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I could have recognized that shy knocking on the door anywhere. It was immediately after my classical dance class finished, and I still had my sweat clothes on. On the door, it was the pulsation that Christine always had; that light knock, unsure of what she was knocking for.
I finally disposed of the costume, feeling a chill in the moldy room. I said something to Christine while I fastened my old and clean dress. Patting my face with a handkerchief, I turned the key and looked upon my friend’s face. She was pale, as usual, her lips without the least scent of a smile. These, very light colored, together with a small rounded nose, gave her the most calm and naive look possible.
Taking some advantage of that, she looked at me and inquired, ”Am I disturbing you?”
She knew I wouldn’t turn her away, even if I wanted to.
“No. No, come in please,” I said more enthusiastically.
She embraced me lightly and headed to the armchair I had in the middle of my room. The seat was occupied by a little dusted pillow, laying in the pink cotton stretched over the furniture. Christine lifted the pillow, placing it on her lap.
She blinked her eyes apprehensively while I sat on my bed, right in front of her. Recognizing her funny way of behaving when she had news to tell me, I laughed and said a little nervously, ”What happened?”
She covered her mouth with her delicate hand and smiled. I held her other hand and insisted.
She suddenly turned very serious and looked at me steadily. I tried to read this look, but it was hard to tell her intentions. I would say she was deciding if she should trust me with this little secret of hers or not.
“Meg, remember when we saw the Viscount around the Opera?”
Christine and I made our lives in the Paris Opera House; me as a dancer, she as a chorus singer.
Although I could say that I grew up in the Opera, the truth was, I was not always an artist. Even my actual position as secondary dancer was far more consequence of the good influence of my mother around the theater than anything else. I still hadn’t found anything in the Opera I could relate to.
Christine, on the other hand, had a very disciplined career, coming from distant lands. Her father taught her music since an early age, and after his death, she entered the conservatory. When she came to the Opera house, she was completely lost in Paris, and her voice seemed to be almost too lifeless, even to join the chorus. We soon became friends and I was the first one she told about an old childhood friend she spotted in the audience.
Two more times she told me that she had seen him around, during daylight. I wondered if she was starting to see ghosts around the theater. Actually, I guess it was around those days that the presence of the major ghost, the Phantom of the Opera, was getting more noticeable. But the Phantom was only the theme of fantastic stories told among stageshifts and the ballet girls, while the aristocrat seen by Christine was our reality.
His brother, the Count, had just acquired the Opera house, and directly, all the artists contracted. Our managers were substituted by a pair of smiling bourgeois. The change of direction didn’t matter too much to most of us, whose duties were to follow some unchanging line of work.
I think that even for the old managers, the sale of the theater was advantageous. They were suffering from some kind of blackmailing, which became some of the best gossip around the theater. The letters were said to be somewhat sinister, once they forced the managers to pay a monthly wage of 20,000 francs to some unknown maniac!
But with the Count de Chagny owning the House, everything changed for Christine Daae. His younger brother, the Viscount de Chagny, got too close to the Opera. More than he wanted to.
“Meg, I was not mistaken! The Viscount is Raoul.”
All that I knew about this name was that he shared with Christine the time she lived with her dad. I could see the importance of it to her.
That afternoon, she told many stories about her rich little friend and the silly dreams she held about him when they were younger. Her eyes became a little sorrowful as she tried to point out how impossible this relationship was, since she was only a young singer with no background.
But she changed the subject quickly, directing her thoughts to her love for singing. Singing for Christine came close to a religious practice, exposed to me through the couple of years we lived together.
The theory was simple. Her father dead, he was to send her, from heaven, the Angel of Music to guide and teach her. As the years passed, she ended up believing that the Angel of Music was only a metaphor her dad invented to encourage her, to give her strength to continue her career without him. But to the surprise of her senses, an Angel of Music truly came to her a while ago, as she told me. And he knew everything her heart longed for.
It took me time to get used to this weird twist in her way of behaving. Once sad and serious, now Christine was absent-minded and full of incredible talk. Her voice had changed a great deal, too. For me, that was almost irrelevant, since I had a hard time understanding these endless secrets of a “perfect voice”. I heard one in my life, and by then I knew. That was enough for me.
But as for other people in the theater, it was almost supernatural the way her singing techniques had improved. And Christine insisted it was the result of her Angel’s lessons.
It was quite a responsibility to take Christine’s words for sure. She was older than me, but I always held her as one of my little sisters, because of her fragile and inexperienced personality. So everytime she came up with a new creative story, I would listen attentively but not say one word in return. I was afraid of encouraging her to go further in this world of fantasy.
When she told me about this Viscount, I confess I was afraid it would be one more of her fairy tales. But it didn’t take too long for Christine to convince me that she was saying the truth. She had in fact been observing the boy, asking everyone about him, making sure he was Raoul, her dear friend. The Viscount was an extremely good-looking fellow, with a boyish face that contrasted all the power he had from his noble position in society. That would be enough for Christine to show such an interest in him, but she assured me he was a very comprehensive soul, and that, together, they used to hear her father’s legends about the North. I believe that’s where the Angel of Music story came from.
Not long after this day, Christine received the first strange proposal of her career. One of the new managers, Monsieur Firmin Richard, knocked at her room. I was there, chatting with her as we so often used to do. Seeing me, he bent and asked if I would allow them to talk in privacy. I was used to being addressed by my first name by the old managers, so when he called me mademoiselle, I made sure he would follow my other employer’s habit. Christine laughed at what she called my audacious request.
I left the room laughing, too, with Monsieur Richard smiling at me in surprise. He was a sympathetic person, with very attractive manners. I only heard him addressing Christine by her whole name, which made me even more curious about his presence.
What he was doing there was, in fact, amazing. Somehow he had noticed Christine’s talent and was offering her the biggest role in a play! Well, it was only for a night, to replace the great diva Carlotta, who was suffering from some sudden illness. But only someone who lives in a place such as the Opera knows the odds of such a thing happening. Even I had to wonder after that if the touch of her Angel was somehow in this.
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