Fire From Heaven
Erik's bedchamber was dim. Red silks like membranes hung over all the lampshades, casting an inflamed sheen on the dark walls and floor. I thought of dried blood staining the skirt of a black dress.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. In the center of the room stood a massive bed cut into the shape of a coffin. It would have fit a giant tightly, making it large enough for a man to lie down or roll about in. Bedcurtains of dark red gauze draped around it. Through that waterfall of blood, the inside of his bed was spread with white sheets of satin and lined with white velvet, just as a real coffin was.
"The monks of old built their final resting places out of pine wood, and then slept in them," he remarked.
"I don't think theirs were quite so luxurious," I retorted.
"Luxurious or not, it reminded them of death. When they took their deaths into their hearts, a great paradox occurred, Christine. Inside them opened a space vast enough to contain the world, and no fear of death was left in them. It wasn't enough for them to lie down in those coffins, no, they were to think of themselves cold and motionless. They were to hear the lid being nailed down, blow by blow, and feel the thud of the first spade of earth that would bury them until the final trumpet's call. One after another rained down the clods of earth that would make them food for worms."
I could stand it no longer. On his walls hung wide pieces of what looked like Japanese rice paper. Sprawling words seemed to have been splashed on with a mop, with specks and splatters of black ink everywhere. I strained in the red dark to read what was written there. Giving up, I asked, "What does it say?"
Slowly and solemnly he intoned,
"Dies iræ, dies illa,
"Solvet sæclum in favilla..."
He chanted beautifully. I stumbled over the Latin, "Day of wrath, day of gloom, all of earth shall fire consume..."
"Very good," he said, teacher praising the favorite pupil.
On a raised dais stood an organ covered with sheet music, staff paper, pens. In the center of the clutter, as if it had been the last item handled, stood a quatro-sized red leather notebook. I hesitated to touch it, but he nodded encouragingly.
"Don Juan Triumphant?" I read aloud. Inside, thousands of little red notes tumbled over one another, ants spilling out of their hill after the naughty boy pours water down the hole. There were scores for violin, for cello, the oboe, the French horn. Then came the vocal scores, the arias, the choruses. It made my head swim, for while I prided myself on my sight-singing and reading, this jagged maze of notes suggested nothing to me.
Every few measures seemed to have a different tempo, a different key signature, and the modulations made no sense. He had interspersed the text with a notation of his own invention. In the margins were comments scrawled in large, irregular print. Some of the comments made sense, "Sopr: kp shldrs bk. & chin hi. Tenr: tk hr hand tndrly." But other notes seemed more like mad poetry than stage directions, these red-scribbled pages of chaos and confusion.
He took the folio from my hands lovingly, reverently. "Ah, you found it," he said, voice trembling with emotion. "It is as if you knew. This is the living, beating work of my heart. This is my great composition that has encompassed two decades. When it is completed, my life will be over. There will be nothing left for me afterwards, and with it I shall climb into my bed, my bed of death, and not wake up. The world will never see it, for with me into the grave it shall go. The world will never hear it, for the world would not understand."
"It seems a waste," I remarked. "All that time and work."
"Oh, it has not been two decades straight," he laughed with strange harshness. "I have done other things in between."
"Why is it written in red?"
"I used to live in Persia many years ago," and his voice took on a faraway quality. "There, as in Egypt and Araby and all through the Mohammedan world, those who submit to Allah had a book like our Bible called the Koran. Every man studied it, and even some women. To memorize it was considered a great virtue . Occasionally one of the Persian Mohammedans would succumb to a burst of enthusiasm and open his veins to write verses of that holy book in his own blood. It was considered a great impiety and the offenders were quickly dispatched, often by strangulation ... at least when I was there." Recovering himself to the present, he went on, "But I was not a Mohammedan. For me to open one of my veins, to record the revelation given to me directly from the dark angels that flap like bats around the buttresses, would not have been blasphemous at all."
I pulled my hands back, and wiped them rapidly on my skirt. "You don't mean to tell me that score is written in your blood?" I looked around the room, terror pounding in the veins of my temple.
