of talent, not of blood. He was the son of a master mason in Rouen. When he was still a child his parents had either given or sold him (he did not know which) to a traveling fair.
As a young man he had ranged far and wide, living by his wits and his abilities as an artificer of ingenious structures and devices. He regaled me with tales of his exotic travels before he had settled in Paris, where, commanding some Turkish laborers (whose language he spoke) at work on Garnier’s great opera house, he had secretly constructed his home in its bowels. He had always worn a kerchief over his nose and mouth “for the dust,” but his workmen had been less interested in his hidden face than in the extra wages he had paid for their clandestine labor.
Given my knowledge of his character, I guessed that he omitted much repellent detail from these lively narratives. Though troubled I never pressed him, reasoning that such matters lay between him, the souls of those he had harmed, and God.
In my turn, I read aloud to him from the biographies and travel books that he favored, or repeated anecdotes of café life and gossip (no matter how stale) about composers and performers whose names he knew. I taught him some Swedish, a language of interest to him because of its strong tonal element, and he enjoyed hearing songs and legends of the northern lands, which he had never visited. As a child I had absorbed many tales, from folk tradition and from books, which now stood me in good stead. People raised in countries with long winters treasure stories and tell them well.
Outside of music, Erik was not so widely read as I had supposed. Many of the volumes on his shelves had only a few of their pages cut, for though he hungered for books he was impatient with their contents once he had them. In the first place, he was sure that he knew more about everything than anyone else did because he was a prodigy and well traveled in the world.
And then, he spent far more time roaming “his” opera house, or working on the various small mechanical contrivances that he was always inventing and refining, than he did reading. Indeed, he was in a continual ferment of activity of one kind or another, from the orbit of which I sometimes had to withdraw simply to rest myself.
I came to regard him as a flood of notes and markings falling in a tempestuous jumble upon the blank page of his life. He had instinctively tried to create order in himself through composing, with limited success: a well orchestrated life is not typified by ferocious obsessions and quixotic crimes. I believe he submitted to my scoring, as it were, in order to experience his own melody, in place of a ceaseless chaos of all but random noise.
Weeks and months passed, bringing our scheduled parting closer by increments almost too small to notice, and never spoken of. Even inadvertent allusions to my future departure sent Erik storming off to work on the darkest of his music, with its plunging, wheeling figures of mockery and despair.
It hurt me, that music. I think it hurt him. I never tried to sing any of it, nor, despite his previously stated intentions, did he ask me to.
In his opera, Don Juan Triumphant, Don Juan seduces an Archangel who helps him to master the Devil in Hell. From this position of power, the Don decrees a regime of true justice on Earth that wins over Heaven also to his side; whereupon God, dethroned, pulls down Creation in a mighty cataclysm in which all are swallowed up. A moral tale, then (as operas tend to be), the music and lyrics of which combined wild extremes of fury, yearning, and savage satire.
Of its quality, I will say this: Erik’s music was magnificent but too radical to have been accepted, let alone admired, in its own time (as he often said himself). Some days, his raw, raging chords drove me out to walk beside the underground lake in blessed quiet. Some days I sat weak with weeping for the extraordinary beauty and poignancy of what I heard. His music offered nothing familiar, comforting, or merely pretty. Parisian audiences would not have stood it.
Nonetheless, he spent hours planning the premier of his opera, which he projected for the turn of the century. All the great men of the world would be invited, and all would come (or else). The experience would change their lives. The course of history itself would be altered for the better by Erik’s music.
My lessons resumed soon after the night of Lohengrin. Erik taught me the rudiments of composition, which I spent many hours refining in practice. In particular, he had me sing and play my own alternate versions of musical figures from the works of the masters, by comparison with which I learned the measure of true genius (as well as the best direction of my own modest talents). This, he said, was how he had taught himself.
He was critical of men like Bizet, Wagner, Verdi, and Gounod, and fiercely envious of their fame. Yet he worked long and hard with me on their music, for he did not deny greatness when he heard it. At leisure, he would play Bach on the piano with a stiff but sure touch; and then his eyes often glittered with tears—of gratitude, I think, for the sublime order of that music.
It was a terror and a joy to sing for him. I have never known anyone to whom music was so all-absorbing, so demanding, and so painfully essential.
His vocal instruction was founded on carefully designed drill and on breathing techniques that he had learned in the Orient. Freed from constriction, my voice began to show its natural qualities. I saw that I might move from the bright but relatively empty soubrette repertoire to the lower-lying, richer, lyric roles. Erik agreed with my assessment.
“Your voice will darken as it ages,” he said, “but you have the vocal capacity for some of the great lyric roles already, I can hear it. And the emotional capacity, too; you are not the child you were, Christine. Your Marguerite is much improved, and you will soon be ready to attempt Violetta.”
Under his tutelage my range expanded downward with minimal loss of agility above, and I gained a certain sumptuosity of tone overall. I would hear myself produce a beautifully floated pianissimo and wonder how on earth I had done it.
Of course, the next day it was unattainable—these achievements torment singers by their evanescence. Erik would not permit me to overwork my voice striving to retake such heights. “Wait,” he said. “Rest. It will come.” About such things he was almost always right.
I bitterly missed performing in public with my improved skills. But in my heart I knew this sacrifice to be well suited to my collusion (however innocent) in Erik’s most recent crimes, which he had committed at least in part
on my behalf.
There was much that I was incapable of learning from him, for he was gifted with a degree of musicality that I simply did not possess. I came to prefer hearing him sing for me (as he did often, true to his promise) to producing the finest singing of which I myself was capable. One’s most glorious tones are inevitably distorted out of true inside one’s own head.
Also, I came to realize that I had a very good voice but not a great one. He said otherwise; but he was in love. And I think that, in his heart, he was well content to train up an exceptional voice that was still not quite as fine as his own.
For he sang like a god, with a beauty that cannot be imagined by those who never heard him. He had a tenor voice of remarkable power, flexibility, and range, which because of his superb musicianship was never merely, monotonously, perfect. I was reminded of descriptions I had read of the singing of the great castrati of the previous century.
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 m
uch 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.