Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  THE VILLAGE

  It was a Roman town, then a flourishing market town; it was Spanish for a while, then French for a while. In the nineteenth century the vine crop failed, so they planted peach and cherry trees instead. Although the people are small, they planted normal-sized fruit trees, whose fruit they collected by climbing up a ladder with a basket. Then dwarf varieties were planted in Provence, where they are much more organized. There they don’t need ladders or baskets to collect their crop, so their labor costs are lower and their prices cheaper. But the village is still famous for producing the first cherries of the year, traditionally sent to the president’s table in the second week of May. I like to think of his face lighting up after breakfast at the start of a busy day, as Mme La Présidente says chirpily, “Cherries tonight, chéri!”

  Most of the 8,000 inhabitants don’t live in the old town, but in the lotissements—housing developments—outside. The old town coils around the square, with the lion fountain and friendly restaurants, a tall hive of interlocking streets which barely see the light except at midday. Old people live in the old houses, for the most part. Old women sit outside their houses all day, shooing dogs. An English friend calls the road where the house is “Dog Alley.”

  The church is in the middle of the hive, the Madonna statuette crouched in a niche above the dusky altar. It’s built in honey sandstone, with pink brick tiles. From the front entrance it looks eleventh-century. Great wooden doors open into a paved circle. Inside it’s nineteenth-century, hideous and cold. Only an old person could feel happy there. Perhaps even only a dead one.

  Funerals are held at one o’clock. While everyone is having lunch a hearse draws up. You see the sons and daughters of the deceased climbing out of cars with Paris license plates in the late morning, and even catching a bite to eat in the restaurant where the traveling salesmen go. Sometimes there will be a sibling left in town, who has never traveled further than the Pont du Diable, and they walk uneasily side by side behind the coffin, their children eyeing each other up, half scornful, half intrigued. Later there will be feuds about the inheritance. The family and the women of the town attend the service, while the men, sometimes up to 200 of them, as in the case of the funeral of Luc’s mother—Miss Béziers, 1937—stand around outside and smoke and talk about the dead. It’s a restful scene, these men gathered in the church square. There’s a peace about them that draws the unincluded. They look protective, as though you would be safe in their midst; they form groups that you could read, if you had the knowledge, for friendship, for village history, for lives shared. It would be nice to glide among them, invisible, and hear what they said.

  Walking through the narrow streets of the old town you are within touching distance of people eating inside their kitchens—always meat of some kind, or fish. The smell of fish as you round a corner can be so strong and aromatic that the walls start to flicker and you look up and see the hulls of little boats bobbing over your head. In summer you can feel the chill coming off sunless kitchen tiles. The interiors of these houses are brown, cold, stone. The conversations are always loud and vivacious. There is often a Spanish TV channel to be shouted over. By one o’clock everything has been cleared away and the old couples climb into their beds and sleep.

  Widows eat frugally alone, then go out and sit outside the mairie in their floral-print housecoats and talk. They sit side by side on a bench reserved for them, and nod at the young world passing by on foot. One day Luc saw one of his patients, a friend of his deceased mother, sitting there on the bench. There was a space beside her, so he sat down and asked her how she was getting on with her dentures. Very well, she replied; she was very happy. She smiled and sat back, watching the world. Since she seemed content for him to be there, Luc sat on beside her, smiling slightly, too, sighing unconsciously when she sighed, nodding off when she did. Afterward I said, “I saw you on the bench with the old ladies.” He said thoughtfully, “You know, for once in my life I felt completely well with the world.”

