Venus in the Musée de l’Homme

She wears not bananas but furs, yet her flesh still tightens into pebbly relief in the cool halls of the museum. There are no more bananas to be had, anyway. There’s a war on. Her heels, studded with steel nails, tap and scrape along the marble government tile. Her hair is marcelled into an inky, rococo screen; her cocoa cheek is tickled by the fans of her black eyelashes; the darkened silver of foxhair plays against her neck. She is the most famous woman in France and one of the richest. As they pass the displays, her manager, a stout Sicilian with a pencil mustache, points at a collection of trepanned skulls and cracks a joke. She laughs and the skin of her throat gleams like polished ash.

The guards fidget and blush as she passes; their clothes feel tight, the room incongruously warm, and they raise soiled handkerchiefs to the pearls of sweat that string along their hairlines. The shortest guard, the clown, winks behind her slender back at his companion, and passionately grips the air in front of him, hip high. Without sound, his mouth shapes her name: Joséphine. The name of an empress, the face of a star, the Black Venus of the Théâtre Champs-Elysées, who danced naked but for the fruit skirt, letting her pet leopard loose in the orchestra pit, for laughs.

Then she turns. Her smile is bright with fame. They would fall to their knees if they could move, but they stand, a temporary exhibit of the Foolishness of Frenchmen. “I’ve come to see the goddess,” she says. “Where’s the Hottentot?” And after the silence and shock, she makes a goofy face and laughs, and everyone happily laughs with her. Over there, they point, so helpful, Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît, là-bas, then they add, But it is nothing to look at. But she is already gone, beyond the knucklebones of Australopithecus, the straw huts of Java man, the stone statues with their phalluses like log canoes, the Sahara scene and the stone chip knives, to the wide hall near the entrance where she expects to find she doesn’t know what.

Beside the plaster figure there are set two jars: one holds a dark rubber orchid, the other a brain. For a moment she can’t recognize the flower floating in the green brine. Her eyes search and wander; she sees the glass case where, on red cloth, are the bones, boiled clean and dry, laid out in separated lines, the ribs arching from the vertebrae like the wings of a serpent. And then she sees: the flower’s petals are skin. She bends to look. Its petals droop and hang like shriveled fruit. The articles stand before her: the mind of a woman, the sex of a woman, a woman’s bones. Like the relics of a saint, or a rebus hiding some lost pun.

How ’bout that, says Giuseppe, leading her on.

They return past the baskets, the clay shards, the empty skulls, to where the photographers wait at the door and beyond, through the crowd with all its Nazis and into the waiting car, where she blows kisses and the flashbulbs pop. And as the window rolls up, she sees them all behind glass: the street and the soldiers on the corner like plaster figures in an enormous diorama. In her mind an image appears—instead of that Hottentot flower, the balls of Hermann Göring floating like pickled radishes in a jar, and then, like a glorious vision, the head of Hitler on a plate. Outside the car, the bodies move in slow motion, and a few eyes shake with undisguised love. Fifteen thousand men have proposed to her since she arrived. So vive la France, Pepito, she says to her man as the car pulls out. Vive la France, anyway.