Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  We finished brushing the horses and went inside to change. Luc found me a woolen sweater his mother had knitted for him, and we both wore jeans. He wore a leather jerkin with pockets for a knife, his tobacco, matches, a flashlight and quince jelly, pressed into a slab, for energy. Wrapped up for warmth, we ate our lunch on the terrace, plain white rice, with a fried egg each and some salad leaves. For months that was almost all we ate, because it was simple and Luc liked everything simple. In the evening we drank red wine with it, and sometimes a hunk of red meat, or a chicken bought ready-roasted from the market. He would sometimes enjoy the dishes I made, fish stews and huge salads, but I knew that things were rocky whenever he stalked in at mealtime and threw half a packet of rice into a pan of boiling water.

  After we’d given the horses some hay, we hauled the saddles out of the tack room. Luc liked Arabian saddles, heavy as nineteenth-century furniture, the kind of thing a pope would sit on to evacuate his bowels, but with a pommel, a large, reinforced protuberance at the front, that stabbed you in the groin if the horse came to a sudden halt and sent you hurtling forward over its ears. I staggered under the weight of it, my legs jammed right up into my pelvic sockets, but you had to lift it above the horse’s back and lower it very gently, so it would barely register the moment of contact. Then you quickly lifted its tail, revealing the hole you had previously cleaned with a tough bristled brush, and wrapped la croupe around the root of the tail, buckling it in place to keep the saddle from sliding when you were riding steep slopes. Luc checked my work at every step, but never told me what to do, so everything had to be worked out from scratch. That way, he said, you understand what it is you’re doing.

  Once I’d gotten up on the horse and gotten over my vertigo we set off, walking slowly down the field, past the house, through long grass, till we reached a small stream in the forest. The water was completely transparent, visible only as a thinning of the light and a movement over stones. Over our heads the branches creaked and rustled, set off by the parting of the lower branches as the horses brushed against them. Luc rode ahead of me, occasionally snapping off a branch with a quick, fierce gesture to clear the way for me, and for himself on the way home. We climbed a hill through the chestnut forests on the other side of the stream, and then down again, through waist-high bracken, till we came to a path the color of pencil shavings, where the horses turned left and began to trot.

  I didn’t fall off. We never cantered for long because Luc always wanted to spare the horses. We stopped for breath on the top of a gentle hill, just beyond some beehives, and when we looked back to where we’d come from we could see the farm. Georges had lit a fire. We hoped he wasn’t smoking Brigitte’s body over the heat, curing her.

  We never talked much on these rides. Occasionally I’d shout, “Wait!” as I tried to wrestle Hector’s head up out of a bouquet of young leaves. He never took much notice of me as I yanked at his head. Luc would turn around in the saddle, his reins wrapped loosely around the pommel, and say, “Gently. Doucement. Fais gaffe.”

  For him, riding was all about communion and harmony, and I liked the excitement, the thrill. I liked to feel I was riding the horse. For that I needed to be hurtling across country, with the horse reaching out with great strides and my body moving with his, like a piston. When I learned to go out on my own, I sometimes had to stop and rub him down with leaves, scrape away the white foam oozing from his flanks and his neck and walk him slowly home.

  I wasn’t always kind to the horse. Often I was angry with him, because after that first day he realized that, even though I may have had some folk memory of being at home on a horse, he could feel the weight of my city sensibilities, the gestures of someone used to driving a car, or having full control. Neither of Luc’s horses had been trained, and they would probably have been quite dangerous to ride if they hadn’t been so laid-back in temperament. They knew the mountains so well, there was never a path they hadn’t seen before, so there wasn’t much you had to do, just keep in the saddle and decide if you were going to walk, trot or canter, and even that usually went with the terrain. Most of the time we walked, especially in the evening, by moonlight, over the crags, returning from the eleventh-century monastery on the other side of the border, exhausted, watchful of the weather, hungry again. I watched him ride ahead of me, his hips swaying very slightly, occasionally saying a word or two to the dog, who ran with him, and his straight back and lean thighs, and felt a mixture of love and impatience. I could either be there or not be there. I knew he’d carry on doing the same things if I left. He’d say, in the end it’s all the same. You do what you want.

  Walking home along the crest of the mountain, through the smoky dusk and down the dark forest paths, I sometimes thought of Angus, who was married to one of my friends. He’d been working in a London theater in the seventies. He was in bed one night when the phone rang. A friend asked him to pick up a spare part from an address in south London and drive through the night with it to a place in France he’d never been. He drove to the port, crossed the Channel and arrived before dawn at the black edge of a canal. He stopped the engine, got out of the car, stretched and smelled the foggy air and said to himself, in surprise, “This is it; this is my place.”

  If you are lucky enough to find your place, he said, to sniff the air and know you have something to do there, then you are lucky in love.

