GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (23 page)

Louis equips himself to negotiate the
chasms. He hammers a saucepan into a crude helmet to protect
himself against falling rubble. He wires a flashlight to his helmet
in rough imitation of a miner’s headgear. He carries a coil of rope
on one shoulder and Max’s pickaxe over the other. But the chasms
are usually unbridgeable even for Louis. Like the others he has to
backtrack for hours past hundreds of already explored rooms. They
never succeed in circumnavigating the zones of destruction.

Often sudden fatigue hits them. They’re
totally drained of energy and collapse into a squat or a sprawl and
wonder if they haven’t been savaged again, if the sandstone block
hasn’t clobbered them into another wasted fifteen years. But they
have no mirror here to check and they want none.

The third day, they stagger back to their
rooms, too exhausted to wash off the mask of filth and blood.
Anyhow it conceals the age of their faces. They collapse on their
beds and dream that they are still below, blundering and stumbling
forward in an endless unlighted corridor.

Before they return to the depths they spend
a few hours slouched in their armchairs staring at the goal of all
those efforts and observe the garrulous repetition of seasons on
the other side of the glass.

Helen and Margaret go into the depths less
and less often.

Max gives up on the idea that they’ll ever
be able to find a tunnel. His palms are itching to dig one as fast
as possible, anywhere, any old wall. More of the same. Louis and
Seymour make sure he doesn’t go down into the depths with a pickaxe
or a sledgehammer. They try to reason with him. They remind him of
what had happened decades ago when he’d already assaulted any old
wall, the place it had landed him in. They try to laugh at the
image of Max with his head through the wall and protruding into the
toilets. It used to be good for a laugh. But they can’t manage even
a smile now.

Helen and Margaret stop going into the
depths altogether. Exploration is an all-male enterprise now. When
the men come back the women always tell them that, with the usual
exception, none of the functionaries had appeared. They haven’t
seen Sadie or Turnkey for years it must be. They don’t even mention
Advocate. When they think of him at all they’re sure he’s a
myth.

Once, Seymour discovers a wall covered with
white fuzz. He takes it for lichen or albino moss. He’s elated at
encountering life at last, even a primitive form of life. He
carefully notes the spot. The next time down, Louis tastes it and
says it’s saltpeter. That’s not organic. That’s mineral like the
walls it crystallizes on. Seymour dismisses the idea of making
gunpowder to blow their way out. You need sulfur and charcoal as
well as saltpeter to make gunpowder. Even so, he’s careful not to
talk to Max about it and give him ideas.

Once, Louis sees a pinpoint of light a mile
or so off at the end of a dark corridor. He imagines that somehow
it’s Paris daylight. He runs toward it. It turns out to be Max with
his flashlight who’s running toward Louis’ flashlight that he’d
taken for, somehow, Paris daylight. They pass by, panting, without
exchanging a word.

In the faint circle of light begrudged by
their flashlight they see that their predecessors have been here
and have left their marks with the number of their passages
(discouragingly high) on all the corners they themselves encounter.
They add their own mark. Corner after corner is covered with
Helen’s H, Louis’ linked circles, Seymour’s childish face, Max’s
doughnut and Margaret’s heart, and in them the number of times
they’ve gone past. Conscientiously, they efface the number of their
previous passage and inscribe the number of their latest passage,
at first single digits.

The leaves outside had been falling when
Louis discovered the way down.

The last of them fall.

They open more doors, knock on more walls,
all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs,
double digits now.

The trees in the window are green.

They explore more corridors, negotiate more
ruined staircases, knock on more walls.

Snow fills the window like static on a TV
screen.

Bastille Day rockets decorate the night
sky.

The trees rust.

They open more doors, knock on more walls,
all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs,
triple digits now.

Christmas tinsel fills the shop windows.

Forsythia yellow announces spring.

The trees are green.

Candelabras of chestnut blossoms light up
May.

Knock knock.

