Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol

by Robert Levy

  The harsh groan of metal, and a small door near the eastern pavilion shudders open a crack, a flicker of torchlight visible through the breach as Sonia emerges from the gloom. She appears focused, no longer the absinthe-addled wretch that Henry and I found earlier at the Rue Blondel but rather the survivor who watched from the cave mouth, her former self left shattered upon the rocky shore. Her eyes are dark pools, narrow and appraising beneath the cowl of a hooded cape. She smiles grimly, and gestures with the torch for me to enter.

  I follow her down into an indentation in the earth, the passage paved and stepped like a cellar. I am reminded of my house in Louveciennes and how it has no cellar, how that fact enticed me from the moment I first crossed over the threshold. Something about the way I could feel the earth directly beneath my feet made me feel as if I were a tree capable of taking root, and, despite my distaste for being tied to any one place, I had found my true home at last. As we descend into these sepulchral tunnels, however, there is no such feeling of the earth anywhere near at hand. Here, I am rootless once more.

  Past a set of heavy wooden doors, and we travel through a passageway lined with ghastly walls of bone. We have entered the catacombs, the underground network of ossuaries that spiders its way along the tunnels of this vast metropolis. The remains of centuries’ worth of Parisians, unearthed when the cemeteries were emptied and relocated to this series of subterranean vaults. Skulls stacked against the walls by the thousands, ornate patterned archways of rib and femur and breastbone and pelvis, a gothic mosaic of generations past. All the many souls of our beloved city, those who lived here and died here, who ate and drank and made love, the reviled and adored alike. In death, we are all the same.

  Sonia and I walk for what seems an eternity. And surely dawn has broken by now, the bells of Notre Dame ringing their morning Angelus. Down another series of passageways, the echo of falling water ahead as my guide steps through a circular entrance. It is like the doorway of Le Monocle, the women’s bar where June once brought me, where she passionately kissed me one autumn evening before we walked home together beneath the stars.

  The damp smell of must, and I step over the low partition into a rounded chamber as Sonia halts ahead of me, the torch flame dancing wildly in her hand. Dozens of candles flicker along the walls and floor, threads of wax dripping from atop the crowns of grinning skulls, from within their hollow eye sockets as well. It is the nightmarish scene of a black mass, a dark vision out of Dante or Goya. I tighten my cape around my shoulders, and move farther into the chamber.

  At the center of the dim space are two heavy pillars. Between them is a large cistern, from Roman times perhaps, the basin of which catches a steady beading of water that leaks from the bone-vaulted ceiling. In the shadows of the crypt’s periphery, a formation of what appear to be statues watches from beneath their own obscuring cowls, arranged about the chamber in a broad circle. Unlike the stone women from my dream, these figures are unbound and clad in moldering black robes. I look closer, and I see one of the hands is that of a skeleton, the white bones of its knuckles glinting in the uneven light. A renewed chill overtakes me, and I hold myself to keep from shivering.

  Sonia brings her torch closer to the wall, where a spindly arm emerges from the darkness to grasp it, a stunted form coalescing as if poured from the shadows themselves. It is the rawboned old woman from the dream, the one who watched from the cave alongside Sonia. She takes the torch and places it into the outstretched hand of a cloaked skeleton, before she steps into the quivering pool of light.

  “Welcome, Anaïs.” The woman lifts her hood, heavy bracelets shifting as her hair springs forth in a wild snarl of unkempt silver. Her face is sallow, skin a papery yellow vellum around a pair of eyes that bulge green and glittering through a sea of dark paint. “My name is Therese. Rest assured that, despite the surroundings, we are safe down here. Thanks be to priestesses past, who charmed the catacombs for this very purpose, so that no demon could walk their hidden paths. At least not the one who now calls himself Monsieur Guillard. Despite his great hunger, this is one moonless place he is unable to haunt, and for that we are most fortunate.”

  “What of Maxa?” I ask. “Do you know what has happened to her?”

  “She is down here,” Therese says. “With me.”

  “Thank goodness.” I exhale a heavy sigh of relief. “She is safe, then?”