  When he says something like that I feel the terror of growing old and dying in a foreign place. In the daytime it seems like a glorious choice, existential in its arbitrariness. While my contemporaries are back in London, living lives between the office and their homes, in rows of houses, on the subway, in long lines of things, I’ve attached myself to this landscape, like a bird whose homing system has thrown up a weirdly mutated set of instructions. But it’s an unnerving freedom, and the thought that the exercising of it could take up the rest of my life strikes me in the night. No one knows anything about me, except that I am from somewhere else. No one knows about my childhood, or has ever asked me about where I studied or lived before. No one interprets my accent, or who I know, or who I went to school with, or what job I do, or my postal code in London, or any of the other things that give you an identity, even if it’s a false one, when you are among your own. Whenever I go back to London I feel naked, the way people can read so much about you that you don’t even know you’re displaying. Here, I am the sum of my spoken words, the way I walk down the street, of accumulated present moments that might one day stack up high enough for a pattern to emerge. Nothing I have done before I came here has any weight. They accept me without question, on the condition that I shed my past.

  THE BOULEVARD

  The Romans made an irrigation system to bring water down from the border hills into the town for their gardens. Thinking of the Romans as gardeners makes you want to discover their gardening literature. Was it Virgil who wrote about gardens and husbandry? Or Ovid? Did Romans take their holidays in places like this? Virgil must have, if he wrote about the mountain, arriving by boat, having sailed from somewhere like Genoa across the Mediterranean bay to land . . . where? On one of the flat beaches of Sigean? Or Empurda, a Roman settlement only a few hours from here by a slow means of transport, itself built on the remains of a Greek town by the sea. Stefan says ruins always look best beside the sea.

  I don’t know what the Romans did here, or when; nobody seems to, but they built, that’s for certain, and they gardened. A garden is a luxury in a walled town. Walking under the Devil’s Bridge and along the banks of the river, where it spills over into the fields, you can see the municipal plots, where most people grow their vegetables and flowers. The water comes down the mountain, through stone gullies, canals and underground channels, till it splashes down behind the hardware store and then along the gutters, sluicing, cleaning and disturbing the air even on the stillest day. Cunning villagers creep out at dawn, when there is a drought, to divert water onto their land with fallen rocks and stones.

  You emerge from the sluiced cobblestone alleys onto the tarmacked boulevard that runs along three sides of the town. A boulevard is a nineteenth-century invention. The outlines for it here must have been clear; it runs from the Porte de France, links up with the Porte d’Espagne, past the café, and right up to the Place de la Liberté—renamed after the war. Here is Maillol’s war memorial, a mother slumped in grief, her stone hands heavy in her unwarmed lap. On May 1 hundreds of villagers gather here in their shirtsleeves to sing the “Internationale,” with a fist in the air. And on your right is the stone washhouse, where women who don’t have a washing machine and consider it too late in life to get used to the launderette still come to plunge their laundry into freezing mountain water.

  Although the village is busy with visitors from late spring until the end of summer, it is not a place that dies in winter. Young people often stay and make their lives here, opening cafés or wine shops, or going into business. In the old town center alone there are three insurance brokers, four banks, two supermarkets, three hardware stores, six épiceries, a fromagerie, two wine cellars—you can fill up the plastic vats in the cellar with good vin de pays for nine francs a liter—five butchers, nine boulangeries, five hairdressers, three florists, seven doctors, eight dentists, twelve dress shops and three news dealers.

  The Maison de la Presse, the large news dealer a couple of doors down from the M
useum of Modern Art, is regarded with suspicion, a corruption of the local, rather modest gene pool. It used to be dark and shabby, like the other two, and sell sweets, tobacco, papers and lottery tickets. Then, it is said, the owners—originally from Paris—won the lottery themselves. They bought up the buildings on either side, and their shop is now bigger than the average WH Smith. You can buy John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer, and magazines in every European language. Tourists line up for their copy of the Daily Telegraph or the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Schoolchildren buy confectionery with artificial colorings and Spice Girl transfers to stick on their upper arms. Japanese watches and carriage clocks are displayed in padlocked glass cases. They sell Basildon Bond stationery, Queen’s Velvet writing papers and Parker pens.

