Fair warning, this chapter was cobbled together from pieces written over the course of several years, all trying to convey too much information. As such, it's the longest chapter to date and probably not the most coherent. Also: did you know that I'm an opera enthusiast in addition to a Phantom of the- enthusiast? Well, you'll see for yourself soon enough.
Dear Shadi,
I know I previously wrote that I would not dwell on my years with Reza, but I find I must tell you of the first time I went to the opera. It had not even been a full year since I had left Ghazvin, and suddenly I was in Rome. Out of all of Reza's postings I accompanied him to, Italian society was the most welcoming. That was, perhaps, why he had taken a detour there. We were constantly dining at someone's house, or picnicking at someone's country villa. My Italian was atrocious, but Reza had been right to have me brush up on my French: it was the default language of diplomacy.
When Reza told me pull out one of those proper evening gowns with a low neck, we've been invited to the opera I thought it was just one more social event to make my head spin. And it was, in a way. We arrived in the evening at the Teatro Argentina, were ushered into a poky wooden box of that ancient theater, and sat. I had no idea what to expect, and Reza's explanation of It's the Barber of Seville, cara sposa did nothing to prepare me.
How to explain the shock of hearing an orchestra—a real, proper orchestra—for the first time? That twisting overture that starts so cheerfully and then transforms into the curious give-and-take of the strings came to life all around me. My poor heart! How was I to know that Ecco, ridente in cielo was just a little cavatino when I had never heard of bel canto before? What was I supposed to do with Figaro's patter? With Rosina's aria, or the quartet, or a thunderstorm? I was lucky to understand one word out of a hundred, but something in that music resonated in my very bones.
I was soon begging Reza to take me to operas whenever possible, which he indulged. He did not quite share my passion for them, but at least had more appreciation for music than Feridoon had. We saw Adelina Patti in Italy and Christina Nilsson in London. We heard Georg Unger sing Siegfried, with his wife Marie as the teasing Waldvogel, at the house of an acquaintance.
And yet none of that quite prepared me for attending the opera with Erik. He sent a note around to the house the morning after our long talk, detailing what I should wear, when I should slip away, and where I should meet him. That was all well and good, but it would still be impossible without taking someone in the house into my confidence, which I hesitated to do. But when the morning of our appointment arrived, I steeled myself. I was proposing to do a far more challenging thing soon: I had to learn to screw up my courage and keep it there alone.
I told my maid to put out a plain black dress for the evening, and confessed that I was going out. "Just a little family gathering," I said. "I am absolutely losing my mind here alone." She was sympathetic, and so I continued. "If someone should call, have them leave a message. I am not at home…" I considered my words carefully, "to visitors."
"But of course, Madame," she said, with a perfectly straight face. "You cannot accept visitors when you have a headache."
I turned to look at her closely. Her face was entirely innocent. "Headache?"
"It is the wind," she shrugged. "I am sure it is a day for headaches. You will probably want to keep to your boudoir most of the day, as it is. Now, Madame, are you sure you want the quite plain black?"
And so I was able to leave in a carriage pulled around to the side entrance, dressed in nondescript black. The maid had thrown a sheer silk scarf over my coiffure before I left. I had absentmindedly started pinning it beneath my chin, but she tsked and arranged the ends to fall becomingly behind my shoulders. I wish I could remember her name.
If the coachman thought it was odd that I had asked to be dropped off on a little side street near the Palais Garnier, he made no comment—merely accepted his fare and tip and headed away.
"Well, Erik," I murmured, "Here I am." I thought I was talking to myself and the empty shadows, but almost at once, a little gate creaked open.
"And here I am," he said. He sounded amused. "Madame? If you will follow me?"
I had the good sense to be wary of Erik's secret passageways—I would be hard pressed to ever forget the occasion I had been in them in Mazandaran—but that was allayed by actually being escorted by Erik.
"I've been to quite a few operas," I told him, "but I usually go in through the front door."
"Ah, but you are embarking on a life of intrigue and trickery," he said, "you will find there are very few front doors that will be open to you."
