Ange Pur
I tremble like a leaf blowing across an autumn sky, even though it is still summer, on this night so full of summer that it penetrates my heart and melts some of the ice.
This morning I went out to the garden and had a long look, as if seeing it for the first time. It's no longer brown, because I've found a man to water it. This week I shall find someone to clear the weeds, sweep last year's dead grass, prune the fruit trees.
I will prune the fruit trees of my heart as well.
M. Peillard – Jacques – came to see me today, just before tea-time. He strode into the foyer and a warm red-brown light followed him, the silver in his hair scarcely noticeable in the midst of the flame. He was apologetic and I could not make him see there was no need for contrition. "I've troubled you," he said over and over. "You must let me take you out to a restaurant."
"Not in the least." For I wanted him to see our home, and if it still felt like Raoul, if the feel of Raoul was still upon it, then it was his choice to endure it or to go. I wanted to see if he would endure it. "It's a pleasure to have you. We'll have tea in the library."
The big dim room was recently dusted, but the smell of disuse remained upon it. Unlike many men, Raoul hadn't kept the library jealously to himself. Most of the bookcases were filled with law tomes and volumes of maritime history and technology, for use in his patent work. But other shelves held some of the children's school books, as well as the adventure and boy's stories he and Philippe and Louvel loved. On the wall to the right of desk hung a portrait, commissioned by Philippe and Martine for his fiftieth birthday. A slight smile, a warmth and softness of his features offset his grave and substantial demeanor in respectable middle-class black. I am more than what I appear, he seemed to say.
M. Peillard looked steadily at Raoul's portrait, then commented, "A remarkable likeness, just like the man I met with M. Gagnepain. He had kind eyes."
"He did," I said softly, and my throat clutched a little.
"How did he pass?"
"He had walked to his office at the Bourse, like all the other mornings before that. When he got there, he complained to his secretary of a headache, and then cried out that he couldn't see. He fell over at his desk. They brought him home and he never really came back to us. He died three days later."
"A hard ending for a long life together."
"The doctors argued about whether it had been apoplexy or the bursting of a vessel in the brain. Before the funeral, they wanted to cut him open and find out. I'm afraid I wasn't very civilized about telling them they couldn't."
"What did you do?"
"I went for the poker from the fireplace. Philippe had to hold onto me and ask them to leave at the same time. I wasn't very rational. You were going to say something, but changed your mind. What was it?"
He swallowed hard. "It had occurred to me that their motives were purely from scientific curiosity, from the desire to investigate. However, it was insensitive and imprudent, I will confess."
"What did it matter? There was nothing they could do for him. He died in our arms, Philippe on one side, I on the other. Martine was out of the room just for an instant, some yelling from the children that she couldn't just let the nursemaid handle."
"I've made you feel sorrowful. I am indeed sorry."
He had on a creamy linen summer suit, and he still carried with him that warm flame-like light, made warmer by the evening sun and the burnished mahogany of Raoul's study. "I don't mind telling you. He had lost so many opportunities in life, and yet he was a contented man. I am often not happy, not in that same sun-filled way as Raoul. But he made me happy, and I think that is all one can ask."
I poured out for him. As we ate and drank, largely in silence, I waited for the other questions I had expected and which had not yet come, not in our weeks of correspondence, and not now.
He refused a second cup, and instead walked over to the window with that thick, fleshy stride of his, that I so liked to admire, and looked out over the grounds shabby in the slanting orange light of late afternoon. "There was once a fountain there," he exclaimed, standing on his toes like a great boy trying to get a better view.
"Would you like to go outside for a better look?" He didn't answer, but headed for the rear parlor door. I followed him through the house, shaking my head with impatience in one direction and laughing the next. He reminded me of Louvel big and grown but still boyish. He nearly collided with the maid removing the tray, ignoring her astonishment.
I brought my fan, for it was hot as we walked around the shabby garden. He knew plants, and several times bent down to feel the earth between his fingers, frowning. "You're a man of many talents, M. Peillard. What else do you know besides lawyering, and sleuthing, and gardening? And why have you no garden of your own?"
He looked at me with his wide brown eyes, spectacles flashing. "We grew up near Giverny, a small village. My father was the investigating magistrate in town and was seldom home. He lived at his club, it seemed. So my mother gardened, until she left." He said this so baldly that it embarrassed me.
"I'm sorry..." I murmured.
"No, no," he waved his hand at me, and dirt sprayed across the walkway. "You're right, we apologize to each other far too much. My mother wasn't French, she was English, and she didn't understand."
"Well, I'm not French either, and neither do I ... 'understand.' Understand what?"
"How a man can have a wife and son at home, and still want a man's life in the city, undisturbed by the cares of a household."
"I see," I said stiffly. "In that case, now that I understand what you mean, I can tell you with certainty that my husband and I had no such 'understanding.' If you know what I mean."
He nodded in agreement. "I was thirteen when she left. My father put me in school and continued to live at his club. Then I read the law, lived at my father's club until I came to employment with M. Gagnepain. So you see, since childhood I have never really had what you call a garden of my own. Now I save M. Gagnepain some of the cost of a gardener, at least on Saturday afternoons." He brushed the earth from his hands. "Swedish, you said. Although Daaé, that's Danish, right?"
"My father had a brother in Copenhagen. But I never met any of our Danish relatives, though."
"Daaé, Daaé," he said to himself, and I braced, waiting for the barrage of questions. But he just said, "You need a new gardener."
"It's not the lack of a gardener," I remarked. "It's the lack of will. My husband looked after the garden. I don't know how to organize it. It seems disloyal, almost."
He surveyed it. "The organization is all there, all laid out. Did he plan it?" and I nodded. "It just needs some work." He caressed the blackberry canes grown wild, and pulled off some berries left behind, under the leaves. He handed a few to me and ate the others himself. "It needs some love."
"Tell me about your mother's garden," I said, feeling myself go pink. The berry was sweet in my mouth, large and very juicy, and I wondered how the cook had missed it.
"She had hollyhocks twice my height, and lilac bushes that I could hide under. My brother and I chased each other and she never scolded us if we broke a twig or two. There were morning-glories as wide as a dinner plate, blue and white and violet. It all ran wild, seemingly, but she worked on it every day. There were statues of fauns, and a nymph that carried a water jug, where the spigot was."
I looked sadly at our fountain, dry as dust, of the kind of stone that glows gold in sunset light. "It sounds beautiful. So was this one in its heyday. I looked at him quizzically. "You don't sound like your letters."
"It's the curse of the attorney's training. You get to sounding just like your pompous old law books." Then he turned to me, flushed quite pink himself, his thick auburn side whiskers bristling. "I didn't think you'd write me back, not after that day in Paris when you left the cafe. I put that letter in my vest pocket and didn't remove it until the next one arrived."
"M. Peillard ..." I began.
"I know what you're thinking," he waved. "No fool like an old fool. Will you call me Jacques? Not Lalonde, I can't bear that. They called me that at school."
