by Norman Lock
THE PHANTOM: I might have been content to remain as I am, where I am, if it were not for ambition, which gnaws me, and love in which I burn—skin, hair on fire, eyes scalded, a human torch not to be put out even in death. I might have been content to be master of all I survey, lord of the underworld, making a royal progress daily through the five cellars of hell, whose rooms and passages multiply in a lunatic arithmetic beyond the knowledge of their architect. There are worse than I put away, deformities greater than mine shut up in more grievous confinement than this. I tell you I would have been content—more than content: happy!—to have found myself in this meager granary provided, nevertheless, with enough to nourish dreaming. Does a rat not dream even of its sewer, and is not the sewer, being all there is, not a sufficient condition for a rat’s happiness? Or have you never given thought to a rat—you in your wider, sunnier world? The companionable rats dream as do I—of walls of brick, stone, and earth, of the black lake that laps the foundations of the Paris opera house and makes a not unmusical sound in the sluices like the flushing all at once of a thousand water closets. And do you think that rats do not apprehend music of a mineral modality, whose timbre is an oozing and whose dynamic sotto voce? I have seen them transfixed by sounds at audition’s furthermost limit, like Elijah in his cave by the voice of the Almighty. And if a rat can be so enthralled, how much, then, the man who hears for the first time an angelic voice? And if that man is I and the voice that of Christine Daaé—how can I do otherwise than burn?
4.
Charles Garnier designed the visible Opéra National de Paris. By “visible,” I mean that which can be observed either above the street or below it. The Phantom’s engagement with the complex structure is illusory. Allow me to retract: The Phantom’s design for the tortuous cellars beneath the fifteen-thousand-square-meter building is real insofar as it was conceived in the imagination of Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, and of its malevolent central figure. To say that Garnier’s subterranean construction is “more real” (or less) than Leroux’s (or the Phantom’s) is to become embroiled in a philosophical controversy for which I am not trained. (Leroux’s opera house does stand and impresses us greatly.) I am equally unwilling to conduct a stale inquiry into fiction as a valid model—or even a substitute for—the verifiable realm of fact. Suffice it to say that Garnier created his opera house in a traditional Italian style inspired by the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux, built by Victor Louis in 1780, and by the Italian and French villas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leroux’s was influenced by Garnier’s, and the Phantom’s cellars by the topology of his own imagination, his disfigurement, or both.
Two events (one geological, the other political) impeded the building’s construction: discovery of a lake far below the building site and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, with the ensuing siege and reduction of the Paris Commune. The latter not only halted construction but resulted in the Phantom’s incarceration in the fifth cellar. Time emptied the dungeons of their prisoners and rid them of the tangible apparatus of torture. (They continued in the Phantom’s mind.) Engineering raised a massive concrete well to carry the opera’s immense stage and fly tower and flooded the well to counter the pressure of the underground lake (thus, overcoming the geological impediment). The Black Lake, as it is called by Leroux, on which the opera’s stage can be said to “float,” is—for me—the novel’s principal topographical feature. Indeed, my interest in the opera house’s architecture centers not on Garnier’s grandiose achievement aboveground but on the Phantom’s cellars (or Leroux’s, if you insist on making the usual distinction between a novelist and his character. Both men having been architects of an identical space, I do not—in this case—make the distinction). In fact, my optimism concerning my relocation to the cellars lies here: If Leroux could build his underground out of nothing but words and attribute its design to his character the Phantom, I, too, can build the cellar in my own century and with my own words, out of my own nothing. And in building it, I will become—like the Phantom—a character inside it.
