Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  All my best clothes came from Gigi’s shop. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, but I liked the way she dressed me. She had a slightly off-key way of saying things like “Mais—you’ve lost weight!” or “Tiens! You’re nice and brown!” implying that it was but a matter of days since she had observed you passing her shop looking fat and pasty.

  Gigi had arrived in the village in the autumn of 1981. She drove down the Route Nationale 7 from Paris in a van. She rented a shop on the main boulevard, ordered clothes at the prêt-à-porter shows and business began.

  She sent the women of the village out into the streets to march for the great French art of seduction. She taught them to walk and to sway and to sit, to use cloth as it hadn’t been used since the days of Greek and Roman tunics, to fold it in sinuous lapping curves about their bodies, and to tell dramatic stories in cut and color. Following the drab invasions of the seventies, the beatnik honey-makers, the bearded potters, the aromatic herbalists on wheat-free diets, Gigi did more to promote the cause of seduction in the village by color and cut than anyone since Matisse himself. Barcelonaises blew in on the weekends, stepping from their husbands’ Mercedes into Gigi’s shop, their heels so fabulously high and sharp that barely more than a square centimeter of pavement came into contact with the shoe. They flicked quickly through the hanging clothes, as their grandmothers might have picked over fruit on a market stall, flashing contemptuous looks and buying up all the most extravagant colors.

  A circle of women meets there every weekday afternoon. They analyze and dream, unpicking and stitching and altering clothes to suit the shape of the client. They talk in hushed voices. Talk is speculative, vicious, sometimes full of love, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sharp as scissors. They are expert lovers. They have grown-up children and private lives. They read Elle and the Goncourt Prize winners. They use electrical gadgets to eliminate cellulite and body hair. Toward the end of the afternoon, in winter, they turn on the lamps, take out their spectacles and draw the cloth up closer to their eyes. They bite needles and pins between their brightly painted lips, and the weak pink inside edges and the pale flesh of their gums show as they break off the thread. The wide balletic movements of their arms throw angular shadows on the shop walls. Now and then their eyes flick up, noting the movements of the villagers along the dogleg boulevard, in the triangle between the pharmacy, the museum and the café. Gigi’s assistant, Pia, fetches a tray of tiny white coffee cups from the bar around the corner. Pia is a plump girl with fine ankles and perfect skin, a Jehovah’s Witness. She is a good saleswoman because she is fair but not beautiful. Gigi, who has taught her to pluck her eyebrows, is always complaining that she hides her beautiful baby-soft arms.

  Gigi’s window is a work of art. Through every season her fiberglass dolls posture in the tiny display window, cavorting and thumbing their noses at the Great Dead Male artists in the museum across the way. Gigi shares with Picasso an eccentric approach to feminine beauty. Better a banshee than a blushing bride, she’ll say. A florid complexion can be nicely lit from underneath by a pale-green blouse, a cruelly cut neckline can frame a crepuscular décolleté in vicious relief. She is a mistress of ragtimes in primary colors. She crawls around the display window like a reptile in an illuminated tank, her coffee-colored hands stroking and teasing at the fabric, tweaking roughly at the mannequins’ skirts, lingering at the crotch, teasing out pleats, palms sliding up the insides of their thighs to check for labels that might spoil the drape of the cloth. Or you will see her standing in the doorway of her shop, looking up and down the boulevard, waiting for the truck, folding her arms and shifting her weight over onto one hip, a ghostly seat for a child now grown.

  Women come in, sometimes with their grown-up daughters, sometimes to try to find something that will make them look like their grown-up daughters, sometimes just to chat. And if there are no real customers Gigi’s friends sometimes try on the stock and twist and scowl in front of the mirrors. I’d pass Gigi’s shop on my way to the mailbox at seven in the evening, and Luc would be there, sitting the wrong way around on a chair with his hands up on its back, in his jeans and baggy woolen sweater. He’d be leaning forward and laughing and chatting with the women, saying, no, the color’s not right, try the red one, or try it with the leather coat, and they’d sway up and down in front of him, and he’d pretend not to notice the way they thrust their crotches in his face. Gigi loved it when he dropped in. I suppose it added a frisson, having a man around, smoking and bringing a touch of testosterone to the air, which usually smelled of ironing, since Pia steam-ironed the clothes once a week by rotation. He’d smoke a cigarette in the doorway before leaving, so I wouldn’t object to the perfume on his clothes. Gigi had one of Luc’s paintings on the wall, from his “femme rose” period, the only time in his life he did anything figurative—female portraits, all done in childish pink paint, with breasts drawn like a W, and often with an angry stab of the brush for a tongue. They were a slap in the face to the notion of feminine beauty the shop proposed, but Gigi had the nerve to hang hers on the wall, like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s story.

