Christine didn’t show up at the Theater all through the next week. Worried, I headed to her little apartment, where she lived with her adoptive mother, Madame Valerius. She was a very old lady who had once been the wife of a great music professor, the man who had brought Christine and her father to Paris.
Christine opened the door. She was incredibly different, compared with the last time I had seen her. She was wearing an old faded brown cotton dress, which poorly covered her pallid thinness. Her large eyes, fit on me, had dark shadows around them, as if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep.
“Christine, what happened?” I tried to hide my shock in a soft voice.
Christine attempted to smile, but she was too weak for that. I entered the apartment slowly, noticing all the windows closed, the muggy and warm air making me uncomfortable. I could see Mde. Valerius laying on her bed, her pure white hair falling over her shoulders. She smiled heartily to me as I greeted her from the threshold of her bedroom.
“Meg, I’m so happy you came to see my Christine! She has been sad, my dear, but she wouldn’t tell me what it is.”
“Mama, I told you I’m fine!” Christine said with impertinence.
I lowered my voice and asked, as the two of us moved back to the living room, “Please, tell me what is going on! Is there something I can do for you?”
Her eyes danced around the room as she thought over and over about my question.
“Yes, there is something you can do,” she said tremulously. “I want you to listen to my story, and please tell me if I am mad.”
I nodded, sitting by her side in a wooden chair.
“Meg, you remember the night of the tragedy in the Theater?”
Again I nodded, encouraging her to go on.
“On the day before that happened, the Angel,” she broke up crying, twisting the brim of her dress with anger. “Oh, how stupid I was! The Angel came to me one last time,” she said, now more scornful. Her eyes were full of tears, and I was afraid I knew the aim of that conversation.
The last thing I wanted to know about was her Angel, her dedicated teacher and suitor.
“He told me I would have the chance of singing Marguerite again, in Carlotta’s place, and therefore I had to be prepared. Not just for a one night replacement, but for assuming this role and further roles...”
She took a deep breath.
“He asked me to follow him, for this lesson would be given somewhere else. He asked me to walk to the mirror. You know, that big mirror I have at my dressing room. I believed him, as I always did, and did as he asked. Somehow the mirror vanished and I ended up in a dark tunnel. A gloved cold hand was waiting for me.”
I swallowed hard, imagining his pleasure in leading his lady through his clever underground artifices.
“We walked for a long time. Hours, days... I wouldn’t be able to say. It was still early afternoon, but in those catacombs, it was an endless night. We ended up at the edge of a lake, where a boat was lying. A lake, in the cellars of an Opera House!”
“A shadowy silhouette seized the oars and led me to the boat. I could only see the shape of a man, wearing a cape and a hat, underneath which he had a mask covering his face. That was when I first felt scared, because I thought it was my angel there, not...that!”
The disgust Christine added to the word made me guess the end of her story. How romantic, the two of them in a boat trip, in the cellars of the Opera.
“He rowed absented-mindedly, while I, in fear, didn’t say one word. We arrived... Meg, please don’t laugh at me...we arrived to a house. His house.”
“The last thing I feel like doing is laughing, Christine.” “It was a rather regular house, with regular furniture and everything. He finally spoke, and when he spoke, it was the...Angel’s voice!!”
She was crying harder now. So he had taken her there. He had certainly shown Christine a lot more trust than he did with me. What was he trying to achieve? Was it only music? Was it all that mattered to him? Music? Or did he choose so because he never had the chance of living something deeper?
“He said, plainly and coldly, that he was no Angel, and apologized for his lie. He said only that at the time he had approached me, he’d had strong reasons to do so.”
Listening to that, I felt my heart stir with hope. For a man like him, insecure and proud at the same time, it certainly took a lot of courage and need to invent and support all this farse with a helpless soprano. Could it be that it didn’t matter to him anymore to befriend Christine, and that was why he decided to tell her the truth? And if so, what had changed his feelings?
I raised an eyebrow in surprise, and became a lot more interested all the sudden.
“I cried for a long time, totally deluded and helpless. So I was no better than any other singer, there was no Angel of Music, and Papa was definitely dead. As well as my talent.”
I was so thrilled by the course the story was taking that I couldn’t bring myself to comfort Christine. I wanted to know the rest.
“He apologized again, always in that cold, almost arrogant attitude, and said that, although he was standing far from heaven, he would help my career, giving me my great chance as a singer on the next night. He also said he wouldn’t be available for lessons for a while, but that he was sure I was prepared to go on alone.”
I was almost cheering now! So he had given up not only his precious instrument, but the convenient position he had as Christine’s teacher?
“Slowly, I understood the practicality of the situation, and swallowed my tears. He gave me a few sheets of music, and asked me to take a look at them. He sat by the astonishing pipe organ he has down there, and began to play. And to sing the tenor’s part from the piece I had in my hands.”
“And he began to sing... that demoniac voice!” she exclaimed in a high pitch. “Destroying my thoughts, making me wallow in music, and only music! We sang all the night, in a species of catharsis, changing roles, changing pieces, changing feelings. All throught the lesson he was calm and very respectful, and I ended up trusting that masked man...thing...creature.”
It was hard for me to picture Erik, such a rational and rather tormented man, giving himself so freely to music, or whatever it was.
“And in the climax of the song, of that ritual, something inside of me wanted desperately to see the face of that mysterious man, who still sang as an angel. As an angel from hell!” she screamed her last sentence hoarsely.
Mde. Valerius apparently heard, for she said, “Meg, tell Christine she needs to rest. She has been so nervous lately, Meg, talking to herself and not eating...Christine is very dear to me, you know.”
We both were too bound to the talk to worry about the old lady’s pleas.
“And I reached for the mask,” she closed her eyes, frowning every muscle of her face in horror, “it was...it was...I can’t tell you, Meg! It was the devil himself, it was the face of death!” she grabbed my arms, as if she was drowning. “While I live, I won’t forget those pale-blue lifeless eyes, glaring at me, without moving, expressing utter pain and fury.”
“And I could do nothing but scream in complete horror, holding the mask in my hand. It was not a man, Meg, it was a dead corpse, it was pure hideousness! “
I couldn’t blame Christine, for I could imagine her fright. And yet her description, completely empty of feelings, but dead disgust, made me think of the pain in his eyes that she referred to.
“I was so horrified that I didn’t know what to think anymore. He was staring at me, just as I was doing with him, his claws slightly projected towards me. I thought he was going to murder me, or much worse, abuse me; and I start to scream desperately at the idea, saying that if he laid a finger on me, I would kill myself before he could do anything to me.”
I simply couldn’t believe it happened. I couldn’t believe he could have stood that. Not after knowing the gentle and innocent side of that man. I imagined that the last touch of kindness in him had been killed that night.
“He spent a long time just staring at me, that dreadful, disgusting, horrible head. I finally threw the mask at him, disgusted to think that it had been attached, in contact with that rotten skin. He bent and caught the mask, replacing it. It seemed like he had dressed a cover of dignity, too.”
“Opening the door that gave way to the lake, he ordered me to get into the boat. He rowed it in fury, and we made the return trip twice as fast. Once on the other shore, he led the path with a lantern, without touching me, and opened the mirror for me.”
Christine looked exhausted, as if she had just made this trip all over again.
“He never said one word again.”
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