THE PHANTOM: Lately I feel the presence of an interloper. At first I believed it was the Persian, who lurks in the opera’s dim corners to spy on me. Or Christine’s lover, Raoul, or his brother, Philippe, the comte de Chagny. Or the secret policeman—or someone employed by the opera’s managers after I had purloined their wine and left them my ultimatum regarding Christine and the fate of La Carlotta, should she fail to yield to her young rival the role of Margarita. If my threats are not taken seriously, let the catastrophe be on their heads! How can they fail to prefer Christine, whose reach, tone, clarity, and declamatory power are superior to Carlotta’s? Who better than I can judge her absolute authority of voice? Not these vermin! Christine is an object of constant obsession. The desideratum. My devotion to her voice, her career, and to her sweet self is single-minded. And yet … something there is that gets into my mind of late—interfering and disturbing. The voice of a man—not sweet, not melodious, not even French—whose quality is a querulousness I consider inane. What is his tribulation against my own? I feel him hunting the margins of my story, probing for a way inside.
5.
From his apartments in the fifth cellar, the Phantom can enter, by means of subterranean ways and secret passages, rooms in the opera house itself. He comes and goes, freely and undetected, through panels cunningly concealed in the wainscoting, trapdoors, and the full-length mirrors in the performers’ dressing rooms. He persuades Christine Daaé to follow him below by passing from her room’s mirror to one of the two mirrors in his. (I am inclined toward Professor Lishko-vitz’s view that the passage is psychical and that the mirror in which the Phantom gazes—and draws Christine to himself by his gaze—will determine whether he appears to her as a sentimental lover enamored of her voice or as a homicidal maniac incited by desire.)
Yesterday, my therapist wondered—provocatively—if I could be content, hiding within an “edifice of prose,” were I no longer able to write and, should I be able, to what degree my happiness depends on publishing the results. I must admit that my happiness is dependent on both conditions being met and am optimistic that a way will be found for me to do both, as a fiction within a fiction. One can write anywhere! Publishing is, of course, problematic. Within all but the most scrupulously objective narratives, however, there is a general telepathy; my hope is that I can use it to “send” my work out into the world. I will look to the Phantom for whatever technical facilities may be required. He will not deny me what services he is, by nature, equipped to provide!
A fiction within a fiction? Surely I can be nothing else, once ensconced inside the Phantom’s story! Unless being conscious of my self (of my being Norman Lock) is sufficient to satisfy actuality’s minimum requirement; in which case, I will be an actual presence inside Leroux’s own edifice of prose. (In what way and to what degree I may alter Leroux’s original structure by the “spaciousness” of an existence no matter how seemingly cramped, I leave to poststructuralists.) I assume—I can do nothing else!—that I will receive by the grace and power of the imagination (the Phantom’s or those who will subsequently encounter me in reading or by other mechanical means) raiment—that is to say, flesh or flesh’s simulacrum. I shall not be a ghost. Whether I will, in time, be bewitched by Christine (if we do indeed come to inhabit the same story), whether or not I will, like Erik, love her and, unlike him, consummate that love—all this remains to be seen. I do believe that the present inadequacies of my personality will vanish when I have disappeared inside The Phantom of the Opera.
THE PHANTOM: Ambition, too, goads me. The gala when Christine, as Margarita, swept La Carlotta into the dustbin, in the prison scene and final trio of Faust—that night Gounod conducted his “Funeral March of a Marionette,” Reyer his overture to Siguar, Massenet a Hungarian march, Guiraud his Carnaval, Saint-Saëns the Danse Macabre and a “Reverie orientale.” I ought to have been among them, smirking at the mob as it surged forward on the ballet foye
r! If I were not …unprepossessing. Ha! I exceed all definitions of ugliness! Quasimodo’s is nothing next to mine. Esmeralda would not have given me water. I am grotesque like the opera gargoyles in whose company I indulge in nocturnal rages at the City of Light. I am more animal than man, more mineral than animal—scoria, slag of the Beast’s foundry, lava of Vesuvius, cinder of a burnt offering. To see me is to be turned to salt, to stone; is to gain admission in an instant to Charenton Asylum; is to be struck deaf, dumb, and blind. God knows I am repulsive! But if I were not, my genius would be proclaimed, my music famous, my face adored. I would be illustrious, and Christine would not have swooned at the sight of me.
6.