  Estranged from Luc, sitting in Angus’s kitchen, drinking the wine he’d made, which was not Burgundy because he hadn’t been able to stay in the place he loved, nor with the woman he’d met there, I reminded him of what he’d said. “You didn’t listen,” he said. “I told you, if you find your place you should never actually live in it, never make it your home. In the same way,” he said kindly, giving me his hand, unwanted because it wasn’t the hand of the man I loved, not Luc’s, though its shape and the feel of it under my fingers were almost the same, “never live with the man you think you cannot live without. And make sure you never do both.”

  STEFAN

  Stefan cultivated me as fastidiously as if I’d been a political contact. He had been brought up in Normandy and sent to school in Paris because he was clever. At sixteen he had helped lead the lycéens in revolt during May 1968, and had drunk coffee with Beauvoir and Sartre.

  “Drunk coffee?” I said, rather scornfully.

  “There was a lot to discuss. Of course we drank coffee. You sound like a communist,” he said.

  By June of that year he was a card-carrying Maoist, and his girlfriend, one of the student teachers at his school, went with him around factories close to Paris and Lyons, trying to drum up revolutionary fervor among the workers. They were part of a cell network, which at that time meant you were a revolutionary with underground links all over Europe. They spent a lot of time making posters and having sex. He was first imprisoned at seventeen for throwing stones. Later, while working on factory production lines, he would be sent down for inciting the workers to strike and creating riots. He was never actually arrested for direct political incitement, he said, there was always some other trumped-up charge, like stealing or damaging machinery.

  When the revolution sputtered in the late seventies, he did a stint as the food critic for Libération, then ran his restaurant on the beach at Gruissan. He claimed that Jack Lang, the minister for culture in the 1980s, had offered him the position of minister for rock and roll, but that he’d turned it down. One day he arrived in the village and decided to stay. He said it felt truly democratic, and he liked living close to a border. He also liked living on the cobblestone Rue de la République because, he said, in summer everyone kept their windows open and you could hear a concert of copulating couples being relayed gently out into the night. After all, he said, what else is there to do after midnight in a place like this?

  He said that doing nothing all day—his partner worked—was a way of showing solidarity with the unemployed, of sharing their burden, which was not so much one of poverty, though there was that, as one of having
no social status. He threw himself into sport—he ran, cycled, rode, swam and played tennis, teaching the children of the village for free—tennis being a suitable weapon in the armory of the potential épateur de la bourgeoisie, involving, as it did, beating them roundly at their own game. He was fiercely competitive for a Maoist, and his body, which must once have been puny, had been built up to something highly sprung and muscled. He had the best legs and the best tan in the village, though this was slightly offset by his having steel hair around the edges with a bald dome on top.

  He often came and hung around in my apartment at the beginning of the afternoon, between the end of Panorama, a rather difficult-to-follow cultural discussion program that goes out on the radio at midday, and two o’clock, when he would go off to see one of his mistresses, who lived a few doors up, saying, “I just come around here first to warm up.” She was German, looked like a former high-jump champion and strode around the village with two straining greyhounds crossed with something wolf like for extra size on the end of a leash.

  He had a thing about German women. The village was twinned with a town of equivalent size in Germany, and Stefan had a seat on the twinning committee. The year before he’d taken a group of children from the lycée on an exchange to Germany. One of the German mothers had been flamehaired and hot for him, and he’d spent the final night with her in the back of her VW. Shortly afterward she had written a letter on pink paper with a floral border to say she planned to spend the summer in the village, so they wouldn’t be apart for long. He had been quite looking forward to some varied sex and an opportunity to practice his German, but when he received her letter he said his sperm ran cold. Aside from the cloying message, which seemed to him particularly repellent in her language, though he wasn’t a prejudiced man, she had enclosed a present, wrapped in tissue and scented with her perfume. He said it was the kind of perfume you could tell had been made in a factory, in great vats. He said real French perfume, the kind Gigi and her friends wore, smelled as though it had been made in tiny vials. In the same way, a small sip of wine tasted entirely different from a great gulp. This was part of his political theory—to do with the microcosm not being necessarily identical to the macrocosm. When Stefan unwrapped the present, he was horrified to find a photograph of the German woman herself with no clothes on, lying in a field of long grass, in a frame upholstered with floral fabric. There was something about the package that was utterly opposed to his whole notion of sex and freedom and honesty. She had packaged herself for him. He decided he’d rather have the exile with her long nose and loping dogs than a luscious flamehaired beauty with her legs spread provocatively in a field.

  Stefan once tried to seduce Gigi by hiding in a closet in her shop, à la Tartuffe, but she threw him out into the street. “Elle m’a foutu sur le cul!”—“I landed on my ass!” he shouted. The problem was, Gigi explained to him a long time after, that he had leaped out at her, flinging himself into her arms. He just didn’t have a clue, she said. Now Luc, on the other hand, would have hidden himself in the closet and stubbornly refused to come out, until you felt it was your fault he was in the closet and you’d better get in there with him.