"Oh, I have frightened you," he said. "Stories of Persia are not for girls of delicate color. I don't know why I brought that up, it's as if I speak and strange things come out of me, for I don't think like other people. No, it's not my blood, but only ordinary red ink. Look, Christine, here is the bottle, and the very pen itself I last used, with the ink still on it."
My heart settled back in my chest. To distract him, to turn my own thoughts away from open veins and blood-writing and strangulation, I touched the cover of the folio and lightly said, "Would you play something for me from your master-work, then? For I can't make it out at all, it's as if it has no melody whatever."
"Melody," he sighed, one of those long drawn-out sighs I came to know so well. "Melody, and harmony, and resolution ... they all point to order, and justice, and coherency. But there really is no order, and worst of all, no justice. Suffering falls upon the innocent from indifferent skies. What Erik has painted with red notes onto this canvas of sound is life itself, life not reduced to pious formulae or submitted to tedious theological explanations, but life that triumphs and spits into the face of a God who inflicts upon it unjust and unbearable suffering. What's written here is life carving out a place for itself."
Shocked, I crossed myself. He saw it and laughed. "Perhaps you prefer Mozart's Don Giovanni? Do you enjoy it when he meets his fateful end, dragged kicking and screaming into hell, directed there by that sibyl of stone who points the way? Perhaps you equally enjoy watching Faust carried away by the devil whose plaything he is, instead of winning Helen of Troy?"
"She wasn't real," I interrupted. "She was an illusion at best, an evil spirit at worst."
"You confuse Goethe with the coldness of the English," he snapped. "Goethe's Helen was no cold concatenation of mist, but a living woman of flesh and blood, and they had a child whose name was Joy. A simulacrum cannot produce a son. There are stories here ripped straight out of the heart, and do you know what opera does? It cuts them down, simplifies them, lards them with sentimentality so that old women in spats and top hats will not be offended, even though they themselves do far worse when the curtain falls. We see only the surface, not the depths. My Don Juan Triumphant plumbs the depths, and in the end he prevails."
"But you won't play some of it for me?" I asked coaxingly.
He stood away from me silently, tall and slim in front of the double keyboard, and a little spasm went through my heart. "You've made your career based on freshness and beauty," he said softly, and I had to strain to hear him. "Do you know what the managers said when they debated about offering you a contract?"
"Of course not. How could I? How could you, for that matter?"
"Oh, around here, the walls have ears. I will tell you what they said," and he mocked Poligny's mincing syllables exactly. " 'She sings like an automaton,' Monsieur Poligny commented. 'But she has the face of a seraph, an exquisite beauty made rarer by its purity.' That was a day to mark in one's journal, when Poligny would compliment a woman's face, as it was well-known that Monsieur Poligny's mistresses all had moustaches, and not because they failed to pluck or wax."
" 'Don't worry,' Monsieur Debienne replied. 'Soon enough her face will grow hard as glass. It happens to them all.'
" 'So let's take advantage of this one while it lasts,' Poligny smirked, and Debienne joined him. When they laughed together like that, I wanted to kill them both," and he wrung his hands together as if restraining them.
"I won't risk you hearing these sounds. These are no simple puffs of breath, no delicate whispered syllables. In the desert, the wind whips up the sand so that it cuts flesh from bone. That is the power of moving air, and were you to hear my Don Juan, that wind would carry to your ears a flame. For my Don Juan lives not in Seville but in the desert, and he burns with a clear flame, one that sheds no light but only heat, heat that scorches down into all four corners of the heart. I don't want that heat to burn you, or melt you so that you harden like glass, or turn you into something that you are not. I love you, and yes, your face tells me that I broke my promise, and it is a promise I am afraid I will break over and over again. For if you hear my Don Juan, or worse, if you sing it, I fear you will become burnt and hardened. You will become like Erik."
The room slightly swirled around me. In that maelstrom of black and red, Paris seemed very far away, a small ship adrift on a vast ocean, and only the man provided a solid anchor. He stood with hand on one hip, head cocked, bronze now in the red light rather than cold like iron. Inexplicably, madly, I wanted to dance with him.
"You've drugged me again," I whispered.
"No," he replied. "It is Don Juan's fire that focuses the senses."
"If you will not play some of it for me, will you at least tell me the synopsis?"
"If you stare at the sun," he answered in a low thrilling tone, "it will still burn your eyes, even if you are millions of miles away from it."
