Music of the Night

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “My voice was not sufficiently warmed up,” I murmured, for indeed Marguerite does not truly begin to sing until the third act. “I might have improved, had I been given time.”

  “No excuses!” he snapped. “You were not concentrating.”

  I ought to have challenged him about the lethal counterweight, to which my concentration had in fact fallen victim; but alone with him on that black, subterranean water, I did not dare.

  “It was nerves,” I said, cravenly. “I never meant to disappoint you, Maestro.”

  We completed the crossing in silence. In some way that I could not quite see he made the far wall open and admit us to his secret home, which I later learned was hidden between the thick barriers retaining the waters of the lake.

  In an ordinary draped and carpeted drawing room, amid a profusion of fresh-cut flowers and myriad gleaming brass candlesticks and lamps, my teacher swore that he loved me and would love me always (despite the inadequate performance I had just attempted in Faust). He knelt before me and asked me to live with him in the city above as his wife.

  Now I was but a girl, and even down on his knee he was an imposing figure. He always wore formal dress, which flatters any tall man; carried himself with studied grace and dignity; and had (till tonight) behaved impeccably toward me. I had imagined the features behind the white, half-face mask he always wore as sad and noble, concealed for a vow of love or honor, or both.

  But he had always seemed much older than I was and, acting as the opera’s demonic spirit, must live at best a highly irregular life. I had simply never imagined him as a suitor. In fact, I had named him from the first my “Angel of Music,” not because I thought he was some sort of heavenly visitor—I was a singer, not a convent-school girl—but to both state and remind him of a standard of conduct that I wished him to uphold in his dealings with me (it had not escaped my notice that he asked no payment for my lessons).

  Taken aback by his proposal—and with Raoul’s ring hanging hidden on a chain ’round my neck!—I temporized: “I am flattered, Monsieur. As my father is dead, you must speak with my guardian. But, forgive me, I do not even know your name, or who you are.”

  The side of his mouth that I could see curved in a smile. “Your guardian is both deaf and senile; it is no use talking to him. As for me, I am the Opéra Ghost, as you surmise. My name is Erik.” He paused, breathed deeply, and added, “There, I have told you who I am; now I shall show you.”

  With a sudden, extravagant gesture, he swept off his mask and with it all of his thick, dark hair—a wig! I gasped, hardly believing my eyes as he displayed to me the full measure, the positively baroque detail and extraordinary extent, of his phenomenal ugliness.

  Large and broad, with bruise-colored patches staining the pallid skin, his head resembled nothing so much as an overripe melon. The fully revealed face was a nightmare. One eye was sunk in a crooked socket, the nose was half-formed and cavernous, and his cheek resembled a welter of ornamental plasterwork, all lumps and hollows and odd tags of skin. His mouth spread and twisted on that same side into a shocking blur of pink flesh, moist and shining. Only his ears were fine, curled tightly to the sides of his freckled crown with its scanty dusting of pale, lank hair. In short, he was a stomach-turning sight.

  Abject and defiant at once this monster gazed up at me, clearly apprehending how I recoiled but bearing it in silence while he awaited my answer.

  In that blood-freezing instant all my childish fancies and conceits—that with his teaching I would become a great singer, that he and my dear Raoul would gladly join forces to that end—were swept away. Words from the interrupted third act of Faust came unbidden to my mind: “Oh, let me, let me, gaze upon your face!” I nearly burst into shrieks of hysterical laughter.

  Instead, I managed to say, “I think you must be mad, Monsieur, to ask me to accept you!”

  “Mad? Certainly not!” He sprang to his feet and glared down at me. “But I am every bit as dangerous as Opéra gossip makes me out to be. Do you remember the stagehand Joseph Buquet, who supposedly hanged himself last Christmas? In fact, he died at my hands, to stop his chattering about me. You may look to me also in the death caused by the fallen counterweight. I was very displeased with your behavior on the roof of my theatre the other evening with the importunate young man whose ring you wear secretly even now; and I made my protest.

