Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  Nina slipped off all her clothes at once, like a carapace, noting with interest the baggy pouches, the stains and streaks that had gravitated to her outfit. Anyone would think she’d been using her good black skirt for an ashtray.

  She lowered her hips down into the tub and scooted under the water and watched her body flatten into a white blurry fish.

  Leo had a strange habit. Often, when Nina took a long bath, he’d knock on the bathroom door and ask if she was all right.

  He’d learned it from his mother, he said. When his mother was a girl, a neighbor’s kid drowned in the tub. So his mother had called into him whenever he took a bath, which was extremely annoying, because he was usually masturbating. It had never occurred to him that he would grow up to be just as crazy. But he’d been programmed; he couldn’t help it. He was afraid not to check periodically when someone he cared about was in the tub. Suppose someone he loved fell asleep and drowned and Leo let her die just because he was afraid of turning into his mother.

  Someone might be irritated at being interrupted just as she slipped into the warm, enveloping fog one wanted from a bath. But if Nina minded, it was only for a second, a burr of irritation quickly washed away in the flood of erotic surrender and overwhelming awareness of her love for Leo, annoying tics and all. Leo cared about her! That was what Nina heard, even though—it occurred to her now—what Leo actually said was that his bathtub-drowning neurosis was about being Jewish; and Nina, not being Jewish, would never understand. He had never specifically said that he was worried about Nina drowning. The fear was that “someone he cared about” might slide under the water. Only now did Nina allow herself the depressing thought of Leo interrupting a long succession of women, each at the point of losing herself in the pleasures of the tub.

  She could stay in the bath forever now! She could fall over and drown and no one would bother her, knocking timidly at the door. But suddenly, bathing began to seem like a strange thing to do, soaking in your own dirt, as shower-takers said.

  Nina got out and dried herself with a thin towel that reeked of candy-sweet disinfectant. She gathered her clothes and put them back on, which was not a good sign. At least she put on clean underwear except for the same black tights, whose baggy feet gave off puffs of grayish dust. Then she switched on the television and lay down on top of the bedspread, clutching the remote control.

  The only interesting program was about Soviet breakaway republics, street fighting and guerilla warfare between two warring Asiatic nations whose names Nina couldn’t catch. This was what Nina should be thinking about: genocide, savage local wars, world peace. That all she could think of was Leo further lowered her self-esteem. She told herself that her failure to focus on the important issues, to concentrate on the news was not a moral but a linguistic lapse; she was missing too much of the French. Her language skills must be degenerating, because she’d always found it easier to understand French on TV than in life. Even though they spoke quickly on television, you weren’t expected to answer and could try to comprehend without the pressure to compose a grammatical reply.

  Soldiers lay on their stomachs in bombed-out rooms, plugging away at mortars; the charred bare windows of government buildings emitted clouds of smoke. Stretchers raced by too quickly for Nina to see who was on them. Toothless grannies beat their chests and fell on the graves of husbands and sons.

  The remote control worked if you shook it and kept hitting the plus button. Nina switched to a channel on which there was some sort of talk show. These people sat on high stools, as if at a kitchen counter, smiling dementedly and breaking off their rapid-fire chat to sing snatches of songs that inspired the audience to fits of raucous applause. Who were these people? What were they saying? Nina had been wrong to assume she understood their language at all.

  So it didn’t matter—in fact it was a relief—that the next show was in Italian. Strip Jeopardy, as it turned out. If the all-girl contestants missed a question, they had to remove an item of clothing.

  A tall blond (on Nina’s TV set, white-haired) woman lost everything but her underwear and was looking troubled until the kindly quiz-show host tossed her a thigh-length satin robe. She embraced the avuncular host and covered his face with kisses. He wore a slightly longer robe in a shiny dark silk.