I knew he was grinning beneath that dark mask. I knew that he meant the words to tease. But I also knew there was truth in them, and I was not sure what to do with that. In my distraction, I stumbled in the dark and reached out to steady myself on Erik's arm. He tensed beneath my hand, but after a moment, slowed and helped me find my feet again.
"Now, now," he said, singsongish. "None of that. We can't have you falling into the water and catching a cold."
It was a strange journey we took: by boat over the reservoir, up abandoned service stairways, winding in between old set pieces in storage, through cramped hidden passageways. What little light there had been faded until we were in almost complete darkness, Erik guiding me with the softest hold on my hand. Eventually, I started to hear the familiar sound of the orchestra tuning and of an audience settling. We stopped. Erik must have known that I was getting ready to ask a question, for his hand moved and one finger tapped my lips in a hushing motion. I was silent.
For all Nadir's exasperated comments that Erik is still Erik, the quick familiarity I had been struck with upon seeing Erik again, the quirks and tics that seemed stuck to the man, there was no denying that I was meeting a different Erik that night at the Garnier. He had always had a theatrical bent. Like all magicians, he had a knack for high drama and misdirection. But in those years in Mazandaran, it had always seemed like he was trying on disguises—which smoke and mirror act would keep him the safest?
Now, it felt as if his exaggerated gestures and pitch-perfect delivery were not entirely for show. Somewhere over the years, what I had thought of as affectations had sunk deeper.
It's that ordinary phenomenon of passing time: we do not notice the minute changes that we undergo day in and day out. But then the separation of perhaps only a few months can throw these little alterations into high relief, and suddenly we might perceive a strangeness not there before, even in those we are closest to.
It was really only a few months I had spent with Erik in Persia, and twenty years had passed since then. We were different people, and for the first time I became truly aware of that fact. So had Erik, I later found. But I also felt that this new Erik was worth getting to know. The old one had fallen into my life by happenstance. This time, it was a choice.
For all that, I will admit that I quickly grew uncomfortable in the dark enclosure Erik had us lingering in. I do not think we were there very long, but the minutes dragged and the walls closed in on me as the seconds ticked by. He must have sensed my discomfort, for he reached out and gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. It was meant to be reassuring, but mostly I was consumed with the jealous thought that he apparently could see quite well in the pitch blackness. I could never bear to tell him that the cramped darkness reminded me of the torture chamber in the moments before the light blazed. All I could comfort myself with was, he's here this time. He knows the way out.
All of a sudden, the overture began. No grand swells to start with, but a soft interplay of flute and oboe that was overtaken by high strings and brass after a few minutes. It was at this point I felt Erik lean forward, heard the quiet pop of a latch, and soft light mercifully poured in. Erik stepped out first and then beckoned for me to follow. It was extremely disorienting to start out in the cellars and end in a balcony box of the auditorium—Box Five, as you know. Erik had engineered a hollow decorative pillar, with a well-hidden slide that allowed him to arrive undetected to this box. Sitting in second row in the box, with the curtains fixed in a strategic drape, meant we were all but invisible to the rest of the auditorium but could still command a decent view of the stage.
"It's La Juive," he said. He had that wonderful gift of manipulating his voice so that it stayed very low, but carried to the ear he wanted. "Have you seen it?"
I had not, though I have seen it many times since then. Erik whispered his commentary to me, sotto voce, throughout the production. La Juive had been the first opera mounted at the Garnier to inaugurate its stage, and had stayed in the repertoire with varying degrees of polish. That night, it was beautifully done.
When Eleazar's aria echoes with those terrible words, Rachel, it's me—me—me who delivers you to the executioner, it cannot help but pierce the heart. I have heard it has become increasingly common for some companies to end on that dramatic line, and then proceed to the final scene of judgment. I cannot agree with that omission. As powerful as those words can be, how much more so to hear him then proclaim, Rachel, you will not die! and then to find his heart turning back to the point where he instead says, come die near your father—and forgive him for giving you the crown of a martyr. No immovable convictions there, but the vacillations of the human heart.