  “Not exactly.” The woman nods at Sonia, who approaches one of the cloaked skeletons staged along the perimeter. Sonia lifts the hood that obscures the figure’s bowed head, and I gasp.

  It is Maxa. Her eyes shut tight, the whole of her frozen as if in the throes of some terrible pain, and I can only stare unspeaking in confusion. She is pale, hair parted doll-like and combed away from her face. To all appearances, she is only asleep and lacks any hint of deathlike pallor, though her chest fails to stir with breath. She is rendered a waxwork, as if she has become her own example of the Guignol’s ingenious stagecraft. Either that or she truly is dead, and preserved by a most gifted mortician.

  “How?” I whisper. I take hold of her hand, which in her strange stillness I am surprised to find warm, the skin of her palm supple and smooth. “Is she alive?”

  “In name only.” Therese shuffles onto the other side of Maxa’s rigid form. “She has surrendered to Guillard. Crossed the Rubicon into the realm of the phantom lover, from which there is no return. With much effort, we are able to sustain her body in its present state, but it will not last much longer. If we awaken her, she will begin to decay at once, and soon she will be no more. It would take as little as a day for her to expire. Maybe less.”

  “What can we do to help her?” I am trembling now, mortally afraid. “What can we do to prevent this fiend from claiming her once and for all?”

  “What can we do?” Sonia says beside me. “Nothing.” We stare as one at Maxa’s corpselike figure.

  “Maxa pleaded with him to spare her. He only laughed, and called her a fool for attempting to revoke her vows. We saw all this from the dream place, his nightmare realm of stone and sea.”

  “What vows?” I ask. “Maxa is neither bride nor nun. She made no covenant with him.”

  “Oh, but she did,” Therese says. “We all did. That is why we are here now. Every one of us promised ourselves to him, each in our own way.”

  She reaches over and caresses Maxa’s waxen cheek. “When she was a child, Maxa went for a walk in the mountains with a young man. He set upon her and brutally raped her, stabbed her repeatedly and left her for dead. As she lay bleeding upon the cliffs, she pleaded to God that she be spared. When she received no response, she began praying to a different being instead. Maxa promised herself to him and, in exchange, he restored her to life without injury. As with the rest of us, there was a price, that many years later he came to collect. You must have made a similar bargain yourself.”

  “Never.” I furiously shake my head in refutation. “I never gave myself to him. I would never make a slave of myself, not to any man. Let alone a creature so cruel.”

  “Not knowingly, perhaps.” Therese’s voice is gentle, almost pitying. “But the phantom lover is clever. It is when you are at your lowest point that he appears, pen in hand, with the kindly manner of a saint. Always in the darkest hour, when you are most in need of the light.”

  I think of Allendy’s office, of sitting inside the isolation accumulator. How fragile and childlike I had felt, trapped within the box’s enveloping darkness. So small again, and so fearful, and most of all so deeply alone. I recall that long-ago time when I was a little girl as well. How lost I was, and how I prayed for my father to return to me. I held so many confused and conflicted feelings inside, over his unwholesome attentions and his eventual abandonment, all of which led me to start this diary.

  The diary. I swore myself capable of becoming my own sorceress, that the words I wrote between these tarnished covers could prove powerful enough to bend my reality and reclaim my life as my own. Only what if I have alway
s been this powerful? The words from the diary, they have already proved to carry a fierce power of their own, my desires realized into the real world, that of flesh, and of blood. Did I not wish as a young woman in my diary for an all-consuming lover, a suitor conjured from the shadows of time to fill the void left in my father’s wake?

  “No. This is not our fault. None of it,” I insist. To Sonia and Therese, to Maxa’s unmoving form, to all the many dead and watchful faces encircling us. “This is not our doing! Who would punish a young child, or even a grown woman, for seeking answers or love or companionship in her time of need? Our souls might have cried out for help, yes. But opening the door to despair does not give evil our permission to walk through. Maxa did not ask to be consumed by such forces. None of us did. This cycle of madness must end, and in order for that to happen, we must fight back. And we must win.”

