Reflections of a Corpse
1
Love is the shadow of a dream.
And you, my impressionable young listener, you expected me to tell you otherwise. That love is all the world, the one joy granted to us.
In the world of men, perhaps. And you are not dead; you are both young and hopeful. But you may be safely assured, monsieur, that love is a disease. What matters is if that germ implanted in your heart will bring you pain or joy. After all, some illnesses are infinitely more uncomfortable than others. Perhaps yours will be light. But no medicine may revive a man dead from it.
Dead, you ask? Yes, indeed, my young friend; you think it curious that we have been speaking only a few minutes and yet I have mentioned death twice. Perhaps one day you will realize it is all you have. After the fleeting moments of joy and sorrow that make up the passage of time so commonly called "life," death will at last be granted to you.
But I speak too wistfully of it, don't I? After all, a young man such as yourself cannot comprehend a wish to die. But you will someday know that as it is inevitably your fate, you will know it is the only reliable thing in this world. One should not fear it. My whole life, it has been my only friend, detained by the constant movement of time. Conceivably, it will arrive for me soon. It has been so long since I had a friend to call on me, and one needs company, doesn't one, monsieur?
I see am frightening you with my talk of mortality. Perhaps I should tell you how I came to know these things, and thus how I saw the "light," or darkness, as the case may be. Certainly, this tomb is impervious to all illumination.
My gloomy puns do not appeal to you? Very well, monsieur, we shall not waste any more time with my morbid discourse.
2
Often one hears of those who are so beautiful, so sweet and charming, that they are like angels on earth. Disabuse your mind of one thing, monsieur: such beauty and charms are purely human. Did you think that otherworldly beings would care so much about charming others? Their places are assured, after all; what need have they of human estimation?
I knew one who was truly more angel than otherwise.
What made her angelic, rather than simply beautiful? You will have to try harder than that to turn my logic against me, my friend. She was truly an angel, but no more than a child. Indeed, she could not have been older than you are today, monsieur. She was beautiful, yes; she possessed the regular features to have been called so. But how could I possibly express to you her pure innocence? She was so ignorant of all that was ugly, cruel, selfish, or stupid. I must have been quite a revelation to her, in this light.
But her entire being was expressed in her voice more than anything else. When she sang, her innocence, her naïveté, and her youth were more evident than ever in those clear, unsullied tones. You did not hear a prima donna parading about the stage; you heard auditory light, you heard a beautiful, perfect being in the midst of a dark, swirling chaos. What was she, to have possessed such a thing of rare beauty? Was she woman, child, wraith, spirit? Who can say? Only of one thing I am certain: rarely has one so close to death as I heard the voice of such an angel.
You ask me why I have paused in the midst of this tender speech. Remembering such a child as she affords me both pain and a mild satisfaction. She was almost perfection itself, and to remember her almost gives me back my faith in humanity.but remembering what ensued reminds me that I will always remain a member of my own solitary underworld.
For I am not simply a gloomy specter in the dark, monsieur. I am still a man, and when I saw her, I did not see a young prima donna. As I said before, I saw only innocence and beauty, surrounded in a haze of light. To see something so far removed from what one has always experienced made me hunger for it.I conceived a violent desire for her.
Come now, young man, don't laugh. This is not a twopenny novelette; if it were, then God help the person who wrote it, for he surely would be insane by now. My desire was not physical in the least; this is not to say I have never had the desires of any normal man; such a thing is inevitable when one's face has denied them everything. But this was a lust for a soul, for a beauty I'd never seen, something that a degenerate monster like me could never have, something that transcended things so insignificant as a pair of fine eyes or a splendid figure.
I have always wanted. Beauty, love, affection, kindness, companionship, sanity, death-none were ever granted to me, and because of my alienation from the rest of the human race I have been forced to bottle up my emotions and store them where they would never surface: in the darkest regions of my soul and mind. But seeing her was both torture and heaven-heaven because I saw the spotless, exquisite purity of a child in her eyes, and torture because the sight of her released that torrent of frenzied emotions, which in turn almost destroyed me.
Then, did I love her, you ask? If love can consume and destroy with its own blaze, if love can kill, and torture the soul-then yes, monsieur, this was love. Love as you have never known love to be. Even if she had loved me, she could never have been with me and retained her hold on sanity. I would have clung to her in this whirlpool of darkness and we would both have perished. Thank God, she responded to me like all the rest.
My inner demons triumphed over the pitiable remains of my self- control, and I did the only thing I could do to silence the screaming cruelty of my own soul, mind, and body. I watched her.