"Of course not."
"You don't sound like your letters either."
"Oh? And how do I sound?"
"Like a young girl, fresh and starting life."
"You're swimming into deep water, Jacques Lalonde."
He withdrew, wincing and laughing at the same time. "I deserved that, didn't I?"
"Perhaps a little."
"There's a little park I passed in the cab, down past the intersection of the main boulevard. Stroll with me down there. There's something I want to talk with you about, something of great importance."
I hesitated. I still wore the strip of black on my lapel, even though I had dispensed with black crepe and netting over my face, much to the shock of some. Honor the living, Raoul would say, not the dead, as he told Martine some years ago when Jannecke's mother died. Martine used the occasion to order an entire new wardrobe all in various shades of black, as well as black frocks for the girls, who were barely out of long baby skirts. A ridiculous extravagance, Raoul fumed, but Martine was mistress in her own home and at the time Jannecke admired her apparent respect.
Now the whole business seemed tiresome to me, the black-trimmed paper, the veiled hats, the whispering and circumspect trepidation one used when approaching the widow. Excusing myself, I went to put on a grey hat trimmed with parrot feathers, each grey feather with a little maroon stripe around the base, and a strip of wine-colored velvet on the band.
He gave me his arm, and we walked largely in silence. His arm was wide around, and my hand nestled up against his side, feeling the muscle slide as he walked. Red velvet streaks painted the sky, and the birds flew wildly about, looking for a nest. On a faux-Greek temple grew vines so high that they almost reached the top. Fat orange flowers like trumpets hung on them heavily. Into the foliage the little birds crept, then sang their song even louder as they nestled down.
He turned to me and took my hands in his. "Madame de Chagny, I don't know where to begin. You'll think me impudent, I know..."
"Christine," I whispered. "Please, Christine."
"Yes," he said. "Thank you. Very well," and he cleared his throat a few times. "In your last letter you said you were going to spend some weeks in London, and then from London would go to Perros-Guirec on the Brittany coast."
"Yes?" I said, wondering where this led.
"Christine, this is important. You need to make for yourself a place to live outside Brussels. Anywhere but Belgium. I've listened to things yesterday and the day before, and they make my head spin. Is Paris safe? If I thought Paris would be safe, I would tell you to come to Paris. Perhaps I am overreacting or having the masculine equivalent of the vapors, that I see spooks with spiked helmets under every bush."
"Jacques," I said, confused. "I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about." He still gripped my hands, and I let him, liking the warmth of his thick paws.
"War, Christine. The German diplomats came and talked to Albert your King, to your prime minister and cabinet, and I fear that while your sovereign is a good man, a kind man and the best ruler you will have, he doesn't understand what brews on his borders."
"That's nonsense," I said. "He will not be fooled by the Prussians. The whole world knows of our neutrality."
"The world hears only what it wants to hear. Your king won't listen to those who want to expand the Belgian army. Why do we need a bigger army? they say. What use does a neutral country have of a large standing army?"
"You sound like my younger son, Louvel," I remarked. "He writes me letters begging me to come to America, and to bring Martine and Jannecke with me. He's young and impetuous, and an American now. What does he know of Belgium anymore?"
"He sounds like a wise young man," Peillard said with a serious face.
"But how can you know this?" I said. "You reported on diplomatic meetings, yes. But how can you know more than the men who rule this land?"
"I don't," he said, abashed. "But if it does come about that my country and Germany come to blows, your fields and farms and this beautiful city will be right in the center of the ring."
"It's a horrible thing to think about."
"Sometimes horrible possibilities require our attention. When we neglect them, more horrible things come to pass. What is Perros like, Christine? I've never been there, so tell me about it."
"It's small, a village really, but with hotels and bathing houses built up on the shore. You take the train to Lannion, and then there is a small train that goes to Perros-Guirec. You used to have to go by stage, it was quite tiresome. But it's beautiful, with great red rocks and what did the Greek poet call it? a wine-dark sea. In the autumn and winter there are very few Parisians there, and it will be quiet, and still, and I will go to watch the ocean."
And write, I thought, but did not say that.
"Are there houses that one can buy?"
I looked at him strangely. What did he have in mind? "Yes, sometimes there are. There are so many tourists now that sometimes when a farmer is old, or sick, and has no sons to take over for him, he will sell. It used to be unheard of, and the older villagers still talk of it for weeks when that happens. It is as if a piece of the living heart of their village was being ripped out."
We walked to a little hillock in the center of the park, where the peaked slate roofs of Brussels could just be seen over the trees. "It sounds beautiful," he said. Then he turned to me, taking my hands again tenderly. "I think you should buy a house there, and make it ready to live in all year round."
"Of course they can be lived in all year, as long as the barn is filled with hay, the woodpile well stacked, and the cribs full of potatoes," I answered. "Our cottage in Perros, where Papa and the Valeriuses and I stayed wasn't that much different than the cottage I grew up in, a little nicer, maybe. In fact, I think that's why I love Perros-Guirec so much, because it's so close in many ways to home. No, not the terrain, or the vegetation, or the trees. But there's a spirit about the place that brings me back. It's the age, I think, so old, even with the new railroad and restaurants and hotels. Something there is still very old."
"Can you grow potatoes?" he asked, eyes laughing.
"I know everything about potatoes. All I did was hoe potatoes, from when I was old enough to grasp a hoe. The potatoes and I are on the best of terms."
"Then you will take my advice?"
"I will think about it. You know, with firewood and a cow, potatoes and cabbages, you can live pretty well."
"So says the elegant lady of Brussels." He put his arm around my shoulder in the cool evening air, and I did not withdraw. His body was very full and he smelled of apple-scented pipe tobacco.
"Not so elegant," I murmured. "After all, I was an actress." Then I swallowed hard, because there was still so much unsaid, and he had not yet asked. But I want him to ask, I'm tired of carrying this burden all these decades. It's time to lay it down, all of it.
He was a little shorter than Raoul, and his chin did not go quite over the top of my head. So he rested the side of his face on my hair, pushing my hat aside, and I pulled it off. "Let's walk," he said, swallowing hard.
So with hat in hand I strolled with him down to the pond whose glossy water rapidly turned deep purple in the approaching night. I picked up a stone and tossed it casually into the water, making a loud plop! "When will you write your article?" I asked.
"When I take my leave of you."
I stirred the purple water with a stick, and didn't need to look at him to feel his eyes on me. "All this time we have written," I said, "Every day, sometimes twice, and never once have you asked me about the strange situation at the National Opera so long ago."
"No, I have not," he said, and his voice was as almost as still as the now-sleeping birds.
"Why not, Jacques? Did your curiosity desert you?"
"Not in the least. But there is no need to ask when newspapers and the records of the National Opera library are open to journalists. Or men wanting to be journalists."
I sat by the side of the pond, and he sat near me, very close. "I thought you would beg, and plead. To know."
