Guided Tours of Hell (26 page)

And what about Leo, the mind-control king! What had he thought
he
was doing, preparing Nina to adore the disgusting Hotel Danton? Where had he gotten
his
information? From that bigoted slut, Madame Cordier? Who in turn had wanted Nina to know some important facts about Leo.

And now Susanna Rose and Isadora reappeared with staring eyes and nearly identical looks of exaltation and distress. Both seemed on the verge of tears, and when Leo said, “How was it?” Susanna Rose held up one hand and steered her daughter past them.

At last it was Leo and Nina’s turn to peek in at Marie Antoinette’s cell. Two mannequins shared the cramped room with a cot, a table, a washbasin, a pen, an inkwell, and paper. In a black dress and bonnet, the Queen sat in a woven rush chair with an ebony rosary pinched between her hinged fingers. Diagonally across, a statue in a military jacket and breeches stared absently through the glass, standing guard over empty space.

Marie Antoinette was meant to look either composed or dejected, Nina couldn’t tell which. It wasn’t a lifelike dummy. There was no illusion of suspended motion, no waxy skin seeming to breathe. Just two grimy mannequins behind a dusty window.

The Marie Antoinette dummy was wearing plum-colored suede shoes. Somehow Nina knew that these same shoes had belonged to the Queen. This was the only touching detail: the idea that she had kept those shoes until the end, an extreme example of women’s faith in the magic of shoes to change their luck and save them.

What had so transformed the college students that they’d come out blinking like possums? What on earth could have moved Susanna Rose and Isadora too profoundly to speak? For Nina, seeing the tableau had reduced the tragedy of Marie Antoinette’s final days to moth-eaten taxidermy.

Nina and Leo trudged out of the corridor to find that they were alone; their so-called guide and her ragtag band had wandered ahead and left them. For a couple that hadn’t wanted to take the tour, they were unreasonably disturbed by the prospect of being left behind. Hurrying, they caught up with the group in a pebbled courtyard landscaped with a few patches of dead grass and a scrawny tree beside a dry fountain and a stone trough.

“
La cour des femmes
. The courtyard of the women,” said the guide. “Here the female prisoners came to wash their linens and groom themselves in whatever pitiful fashion they could manage. Sometimes two hundred women were packed into this yard. And there, behind that iron grill, the male prisoners gathered to watch. Even at the hour of their death, they took time for harmless flirtation.”

Well, speaking of flirtation, here was Susanna Rose again, dragging Isadora behind her as she zoomed over to Leo.

“Did you see it?” Susanna Rose asked breathlessly.

“See what?” Leo asked.

“Danton’s cell,” she said.

“Marie Antoinette’s,” corrected Leo.

“No, no,” said Susanna Rose. “Not that. Not those stupid dummies. You were meant to keep going past the Marie Antoinette room and on to Danton’s cell. It was unbelievably powerful. Really incredibly moving.”

“We must have missed it,” Nina said glumly. “We didn’t know there was anything beyond—”

Leo wheeled on her in silent fury. Missing something by accident was Leo’s personal hell, worse than capricious changes of plans, worse than someone else having an experience he envied.

The guide’s voice dropped and faltered as she reeled off one last list of statistics: deaths from starvation, malnutrition, disease, from torture and execution. Probably her job required that she offer the facts of French history without praise or blame, free from partisan sympathies for Jacobins or Girondins, above pity for the victims or censure for their killers. But that could hardly be possible after spending day after day in this prison, serving out a sentence not unlike that of the Revolution’s casualties, though with the hope of parole every evening, Sundays, and national holidays. The staggering numbers were her way of giving her story emotional content, of adding moral judgment to a presentation that was meant to be factual, unimpassioned, and historically objective.

They left the courtyard for another large stone hall, a shade less dark than the others. The show was over. The house lights had come up. The guide stood near the far door, expressionless and glazed over. She wasn’t even going to tell them what this room was for.

Before she’d finished thanking them for their time and attention, the college students were tripping over each other in their rush to escape. The other tourists trudged past, mumbling
“merci merci,”
without looking at the guide, their faces frozen in the abashed social smiles exchanged by flight attendants and passengers filing gratefully from an airplane.