  Most of the pretty hotels in which the famous dead had slept provided robes for when the living emerged all wet and warm from the tub. During that last trip, it had often been hard to tell when Leo and Nina’s lovemaking started or stopped, hard to remember specific events apart from a general feeling. But there was one evening Nina remembered, or a part of that evening: Nina had stepped out of the tub and thrown a robe over her steaming skin. Leo was lying on the bed and, as she crossed the room, he watched her very intently, then shut his eyes and tipped back his head, and she knelt and kissed his throat.

  NINA MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep. A trail of drool slicked her pillow. Had someone changed channels while she’d slept? Could she still be dreaming?

  It seemed to her that on TV a pig was about to die.

  As a child she’d had a recurring dream that began with her mother or father calling her name in their gentle familiar voices. When she heard that, she knew what was coming next: A ghostly figure, a translucent chalky silhouette would drift closer and closer to her bed, and just before it reached her, she would wake up, rigid with terror.

  That’s how it was about the pig. She knew what was going to happen although there was no pig around.

  On television a peasant couple sat side by side at a picnic table in the courtyard of a palatial stone barn. A stooped man in a cardigan and beret, his wrinkled wife in an apron, they lived in the Auvergne, la France profonde, in a stone house in a magnificent valley.

  The couple held hands as they told the interviewer how many generations of their families had farmed that fertile soil, mon grand-père, ma mère. Each time they mentioned a generation or referred to the land, the camera rose into the air and swooped over the lush fields and treetops to make sure the viewers saw what they were describing.

  They loved each other, they loved their farm, and despite everything that was about to happen, they loved their pig. How did Nina know what was about to happen? There was still no pig to be seen, and just because of the other pigs, the ones in Provence and Alsace, that didn’t mean that another poor pig was slated to be slaughtered.

  But now, at long last, there was a pig. The camera had rooted it out, tracked it to its hiding place, a boggy spot near the barn door. The pig was half buried in the dirt, wallowing in mud, looking alternately like a hog or a miniature hippo.

  Nina knew it was a pig. She knew what was going to happen. And so did the couple who loved their pig, and so did the camera crew, and so did everyone except for the pig, which slowly hauled itself from the mud and trotted over to the woman as she sweetly sang out its name.

  “Mizu mizu mizu,” she sang. The pig lowered its snout and nuzzled her hand. The camera zoomed in on the old woman’s hand, cradling an apple. The pig lowered its head and bit the apple. The old woman stroked the pig’s forehead and warbled into its ear. A look of sheer bliss came over its face. The woman seemed happy, too. Only now did the camera pull back to reveal the farmer holding a rifle. He hesitated a moment, then raised the gun to the pig’s head and shot.

  This pig had the best death, the most conscious, humane, and loving demise. Nina felt she was meant to admire this scene, the happy death of this barnyard creature, this couple who had lived in this place for so many generations and found through long trial and error the best way to slaughter a pig. An apple on its tongue, a hand on its chin, a bullet in its temple.

  The audience was supposed to admire these peasants and their pig. But if so, why did the filmmakers indulge in ironic arty gestures, for example, playing Puccini’s “Un bel di” on the sound track as the animal died, grinning. They kept stopping the film and running it back and repeatedly showing the pig death footage. With each replay the death appeared less serene
and idyllic, and by the third time looked more brutal than the violent mindless deaths of the Alsatian and Provençal pigs.

  Someone knocked on Nina’s door.

  “Nina?” a man said. “Nina?”

  “Excuse me?” she said. “Who is it?”

  “Nina,” a man said. “It’s me.”

  Nina opened the door.

  It was Leo.

  Well, maybe it was Leo. That is, he looked exactly and nothing like the Leo she remembered, the Leo she had been thinking about every minute of every day while making such an effort not to think about Leo. She knew that it was Leo, but at the same time couldn’t help feeling that this imitation Leo didn’t resemble anyone she knew. At first she felt unnaturally calm and then so weak in the knees that when Leo opened his arms she slumped and fell into his chest.