That is correct, monsieur. I watched her, and did nothing more. I can see you expected something much more terrible; whatever you expected, young man, would have been infinitely better than the way I chose to free myself. For I was not freed; I only bound myself with stronger chains.
I located her dressing room, and sat behind the mirror; by way of that mirror, I was able to see her without being seen. This mirror was my protection, and yet, it carried a price. I could not live for more than an hour or two without cementing my eyes to that tyrannical sheet of glass; she was literally my light, and I could not do without the sight of her. This was one of the many particularly pointless little jokes that I had secretly installed while building this great art emporium, and it finally served a purpose, in my mind.
But I still remained starved for the illumination her person afforded me; and finally, driven to desperation, I concocted perhaps the most insane plot that love ever drove a human being to think of.
3
Have you ever loved, monsieur? Is there one at this moment who above all others can give you that sweetness, that delight, that nothing else on earth could offer you?
You blush. That is good, monsieur; you are a modest young man, and where modesty is, kindness surely follows. Truly your kindness shows in your willingness to listen to the insane ramblings of a sick, degenerate, half-crazed monster such as I.
I want none of your polite protestations to the contrary. I have told you only the beginning, and even when you know the entire story you will still not know me truly. You should thank the living God on your knees you never shall.
But to return to her.
You will pardon me, monsieur, if I do not mention her name. I feel that I owe her that one grace: never to let the blessed syllables of her name be soiled by my tongue again.
I have not told you of my musicianship. Perhaps it went without saying, considering where I make my home. But music, monsieur, is all that I have been granted to me; it is my life, it is my soul. It does not need eyes, and has no use for visual beauty. Its true loveliness is felt and heard in the heart and in the soul, as my own loveliness could have been, had anyone cared to find out. In short, my music is the only thing I could offer anyone.
And I was able to put it to, I thought, good use.
I have told you she was an angel. But it may come as a surprise to you that she had need of an angel herself; however, she had no need of any auditory light, of any vocal beauty. The child was alone, save for the invalid woman she called her Mamma Valérius.
Her Papa was not there. He had died, long before she ever came to my stage and had the misfortune of being seen by my eyes. And yet, she had need of guidance. She had no use for admiration; she wanted her own angel.
Her Angel of Music.
Ah yes, then you have heard of this charming little child's tale? So much the easier for myself, that I need not explain to you how I used it to exploit this dear, pretty child and her otherworldly voice.
4.
Never have I known a father's love; I did not know the tenderness that she had been so accustomed to until her source of guidance left her. My own father hated me, for what reasons I need hardly explain. You see my mask, but you do not know the evil below it. No, I do not speak of the destruction of my face. You do not understand. You will, in time.
This child, this little girl afraid to grow up, knew nothing about the legends of the Opera ghost. She did not speak to the little members of the corps de ballet, where the little brats of the dance spent their free hours weaving tales of utter absurdity. About me. About the monster reputed to live in the catacombs of the Opera. I doubt any of them believed their own tales. If they had they would have trembled.
You mention that I speak of myself as a god. No, my dear young monsieur, though I have been told I have the powers of one. You will understand in time that one trembles not from awe but from sheer and utter terror when they hear my name and know it. I shall not tell you my name or my past, you shall know nothing but the story that I tell you.
This child was beautiful in her purity, her innocence; her gullibility, you may have labeled it in your mind. You blush. Yes, I do know she was young and therefore possessed all the simplicity of youth. She was not stupid, merely inexperienced. She was a perfect child in every sense of the word. And yet I cared not for her in the way a father might a daughter. I saw her as the complementing link that my soul craved. Imagine it, monsieur; we could have spent days making the beautiful music that is the consolation of my life. I could possess her voice, I could create music fit only for the gods and feel myself one in her presence, in the presence of her genius, this genius she did not even know she had. Ah, the charming sweetness of this woman-child who had strayed to Paris and my stage! I began to love her gift, to love her soul, to love these two things that were irrevocably entwined.
Yes, monsieur. I watched her, I became nothing but her shadow, that shadow that could not be seen in much the way the shadow of a flower cannot be seen when the sun glows so brightly down upon it that nothing can be viewed but the vibrancy of the petals themselves. Her voice was timid, she was afraid to take the unworthy audience of Paris and grip the viewers by their souls and whatever emotions in them that were so deep-set, only an otherworldly voice such as hers could have brought them to light.
And that sheet of glass, monsieur, became my tool.
5.