To enter Leroux’s edifice, I must first become prose. Only as words can matter and its energy exist among other words. I sometimes think that when the last word is spoken or set down—at the moment utterance ceases—all that is will vanish, will become again the aboriginal thought. The film will run in reverse through recorded and unrecorded time all the way back to Nothing. (I believe that a case can be made for everything that is as being only words—knowable by words, invoked by words, and created by them. But I will not make it here.) And when I have entered The Phantom of the Opera, will I—like Wells’s Martian machines—perish by a germ endemic to melodrama, or will I—a foreign body—carry off the Phantom?
The fifth cellar incorporates the principal features of an eighteenth-century pleasure park. There are a room of mirrors, a chamber of horrors, a maze, and boats moving silently through a flooded grotto. None was in Garnier’s original plan or in Leroux’s projection of it onto the fictional space of The Phantom of the Opera. These are elaborations made by the Phantom, who as a child was captivated by holiday visits to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and the Prater in Vienna. (Theories of the novel aside, you must grant me that a character will sometimes take on a life of its own, seemingly independent of its author’s conception. What else can we mean when, in the presence of remarkable fiction, we say that a character lives and continues to do so after we have closed the book on its recounted history? And to live is to change, at least subtly, the surrounding world.) Reminded of my own novel The Long Rowing unto Morning, I thought that, in the submerged channels spreading like black lace beneath the opera house, I might insert myself—as prose—into Leroux’s novel and the Phantom’s actualization of it. I have already constructed—in words—an eminently stable and watertight boat and demonstrated—in words—that I know how to set it going. I will, then, row my way inside the edifice! It requires only a single sentence, ostensibly written by Leroux (and rendered into English)—perhaps in an early draft of his novel, suppressed or forgotten until now: The oar blades dipped and rose, scattering garnets and rubies in profusion in the fitful light of flambeaux, which, at regular intervals, relieved the grotto’s otherwise-absolute dark, as M. Lock entered the Black Lake.
THE PHANTOM: The intuition that a person extraneous, adventitious, alien to my world has been probing the margin for a way inside is now a certainty. He has come by boat: I have heard the oarlocks creak in the brick vaults and the rats’ alarms. I am used to intruders and know how to scare them off. Those that won’t scare, I murder. As architect of the mise-en-scène, the advantage is always mine. But against this infiltrator, I have none; he knows what I know—every secret passage, trapdoor, and sluice. If all that I know can be told in words, he has imagined them. If every brick is a word and every drape in whose folds I can hide is, too, those words are also his. I am bound to him and he to me by a paradigm established elsewhere. Call it my sentence. My only hope to escape it is to act arbitrarily. Only in the principle by which rooms and corridors propagate and mirrors unfold unplotted spaces can I be free of an invisible dependency. The Persian, Raoul, Philippe, the secret policeman, the opera’s managers and minions—they want to put an end to my incursions into the upper world, from which I am banished. They want to be rid of me as you would a rat. I understand them—their repugnance. But this other who inserts himself into my realm—what can he want? Certainly he does not mean to befriend me, obtain for me justice, or restore me to the podiums of the great orchestras of Europe. He can have come only to harm me, kill me, expel me from the only place in which I exist: this story, these words of Gaston Leroux’s, surrounding and defining me, which I enlarge according to my capacity and will. Do not ask how I know! I do as the sluice does the pressure of water or the lightning rod the electric current’s heat. I know it the way an actor would if something not written were introduced into the play. My antagonist is rowing upon the Black Lake. I might release the pent water that acts as counterpressure to the lake on which the stage floats; it would be a second Deluge. Would he drown in his boat, or has he foreseen my hands on the massive valves? I ought to put on my cloak and hurry into the passages to seek in the opera’s foundations that part built according to an irrational design. If I could chance upon a moment of expansion when time stretches like an elastic, the cramped view enlarges to a panorama, the space between atoms yawns—if I could only! But I am weary suddenly of the game in which I have been made to play. Leroux! It would have been better had I been left ignorant of my author; better yet if I had never been. I wish you had been run down by a carriage, carried off by fever, or had written instead about the man in the moon! I feel the other’s presence like a microbe and am made sick to death! I will not join the rats tumbling pell-mell over the Turkish carpet. I will play Bach—Passacaglia and Fugue—and wait.
