Erik and Christine
My more romantic sensibilities imagined I resembled a sad spectre, a ghostly form slipping amongst the gravestones through the twilight on an errand so desperate as to stave off the pull of Heaven – or of Hell. But I was not a ghost: I was perhaps the only thing alive in the cemetery that night, though my destination was as sepulchral as any shade's bent on some significant contact with an earthly place.
Cold tensed my muscles, for I was dressed for a party and not for a nighttime sojourn in a cemetery; but the old childhood fear of the dark and of the dead gripped my throat like icy fingers, and because of it I ran. My aim was the one spot where all sensations crossed for me: fear, love, anger, rapture, despair, all entombed there within cold stone.
I pressed my body to the gate, wrapped my raw fingers around the bars, leaned my frozen cheek against the still-colder iron. "Papa," I whispered to the man held prisoner behind those bars, within these stones, "I must tell someone …"
He could give me no answers, no explanations – because there are none.
There is no one reason we cannot be together, Papa – it is just as inevitable as his poor face, or your silent stillness now. There are a thousand things, things which seem so small in comparison to the magnitude of our possibility, to which I could point a finger of blame.
But I am tired, tired of blame and irresponsibility! I want to shoulder it myself! – but I cannot, for even he will not place it with me, even though I had carried to him the proof of my faithless heart.
Everything I have done since our last parting has been a penance: the marriage to Raoul, the hanging silently on his arm and the allowing him to construct a gilded cage around me. I have borne it all with patience, telling myself that Raoul will be good to me and that I am bound to this course of action, locked into this prison-future by my own choices – or lack of choices, which is more accurate! – for all my decisions were made for me, by events unfolding around me but without my participation.
Oh Papa! – I know you would scold me, say that if I am to marry Raoul that I will be doomed to constantly repeat that pattern, to have all my choices made for me. But I cannot think of it that way; Erik and I have been separated by forces far beyond my control, and I must make what I can of what has been left to me.
Then why did I go back, you would ask – if, for some reason above our collective comprehension, we are forbidden to each other, why go back to gaze at him, to speak with him and share a stolen moment of time in which to touch? Why endure the torment– when my husband is to be another man! – of delivering a wedding-invitation to him who I want more than anything and yet who is forever beyond my reach?
Again there are no explanations … all I have to offer is the promise I made to him on that most horrific of nights. I know he did not mean it; I could hear the hysteria in his voice, just thinly disguised beneath a veneer of almost paternal resignation.
He released my hand as reluctantly as you did, Papa, when the time came that you could not hold it any more …
But he is not dead, Papa! And that is what makes it the hardest, saying goodbye to him when he will go on living, somewhere out in the world where I cannot see or hold him. If I were able, I would go back there each and every day to say goodbye to him over and over again – no matter how it should torture us, I would raise him like a poisoned cup to my lips and toast our doom.
Oh, he knew it – he learned it long before I could ever cage it down in words, that I would be locked in the cycle of going and returning, of pulling away and running back with arms outstretched. I am unable, even now, to place a period at the end of our sentence. So perhaps he knew, even through his madness and grief, that when he placed the seed of a thought in my mind it would sprout and bloom, the light shining at the end of the dank oppressive tunnel that has been the weeks leading up to the wedding.
Papa, I am supposed to be, at this very moment, at a party celebrating the last night before the marriage. An ostentatious display of my intended's, a reception before the wedding itself! And instead I slipped away, bent on going to him who Raoul considers my jilted suitor. How he carried on when I first reminded him of the promise I had made!
"I absolutely forbid it, Christine!" he shouted at me, as though I were already his possession. And because I did not wish to argue, I bent my head and said nothing … and made my plans to go unbeknownst to him. How complete was my deception, Papa, down to the lacing up of my gown and the pulling on of gloves to go with Raoul to the hall he had rented.
And upon arriving there, the sudden remembering of some precious thing left behind – and the thrill of hailing a cab and rushing off in the direction of the Opera, all under Raoul's very nose! Oh, Papa – I am sure that Erik has changed me for ever, for before I knew him I could never have been so brazen, could never have told such lies to make myself free to do as I wished.
Never before have I known so clearly what it is that I wanted!
I cannot repeat the scene that passed between us – it would hurt me too much to speak it, to pour it out like blood from my veins. I want to hold it forever, absorb it into my heart like an elixir to carry me through the years that loom ahead of me, empty and meaningless without him.
But it almost doesn't matter, how sorry I shall be for the rest of my life … for tonight I have known what it was to go freely into his arms, and without coercion or guilt to simply speak the words I have held prisoner so long in my heart. I love him, Papa – and I cannot have him; but I have had his kiss! That one precious thing no Fate, no matter how cruel, can deny me.
Nor could it keep from him the happiness he so richly deserves. He held me for a moment after it was over, and whispered in my ear; he told me I had saved him.
I wish I could only have saved us both – from the life of solitude we shall always live now we are doomed to be apart! For I know we are separated forever now, just as we were joined forever only brief hours ago, by the power of that kiss. In it he learned of my love, and of my weakness – and I know in my heart that he has left the Opera and will never return, for fear that I shall come there again and again, and destroy us both with our passion and our weeping.
And so I shall be alone, Papa; no matter how filled with people the house of Raoul de Chagny, I shall always be alone without Erik at my side. Even tomorrow morning, in the nave of the cathedral, I shall stand at the altar alone though Raoul will be next to me, gripping my lace-gloved hand. This loneliness will be the worst I have ever known, for it will be trapped within me, beneath my own skin: in my heart, I shall be as alone as Erik ever was in the dark basements of his cellar-kingdom.
But do not fear for me, Papa! I can bear it – the heat of Erik's kiss has forged for me a new heart, stronger than one of steel. I will surround myself with those I love who are still within my reach and take my comfort in the knowledge that though he is somewhere out in the world, he will be loving me as long as he draws breath.
If I close my eyes now, Papa – if I close my eyes and think of him, there is some chance that somewhere, he is doing the same. We are far apart, but our souls are joined by links stronger than time or Fate or death; I feel my heart turning within me, following his wherever it is he shall roam.
Tell him that, Papa. Do not send the Angel of Music as you once promised me – for I seek Him no longer in Heaven since I have found Him on Earth. Send instead the Angel of Healing to my beloved, to give him strength and resolve to live without me, as he has given me strength and resolve to live without him.
Have that angel whisper in his ear that I love him still, that I shall love him in the deepest fires of my heart until I am cold and gone – and beyond then; that I shall look for him beyond the doors of the Grave.
Watch for him there, Papa, and keep him safe for me.
