Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  SIESTA

  Afternoon, summer. A shallow sweep of wind blurring the grass—a casual gesture, a woman ruffling her lover’s hair, for no reason. The space, the scent—of tobacco, leather, paints and mouthwash—in the bed, left by the man who seems like the only man alive, to me; the one with the halo around his head in a crowd, if I should ever see him in a crowd. The light is diffused by a scrap of curtain pinned to the door frame, a snatch of red cotton, tinting the room to the shade of my inner eyelids, so it still seems like a room in one of my dreams. Here I am again, awake, walls buckling, flies by my head on the pillow. His riding boots kicked off by the bed, his blue-check shirt and leather hat on the pegs jammed into the wall, a photo of the horses, the dark armoire, the frolicsome bishop’s starched white linen, stacked like stationery, interleaved with brittle relics, spidery gray rosemary and lavender, pressed flat, without scent.

  He sleeps with his body, flinging himself down, exhausted, out of sheer need, as a horse drinks from a stream, thirstily, till he’s had enough. Then he slips from the bed like a little American Indian boy, fresh and stealthy; just the clink of his belt as he does up his jeans before stepping outside into the hot metal air. The dog hoists herself to her feet, still asleep, and bustles noisily across the room after him. I hear him talking to her outside as he carries out some small task, polishing a bridle or knocking a nail into the wall, little phrases, murmurs, up, down, around about, short, longer, tender. The words themselves have dropped away like the outer case of a nut, leaving only the sweet, soft inner sounds he keeps back for her. Good dog. She is smug as hell. I don’t want to hurt her, or get rid of her. I just want to be able to say, in clear words she will understand, “Look, I’m his girlfriend, OK. You’re his dog.”

  * * *

  He had made his own bed, like Odysseus, the winter before we met, from the logs of a lightning tree, and laid on the frame a mattress as dense as peat. I sang him the song I’d learned in primary school about the lightning tree. He liked it and said they hadn’t had singing at the school in the village, only “des chansons cathos”—religious dirges. The fact that we had sat cross-legged on the floor singing about “down by the river when the wind blows free, there’s a whisper of green on the lightning tree” made him think England was a country where pagan rituals and stories about the regeneration of the earth occupied a large part of the school curriculum. When he’d finished the lightning bed he phoned Gigi, who came up to inspect it.

  “On essaie?” she had asked, understandably, since she hadn’t driven seven kilometers up the mountain just to look at a bed. He said she had been about to kick off her shoes when he’d stopped her. “Sorry,” he’d said, holding her back. “It’s reserved.”

  “For who?”

  He’d shrugged. “The one who’ll turn up in the spring.”

  “Salaud,” she’d said, coldly, and left.

  They didn’t speak for another two months, till some weeks after Luc and I met. I couldn’t figure out why she ignored me. I’d walk past her dress shop and she’d stare glassily out, through me, as though I were the mannequin and she the browsing customer who saw nothing that impressed her. When we first talked properly, at a party, she had just had her hair cut short and dyed pale auburn.

  “You’ve never cut your hair short?” she asked me gently.

  “No.”

  “You will,” she said. “Just wait.” She was solicitous about my new life. Was I enjoying the farm? Was the country air suiting me? She might as well have asked straight out “Good orgasms, chérie?” and been done with it.

  “Charming, isn’t she?” Luc said smoothly after she’d slid away again. They were rather well suited to each other.

  “She’s OK. Wasn’t she blond last week?”

  “She was.”

  “What’s her natural color?”

  “Green.”

  * * *

  The bed was solid. To remove it from the room he would have had to chop it back up into pieces again. On the wall behind the bed he had drawn a giant fantasy insect. His bed, the walls, his voice, paper, stone, scissors . . . I fell backward into sleep. I dreamed of other houses, other beds. In my dreams Luc lived in all these other houses, too, even in the seventies housing development where I’d spent my childhood. I’d go and get myself some orangeade from the pantry in the break between children’s TV and homework, and Luc would be there in the garden, sitting on the climbing frame, swinging his legs. I woke and he was sitting back on the bed again, smiling. He had eyes like burnished coins in a fountain, and his face was dark golden brown, too, with steel-gray hair, too old for his young face and adolescent frame.

  “You look nice,” I said sleepily.

