Chapter 7
In 1900, Puccini's Tosca taught Christian, among other things, that a country priest's collar was dirty. Having seen neither a priest nor the country, he naturally began to search for those with dirty collars in the audience, peering from the safety of the riggings. Tosca became a favourite; the lecherous and cruel Scarpia against brave Tosca resonated with Christian somewhere, and the way with which Scarpia's very breaths and glances were sinister fascinated the boy for a whole season while his papa was unwell. It was in this way that Christian learned the sign of the Cross, a sign he adopted – though he had never known any God but music – as a ritual of relief or courage. Any reader who has seen Tosca will understand why he needed both. Nothing offstage frightened him. At twelve years of age, he was strong enough to climb the riggings himself and explore without his father, who had taken to long sleeps since there last visit above.
Christian's newfound freedom to romp through the Opera House allowed him to see much off the Opera House up close for the first time. His brain to be blasted with discoveries. He learned that fruit comes not from the fruit bowl but from trees, and had to be picked by someone. The romantic languages he heard on stage corresponded to places across a wide expanse called the ocean, of which an encyclopaedia told him there were several. Most shocking of all, Christian uncovered the knowledge that the ballerinas were not ringleted boys like himself, nor angels like La Theresé, but something else altogether.
Having been raised around other people and made privy to the existence of difference sexes early in life, it may surprise the reader to learn that this information had bypassed an (apparently intelligent) child. Even allowing for the isolation of his early years and the absence of a mother or nanny, one might argue, the Opera House is full of ballerinas, and decorated with statues that revealed the mysteries of human anatomy. Had he ever seen a ballerina up close, then perhaps the boy might have realised that his being the boy would in turn indicate that there were people alive who were not boys. Certainly, he understood that human voices varied from baritone to soprano to bass to castrati. The simplest explanation that can be offered for Christian's strange ignorance is that, having only ever seen the ballerinas from above and far away, he looked at them and thought about them in the same way another child might think about ants: fascinating but with no bearing on his own humanity. Even the clues he might have picked up from the statues gave him only the barest understanding of gender as, having no further interest in women, Erik had taken no effort to make his son aware of them, either. What good would it have done to tell a child that there were beautiful creatures somewhere that he could give his adoration to instead of his father. Erik needed the boy more than anyone else did; no one else could ever love the boy so much.
Christian discovered a woman on one of his most daring adventures. To console himself over Tosca's final show, he decided that he would end the evening in one of the boxes. Having scoured the place to learn which box had been unexpectedly empty, he slipped in, quietly and watched the stage with his usual trance. Tears slid out of him as Tosca contemplated her choice between violation and bereavement. He gasped as though he had never before seen Tosca stab her would-be rapist. Her flight from life overwhelmed him with sympathy, that someone so good could be left so unhappy. He thought of his father below. The curtain fell and, amidst the applause, he became aware of sniffing in the next box. There she was: a girl, her face buried in her handkerchief, her sobs shaking her small back. She was red down her neck through her ruffled sleeve into her little hand. Her curls were the same colour as the black swirls on her gown. Had it not been for a sudden shyness or the stern, stout man beside her Christian would have clambered out of his box and across to hers. Her image would become his close companion; they would not meet for several years.
Later that night, he would catch sight of himself in a dusty mirror. The suit he had been so proud of disgusted him, and he went to beg new clothes of his father. Feeling particularly bold, he asked, furthermore, how he could know what was being worn by the people above. By insisting that the boy need not dress like a fashion magazine, Erik inadvertently gave his son an answer.
The revelation that women existed and that ballerinas were among them gave way to an unfortunate habit of peeping through holes in changing rooms as Christian tried to learn the exact differences between them and himself. Though he quickly satisfied his curiosity, he found himself troubled by new inclinations that compelled him to stare at the undressed women; realising that this was the sort of thing Scarpia might try, he tried to curb this appetite, opting where he could for statues and paintings (later he would draw his own models and instinctively hide them). However, it was from this peering that he discovered, in a baritone's room, a stack of magazines that mysteriously vanished from the room during the nightly show. Among the pictures of the latest fashions, the books also offered insight into politics, geography and (he saw with delight) theatrical reviews. It was through these books, in snatched moments when his father was asleep or enveloped in his music, that Christian became by small degrees aware of the world from which he had been concealed.