I cannot say if I was happy, at the Opera, before it happened, but I was content, yes, and I felt I think very secure. I sang passably in the midst of the great trained voices of Paris, and, of course, that blowsy Spanish harridan La Carlotta, who domineered the Opera like a fat white hen in a hen-house full of piping chicks. I did not sing as I had in the choir, for, as I have said: where was God in the Opera house? I think, too, I did not really want anyone to look too closely at the little Danish Chorus Girl. My hair grew down my back, so that I could plait it, and my voice shrank to the right size for a lesser middle soprano among a flock of the same, and the husky altos and contraltos, and the strutting second tenors, the robust baritones, the menacing basses.
But never mind that. My voice had been trained for the choirs of God, and for God alone I sang. Perhaps too for my father's spirit, a little. But God's place is not the house of the Opera; that is reserved for human beings, and fallen angels. I needed something else, I knew not what. I knew only that I was small, I was unseen, I was content. And then one day, while I sat in my dressing room, I heard the most adorable, wonderful voice, singing a lovely aria. I recognised it right away as one of my own parts, though lowered to fit a most magnificent tenor, a tenor of which I could have hardly dreamed! A tenor that, perhaps, I think now, could have been my own, some day... ah, never mind that either. I am not a poet; I tell you: the voice was lovely, the loveliest thing I had ever heard in my little life. I rose from my little seat and looked about in the hall, down the dressing rooms-- but once outside of my room I could no longer hear it. Terribly distraught, I returned to my room... only to find that the voice was singing still, had continued! It seemed to swallow the room whole! Dumbfounded and dumb, I sat in my chair once more and listened, I listened for what seemed like a lifetime, and all that while the voice sang to me (I fancied!), and all the while I dreamed wide awake, I lost myself and found myself, I thought myself transformed!
I scarcely knew that the voice had stopped singing when it said-- he said, for the voice was assuredly male!-- "Sing with me, Christine, sing your part, if you please!"
I gave a start, shocked out of my reverie.
"But who are you? Where are you?" I exclaimed, sitting straight up, peering all around, under my little table. What a silly thing I must have looked, peering and stretching like that!
The voice paused then spoke again, so musically, as poets must dream of speaking, "Erik. Call me Erik. And I am here. For you."
I opened my mouth to ask something else, but then the voice... Erik, he began to sing again. And I really could do nothing but sing with him, alongside him, really, and the result was a harmony that I had never heard in the choirs of God, that had never soared in any vaulted cathedral. His voice teased mine forth, and I remembered a talent I had almost forgotten. Talent, after all, had cut manhood from me, and made me into its instrument. Here, in the room with the angelic voice-- the Angel's voice, I think, the idea had entered my head already-- it for the first time occurred to me that Christine Daae could be a mighty instrument, that she could be great, and that, perhaps, this was what God had meant when he instructed His Servants, the brothers and fathers of the Church, to create her. My dear friend, my imaginary reader, perhaps you have known a moment such as that I then experienced, a moment in which all of your life seems to have happened solely to present you with the Now, with This... when it all is all right, and makes sense, because you are where you are when you are. That is what I felt, accompanying that massive voice with my growing one. Christian to Christine, I made sense. I was myself, One Self.
For there could only be two in the duet that we sang: There was Erik, and there was Me.
I long for that feeling, you know. I have not known it... I have forgotten it, even now. Remembering that moment... if only it could have been like that forever! If only beauty were not so often a facade, a pretty carnival mask for something awful, something dark, something so vile... What am I saying, if only! If only I were not so happy now, and this were an easy thing to write. If only every word did not feel like a stab...
I did say there would be no more of this... this prattle. But I cannot bring myself to strike the words out. No, I will not remove a word, not a single word, I cannot bear to see a note of it stricken. Perhaps I hope for a little absolution, in the event that these words are uncovered... selfishly, I hope that my judge will see my anguish and look on me with pity, when he-- she-- whomever! Whatever! Reads how I gloried, how I suffered, the depth of my loss and my redemption, and as strange as my tale is, how unnatural and uncanny, that they will see, beneath it all, the human being behind the monster.
Do I mean myself by that, or do I mean him?
Perhaps I mean all of us, every last one.