  There was a huge gilt-framed mirror by the bed, purloined from the bishop’s bedroom. I’d carried it across from the summer house with Henri, the cardiologist who wrote pornographic stories. I read them for him and sent them back to him at his office with textual criticism, which raised his nonprofessional standing with his secretary no end. Henri was divorced, bored and had a new passion every month—waterskiing, motorbiking, sailing, hang-gliding, playing the trombone. It didn’t matter what it was as long as it involved a large piece of equipment. Every time he acquired a new piece of equipment he also acquired a new girlfriend to go with it. When the enthusiasm was over, he’d write an erotic story involving the equipment, the girl and the latest sexual fantasy. This allowed his friends, who might otherwise have been bewildered by the turnover, to index the episodes of his life accordingly, with three simple code words, e.g., trombone, Alice, seaweed. While we’d carried the mirror, Luc had been on horseback, giving instructions about flower beds and ruts in the path, dodging back out of view of the mirror in case the horse saw its own reflection, shied and crashed into the mirror, leaving glass on the tracks. “Bad for the tires,” Luc said. He was never superstitious about normal things. Mirrors and ladders held no fears at all for Luc.

  He looked fondly at himself, at me looking at him, in the mirror.

  “C’est vrai. Je suis très beau,” he agreed.

  We both looked back at me. I wasn’t brown or thin enough. He himself corresponded more closely than I did to what he described as his type. I think he believed that if he assured me and others often enough that I wasn’t the kind of woman he usually went for, he would eventually be able to say, quoting one of the two lines from Proust everyone in France knows, “To think that I have ruined my life for a woman who wasn’t even my type.”

  “Never mind, coquine. You’ll get better-looking every day you spend with me. By the time we split up you’ll be a beauty. Come, get up. There’s someone here to see you.”

  “In a minute.”

  He threw my jeans onto the bed. “Wear those, or Stefan will go looking up your skirt.”

  I lay there a bit longer, so as not to just do what he said, watching daddy longlegs lollop across the grubby ceiling with their langlauf strides. A quick glance round, then they’d disappear up a crack in the ceiling. Above was a room full of books, Luc’s collection. Biographies of James Dean and Jimi Hendrix, books on Matisse and dreams, art books, portfolios of lithographs tied with ribbon, translations of Goethe and Shakespeare, and dust everywhere, on the shelves, the books, the pictures and the floor. I was often surprised at the things he’d read.

  “I read Hamlet once,” he told me. “It’s a cracker. There’s a dog in it.”

  Was there? “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “He’s in a boat and they’re escaping across a lake. There’s a soliloquy; he’s talking to the dog.”

  He also loved the novels of Cormac McCarthy, because there were horses in them. But most of the shelves were taken up with Buddhist texts. He read them slowly, word for word, by the fire after dark, or on the terrace on his day off, his feet up on the wall and his hair growing hot under a decomposing Huck Finn hat, treating them like comic novels, reading out the good bits—not mocking, but full of admiration for their sly brand of tranquilli
ty.

  “Ecoute: ‘A mandarin loved a courtesan. “I will be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent one hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night the mandarin stood up, tucked his stool under his arm and went away.’ ”

  “And?” Who cared? I didn’t like the would-be bathetic tone of these mininarratives. I’d grown up with the epigrammatic style in advertising slogans. Lao Tse and Co. sounded like fortune-cookie writers or lyricists to me. I just wasn’t of an Oriental cast of mind. I operated on the vertical, not the horizontal axis, I thought, getting out of bed and putting on my jeans. I preferred Jesus, because he was sweaty and young and had lots of friends and got into trouble. And he wasn’t a writer. It made his words seem more trustworthy, in the long run.

  Out on the terrace my feet burned on the brick tiles. Even sluggish with sleep you still had to run. I came to the stone arch below the dairy and stopped to lay my hand on the horse and feel the reassurance of his coarse black coat. He stood in silence against the cool wall, a dark, uncomplicated shape, passing the time, waiting for his ninety-ninth day.

  Stefan and Luc were sitting on the lawn under the lime tree at a table. Luc introduced me: “Mon copain,” he said. “Stefan.” A small, handsome, fit man, functional looking, like something you could buy in a hardware store.

  “Ah. L’Anglaise. Salut,” he said.

