Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “Nothing,” Nina said.

  Leo would never agree to this seemingly minor, spontaneous change of plans and actual major disruption in his whole way of being. Nina caught up with him and grabbed his arm with such force that they teetered and clumsily rocked to a stop.

  “Whoa,” said Leo. “Easy, big fella.”

  “It’s important to me,” she said. “I want to. I mean it, Leo. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. We can just run in and check it out. It would be unfair to me not to. I never ask for anything. And this is nothing. You know that.” Nina was as shocked as Leo by the intensity in her voice.

  “Fine,” said Leo. “Fine. Okay. You win. We’ll go to the Montparnasse Cemetery. It’s going to throw the whole day off, but fine, if it makes you happy.”

  “It’s not about happiness,” said Nina. “It’s about obligation.” What was Nina saying? Obligation to what? What did she care about Simone de Beauvoir’s grave? Nothing, less than nothing! This was some superstitious tic, some fear that she would be consumed with regret if she passed so near and didn’t go see the grave.

  Nina said, “Leo, you of all people hate to know you’ve been near something great and not stopped to see it. This would be like going to Chartres and not looking at the cathedral, like visiting Agra and skipping the Taj Mahal…. Well, okay. Not exactly like that.”

  “Okay.” Leo sighed. “This makes no sense at all. But fine. I already said you win. All right? Satisfied? Let’s cross here.”

  He yanked her hand and she followed, stepping off the traffic island and into the empty street just as the light turned green and the taxi drivers hit the gas and headed straight for them, forcing them to hurry, then run, as they threaded through traffic, like pinballs slamming through a maze of harsh bells and flashing lights.

  THE DEAD WERE POLITE in Montparnasse, not only silent but considerate, lying modestly under their neutral-colored stones, shrinking back from the pavement, from the tidy edges of the narrow paths and the broad tree-lined alleys so that you didn’t have to step over them or even think about them as you passed right by their dwellings. You could pretend that the place was something else, some other sort of city, with neighborhoods and families, grandparents, bachelors, children, pets, all making room, getting along, overcrowded but civic-minded, law-abiding and peaceful.

  Nothing and no one would bother you here, not even the cats that sat on the tombs and watched without seeming to see you, then snarled and took off running when you made the slightest move. Every motion was a blur across the edge of your peripheral vision. Was that a feral cat or the beating wings of a stone angel or a puttering three-wheeled truck bristling with brooms and rakes? No one would harm you, nor would anyone help—if, for example, you’d got here and realized that you had no idea where, in this city of graves, Simone de Beauvoir was buried.

  People sat on benches along the wide cobbled avenues: a desiccated old lady in a black coat and lavender gloves, two middle-aged sisters with matching small dogs. Clasped together, a pair of young lovers in blue jeans and sweaters flung themselves across their bench, their limbs at the floppy angles of the dead or gravely wounded. Everyone seemed insubstantial, flat, like pencil drawings or ghosts, and gave no sign of noticing Leo and Nina. Especially not the young couple, whom Nina and Leo hurried past with an uneasy and, it seemed to Nina, jealous haste. Why should they be jealous? They’d made love almost all last night.

  On another bench a natty old gentleman in a dark tweed jacket rotated his head and shoulders in small obliging increments so a photographer could shoot his distinguished face from every flattering angle.

  “Who is he?” asked Nina. “Do you recognize him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Leo. “A poet, maybe. He looks like Buster Keaton.”

  He looked to Nina like someone they could ask for directions. What would it cost Leo to ask? He needn’t mention Simone de Beauvoir. He could say that they were looking for Sartre. This old man would know and gladly explain where to find Sartre’s grave. But it wasn’t in Leo’s nature to ask, certainly not in this case. And since his French was so much better than hers, Nina couldn’t ask, and was reduced to glaring at Leo as they passed the old man and walked on.

  “Where is the goddamn grave?” Leo said. “If you know it’s in this cemetery, why don’t you know where it is?”

  But it was Leo who had said that de Beauvoir’s grave was here. Leo was never wrong about such things. It was Nina who made mistakes.

  “Let’s forget it,” Nina said. “If it’s too hard…maybe it’s not here…this is taking too much time.”