"I thought so too. But something lay before me, a path through the woods that came to a fork. One path would lead me to sit here with you, and perhaps I would never know, for the nonsense you read in these newspapers, you would not believe. That first path, there I would be with my partial knowledge, but would sit here as I imagined, under a thin sliver of moon quivering in the water. The other path, oh, there's always another path, isn't there? That path would lead to forcing you open like a clam, interviewing people, searching out those young enough or sound enough of mind to speak of those nights, those odd events, and then I would have my article, my story, a book perhaps. But you, no, not you, because the best I could hope for was that you would slap my face before refusing to speak to me at all."
"And the worst?"
"I don't even think about the worst," he said, gently pulling me into his warm circle again, "because I did not take that path. And so that worst thing will not happen, will never happen."
"What do you mean?" I murmured, although I thought I knew.
"Quite simply this, Christine of the deep mystery. I've fallen in love with you. And to pursue you through the halls of history, especially a history you hold close to your heart, would be like peeling off your skin. Still, there's something strange about you, some glamour that will not fade, as if you had seen things that few women have, or should, strange things, unknowable things."
"Do you fish for my story, Jacques?"
"I didn't fall in love with your story, whatever it may be," he answered. "But I know it's there, inside you. It may go with you to your grave. Oh, you're trembling. I didn't mean ... no, don't cry, please, it unnerves me entirely."
But cry I did, just a little, enough to wet my own handkerchief and not have to accept his. To tell, to confess, to bring forth not just on this blank page, but to another heart beating in time with one's own. Such a heart it was, huge and ponderous it pounded beneath the silk of his vest, as I lay my head down on that broad breast and silently shook.
He stroked my hair, my neck, under my chin. My arms almost went around him, not quite, for he was big of belly and barrel-chested. Somewhere far away a night-bird called sharp and sweet, and another answered. When I raised my chin and kissed his mouth he looked a little surprised, but I didn't pull away. I kissed him until he kissed me back, shy at first and then eager, his hesitancy a bit like Raoul's early kisses but not quite. There was no rush, for one thing. No one was hunting me through Paris, or demanding that I choose between one man or the next. No one demanded I choose, and so I chose to kiss Jacques for no other reason than that I wanted to.
His spectacles bumped my nose. "Wait," he said, breaking away. He put them into his jacket pocket but his eyes stayed open and on mine the whole time. Amazed yet expectant he swallowed me in his arms, embraced me with his open mouth.
Wiry and full, his moustache tickled my upper lip, so I pulled his lower one between mine and licked it gently. Comfort and desire rolled over me just from having him near me, warm and pillowed. Down his tongue went into my mouth, a new taste, a new tongue, new lips, new hair, and all new flesh under my hands. His body was damp under his linen jacket, and I ran my hands underneath with glee, loving the sweaty warmth of him, the round flesh under his arms, and the deep kisses he laid across my ears and neck and throat.
The hat fell from my hand, and it wasn't until we broke for breath that I noticed it had fallen into the pond. It had drifted away across the water like some little grey bird floating on its own for the first time.
We walked back mostly in a silence that sang through my body. The bedraggled hat left a trail of drips that vanished behind us in the night. When he stood at my back door, hidden by the arbor hanging with wild uncut vines, he kissed me once more and I cried out without words.
He was the first to speak. "What shall we tell your children?"
The children? I thought of eyes indifferent, eyes amused, eyes censorious. Jannecke would smile in that weak, tolerant way of his. Anki would wink and say, Mother de Chagny, you're only human. I saw Louvel's eyes, smiling. Only Philippe and Martine's eyes bored into me, sharp corkscrews of disapproval. "Some will be harder than others," I murmured.
He left shortly after because, as he explained, he was taking an early train back to Paris, one that left just before dawn. He kissed my fingers and told me he loved me again, although I did not say the same back to him. I had no sense of urgency or rush. He said he would write. Now he is gone, but only for a time. I feel something has been ratified. It is too soon for me to speak of love, but for the first time, I have kissed a man whom I have utterly, freely, and completely chosen.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
When I arrived for my final performance at the National Opera, the whispering started from the first moment I emerged from the cab. A group of men dancers outside the Rue Halévy entrance smoked and chattered like parrots. If their mocking laughter had been swords, not one passing soul would have remained standing on the street. When I swept by they fell silent and stared, grinning like apes.
"Good catch, Daaé," one called out, not unfriendly.
"Two big fish reeled in on one night," said another with a wide waxed moustache. "Not bad."
"Why can't I get one of those for my very own?" a third man moaned, rolling his eyes.
The first slapped him at him playfully. "Greedy. You brought home two last week."
"Nothing of that caliber," he retorted. "No de Chagny warms my bed."
Their snickers faded as the doorman closed the big brass slab against the noise of the street. But it was laughter that repeated all through the evening, laughter I heard and laughter I only imagined, from the whispers of the chorus girls to the sneer of La Sorelli herself, who demanded to see what kind of ring the young nobleman had given me. When she saw my bare finger she sniffed to a few of her avidly-watching claque, "Were he really marrying her, she'd be wearing a diamond as big as one of Venus's nipples. I don't know what the Comte is worried about," and the other girls cackled like geese at her wit.
The costumers grimaced to each other as they pinned me into Carlotta's peasant dress. I dreaded the whole long first half of Faust, where Marguerite has very little to do. There I sat in a dusty little room with students and wenches and a few men dancers, and L'Epoque was passed around in front of me. I carefully avoided looking at the article which gave them so much amusement, although I knew that both Raoul's and my name were mentioned in it. Blushing under my caking paint, I shook so badly that when I finally took the stage, the tenor Fonta looked me over with serious concern.
"Eyes up," he mouthed when I stared down at my embroidered slippers. So I did, facing the cold and critical audience. Backstage stares slid through me like knives. In the blurred distance I heard the whispers of the audience punctuated by faint chilly applause and more chatter.
What would they do, I thought, if I kicked this spinning wheel over right now and ran for the exit? They'd find it oh so entertaining. They'd give me an ovation worthy of Carlotta.
Then, as if calling her to mind made her magically appear, Carlotta and her entourage filed into an empty box on the first tier. She flung off her wide white shoulders a rippling silver fur. Beside her stood an older man, white hair flying, glasses reflecting in the limelight, and behind him a whole crowd of dandies and hangers-on. They talked so loudly I could hear Carlotta's sharp tones even above the orchestra. They leaned over the box's edge frankly staring, as if they saw trained monkeys on the stage instead of performers. Over the gilded edge a man with high teased hair dangled Carlotta's fur wrap, shaking it like a fishing lure. From their box came the loud pop! of a champagne bottle being uncorked.
Something went red inside me when I began the "Jewel Song." I glared directly up at Carlotta's box, thinking, You great hyena, you come in laughing, but I will show you, and then it was as if Erik filled me with a great pillar of song, or perhaps with the great pillar of himself. My diaphragm relaxed, my lower belly pushed up with a great surging force, and that column which pierced me from bottom to top burst through my mouth and emerged in a fountain spray of sound.