  Luc said afterward, “He’s cross because I found you first. He goes all around the countryside, cycling, running, climbing, stays up late talking, drives to cafés, goes to the cinema, plays with his politician friends, hangs out in jazz clubs and he never meets a better woman than his wife. And I just sit and wait and you turn up.”

  “What do you write?” Stefan asked.

  (“He reads everything.”)

  I said I’d written a novel, and was writing another one.

  “Is it in French?” he wanted to know. “Can I read it?”

  “No,” I said, “you can’t. It’s a foreigner’s perk. No one you meet can read what you’ve written.” It was true, and went with not having a pedigree or an accent anyone could trace.

  Stefan said, “She’s secretive.”

  Luc said, “Maybe she just isn’t any good.”

  We went down to the barn to look at Luc’s paintings, the ones he’d done since the spring. We stopped on the way to squeeze the fruit. Up at the summer house, Luc’s parents were sitting out on the terrace in high-backed wicker chairs. They looked as though they were posing for the image we’d remember them by when they were dead. His mother counted the days we were together. Two months now and no sign of a rift. “Is it serious, then?” asked her cousin, the wife of the mayor. His mother thought it was. “But she’s English,” said her cousin. “Elle n’est pas d’ici.”

  “Ah well,” Luc told me his mother replied, “if it’s the best he can do . . . It’s time he was married again. Doesn’t want to be too old to be a father. If she makes him happy . . .”

  Inside the barn the two latest paintings were spread out to dry on the cement floor. Luc sat in a mottled armchair, upholstered in dark-red velvet, at the far end of the room. Part of the roof had been replaced with glass, and a soft swoop of muslin billowed like a cradle, where a ceiling might have been. The dog lay in the straw bales in the corner. Stefan couldn’t keep still and kept picking up pots and rolls of tape. He had taken up painting himself recently, and Luc had “passed him” a show, one he didn’t want to do himself, in a tourist village on the coast. He said that while preparing the show Stefan took on the whole persona of “the Painter,” which, as even Luc, who was not a great reader of existential texts, could tell you, was an article of Sartrean bad faith. Luc had even lent him a studio, further up the valley, between villages. “Sadly,” Luc said, after a careful pause, “no one turned up at the opening. Just him and the woman who runs the tourist office.”

  “And he didn’t even turn up at the opening,” Stefan told me. “I think he was jealous. He likes to think he’s the only painter around here.”

  Luc was preparing an exhibition to be shown in Burgundy—“wherever that is,” he said. At the far end of the room was a 100-meter roll of brown wrapping paper, which he glued several times to itself and folded over to create a tough paper canvas. Then he diluted his paints down to a thin wash, took a kitchen broom and swept the paint over the surface. When an interviewer asked him on a television show why he painted on paper, Luc said, “Because it’s cheap.” Stefan was furious with him for saying that. “He’s a dentist!” he’d say. “He drives a jeep!” Luc said Stefan was in no position to criticize, because Stefan lived off his wife.

  “Girlfriend,” Stefan said.

  “The mother of your child.”

  “A woman I love.” Not “the,” I noticed.

  “I bet you do,” Luc said, poking at a bale of straw with his toe. “Where would you be without her? Who’d pay your bills?” What Luc really needed was a woman who’d bring home a salary check to keep him in paint.

  Toward the end of the afternoon I shut down my computer and went to join them again. They were still talking.

  “Stefan wants us to go and eat pizza with him on the coast.”

  “Wonderful. I’d love to. Shall we leave right away?”

  Luc said, “Why would we want to do that?”

  “Because we like pizza?”

  He shrugged.

  “Because we like the sea?”

  “You see,” Stefan said. “Luc?”

  “Do what you want. I’m staying here.”

  “You see?” Stefan said to me.

  We walked as far as the road with him. He pulled his bike out of the rhododendrons by the gate and put on his baseball cap to cover his pate. Luc ran his fingers through his own luxurious hair and whistled softly to the horses, who turned, looked at him and began their listless progress through the field.

  “Take care,” Luc told him seriously, his hand on Stefan’s shoulder as he sat there with one foot balanced on the gate. He gave him a push, sending him whizzing off down the mountain road.

  “Allez, plus de pédale!” Luc yelled after him. “Allez, faster! Plus vite!”

