Guided Tours of Hell (25 page)

Eye contact wasn’t part of her job. She addressed the air in a voice just loud enough to collect the English-speaking tour.

“Welcome to the Conciergerie,” she said. “The infamous Revolutionary Prison. Right now we are standing in the Hall of the Men-at-Arms. Built in the thirteenth century, it was—”

The group assembled in front of her. Isadora was the first to rise from the bench, then Nina, then Susanna Rose and finally Leo. The little girl ran over and weaseled her way to the front. Several students patted her head as she wriggled past.

Nina, Leo, and Susanna Rose stood off to one side, and as far back as they could.

Leo said, “I’m waiting for this babe to tell me something I don’t know.”

“I despise tours,” said Susanna Rose.

“Me, too,” Nina said.

A common rebellious spirit united the three of them. They might not be permitted to go through the prison unescorted but they didn’t have to cooperate with this fascist guided tour.

“Many famous people,” said the guide, “passed through the gates of this prison. Marie Antoinette. Charlotte Corday. Danton. Robespierre. If you turn around, you will see the grill to which Madame du Barry clung when they carried her in.”

Everyone turned except Nina, Leo, and Susanna Rose—they weren’t about to roll over and do what they were told—so that the rest of the tour wound up staring at
them
. All except the college kids, who weren’t even pretending to listen. A British boy pinched his sister, which started a punching match that engulfed their parents in a firestorm of furious whispers.

“It’s all Nazi totalitarian shit,” Leo told Susanna Rose. “You know what happened to us this morning?”

“How would I?” asked Susanna Rose.

“Tell her, Nina,” said Leo.

“No, go ahead,” said Nina, dully.

“We were in the Montparnasse Cemetery,” Leo said.

“I love it there,” said Susanna Rose. “So restful.”

“To see Simone de Beauvoir’s grave,” Leo said.

“Wasn’t it inspiring?” Susanna Rose said. “She may have been full of baloney, but she really galvanized millions of women—”

“I know.” Leo interrupted her. “I agree. I’m sure you’ve seen the touching notes that women leave on her grave. It’s really quite extraordinary. She’s become a sort of patron saint.”

Edging closer to Leo, Susanna Rose nodded as if he were a slow, sweet-natured child she was trying to encourage. What was Leo saying? This was worse that outright lying! Didn’t it bother him to imply he’d
wanted
to visit de Beauvoir’s grave, to pretend in the presence of someone—Nina!—who knew he’d been dragged there kicking and screaming?

Their guide said, “During the Terror, thousands of prisoners were brought through this hall every day.”

Peering into the darkness, Nina listened for some residual echo of the victims’ groans and sobbing. In the face of that, it was senseless to get so bent out of shape because her boyfriend was misrepresenting himself to impress another woman.

“We ran into a gang of skinheads,” Leo said. “At the cemetery. Apparently they’ve turned the grave of Pierre Laval into some sort of neo-Fascist shrine.”

“Oh, God in heaven.” Was Susanna Rose pretending to know who Pierre Laval was? Was that something every…theater director…knew as a matter of course? Nina had never heard of him until today in the graveyard.

“God in heaven indeed,” said Leo. “It was very unpleasant. Luckily, they knew not to fuck with me. But it could easily have gotten ugly.”

“Well, I suppose it’s just a matter of time before every local minority gets picked off and slaughtered.” The dolorous resignation with which Susanna Rose accepted the brutality of her fellow man was leavened by a shiver of anticipatory excitement. “It’s just a fact that the peasantry—French, German, Polish, whatever—never had a problem rounding up and turning in Jews.”

Certainly there must have been some peasant who’d had a problem killing Jews. Leo and Susanna Rose knew it, too, but that wasn’t their point. And Nina couldn’t say so. They might think she was anti-Semitic.

They
. It struck her with the force of a slap that Leo and Susanna Rose were Jewish—and were using that fact to exclude her. But what about Leo and Nina, excluding the rest of the world on the immensely sensible, rational basis of sexual attraction? What about Leo and the old man in the graveyard, shutting out Simone de Beauvoir and an entire gender of hysterical, nagging females? And the cabdrivers, each xenophobic in his own way, and Madame Cordier and Nina, joined together in an aggrieved, exclusive sisterhood: Leo’s current and former lovers.