As enchained to her as I became, I fell deeper into my own sludge of degradation and insanity. Unattainable creature! What hell did she unknowingly inflict upon me? Insanity has always been my motive for music, rape, murder, and gore my inspiration. Pain is what has always been granted to me, and so music fills my head when I see it granted to the human race! Music that rips into your ears and screams, claws its way into your skull, shrieks of your death and laughs at the inevitability of your fiery fate. My requiem mass has none of the soul in it; it glories in the death.
I see that I have frightened you. Hell is the possibility of sanity, monsieur. Concern yourself not with these ideals of goodness and sweetness. Evil is as embedded into the soul as any other quality. To bring it to light, that is human! That is what is beautiful! To make your own evil into an art, so few know how to do it! Do not be so frightened, monsieur. I have not finished my story, in any case; you would be wise to listen to the end.
I felt the presence of a great pain in her heart. Like a shadow, I felt myself to be the darker version of her own soul, and could feel the same things she did. Her pain was caused by the absence of her father; I knew this in whatever remnant of a soul I had left. I have had so much pain in my life, and have become so well acquainted with it, that I could hardly bear this emotion that linked this beautiful child to a monster such as me in such a way. We both had had pain; that was our first bond, and I blessed it for I knew I could bring myself closer to her heart if I only dared, and cursed it because it was the one thing that had brought me as low and evil as I was, and for her to feel it was sacrilege. Pain can become as great as it can become small; the measure of a human life is only determined by the level of what they feel. I began to pity her and to pray that she was too far above the mindset of a normal human being that she would not feel any more. I wanted her to be as unspoiled as possible, not only to keep her ready for that far-off, impossible day that we might unite, but as much for Paris, for the people who she made happy with the simple grace of her voice.
And this, I knew, was a sign of her unconscious influence. I had never cared for anyone except myself, as no one had ever bothered to reciprocate when I did, and thus to realize that I wanted to keep her to make Paris happy-that was a shocking thought. What else would her sweetness move me to feel? This was a fateful question and one I pondered throughout my solitary days.
I do not know what possessed me that first day I alerted her to my presence. Perhaps her loneliness had finally touched me so much as to make it unbearable; I longed to reach out to her and afford her some happiness, and I do confess now that I had not a selfish motive in this desire. The only happiness I knew was the beauty of her voice that I now understood she appreciated as much as the rest of the city. And I determined to make it an unending source of joy, so that she might forget her pain and savor only the sweetness of her triumphs.
1
Love is the shadow of a dream.
And you, my impressionable young listener, you expected me to tell you otherwise. That love is all the world, the one joy granted to us.
In the world of men, perhaps. And you are not dead; you are both young and hopeful. But you may be safely assured, monsieur, that love is a disease. What matters is if that germ implanted in your heart will bring you pain or joy. After all, some illnesses are infinitely more uncomfortable than others. Perhaps yours will be light. But no medicine may revive a man dead from it.
Dead, you ask? Yes, indeed, my young friend; you think it curious that we have been speaking only a few minutes and yet I have mentioned death twice. Perhaps one day you will realize it is all you have. After the fleeting moments of joy and sorrow that make up the passage of time so commonly called "life," death will at last be granted to you.
But I speak too wistfully of it, don't I? After all, a young man such as yourself cannot comprehend a wish to die. But you will someday know that as it is inevitably your fate, you will know it is the only reliable thing in this world. One should not fear it. My whole life, it has been my only friend, detained by the constant movement of time. Conceivably, it will arrive for me soon. It has been so long since I had a friend to call on me, and one needs company, doesn't one, monsieur?
I see am frightening you with my talk of mortality. Perhaps I should tell you how I came to know these things, and thus how I saw the "light," or darkness, as the case may be. Certainly, this tomb is impervious to all illumination.
My gloomy puns do not appeal to you? Very well, monsieur, we shall not waste any more time with my morbid discourse.
2
Often one hears of those who are so beautiful, so sweet and charming, that they are like angels on earth. Disabuse your mind of one thing, monsieur: such beauty and charms are purely human. Did you think that otherworldly beings would care so much about charming others? Their places are assured, after all; what need have they of human estimation?
I knew one who was truly more angel than otherwise.
What made her angelic, rather than simply beautiful? You will have to try harder than that to turn my logic against me, my friend. She was truly an angel, but no more than a child. Indeed, she could not have been older than you are today, monsieur. She was beautiful, yes; she possessed the regular features to have been called so. But how could I possibly express to you her pure innocence? She was so ignorant of all that was ugly, cruel, selfish, or stupid. I must have been quite a revelation to her, in this light.