"Who are you?" I whispered. "You say you love me. How can I love you, when I can't even see you? How can you show me a coffin set in the middle of a tomb, and expect me to think of anything but death? Do you expect me to love you in a grave?"
"I take my rendezvous wherever I can get them," he said in a soft voice choked with regret.
"Down here, I can't imagine you find any rendezvous at all."
His black impassive face fluttered with heavy breath. "You would be surprised."
Blushing, I said, "Would you play me something from the opera, then?"
Turning on me harshly, he said, "What, Mozart? Or something of Herr Hoffman, perhaps a story of an old magician in love with his favorite pupil? When I think of the stupidity, the waste, the trivia that those fools upstairs call entertainment ..."
"If you dislike the opera so much, Erik," I interrupted, "why do you live here?"
"The real curse of Eve, inflicted on man from generation to generation, is that women are not content to accept that which is presented to them, but angle endlessly for more, always more. Very well, Christine, I will play you something from the opera, and you will sing with me, from the bottom of your narrow little chest out of which we have worked so hard to coax every last vibration of sound."
I crossed my hands in front of my breast protectively, even though he did not leer. Instead, it was I who looked at him with different eyes than when I had first entered the room.
Later, when I would play at jigsaw puzzles with the children, we found that when pieces of the puzzle were missing, the whole puzzle was spoiled. Even one lost piece was enough to make a child weep with frustration. After all that work, the picture still was incomplete. But we don't see things like that in life. When pieces are missing, we fill in the gaps ourselves with details of our own imagining.
While Erik talked or gestured before the keyboards, I gave him a story, the saga of a lost prince, a rejected nobleman, a separation in childhood, a lonely life of exile, desperation and a touch of madness born from tribulation, but due to be all set right in the end, healed by a kiss or a touch. When he twisted his shoulders around sometimes spastically, sometimes gracefully, or when his long spider-like fingers molded the air, the conviction grew in me that under the mask he was beautiful. Something terrible had happened to him to make him hide.
"Something from the opera," he repeated. "I have the very thing, back at the piano. Something that will stir your soul but still allow you to keep your fresh and pretty coloring."
In his haste and agitation, he preceded me out of the room. His tall back narrowed down so rapidly to taut hips swathed in swallowtail. The naïve child of my imaginations and illusionings went with him, riding on his wide and angular shoulders.
He played a prelude, and I shuddered, recognizing it as the beginning of Act III of Rossini's Otello.
"Take up your harp, Christine, and start at 'O thou sweet instrument of my grief.'"
"I can't play the harp," I remarked, "and anyway, yours is too big to lift from the floor."
He stared at me momentarily, then said, "I will sing Emilia's few lines, and will later come in as Otello."
I stared back at him. He banged on the piano angrily. When he went through several introductory measures to my silence, he looked hard at me and said in clenched voice, "Sing."
So I began Desdemona's lament, not softly and sweetly as he had sung it for me the night before, but with plaintive wailing. It could not be helped, because I was led by my accompaniest anywhere he wished to go.
Then the great thunderclap rumbled out of the bass notes, followed by the daggerlike shards that blew from Desdemona's window with the approaching storm. The wild music disoriented me, because he no longer played Rossini's accompaniment, but some passionate invention of his own born of the storm, of wind and rain, of the approaching Moor's murderous passion.
He sang, "Eccomi giunto inosservato e solo," but in no way did he "arrive unnoticed." When the first syllables pounded the air, my heart leapt like a rabbit set free from its hutch.
"She is not to blame, if my loathsome visage drives her from me, from my shame," he sang. What did Rossini's librettist mean? I had seen North African men in Paris, and they weren't repulsive at all, but instead beautiful with their haunting brown eyes, their long dark noses, their carved smiling lips. His long wig and ink-swathed face swam before me, and only the long white hands racing up and down the keyboard let me know that he was not the Moor himself.
"Why did you not give me, God, a face which matched my heart?" he half-sobbed, the thunder of his voice matching the thunder he teased from the keys, and I sobbed out loud with him.
"My dear love," I breathed, as Desdemona turned in her sleep, embracing Otello in her dream.