Knock knock knock.

Knock knock knock knock.

Chapter 25

Out Of The Depths

In constant terror of another sandstone
clobbering, Margaret sees herself tottering out of it, white and
brittle as chalk. It would be shared suffering of course but much
worse for her than for the others, she judges. With the fragile
remnants of her beauty she has so much more to lose than they
have.

She weeps uncontrollably. That too frightens
her. Wouldn’t the loss of all those tears, torrents of them, leave
her body a shriveled husk? Wouldn’t the constant mask of grief
leave indelible lines and wrinkles on her face? She rubs rotten
banana on her face and tries to stop the tears. She chokes over the
attempt and goes on weeping.

By now Margaret has abandoned all hope of a
collective way out via a tunnel. There’s a possible private way out
for her if she dares but she doesn’t dare. Yielding to that long
white hand might result in instant brimstone and annihilation.

She tries to hold on to the hope that maybe
resisting temptation is a possible way out, each “no” to the
Prefect clicking up good points for her. Maybe one night, saying
“no” again she’ll suddenly be crowned for virtue and find herself
out there in sunshine. But the hope dwindles every day.

One day, seated alongside the others,
staring out at her exclusive vision of 1937 Paris, Margaret has
another spiritual illumination as she sees cowled black nuns
herding deformed loping children in institutional gray along the
quay. She sobs with sudden pity for the small monsters, perhaps the
first tears she’s ever shed for others here or back then.

Realizing that, she’s pulled out of the tar
pit of depression. She sees herself again as selfless Sister
Margaret out there, confined in black and dedicating herself to the
deformed children. She’s so badly needed out there.

She sees the deprived faces of her
fellow-sufferers on both sides of her armchair, staring out at
longed-for scenes invisible to her eyes and feels pity for them
too. She realizes her unforgivable selfishness before, having
restricted her plea for transfer to herself alone. They need her
badly too.

Remembering the cruelty of her last meeting
with Jean Hussier, Margaret sees herself accepting the ring, not as
parting two-carat gift but as wedding ring and so changing the
course of things, saving him from suicide.

But to help the little monsters, her fellow
prisoners and her long-ago sweetheart she would have to say yes to
the Prefect, have to sin in order to save.

Sin? Wouldn’t saying yes to the Prefect be
an act of piety, of supreme sacrifice of self, rather than an act
of prostitution? Where was the sin of saying yes to the corpse-like
Prefect? How could there be sin where, predictably, there could be
no pleasure, only horror?

But isn’t it possible that what she takes
for spiritual illumination is actually another of the guises of
temptation? Self-sacrifice a trap tricked out as altruism? For even
cowled, she’d have precious sunshine on her face and enjoy colors.
Or as Jean Hussier’s wife how could she abstain from champagne and
wild but legitimate loving?

If only God would give her a sign.

Margaret quits the window. Out in the
corridor she sinks to her knees and begs God to give her a sign.
The dusty silence goes on.

She fatigues her voice and knees in
countless corridors as the days and seasons revolve on the good
side of the window. Sometimes she imagines her words disintegrating
against that shatterproof, prayer-proof window or dying out in the
endless windings of corridors, perhaps ending as a file in some
obscure room. The Prefecture isn’t an appropriate place for prayer.
The appropriate place is, of course, a church. But churches are
outside and her prayer is basically to be outside in the first
place.

Margaret weeps at the absence of a church here until
Helen tells her that a place of prayer doesn’t have to be as
grandiose as a cathedral. There are chapels. A chapel is room-size.
Margaret asks Helen and the others to tell her if they find a
chapel. They never do. Margaret never does.

But one day as she rises from kneeling
prayer in an unconsecrated place, the drab corridor vanishes and
she finds herself in a familiar sunny street. She has a
split-second recollection that exit or transfer might happen at any
time, no warning, and now without warning it’s happened, transfer,
transfer, to offer loving care to the small monsters, to say yes to
Jean Hussier, Oh Lord, blessed be Thy Name.