  “We’re here,” said Leo. “Let’s find the goddamn grave if it’s so goddamn important. It’s not like I haven’t told you the truth about de Beauvoir, just like I have to tell you every goddamn—”

  “Tell me what, Leo?” said Nina.

  “Nothing,” said Leo. “Sorry. Let’s keep on looking for the grave. We’ve wasted the goddamn time already.”

  Oh, this was awful! Awful! They were practically never like this, like a married couple with decades of practice in detesting and boring each other! The reflexive squabbles of intimacy were what they most wanted to avoid.

  Nina scanned the names on the tombs. Who would have thought that Death had undone so many? It was like trying to find an old friend whose address you had misplaced by checking the names on every door in a large foreign city. In a regular city, a living city, Leo’s directional sense was useful. But it wasn’t working in the dead’s hometown, and Leo wasn’t pleased.

  “This is just like yesterday,” Nina said. “I kept getting lost. And then I’d surface on some boulevard and I’d know where I was, more or less.”

  Leo didn’t answer. Nina observed—did Leo?—that they seemed to be walking past the same graves they’d just passed. Oh, they should have skipped this and gone to Père Lachaise, where Leo would have known where to find every grave worth finding.

  “Look!” Nina said. “Who’s buried there? Look, Leo! It’s Baudelaire.”

  Even in the graveyard the famous dead retained some cachet. From far away you could sense that a particular grave was special and gave off a sort of aura, like celebrities at parties. Did the dead still have personalities? Certainly Baudelaire did, as did Maupassant; both their graves were surrounded by force fields, palpable from a distance. Wouldn’t Allo! readers like knowing where to pay their respects to great French writers, and maybe snap their loved one’s photo beside the tomb of—

  “Let’s bag it, Nina,” Leo said. “Sartre and the girlfriend must be somewhere else.”

  But they were here. They had to be, or Leo wouldn’t have said so, twice. So what? It wasn’t worth it. Coming here was a giant mistake, and now it was time to correct it.

  They needed lunch. Then on to the Cluny and Père Lachaise. She and Leo would forget this, just as they had already forgotten their miserable trek through the Catacombs. Though of course they hadn’t forgotten and were only pretending, which only made their misery and frustration seem cumulative and more depressing.

  They were heading toward the gate when Nina looked down a wide path and saw a grave that looked from a distance like a homemade shrine, decked with flowers and bright objects. This grave gave off, with unmistakable force, that indefinable aura that preserved the dead’s reputations even here in the graveyard.

  “I think I see it,” Nina said. “Over there! Leo, look!”

  Leo turned. “You may be right,” he said dully.

  They approached the graves cautiously as if they were at a party and were inching toward a group of guests surrounding de Beauvoir and Sartre.

  Two simple plaques lay side by side. Sartre’s grave was bare. De Beauvoir’s was covered with flowers, votive candles, marble eggs, handwritten notes pinned down by rocks, and a confettilike sprinkle of punched metro tickets, faded and bloated by sun and rain. These were tokens pilgrims left as proof they’d completed their mission. Nina had no metro stubs. She and Leo had walked here. Shou
ld she leave their punched Catacombs tickets? Leo probably had them, but Nina couldn’t make herself ask.

  “Like the grave of a fucking voodoo queen,” Leo said. “These French feminists are just like their grandmothers, lighting candles to the saints. They should sell actual relics. I’ll bet there’d be a market for the finger bone of Saint Simone.”

  Most of the notes were illegible, puckered by yesterday’s rain. But two handwritten letters, both on fresh notebook paper, must have been left here this morning. One was in Cyrillic. Nina hesitated briefly, then knelt so she could read the other, which turned out to be in English. The top corner was folded down, hiding parts of the text. It seemed wrong to touch it. Nina read what she could.

  “Blank blank Pakistani student,” Nina read. “Thank you, dear Simone. Thank blur, big blank. Thank you for being the first.”