No other art form plays out human folly on such a grand scale as does grand opera. And as I sat there, with Erik playing the secret impresario, I realized that this was the piece that had always been missing from the puzzle. At his sanest, at his safest, this was what still made Erik stand just left of center. Tigers tamed, teacups talking, trees teeming in a mirrored forest: they were simple displays of his talents, not a reflection of what was in his heart.
What was in his heart was this sweeping stage, with its mind-boggling ricochets between high drama and low comedy. The music he produced, which I had only ever heard with one voice or one instrument, was made for this orchestra with its hundred exceptional musicians. I had first heard opera as a mature woman, and it touched me. He had first experienced it as a very young man, a child really, and it transformed him. He would never have found contentment in a world without an opera house. And my mind turned back to Nadir's tale: of course, he would be drawn to a woman from this world, as well.
La Juive ends with needless tragedy piled upon needless tragedy, comeuppance that may be divine—or may be utterly mundane. Who is to say?
Just before the curtain fell, he again opened the pillar. "Backstage tour, Madame?"
I was giddy off the music and the heartbreak and so consented. I endured more dark and cramped passageways for Erik's sake. Our tour could not be as extensive as Erik would have liked— it was a Tuesday, the theater evening of choice for many branches of society, including the various diplomatic corps. We agreed that, while I would probably be able to slip unnoticed at some of the less hidden junctures of Erik's haunts (service corridors, or brief walks between hidden entrances, or the like,) it was not worth the risk.
"It would, in truth, take many days to show you the entirety of the Opera House," he commented. After a close call in a side corridor, Erik had taken me high into the auditorium, where we had a magnificent—if somewhat distorted—view of Lenepveu's ceiling, the muses inspiring their pet artists through every hour of the day and night. He spoke of movable mirrors in the foyer, of passages that would allow him to listen to managers and maestros alike. And through it all, he could point out some bone of the building, some refined detail that served to showcase the work of other artists. There really was no end to his genius, but having walked the halls of the Garnier, I could not help but feel there was something very sad about seeing the splendor he had helped create hidden behind mirrors and shadows.
Nevertheless, Erik had no cause to doubt how impressed I was with his work. It seemed like everything he touched was beautiful, and I told him so.
"Were that but so." He sounded pleased, but he also sighed. He asked if there was anything of particular note that I might wish to stay and see, after the crowds had faded.
"I would not mind seeing your home," I said.
He laughed shortly. "I am afraid it is bereft of the gilding that makes these halls shimmer so. It is, in fact, not very grand at all." After a long pause, he said, "but it will not be too far of a detour."
And so we descended again, and Erik grew more animated. We reached the lake again, and the little boat he had secreted, and Erik spoke of the creation of the waterways. It seemed an endless series of archways, some large and some small, filled with bracken water that might shimmer green for a moment in the light of Erik's lone lantern. The air was stale, far more so than the relatively direct path that we had paddled from the Rue Scribe, and I knew the squeaks of rats running along any little purchase to be found in the walls.
This was the very reason Erik had first come to the Garnier: a miscalculation with the pumps had caused the cistern to overflow and threatened the entire foundation of the building. Erik had the solution. And then, as he had said, the lower levels of the building became his domain.
His marvelous white marble palace rose up before my mind's eye. How much more fitting than these sewers! I remember what he had told me—that the palace had been built for a dream. And perhaps the rest of the Garnier had also been built for a dream, but that damp and dark place below ground? If that was a dream, I was sorry for it. Cynic though I was, even I believed dreams could be bigger than that.
…or perhaps, his dreams were larger than that. When the labyrinth at last gave way to a gravel shore, and the shore cut a path up to something like an ordinary house, and the inside of the house turned out to be a study in normalcy, it struck me that perhaps that was the biggest dream of all. What did this new, older Erik want most in life? To be normal. And how difficult had that proved to be? As yet, it was unattainable.
And, in reality, what was it that I most desired? I could not quite call it a normal life, for I wanted more independence than what a woman was normally allowed. But, still, an ordinary one. One where I could go out walking, or riding, or perhaps even shopping and not wonder, will this ruin my husband's career? Will my brother-in-law approve? Will this end in my death?