Everywhere on the planet, people were agglomerating in gummy alliances based on sex or nationality, ethnic origin, history, or religion, some of it more or less violent and all about us versus them. It was naive to imagine a world without combination and exclusion occurring constantly, unstoppably, on the lowest biological level, a world of humans running about, pretending to be complex organisms but really no more than gametes swimming toward fertilization, toward that moment, that shattering pop between the sperm and the egg that signals all the others to just keep on swimming by….

I’m losing my mind, thought Nina.

The guide was reeling off numbers: thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and women arrested, imprisoned, tortured, numbers of prisoners guillotined per hour, per day, per week. The college kids were with her now. They could relate to this.

Leo told Susanna Rose, “I’m trying to get back here later this year. They’re celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris. And I can’t help wondering if there’s going to be a fuss about the French not exactly…hesitating to help deport the Jews.

What
trip to Paris later this year? Was Leo coming back with Nina?

“What’s the name of that town?” said Susanna Rose. “Help me. My memory’s going. Somewhere near Lyons? It was the staging place for the deportation of all those children. And the commemorative plaque doesn’t even mention the fact that the kids were Jewish.”

“Izieu,” said Leo.

“That’s right,” said Susanna Rose. “That’s right. Izieu.”

This was vile. Vile! Nina couldn’t believe it! Using the deportation of the French Jews as a sexual come-on!

Yet everything they were saying was true. And was it any more outrageous than Nina standing in this vast hall from which so many thousands of wretched innocents were dispatched to their deaths and having a jealous fit because her boyfriend was flirting? No wonder every new day presented a new ontological challenge as you kept trying to see the world as it really was, while the world’s face kept changing, and sex kept you from seeing at all, kept your eyes from focusing unless you had the beloved beside you, covering you with kisses and signs of physical devotion.

What did Nina expect to happen now? Did she for one moment imagine that Leo would leave her for Susanna Rose, exchange her right here in the prison like a worn-out pair of sneakers? I think I’ll wear the new ones, you can wrap up the old ones, or better yet, if you wouldn’t mind, just toss them in the trash. Anyone but the deeply disturbed would predict that they would have their little conversation, take their little guided tour, and return to their separate lives: Susanna Rose to her daughter and her play, Leo to his magazines and Nina.

Leo and Nina would never mention this. And when he wrote about the Conciergerie for
Allo!
it would not be as the place where he’d flirted shamelessly with a fellow tourist, but as the historic landmark in which Marie Antoinette spent her historic last night on earth.

“Allons,”
said the tour guide, and everyone nervously regrouped as she shepherded them from the huge reception-detention hall into a corridor that was slightly less dark but exceedingly narrow. Not so narrow, Nina hoped, that Leo would get claustrophobic, though she assumed he’d keep it together around Susanna Rose and the others.

The passage was only wide enough for two. Suppose Leo and Susanna Rose paired off and left Nina to tag behind, like their duenna, their chaperone, like Eurydice again, this time with Orpheus walking ahead to chat up another woman.

Susanna Rose left off her desultory conversation with Leo and peered anxiously over the heads of the crowd. As if summoned, her daughter sidled up and burrowed under her arm.

“On the third of Thermidor,” said the guide, “one hundred and thirty-eight prisoners…”

“Did you hear what the guide said before?” Isadora asked.

“What, dear?” said Susanna Ross.

“They guillotined this woman? And after they cut off her head, they picked it out of the basket and one of the jailers smacked her face? Slap slap.” The little girl backhanded the air.

“Please, dear,” said Susanna Rose. She and the child skipped off, arm in arm, down the hall.

“Wait!” Leo called after them, and they paused for him to catch up. “Remember Orpheus! The one rule is: Don’t look back.” Leo’s voice was low and confiding, but even so, Nina heard.

They had made it through the corridor and were walking along a portico and had just picked up speed when the guide stopped short and once more raised her hand.

“The so-called rue de Paris. Four hundred and fifty meters long, it was for many prisoners the last march to the guillotine. During the worst of the Terror, the condemned were obliged to walk past as many as five hundred prisoners sleeping on the rue de Paris, as well as a miniature city of errand boys, barbers, cooks, vendors, nurses, and lawyers who lived off the prisoners housed here. At one point there were two hundred and sixty lawyers for half that many prisoners.”