  “He is formed from the roiling deep,” Therese says. “That which is made of the whirl of crashing waves cannot be captured, and will always find its way back into being. He is a storm demon, fashioned from the very depths of the abyss itself. He cannot be drowned, or even burned. He can only be endured.”

  “Then we will come up with another solution.” I puff out my chest, make myself as large as I can. “There is a way to end everything, even a creature such as Guillard. Anything made can be unmade. That is what Mother Nature teaches us to be true.”

  Therese chuckles at my boldness, her beaded bracelets clacking against one another. “You do not understand,” she says. “He controls the twilight realm, the place where we saw each other upon the windswept shore. He can come for you at any time there, and do whatever is in his power to do. In his world, you are his to command. That is his home.”

  “Then we will confront him here, in Paris. The city that is our home. And we shall do it tonight.”

  I play with the strings of my cape, the satin banding my fingers. “How is it that you are safe from him?” I say. “You, Sonia, whose image lay shattered upon the shore of his domain. And you, Therese, who never appeared captive in the first place. How did you manage to secure your own safety?”

  They exchange a look of longing and anguish before Sonia bursts into tears. She hurls herself into her companion’s arms, Therese combing Sonia’s hair and rubbing her back for comfort.

  “Sacrifices were made,” Therese says quietly, her eyes unwilling to meet mine. “We purchased our freedom at the expense of others.”

  “Three girls,” Sonia says through her sobs. “Sisters, who worked with me at the Rue Blondel. We summoned the demon, and we gave them to him. He hasn’t appeared to us since.”

  “I am sorry, but I cannot do that.” I shake my head. “Neither for Maxa nor myself. I will not offer up another in my stead.”

  I wait for them to speak, but when they fail to do so I continue. “The Dark Angel, he came to me recently, at a masquerade. He must have felt welcome there, able to operate under cover of the night, his true face hidden from sight. We shall lure him back by promising him more shadows, a place of darkness where he feels most comfortable.”

  “Do you think you are the first woman to try to destroy him?” Sonia laughs bitterly, and throws her hands up in frustration. “He is not a man, but a demon.”

  “Then we shall make him otherwise. The way Hera changed Tiresias from man to woman, we shall transform Guillard from demon to man. We will seduce him, the way we have been seduced. Only we shall use the cunning words and the alluring gestures of the coquette, or the virgin, or the courtesan. Appeal to his vanity, the way you would draw forth any man, as the spider lures a fly into its web. And then, like the spider, we shall strike.”

  “And where exactly do you propose we attempt such folly?” Sonia’s eyes widen, with what I can only assume is incredulity. “Where shall we lure the beast to lull him into such submission that he would give himself over to the very women he is so fond of afflicting?”

  The crypt falls quiet, the hollow skulls vigilant and waiting. All the many faces of the departed Parisians, who watch as an audience watches, breathlessly awaiting the next twist of fate as our dark drama of violation and revenge plays out before them. It is in them that I find my answer, and smile at last.

  Before the car comes to a full stop, Maxa opens her door and steps onto the street, her feet unsteady on the rough cobblestones. I pay the fare and hurry out of the taxi to lend her my arm, and she leans hard against me as we totter our way to the stage door of the Theatre du Grand-Guignol. Already she is fading.

  She raps on the wood three times. After a brief pause she raps once again, and I am reminded of Henry’s surreptitious knock at the door of 32 Rue Blondel. All the many secret codes and signals, the mysterious pass keys that gain us entry to private places hidden behind heavy doors. Was it only last night that we had ventured out to the whorehouse in search of Sonia? My life entire is now lived in the realm of the incredible, indeed the impossible.

  A stagehand opens the door, and upon seeing my wan companion he rolls his eyes with great force. “Maxa!” he cries. “Where the hell have you been? Jack is out for blood.” He exhales smoke, his cigarette juddering at the corner of his mouth. “He said if you show your face around here again, to make certain you know that you’ve been permanently replaced by Hélène.”