Lightning crackled under his fingertips, and when Desdemona awoke, and he called out "False one!" I was ready for him. Desdemona offered him her bosom, crying out, "Pierce me to the core!" and I did the same. But while Desdemona feared Otello and on stage moved away from him, he always advancing, hidden dagger ready to strike, I bent down to Erik and sang into his masked face, making the silk ripple with the force of my breath.
"Non arrestare il colpo ... Hold not your blow," I cried, and spread my arms wide, breast entirely opened to him. "Most cruel of men," I sang, but by now it was a sweet cruelty which animated him, and he pressed me with his voice so that I shook as if he were pressing me with his body.
When I told Raoul of this fateful duet, it was the terror I recounted. But the terror was my character's, not mine.
"Io fremo," he breathed in agony, trembling now with genuine passion, no more acting. He and Otello were one. Never had I heard such. Never had I understood what moved Otello, why he shook and shivered and sobbed with agony. I would have stopped our duet and embraced him right there, but he forged onward with "O dismal night, o cruelest storm," so that his improvisation of thunder and hail rained down and echoed through the room like balls of ricocheting ice.
Closer we moved towards each other, but I dared not touch him, for those wild arms gyrating up and down the keys would have knocked me to the floor. Again I thought to wrap my arms around him and fling my head onto his flat breast. There was no modesty left to stop me. All that held me back was that were I to embrace him, the sensual laceration of singing with him through a storm of scorching ice would stop. Any pleasure I would have had from such an embrace seemed pale in comparison.
Never had we sung like this in our lessons. Never had a man and woman sung this way on stage, not that I had ever heard.
When I commanded, "Take your pleasure, cruel man," I knew what I meant and so did he. He looked me full in the face, and through the eyeholes of his mask I could see his rich dark eyes, glittery and black, and they were opened wide, very wide, for the whites shone entirely around those inky orbs. For a few seconds, the last few seconds of unfettered happiness Erik and I ever shared, he was the Moor, I his beloved, and I would have given him anything, been anyone for him, done anything for him. He shook with deep hunger, and clearly as if he'd spoken, I knew what would conclude our duet. He would take me in his arms, carry me into his room, and under that gauzy red lamina I would yield, and die.
These were my last few seconds of innocence on earth.
Otello's vengeance was completed with his knife plunged to the hilt in Desdemona's pale breast, making the slow stream of her life run down with the rain. Erik leaned his head back, eyes closed, as if wanting to be kissed beneath that black-clad mouth. I stared for a second at his pale eyelids while the long wail, "Alas..." poured from me. He held the notes a long time. Directing me with one hand, sweeping across the keyboard with the other, he drew out my cry of pain into a soaring moan of passion as he stabbed me to the quick, again, again. Dying with Desdemona, I wanted to see the face of he who pierced my soul, the one who would pierce my body.
Everything moved very slowly. Back then I had never seen a film, nothing of that sort had been invented yet, but it was like watching one played more slowly than usual. Moving as if through warm honey, I seized a handful of thin flexible silk and pulled upwards, and as the mask came free, his wig flew off as well.
Time stopped. At first I didn't know what I saw. A grey-white horror swam before me in a confusion of angles and planes and fearsome distorted proportions. In a deluded second I thought that I had pulled his whole head off, leaving behind a whitened, tortured stump. The spider is eaten by his mate from the top down, but he still couples blindly until fulfilled. Like that, Erik's hands moved for the last few seconds more on the keyboard, for Otello's line was not complete. He turned fully towards me, and the last words of Otello flew full of spittle from his mouth, the last chords fell like hammers from his hands.
"Mori, infidel."
Even in Erik's headless rage, Otello's last chord must be laid down, complete. Then he stood up slowly, but with such force that the bench crashed to the floor behind him, spreading sheet music all over. He kicked it across the room and I heard it splinter. I stared at the white corrugated surface of his skull, trying to make sense of what I saw, when a stunning blow across the temple sent me spinning to the carpet.
Everything went grey. "Have you satisfied yourself at last, cruel woman?" he roared, and the glassware still sitting on the dining room table shook. "Here is Erik! Look upon him."