  “Also that crash, with certain communications from me, is what persuaded Madame Carlotta to step aside tonight and give you your chance to sing Marguerite, of which you made so little. I tell you these things so that you will believe me when I say that your Vicomte’s life depends upon your answer, and other lives also.”

  My heart dropped. “You haven’t hurt Raoul! Where is he?”

  “Why, he is here, unharmed. Only his fine feathers are somewhat ruffled.” He drew a heavy curtain, revealing a window into an adjoining room.

  There sat the Vicomte de Chagny, struggling wildly in a chair to which he was lashed by a crisscrossing of thin, bright chains. His clothes were all awry from his wrenching to get loose, his opera cape was rucked up on the floor at his feet, and his top hat lay on its side in a corner.

  Seeing me, Raoul began shouting mightily, his face so reddened that I feared an attack of apoplexy. The Phantom pressed some switch in the wall and Raoul’s voice became audible, bawling out my name: “Christine! Christine, has he touched you, has he insulted you? Charlatan! Scoundrel! Let me go! You ugly devil, I will break you in pieces, I will—”

  The curtain fell again. Raoul’s yells subsided into frustrated grunting as he renewed his attempts to free himself.

  I was horrified. I loved Raoul for his (normally) ebullient and affectionate nature and I dreaded to see him hurt. Of course, he was as artistically sensitive as a large veal calf, but we cannot all serve the Muses; nor is it a capital offense to be a Philistine.

  I sank onto a velvet-seated chair, trying to collect myself. The Opéra Ghost stepped close and said darkly, “His life is in your hands, Christine.”

  Now I understood his meaning, and I was aghast; yet my heart rose up in exhilaration at the grant of such power. That love of justice found mainly in children burned in my breast. Feeling at fault for the death of the counterweight victim at least, I longed to do right. The Phantom’s words seemed to mean that right lay within my grasp—if I had the courage to seize it.

  Gripping the arms of my chair, I looked up into his awful face with what I hoped would seem a fearless gaze. “Monsieur Erik, I see in you a man of violence and cruelty. You wish to hurt Raoul because he loves me, and from what you say you plan some wider gesture of destruction as well if I refuse to be your wife.”

  A vindictive gleam in his eyes confirmed the truth of this. I trembled for myself, and for Raoul who groaned and struggled in the next room. Clearly he could not rescue me; I must rescue him and with him, apparently, others unknown to me but equally at risk.

  In fact, this great goblin in evening dress who called himself Erik, whom I had rashly taken for a friend and mentor, offered me a role grander than any I had yet sung on stage (this was the spring of 1881; Tosca had not yet been written), a challenge of breathtaking proportions. Still costumed as honest Marguerite and bursting with her unsung music, I determined to meet the test. I was very young.

  “Here is my answer,” I said. “If you let Raoul go and swear, moreover, to commit no further violence so long as you live, I will stay with you—for five years.”

  One does not survive in the arts without learning to bargain.

  “Five years!” exclaimed the Ghost, fine spittle spraying from his twisted mouth.

  “Monsieur Erik,” I replied, “I mean what I say: I offer my talent, such as it is, for you to shape and train as you choose, as well as my acceptance of your love—” My throat nearly closed on these words, and I was afraid I might vomit. “—on the terms I have stated, for five years.”

  In fact, I had chosen the number out of the air; five years was the length o
f time I had spent at the Paris Opéra.

  How well prepared I was for that moment I understood only upon later reflection. A French music professor had seen my father and me performing in our native Sweden, and, thinking my father a rustic genius on the violin, had brought us both to France. But my father—more at ease, perhaps, as an exhibitor of my talents than as someone else’s prize exhibit—had before long gone into a steep decline.

  Extremity makes a monster of any dying man to those who must answer his incessant, heart wringing, and ultimately vain demands for help and comfort. I did not begrudge the duty I owed, and paid; but I learned in those long months the price of yielding to another person unbounded power over my days and nights. In life as in art, limitation is all.

