Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  By now Nina’s breathlessness came as much from excitement as from oxygen deprivation. She felt she understood something; she’d arrived at a realization. So what if she’d made it up on the spot to prevent Leo from flipping out and to quiet her own anxieties? Sometimes extreme situations inspired revelations. The yogis who lay on burning coals might want to experiment with a brisk little trot down these stairs.

  And now Nina recalled another version of the story, the most common, the most human: Orpheus begins to worry that Eurydice might no longer be behind him, and he turns instinctively, helplessly…. Poor Eurydice! Imagine how she must have felt, condemned to eternity in hell because the guy got nervous. This was the version that Nina couldn’t mention to Leo, lest he imagine she was commenting on their present situation.

  “Leo, what do you think?” Nina said.

  “I think we’re saved,” said Leo.

  They had reached the bottom of the stairs. They stood in a dimly lit passage, no less narrow and close than the stairwell, but at least horizontal.

  Leo bent over and clutched his knees, taking deep hungry breaths, then straightened his back and shook his head and held out his arms to Nina.

  “What do I think?” he said. “I think you’re an angel. I was having a pretty tough time on those steps. I don’t know…Dizzy, oxygen deprived, I guess. And it was such a help for me to hear you burbling on about…what was it, Nina? Orpheus and Eurydice?”

  “Yeah,” said Nina.

  Leo kissed her on the mouth, and they embraced right there in the middle of the corridor leading to the Catacombs. So then, it was settled: Sex was stronger than death.

  “What’s the matter?” Nina said.

  Leo said, “Something dripped on my head.”

  “Ugh. Let’s keep walking,” said Nina.

  They set off through the gloomy tunnel lit by dangling bulbs that, separated by long intervals, cast down small tarnished coins of light. As the passageway curved, Nina and Leo groped through the blackness until they rounded a corner and reached the next pale circle.

  “We should have brought a goddamn flashlight,” said Leo.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Nina said.

  “Oh, isn’t it?” said Leo.

  Under their feet, wet gravel crunched with a sound like rattling bones.

  “I stepped in a puddle,” Leo said. “Jesus, this is hellish.”

  Nina’s eyes had given up trying to distinguish darkness from near darkness and had begun to suggest an array of alarming alternatives: shadowy afterimages and flashes of phosphorescence.

  “Leo,” she called. “Where are you?”

  O Lord, she prayed, don’t let it be true that Leo was insane and that this whole trip was a plot he’d hatched that day in his office, a scheme to drive her crazy, to make her think they’d broken up and then find her and fuck her and ditch her in the Catacombs under Paris. That did seem highly unlikely. What would the purpose be? Only Nina would dream up a paranoid melodrama like that. She was the insane one. And what if Leo did run off and leave her down here now? She would go the end of the tunnel and get a cab and somehow find her way back to the hotel.

  Why was she still thinking like this? She’d thought she’d successfully navigated those treacherous straits of doubt in which every word of Leo’s cried out for close interpretation. The visible universe no longer had to be dissected into its component parts in order for Nina to distinguish what was real from what was Leo. Now that they were together, their reality was the same. Or was it?

  “Where do you think I am, Nina?” Hearing Leo’s voice, Nina felt something like the relief she’d seen on the faces of mothers reunited with toddlers who’d wandered off in the supermarket. “We’re practically falling all over each other. What is wrong with you, Nina? You sound completely hysterical.”

  At least Leo was no longer panicking, as he’d been on the stairs, but only cranky and skittish in a way that required Nina’s unceasing vigilance.

  Had they walked a half mile? A mile? It seemed considerably longer, perhaps because of how their spirits sank every time they left a ring of light and headed into the darkness and into the silence broken only by the osteoid crunch underfoot. They should have learned their lesson from the stairs: Everything has an end. But the fact that they’d stopped descending didn’t prove that they would ever stop going forward. There had to be a finite depth to which you could bore down into the earth. But how could one know that this tunnel wouldn’t continue forever?

  Finally they reached an archway. Over the door a sign said: STOP! YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD!