Never has a Marguerite betrayed a man so throughly as I betrayed the innocent Siebel that night. What flooded out of me was Erik, all Erik, his rage, his disappointment, my resentment and frustration at having being deceived, locked up, smacked, bullied. His rage was mine, mine was his, and they flowed together in a sweet tide as Marguerite cast aside the flowers from the man who truly loved her. Then Marguerite made her choice and opened the casket of jewels – the prop even shaped like a small coffin, to make the point clearer – jewels sent from the man who deceived her and pretended to be what he was not. Siebel's bouquet fell to the stage floor, abandoned.
And my Siebel, my poor Siebel did not share his brother's box that night, but instead sat in the orchestra's third row and stared at me as if he had never seen me before. On that stage, with the discarded flowers on my one side, the coveted jewels to the other, a great choice presented itself – the carriage that waited to take me away to a garden, or the key that led into a tomb. There was the sweet man on one hand, and on the other the djinn beneath the earth, who when I invoked him made me sing like a woman possessed. Before me swam the casket and the tomb, or flowers and the life of the earth.
The audience had stopped talking. Carlotta herself leaned over the box edge, and her fur slipped down from the balcony and lightly thumped on the floor below. For a long second no one moved or spoke.
The applause that followed was thunderous, and every soul looked to every other one, right or left, with comments and gestures, pointing at me and Fonta. Now that I was no longer singing I started to shake, the kind of trembling that seizes a person when she has been terribly angry and has just begun to calm down. I realized with a little shock that if I climbed into Raoul's carriage at the end of that evening's performance, I would never sing again, not like this, painted and decorated before le tout Paris. I would disappear as thoroughly as Erik disappeared into the bowels of the Opera when he did not want to be seen.
Backstage Fonta kissed my cheek and whispered, "That was beautiful, carissima. I've never heard anyone do that. My heart breaks for Marguerite."
Mine too, I thought as I squeezed his hand. When I changed into the filmy shift of Marguerite's prison dress, I pulled off the blonde braided wig. Down my hair went like a shroud over my bare shoulders. I was ready to meet my doom for having loved Faust, borne his child, and then killed it.
As I sat in prison, I wondered as I had so many times before about this scene, could I have done this to a baby in its cradle? Could I blame Marguerite, when her lover abandoned her to shame and misfortune? I crossed my hands over my own belly and a little nausea flicked at me, just a touch, but not the kind that comes from eating bad fish or drinking too much champagne. It buzzed me a little around the edges, almost a chemical feeling, and I shook myself, hard.
Then there was Faust, yearning, entreating me to come through the magical opening in the prison wall that Mephistopheles had forged with his dark art. And there was my own sweet Siebel, no longer sitting in his orchestra seat, but standing, arms outstretched as if to say, No, Marguerite, don't do it, don't go with him, it's not too late, I will still offer you flowers and there is still time for you to press them to your breast, weave them into your hair, because although I have no jewels of music to offer you, I have life itself.
There must have been something about him so pathetic, so tragic that those sitting around him were moved enough not to roughly pull or shove him back down into his seat. It was as if Raoul were part of the performance itself, some newly-scripted insert that they feared to disturb and thus run afoul of the composer's intent. So all throughout the final lamentation, where Faust finally understands that Marguerite would rather go to the scaffold than return to his bed, my Siebel stood before me like an offering. Then he put his hands to his face and sank into his seat, weeping openly and without shame, overcome.
Faust and Mephistopheles moved out of the way as the final scene commenced. Marguerite won't be hung at all, instead, she will be taken up to heaven just as the Blessed Virgin was. The gears of the cloud machines behind me creaked. The great platform covered with gauze and fluff lowered for me to mount it.
"Ange pur," I sang, "Ange radieux..." Angels pure and radiant, lift me up to you. Lift me up to my Siebel, because this is my goodbye to you all, to Erik, my farewell to singing like a bacchante who chants not her own tune but the song of her god, goodbye to the paint and machines and ropes that make up this world of illusion. I stepped back, ready to put my foot onto the platform and be hoisted up into the clouds. It was the end of a performance of a kind never before seen by these jaded Parisian eyes.
Everything went black as the inside of a cave.
I screamed and flailed, then stumbled and tripped on my dress. My foot came down into a hole, or a space where the floor or the platform should have been, and I fell over, suddenly gripped by nausea. The whole room tilted on its axis, and in the utter black I couldn't tell up from down. I scrabbled blindly for the floor, for any fixed point of reference, and then on my grasping arm I felt a hand.
His hand, and cold. Terribly cold.
I never knew how he got me off the stage, because at that instant a cloth slammed over my face, and under the weight of the sickly-sweet stench of chloroform I went limp.
Around I spun, whirling like a top through the black, up and down, back and forth. The spinning slowed, and everything wobbled, tottered, then fell over onto its side. But it was no child's toy who lay there sick and abandoned. I thought I was still on the stage, and fumbled around, expecting to feel the hard dusty floor. Instead my hands grabbed at soft cloth, a plushy surface, a soft pillow. Despair seized me, as well as mounting sickness. It can't be, I thought. This is madness. When the whirling stopped I carefully opened my eyes. The Sun King's ladies mounted on the wall shimmied back and forth, and the bile rose in my throat.
This can't be real, I thought. I've hit my head and it's rattled my brains so that I dream this is my room underneath the opera. That can't be Erik sitting on the side of the bed with his jacket off.
But it was. As I tried to focus my eyes, a wave of nauseating motion flattened me. When it receded, I leaned over the side of the bed and spewed all over the Aubusson carpet.
He cleaned it up without comment. The sharp stench remained as I lay on the bed, refusing to look at him. While he rinsed rags in the bathroom, I tried to get out of bed, but couldn't because of the dizziness. "Erik," I cried out, "I'm going to be sick again," and this time he caught in a basin something yellow and full of bile. He wiped my face as I slapped at his hands. The motion made me sick again, so I lay curled on my side shaking. He hovered over me and muttered to himself, "Too much, Erik has given her too much, just like the first time with the perfume. She's such a small thing, it's hard to know how much to use."
He brought me a clean basin with some tooth powder, and I rinsed my mouth. "I'm thirsty," I complained.
"Not yet," he answered. "Or you'll deliver a repeat performance."
Slowly my head cleared. When he went to empty the basin I struggled to get out of bed but was too slow. Around the waist he caught me and pulled me back down. "You'll never leave your Erik," he said into my ear, in quiet tones that terrified me more than his rages. "You'll never go out of his sight again. I wanted to bring you before Paris in triumph, but look how you've repaid me, dallying with a lover, planning to run away with him, thinking you could hide on the roof. It matters not, in some ways it's better. You can sing for an audience of one. Erik doesn't need you on the stage; he has quite enough money for the both of us. A husband should provide for his wife," and he laughed low, nastily.
He leaned into me so close that the smell of spiced wine on his breath and the drug on his hands made my gorge rise once more. I pushed him away and moaned, "You can't keep me here. Someone will come looking for me."
