The Angel of Music
I have lived in the darkness.
Darkness alive with hope and loss,
with magic and fear.
Alone in the darkness with a madman who
should have been an angel.
Alone, yes, for though he was always with me,
I know it was not Christine he saw
when he gazed at me, but a pale and perfect
automaton he could program as he pleased.
He used his eyes, his voice,
the touch of his cool gloved hands
(things that surely ought to have marked the
fallen angel merely a man) to silence my questioning,
my doubts, as one might poke a droplet of sugar candy into
the mouth of a babe to halt its impatient cries.
Always charming, always changeable, always deadly.
Erik.
A dark spider spinning webs of lonely tales,
gossamer strands of dream
to ensnare a romantic and desperately-seeking heart.
I was often reminded of a large cat,
a panther perhaps, purring and licking his massive-jawed muzzle
over a particularly choice bit of pheasant,
when things went the way he wanted.
And they often did.
When they did not -- well, his rages were legendary.
A menagerie could not contain all the beasts within him,
his storms and rantings,
his sobs and pleadings and cursing shrieks.
After, of course, he would come to me,
contrite, meek, conciliatory,
more like the wandering child he truly was.
And he wanted me to forgive.
I tried.
I strove to understand him,
to know the man who wanted to become my whole world,
to shrink down the opera like some strange dollhouse,
peopled by living dolls
who danced across the stage according to his whims.
But he grew so angry when I stumbled,
my feet entangled in the marionette strings
clutched in his bone-white hands.
As his cloak encircled me,
I pressed my tear-dampened face to the chest of the master puppeteer
and he whirled me away to the dark.
He brought me there to his world of night
- to protect me, he said - but it was clear even to me
that he did it to protect himself; his world;
to keep the fragile (opera)-house of cards he'd
so painstakingly built around himself
ordered just as he would have it.
But his vast playhouse was crumbling.
The toys would not behave.
He threw the ballerina-cum-singer into the toychest
and slammed the lid, whisking her far from the grasp of the
little tin soldier who would not march to the phantom's drum.
But the soldier was loyal.
And good.
And kind.
Within his breast beat a heart that would not forget
his little Christine, and in his eyes a light
that no unhallowed dungeon could dim.
When the walls at last collapsed, letting the faint rays
of the sun at dawn kiss the cold, damp stone,
he came for me and I went without looking back.
I chose the light, and life, and hope.
There are those who will say I was heartless,
turning my back on the man who gave me
my voice, my star, and laid all Paris at my feet.
You are wrong;
it was my heart that gave me the answer.
The boy is loyal, and good, and kind.
His love makes no demands,
plays no twisted games,
and returns a thousandfold more than it takes.
All he asks is the touch of my little hand in his own,
and the light in my eyes to shine upon him,
out of the dark at last.
We will live simply, we two;
quietly, no longer seeking adventure or mystery or fame.
I shun these now even as I sought them once before.
Foolish Christine, to have given your heart and your mind for them;
to have almost given your soul.
I shudder in my sleep, my dreams still haunted
by images of the lost angel stirring in the ruins of the opera house.
He is there, I know, and if he still lives
(as I feel he must) -- is he even now
crawling through the rubble of his ruined kingdom,
long fingers scrabbling in the dust
to collect the fragments of his ruined dreams,
the broken shards of the toys he moved so skillfully
to his music?
He will never understand why I left.
In his mad, deliberate monomania,
he managed to convince even himself that he loved me;
he, who could not show his face to the world
and so created a world he could control
and then constructed out of deception
and cruel manipulation
a lovely living doll to soullessly mouth his music on the stage.
A creature fashioned by him out of greed
and his own deep self-loathing.
With nothing of love within him,
he had none to give to me.
And so it must continue for him,
a wretched cycle of despair and longing,
colored always with the sorrowful pall of loss.
He will live eternally in the darkness
of his own closed eyes, his closed soul,
a loneliness in which will find excuses to sweep
the disobedient toys from the stage,
then crawl through the dust and the scattered pieces
for some twisted and broken bits from which
he might begin to fashion his next creation.
Though his playthings are scattered now beyond repair,
he will begin again,
gathering the bits to him, fitting this piece to that,
tinkering, absorbed as always
with the complex machinations
that might one day make the tortured figures
breathe once more,
Heedless, as always, of the pain to them
and to him.
His blood seeping through lacerated fingers,
he is, as ever, concerned only with the complex manipulations
to create something that should not be -
to forge a dream of flesh out of string and wood
and metal as dead as his cold empty soul.
I wake then, and turn my face
to the warm arms that hold me.
He whispers meaningless sounds, and I
clasp him close and breathe slowly,
deliberately, until at last I again fall asleep.
I heal, slowly, painfully,
feeling the wounds at last fading,
the lasting chill finally warming from my skin.
Soon.
Soon I will be whole.
Soon, I will forgive,
though I will never forget.
One night I will dream instead of sunlight.
I will wake with the word 'hope' on my lips,
and release in my heart, at last.
My love and I will walk hand-in-hand in
a world of soft meadows and picnic baskets and
birds calling from a cloudless blue sky.
And perhaps one day I will even dare to sing - here, where
even if my voice is no longer heard by an adoring crowd,
there is one at my feet to hand me a posey of wildflowers
and I will know for certain for the first time
that it is my voice.
----
AMH
19 September 2005