None of those seemed like questions to ask oneself in Erik's parlor. It was homey, with its dark floral wallcoverings and somewhat austere mahogany furnishings. Books in half a dozen languages huddled together on their shelves, along with various pieces of bric-a-brac. A few empty vases, tied with black ribbons, stood on various surfaces. I wondered if his house in Nowshahr had been so commonplace. I had never been there, though he had visited my home plenty of times.
Erik poked the fire to life, and it was difficult to believe that this room had been the set piece against which so much pain and—yes, let's admit it—horror played out. I found myself looking up at the drapes that graced one of the walls. In an ordinary house, there might be a window there. I knew from Nadir that there was a window behind the curtains, if smaller and higher up than what would be usual. I knew what was behind that window: the one great question I could not reconcile, the miniature torture chamber.
Erik must have caught my gaze, for he heaved a sigh. "You wanted to see the flat? This is the only part worth the seeing anymore."
"It's comfortable," I said truthfully.
"Is it? I can't tell anymore," he fidgeted. "I doubt the Daroga would describe it so." His eyes flashed from under the shade of his mask. "He told you Erik lived here, after all. What else did he decide to share with you?"
I had no desire to see Erik on his guard against me. And I had had many long weeks to think over Nadir's story, and to compare it to what I knew of Erik.
The fact of the matter was, more than one woman had led Erik on a dance. He had no defense against feminine charms—mostly because they were usually the product of his own hopes and dreams, more than the efforts of the woman in question. I had watched the Sultana take advantage of his brilliant mind and desperate heart. Erik had done fearsome things for her, all for the promise of her laughter. I always suspected that he turned to her, not because she appealed to something dark in him, but because he did not think himself fit for anything better.
The little soprano was different, from what Nadir had said. Sweet. A child. Nothing dark came from her, but she had brought it out in him.
But that was the Daroga's opinion, and he was as prone to being overly harsh to Erik as he was to showing him unusual kindness. But if I really wanted to know about Christine Daaé and Erik, I would need to ask. And so I did.
He looked at me, one of those narrow, peering looks that came up when he was utterly baffled by something. I thought he might decline to answer at all, but, in fits and starts, he spoke of her. I let him talk, just as we used to, and the story came together. Again, I know you know some of the common knowledge of that affair. But I will tell you a few things that Erik told me that evening, in the interest of letting his side of the story be heard.
Christine Daaé came to the Garnier out of the Paris Conservatory, her place in which had been given out of deference to her patron, a well-respected professor, and the fact that anyone with ears could tell she had a good voice. A good voice, not great. A respectable member of a great chorus, not a prima donna. I imagine that she had the face of a china doll and a figure both tall enough to command a stage and shapely enough to tempt a jaded chorus master probably helped. That, I should note, is my own opinion; the primary focus of Erik's description of Christine was her voice.
He loved music—he lived in an opera house—it followed that he would involve himself in the music of the opera house. (I think I'll leave the exact details of that arrangement for another letter.) He listened to rehearsals, he paid attention to new members of the chorus. He noticed Christine the instant her mouth opened in song.
Like a badly tuned Stradivarius, he said. A magnificent instrument just waiting for the hands of master. Such was the quality of her voice that even the strictest masters at the Conservatory failed to realize how mechanical her technique was. It was worse than that, Erik said: her voice was soulless.
With Erik's clever brain, it did not take him long to ferret out her story: a poor little grieving girl, who thought nothing of her talent, and whose love for music was overshadowed by her sadness.
Those were the things he first loved her for: for her music—you can understand the excitement of one genius finally being able to speak with another genius—and for her grief. He thought that her grief helped color her soul into something recognizable to him. Without it, he was sure she would have been too pure for comprehension.
His love for her belonged in the nursery. Had they been thirteen, playing in the summer-sweet meadows and shores, it would have been a beautiful thing. But Erik had lived more than four decades in a wild and wicked world, and, at twenty, Christine wanted nothing more than to lay her ordinary griefs to rest and live as a young woman filled with talent and beauty might. Anyone with experience in the ways of the world might have guessed it was doomed from the start. And yet, there was something intriguing about the two of them, like something out of a fairytale gone wrong.