"My loving wife," he said, papering over with calmness the sneer underneath, "as far as Paris is concerned, you're a 'light' girl from the Opera. You have no friends, not counting that ineffectual boy, and no protector, no patron, no prominent man to miss you at some rendezvous. Girls like you wind up in the back alleys of the Pigalle every month, and they go into an unmarked pauper's grave. How long do you think they'll look for you?"
He went on, his quiet voice driving me into the bed as intensely as his body once had. "What did you tell me your boy called you? As I recall, it was 'that Scandinavian sprite,' 'that opera wench,' wasn't it?"
"He was angry and jealous," I said. "He didn't mean it." Then I grew sick again, not from the chloroform but from knowing that Raoul waited for me, expected to see me, and oh God, probably thought that I had left with Erik after all.
Erik stood over me like a black column of death but I stared back at him. My despair turned to anger when he said, "Well, I have given you my name before God, and will do so before man as well. Erik has broken oaths, but this is one I will not break."
"Your name?" I retorted. "I don't even know your true name. That's why you seduced me into this false marriage, this sham, because you could not put your name on the registry papers."
"Oh, Erik is good enough," he crooned, "but women are never satisfied, not in their curiosity or anything else. You want a name? I'll give you one. You are the wife of Erik Muspelheim," and he laughed with long cruelty.
"It fits a demon to have a name plucked from the depths of fiery hell itself."
"You disappoint me, Christine. I would have thought with your background you would know that Muspelheim isn't hell, but the realm of the fire giants, and at the end of the world they will come forth and leave all of Valhalla in flaming rubble. Which is what I will do if you continue to give me trouble."
I tried once more to dash from the bed, but only stumbled onto the carpet. Lifting me up like a doll, he pulled me close to his body of steel and bone, and placed two long hard hands around my throat. Instead of squeezing, he stroked my neck gently and said, "In here you'll stay, Madame Muspelheim, bride of death, until you see reason. Until you can learn to act like a proper wife, and not a wanton slut." Never taking his eyes off me, he backed out of the room, and when the lock clicked I buried my face in the pillow that smelled now of sickness instead of Erik.
A quick search through the room revealed nothing sharp, no weapon. The shears I had taken with me into the bathroom so long ago were gone, and not so much as a hatpin remained. The tub had been shut off, and while the tiny sink had water, it wouldn't accommodate my head. Then the desperation of my position sank in. He thought of everything. I might try to flee from him into the arms of death, but this jealous lover would deny me even that.
But there was one fixture he couldn't remove, and slowly, methodically, I began to bang my head against the wall. It hurt more than I could imagine, and when the first stains of blood marked the wall, I stopped, sick and terrified. In my mind I saw a whole host of demons, all like Erik or worse, making my body and soul their plaything for the rest of eternity.
He must have heard the thumping. When he entered and saw the blood on my face, he staggered to his knees and tried to embrace my legs, but I kicked at him. He raised himself up to his full height and slapped me lightly on the face, snarling, "What game is this? You think a person is easy to kill? Believe my expert opinion when I say the body does not give up its life that willingly."
"You'll have to kill me, then, because I would rather die than live another day as your wife."
"Stupid girl," he said, "you know nothing of death." He ripped Marguerite's garish costume crucifix from my neck and tossed it aside. "Little pious one, are you so willing to court hell?"
"Since when do you believe in hell?" I snapped back. "You act as if you fear no one, least of all God. If you try to keep me here as your wife, I will kill myself."
"If you do not live openly with me as my wife, then I promise you, I will kill not only you but myself as well, and bury everyone else along with us. Think carefully; Erik may break oaths, but I keep my word."
Around me he wrapped his iron-banded arms and dragged me to the cushioned Louis-Phillipe chair, and with scarves from the drawer tied me securely to it. "You won't cheat me by fleeing to the arms of death," he said. I clawed and spit but he went on methodically until I could move nothing but my head and neck, crying out that he was a monster, a demon, that nothing he did was hidden from the eyes of God, and that I would die before ever letting him touch me as a wife again.
He held a scarf in front of my face and said, "Will you be quiet, or shall I gag you? Let me show you what it will feel like," and he stretched the scarf across my mouth. My nose ran from all the crying, and I almost wet myself in terror, for with the thick scarf across my mouth I could scarcely breathe. He must have seen the horror on my face, for he lowered it and I took in great gasps. "Keep still," he commanded, "or I will use this. You are such a little actress, Christine. It's no wonder the Greeks called you actors and actresses 'hypocrites.' You moan about dying, but when you miss even one breath, the terror of death fills your eyes and you will do anything to draw another one, anything to live."
Then he paced back and forth, shaking his head. "So you say you would rather die than let me touch you," he said in a flat, dead tone. "Since you seem to be willing to let that boy touch you, and how he did touch you, oh, you didn't think Erik saw, but he did, he saw everything, he heard your sighs and his moans when you put your hand on his breast, but for me you had nothing, no kindness, not a single caress, and so Erik will arrange for the death of everything right now," and then I did wet myself. As it soaked the thin costume and the cushion beneath me, I sobbed in shame and horror, not even aware that he had once again left the room until the stillness enveloped me.
I sat there restrained, and every so often called for him over and over, but he didn't return for what seemed like hours. Finally, he opened the door and pulled up the other chair, sitting calmly as he looked over at me with the same investigational expression. "Christine," he said, "do you know why Erik does this?"
"Because you don't want me to leave you," I said, hoping it was the right answer.
"Because you betrayed Erik," and anger shook underneath his voice. He held up the thick gold band of my bondage, and my stomach clenched. "You were given trust, and you took it. You accepted my ring, and then I find it on the roof of the Opera tout a la rue, discarded like trash," and he waved it in front of my face. "You took it off and left it there, like every flit who opens her legs for the baker or butcher, but at least has the decency to take off the symbol of marriage first. You bound yourself to me, but you made love with that popinjay, that little white toadstool. How many times have you done that?" he demanded, putting the ring on his little finger, twisting his hands together.
"You know everything I do. How could I deceive you in that way?"
He came over to me and I held my breath as if it were my last. He put his hands again on my throat, but tenderly like before. My first thought was to spit in his face and then to bite, to bite as hard as I could, but some instinct corrected me and I laid my head back, exposing my neck to him fully. His caresses played over my throat. He lowered his head so that his hot cinnamony breath hovered over my breast as he whispered softly, sadly, "Christine, don't make me do this, please."
The absurdity of it almost made me laugh - how could I make him do anything, tied to a chair, mired in my own soggy waste, but I silenced laughter and lay perfectly still, open and vulnerable. He laughed a little himself, a crazy mirthless sound from deep inside the chest, and as he rose up once more, said, "You have until eleven o'clock tonight to decide. You want so badly to die? Refuse to ratify in public what you have fulfilled in secret, and you die, and I along with you."