  The Phantom scowled, plainly perplexed by a response he had not foreseen. I added hurriedly, “And we must live here below, not out in the everyday world. The strain of pretending to be just like other people would be more than I could bear. That is my offer. Will you take it?”

  He showed wolfish teeth. “Remember where you are. I can take what I want and keep what I like, for as long as I wish.”

  “But, my dear Angel,” I quavered, “you may not like to have me with you even as long as five years. You are accustomed to your own ways, untrammeled by considerations of the wants of a companion. And we will not be honing my talents for public performance but only for our own satisfaction, which may lessen your pleasure in my constant company.”

  “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I have promised from the first to make a famous diva of you!”

  “Maestro,” I said, “please understand: you have allowed your passions to drive you too far. I doubt that the Opéra managers would accept your direction of my career now on any terms. You have just said that you killed a stagehand and loosed the counterweight on the head of a helpless old woman. In the world above, you are not a great music master but a callous murderer.”

  “ ‘In the world above—’ ” he repeated intently. “But not here below? Then you forgive me?”

  “I do not presume to forgive crimes committed against others,” said I, with the lofty severity of youth. “Still, neither can anything you or I might do bring back your victims alive and well, so what use is blame and condemnation? You have treated me—for the most part—with consideration and respect, and I mean to respond in kind. But I can accept no more advancement of my career by your efforts. I must reject a success made for me by the heartless criminality of the Opéra Ghost.”

  He wrung his hands, a poignant gesture when coupled with his ghastly head and threatening demeanor. “But what have I to offer you, except my knowledge of music and my influence here at the Opéra?”

  “That we must discover,” I replied more gently, for his question had touched me. As the answer to it was “nothing,” I dared to hope that my arguments might induce him to acknowledge the futility of his plans and release Raoul and me. “But making a career for me is out of the question now. Please put that possibility from your mind.”

  Drawing a square of cambric from his pocket and patting his lips dry with it, he stared gloomily at the floor. No apology, no instant grant of liberty was forthcoming. I saw that he would not reconsider, and it was too late for me to do so.

  “So,” I finished dejectedly, “my choice is to join you in exile and obscurity, not fame and glory.”

  “Then you won’t sing in my opera, when it is staged?” he protested, sounding near to tears himself. “But I composed it for you!”

  He had previously told me that he had been working on this opus for twenty years and that it was too advanced for me in any case; but I judged his emotion honest enough.

  “And I will sing it for you if you wish,” I said quickly, “here in your home. Won’t that suffice? Can it be, my angel and teacher, that you do not want me at all, just my voice for your opera? Is it only my talent, put to use for your own recognition, that you love? I am sorry, but you must give that up. Guiltless as I am of your crimes, if I let you raise me up with hands tainted by murder I shall be as bloodstained as you are yourself.”

  He blinked at me in pained bafflement. “How is it, Christine, that I love you to the depths of my soul, but I do not understand you at all? You are scarcely more than a child, yet you speak like a jurist! What do you want of me? What must I do?”

  Taking a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air, I repeated my terms: “You must release the Vicomte, unharmed. You must swear to do no more violence to him or to anyone. And five years from now you must let me go too.”

  He flung away from me and began to pace the carpeted floor, raising puffs of dust with every step (for he had no servants, and like many artistic people he was an indifferent housekeeper). Freed from his oppressive hovering, I arose from my chair and surreptitiously breathed in the calming way that he himself had taught me.

  “I have said that I love you,” he said sulkily over his shoulder, “and I mean love that lasts and informs a lifetime—not the trifling fancy of an Opéra dandy whose true loves are the gaming tables and the racetrack!”

  This jeer, spoken with deliberate loudness, provoked renewed sounds of struggle in the next room, which I resolutely ignored.

  “I am young yet, Maestro,” I said meekly. “Five years is a very long time to me.” He sighed, crossed his arms on his breast, and bowed his dreadful head. “But I can school myself to spend that time with you so long as I know there is an end to it; and if you will promise to sing for me, often, in your splendid voice that I have never heard equaled.”