Then her posthumous future is blotted out.
Sunshine and color cease being miraculous. No nun after all, she
hurries down the
Rue de l’Assumption
, then turns into the
Rue du Docteur Blanche
, hurrying past
l’Assiette Bleue
, the corner four-star restaurant where he takes
her so often, and turns into the tiny
Rue Mallet Stevens
. She approaches the elegant private
two-story dwelling with its quietly superior flowerbeds and
wrought-iron railing. She sees Jean’s bedroom curtains, open now
but sure to be drawn later.

Pushing the gate open she pictures the vast drawing
room with precious oriental rugs and hundreds of leather-bound
classics behind locked glass and the grand piano and a closed score
on it which is always the same, something by somebody called
Domenico Scarlatti. He’ll kiss her in a distinguished respectful
way on her cheeks and just brushing her lips. She knows there’ll
be, first, something serious and a little boring, her French
lesson. But even in something awfully impersonal like verb
conjugations he makes it elegantly personal. He always chooses
adorer
as the model regular verb (“perhaps a little
irregular in our case,” he often says with that impassive dryness,
so she knows he must be making a joke). The Present is: “I adore
you” and that’s certain, he says and the reflexive form, “We adore
each other.” “Less certain,” he says, “but I like to believe it.”
The Past is “I adored you” but it’s sad to make it something past,
he says and adds things to it like “I adored you as soon as I saw
you.” Like what he adds to the Future, “I shall adore you forever,”
and makes her say it to him over and over.

After the lesson they’ll sip champagne and
then he’ll put Ravel’s
Bolero
on the gramophone and she’ll dance in increasing nudity to
it for him and then the tremendous climax to the bolero and then
nothing from the gramophone except the hiss of the needle until
much later when he’ll put on something nice and calm, Debussy, he
says,
The
Afternoon of a Faun
, and
he’ll return to her.

Then the table set for the two of them involving
superior things like candle flames and caviar and a certain chilled
white wine, much less blatant than champagne, he says. She loves to
hear him say things like that.

And there’s always a little
precious-looking package for her, usually things for her graceful
neck and perfect earlobes. And once, she remembers, she broke down
and wept (she’d drunk almost a whole bottle of
Meursant
1929) and said she didn’t want that, it
was too much like payment, she wasn’t that kind of girl, but the
next time there was another gift to prove he didn’t think she was
that kind of a girl. He said that if she didn’t accept the gold
ring with the big diamond and what went with it, my darling, he
would press charges against her for the first ring she’d
taken.

The door is ajar for her. She pushes it
open. Strange, the lights are out in the long corridor. The door
clicks shut behind her.

She gropes forward, calling out, “Jean?
Jean?”

The dark corridor goes on and on and then
turns and she finds herself posthumous, breathing in rotting
flowers and dust, facing a familiar white medalled and braided
uniform and beneath the peaked cap the frighteningly bloodless
emaciated mask of the Prefect with a mile of dimly lit corridor
behind him and all those doors with crazy numbers.

She stammers, weeping: “Oh let me return
there, sir, I beg of you.”

His distant cavernous voice formulates the
familiar question between motionless lips. She stammers the
familiar frightened reply.

“I don’t dance any more, sir, my dancing
days are over. God would be angered at me. Please, oh please, let
me return there.”

The Prefect says nothing. His bony long
white hand reaches out for her. She shrinks back at the burning
cold aura of it, cries out: “No! No! O God, help me!”

Chapter 26

What The Graffiti Say

One late May day outside (the chestnut
blossoms fading) in the third circular year of the quest for the
tunnel, that grain of sand in all the beaches of the world, Louis
stares at the graffiti on the wall of their room for maybe an hour.
His lips move silently. Finally he asks Seymour what he would do if
he’d been administratively suspended here all by himself and had
discovered a way out.