Leo and Nina, Susanna Rose and Isadora paused to thank the guide. Had they become a group of four? Oh, please, God, no, prayed Nina. Don’t let anyone suggest that Nina and Leo and their new best friends go out for a drink or a meal.

“Plus ça change,”
said Leo.

“Pardon?”
The guide’s moist eyes found Leo.

“There are always massacres,” Leo said. “What happened here was simply standard operating procedure. Actually quite neat and orderly compared with what was going on in the rest of Paris. Isn’t it true, Madame, that no one knows how many people were hacked to death in the streets?”

The guide knew Leo was talking to her. She wanted to be polite but couldn’t control her yearning gaze after the departing tourists.

Leo went on. “The mobs were grabbing everyone in nice clothes or a fancy hat, bludgeoning and dismembering them, cutting out their hearts and stuffing their testicles in their mouths, while people danced on the corpses, up to their ankles in blood, and for months the whole city reeked of rotting flesh. That was only two hundred years ago. Hardly prehistory, right? But now everyone acts so shocked when it happens in Europe, Bosnia, Russia. And by the form it takes in
our
country: some nut goes into a fast food joint and blows away fifty kids…”

Nina, Susanna Rose, Isadora, the guide—one by one they forgot themselves and let their jaws go slack as Leo raved on. Finally, he ran out of steam. No one said a word. A low thrumming could be heard from the depths of the prison, like the sound of the ocean trapped inside a shell.

A long time passed. Then Susanna Rose said, “God, you’re right. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

What was the little girl making of all this? And the guide? Was she marveling that this addled American was comparing the glorious Revolution to a shoot-out in a McDonald’s? None of them could have known what Nina was thinking about: Leo’s earlier speech that day on the subject of bloody mass murder.

That afternoon, at the hotel, they’d just finished their sandwiches and were satisfied and sleepy from lunch and the bottle of good wine. Leo started talking about the fact that their hotel had once been a famous abbey. Not just a famous abbey, but the site of a famous slaughter, the massacre of more than fifty priests during the Revolution. A mob had dragged them from their cells and herded them into the courtyard—the same garden where now, in the warmer months, guests enjoyed their coffee, croissants, and jam. Several monks tried to hide in the cellar. But the killers dragged them out and hacked them into chunks. The courtyard was littered with body parts, the paving stones slick with blood.

Somehow this story had segued into Leo and Nina having sex. Not in some obvious corny way: the violence turning them on. It was all more accidental, less linear, less clear. Leo had fallen silent a moment, and something in their glance just
caught
, the way a sleeve or a lock of hair can snag on a button or coat hook.

Leo had reached out and taken Nina’s legs and lifted them onto his lap. It was exciting in itself that he could do that if he wanted, the intimate hint of possession implicit in his freedom to move her around.

At some point (they were kissing) Nina thought about the abbey, and it did make Leo’s kisses seem more caustic and sweet. It intensified her desire to have so much pleasure in a place that had seen so much pain. Sex obliterated all that, along with everything else: the history of the hotel, Nina and Leo’s past, the room, the pillows, the cool crisp sheets, time, everything but their bodies. All five senses were distilled into one molten drop of sensation. Then Nina was outside herself. Absent. Visiting Cathedrals.

You had to trust someone to let yourself get to that place where you were so wide open, so dangerously unprotected that anyone could sneak up on you and bop you over the head with a mallet. You could wind up like the French pigs, let’s say the Auvergne pig, lumbering over for apples and love and taking a bullet instead. The farmer’s wife’s voice had been so musical as she sang out her darling pig’s name. “Mizu mizu mizu,” she had called. Nina could hear it still.

And what if no one killed the pig but just tortured it awhile, alternately stroking and cuffing it, making it behave one way, then changing the rules completely. The poor pig would go mad, like Camille Claudel, better off in the nuthouse, or like Nina, who chose to think of herself as a sensible person even as she drifted through an unreliable world that might transform its whole appearance at any given moment, depending on what Leo said, and if she thought he loved her.

A rubbery snap of awareness recalled Nina to herself. How amazing that she was here—not in their room, in bed with Leo, but in the vast dark chilly hall of the Revolutionary Prison.