"Do you think," I asked as Erik lapsed again into silence, "there was some other way things might have gone? Some other way to have wooed and won her?"
I had the distinct impression that he was looking at me like I was a madwoman. "Yes," he said very drily. He gestured to his mask.
I caught his meaning at once, and I sighed. "If that is so, then she was not worthy of you." The words sounded patronizing and melodramatic in my ears, but I could not come up with a better way to express what I thought. Apparently, Erik did not find them to be so. He merely found them to be insupportable.
"What?" Was the only thing he said in a reply, a high-pitched note of disbelief.
"There is more to love than a face," I said. I thought I had the right to speak on this subject. I could not help but remember my kind, gentle first husband. But to remember Feridoon's kindness also meant remembering the tangle of scars that gouged into his cheek and cut stark, haphazard lines through his beard and into his hair, the black gunpowder that freckled across his chest and arm and even on the less damaged side of his face. It was not some romantic image of heroic masculine beauty, not the face of a warrior prince. It was a tale of needless expense written on human flesh, and it was not pretty. Erik's face was also that of a survivor: of a spirit that would not die despite the body it was trapped in. But these were not words Erik was interested in hearing, and so I demurred. "You were right to give her leave to go with her young man. Let them grow old together. They will lose their beauty eventually, and if they are lucky, will find something more valuable will remain."
Erik huffed, rather like a walrus. He seemed to melt into his chair. Oh, how I remembered his sulks from his youth! I would not have thought it possible for that he might still throw himself into the sullens with such panache, and it almost brought a smile to my face. "Yes. Yes, I suppose you are right," he said petulantly. "And I suppose Erik does not have that time to wait."
"No," I agreed, "it's a curious thing, getting old. You finally learn patience, but no longer have the time left to be patient."
"Ah. Is that why you have decided to run away from home all of a sudden?" he asked pointedly.
"Oh, yes. Either that, or the fact that I am not sure I have a home to run away from," I lifted my eyebrows at him. "And is that why you are running to Rouen?"
"I am not running anywhere," he insisted. "I am engaged in a promising new professional venture. Rouen is a land of opportunity."
His tone may have been flippant, but it struck a chord in me. "Well. Well, then, perhaps I should just follow you there."
To Erik's credit, he did not immediately brush aside my half-joking, half-serious suggestion. "And what shall you do in Rouen?"
"Did you not say it was a land of opportunity?"
"Yes. For contractors. Not little veiled widows."
His words stung—because they were true. "There are no lands of opportunity for little veiled widows." I laughed. "So I may as well be your housekeeper."
There was a long pause. "You are serious."
I had not started out so. But if there were no open prospects awaiting me, then I would be obliged to make them. Erik had said he would think the matter through, and I felt confident he might. But the idea had struck, and he wasn't offering any alternative. "Do you dislike the idea?"
Another, longer pause. "It's not a matter of liking or disliking the idea."
As the British say, I was in for a penny—I might as well be in for a pound. "You said it yourself, Erik. I am to disappear. Who will look for me there?"
"You may find Erik's company does not suit you," he said eventually. "And you may find that you have picked a more perilous road than the one that leads back to Persia."
"What, will I be flogged if I'm found unchaperoned in your company?" I looked around his parlor significantly. "Or worse?"
"Worse," he replied.
"Well, we did it once before anyway. That came off."
"We were fleeing for our lives," Erik said drily. "On the balance, I think that was worth the risk."
"And what are we doing now?" It was a philosophical question.
"What, indeed," he murmured.
There was another pause, and I took stock of the parlor once again. I looked up at the drapes again. There were so many kinds of horror, I decided. Some were obvious: say, a torture chamber at work. Or a kidnapped girl fighting to protect her beloved. Others were quieter, but no less terrible: a life spiraling hopelessly out of control. A life half lived, or lived all alone.
"Your eye keeps wandering up there," Erik said flatly, jerking his chin up to the hidden window.
"Yes," I said. I did not want to deny it. This was the question that had tormented me, even when I was ready to excuse all of his other atrocious actions. "Erik, why did you build that room in this flat?"