He paced back and forth, wringing his hands. I started to cry, but not for Erik. Instead, I saw myself lying dead and broken five stories down, and the sense of abandonment racked me with sobs. He was right. Raoul might look for me, but no one would find me here, and Erik could hide my body anywhere – weigh it down with stones and drop it in the lake, stuff it in one of the great boilers that kept the Opera supplied with steam, where it would burn up like the kindling that starts the fire. I had been afraid of him before, but not like this, tied as I was to a chair, helpless with terror at the threat of the gag and of abandonment.
Don't inflame him, I told myself, but I couldn't think straight. He circled me like a cat circles its prey, endlessly rubbing his hands, smoothing what little he had of hair, muttering to himself, "Erik, don't give up on her yet, she still may see reason, she still may find it in her heart to love you," and then interrupted these monologues with great wails from the heart, "Why are you doing this to Erik? How can you hurt him so? Why did you try to run away?"
I didn't dare answer, having no idea what to say to him, terrified that anything I did say would enrage him more. He came down very close to me and almost rested his face on mine. Suddenly his voice changed from hoarse and passionate to finest silk. "We used to sing together so beautifully, do you remember?" he whispered. "What happened to that? Look at you now, with all your crying, what if you have already ruined your voice?" Then he turned away abruptly, laughing to himself without joy, "Not that it matters, does it? But perhaps we could have sung one duet before we died... I thought you would love me when we sang Otello. Even after that, I thought that when you sang my opera, when you heard it and knew the story, that you might. Had I been handsome I knew you would love me, but curse this face, this decrepit skin," and he began to tear at himself with his own hands as once he had forced me to stab him with mine.
"Erik," I said, fighting to stay calm. "Don't. Please don't. I think I did love you when we sang Otello. Yes, it's true, I thought you were handsome then. But Erik, when I took off your mask, you hit me. You hit me so hard I fell to the floor." I shook with terror and even wet a little more as I said this, because it would have been so easy for him to hurt me again as I sat there, unresisting and helpless.
He pulled at his own skin even harder, leaving long purplish-red marks. His mouth worked vainly but nothing came out. Then he rested his head on my knees and started to shudder, with sobs or anger I could not tell. "Gone," he muttered, "gone, all gone, you'll never trust Erik now," and he worked my costume back and forth in his hands, almost shredding the fine lawn fabric. The he looked up at me, eyes bleared with tears. "Your forehead is bleeding."
Sniffing, I said, "Yes, and it hurts."
He got up and winced, almost stumbling. Grasping his left upper thigh, he walked to the bathroom with a slight limp. I hadn't noticed his hesitant gait before. What was wrong with his leg? He dabbed my forehead with cold water, stroking my brow tenderly as he brushed back the hair that had matted down with blood. "There was a moment when you loved me," he said. "You can't deny it. We were singing together as we never had before, and were both ready to die of pleasure. Why can't that happen again? Why? Why does everything have to be ruined?"
He threw the rag to the floor and circled the room again. "One moment in a life, in all those decades that make up a life, and to see it gone in an instant. Then I thought, you were not afraid of me anymore ... then you tell that fancy boy, that malakos, that you did fear me, that Erik's face revolted you. That, Christine, was the betrayal that cut the closest. Yes, it stabbed me through to see your hands on him. When did you ever put your hands on me, save to rip off my mask or try to claw my eyes out?
"But to hear you lie, to hear you tell him that you feared my face, I would have killed you at that moment but that would have been too simple. It would have had too little style. See, I have become a Parisian after all, no longer that country boy from Rouen. Doing things properly matters to me, Christine, and if I cannot have your heart, if you refuse to love me and live with me as a real and proper wife, then Erik will show you how he has cultivated his sense of style in this great Babylon on the European Euphrates."
"How can I love you when you tie me up?"
"How can I love you if you run away? It is you who makes Erik do these things," and on he went, over and over.
I closed my eyes and wished that my ears had lids to shut as well.
"... Where were you planning to go with that boy?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "He didn't tell me."
"Well, I will tell you where I will take you. After all, it shouldn't be a secret. I had wanted an apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg, wouldn't that have been nice? There are swans in the lakes there, and it's so much less pretentious a place to walk about than the Bois de Boulogne I could see you in a dress of purest ivory, clinging to my arm as I tipped my hat to those who passed us by, and you dipping your head in cool and remote acknowledgment.
"That was back when I thought I could trust you, however. Now I am considering new plans. I don't wash my own linens, why should I have to guard you every moment of the day? I'm done with my contract here, all my automata have been delivered, so why should I not return to Constantinople? There is a new Sultan, one who might find my work of use, and you would be with me, Christine. But you would be safe there, because you would live in the deepest part of the harem, and I would visit you, and perhaps when I secured a piano we would be able to sing together again."
Appalled, shocked, I said nothing. It was as if Erik had read my fearful thoughts of being taken to Morocco. But to be lost in the depths of the Ottoman Empire, it was too dreadful. "You would bury me in a living tomb," I said.
"If I do not believe that you will love me, really love me, and show me that you do, you will be buried in a living tomb, or a dead one. You won't cheat me by suicide, of that you can be sure. I can have you in life, or have you in death, but have you I shall."
"Against my will."
"You don't know your will. No woman knows her will, because her will is to yield to the stronger man. You doubt me? Who are you with right now? You're not in the little Vicomte's carriage, you're here with me, and soon you'll be off in mine. But what I hate above all is your hypocrisy. You did love me. You would have lain with me the first night you were here, and don't look so shocked, young woman who sticks her hand inside men's shirts. Erik may be ugly beyond measure but he is not stupid. I told you that night who I was, that I was no angel and no ghost, but a man. A man that knows when a woman looks at him with desire, and if no woman had ever before looked at Erik with desire not compelled by coin, you did.
"You stayed with me for a fortnight and then you returned, and did I reach my arm out onto the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and drag you back? Did I seize your hand in mine and force my ring onto your finger? Let me refresh your memory, as that chat on the roof with your lover has apparently fogged it as badly as your foster mother's. It was you who opened the box that snapped shut on your finger like an omen, saying, Do not deceive Erik or he will bite you as this box does, and you who removed the ring from its bed of velvet while I watched. You put it on the finger that in most women connects directly to the heart, although in your case I seriously doubt it."
"It's true that I accepted your ring," I said, looking away. "But how am I to love you if you tie me up, if you bully me?"
"Bully you?" He raised himself up to his full height. "When you break a horse, is it bullying? When you train a dog to retrieve the pheasant without taking a taste for himself, is it bullying? You betrayed me, it wasn't the other way around." He looked around wildly, then walked over to the second door that led to the strange room whose many-sided walls were all draped in red silk, and said, "What was that noise? There was some noise on the other side of the wall, I heard it."
"I heard nothing, Erik," and while I strained to catch any unfamiliar sound, all was silent.
"You lied to me and betrayed me." Then he cocked his head as if something had just occurred to him. "With whom else did you dally? You said you met that great ninny of a Persian in the corridors, that man who thinks he is one step ahead of me, but little does he know I walk three steps ahead of him, and my strides are longer than his. But he is fair of face, Christine, yes, he is fair, although far fairer when he was young. So did you sojourn with him, too?"