  Nina burrowed into his neck. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. First she had to touch his wide back and slightly rounded shoulders. Second, she had to smell him.

  It was definitely Leo.

  Only lovers had that pride in knowing each other’s smell, which was so much more basic, more true, she and Leo agreed, than how most humans identified one another, with shallow questions about where they were from and what they did for a living. Lovers got past that, way past that, back to the essential, down to the primordial sniffing of cats and dogs in heat. That too was something you didn’t share with every stranger you met.

  “I missed you,” Leo said huskily.

  “I missed you, too,” said Nina.

  Leo knelt and picked up his valise and walked past Nina into the room. He put down his suitcase.

  He said, “What is this place? A whorehouse?”

  Laughter diffused the tension long enough for them to face each other. The strain and fatigue of travel enhanced Leo’s haggard good looks. And as Leo studied Nina, he seemed to like whatever he saw and not to notice or care that she was wearing the same outfit she’d been sleeping in for days. Nina’s clothing meant nothing to Leo, though he was vain about his own. Their romance still had nothing to do with clothes. Only at a later stage did lovers begin giving each other fashion advice, after the beloved’s once attractive eccentricities began to seem like embarrassing reflections on one’s self.

  “This place is wild,” said Leo.

  “You noticed,” Nina said.

  “Adele Cordier’s a real piece of work,” Leo said. “She called and specifically promised that this place was charming—and remodeled top to bottom.”

  It lightened Nina’s spirits that Leo talked about Madame Cordier like any hotel owner, someone to do business with—or not. But maybe it should have worried Nina to hear Leo speak that way about a former lover. How would Leo talk about Nina in their separate futures—futures that seemed less imminent and less separate now than they had just a few hours before? Normally, Nina and Leo never mentioned past loves, except for that poor woman having all-day sex with plants. Leo’s passion for history did not extend to personal history. Once Leo told Nina about a man he knew whose new wife asked him to make a list of all his previous girlfriends; he said he’d go to his office and do it—and he never came home again. The warning in Leo’s story was clear: He and Nina had no romantic pasts before they’d met. He was right, it was wiser not to consider the time they’d wasted, the years they could have spent together. The only subject more taboo than the past was the subject of the future….

  Leo said, “Adele’s an old friend from when I lived here. She buys and redecorates hotels now. I thought: Why not do her a favor, check out her new hotel. We could go to Paris and write the whole thing off.”

  We? When had Leo ever said we? Also, hadn’t he said that a friend in London has recommended this hotel? And what about the other hotel Madame Cordier owned, the one in which Sarah Bernhardt had stayed and, more recently, Leo and Nina? Did she recommend that one, too?

  Madame Cordier had insisted that she’d told Leo that the Danton wasn’t fixed up yet. One of them was lying or had a twisted idea of the truth. But it was surprisingly easy to let one’s ideas get twisted. Yesterday, had anyone asked, Nina would have insisted that Leo had told her that she was going to Paris without him.

  “I met her. Madame Cordier,” Nina blurted out.

  “How predictable,” said Leo. “All these hotel owners—these innkeepers—believe in the personal touch. Poor slobs. Their job depends on sending up fruit baskets and champagne, and conning writers into saying something complimentary, or at least listing the joint in Allo! Remember that guy who kept calling our room and we kept blowing him off and finally he came and knocked on the door when we were fooling around in the tub? Where was that? Was that Oscar Wilde’s room? I only remember the tub.”

  Lucky Leo could still recall events like that without the searing pain that such memories had begun to cause Nina. But why should it be painful for him? He hadn’t just lived through days—no, weeks—since they’d broken up. He hadn’t known they’d broken up. He thought they’d been together all along.

  “What are you doing here?” Nina said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Leo.

  “I thought you weren’t coming to Paris.”