Sprawled on the floor, I slowly opened my eyes. The room rocked alarmingly. He straddled me, gripped my face and forced me to look. As my eyes focused, he came ever closer, until his face loomed right above me. Hot fast breath blew through his collapsed and distorted, discolored and dark, scabby and shredded nose. It was worse than the rest of his skin, which was bad enough. In the shadow it appeared that he possessed a cavernous hole in the center of his face. The skin stretched tightly over his bones, more prominent and developed than facial bones should be, with skin the pasty greenish-white of dough that has been left in the cupboard too long and has gone to mold. That same mottled scaly patchiness continued down the neck under his silk scarf.
Sick and terrified, I glanced only briefly at his mouth as he screamed "I may be a dog, a dog that deserves death, but you, Christine, are a lying bitch, the mother of all foul and faithless bitches in Paris." How could a man scream with no lips? Oh, there was skin, or else how could he have cursed me with such perfect enunciation, the consonants crisp as spring lettuce, sharp as knifeblades?
"Do you like your handsome dog, you scheming trull? The cheapest whore who lifts her skirt and bends over in the back alley is kinder than you." His mouth came straight down to the teeth with no fleshy part, no soft pink padding to form a kiss or twist with emotion. Skin stretched tightly across it, outlining his large square teeth and sharp, thick canines. Under his eyes, deep blue-black circles hung in pouches, and the skin of his brow, while less scabrous than the rest, furrowed up in ridges as he continued to shout.
"Stop," I cried out. "I can't bear it. Please, please stop," and I turned my face away.
He gave a half-growl, half-snarl, "Look at Erik! Here is the answer to all your questions, your damnable, endless questions. Do you like the answer?" and then he grabbed my hair, forcing his face into my view.
Sobbing, still trying to turn my face away without tearing my hair off at the scalp, I must have cried out for mercy, for he laughed fierce and hard, like the piano notes of thunder he had just recreated. "Mercy? Mercy is what God uses to wipe his ass! He's shown none to me, so why should you expect any?"
"He will strike you down for saying that," I sobbed.
A few long locks of shiny black hair fell into my face. It was just as well he had worn the wig when he first showed himself to me, because those four or five curls that sprung at odd intervals from his head would have alone been enough to frighten me. Those locks were a tragic mockery of all that might have been.
I tried to bring my hands up to his face, thinking to claw those black eyes out with my nails. Once, a ballet girl had described a trick. "Slide your finger into the inside corner of the eye as far as it will go," she said. "Dig in with your nail, and then pull out, hard." So I slid my hands up towards his face, but he was ready for me.
He clasped my wrists like steel cuffs and shouted, "So you think to scratch me, harpy? Perhaps you think I still play, and that this mockery of a face really isn't mine? Do you think this is a nursery game? You're so fond of them, you and your little blond friend in the sailor suit! Let's see if it's a game after all. Let's see if we can remove Erik's mask, and discover if there's really a beautiful prince hidden underneath."
I must have shown shock, because he looked at me sharply. "You did think that, didn't you? You thought I was handsome. I saw you watching me as we sang Act Three. Is there a surprise for little Christine under this face that God crapped out one day? Let's investigate." My hands had no will of their own, for had I resisted, he would have snapped my wrists like chicken bones. I tried to ball my hands into fists, but he found some nerve in my palm and pressed until the pain forced me to open them. Again and again he forced me to dig into his waxy cold brow and cheeks, until the blood filled my nails and dripped onto my face, onto the front of that beautiful grey dress.
Then, as if the strings had been cut on a shadow-play puppet, he sank with his full weight onto my body, his face pressed into my shoulder. Wetness soaked through the thin fabric, tears or blood, I could not tell. Never had the full weight of a man rested on me before. A mountain of iron pressed down upon me, and I struggled to breathe.
He held me down at the shoulders, pinning my arms with his lower body. In an entirely different voice he began to chant, "Why? Why, Christine? We could have been happy. You could have gone back upstairs, up to the opera, and come back to see me once in a while. We would have sung together, and continued our lessons. But now, look what you have done with your damnable curiosity. Why did you have to see my face? Why were you not content? Don't you know that if a woman sees my face, she never sees the light of day again? She remains with me forever," and he laughed and sobbed all at once, tears washing the clotted blood from his smeared cheeks.
"Where are those other women? Where are they now?" I cried out, for there clearly were no others here, and that could mean only one thing.