In the time that Nina had taken for a quick mental jog back to their hotel room, Leo had fallen silent. And now it was, apparently, Susanna Rose’s turn. Maybe she hadn’t liked Leo’s impassioned operatic aria about wholesale slaughter, after all. Because now, unaccountably, she seemed to be showing off for the tour guide, as if the guide were their teacher and she was set on being the smartest kid in the class. A better student than Leo, better than her own daughter, better than Nina, who didn’t count and was at any rate out of the running, having been spaced out entirely in some sexual other dimension. Or maybe Susanna Rose’s attraction to Leo was entering some new phase that looked, to the casual observer, like cutthroat competition.

“The Revolution was all about sex,” Susanna Rose was saying. And though this was a reprise of a topic that, even in their brief acquaintance, Nina had already heard Susanna Rose address, she felt responsible, as if, with those radar signals that thoughts of sex emitted, her meditation about Leo had somehow made Susanna Rose say this:

“The Revolution was entirely about the rumors people spread concerning Marie Antoinette and her so-called lovers and her incest with her son. It was all about Danton adoring sex and Robespierre and Marat hating everything to do with the body. Once Danton and Robespierre had a fight about the meaning of virtue, and Danton said that virtue was what he did in bed with his wife. Finally Danton quit going to the long boring political meetings and just stayed home and made love to his wife all day. Naturally, that was the end of him.” Susanna Rose tipped back her head and slashed a finger across her lovely throat.

“Bravo!” Leo said.

Leo might have been one of the mannequins in Marie Antoinette’s cell, that’s how startled Susanna Rose was when he opened his mouth and spoke. She had a watery unfocused look. She’d almost forgotten their existence. In theory she was speaking to them, but in fact she’d been talking to herself.

But what was she trying to tell herself? What did Danton mean to her? And how could Nina hope to know what Susanna Rose was thinking? How would she cross that unbridgeable distance between one life and another, a chasm that deepened with every second, with every tiny exchange, with every quick impression that divided us one from another and made up the separate hours and minutes of our separate lives? How she could assume anything about this stranger when—after all this brooding obsession, all this pain, all this wasted time—she knew so little, almost nothing, about the man she loved!

Susanna Rose’s voice grew soft and thick. Nina felt herself tense. Was this woman about to make some grandiose sexual claims on Danton’s behalf? Susanna Rose took a deep breath. She could say anything, Nina feared.

“Danton’s wife died suddenly while he was away,” Susanna Rose began. “It took six days for him to get home. And when he got back to their village, he paid for her corpse to be dug up. It was no big deal in those days. In fact it was often a good idea, since a certain percentage of the population got buried alive by mistake.

“Danton’s wife was dead, all right. Still, he held her in his arms. One of the gravediggers wrote about how that giant ox, Danton, lifted his wife and shut his eyes and softly kissed her forehead. The gravedigger wrote that Danton forgot that they were there, and he howled. The men were too scared to breathe or move or do anything to disturb him.”

Susanna Rose slipped deeper into abstraction and gazed down at the gritty stone floor. Nina heard the sound of water, dripping somewhere in the prison. One by one, the adults glanced over at Isadora to check out her response, as if depending on the child to react to this for them.

After a considered pause, the little girl said, “Gross.”

The tour guide seemed appalled by the whole performance. It was harder to read Leo. Perhaps he was less affected by the story than by annoyance at Susanna Rose for having upstaged him. Whatever fragile thread of attraction was being spun between her and Leo was snipped by their competition over who could get more exercised about the French Revolution. Nina knew better than to compete with him. He was so easily wounded. If Susanna Rose had meant to impress him, what a miscalculation!

It was Nina—and Nina alone—who was thrilled by Susanna Rose’s story. The story of Danton and his wife had worked like a magic key, rolling back the stone prison roof like the top of a sardine can. Light had come streaming in along with this ghastly anecdote about an historic disinterment. About Orpheus and Eurydice, translated from Greek myth into modern history, from Hades to a country graveyard during the Revolution.

“Merci, Madame,”
said Susanna Rose.