Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  2. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  LEAVING HOME

  I was eighteen when I first saw the Canigou, without knowing its name. It was the shape of a clean-cutting kitchen instrument against the Mediterranean sky. We’d stopped at the péage and were about to cross over into Spain. It was almost the first day of my adult life. I asked the name of the mountain, but I didn’t remember it, didn’t write it down. Sometimes you ask the name of a thing, of a person, not to remember the name, but the better to remember its face.

  I only realized years later that I had come to live in the place I had never forgotten. I was carrying my shopping out from one of the huge hypermarkets on the edge of the city by the coast, with the wind turning the stiff palm trees into vicious whips, flaying the air, which was tight and warm as a drum. I looked west toward the mountain, toward the village at the bottom of the valley and thought, Oh, it’s here. I came here after all.

  I came here without knowing where I was coming to, except that it was the furthest point south you could go in France. I was married to an Englishman. We chose France because it was cheaper than England and we were free to move anywhere in the world. It was the end of the eighties, we were in our mid-twenties and he was rich.

  We bought a huge, ugly house in the southernmost valley of France. It looked like something that might have been built in Cornwall by a tin merchant. It had once been a water mill, and the river flowed through the back garden, no longer wearing away at the walls, but at 300 meters’ distance. The parched riverbed between the house and the water was a reminder of lost intimacy, of something shriveled and baked. Now it’s overgrown with purple trumpeted buddleia, which attracts orange and white butterflies, and sometimes a gray and black one called Old Lady, as big as my hand. The façade of the house had been remodeled in the nineteenth century, so from the road it looked Gothic and Walt Disney–ish, like someplace Scooby Doo would have refused to enter.

  I moved out one day in August, after three years. I had started telling myself after only a couple of months that “happiness is not the only way to be happy,” in Alice Walker’s words. It wasn’t surprising it hadn’t worked out. Still, I had believed I would stay married to the same man all my life, that from now on there would only be changes here, modifications there, surprises and afflictions, but always the same path; I hadn’t thought there would be a moment when I would lose everything—my confidence that I would one day be a mother; the knowledge that when I woke up each morning my garden would be there, and would have grown; the familiar topography of the house; the status of being a wife and having somewhere to welcome people into, someone to lie down next to at night. It was obvious, though, that these were not reasons for staying. I moved out to the town ten kilometers down the road, into an apartment opposite the Museum of Modern Art that cost thirty pounds a week to rent. It was three and a half years before I bought the village house.

  Suddenly, stripped of everything that had seemed essential for happiness—a husband, the river running through the garden, the music room with two pianos, my garden, the stream of visitors—I was reminded of happiness itself. I was nearer the Mediterranean than the mountains, and the atmosphere here was more open and relaxed. All I had was this tiny apartment; a computer my ex-husband had acquired from his former employers; a wall full of books; a finished, unpublished novel and two small cats. I had a photo album full of wedding shots featuring an alarmed-looking woman and a man looking the way men do when they have spent the afternoon with people shaking their hand and saying, “Well done!”

  Banned, now, from the kind of interminable drink-sodden dinner parties at which expatriates, in their monstrous stone houses, exercise their spite, snobbery and recipe fetishes; freed from the requirement ever again to comment on the relative advantages of plastic liners over cement-and-tile swimming pools, I found myself looking back at the world I’d been part of with regret only for time misspent. It didn’t seem a good idea to stay too high up the valley, being single and female. I carried with me a whiff of adultery most people prefer to keep safely between the covers of their favorite, much-thumbed novels. One woman spat at me in a bar. I didn’t realize she was spitting at me; I thought she was consumptive at first, an illness from another age. It turned out it was just a contemptuous gesture from another age. The French, on the other hand, found the public spurning of me and the abusive phone calls hilarious, like a Beaumarchais play. It heightened the atmosphere in the little apartment, which overlooked the church roof and set me nose to nose with the pigeons.

  There were awful, lonely days at the beginning. I’d fall asleep in the early afternoon. Sleep seemed the only way of reconnecting with what was familiar. I’d fall so deep into the well my head would implode and I’d wake up still inside my sleep, paralyzed, shouting out but making no noise. I read somewhere that this was quite common and had to do with momentary paralysis of the brain. When I eventually managed to wake myself I’d walk around the apartment, banging into the walls, unable to judge the width of doorways, the spaces between the chairs, like being reborn fully adult, but ignorant of how to feed, walk or phone the emergency services.

  I hardly knew anyone in the town. We’d lived for three years up the valley, and only occasionally came this far down for the market, or sometimes to eat. I knew a few French people, but not the ones I wanted to know. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to be part of the landscape, to have a right to live in it, to drop my accent, speak southern French, and have all the time in the world you need for those extra syllables Parisians never use. Stepping out of the expat world was like stepping out of an isolation tent into contact with the smell, touch and weight of things.