Instead of answering, he rocked his body back and forth, crooning, "Why must they want to see if Erik is handsome? Why?"
"What are you going to do with me?" For I felt that if he continued to talk to me, he would not kill me, at least not right away.
"If Erik lets you loose, will you struggle?" he whispered. "Does Erik have to bind and gag you?"
No, I shook my head rapidly, no.
He lowered himself off of me, not touching me anymore. I rolled over away from him as quickly as I could, thinking to grab the fire-iron not two meters from my reach and open his skull with it. My ill-chosen attempt bought me nothing. Again seizing my hair with vehement fury, he dragged me across the drawing room floor, and this time I shrieked with the pain, for my skirt caught on the leg of the pedestal table and held me there, while he continued to tug. He yanked me free and towards the door of his bedroom he pulled me.
"To your feet," he growled, and I glanced once again the inside of that blackened, reddened cave. He yanked me up and slammed me up against the doorframe. I swayed, about to fall to the floor, and wondered why he hadn't simply carried me into his room and thrown me on that sepulchural bed, the bed I had not five minutes earlier seen in my mind's eye as the conclusion of our duet.
His face was terrible to behold, twisted not only with deformity but rage as well. He stuck one hand deep in the pit of my stomach, right below the breast, in that spot where if you are hit you gasp for breath like a beached fish, and he pressed inwards ever so gently. I stood paralysed, for the slightest movement in any direction would cause my breathing to stop.
"So you wanted to know the story of my opera? Let me tell you the secret of why no woman who sees my face can ever leave me. Don Giovanni had his thousands, two thousand sixty five to be exact, as he wanted none of them more than three days. Yet all those women combined could not hold him back when the pit of hell itself yawned under him. But my Don Juan, he's a handsome fellow like me."
I winced, and those black-gold eyes noticed everything. "You don't think I'm handsome?" he roared. "My love, unlike Don Giovanni's, does not fail. I have no need of a harem, of thousands, of the endless multiplication of female flesh like tadpoles in a stream. Can you imagine any more horrific nakedness than my face? Good, you nod, at least you are honest with me, for this moment anyway.
"The nakedness of my face is like a fire from heaven," he said, stabbing once or twice into my diaphragm just a little, so that I gasped, breathless. "Surely you remember the mother of Bacchus? She too wanted to see, she too burned with curiosity and made Zeus promise her anything she wanted, and what she wanted more than anything was to see him in his glory. He needed not strike her with a thunderbolt, as the glory of his presence alone was enough to reduce her to ash, and within his thigh he sewed up the child that she carried.
"It's like that with my Don Juan. He needs no harem. The woman he loves is his harem of one, and he will not burn her when she sees him in his glory, for what he is. That is his triumph – fire from heaven will not burn him, and he in turn will not burn to ash the one he loves."
He released his hand from my stomach while his words became madder, less coherent. I dared not move, for fear of that breath-robbing stab in the diaphragm once more.
"Do you see that coffin in there, Christine?" pointing and stabbing towards his bed. "I'm going to enlarge it, so that you fit in it with me. It's simple. You will stay with me, here in these rooms. This will be your home. If you live here, quietly, you may have anything you want – dresses,books, music. I will entertain you, and you will find me an amiable companion. When I set my mind to it, I have never failed to make a woman laugh. I will honor your virtue, so long as you remain virtuous. But you will never leave, and if you try to escape, I will kill you.
"You will die here, Christine, because it is a corpse you now have for a lover, a corpse who loves you, and at the end of our love, we will both lie down in this coffin together, and the earth shall fall down upon us. I am a walking dead man, and so are you, a woman who is dead, although her body has not yet caught up with her. But because you are beautiful, you don't know it yet. Oh, you will feel it someday, when your fresh pink cheeks fade and wrinkle, when your hair comes out by the handful and your eyes grow dim. But think how lucky I am, because I have always had that knowledge.
"I've always been a living corpse from top to bottom, and not just my face. For I think once the mask has been removed, the woman should have every curiosity fulfilled, even the questions she doesn't yet know to ask. You're lucky, Christine. If you're careful, you may have that knowledge dripped out slowly upon you, with time, instead of wrapped around your neck in an instant. Erik should hate that, because he loves you, and doesn't want to let you go, doesn't want to let you go the route of all the other insatiable women who spawn such plagues on the world.