  It is difficult to write about Gigi. There is so much I know about her; so much, also, I will never know. What kind of bond exists between women who have shared a lover? When Luc met me there was a kind of official handover of power, but it was one of those handovers where the old regime continues to see to the details of administration in the early days of the new one. She corrected my French. She told me that if I was going to go running I should avoid the boulevard; it wasn’t dignified. She would call me in off the street, with her cashmere cardigan draped around her shoulders and a sharpened pencil slid behind her ear.

  “Those jeans are hideous,” she would say. “Where are you going?”

  “To the beach.”

  “That might pass for chic in London, chérie, but here you just look like one more hippie. And after the beach?”

  “Dinner at Les Lauriers.”

  “What will you wear?”

  “The same?”

  “No you won’t. People will think I’ve nothing left to sell. Come inside. Take those things off. Put this on. Now.”

  She gave me all my best clothes. She gave me her best lover. And sometimes, when we were watching the dancing in the square, or he was standing behind me at a bar, Luc would run his hands over the red dress, the one that clung to my skin as though I had grown inside it from a small seed.

  “Tiens,” he’d say quietly, so close his lips brushed against my face and I smelled his tobacco, but couldn’t see his eyes. “These are Gigi’s hips!”

  REFRESHMENTS

  There are three main cafés on the boulevard. Everyone appears to drink slowly and talk quietly, or maybe it just seems that way because it’s out of doors. There is also a salon de thé in the square with the fountain. The couple who run it often forget it’s their café and that they are the staff. They’ll look up from where they are sitting under a parasol, playing cards, with a pot of Darjeeling and a cake each, wondering what’s happened to the service.

  Angélique’s bar is next to the museum. Angélique’s brother is a doctor. When I went to him with a stomachache he gave me a piece of paper which, when I handed it in at the pharmacy, turned out to be a prescription for a book—The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. They always have a self-improvement proverb or quotation of the day written up in chalk on the board, and the doctor is their literary adviser. It’s not that difficult to come up with something to send the villagers on their way spiritually refreshed: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” would sound profound in French. When Angélique changed the name of her bar from Chez Angélique to Papillon Vert for no obvious reason, Luc boycotted it for a few weeks, objecting that any shop, bar or gallery whose title didn’t tell you either the name of the owner, or what it sold—and it seemed unlikely Angélique would be serving green-butterfly sandwiches—was inherently suspect. On the whole the French are strikingly straightforward, by English standar
ds, when it comes to naming things. All animals born in one twelve-month period have to be given a name beginning with that year’s letter, like a car registration. All streets have abstract names like Freedom, Republic, Commerce. Even people all seem to share a very small common pool of names. In this way French language resists the Lycra stretch of transatlantic English. Stefan, who called his daughter Héloïse, says they keep their fantasy for better things. Angélique and her partner left the village in 1968, when they were eighteen, to hitchhike to Katmandu, but they only got as far—Luc says, sweetly—as Narbonne.

  The three main cafés are the Café de France, the Café du Sport and the Café Central.

  A socialist cooperative was set up in 1938 to finance and manage the Café de France—the one with the green umbrellas under the plane trees. Many families still have shares today. They hold their annual general meeting on November 2, the day of the dead, when the streets are lined with tubs of golden chrysanthemums and fallen leaves. After visiting the graves of the dead they convene at the café to go over the accounts. The woman who runs the bookshop across the way decided to start a Café Philosophe in the room upstairs. The first talk of the series was given by a woman who worked in advertising in Perpignan. It was about advertising techniques, with a bit of Marcuse thrown in to blot up the many references to her own rapidly expanding business (cards on the table in the back). Since everything is subject to philosophical consideration in France, she could equally have talked about getting jam to set, or some Himalayan trails. The Café Philosophe becomes the secular equivalent of the Sunday sermon, full of reminders that “life’s a bit like that.”