  * * *

  My first real friend was Duncan, who stood up for the scarlet woman in me because he’d always fancied being one himself. He also dreamed of being a lady novelist. When I stopped at the mailbox of my old house one day and found a month-old letter from a publisher offering me a contract, he said I was fulfilling his life’s ambitions by becoming both at once.

  Duncan kept goats and made cheese and had moved to the valley from Leicester in the seventies. He had four children and the younger three had stayed there with their mother, living in a feminist commune. The eldest, Ben, was now at university. He had run away to join his father when he was seven, and then he’d run away from his father and the milk churns when he was fourteen on his horse. Arriving at Luc’s farm, he asked for a glass of water and stayed for three years. Ben never went to school, but his father had a huge library, and so he was immensely well read. When he got to university he discovered that he had read everything on the reading list for the three-year course by the time he was twelve, but he didn’t know the order of the letters of the alphabet, or the months of the year. Even now, if you ask him the months of the year he can’t recite them, he has to work them out.

  Duncan looked after me with disinterested kindness and passion, not for me, but for the act of looking after me. He had a succession of beautiful, malicious girlfriends, who bullied him, stamped on his glasses in the middle of the road, slept with his friends, seduced his son and threw paint at his walls. He was utterly poverty-stricken, camp and butch; the funniest, most petulant, most selfish, extravagant man I’d ever met; gay as a daisy one minute, macho the next. To me he was only ever kind. He spent hours sawing wood by hand during the day and mending fences. At night he made little dishes of goat’s liver.

  He read me the short stories of Gabriel García Márquez, Giles Goat Boy by John Barth, Patricia Highsmith, Georges Simenon, The Persian Boy by Mary Renault, something different every night. He called me the synchronicity kid, because, he said, wherever I went coincidences came hurtling out of the sky. He could walk to his bookshelf, where there were over 2,000 volumes, pick up any book and open it at the page with my name on it. Either that or “goat.” His cry, one evening, when he opened a book by Márquez and fell on the first page of a story about a goat with the same name as me sent my cats skittering from the fire and out into
the night. One of them, a ginger kitten, was eaten by a fox.

  Duncan had told me about Luc. He was born here. Not only is he the village dentist, he said, he is also an artist, and he paints horrible pictures, and sells them in Paris, and he is terribly clever and bitter and my son loves him. He sounded right up my alley. Strangely, because Duncan was always pushing me toward men, but then maybe only the men he fancied himself, he never imagined me with Luc. Luc himself says he first saw me one Saturday morning in the café, talking to Duncan and laughing. Luc found Duncan tedious because he laughed too much, too loud, but since I seemed, in public at least, quite well behaved, he told Ben to introduce us.

  MEETING LUC

  The day Ben and I first drove up to the farm it was already growing dark. It was a Sunday in February. We were in my Renault 5. The road out of the town led south. Ahead you saw a bank of high hills, the same ones you can see from the house in the village. The road bends left and right, zigzagging upward toward the border. It was to become such a familiar journey. Now I can’t recall if the dog at the geranium house on the ninth corner barked that day as it did on all the days of the years that came after, or if I was aware of the gray Mediterranean in the gulf behind us, a Sunday afternoon sea in winter, strung with faint white lights along the coast, and the railway track running along beside it.

  We turned in at a green gate. It was like lurching from Pagnol to Proust, from something dry and brittle, taut with winter resin, to an elegant avenue of limes and rhododendron, with a summer house here, and on the left an overgrown tennis court. Then the avenue became a dirt road and the world turned Mediterranean again, with two squat farmhouses and two black horses sleeping standing up. Across the fields was a line of trees. They looked as though they had been torched, but in fact they were just about to come into leaf. There was a moribund feel to the place. It was someplace of which people would say, “It’s so beautiful,” but you could tell they were glad they didn’t live there themselves.

  He was standing by the door, outside, getting wood from the pile at the front of the house. I didn’t see him till we were close to the door, and then he appeared out of the dark. His ex-wife used to say he could levitate sideways, so you could be quite sure he was next door, asleep, or reading, and then you’d feel his breath on your face. He smiled at me, and I felt like a plant set back in softly forked earth, packed gently into place. The world had become familiar again, possible again, because he was in it, though I had never seen him before. When Ben introduced me he said, “I know.”

  * * *

  Luc lived alone. His life was austere, his living space completely spartan. Any one of the rooms in his house could have been the tack room—saddles and bridles hung from trestles, oilskin coats and hats from hooks screwed into the walls. It was everyone’s idea of the perfect, remote French farmhouse. It was desperately uncomfortable, had two barns, which he used for painting, and a rat lived in the bathroom. I was always poised to leap onto a chair. Sometimes, when there was a silence between us and I was lying on the grass with my head on his stomach looking up at the leaves, he would wait till my breathing was deep and relaxed and then would say, “Do you know how they discovered I had tapeworm?” I’d yell, “Stop!” and leap away from him and run. Once I jumped onto his horse without stirrups or a saddle, an unprecedented act of athleticism, and kicked her to a gallop from standing still. When I came back he was waiting on the step outside the tack room. He said severely, “You should never make her gallop from cold like that. It’s bad for her.” When I apologized he said quietly, “That’s all right. By the way, did I ever tell you . . . ?”

