Many years ago you were my friend. You were special. No one else knew about you. You were my secret. I could tell you things that my other friends, silly, shallow ballerinas, did not understand. You knew about everything. Art, science, language, mathematics, and more than anything, you knew about music. You helped me with all my studies, even though you were younger than me. You shared your genius to help me with schooling, but it was your music that inspired me the most. Through wonderful compositions and harmonies that seemed to run through you, like the very blood in your veins, you showed me the true wonder of beautiful music.
We sang together, although I am hardly a singer. But you never criticized me for being off key or missing a half-step. Never once did you look down upon me, with your brilliant mind and voice of celestial perfection. We were outcast together. Two lost children, forsaken and forgotten by their parents, pursuing their art and dreams. The ballerina and the composer; we were two lost spirits clinging to each other for guidance, for safety, and for love.
I never feared your appearance like others. I never screamed in terror or foolishly swooned when I saw you. I knew what you truly were. You were not your face. The boy inside was not really a monster; only a very broken, very tragic being, who had been shunned by humanity from the moment of his birth. Sometimes you were very angry. I did fear those spells of fury. I kept away during those times. When you were angry I sensed a power you in. It was strong. It frightened me.
It was in one of those spells you decided to leave. You were so angry. You told me I'd imprisoned you. You no longer wished to stay in those amazing labyrinthine passages. You were tired of our adventures together. You wished to see the world and to amaze them with your talents. I begged you to stay, but there was no one who could make you do anything. You could do be held down. And so, to my deepest despair, you left me in search of your place in humanity.
Twenty years went by. I married, had a daughter, and was widowed all within five of those years. My husband Jules was a sailor. He was a good man who loved me and I felt great fondness for him. He'd been on so many excursions across the globe; I'd never expected a voyage to Spain would kill him. The sea had been rough. He fell from the ship and drowned. It was a freak accident, they told me. They never found his body. I was twenty-five.
I mourned for a very long time. I became a widow for life; replacing everything I owned with black, except my wedding gown, hidden at the back of the wardrobe. I constantly thought of you. I dishonored my husband's memory by thinking of you in such a way, but I did not seem to care. I wanted you. I have always wanted you. I craved for you, even as I raised my daughter, Marguerite, to be a respectable woman. I called her Meg, a simple name for a very complex girl. She was a beautiful child, fair and sweet, but she knew what she wanted. Her ambitions were strong and her hopes vast. I tried not to let my bitterness crush her spirits. She looked so like her father, sometimes I still look at her and feel like I may cry. But I will not. I do not cry.
When Meg was fourteen, I received a letter from Sweden. Gustave Daaé, the widower of my late friend, was deathly ill and would most likely die within a few days. The woman, who wrote, she called herself Valerius, reminded me of a promise. When my dear friend Hélène, Gustave's wife, passed away after a complicated childbirth, I became his sole source of comfort. He begged for me to come before the baby was born, she had been ill and somehow he knew she would not survive the birth. I was expecting Meg at the time, with only a few weeks to go, but to my doctor's discretion and husband's distaste, I boarded a ship and made the three day ship voyage to Uppsala without a word of discomfort. Hélène was my oldest friend; I could not abandon her, even in death.
She had been dead for a fortnight when I arrived. Her corpse lay on their bed, covered by a white sheet. I could not bear to lift the sheet. I found Gustave in the room, sitting in a chair opposite the bed. He held the new baby in his arms, staring at the covered body, his face wary with grief.
"I could not bear to move her," he whispered tiredly, "yet I could not stand to see her. Her eyes…so blank…her face…so white…" he trailed off and bit his lower lip, for fear of crying before a woman.
I felt ashamed that I could not cry with him, being a woman devoid of tears. All I could do was hold him, and tell him that he could cry. I knelt down by his chair, which was difficult being pregnant as I was, and held him as he cried into my shoulder. The baby girl slept in his arms, a quiet, beautiful image of her dead mother.
There was a small funeral in Uppsala. Hélène's body was laid out for mourners to pay respects. I looked down on her, so perfect and beautiful. I remembered her smile and her laugh from girlhood. I longed to hear it again.
Gustave and the child would be soon moving to France and living with their friends, Professor and Madame Valerius. He planned to have Hélène's body sent to the village of Perros-Guirrec, the village they would live in, and buried in the cemetery's family plot. I promised him I would come down from Paris with Jules and the baby as often as possible. Even then, it was a hollow promise, made only to solace a distraught man. As we stood in the church, gazing sadly at our dear Hélène, he made an innocent request of me.
"Antoinette, I know you and Hélène were dear friends as children. She loved you and spoke very highly of you. You were always so good to her…good to both of us," he began; his handsome Swedish accent was even pleasant to hear in a dark time.
"But, I confess, there is something I want to ask of you. It's a promise I want you to make; a very serious promise at that."
"Of course, Gustave, I'll do anything for you." I was feeling terribly and stupidly charitable at the time. The poor man's wife had died what else could I say?
"It was Hélène's wish that should anything happen to us; it would be you would have custody of our daughter."
"What?" I asked, rather stunned. I was not even certain I could raise my own child at that time, let alone someone else's.