The tourists laughed harshly, placatingly, but the numbers were not to be stopped. Numbers were their guide’s true subject, the statistics of the dead. Meticulous records had been kept, all very proper and bureaucratic.

They passed a guillotine blade no bigger than a meat cleaver. Were human heads smaller then? The rusty iron inspired the guide to a new barrage of numerals, the precise dimensions and weight of the axe, the bills for daily corpse removal, carting, and disposal.

It was perfect for “Paris Death Trip.” But Leo seemed to have forgotten the article he was researching. At that moment, he wasn’t brooding on death. Which was a blessing…or was it? Which was preferable, sex or death, if the sex was with someone else, if he wanted Susanna Rose…?

“Through that door,” said the guide, “was the prison kitchen. The wealthiest prisoners brought their own cooks, but in some cases that was denied. For example, in the case of Danton, the great orator and cruel revolutionary leader who sent so many innocents to the guillotine…”

“Bullshit,” Susanna Rose said, just loud enough for Leo and Nina—but not the guide—to hear.

“Hardly bullshit,” Leo said. “The guy was heavy-duty.”

“With Marie Antoinette,” the guide continued, “known during her imprisonment here as the Widow Capet, there were very rigid controls on what the prisoner could eat. A servant girl tried to make the Queen some unsalted chicken broth. But that was not permitted.”

The college students shook their heads. Now they saw how bad this was. No Big Macs, no French fries, no Mom’s chicken soup…

“Animals,” said the man who didn’t know about French kissing.

“Relax, hon,” said his wife.

At last they reached a bottleneck, a tunnel-like cul-de-sac they had to venture in and out of to see Marie Antoinette’s cell. Moving in an orderly line, they approached the opening where they waited for the others to inspect the Queen’s last room and to come back through the corridor and pop out like champagne corks. Couldn’t the Revolution have foreseen this eventuality and housed the Widow Capet in a cell with a separate entrance and exit so that a line of tourists could have filed past in one direction?

Once more, Leo and Nina separated from the group. Susanna Rose and Isadora also stopped, a short distance ahead.

“When they took the Queen’s son away,” Susanna Rose told Isadora, “when they came for the little Dauphin, Marie Antoinette kissed him and told him to be very brave. And then she let him go. But when they tried to take her daughter, the beautiful little Princess, the Queen grabbed her and wouldn’t give her up and offered to die for her child.”

“What happened then?” breathed Isadora.

“They took the Princess anyway.”

“And after that?”

“Well, er, the mommy died, and the little girl lived.”

Though Susanna Rose directed this intensely at Isadora, there was an aspect of theater about it, an address to a larger crowd as she labored to entrance her daughter and Leo, both at once. Nina recalled how, when they’d sat on the bench and Leo described the royal family’s failed escape attempt, his voice had risen to involve Susanna Rose and her daughter.

A group of college kids emerged from the corridor, looking chastened and perturbed, blinking until their bland faces set like individual puddings. Leo held Nina back and let Susanna Rose and Isadora precede them to see the Queen’s cell.

In their absence, Leo and Nina could hardly look at each other. It was as if the two of them were rejected spouses whose more attractive partners had just run off together.

Finally Leo said, “Did you hear that crap? That was pure feminist bullshit! I’ll bet that’s not what happened. No one in those times gave a flying fuck about little princesses, Marie Antoinette included. It was the Prince—the royal heir—she tried to save, the Prince she offered to trade her life for. What’s her name, Susanna Rose, was just jacking that kid around, inventing some elaborate psychodrama so that poor girl would believe that
her
mother would gladly die for her, too.”

Leo’s handsome jaw clenched. Why was he so enraged? Was he jealous of Isadora? Otherwise, what did he care if a woman told a harmless lie about a long-dead mother and daughter?

And what did Leo imagine that everyone was doing: he and Nina, Susanna Rose, her daughter, the tour guide, and her group? Drifting like a pack of zombies around this monstrous prison, madly pushing each other’s buttons, trying to distort or manipulate their listeners’ sense of the world with appalling statistics and selected snippets of information? And how was that different from people everywhere since the beginning of time, from the revolutionaries who’d spread lying gossip about Marie Antoinette, from the TV stations showing documentaries intended to persuade you that peasant couples killing their pigs and making their blood sausage would lose their whole way of life if France allowed foreign workers and oranges from Morocco?