He laughed. "Why, Mojgan! The whole of the flat is built around that room. It is the centerpiece." He radiated forbidding silence, daring me to be satisfied with his response.
I had never been in the habit of pressing Erik for answers. Some things were better left unsaid. But I hated that mirrored room, and all it represented: I hated that there was a place where such a thing would be looked on as a novel addition to justice. I hated that there were people who had turned Erik's beautiful talents into something so ugly. And I hated the fact that I had almost died in such a contraption. Did I blame Erik? No, for I was there and I knew what it meant. And so I persisted. "But why?"
He stared up at the curtain, dropped like a funeral shroud from the ceiling. The rigid line of his shoulders fell and silence reigned. When he at last spoke, his voice was quiet. "Erik wanted sunlight in all the rooms. And I already knew how to build it."
As answers go, it was not satisfactory. But his eyes were earnest, and his words rung absolutely true, and I let the subject drop. Our evening had dragged on too long, as it was. With deliberate gallantry, Erik helped me wrap my cloak about me and we started on the strange journey back to the streets above.
When we reached the entrance on the Rue Scribe, I saw the yellow of the street lamps filtering in through the bars on the gate. What the lamps cast was weak and ghostly, a mere placeholder until the rays of the sun could again light the streets. I remembered the burning room of mirrors. I thought—yes, you might mistake that for sunlight. But it was sunlight stripped of its kindness, with only harsh heat remaining in its place.
Erik insisted on escorting me in the carriage. And though we maintained some little friendly conversation (mostly about the opera and not at all about Rouen,) he was noticeably more reserved. It was dawning on me that perhaps I was not welcomed on his new endeavor, not simply because I would be an inconvenience, but because traveling with me did not suit Erik. He also was trying to start his life over; did he really want a reminder of the past, of a terrible part of his past, accompanying him?
Just before we arrived at my house, I found a few words to stumble through to give Erik plenty of room to extricate himself. I started throwing out other possible scenarios, some quite wild— though, hypocrite that I am, I was also hoping that he would protest that he was perfectly satisfied with the current arrangement. As it was, however, he did not seem to be paying much heed to me at all. I was on the verge of simply rescinding my previous request altogether. Call it an uncommon attack of altruism.
Erik precipitated me, his voice back to the wry amusement that had colored the start of the evening. In fact, he sounded positively mischievous. "I do not believe the good Daroga will be in favor of our plan—" our plan now, I had to notice—"but I may have something that will serve to reconcile him. As for you, I do not wish you to worry about anything. Your only concern shall be arranging your luggage: what you want for our little sojourn, and what you have as insurance. Have these ready by Friday, and I will attend to the rest."
The cogs of his great mind were clearly turning behind his flashing eyes, and by the time we arrived, it almost sounded as though my harebrained idea had morphed into his ingenious plan. I was relieved, and altruism was forgotten.
But then when I at last took to my bed, and sleep eluded me yet again, I had to question myself. The very knowledge that I mentioned to you earlier in this letter struck me: that many a woman had used Erik for her own ends, either deliberately or inadvertently, and that he never noticed until it was too late—until he had lost something of himself. And I had to wonder, is that what I was doing?
I had the unpleasant notion that the answer was yes. It is a terrible thing to hold up the mirror of one's conscience and realize how short we fall. I could not deceive myself into thinking that what I was doing was right by any standard. And, yet, I had no intention of changing course. That is an admission I take no pride in, though these many years have passed. I was in a desperate situation, and the fact that I spent that one night hating my very soul would not alter that. I salved my conscience by vowing, silently and fiercely, that I would somehow 'make it up' to Erik. That I would, as the medical men say, do no harm. And perhaps, if I turned all of my efforts into doing something good for him, then I could somehow counterbalance my own selfishness.
History has at least given me that victory. I think. You may be the judge of that, later.
I am sorry to have written so much, and perhaps so badly. There is in fact more I could write about that night, but I have worn myself out. Grief, even old grief, has a curious way of doing that to a body. Ask questions if you are curious; I will do my best to answer them in some other letter.
Mojgan Khanum