7.
I tie the boat to a heavy ring and climb stone stairs slippery with ooze. Light from a pair of smoking torches trembles on the black water. The air is foul. A rat climbs over another, then falls into the sluice. On the other side of the iron door, the Phantom plays Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue. The playing is manic, portentous, doom-cadenced; and I am aware suddenly of what I risk by my intercalation—the danger in hoping to lose myself in another’s story. But my abnegation has been thorough; already I have acquired something of a character’s insubstantiality. The Phantom has his cloak, his mask, and his scars with which to imprint another’s memory, while my face in its bland ordinariness has nothing to commend it. I had intended to keep out of his way, haunting the opera house’s labyrinthine passages, listening to music and silence. But the story’s magnetism drew me at once to its center. The boat fetched up at the Phantom’s door.
Anna Karenina, Marguerite Gautier, Lear, Kurtz—what was death for them? Is there pain in the words of pain’s depiction? Is death no more than an end to words? If I should, while writing this sentence, stop, never to begin again, is that death? When the Phantom kills me (he must, for there is room only for a single tragic destiny in Leroux’s conception), will I become the word corpse, left to lie where it fell upon the page like cigar ash, which the reader in his headlong flight will forget? Or will I simply enter the white space where writing does not exist? And is this not what I wanted?
THE PHANTOM: By a moment’s inattention, I may unbind myself from the one on the other side of the door, from Leroux’s nightmare, from the rack of my special destiny. It needs only art—a momentary bending of its rigor. If in the twentieth and final variation I transpose certain of the notes or depart briefly the key signature or linger overlong on the pedal, it will be enough, perhaps, to disenthrall me. By error I may escape my assassin and the mob whose own destiny it is to harry me tonight into the Seine! I may escape, as well, Christine, who is bound to the bed of my desire by Leroux’s rope and whose mouth is muted with his handkerchief. I will rise from the organ, which will have ceased intoning another’s music, put on my cloak and hat, and walk out of the opera house into a soft Parisian night—handsome and free of the thralldom of art. And should a reader turn anew to Leroux’s story, it will not be I buried beneath the opera house, but another delivered up according to his sentence.
Tango in Amsterdam
For Marco & Marian
It is raining. I am tempted to elaborate, to compose a striking literary trope. So that y
ou will know—know with whom you are dealing. What quality of author. But I like this, a plain statement such as anyone might make and does make, standing in the doorway of his house and, perhaps, putting his hand outside to confirm the truth of his eyes: It is raining. In Holland—a land famous for dampness as much as for tulips, which are at the moment bending, if not actually bent, beneath it. The Dutch rain. Which is falling, falling on the blades of charming windmills, on the Zuiderzee, and on B. Street, too, where Karin is at this moment worrying about Peter. Where is Peter, the wandering husband, tennis player, and actor in minor roles in the Dutch film industry?
He is in Cannes, walking the streets beneath the fine, high, blue Mediterranean sky. This is the Côte d’Azur after all! Peter is walking with the director of Tango in Amsterdam, an exciting new film; and they are wondering, each to himself, how they will act if it should receive this year’s Palme d’Or. Peter hopes he will be composed. He may, he thinks, appear to be even a little weary of celebrity, although—to tell the truth—Peter’s role in Tango is small. He plays a man in a bar who puts his hand on the breasts of a beautiful woman of the demimonde. One breast—but it is a firm and shapely one. Peter was secretly thrilled to be touching it, although he could not, of course, show it. Instead, he pretended to be weary of the world and its dissipations. A jaded and phlegmatic Dutchman. That is how I shall behave when we are awarded the Palme d’Or, he thinks to himself. I shall remember how it was I pretended to feel when I touched Margot’s breast.