Then I prayed silently long and hard in thanks that Erik had not seen the Persian and I talking on the roof. More than talking, because when I stepped down from the roof edge, he had caught me in his arms for a moment, and had Erik seen that, it would doubtless have driven him even wilder with jealous rage. "He frightened me in the corridor, Erik. I walked as fast as I could to get here. I would have run, had I not feared tripping on my skirt and falling in the lake."
He searched my face. "An honest answer, one of the few, probably."
I tried to keep my voice as quiet and reasonable as possible. "If I am so dishonest, such a Lilith, why not simply untie me and let me go? How can you want someone who does these things to you?" and held my breath, hoping he would not hit me or worse.
"Let you go," he whispered so low I could scarcely hear him, astonished as if I'd started reciting the multiplication table or something else equally irrelevant. "Let you go. Never. You were a virgin when you came to my bed, so however much your heart or eyes might have wandered, I knew you were pure. I made you mine, and mine you will stay, even if circumstances allowed you to betray me a thousand times. For I will not live without you for even several short months, not like the stupid husband of your predecessor on the stage, who killed the jade as she lay in that bed still smeared with adultery. But things will change, Christine. Circumstances will no longer allow you to wander, I will see to that."
Then he brought his hands up to my face as if he were going to caress me, and I looked away, because if he were to touch me, I would have cried out something angry, something hateful, and then I would have died, so I bit my lip and looked over as far as I could at the mocking cheeks and chins and bosoms of the Sun King's concubines.
He gasped and I turned to see him put his hands on his thigh as if it suddenly pained him. He stared at me like a child who's opened every Christmas present and not found the one he wanted after all that time, and who knows that nothing else remains at the bottom of the stocking, there are no more packages to open, the hangings of green have been taken down, that feast is over and done with and will not come again for another year, that is to say for a child, forever. His great dark eyes welled with tears as he saw, and realized, and thought of what it all meant, and then he cried out in a deep loud voice that rang through the room, "You don't love me! You don't love me! You don't love me!"
Die or live, I could no longer lie to him. "It's true. I don't," I said very softly, almost drowned out by the echoes. "So kill me now or untie me, Erik, because I'm wet, and I want a fresh dress." The sob which he gave was that of a child's. He wept there silently for a moment. "Please," I begged. "Please let me loose. I won't hurt myself or try to run away."
"So many times you've said that," he sniffed, although he fumbled with one of the bonds, blinded by tears. He managed to loosen the knot a little but couldn't get it to unravel, for his hands shook like an old man's. He gave up and rested his forehead on my wrist, using it to wipe away his hot tears.
I thought of what I would do when he set me free. To run seemed like madness, but whatever happened, I could not let him force me on board a ship, if that was indeed his plan and simply not an idle threat meant to terrify me. "Oh, Erik," I said softly. "Never did you fail to untie your own knots," and I begged, but he just caressed my hand with his face, and then rested his head very still upon it. I thought I heard a slight shift, a creak from behind the wall, but it had to be imagination, and Erik didn't move. The minutes passed.
Then a buzzer rang, sharp and shrill, and he jerked his head up. He looked astonished for a moment, and then said, "I fear I've caught a mouse, and I must see whether it is worth releasing or whether I should snap its little neck right now." His face had a wild, crazed expression, and there was no point in reminding him he had planned to untie me. It's Raoul, I thought at once. He has come to find me, and he's out there somewhere looking for a way in. Erik grimaced and hissed from between his teeth, "Pray it's not the one you wait for, if you care about his life," and he sped out of the room.
I closed my eyes and quietly wept. His mad remarks pounded in my head until I heard Raoul's voice shout my name from the other side of the bedroom wall.
"Where are you?" I cried out. "Oh, God, I can't believe it's you. I thought you might have been outside, by the front door."
"Oh, merciful Allah, not the front door," a voice came, but it was not Raoul's.
"Raoul!' I cried. "Who is that with you? Are you there?"
"We're in a room lined with mirrors," Raoul said in clipped tones, "and there's a door but we can't get it open."
"We?" I said confused. Mirrors? "You must be wrong, I've been through that room, and it was covered with red silk hangings."
"Yes, Mademoiselle," came that other voice. "That is Erik's way when he passes through and does not wish to see his reflection. But the curtains are gone now."
"Monsieur Daroga?" I asked. "Are you there too? What is that room?"
"Christine," Raoul interrupted, "there is a door but it's locked. You must find the key and let us out."
"I can't," I said. "I'm bound, and lucky I'm not gagged as well. I know where the key is, though. Erik has it in his room."
"Where is Erik?" the daroga asked.
"I don't know. He said something about a mouse caught in a trap, and he was either going to spring it or snap its neck. How long does that take?" I asked the Persian. "I fear he'll be back any second."
"It depends," the older man answered, his voice full of woe.
"Why are you tied up?" Raoul said. "What has happened to you? Stay calm but speak as fast as you can, before he returns."
"I tried to kill myself," and Raoul interjected, "No!" The Persian hushed him. I went on, "He's going to take me away somewhere, he says Turkey. But he won't ever let me go, and if I don't stay with him, he says he'll kill me and himself as well."
"The villain is forcing you to marry him, then?"
I hesitated, and held suspended in my heart what I feared to tell Raoul. If he thinks Erik has already possessed me, he might leave, and then I truly would be trapped forever. "Yes," I said, hoping he didn't hear the lie in my voice. "He is threatening to make me marry him."
Raoul and the Persian talked together, hasty and indistinct, the Persian calming Raoul down. Finally the daroga said, "Mademoiselle, you must get that key from Erik."
"Persuade him to untie you," Raoul chimed in.
"He was about to before the buzzer rang," I said. "What is that room you are in, and how did you get there?"
"We're trapped, as you are," Raoul said.
The Persian told him to hush. "Don't discourage her," I thought he muttered. Then he addressed me. "Does he know we are here?"
"I don't think so. He heard a noise some moments ago, but it didn't concern him."
"Good. For all our lives' sake, he must not know we are here, and I address that to you as well, Monsieur le Vicomte. It is critical we stay hidden, and Mademoiselle, I appreciate your desire to know the secrets of Erik's house, but I beg you to waste no more time asking. Calm yourself, and I will calm your fiancé. Everything depends upon you retrieving that key."
"Raoul," I called, "you and Monsieur Daroga save yourselves. Erik is mad. I have escaped from his madness once before, I can do it again. There has to be a way out of there, since you got in, didn't you?"
"Listen. What the daroga says is true. I've told you, we're trapped. There's only one way out of here, and that's through the door to your room. I know you're afraid. I'm afraid, too. I don't want to die, I want to live and love you. But I will not leave, I will not retreat. You wanted me to leave last night, to surrender the field and I did. It didn't work, did it, Christine? I will do so no more."
"He'll kill you," I said. "He'll kill us all."
