Guided Tours of Hell (20 page)

“Jesus Christ,” said Leo. “Is that your idea of a joke?”

“Sort of,” murmured Nina, but Leo didn’t hear. Just ahead, he stumbled and held on to the wall. He paused a moment, then straightened and, with a rattling sigh, went on.

“You wouldn’t want to fall down this!” Nina forced herself to sound cheery. “Though you probably couldn’t find a more convenient and considerate place to break your neck. They wouldn’t even have to move you, just roll you onto the last pile of bones. Leo? Leo, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, goddamn it,” said Leo.

Was Leo having a claustrophobic attack? Nina couldn’t ask him, so she couldn’t determine how serious it was, or if there were any way she could help. Oh, theirs had to be the absolute worst, the most deficient romance in the world! Everyone knew that communication was essential—basic! But Leo and Nina couldn’t talk about the largest or least little things.

How many times had the stairs twisted down? Forty? Fifty? Sixty?

“Are you finding it hard to breathe?” Nina said. “I mean, I can hardly get any air.”

Leo didn’t reply.

“Leo?” said Nina. “Are you all right? Do you want to go back?”

“We can’t,” Leo said through clenched teeth. “People are coming down.”

“I don’t hear anyone,” said Nina.

“Shut up and listen,” said Leo.

Nina was becoming caught up in the rhythm of spiraling down, almost as if she’d surrendered to the centripetal force that spun the possessed at voodoo rites in diminishing circles until they dropped, twitching, to the ground, foamed at the mouth, and passed out. Would she and Leo have the strength to stop turning if they ever reached bottom? This was terrible! Terrible! To think that they’d paid money to let themselves be punished this way!

Leo was panting raggedly. Nina’s legs felt wooden—it was partly exertion, she knew, but also tension, vertigo, the fear that it would never end. She could ward off panic if she could just keep from thinking that later they would have to climb this far to return to street level. Oh, let there be an elevator! Please, just let there be that! Nina’s heartfelt prayer concluded with a promise that she would become a better person and never again have a doubting or suspicious thought about Leo.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Nina’s voice emerged in high pinched bursts between spasms of shallow breathing. “Orpheus and Eurydice. Ever since we left that room at the Hotel Danton and you told me not to look back. I’ve been thinking about Orpheus. You want to know what, exactly?”

Leo didn’t answer. He kept on going downstairs. There was a funny pitch in his walk. What if he froze and couldn’t move? Then they would sit down and wait calmly on the stairs, perhaps till the Syracuse students came and bailed them out. Leo must not be made to feel like an aging neurotic, dependent on the dumb healthy strength of two blond meathead Vikings!

Nina said, “Everyone assumes that the Orpheus myth is about how the power of art and music and love and sex is stronger than the power of death. But obviously, death is stronger than all the rest put together. I mean, death is making the rules, love can only bend them. Or maybe it’s a warning about love, not to let it get out of hand and obliterate everything else. No matter how clearly Orpheus is warned not to look back until they’re out of Hades, nothing’s real for him but Eurydice, and he turns around and loses her….”

It was becoming harder to talk, but Nina couldn’t stop babbling any more than she could have quit corkscrewing down those endless stairs. Why had they done this to themselves? In the name of what? Curiosity? Pleasure? Why would a chronic claustrophobe with a serious death fixation decide that he had to come here—here, of all places in Paris?

Nina sensed that Leo was listening and wouldn’t interrupt. Fine! Just let him keep breathing and not stop dead or fall down. Maybe it wasn’t true that she’d been thinking about Orpheus and Eurydice ever since Leo warned her not to look back at the Hotel Danton. All right. She was thinking about them now, and she wanted to tell Leo.

“The other thing, Leo, and excuse me for saying this, is that maybe it’s not about love but about men. Maybe Eurydice was just an excuse for Orpheus to take on Death, to pit his music or poetry against Pluto or whatever. Because the point at which he looks back is when they’re almost out of hell, and he wants to make sure that Eurydice knows what he’s done, accomplished, achieved for her—the whole bright living world! So maybe it’s a warning about that tendency some men have, wanting to show women the world, to tell them what’s real and what’s not.

“I said
some
men, Leo. Or maybe it’s a story about women, too. Aren’t there versions where Eurydice wonders why he won’t look at her? Doesn’t he love her anymore? Of course there’s a reason, but all she can think about is love love love love love, and so she keeps calling and calling him until he turns around and looks and she loses him, loses everything…so maybe it’s also a warning to women.”

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 developed 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.