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The Novel
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Erik/Opera Ghost “You know I never keep my oaths. Oaths are made to catch gulls with.” When not speaking through walls, pretending to be a bodiless voice, the Opera Ghost (O.G.) communicates through newspaper ads (with the world outside the Opera House) and through handwritten notes (within the theater). His letters are written in a childish, clumsy handwriting, his letters look as though made with a match-end dipped in red ink. “But why do these walls obey him alone? He did not build them!” “Yes, sir, that is just what he did!” -Raoul and The Persian on the mirror-door in Christine’s dressing room Hidden behind his exquisite singing voice and gentle speaking voice, behind the full black mask is a pallid face, ‘so lugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows’ and ‘scorching [yellow] eyes’. Beneath his large cloak and gloves are stone-cold, bony hands that smell of death. “…when he went out in the streets or ventured to show himself in public, he wore a pasteboard nose, with a mustache attached to it, instead of his own horrible hole of a nose. This did not quite take away his corpse-like air, but it made him almost, I say almost, endurable to look at.’ –Daroga ‘His horrible, unparalleled and repulsive ugliness put him without the pale of humanity; and it often seemed to me that, for this reason, he no longer believed that he had any duty toward the human race.’ –Daroga “I should always hear the superhuman cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared before my eyes … But imagine, if you can, Red Death’s mask suddenly coming to life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its nose, and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury of a demon; and not a ray of light from the sockets, for, as I learned later, you can not see his blazing eyes except in the dark.” –Christine on Erik’s reaction to the removal of his mask and the face it hid ”My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never…let me kiss her…She used to run away…and throw me my mask” He claims to have ‘no name and no country’ and that he has ‘taken the name of Erik by accident.’ Of his past he speaks very little. He says his father never looked on him and it was from his mother that he received his first mask. ”In my country, he was known by a name which means the ‘trap-door lover’.” –The Persian speaking of Erik ‘He had lived in India and acquired an incredible skill in the art of strangulation. He would make them lock him into a court-yard to which they brought a warrior-usually a man condemned to death-armed with a long pike and broadsword. Erik had only his lasso; and it was always just when the warrior thought he was going to fell Erik with a tremendous blow that we heard the lasso whistle through the air. With a turn of the wrist, Erik tightened the noose round his adversary’s neck and, in the fashion, dragged him before the little sultana and her women, who sat looking from a window and applauding.’-Daroga/The Persian Erik lived and played in Persia, learned tricks of Tonkin pirates, and employed all the underhanded and ingenious ways he knew in keeping unwanted visitors out of his House on the Lake. He is also, quite possibly, the very first ventriloquist in the world and most likely the very best. A skill he used well and often. “I began this work [Don Juan Triumphant] twenty years ago. When I have finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin and never wake again. … I sometimes work at it for fourteen days and nights together, during which I live on music only, and then I rest for years at a time.” “When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time…he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors.” –Christine on Erik’s devotion to the composing of Don Juan Triumphant Erik is desperate to be loved after finding someone to love and is possessive beyond all else. ‘…for Erik who is a real monster-I have seen him at work in Persian, alas-is also in certain respects a regular child, vain and self-conceited, and there is nothing he loves so much, after astonishing people, as to prove all the really miraculous ingenuity of his mind.’ –Daroga “Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness! … He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love…He has carried me off for love! … But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps! … And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me liberty…he offered it…he offered to show me the mysterious road…Only…only he rose too…and I was made to remember that, although he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice…for he sang.” –Christine telling of her first visit to the House on the Lake “I can’t go on living like this, like a mole in a borrow! Don Juan Triumphant is finished; and now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody else. People will not even turn around in the streets….You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself. If you loved me I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased.” ’Erik was born in a small town not far from Rouen. He was the son of a master-mason. He ran away at an early age from his father’s house, where his ugliness was a subject of horror and terror to his parents. For a time, he frequented the fairs, where a showman exhibited him as the ‘living corpse.’ He seems to have crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair, and to have completed his strange education as an artist and magician at the very fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies. A period of Erik’s life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous glory. He already sang as nobody on this earth and had ever sung before; he practiced ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain so extraordinary that the caravans returning to Asia talked about it during the whole length of their journey. In this way, his reputation penetrated the walls of the palace at Mazenderan, where the little sultana, the favorite of the shah-in-shah, was boring herself to death. A dealer in furs, returning to Samarkand from Nijni-Novgorod, told of the marvels which he had seen performed in Kerik’s tent. The trader was summoned to the palace and the daroga of Mazenderan was told to question him. Next the daroga was instructed to go and find Erik. He brought him to Persia, where for some months Erik’s will was law. He was guilty of not a few horrors, for he seemed not to know the difference between good and evil. He took part calmly in a number of political assassinations; and he turned his diabolical inventive powers against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian empire. The shah took a liking to him.’ ‘Erik had very original ideas on the subject of architecture and thought out a palace much as a conjuror contrives a trick casket. The Shah ordered him to construct an edifice of this kind. Erik did so; and the building appears to have been so ingenious that His Majesty was able to move about in it unseen and to disappear without the possibility of the trick’s being discovered. When the Shah-in-Shah found himself the possessor of this gem, he ordered Erik’s yellow eyes to be put out. But he reflected that, even when blind, Erik would be able to build so remarkable a house for another sovereign; and also that as long as Erik was alive, some one would know the secret of the wonderful palace. Erik’s death was decided upon, together with that of all the laborers who had worked under his orders. The execution of this abominable decree devolved upon the daroga of Mazenderan. Erik had shown him some slight services and procured him many a hearty laugh. He saved Erik by providing him with the means of escape...’ ‘As for Erik, he went to Asia Minor and thence to Constantinople, where he entered the Sultan’s employment. In explanation of the services which he was able to render a monarch haunted by perpetual terrors, I need only say that it was Erik who constructed all the famous trap-doors and secret chambers and mysterious strong-boxes which were found at Yildiz-Kiosk and after the last Turkish revolution. He also invented those automata, dressed like the Sultan and resembling the Sultan in all respects, which made people believe that the Commander of the Faithful was awake at one palace, when, in reality, he was asleep elsewhere. ‘Of course, he had to leave the Sultan’s service for the same reasons that made him fly from Persian: he knew too much. Then, tired of his adventurous, formidable and monstrous life, he longed to be some one ‘like everybody else.’ And he became a contractor, like any ordinary contractor, building ordinary houses with ordinary bricks. He tendered for part of the foundations in the Opera. His estimate was accepted. When he found himself in the cellars of the enormous playhouse, his artistic, fantastic, wizard nature resumed the upper hand. Besides, was he not as ugly as ever? He dreamed of creating for his own use a dwelling unknown to the rest of the earth, where he could hide from men’s eyes for all time.’ ‘He asked only to be ‘some one,’ like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera ghost.’ |
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