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.
“De rien, au revoir,” trilled the guide.
“Au revoir,” Susanna Rose told Leo and Nina, and then she and her daughter were gone.
So Nina’s premonition had been all wrong. She had mistaken Susanna Rose for a demon instead of a guardian angel. She had thought Susanna Rose would sow discord and erotic unrest when in fact she was offering help in the form of a grisly story that Nina hoped she could keep in mind after she and Leo left the prison and returned to their regular lives.
Nina felt like an explorer in one of those misty historical paintings of white men in armor or buckskins on the edge of a cliff from which some misguided native scout points out the promised land. Though what Nina saw before her was hardly a heaven on earth, but rather a desolate wilderness she would have to cross and would cross, out of faith in what waited (well, what might wait or what might not be there at all, who could possibly say?) on the other side. How she longed to bridge that chasm and find someone to trust, to know as well as she knew herself. And they wouldn’t have to discuss their love, this time because what existed between them would be as tangible, as real, as simple and mysterious as a loaf of bread. She would—that is, she hoped she would—feel that way about someone. But it seemed unlikely that this someone would be Leo….
Her desire for Leo would intensify, growing more obsessive and tragic the nearer it got to ending, to changing from a constant presence into a constant—and present—absence. Their passion would die, finished off by deepening misunderstanding, by their inability to exchange one unambiguous word, to break their sacred taboo against admitting the other mattered. Nina tried to tell herself: No. They would love each other forever. The love they’d made, the love they’d shared was a fact of nature, an entity that existed and had its own survival instinct. But Nina didn’t believe that. She and Leo would edge apart. Leo wouldn’t dig up her grave or come down to hell to save her.
Meanwhile it would help to think of Danton lifting his wife from her coffin. It would inspire Nina to keep her sights fixed past Leo. Danton’s story was a light to steer toward without knowing where she was going, the light of a love that couldn’t be argued with, nor told it couldn’t succeed: Don’t bother. Leave that dead woman alone. Stay out of hell with that lyre.
Nina imagined Danton hunkered down, his wide strong back muscled like a Rodin bronze. And her hands flew to her ears as if he really were howling—
Someone touched her, covered her hands with his own. Nina shuddered. It was Leo. She knew it was Leo. But her heart refused to quit hammering as he tenderly peeled back her fingers, starting with her thumbs. He leaned close and began to whisper, his warm breath on her temple. The guide was still there, though she’d moved farther on toward the exit, as if to urge them forward. Really, they should be leaving and let her get on her way.
Leo’s chest brushed Nina’s shoulder as he whispered in her ear. She longed to arch her back and rub up against him—that is, till she understood what he was saying.
He said, “The best part, the really terrific detail that what’s-her-name, Susanna, left out was that Danton remarried within a year. Within one year of digging up his wife and howling over her grave. The second time, he married a girl of sixteen. Some nubile sixteen-year-old cutie…”
Nina took a few steps away and again covered her ears. Once again she shut her eyes, and once more she saw Danton.
She stood where the gravediggers must have stood and watched Danton, crouc
hed and howling. She felt what the gravediggers must have felt. She tried not to breathe. She was determined not to move, not to disturb or stop Danton, not for fear of him but from respect for what he was doing, for the ambition, the foolishness of his doomed impossible hope, disinterring his wife from the grave, that grand ridiculous gesture that proved, despite what Leo said and despite any whisper of doubt, the existence of love beyond reason, beyond the reach of time’s sharp blade: the love that—miraculously, narrowly—evades the arc of the scythe as Death stalks past in his hooded cape, mowing his way through the world.
About the Author
Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Francine Prose
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-4512-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Guided Tours of Hell Page 21