  “You did? Why? I can’t believe it,” said Leo. “I thought we agreed I couldn’t leave New York until yesterday evening. But our frequent-flier miles expired the day you left, and if we didn’t use them by then we’d have to pay for your ticket.”

  Frequent-flier miles? Separate flights? Surely Nina would have registered these fairly complex arrangements. But she didn’t remember Leo mentioning frequent-flier miles. Often such questions did come up, requiring him to work out some thorny air-travel snag. So maybe he had explained all this, and it had scooted right past Nina.

  If only she could reconstruct the details of that afternoon in his office, what he’d said and didn’t say that made her think she was going alone. She started off assuming the opposite: that they were going together. Something must have made it plain enough for her to change her mind. She saw herself looking out his window, heard his “Nina, I’m over here.” Could you feel so strongly and suffer so deeply because of a misunderstanding? What a ridiculous question! Wars broke out for less….

  Always, in the past, she and Leo had barely tipped the bellboy and locked the door before they were glued together, stumbling toward the bed. They joked about Leo’s jet lag cure, which often began on the flight, under the airplane blankets, with quasi-accidental touches that escalated into furtive groping. If some prudish fellow passenger disapproved—well, so much the better! And so when they reached the hotel rooms already falling into each other, it wasn’t the beginning but rather a stage in what had begun with a kiss before takeoff, clasped hands during landing, and evolved into long starved looks in the taxi from the airport.

  But now they were starting off cold, so to speak. They had to find out where they were.

  Leo kissed her, then kissed her again, seriously enough so that Nina toppled slightly and held up her hands, as if to regain her balance.

  Leo sat down on the edge of the bed. Nina almost sat on his lap. But her guardian angel must have yanked her back seconds before Leo twisted around and reached for the remote.

  Leo stared at the TV. Nina sat in a nearby chair.

  No need to change the channel. The Auvergne pig was dying again. That was what got Leo’s attention. The old woman was still singing its name. Mizu mizu mizu. Had they been repeating this scene, replaying it over and over during the time it had taken Nina and Leo to get from the doorway to the bed?

  The end, hoped Nina. One final loop. The apple. The opera. Blam.

  “Would you look at this?” said Leo. “Right-wing propaganda. La France profonde. Our peasant grand-mère and grand-père. Doing things the old way, the French way, not the Turkish or Senegalese or Algerian way. Voting the right-wing agenda is a vote for the peasants, for delicious French sausage made from French pigs hand-fed and hand-raised on French apples. Voting the straight right-wing ticket doesn’t mean a
vote, as one might ignorantly suppose, for deporting foreign workers, firebombing guest worker hostels, protectionism, high tariffs. Not at all!…It’s a vote for sausage! You know what the pig’s name should be?”

  “Mizu?” said Nina.

  “Dreyfus!” Leo laughed. “This lovely film about the lovely French farmers is all about the coming election. And that’s why it took me two goddamn hours to get in from the airport. There was a demonstration on the Orly road, gangs of rednecks from the provinces dumping oranges on the highway. Crates of Moroccan oranges. How many oranges can France grow?

  “But of course you can’t blame them, the poor bastard farmers are broke, right along with the rest of the world, except for a few corporate slimeballs. The time is ripe for some fascist shithead to get the trains running on time and everyone eating pure French pork like our pure peasant grandparents. French sausage! You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud—”

  “I heard about that demonstration,” Nina said. “The oranges on the road.”

  “Sure,” said Leo. “Everyone heard about it. And I got to be the lucky guy sitting in traffic with the meter running.”

  “Was the flight all right?” said Nina.

  “Hellish,” Leo said. “The airline must have held a contest: free tickets for the most colicky infants and hyperactive toddlers. All the winners got to travel together on one flight to Paris—my flight, needless to say—with their passive parents, heavy into the drinks cart. The kids were all shrieking and punching each other and racing up and down the aisles. I insisted on being bumped up to business class. I flashed some back issues of Allo! until I found a steward who knew what Allo! was.