  He’d be home in seven minutes. One minute per kilometer. Luc put his arm around me, so we looked just like a real couple waving goodbye at a gate, grinned happily and said in his little English voice that came from somewhere at the back of the class, “Hurry hurry, everybody! Don’t be late.”

  HORSES

  He took me for a walk. The dog came, too. We arrived in the field by the green painted gate, where his two horses stood. They were huge as bronze monuments, scarcely moving, their flanks like continents on a map, their hooves like counties. They were beginning to shed their winter coats. As we approached, they froze and watched. Luc said, “Do you want to ride?” I didn’t know how. He passed me the rope bridle. “Hold the buckles firmly,” he said, “so they don’t make a noise. Always show the back of your hand, not the palm. This one’s Hector.”

  Hector and Lux were his strange, adopted passion. He was not a natural horseman; he’d started late, and he had chosen these two, of an almost prehistoric Pyrenean breed, because they were strong and slow and seemed to be able to pick up harmonics from ancient volcanic movements inside the earth. They were his path away from himself, that part of himself he feared, that twitched and fluttered and could tip over in the wind. They were what he had turned to when he gave up sailing boats. He denied they bore any symbolic weight for him. They were the things themselves, not symbols; they were so prehistoric and atavistic they didn’t need to stand for anything. They were at the end of the road, the deepest sound, the darkest night. They were the things first painted on the walls of caves, the things first represented.

  Hector watched me coming, his huge, sullen eye as big as a stone. Luc was rolling a cigarette. The dog was sitting by him. I tried to empty my head of fear, unlocking the muscles in my face, and concentrated on accepting this huge animal a
nd not being afraid. As I came up close to him I breathed very gently and lightly, and I felt a humming sensation run through my body, deep down. I felt my senses lift, so that the horse was wrapped in something coming from me, a prayer. Right up against him, so I could smell the straw on him and the sweet dung stuck to his tail. I slipped the bridle over his head, touched his ears and buckled it quickly under his chin. I hadn’t fastened a buckle since primary school. Taking the rope, I led him back to Luc.

  Luc was convinced then that I would ride like a dream, that it wouldn’t matter that I was English and blond—not his type at all—that I wrote at a computer, kept my make-up in the bathroom and was afraid of rats. He would teach me, and together we’d act out his dream of a life, in slow motion, tethered only to the course of the sun and straitened by paths through the forest.

  We tied up the horses on iron hooks embedded in the wall outside the kitchen, and he took me into the tack room to get the brushes and blankets and pieces of complicated-looking leather gear. The process of saddling up a horse became familiar over the next few years, and I grew to love it, each buckle in its order, the deft, neat movements, the slot of leather through metal, and the terrifying moment when you slicked back his mouth with your forefinger to place the bit behind his yellow teeth. It reminded me of threading a sewing machine, which was something that came so unnaturally that once you’d learned the procedure it was impossible ever to forget or do differently from how you’d been taught.

  In summer, fat, feasted flies stuck to their flesh like leeches and you had to flick them away, hoping that the irritation wouldn’t make the horse kick or jump. Whenever you passed behind a horse, where it couldn’t see you, you had to run your hand over the swell of its buttocks, so it knew where you were and wouldn’t be frightened. This was so second nature to Luc that sometimes he’d do it to me as I sat reading in the evening, just run his hand over my head as he passed.

  During the preparations, though, every consideration was for the horse. For Luc it was quite clear: humans were perverted and complicated and had invented the world. To get along with a horse you had to start thinking and feeling from scratch, and if you did something wrong the horse was quite within its rights to lash out at you. Even if an animal, or one of its ancestors—100 years ago, or back in the Middle Ages, or even back in that cave when it had all started to go wrong—had learned to be afraid at the hands of some previous owner, or car driver, or idiot farmer you’d never met, you had to live with that and accept that you were part of a fallen species who deserved to get kicked or chomped. Stefan despised this primitive approach to horses, to the world. The world is complicated, he said, the more complicated the better—a troubled skein spun by the minds of men. It was Luc’s Platonic view of the world that Stefan warned me of later, angrily rattling a stepladder as I stood on the topmost rung: “He doesn’t want you to go and live with him, he wants you to go and die with him! Get that into your head, enfin, ma belle.”