  Maxa straightens up. “You find Jack,” she hisses, and I see what a struggle it is for her to marshal her strength, to project her expected air of superiority. “And you make certain that he knows it will take a far greater director to get rid of Maxa! Not to mention a better actress than Hélène to replace her.” She reaches with a shaky hand to snatch the cigarette from between the stagehand’s lips, and she points it back at him, the tip dangerously close to his face. “Now, my dear. Are you going to get out of my way, or am I going to have to put this out in your eye?”

  He flattens against the wall, hands held up in submission, and she strides past him. I follow as she staggers ahead through the theatre’s narrow backstage passageways, until we reach a cluttered dressing room. “Wait here,” Maxa says, “I’ll be back,” and I take myself inside.

  Racks of costumes fill the space. Nun’s habits and clerical vestments, corsets and pre-styled wigs, tattered burial clothing and hospital gowns and schoolgirl uniforms and far, far more. Past the racks there is a small and crowded table, the surface overrun with assorted powders and paints and brushes, bottles of cream and pots of paste. The round mirror against the naked brick wall is cracked down the middle, two small lamps trained upon its tarnished surface and casting an unearthly glow. I bend to examine my reflection, turn my face this way and that, searching out any indication of my own potential decay. How calm I appear, given the dangers at hand! By midnight, both of us may no longer be of this world.

  As I study myself, the sensation of being watched creeps over me, and my eyes flit across the glass. Cleaved in two by the violent lightning crack upon the mirror, I glimpse an image of the unimaginable standing behind me, that of the most alluring woman on earth. Still as a statue in portrait-worthy silhouette, as if captured in bold aquatint by the deft hand of Matisse, hair pinned to one side beneath a plumed hat, her lingering form rests against the doorframe as she watches me through blazing bright eyes.

  I turn and face her. Breath trapped inside my chest, my heart aflutter as I take in her wry smile, her lips painted the color of a ripe plum. With one look, she instantly possesses me once more, and it is as if she had never departed Paris in the first place. Her gaze, as ever, is ravenous.

  “June?” I manage, once I have found my voice. “Is it really you?”

  “Hello, Anaïs.” She steps into the dressing room and glances about with a languid curiosity. She parts her cape to reveal a black silk dress, a new one, the neckline low and matched by a lengthy slit that exposes her gartered and stockinged leg. The extended gazelle limb of a taxi dancer, the graceful dancer she will always be, so long as she still draws air.

  June slides aside one of the costume racks and nears w
ith the same air of voluptuous nonchalance she exhibited the very first time I laid eyes upon her, in the garden at Louveciennes. Not much more than a year ago now, but nevertheless an altogether different time, one in which I naïvely thought I understood the boundaries of the world outside my door.

  “It’s good to see you again,” she says, her eyes returning to my face.

  “I…I don’t understand,” I sputter, and it is as if I am encountering a ghost. She kisses one cheek and the other, and I cannot help but blush, the heat of desire pumping fresh blood to the surface of my skin. I had forgotten how much taller she is than me, how delicate and small she makes me feel, a hollow-boned little bird that may be snapped in two with ease. “When did you return to Paris?”

  “Early this morning. You don’t have to worry, I won’t be here long. I’m off to Rome tomorrow. I’ve been hired to dance in an Italian revue. A legitimate one, I might add.”

  “I am happy you are here. Only…. What are you doing at the Guignol?”

  “A little birdie told me you might be here,” she says, and I wonder if she has plucked the image from my mind in her own deft form of sorcery. She unties her cape and squares her shoulders, the cramped room made more so by her heavy aura of imperiousness. “So. Where is she?”

  “Where is who?”

  “This other woman Henry told me about.” She cocks her head. “The actress I hear you’ve fallen for. She must be something else if she caught your eye.”

  “I have not ‘fallen’ for anyone,” I answer meekly. “Henry was wrong to tell you that.”

  “Yeah, well, Henry’s wrong about a lot of things, isn’t he?” She pulls the chair out from the table and sits. “My feet are in so much pain,” she huffs, and begins to loosen her boot laces. “I walked across half the city today. American Express, Café Viking, the usual haunts. All in search of you. That might not mean anything to you anymore, but I wanted to make sure I saw you in the flesh.”