  The owner, Madame Arnoux, is small and dark, with her hair in a chignon and the same round, brown eyes as her namesake in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale. She is a proud commerçante. Her husband is a funereal man with a chalky face. I have a disturbing recurrent image of him standing looking in the bathroom mirror, gripping the edge of the basin as she calls to him from the bedroom, reminding him of the chores of the day ahead. And yet I may be wrong, because her eyes are warm, the color of oxtail soup, and it must be good to wake up to a fine pair of eyes that are never cold. Her speech is one long, hyphenated sentence of greeting, consolation, price-naming and scolding, from eight till eight. She seems to run on sherbet, fizzing Thatcherisme with her fast, till-tapping fingers and her reprimanding cries to the staff: “No, Gaston, the Guardian for Mr. Herbert, not The Times, thirteen francs, there you are, your change, sir, thank you, Gauloises Rouges, certainly, eleven francs, lucky number, never mind, not today, another one.” She knows what everybody smokes, and people feel comfortable buying cigarettes from her. The more people smoke, the happier she is. “Relax!” she cries, as she unwraps another wad of tobacco. “Monsieur, enjoy your pipe!” When I go in to buy Luc’s cigarette papers she tries to persuade me to take the ones with gummed edges, but he won’t have them. He says the gum is unnecessary, that you just have to use the right amount of spit. “You know what that man’s motto is?” she cries. “Why be straightforward when you could be compliqué?’ ”

  On Saturday mornings the boulevard becomes a market place. You can buy organic vegetables, goat cheese, honey, fish, oysters, wine, buttons, pegs, screws, flowers, plants, lace, fabrics, spices, soaps, chickens, dried salt cod, olives, olive oil, bread, paella, terrine, prunes and salami. On Monday and Tuesday mornings it is full of parked trucks unloading into shops. On Wednesday it is taken over by children and teenagers who have the afternoon off from school. They are meant to spend it in self-improvement, like learning another language or having riding lessons or painting at the museum’s art class, but most of them just smoke and flirt and walk the boulevard.

  Every evening, before dinner and after work, the grown men walk the boulevard, too. Luc comes out of his dental office at seven and stands with his dog, his hands in his pockets, nodding at people he knows. He rolls a cigarette, then sets off along the boulevard, under the plane trees. The dog follows. In spring, after the plane trees have flowered, they walk in a cloud of fairy’s cotton, sometimes sneezing. At the junction of the boulevard and the Rue Costète he is joined by Monsieur Montiel, the pharmacist.

  I am standing outside the grocer’s looking at vegetables laid out in baskets, feeling odd because I have just been writing about the mining town in South Yorkshire where I lived as a child, and I feel as though someone has sat on the remote control and accidentally flicked me into this busy early evening scene of warm stones, fluttering awnings and flowers. Stefan comes by on his bicycle, wearing shorts and a clean T-shirt, with his tennis racquet strapped to his back. He stops and talks to me, but quickly: he has seen Luc out of the corner of his eye and will move off again before he draws near. He comments, with a mixture of crudeness and grace, that since the election the pharmacist, now a town councillor, has a new spring in a part of his anatomy that is not his feet. Stefan does not walk the boulevard because he runs and cycles everywhere, and he condemns it, anyway, as a bourgeois way of laying claim to property and space. There are many foreigners living here and in the outlying villages between the mountains and the sea, and still more Parisians. The locals say of outsiders, “Ils ne sont pas d’ici”—they’re not from here. Monsieur Montiel and Luc are definitely “d’ici.” Walking the boulevard proves it. Stefan, who is from Normandy, laughs and says, “Si je suis ici, je suis d’ici.” If I’m here, I belong here.

  Outside the Café du Sport they pause. If you are walking the boulevard you can choose to stop and talk to people walking on the pavements or doing their shopping, but you may not interrupt someone who is walking the boulevard unless you are doing it yourself. That’s the etiquette. They talk briefly with the man who lives in the house opposite mine, who has a face which, from a distance, looks as though a grenade had exploded across the street and pitted it with scars. In fact, what look like indentations at twenty meters are actually age spots, like shading on a map for points of interest. He has a brother who follows him around all day, from one café to the next, like a child blown up to giant size in a cartoon—adult, but with the features of a ten-year-old. The brother got lost during the bull chase in Pamplona one year and turned up in a police station in Buenos Aires. It is the big mystery of his life, but the great discovery of his life was when Luc cured his teeth-grinding, and with it his migraines, by giving him a box of wooden toothpicks, with instructions to chew one every three hours. Sometimes he and his brother will toss their coins onto the tabletop and join the walk.