But her entire being was expressed in her voice more than anything else. When she sang, her innocence, her naïveté, and her youth were more evident than ever in those clear, unsullied tones. You did not hear a prima donna parading about the stage; you heard auditory light, you heard a beautiful, perfect being in the midst of a dark, swirling chaos. What was she, to have possessed such a thing of rare beauty? Was she woman, child, wraith, spirit? Who can say? Only of one thing I am certain: rarely has one so close to death as I heard the voice of such an angel.
You ask me why I have paused in the midst of this tender speech. Remembering such a child as she affords me both pain and a mild satisfaction. She was almost perfection itself, and to remember her almost gives me back my faith in humanity.but remembering what ensued reminds me that I will always remain a member of my own solitary underworld.
For I am not simply a gloomy specter in the dark, monsieur. I am still a man, and when I saw her, I did not see a young prima donna. As I said before, I saw only innocence and beauty, surrounded in a haze of light. To see something so far removed from what one has always experienced made me hunger for it.I conceived a violent desire for her.
Come now, young man, don't laugh. This is not a twopenny novelette; if it were, then God help the person who wrote it, for he surely would be insane by now. My desire was not physical in the least; this is not to say I have never had the desires of any normal man; such a thing is inevitable when one's face has denied them everything. But this was a lust for a soul, for a beauty I'd never seen, something that a degenerate monster like me could never have, something that transcended things so insignificant as a pair of fine eyes or a splendid figure.
I have always wanted. Beauty, love, affection, kindness, companionship, sanity, death-none were ever granted to me, and because of my alienation from the rest of the human race I have been forced to bottle up my emotions and store them where they would never surface: in the darkest regions of my soul and mind. But seeing her was both torture and heaven-heaven because I saw the spotless, exquisite purity of a child in her eyes, and torture because the sight of her released that torrent of frenzied emotions, which in turn almost destroyed me.
Then, did I love her, you ask? If love can consume and destroy with its own blaze, if love can kill, and torture the soul-then yes, monsieur, this was love. Love as you have never known love to be. Even if she had loved me, she could never have been with me and retained her hold on sanity. I would have clung to her in this whirlpool of darkness and we would both have perished. Thank God, she responded to me like all the rest.
My inner demons triumphed over the pitiable remains of my self- control, and I did the only thing I could do to silence the screaming cruelty of my own soul, mind, and body. I watched her.
That is correct, monsieur. I watched her, and did nothing more. I can see you expected something much more terrible; whatever you expected, young man, would have been infinitely better than the way I chose to free myself. For I was not freed; I only bound myself with stronger chains.
I located her dressing room, and sat behind the mirror; by way of that mirror, I was able to see her without being seen. This mirror was my protection, and yet, it carried a price. I could not live for more than an hour or two without cementing my eyes to that tyrannical sheet of glass; she was literally my light, and I could not do without the sight of her. This was one of the many particularly pointless little jokes that I had secretly installed while building this great art emporium, and it finally served a purpose, in my mind.
But I still remained starved for the illumination her person afforded me; and finally, driven to desperation, I concocted perhaps the most insane plot that love ever drove a human being to think of.
3
Have you ever loved, monsieur? Is there one at this moment who above all others can give you that sweetness, that delight, that nothing else on earth could offer you?
You blush. That is good, monsieur; you are a modest young man, and where modesty is, kindness surely follows. Truly your kindness shows in your willingness to listen to the insane ramblings of a sick, degenerate, half-crazed monster such as I.
I want none of your polite protestations to the contrary. I have told you only the beginning, and even when you know the entire story you will still not know me truly. You should thank the living God on your knees you never shall.
But to return to her.
You will pardon me, monsieur, if I do not mention her name. I feel that I owe her that one grace: never to let the blessed syllables of her name be soiled by my tongue again.
I have not told you of my musicianship. Perhaps it went without saying, considering where I make my home. But music, monsieur, is all that I have been granted to me; it is my life, it is my soul. It does not need eyes, and has no use for visual beauty. Its true loveliness is felt and heard in the heart and in the soul, as my own loveliness could have been, had anyone cared to find out. In short, my music is the only thing I could offer anyone.
And I was able to put it to, I thought, good use.
I have told you she was an angel. But it may come as a surprise to you that she had need of an angel herself; however, she had no need of any auditory light, of any vocal beauty. The child was alone, save for the invalid woman she called her Mamma Valérius.
Her Papa was not there. He had died, long before she ever came to my stage and had the misfortune of being seen by my eyes. And yet, she had need of guidance. She had no use for admiration; she wanted her own angel.
Her Angel of Music.
Ah yes, then you have heard of this charming little child's tale? So much the easier for myself, that I need not explain to you how I used it to exploit this dear, pretty child and her otherworldly voice.