"More than that, perhaps," said the Persian, and Raoul answered, "What?" The two men talked for a moment, then Raoul spoke again. "If he kills us, then he kills us both, and we are together in death. Because I am not leaving you here. Either we leave together or we die together."
I heard a scrape on stone outside. "Quiet," I said frantically. "He's back."
My heart pounded so hard I scarcely heard the bedroom door open. Then what I saw filled me with horror, more than even my first glimpse of Erik's whitened corrugated head. His vest was off, his shirt was torn and pulled out of his trousers' waistband. A great stain of blood spread out over the shirt's hem. Blood dripped behind him on the brown-stained carpet. Another great smear colored his cheek and went down his neck, where he had wiped himself with his wet hand.
Not only blood spattered on the carpet. For he was wet, wet as a seal who has just slid from ocean to shore. He moved like some great sea beast as he staggered across the room, gasping and heaving. When he turned his harrowed expression towards me, pitiful and bloody and crazed, all the pent-up terror let loose inside me, and I cried out, "Erik, what happened?"
"Who knew that a drowning mouse could bite so, or fight so?" he said in an odd sing-song. "Who asked him to come down here, blustering his way in where he had no business? Erik tried to meet him last night, tried to arrange things, but no, he didn't have the time then to spare for Erik, too busy with his own affairs he was, and so Erik made plans on his own. Now he shows up, blustering and demanding, but that was his own funeral, wasn't it? That man will never knock on another door unwanted, Erik has seen to that." He had a kitchen knife in his hand and waved it around at me as he raved.
Then, as if seeing it for the first time, he grasped at his thigh and watched the blood well up through his fingers and run down his leg, mixing with the water to make a little pool on the carpet at his feet. Stumbling to the bathroom, he tied a towel around his leg. He still held the knife as he approached, and I grew green and faint as he came over to me with it extended. Swiftly he sliced through my bonds and said, "Come into the kitchen if you don't want to die buried down here."
I tried to follow him, but my arms and legs were numb and stiff as I stumbled after him. The foul, wet costume stuck to my legs. He slammed the bedroom door behind him and tracked blood and water all through the apartment, and I noticed with mad hysterical interest that none of the blood showed on the drawing room's Turkey carpet.
In the kitchen he took a little box from the pantry. "Forgive me for disturbing your wifely modesty," he said as he swiftly unbuttoned and pulled down his trousers and long undergarment. I tried not to look at his maleness that drooped so low, and instead focused on the wound on his upper thigh that still seeped blood.
It had already been stitched, but half the stitches had ripped out, and it was through this opening that the blood came. A little blood makes a lot of stain, Lill-jänta, my mother used to say if I cut myself and cried at the few drops. The red-stained water from his sopping trousers collected on the floor. He took a thin belt and wrapped it around his leg, and said, "Hold this until I tell you to let it go."
"I can't, Erik," I moaned. "I will faint."
"You'll do more than that if I bleed to death," he said in a cutting voice. Then he gave me a sharp glance. "Look, you're out and free, and there's the knife on the marble over there. There's nothing I can do, so you can help me, or you can kill me."
He was so white. So after he bound his thigh above the cut and had me pull, he dug in the wound and started to stitch in the squirting, bright red blood. "Pull tighter," he gasped, and I did, not even caring that I sat between his legs. His manhood brushed my shoulder, but it was just another part of his body now like an ear or finger, as he focused on running thread through the tissue under the skin. "Now let this belt go," he said, and I did. He looked intently, but the mass of bleeding had stopped, although some still seeped from the skin where it was torn and frayed. He gasped, so pale that he did look like a skull of death.
"Get some of that wine over there and uncork it. Now, pour it on the wound. Don't be such a housewife, don't spare the floor. Just pour it, like that," and his eyes rolled back for the wine must have stung terribly. Then he pulled the gaping lips of the wound together, but they were frayed and torn where the earlier stitches had pulled through. He cursed and pulled the skin even harder so that it puckered, and he swiftly stitched the puckered edges together over the long slice that went around the inner curve of his practically fleshless thigh.
It had taken less than five minutes, and I sank to the ground, shaking. He put the bottle to his lips and took several long pulls.
I almost giggled with hysteria. Erik was drinking cooking wine. Then for the first time I noticed the smell of the lake water, which still dripped from his shirt down onto his legs and over the wound he had just stitched. It reeked like algae, or something faintly rotten.
"Erik, what happened," I said. "How did you get this?"
"Shot," he said shortly.
"Shot? By whom?"
He laughed without joy. "A poacher. At least he didn't unman me, which would have been so unfortunate for you. But never mind. There are some trousers on a peg in my room," he said. "Bring them while I bind this up." He stood shakily and headed for one of the cupboard drawers.
Into his room I ran, took the trousers, and then saw it lying on a table near the organ – a small brown leather bag that I knew contained the key that I needed. It was bound with another one of Erik's impossible knots, and my trembling fingers couldn't manage it. Take the whole bag, I told myself, and you can cut it open, or tear it. There's no time to waste.
He leaned on the door frame, glaring. "What is it you are doing in here?" he thundered, fierce, bloodstained, almost naked. I fled past him and he grasped for me but missed. I ran towards the bedroom and tore vainly at the bag with my nails as Erik limped into the room behind me, a rag wrapped around his thigh, his soaked and bloodied shirt flapping around his belly. "Give me my bag!" he screamed. "You vicious tramp, you murdering schemer!"
He seized my wrists with both hands and forced them backwards, farther, harder, until I thought they'd snap. "Drop it!" he roared, "Or I shall break them." I felt something in my wrist give way, and I screamed from the pain as the bag hit the floor. Erik pushed me into the bedside table, and the rose lamp overturned with a loud thump. Scrambling to retrieve the bag, he stood stock still as Raoul called from the other side of the wall, "Christine! Christine! Are you all right? Has he hurt you?" followed by the frantic hushing noises of the Persian.
"No!" Erik screamed, high and shrill as a woman. "It cannot be!" He ran to the corner where the hidden door sat and gave a hard smack to a brass plate that sat high up on the wall. There was the grinding of gears, something hissed like gas when you turn it on, then came the loud whoosh! of a burner being lit, and a bitter, hot smell filled the room. "Now we shall see what we've caught in the other trap!"
"Oh, God, no," I said as he advanced on me. "Let them go, please let them go." A heavy blow on the side of my head was my answer. It brought me to my knees, everything went black, and I never remembered even hitting the floor.
My poor dead husband, do you read over my shoulder from your armchair in the lounge of the communion of saints, or from your blazing bed of purgatorial fire? Do you stifle your anguish as I once stifled my laugh and probably saved my life? Can the happy dead still feel horror?
Or have you met him on the other side, heard his tale, and know already what you read here?
And you, my beautiful son, if you have found these unhappy papers, have you already risen from your seat to burn them, as your father's madness is laid before you like a table spread by a company of devils? Please don't throw this into the fire yet, for his story is not done.
(continued...)