Erik and Christine
"I know I shall sound terribly dramatic, Daroga ... but you won't believe me."
I spoke these words with my back turned to him, my palm resting gently on the mantle's edge beside the untouched tumbler he had handed me and which I had placed there.
I had flown here on the liquid energy of a soul turned inside out, knowing Nadir to be my last link to what is human, knowing that no matter how bizarre a turn my life's road should bend, he would offer a drink and an ear. And though he had heard the majority of the story countless times as he had reassembled me like a shattered nursery-rhyme-hero, tonight had parted the curtains of chance to add a brief epilogue to the tragedy of Erik and Christine.
I had come here, I suppose, to speak it aloud - for though I chided the Daroga for his natural doubt of me, I realized I did not believe it either.
His voice was softly husky, perhaps with the lingering vestiges of the sleep from which I had woken him. "Try me," was his gentle command.
It would have had to be "Il Muto."
In retrospect I realize how I had allowed the music to bleed into what little was left of my senses that night. I suppose - how futile and yet necessary it seems now, to lay down these excuses! - but I suppose, had it been any other opera, what I witnessed on the roof might have affected me less. I would have perhaps been more willing to hear Christine's explanations, her protestations that she had said and done what she had to pacify him, to keep him quiet and therefore safe. I could have let go the stirrings of jealousy in my mind - for would I not have had to resign her, had she become both my triumphant diva and my love, to the arms of other men before countless pairs of eyes?
But "Il Muto" - ah, the irony, the symbolism of that opera when placed beside the scene that played out beneath the Angel could not be overlooked - nor its effect underestimated. Think - how like the Count I was, concealed just outside my darling's sight, caught between the necessity of silence and the crashing insistence of rage. Cuckolded - in my own house!
To hear her speak so plainly of my shame - to actually confide it into the Vicomte's greedy ears - ten times, a hundred times more woundingg than to hear her reject me outright. I would have preferred it! To see her kiss his golden cheek, when she had described to him my horror of a face - when she knew what she owed to me ...!
And suddenly I could hear their laughter - all of them - the managers, their fear of the Opera Ghost suddenly gone; Carlotta's triumphant cackles as she resumed the stage, daring me to do my worst; even Christine, alone in her dressing room with the boy, laughing that I could ever have believed she would choose to love me!
I had told her that there was more to me than appearances, had invited her beneath the angelic guise I had assumed, so she might know the heart that adored her. And when she took my meaning too literally - poor child, she was never one for lofty speech - I begged her to look beyond the monster to the man I knew I could be if armed by her love. But what I did not admit to her then was that I am built so very much like the structure under whose roof I first beheld her ... beneath the gilded glittering Apollo's Lyre, behind the facade carved with the figures of angels and gods, I descend stories into the ground, down into the cold of the earth where there is no measure and no end to the darkness. Within me is a place blacker than the unlit passages of the labyrinth, more dead than I ever was in those basements lying night after night in my coffin.
I cannot have her, Daroga. I know that now. But I wanted her more than any other thing I have ever been denied - and as you well know, this life has denied me much. I wanted her beyond reason, beyond sense - and that night, beyond sanity. There is no other explanation, just as there are no apologies profound enough to absolve me of the wrongs I committed that night in the blindness of my rage.
The silence since her leaving had given me time enough to learn these truths - not ever expecting a chance to recite them. But now I cannot stay in those cellars, having told her ...
For she came back! Dear Daroga, do not start so - you shall spill your brandy. No, I am not a liar, though I know you hardly believe me capable of truth where she is concerned. She came back, as she had promised ... she came back with a wedding invitation!
I had asked something to that effect - some nonsense as I blathered and pushed the pair of them from my home. Once I had made up my mind to do it, I could not look at them, could not even pretend to be myself. I descended into the manic giddiness of misery, and Christine watched me with eyes like shattered crystal. Even as the Vicomte led her away I could feel those eyes boring into me, stabbing me from across the darkness that expanded between us with the pressure of Raoul de Changy's hand.
But as I live and breath and pray against all possibility for salvation, my dear Daroga - I never thought she would come back!
Nor did you, I wager; for though you have always been extremely kind, none of your words - not when you found me in my state, nor since - have ever betrayed an acknowledgment of that chance. But I did not crave it; that fact was my medicine, the bitter elixir I drank from daily to try to heal the wounds her leaving had inflicted. I wanted none of that fragile and damaging hope.
But this evening, so simply as you please, she walked through my door! At first I thought that I had gone truly and blessedly mad: and I was grateful for the madness, Daroga! for it had conjured me her likeness, a ghost of my beloved to keep company with my shattered mind. At least I could believe that she was here, despite knowing she was somewhere out in the world, sitting before the fire and beside the Vicomte. And then she spoke, and my ears thrilled at how perfectly my madness had recreated her voice ...
But as she explained her errand, as she handed me the crisp envelope, as our trembling hands touched - I knew she was no apparition; and I knew that I was doomed, doomed for ever to languish in the hope that she would be returning to me. She would not, but still the hope would hold me til it choked the life out of me - for she had returned, once!
How long we stood, our fingertips joined so tentatively beneath the shield of paper, I cannot guess; I was lost to time staring into those eyes. Like cracked mirrors they reflected back to me all that had passed between us, in a tangled stream of painful vivid images; they refracted like light from within her her confusion and sorrow and our thwarted potential, so that they mingled together and poured off her in rays to flood the room.
Revelation and sudden understanding were strangling me, and all the words that could struggle out of me were, "Christine ... I wish ..."
The light coming from her seemed to intensify, and she was as still and solemn as a statue. "Erik - please tell me why."
I shook my head; I could offer no explanations. There is already a story of a man and a woman who lived briefly in the perfection of paradise; like them, we were human, we had succumbed to our faults, and begun our own fall. Our fingers had reached out from the throes of song to brush the flames of Possibility; but what we were knocked our feet from beneath us, and as we tumbled we were left only with the vague singes of what might have been.
She nursed those scars too, the sore spots in her mind where she still remembered the joys we had almost shared. But now we never could - the bridge back to that place was burned, and nothing we were capable of could rebuild it.
I could not mar our last goodbye with silence, lest it be mistaken for sullenness; and so I told her what I have just told you, Daroga, about "Il Muto" and about what my sins have done to me. I told her your Persian tale of the Nightingale and the Rose, and we wept together. I begged her forgiveness for ever having revealed to her the castle I built for us in the sky, the glorious dream I constructed out of my desire and yet to which we never could have ascended. I should have kept it to myself, should have let it kill only me with the oppressive longing for that which can never be possessed.
She pressed her small body into my arms and a sudden kiss against my lips, swearing with her mouth and with her tears that she would rather have glimpsed paradise, and mourned its loss for ever, than never once known its destructive beauty!
It was the most profound thing she had ever said, the most perfect moment I had ever known. And then just as suddenly as she had come she was gone, leaving in my palm the ring I had given her, and at my feet where it had fallen, the wedding invitation.
Now I have fled that place too, Daroga, and I shall never return to it; perhaps I am doomed to the hope that she will someday come back again, but if I am not there of my own choice then perhaps I shall have maintained a hand in my own fate. Perhaps I may be permitted to tell myself this one last lie, that I have made the final decision.
We are two particles afloat in the great electrical sea, Nadir; despite the desires of our own hearts, we are pushed away from each other by forces greater than our own paltry strengths. The night may be in love with morning, but they cannot stand together.
But oh, Daroga! ... they can still steal a kiss ... at the brief and beautiful moment of dawn!