  “With songs or without them, I can keep you here forever if I choose,” he muttered.

  “As a prisoner filled with hatred for you, yes,” I dared to reply, for I saw that he was losing heart. “But prisoners are the chains of their jailers, and they often pine and die. If I were to perish here, my poor dead body would stink and rot like any other. You would be worse off than you are now. I offer more than that, dear Angel; for five years, no less and no more.”

  I think that no one had argued with Erik, face to face, for a very long time. He certainly had not expected reasoned opposition from me. He was on the verge of giving way.

  Raoul chose this moment to issue a challenge at the top of his lungs from next door: “Fight me like a man, if you are a man, you disgusting freak! Choose your weapons and fight for her!”

  The Phantom’s head came sharply up and he rounded on me so fiercely that I could not keep from flinching.

  “Liar!” he shouted. “It’s a trick! You maneuver to save your little Vicomte, that is all! Do you think he would wait for you? Do you think he would want you, after I have had you by me for even your paltry five years? You would be sadly disappointed, Ma’amselle. Or do you mean to coax and befool me, and then escape in a month or two when my back is turned and run to your Raoul? I will kill him first. You lying vixen, I will kill you both!”

  “I am not a liar!” I cried, my eyes brimming over at last.

  “Prove it!” he screamed, in a very ecstasy of grief and rage. “Liar! Little liar! Prove it!”

  I stepped forward, caught him ’round the neck and kissed him. I shut my eyes, I could not help that, but I pressed my mouth full on his bloated, glistening lips and leant my breast on his. My trembling hands fitted themselves to the back of his nearly naked head, holding his face tight to mine; and he was not cold and toadlike to the touch as I had anticipated, but vigorous and warm.

  How can I describe that kiss? It was like putting my mouth to an open wound, as intimate an act as if I had somehow slipped my hand in among his entrails.

  After a blind and breathless moment I stepped away again, much shaken. He had not moved but had stood utterly rigid from head to foot in my embrace. We looked one another in the eyes in shocked silence.

  “So be it,” he said at last in a hoarse voice. “The boy goes free, and I will submit my hatreds to your authority.” His eyes narrowed. “But you must marry me, Christine. I will have no shadow cast upon your nam
e or character on my account; and there must be no misunderstanding between us as to the duties owed whilst you live with me.”

  “I accept,” I whispered, although I quailed inwardly at the mention of those “duties.”

  He left me. There came some muffled, unsettling sounds from the next room, during which I had time to wonder wretchedly how my Raoul had fallen into the hands of this monster.

  But according to Opéra gossip the Phantom was supremely clever, while I had reluctantly noticed in Raoul flashes (if that is the word) of the obdurate, uncomprehending stupidity of the privileged. I was familiar with this quality from my childhood days of entertaining, with my father, the wealthy farmers and burghers who hired us to make music for them. Apparently, the addition of noble blood only exacerbated the condition.

  In a few moments Erik reappeared, holding his rival’s limp body in his arms like that of a sleeping child. Raoul had recently begun growing a beard, and he looked very downy and dear. The sight of him all but undid me.

  “He is not hurt,” said the Phantom gruffly. “Bid him goodbye, Christine. You shall not see him again in my domain.”

  I longed to press a parting kiss to Raoul’s flushed and slackjawed face, for he looked like Heaven itself to me. But my kisses were pledged now, every one. I must wait, in an agony of mingled terror and queasy anticipation, for their claimed redemption—not by Raoul, but by the Opéra Ghost.

  I slipped off the little gold chain with Raoul’s ring on it, wound it ’round his hand, and stood back helplessly as Erik bore him away.

  Left alone, I rushed about the underground house like a bird trapped in a mineshaft. Fear drove me this way and that and would not let me rest. I was locked in, for Erik quite correctly mistrusted me; had I found a way out, I would have taken it.