  We sat by the fire and drank a kind of white pastis from an old monastery Luc often rode to on a Sunday. The fire was hot and spat out gobbets of flame. “Do you have children?” he asked. “No,” I said, “not yet. And you?” “No,” he said, “not yet.” He took us to see his paintings.

  “The museum is making postcards of them for the exhibition,” he said. “Quelle époque!” He painted on huge stretches of brown wrapping paper, stuck several times to itself, with acrylic paints. At first I was horrified by what he painted. I couldn’t see it at all. I didn’t understand what he was doing. Later I wrote two books in his house. He was always asking me to translate a page or two for him, but I never did. It made him angry, and he’d say, “It’s as though you couldn’t actually see my paintings, but you do, you see them all the time.” I wasn’t sure I did really see them. He’d show me a new one and say, “Tu le vois?”

  “What’s for supper?” Ben asked.

  “Confit de canard.” I was impressed. Months afterward I asked if they’d really had confit de canard that night, because we certainly hadn’t since.

  “Why not?” Luc said. “Even I can open a can.”

  “Stay for supper,” he said. “Ben’s staying, then I’m driving him back to college.”

  “I’m not hungry. We had a late lunch.”

  “L’appétit vient en mangeant.” The more you have the more you want.

  I had to leave anyway because I was meeting someone in the café later on. We had to sit on the edge of a table because they’d cleared away all the chairs, for some reason. Outside they were burning life-sized papier-mâché dolls; it was the last day of the carnival. At one point in the evening Luc walked into the café and bought a packet of cigarettes. I thought it must be his brother because I’d never seen him before that afternoon, and it seemed too much of a coincidence to bump into him again already. It was him, though. Like me, he had a way of looking different every time you saw him. People were never sure, when they saw us together, that it was really us.

  People don’t walk into your life. They were there all along, but you couldn’t see them. That day, he emerged from invisibility. He told me that he was someone who, if you didn’t know him, was invisible. “Wait and see,” he said. “Now that you know who I am you’ll see me all the time.”

  FIRST DAY

  The next morning I went out to buy bread. The baker I normally went to was shut on Mondays, so I went to a new one. While I was waiting in line, Luc walked in, whistling. He had a breathy whistle, like a leaking pipe. The baker’s wife came out from behind the counter, kissed him and gave him a jar of quince jelly. “Pour ta maman.”

  “Salut,” he said, as though we met there every morning.

  I said, “Aren’t you going to work today?”

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing the previous evening. He frowned. “Of course I am. I’m not a tourist.”

  When we came out, me with my baguette in a wisp of paper and him with his croissant and his jar of quince, he said “Tiens, I’ve got something to show you.” We walked back up to the boulevard. It was so hot that the news dealers had all put out their postcard stands for the first time that year, and the sandwich shop next to the museum had set up its yellow umbrellas. Luc looked at them and said softly, “Quelle idée!”

  It was like the scrolling credits of a film. In fifty yards of street on a Monday morning we met all the people who would feature in our life. We bumped into Marie-Lou, yawning on her way to give a dance class, and passed the pharmacist, opening up his shop window, where he displayed miniature replicas of prosthetic equipment you could order from him—tiny wheel-chairs and miniature toilets for the disabled, and next to them a chart showing which local mushrooms were safe to pick and which to leave, and a couple of taxidermied poisonous snakes. Luc waved at Gigi, who was crawling around inside her shop window, fixing pleats on a mannequin. Stefan slipped out of a doorway with Libération under his arm. The doctor was writing up a motto on a blackboard outside his sister’s coffee shop. That morning it said, “La dernière chose qu’on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu’il faut mettre en premier”—the last thing you realize on constructing a work is what to put first. “C’est Pascal,” Luc said. “Quel con.”

  We stopped outside the Museum of Modern Art, opposite my rented apartment. Luc said, “Meet me here at midday. I
’m hanging my pictures for Friday.” He pointed upward. “That’s what I wanted to show you.”

  “The sky?”

  “No, that.”

  There was a huge banner draped from a pole over the façade of the building with his name on it. “Don’t forget,” he said and went off to open his office. I waited till he’d gone around the corner, then bought a postcard.

  At midday I found him standing next to the rack outside the news dealer, talking to a man with paralyzed hands. He introduced us and I held out my hand, but the man didn’t respond. Luc took my hand instead, and led me into the museum. Inside it was so pale and cool I got goose pimples. A woman with silky brown hair came rushing down the stairs with her cardigan around her shoulders, like a fifties heroine, scolding him from a distance. Luc dropped my hand and shrugged, with a smile.