  “Well,” said Leo. “I’d say their empire extends all the way back to the top of those fucking stairs.”

  They’d been traveling for ages—and they’d only reached the border of the empire. They passed a few historical exhibits, a tiny city carved from stone.

  “It’s so beautiful and weird. Like a dollhouse,” said Nina. “Who built it?”

  “Some quarry worker,” Leo said. “Then the poor guy got the bright idea of building steps so that people could come down here and pay a few centimes to see his little project. And guess what? He got flattened by a cave-in. Shouldn’t that have sent a message? Well, I guess it did—that there was money to be made. What was one more dead body? They dug the guy out and promptly raised the price of admission.”

  Now the walls on both sides were interrupted by niches, each containing thousands of bones, neatly stacked or arranged in decorative bands of thick femurs and delicate tibias. There were crosses made of skulls and columns of skulls winged with curving ribs against a playfully rococo background of pelvic arches. There were street signs on the wall: QUARTIER DES INNOCENTS, RUE DE MONROUGE. Leo told Nina that they referred to the original graveyards from which the masses of dead had come.

  “No Jewish bones here,” said Leo. “You can bet on that.”

  The bones encouraged Leo. They provided company of a sort, and suggested that he and Nina might be making progress. And wasn’t there something that Nina should be learning from these bones, perhaps some Buddhist precept about how our individual lives finally amount to no more than an anthill of calcium dust? The sheer numbers of skeletons should free her from the prison of self. But she had already escaped that prison. Her new jailer was Leo, and she kissed the hand that had locked her up and thrown away the key.

  As they passed between the walls of bones, the corridor took a series of turns that let them glimpse other sightseers, several bends farther on: the first indication since they’d started that they weren’t entirely alone. How happy Leo and Nina were now to see the very same tourists they’d scorned in the world of the living—and to hear them having such a rollicking good time. The crowlike caws of children echoed through the tunnel. Where had these people come from? Nina turned and saw the two Syracuse students rapidly gaining on them. She and Leo squeezed to one side to let the boys pass by.

  “This is sick,” said one of them.

  “My buddy here wants out,” said the other.

  Now they were on the rue Danton.

  “Danton again?” said Leo. “That fanatical fucker is following us this whole trip. These must be the dead from the Revolution. Do you think the dead aristocrats are stacked up with the dead workers and the dead middle class? I’d say not. If I know the French, they’ve got it all neatly divided.”

  “Look! That corridor’s blocked off,” Nina said. “I wonder what’s down there.”

  “Hiding places,” said Leo. “How about it, Nina? We could find our little niche and never go back to New York. Imagine fucking in the Catacombs! Talk about sex and death!”

  The acoustics gave Leo’s voice a ringing metallic overtone. “Sometimes when Resistance people got fingered by the Gestapo and couldn’t get out of Paris, the Maquis would stash them down here, often for months at a time. I read a memoir by a guy who hid out in a passageway surrounded by mounds of skulls. He wrote that at first the skulls were just skulls, but soon they develope
d personalities. Some were hard to get to know. Some were friendly, some weren’t. And when his Resistance girlfriend came to sleep with him on his cot, some of the skulls would get jealous and throw themselves off the walls.”

  They were standing too far from a lightbulb for Nina to see Leo’s face, but she could tell from his dreamy tone that he was putting himself in the scene. He was the anti-Nazi hero whose only hope of survival required a solitary indefinite stay in the empire of death. In Leo’s fantasy, he was Yves Montand making love to Simone Signoret surrounded by the suicidal crashing of jealous brittle skulls. Who was the woman Leo imagined braving Nazis and tunnels for him? And who was the Leo he pictured down here, the unclaustrophobic courageous Leo, living in a cul-de-sac, making friends with skulls? Certainly not the Leo who barely made it down the stairs and still seemed very unsteady as they made their way through the tunnel.