"So shall we explore the mysteries together? Shall we investigate what you have let loose? Surely you have more questions."
My head rang with terror, with sickness. There was no fight left in me. As I slumped, he lowered me to the floor and sat down near me, long legs drawn up, spiderlike.
"Has it ... always been like that?" I whispered.
Any other man's expression could be described as dreamy, but in his case, it was one out of a nightmare. His eyes took on a faraway look. "The insatiable desire to know is written by nature into every woman, because every woman longs to see her child. I know that it's simply the weak and stupid nature of women, but Erik doesn't understand. Now to answer you ... The tale was told that when I appeared, my mother started screaming and wouldn't stop, not till they poured syrup of laudanum down her throat. 'It might hurt the baby when it comes out in the milk,' someone said, and another replied, 'That would be a mercy.' See, there's that mercy of God again, for what it's worth. But the laudanum shut her up and didn't kill me. Then my father wanted to see me, but when the midwife told him what I looked like, he waved me away. 'I don't want to see it,' he said. 'Maybe it won't live.'
"I disappointed him, too, and he ordered my mother to nurse me and dandle me out of his sight. I was never to appear in his presence without a mask, or he would beat her, seeing as when any monster is birthed, it's the fault of the dam and not the sire, as that ignorant old man thought.
"So what makes you think, Christine, that you could see me any time you liked, when even my parents barely saw my face?"
We both sat shaking on the floor, all the fight gone out of us. I said nothing, and then, most horrible of all in that dreadful evening, he began to cry. A man's tears are not like a woman's. Those who find a man's tears effeminate are wrong, for a man does not weep unless something tears out his very heart from its roots. Erik lay face down on the Turkey carpet with its red and blue whorls so good for hiding bloodstains. He sobbed and beat the flat of his hand on the carpet, each sob punctuated with a blow. I don't know how long I sat through that bout of weeping. I could have walked away and he would not have noticed, but my arms and legs shook so hard that I could not stand.
Then I began to weep a little myself as I realized that had I actually brained him with the poker as I'd planned, I would have died of slow starvation down in that rocky tomb. The front door to his apartments remained as imperviously closed as that of any fortress, as barricaded as that other hidden door in the Louis-Phillipe bedroom. I would leave this apartment when Erik gave me leave, and no sooner.
After a long struggle, the mind goes strangely still. Erik continued to sob, but more quietly now. Then, dreadfully, instead of rising to his feet like a man, he pulled himself along with his elbows, sliding on his belly like a serpent or some kind of reptile. Each pull pushed a breathy little sob out of him, and he would not look at me. His vest-front buttons scraped on the carpet. Finally he crawled into his room, and without looking back, shut the door quietly.
The apartment was silent. His discarded mask lay on the rug, and absently I picked it up and jammed it into my pocket. Next to it was one of his brass vest buttons, and I took that too.
I had no reason to doubt him, that I would stay here until I died or until he decided to let me go, whichever came first. For the first time since I had woken in this prison, the thought of suicide seriously crossed my mind. Not as a ploy to get Erik to let me go, not as a pretext to slice him with scissors, but as a serious means of escape, for none other seemed open to me.
For it was not him so much I feared, as what would happen to me were he himself to die, or fail to return. It was the fear of dying a captive animal, pounding against the walls of one's tomb, like the poor Fortunato I read about as a schoolgirl, walled up inside the wine cellar's rocky tomb. God would have to understand that Erik had driven me mad with terror, and then I laughed like a madwoman, because would a madwoman know that terror had driven her mad? Was there no recourse, no mercy from God were I to kill myself?
Half laughing, half sobbing like Erik, I tried to stand up, but could not. I crawled on hands and knees to my own room, and that was the first time I called it "mine." It's yours now, I thought, yours forever. He said he would keep me, that he would never let me go, and this is where I shall live, at least until he slips on a stone, or decides he's tired of me and never comes back. Lying on the floor besides the mahogany bed, looking at the gleaming silver tip of the scissors that rested on the vanity table, I closed my eyes, and wondered if it were possible to hide from the terrible mercy of God.
(continued)