"I'm only asking if it happens. Her death has made me think more seriously about everything. Especially Christine's well-being…that's what I've named her, Christine."
I gave the question a few moments of thought. I remembered how dearly I'd loved Hélène. So hesitantly, I consented, to help mend his broken heart a little more. I never thought anything much of the promise for fourteen years after that. Meg and I never travelled. Not even to Perros to see them. I became a bitter old widow, angry at Jules for dying, angry that I could no longer dance due to age and injury, and still angry at you for leaving. I was angry old woman, crippled and using a cane, at the young age of thirty. They made me a co-ballet mistress out of pity for their old star, but not even that brightened my mood. Meg was the sole spark of light in my life.
But then I received the letter, Gustave was dying and I must come and collect Christine as I had promised. The Valerius woman's husband was dead and she was too old to care for the girl. I found myself cursing Gustave Daaé. Had he known he would die, as he had known his wife would? It almost seemed as if he had let himself die. Yet I knew I must follow through on my word. So I brought Christine home to Paris, took her into my home, gave her spot in the petit corps de ballet and raised her like my own. She and Meg became inseparably close and I grew to love her as dearly as I'd loved her mother. For six pleasant years, I had two lovely daughters, life was a bit brighter. Things were simple and undisturbed.
And then you returned.
Unexpectedly, of course, with no notice; it was very like you. I'd gotten one or two letters from you over the years, but they'd stopped. I suppose it was too dangerous to send them from where you were. You returned from those mysterious lands changed for the worse. You had become as bitter as I was. An angry, violent man, cold and hardened by the scorn of the world, came back in exchange for the tragic, wonderful, passionate boy who had sought acceptance. You returned as a villain when I knew you could have been a hero. You could have been something great if not for that unfortunate disfigurement. The world could not accept your genius and ignore your horrible appearance. Your wishes and dreams had been shattered as mine had.
You returned in a mask, a mask whose white plaster hid your deformity. You came to me for the first time in twenty years in that mask. You wore a black cloak, and a black, felt hat pulled low over your face. The sight of you, grown up, dark and strangely attractive beneath a mask, stopped my breath. You enthralled me with your new mysterious and seductive mannerism. The last time I had seen you were shorter than I, smaller too. Now you towered over me, with broad shoulders and a hard, striking frame. Your voice was older too, low and smooth, but still the most glorious and pleasurable sound the ears could ever intake. I felt love again. I wanted you right then. If you had wanted it, I would've let you take me right there on that wooden floor. These wicked fantasies filled my head as I stupidly hoped such things could be.
I soon found that you were not the person I had loved for so long. You were different. I was different too. We were horrible, angry people. Life had not gone as I had intended, so I became a spiteful widow in black. Reality had refused to accept you, and so you became a ghost.
You made those cellars you had so desperately wished to leave your home. It was a lair of mazes and tricks. A trap, intended to kill intruders. You became the phantom, the eyes and ears of the opera. You made threats. One of your threats made me head ballet mistress. I suppose it was your attempt at a favor. I accepted the post I had once longed for half-heartedly. You murdered with such skill that I knew you had been given practice during your time in the Orient. I began to hate you for what you did, to deeply despise you. But oh God, forgive me, my heart still ached for you.
But now you love another. You cast those lustful, watching eyes upon my foster child, Christine Daaé. You fell in love with her instantly. You obsess over her. You lust after her. You thwart her naïve mind with your music and lies. Whether you have seduced her physically I do not know. You do not allow me to warn her about you. She fears you greatly, but I see how she loves you too, in a strange internal way. You want her, with the same unbearable intensity that I have felt towards you since I was thirteen. A part of me hates her for it. Because of you, I actually feel hate towards my beloved foster daughter. She runs from you. She runs to her Vicomte, her lover, the one she hides from you. She is foolish enough to think she can keep secrets from you.
Oh, but you now. You are hurt. I see how the two of you hurt each other, how she crushes your heart in a way so innocent yet so unforgiving. How can you still want her? She who denies you? She who says she hates you? I cannot bear it! I cannot stand to see you suffer any longer, despite your numerous crimes. You cry over her! Tears of pain, of ripping pain that I have only ever wanted to take away. Why, by some cruel twist of fate, must you whom I so deeply love, love a girl whom I love just as greatly?
Of course, it is only natural that you should prefer Christine over me. She is young and beautiful in the way of only a goddess. All the men stare after her. She shares your musical genius, with that angelic soprano voice of hers which brings audiences to their feet in tears. That voice which you just could not resist in nurturing. You created that voice of hers. You taught her in ways that no other human could. Her body is young and slender; everything is still firm and curved correctly. Why shouldn't you lust after that? You're still just a man after all, with everything it entails. You don't want a fraying, wrinkling old woman like me. You long for beauty, despite your own lack of it. Christine is beautiful, innocent, youthful perfection. And you will destroy her while I helplessly stand and watch.
The terrible truth of the matter is that I love you. I will always and have always loved you. I love you despite your looks and despite all your terrible deeds. But you shall never know. For these words I have written, will always remain a secret. This shall always be my secret yearning, the bitter pill I am forced to swallow until my last day.
It is my heart's lament.