  Two young brothers run the Café du Sport with military efficiency, and polish their photos of Picasso every morning. It’s easy to identify the political right, Stefan says, they carry with them an odor of Mr. Clean. They hose the pavement down every night and their chairs are always first out in the morning. It’s a good place to drink coffee when it opens at seven-thirty, and to read newspapers from Madame Arnoux’s next door. In summer the heat crinkles your newspaper by nine, but inside it is chilly and Vanessa Paradis is always on MTV.

  On Saturday mornings and summer evenings, clusters of acquaintances, tourists and locals arrange themselves outside the Café Central, opposite the Roman arch, creating patches of alliances, as on a schoolroom map. Ice cream in colors of flesh-pink, pale brown and green sprout like flowers on ornamental shrubs, frothy and crude, and the waiters move in formation between tables with trays on their fingertips, each aware of the others’ position, so that if one threw his tray to his colleague at any moment, he could catch it with his spare hand and pass it through his legs to his colleague behind. In summer there are as many English voices as French.

  I’d never noticed before how loud an English voice is. I suppose it’s less noticeable at home, but here it squawks jaggedly, like a badly played clarinet against a string ensemble. “Gary, look at this, let’s get this for the table; it’s cotton, no it’s not. Well anyway, it’ll wipe, let’s get some. Where’s Alison gone? Gary! Where’s Alison? You take the bags back to the car. No, you, I’m going to find Alison. Where’s she gone?”

  Of the fifteen restaurants, Les Lauriers and Le Jardin Fleuri have two Michelin stars. Les Lauriers is a graceful building with dark-pink walls and turquoise woodwork, a garden and a slender conservatory which is heated all year round. The owner is the only female sommelier in France. People mostly go for the cheese and the wine, all of them local, all from sources known only to the sommelière herself. You peer at the label on the bottle, scribble it down on your napkin, set off to find it the next day, and never do. The same with the cheeses. It’s a mystery to me. Les Lauriers votes to the left.

  Le Jardin Fleuri is on the road that leads out of the back of the village and up the mountain to the border with Spain—a ten-minute walk from the village. It looks like any glossy hotel with fake-hacienda appeal in any country in the world. It votes to the right.

  The pizzeria on the square serves Catalan specialties, ensalivada, boules de picolat, pollastre amb gambes, la sardinade, morue, fraginat de Baixas, and belongs to one of the town’s most colorful families, a pair of brothers, perfect examples of the Catalan style, blown up to major-league proportions, so that they are tall, as well as dark-eyed and brown-skinned. I watch their hands and wonder what evolutionary purpose such huge but fine-fingered hands could serve—rope-making, or calf-delivering, maybe, something for which both size and delicacy would be an asset. Paulo, the younger brother, will often sit out in the afternoon in his suit and a hat on the café terrace, maybe waiting for someone to pass with whom he wants a quiet but public word, which will be delivered painfully, with a stammer—a beguiling impediment in a man of such athletic grace. Janine, his girlfriend, had two boyfriends before him; one of them lisped and the other couldn’t pronounce his “r”s. Paulo has huge feet. His drunkenness always seems like a courtesy, to make everyone else feel more relaxed. If drunk enough, he dances, watching his feet come miraculously to life, bending down to gaze at them in astonishment. His brother, Jean-François, runs the bullfighting association and owns a nightclub. They have lived with all the most beautiful women in town, and their present girlfriends look sour and triumphant, knowing they have caught them at the right time, when they are growing tired and want less trouble in their lives.

  ACTIVITIES

  There is a list of activities for visitors at the Syndicat d’Initiative—riding, canoeing, thermal baths, Cathar castles—but there are some things it doesn’t mention, like swimming at La Cascade, a waterfall concealed in a crack in the hills. There is swimming, too, at La Veyroux—turn right at the sign for the organic duck farm and climb, by car, for another ten minutes or so. Here, the only person you ever meet will be Stefan, reading Libération at three in the afternoon in a shady pool, with minnows flicking around his thighs. Or you could spend a night wallowing in one of the sulfurous hot pools in the foothills behind the town. You could rent horses and ride up through the mimosa groves and cherry orchards onto the windy hill called le Ventous, from where you can see the sea.