4.
Never have I known a father's love; I did not know the tenderness that she had been so accustomed to until her source of guidance left her. My own father hated me, for what reasons I need hardly explain. You see my mask, but you do not know the evil below it. No, I do not speak of the destruction of my face. You do not understand. You will, in time.
This child, this little girl afraid to grow up, knew nothing about the legends of the Opera ghost. She did not speak to the little members of the corps de ballet, where the little brats of the dance spent their free hours weaving tales of utter absurdity. About me. About the monster reputed to live in the catacombs of the Opera. I doubt any of them believed their own tales. If they had they would have trembled.
You mention that I speak of myself as a god. No, my dear young monsieur, though I have been told I have the powers of one. You will understand in time that one trembles not from awe but from sheer and utter terror when they hear my name and know it. I shall not tell you my name or my past, you shall know nothing but the story that I tell you.
This child was beautiful in her purity, her innocence; her gullibility, you may have labeled it in your mind. You blush. Yes, I do know she was young and therefore possessed all the simplicity of youth. She was not stupid, merely inexperienced. She was a perfect child in every sense of the word. And yet I cared not for her in the way a father might a daughter. I saw her as the complementing link that my soul craved. Imagine it, monsieur; we could have spent days making the beautiful music that is the consolation of my life. I could possess her voice, I could create music fit only for the gods and feel myself one in her presence, in the presence of her genius, this genius she did not even know she had. Ah, the charming sweetness of this woman-child who had strayed to Paris and my stage! I began to love her gift, to love her soul, to love these two things that were irrevocably entwined.
Yes, monsieur. I watched her, I became nothing but her shadow, that shadow that could not be seen in much the way the shadow of a flower cannot be seen when the sun glows so brightly down upon it that nothing can be viewed but the vibrancy of the petals themselves. Her voice was timid, she was afraid to take the unworthy audience of Paris and grip the viewers by their souls and whatever emotions in them that were so deep-set, only an otherworldly voice such as hers could have brought them to light.
And that sheet of glass, monsieur, became my tool.
5.
As enchained to her as I became, I fell deeper into my own sludge of degradation and insanity. Unattainable creature! What hell did she unknowingly inflict upon me? Insanity has always been my motive for music, rape, murder, and gore my inspiration. Pain is what has always been granted to me, and so music fills my head when I see it granted to the human race! Music that rips into your ears and screams, claws its way into your skull, shrieks of your death and laughs at the inevitability of your fiery fate. My requiem mass has none of the soul in it; it glories in the death.
I see that I have frightened you. Hell is the possibility of sanity, monsieur. Concern yourself not with these ideals of goodness and sweetness. Evil is as embedded into the soul as any other quality. To bring it to light, that is human! That is what is beautiful! To make your own evil into an art, so few know how to do it! Do not be so frightened, monsieur. I have not finished my story, in any case; you would be wise to listen to the end.
I felt the presence of a great pain in her heart. Like a shadow, I felt myself to be the darker version of her own soul, and could feel the same things she did. Her pain was caused by the absence of her father; I knew this in whatever remnant of a soul I had left. I have had so much pain in my life, and have become so well acquainted with it, that I could hardly bear this emotion that linked this beautiful child to a monster such as me in such a way. We both had had pain; that was our first bond, and I blessed it for I knew I could bring myself closer to her heart if I only dared, and cursed it because it was the one thing that had brought me as low and evil as I was, and for her to feel it was sacrilege. Pain can become as great as it can become small; the measure of a human life is only determined by the level of what they feel. I began to pity her and to pray that she was too far above the mindset of a normal human being that she would not feel any more. I wanted her to be as unspoiled as possible, not only to keep her ready for that far-off, impossible day that we might unite, but as much for Paris, for the people who she made happy with the simple grace of her voice.
And this, I knew, was a sign of her unconscious influence. I had never cared for anyone except myself, as no one had ever bothered to reciprocate when I did, and thus to realize that I wanted to keep her to make Paris happy-that was a shocking thought. What else would her sweetness move me to feel? This was a fateful question and one I pondered throughout my solitary days.
I do not know what possessed me that first day I alerted her to my presence. Perhaps her loneliness had finally touched me so much as to make it unbearable; I longed to reach out to her and afford her some happiness, and I do confess now that I had not a selfish motive in this desire. The only happiness I knew was the beauty of her voice that I now understood she appreciated as much as the rest of the city. And I determined to make it an unending source of joy, so that she might forget her pain and savor only the sweetness of her triumphs.