  The first what? The first woman to write her own books and edit her lover’s manuscripts, schedule his romances and intercede with girls he’d tired of but couldn’t bring himself to reject, including several he’d agreed to marry only because they’d proposed…. That couldn’t be what the Pakistani woman meant. But why was Nina dwelling on that? De Beauvoir had managed to write her books, and now her lover lay beside her, and hers—not his—was the grave heaped with presents, metro tickets, and flowers.

  Someone had left a book on the grave, a paperback sealed in a clear plastic bag.

  L’Amour fou. Roman.

  “Perfect,” Leo said. “A big literary best-seller by some sex-crazed woman novelist about her brief obsessive love affair with a married Russian double agent. All I did was wait for his phone call. And then he went back to his wife. That sort of hooey. Bad Jean Rhys. Bad Edna O’Brien. Boring. Jesus, who cares?”

  Worn out from the effort of deciphering Leo’s utterances and decoding his shifting moods, Nina had grown so inattentive to her own responses that it took her a while to understand why her spirits had just plummeted.

  All I did was wait for his call—wasn’t that the story of Nina’s stay in Paris before Leo arrived? Leo was right, it was tedious. Who wanted to hear about women strung out over guys? Men thought it neurotic and trivial; worse, it made them feel guilty. And women considered it bad luck to even mention that there were still women like that. Women whose hearts could be shattered by men were an embarrassment to their sex. It was bad for the image of Liberated Womanhood to admit that such women existed!

  Leo must have said something. He waited for Nina’s reply.

  “Excuse me?” Nina said.

  Leo didn’t answer. He and Nina stood in silence, looking from Sartre’s grave to de Beauvoir’s and back.

  “His name is on top,” Leo said.

  “I saw that.” Nina liked it that Leo noticed, too. But what did that signify, really? His paying—and calling—attention to this gender inequity beyond death might just be another trick, a technique that worked on women, like playing Billie Holiday songs and peering into their passionate souls. If that fooled women, anything would! Women were so pathetic. Poor Simone de Beauvoir with her hopeless love, her galley proofs and girl students!

  By now the silence had lasted too long to be comfortable even for lovers, if that’s what they were. Nina felt compelled to speak, although she had nothing to say.

  “Sex and death,” she said. Her faux-casual wave took in the two graves.

  Leo said gloomily, “Death without sex turns out to be the actual story.”

  Why couldn’t Leo stop it? For now, for a day or two at least, they could have sex without death, if Leo would just quit ruining everything by being so gloomy and morbid.

  “You know what these two lovebirds did in the war?” Leo said. “Sartre decided to start the Resistance. Like it was his idea. It never occurred to him that anyone would think of it without him. So he formed his own cell to discuss Resistance theory and tried to recruit other members—guys who were already in the Resistance, but who wouldn’t tell Sartre because they thought he was just some fruitcake who liked to sit in cafés and run his mouth…. When de Beauvoir lost her teaching job for corrupting the morals of female students, she got hired to write for the collaborationist radio station.”

  “I know that, Leo,” Nina said quietly.

  But Leo went on, “De Beauvoir always swore she wasn’t anti-Semitic. I mean, she had affairs with Jewish guys. As if that proved anything at all!”

  Nina flinched, though she knew this wasn’t meant personally. At least she hoped it wasn’t. Once, as if it were an abstract matter of mild interest to them both, Leo had mused aloud that he didn’t much like the way Nina pronounced the word Jewish. He claimed that she pursed her lips as if she were sucking a lemon. After that, she tried not to say the word at all.

  Leo was hardly ever like this! He put his energies into good living, sex, food, and travel, not into harboring venomous hatreds against dead existentialists. Like poor Camille Claudel, silenced by death and helpless to defend herself against Madame Martin, Sartre and de Beauvoir had to lie there while Leo stood directly over them and told the worst stories he knew. And it wasn’t their fault; he wasn’t mad at Sartre and de Beauvoir—he was angry at Nina for dragging him here and making him change his plans.

  Leo said, “You want to know the truth? The truth is, I’m jealous. I’m jealous that they’re immortal, that the faithful are still making pilgrimages to their graves. Who the hell’s going to visit the grave of a guy who wasted his life editing newsletters for hypochondriacs and cheap greedy retiree tourists from Connecticut and the Jersey suburbs?”