  The gap between Leo’s fantasies and the actual Leo moved Nina so powerfully that she knew she would do anything—anything at all—to protect him, to keep him from having to face the abyss between his lofty ideal of himself and the Leo she knew and loved. She would go the ends of the earth for this man, risk her life to be with him, just like the Resistance heroine, weak and thin from wartime shortages, threading her way through this ghoulish maze to spend one night with her lover. And in fact she quite liked the idea of never returning home and having Leo for all eternity in their underground love nest.

  They would never mention Leo’s episode on the stairs. Hush now, don’t explain. It was better that way. The incident would be forgotten, Leo’s dignity left intact. Maybe noncommunication was a synonym for good manners. Maybe Leo was right. Analysis—in fact, any mention of what transpired between them—was not merely the death of passion but a shameful waste of time. Instead of investigating the causes and symptoms of Leo’s claustrophobia, instead of going on about whether Leo had meant to ditch her in Paris, she’d had a series of revelations about Orpheus and Eurydice, though already she could hardly recall what had seemed so revelatory. A fat drop of cold liquid hit her forehead. Tears of insult sprang to her eyes.

  “What’s this shit dripping down on us?” she said.

  “Don’t ask,” Leo warned her.

  Leo stopped in front of one of the wall plaques that appeared at intervals, brass squares engraved with quotations on the subject of death. Unnecessarily, Leo translated the French for Nina, “‘Remember every morning that you may be dead by evening. Remember every evening that you may be dead by morning.’

  “Terrific,” said Leo. “Just what I needed to hear.” He gripped Nina’s upper arm.

  “I’m getting through this,” Leo said. “But I’m not enjoying it, Nina.”

  THE STAIRS THAT RESTORED them to the living (not that the living paid them any more notice than the dead) were also long and steep but, despite what Nina anticipated, less arduous and exhausting. Perhaps the promise of daylight made the climb seem easier, combined with the added assurance that this nightmare would soon end. On the way up, they paused prudently to rest and catch their breath. And in a short time, they popped out onto the noisy street and were blithely dodging the taxis that screeched and careened around the circle.

  Had Leo and Nina been changed by their underground ordeal? Certainly the world had. How fragrant the smell of diesel seemed now, how lively and skilled the drivers, how graceful the veiled Muslim girls who brushed past them, shouting and giggling. This time, Orpheus had succeeded and left the underworld so far behind that he and Eurydice could already laugh at their recent perils.

  Apparently, Nina and Leo had had a great time down in the Catacombs!

  “Pretty amazing,” said Leo.

  “Amazing,” Nina agreed. How instantly the thrill of escape transforms the memory of imprisonment.

  Leo said, “Wait till I encourage droves of Allo! readers to have massive coronaries humping up and down those stairs. Of course, I’ll say it’s only for travelers in tip-top physical shape. But show me one flabby American who doesn’t think he’s in tip-top condition.”

  Often, when Leo wrote for Allo!, he amused himself with a private game: At least once per article, he’d recommend some crummy dive or smoke-clogged brasserie, some roach-infested truck stop with abysmal food, some seedy Montmartre strip joint, places Allo! readers would automatically hate unless they chose to imagine they were slumming, seeing the insider’s Paris. Maybe no one actually followed Leo’s and Nina’s tips; surprisingly, no one ever wrote to complain or cancel a subscription. Demographic studies showed that the typical Allo! subscriber was married and retired with a median pension income of seventy thousand a year.

  Nina said, “Are you sure you want to do that? What if someone died—and sued you? Us.”

  Leo let that us go by. “I’ll find out the exact number of steps,” he said. “And put that in the article. That way, I will have covered my ass. They can’t say they weren’t warned.”

  Leo often claimed that he was doing his readers a favor by keeping them on their toes, sending them to some bistro where penniless students ate wedges of packaged cheese and sandy salads with charred croutons and chunks of cold salt pork. He was doing his public a service by making them decide, at least once per trip, what they really liked or hated. Had he been doing Nina a similar favor by making her think she was traveling alone and staying in a lovely hôtel de charme? Was it kindness or cruelty? Love made it so hard to tell. Had it all been a test, and had Nina passed or failed? What was in it for Leo? Another successful experiment in female-mind control?