  The dog, a black shaggy mountain breed, jiggles and pushes between the newcomers to get back to Luc’s side. They stop again outside the Museum of Modern Art. If Luc and his uncle are on speaking terms, he’ll join them, too. Outside the dress shop they stop again and chat with Gigi and her assistant, who are locking up and sighing about slack business, or about a woman who wore a dress for a party and returned it, soiled, demanding her money back. The florist rushes out with a delivery for Gigi from her lover in Nîmes. She looks at him coldly because he was caught last year making anonymous phone calls to her home in the night, heavy breathing and mewing over the phone. When, to his disappointment, she failed to identify him, he began sending her anonymous bunches of flowers, then potted plants, sprays of pampas grass, fleshy orchids and, finally reaching the outer limits of his range, paper poppies, plastic tulips, cacti and palms. She got her lover, a famous lawyer, to write him a warning letter, and he stopped. Now the lawyer gets a thrill from ringing him up at odd times of the day and getting him to take flowers over to Gigi, dictating delicately erotic messages over the phone.

  Etienne, who runs the African art shop, waves and goes to order a lemonade. He is from Paris and doesn’t walk the boulevard. He’ll sit with Anna, the overworked English teacher with a long white ponytail and a Catalan boyfriend who treats her, as she says, in the old-fashioned way, for which one day he may end up in prison. He is one of a group of men in their forties whose muscular bodies are starting to sag and their gambling debts to add up. They are waiting for their parents to die. Their fathers will die first. When their mothers die, they will weep and drink for a few days, then use the money to set up brocantes—secondhand furniture shops—which will fail. Sometimes Anna drinks a slow, cold gin in the early evening and reads a letter from her grown-up daughter in Ashford, England, with the words of her last lesson still ringing in her ears—“A dolphin can laugh, a dolphin can swim, a dolphin can dive and a dolphin can sing!”—Or, if it had been the baccalauréat class, “Did Jane enjoy ‘coming off’ heroin? What is the meaning of the phrase ‘cold turkey’?” I stood in for Anna once when she was ill. The textbook was so depressing I felt glad to have learned French at a school that made you translate phrases like “Madame Aimant’s cat is a secretive tabby with nine lives.”

  The café owner, Astrou, shakes his cloth as the boulevardiers pass. Luc’s dog walks proudly,
like a new recruit. The talk is of the dead and the dying, of horses and painting, of a failed crop, a failed marriage, of local politics, of taxes and feuds. When they draw level with the Salle de Spectacle, they turn. Luc’s dog turns first, like a Girl Scout at the front of a parade, a touch too eager to be part of things. They come back past the café, and will repeat the walk, maybe once more, maybe twice, till conversation runs dry or they get thirsty.

  I’m still standing by the vegetable baskets. My eyes are on Luc, bewitched by his slow walk, like a dancer’s, his tongue flicking out to lick the edge of his cigarette paper, his strong brown hands gesturing excitedly, giving him away, while the rest of his body is schooled and graceful as an athlete’s, and I think I can’t leave, I love it here, and I cannot imagine a time when I won’t know him more intimately than anyone in the world, and be the one his eyes graze over as he passes, and winks at, and tosses his car keys to as I pull a face to show my shopping bags are heavy. I’ll bring the car around to the café and wait for him there.

  THE DRESS SHOP

  Luc had made it quite clear, without actually stating it, that he had been the sexual sensation of Gigi’s life, and she had lived with many men, including the one who was now married to the Lagerfeld model, and who had painted the picture called Woman Met in Martinique, Who Left Me. Now she was well into her fifties and enjoying her late summer beauty. When Luc met me she made some scathing comments, then gave up and merely stipulated that if he was going to insist on going out with me she should get to dress me. Errors of taste could be kept to a minimum in the clothes department, at least.