  I will, thought Nina. I will, Leo. But it wouldn’t have helped to say so.

  “They’re not immortal, Leo,” she said. “As a matter of fact, they’re dead. And it doesn’t make them any happier that people are coming to see them. They don’t know about it, Leo. You know as well as I do. The point is to be happy when you’re alive….”

  Nina’s voice trailed off, and she looked searchingly at Leo. Was this too much passion for him? Surely, their ban on expressed emotion didn’t include helping Leo deal with his fear of death.

  After a silence Leo said, “Gather ye rosebuds? Is that your point, Nina? The grave is a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace. All right. Brilliant. Can we go now?”

  “Sure,” said Nina, blinking back tears. Before Leo joined her in Paris, she’d prayed to have him here with her. And for what? To have this dreary argument over Simone de Beauvoir’s grave, to have Leo act like she was a fool for trying to make him feel better?

  “Let’s beat it.” Leo sounded cheered by the prospect of leaving.

  One good thing about Leo was that he didn’t hold grudges and had a mercifully short memory for quarrels and moments of strain. As soon as they left the Catacombs, they’d acted as if it had been fun, and now that they were escaping Montparnasse Cemetery they could forget this sniping over the graves, those fits of temper and annoyance when they’d thought they were lost.

  Retracing their steps, they took the broad empty avenue bordered with benches, trees, and graves. They walked so quickly that the headstones they passed seemed to flip over like rows of collapsing dominoes. The squat trees were bare, with skinny fingerlike branches vertically clawing the air. Giant gnarled cankers grew riotously over their trunks. Their bark had a metallic sheen, gold and silver, peeling like the wallpaper at the Hotel Danton. A few papery leaves clattered along the cobblestones.

  Someone turned a corner and came toward them.

  A young man. Then another.

  Another.

  Another.

  All skinheads.

  That Nina could read them so quickly was part of the effect: the stubbly hair, the leather jackets, the jeans, the peaked caps and black Doc Martens. The skinheads spotted Nina and Leo, and began walking toward them.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Nina.

  “What’s the matter?” said Leo.

  “Here comes trouble,” said Nina.

  “Don’t be paranoid,” Leo s
aid. “Just keep walking. Nothing will happen. It’s not like we’re…Moroccans.”

  Two tall lumpy guys with faces the color and texture of cooked cauliflower walked on either end. The other two, in the middle, were slighter and more tense.

  “Couples, do you think?” Leo whispered. Why was he so relaxed? Leo, who always insisted he wouldn’t be surprised by a flat-out Nazi resurgence within the next five years. Why couldn’t Leo see what was obvious to Nina, that these boys intended to rape her and make Leo watch, and afterwards kill Leo and make Nina watch that. Or else they would rape and torture Leo and then get around to Nina.

  But maybe nothing would happen. Maybe it was paranoia. Nina put her hand on her chest to quiet the buttery thump of her heart. How could Leo accuse her of feeling safe because she wasn’t Jewish? If fear, as Leo claimed, was a Jewish emotion, then Nina was the Jew this time. How could Leo have been scared in the Catacombs when they weren’t in danger and so stupidly serene now when they were about to be sodomized and killed? Who said Leo was the sensible one? The one who knew what was real?

  How did Leo and Nina look to these guys? She rarely thought of herself from the outside. It was hard enough being inside herself, and trying to see inside Leo. The only time she was conscious of their appearance was when she and Leo flirted in public, and that was not an aspect of themselves that they wanted to show a gang of neo-Nazis.

  Nina was blond. Okay, Aryan. That’s how Leo described her. And Leo? Not American. French? French gangster? Jewish? It was possible, though not certain, that the skinheads registered that. Or maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe this wasn’t about religion or race but about social class. Maybe the skinheads wouldn’t have cared if Leo and Nina were Africans or Arabs but simply wanted to kick the shit out of anyone with a good wristwatch. Nina would be useless in a fight. Leo was strong, compact enough. But this was four against one.

  No one said a word. Then suddenly, as if on command, the four guys walking toward them fanned out and blocked the road so that Nina and Leo would have to pass between them.