  They were passing through the neighborhood not far from the Hotel Danton. Perhaps that was why Nina found herself stuck in this grating repetitive groove; perhaps these minor chords of paranoia and self-pity still lingered in the air.

  “Where to?” Nina piped up.

  “Père Lachaise,” said Leo. “Let’s walk awhile, have an early lunch and go the rest of the way by metro. Maybe stop at the Cluny to try and find some especially gorgeous and grisly depiction of the Grim Reaper, hard at work in the fields.”

  Nina was silent a moment, then said, “Leo, where is Simone de Beauvoir buried?”

  “Oh, isn’t that wild?” said Leo. “We talked about that, didn’t we? Nutty women from all over the planet leaving flowers and letters on her grave, those poor crazy girls deceiving themselves with that mother-of-us-all bullshit. None of them seem to have heard what everyone’s known for years: All the time de Beauvoir was writing about how women should call the shots, she was being Sartre’s handmaid and pimp, editing his manuscripts, sending him her cutest girl students—not even getting laid! To say nothing of the charge that de Beauvoir collaborated during the Occupation. I’m pretty sure she and Sartre are buried in Montparnasse. Which we’re actually passing near. But we’d better not stop. How many graveyards can I put in this piece? I’d hate to be late for lunch.”

  “Can’t we go there?” Nina asked. “As long as it’s on the way? I’ve been thinking about de Beauvoir’s grave. Ever since you told me, Leo. Before you got here, I was thinking about it, Leo. I’d really like to see it, Leo. It would only take a minute, and then we could be on our way.” Saying Leo’s name so much had not been a good idea. It had made Nina seem like an imploring whiny child. In response, Leo sounded like a tolerant parent at the limits of his patience.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Leo. “You want to leave a note on the grave. ‘Please Simone, don’t let Leo notice that my historic hotels article for Allo! is already two weeks late.’”

  “The piece is in!” cried Nina, wounded. Didn’t he know? Actually, Leo never said if he liked her writing or not, but he printed it unedited, so she’d always assumed…. “I handed it in the week before I left.”

  The way Leo changed the subject was truly sleight of hand. You could easily miss the moment at which the conversation veered past you, and it took great stamina to try and change it back.

  “Who else is buried in Montparnasse?” persisted Nina.

  Leo said, �
��I don’t get it, Nina. Since when are you such a de Beauvoir fan? I thought you were a sensible person.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I mean I am.” Years ago she’d read The Second Sex and found it passionate but boring. She knew the less attractive facts of de Beauvoir’s life but was still moved by the idea of her—a serious intellectual who wrote books and had love affairs with writers, a woman who made mistakes and cheated and was cheated on, but still kept loving, kept working, kept going…. Yesterday she’d felt guilty for reducing this brilliant writer to yet another bleeding female heart. But yesterday she’d had the chance to visit her grave—and it had simply slipped her mind. So why was Nina digging in her heels and insisting on doing what hadn’t seemed urgent enough to do on her own?

  Maybe the reason she wanted to go was that she had thought of it yesterday. The impulse was like a sudden desire to revisit a childhood home, to forge or discover a link between the present and the long-lost self, or in any case her recently discarded pre-Leo-in-Paris self. But what did she want from that paralyzed drip, unable to get out of bed, seeing Paris and Rodin’s sculpture as a clutch of demeaning private communiqués about her failed romance with Leo?

  Perhaps what Nina wanted from that earlier self was its two-week head start, getting over Leo. But why was Nina still thinking like a woman whose boyfriend had left her or was about to leave her when new evidence suggested that Leo wasn’t planning to leave her—at least not in the near future.

  “Maybe we could go to Montparnasse and skip Père Lachaise,” Nina said. “How many graveyards do you need to put in ‘Paris Death Trip’?”

  Surely, Leo must have realized by now that this article would never be written unless he had some subconscious desire to permanently alienate his faithful Allo! readers. To kiss Allo! good-bye, so to speak.

  “What’s so funny?” said Leo. “What are you smiling at, Nina?”