  The Museum of Modern Art is open all year round. The inner courtyards are planted with olives, where you can sit out in the sun and peer into the cool white chambers where the paintings are displayed. There’s a series of sketches by Matisse, works by Picasso, Derain and the other Fauves, a huge Tàpies, and a collection of local contemporary painters. Opposition to the museum comes from the local painting club, which works up neat miniatures of a cherry orchard with the Canigou in the background and rages at the smears in the museum by people like Luc, who can’t even decide which hand to hold a paintbrush in. At the front entrance a graffiti-style mural by Tàpies confuses foreigners who have boldly asked for directions to the public lavatories and not really unscrambled the reply.

  The Cinema shows one film every week, once on a Wednesday for members of the cinema club, and once on a Saturday for the general public. For half an hour at the start of the cinema club someone gives a paper on the film shown the previous Wednesday. Once I heard a lecture on signals of thrust and retreat in The Bridges of Madison County, culminating in a frame-by-frame analysis of the scene where Clint Eastwood stops at the traffic lights in the rain. There are sometimes performances at the Salle de Spectacle by Marie-Lou’s dance troop—Pierrot et Columbine, Coppélia, Scheherezade. A touring theater group stops off for a couple of nights four or five times a year and stages a production of something classic with a twist, Don Quixote, or Le Cid.

  But it is a place for being, not for doing. The lay of the land came first, and the people take its shade, respect the way the river runs, the slopes offered to the sun, the blessing of the mountain. Il faut faire avec. If you grow up in England you become used to a things-to-make-and-do-on-rainy-days way of looking at the world, learning to adapt it for your pleasure. Of course there are rainy days here, far more than the twenty days a year they will admit to, but for the most part you just watch. You feel the
sun on your skin. You do the things God meant you to do. There are only enough hours in a life to do the things you have to do. It is as though God wrote out lots of instructions at the beginning of the world, like “build cities,” “make maps,” “invent printing press,” “cure the sick,” “discover penicillin”—endless penalties to be performed the world over, forever. The instructions around here simply said things like “walk,” “play with children,” “plant orchard.” Luc had taken the one that said “sit under tree and watch spider.”

  Up at the farm, while a painting dried, he’d sit out under a lime tree with the dog. I’d see him through the window from the sink in the kitchen. I couldn’t believe he could spend so long just staring up into a tree. One day, it must have been a Thursday—he didn’t work on Thursdays, when he often cut his own hair with a blunt pair of scissors, ending up looking for the next couple of days like a schoolboy with lice who had suffered at the hands of a rough matron—I came out to see if the elderflower had set. Both my former mothers-in-law had tried to teach me how to make elderflower champagne—not that I had been married twice, but my former husband’s parents each had, so I’d had two mothers-in-law, each with her own recipe for elderflower champagne, one much sweeter than the other.

  Luc’s dog looked up at me, then turned back and stared up at the tree as well. Luc held up his hand and said, very softly, stop. I sat down on the grass beside him. The sleeve of his sweater was smeared with acrylic paint and there were a few stiff gray hairs caught in the wool from that morning’s mangled haircut. The dog’s nose was split, a constant glistening wound, red and wet. She looked around at us, then back up into the tree again. It turned out they had been looking not at the tree, or the leaves of the tree, but at a spider, who was rappelling down from a leaf on a rope of spittle, but they could equally well have been watching the tree. He was someone who could watch a leaf for hours. As his focus narrowed—intensified, he said—he would come to concentrate maybe on just one tiny pore, its greenness, its roundness, the leak of moisture, the bite of the leaf’s edge. And you, he said to me, you cannot watch a leaf for five seconds without wondering about the breeze that came on the storm that arose from the cloud that was moved by the tug of a gale that came from the switch of a reed of corn in a field where a butterfly’s wing moved. He’d go and paint in the early evening, while across the valley someone scythed, or mowed a field with a giant pair of electric shears that swung from a waist harness. In his painting you might see the edge of the leaf, or the pore, drawn with the blunt edge of a stick on the huge paper sheets he stuck together with glue and taped to the floor of the barn. The dog would sit with her front paws crossed, watching him. She was so happy, loving him, I wished she loved me, too.