  Sometimes Stefan read to me. My favorite passage, the one I’ve remembered, involved a girl and boy in their mid to late teens walking up one of those staircases from landing to landing to the top of an apartment house in Paris. The girl is walking ahead, a few steps higher than the boy. There is silence between them, only the sound of their feet. Then she says, “Can you see my knickers?” There is a long pause. After several more steps and the turn of the staircase he says, “Yes, I can.” She replies at the next turn of the stairs. “What color are they, then?” He pauses, thinks, pauses, then says, “They’re blue.”

  Stefan thought this was the most erotic passage he had ever read in a book. He said it was obvious, if you thought about it. The boy can’t see her knickers, she knows he can’t, but he says he can to please her, to please himself. She asks what color they are anyway, authorizing him to say whatever he likes, letting him know that when they reach the top apartment they will make love, and he says quietly, they are blue, avoiding the pornographic, leaving it still open, enigmatic, so she can still decide to send him off after a cool tisane. I hadn’t understood this at all, and I don’t think it’s what the author meant, but Stefan’s exegesis was erotic in its own way, and I’m sure the author would have been pleased.

  Stefan was much better than the radio. He could talk for hours on end about sex, and the government, and about the Super-Gigis he’d met when he went up to Paris to ask Yves St. Laurent to finance his emergency food trip to Gdansk in 1982. He said he could love a woman for just one tiny detail. He loved the German woman two doors up because she always smiled with such a look of lascivious relish as she bent to kiss him. Stefan is more fun than most people, but he has an inflated sense of how much people want him—women and the police in particular. He justifies his political inactivity—activiste à la retraite—by saying he is still wanted by the international police for kidnapping a judge in Toulouse in 1974. It turned out they got the wrong judge, and kept his liberal homonym tied up in the back of a van for ten days. Stefan had to flee to Italy to be hidden by the Red Brigade. They stopped looking for him after a couple of weeks, though. “They just didn’t want you enough,” I said. In the car we used to listen to Pulp, which he pronounced Poulpe, like an octopus. I told him Jarvis Cocker was working-class, but then his daughter brought a picture of him home from school, and Stefan came around to contest my notion of working-class, waving the picture of Jarvis, pouting in tight trousers with a hint of tint on his lips on a bed in a Paris hotel, photographed by Bettina Rheims.

  Because Luc wouldn’t go anywhere, Stefan took me for drives in the afternoon, into Spain, to the coast at Calella, or to La Bisbal or Figueras, where we visited the Dali museum with our noses in the air. Or Cadaqués, blue and white, like friendly china. He said, “The north of a southern country is far more northern than the south of a northern country,” and you only had to drive over the border to see it was true. Where we lived was deep southern country, and the stone was rose-pink and warm, the vegetation dry and coastal. In certain parts of northern Spain, only a few miles to the south, you felt you had traveled far north into industrial Catalunia.

  We drank cold beer in high-ceilinged bars where I was the only woman, or strolled down the ramblas, past huge, gray modernist buildings. Cafés and sex were his two favorite pressure points for taking the pulse of a country. If he heard a new café had opened in Figueras he would go there and deconstruct the bar stools, the jukebox, the coy murals, the row of bottles behind the bar, the age group aimed at, and what you could learn from that about the social and economic condition of the town. We ate complex meals of tapas, or Chinese food, with flavors wrapped up together, indissoluble, and sauces that no amount of chemistry could ever have separated back to their constituent parts. We’d argue about John Berger’s interpretation of Spain in his book on Picasso, that the only kind of revolution they could have had was one based on a belief in the possibility of apotheosis—that everything could be magically transformed overnight. “No wonder you like him,” he said. “That’s what you think, too.” Berger argued that Picasso had remained a typical Spaniard all his life, constantly overhauling himself and looking for a radical change, almost religious in his belief that the world could change by some other means than the slow, methodical, carefully programmed Marxist method. Look at him when he joined the Communist Party, he says. Imagine the power he had as one of the world’s most famous men. He could have done anything! Why wasn’t he out there as an ambassador, or even an activist himself? All he did was design them a lousy symbol, a dove. Put like that it did seem rather meager, though I felt Berger and Stefan were expecting too much of the wrong man.

  It was the kind of thing we argued over, driving, or walking down a beach on winter afternoons. One day, as we crossed the border back into France and Stefan had gone through
the ritual of ducking the sleeping border guards, he said, “We are lucky in France. All the best love songs are in a foreign language. We keep ourselves pure by not knowing any of those words. And anyway,” he added, “it’s a bit ridiculous in your language, the way they’re always saying ‘I love you.’ ” At least in French it’s ambiguous. You might only be saying, ‘I like you.’ ” Then a bit later, looking out of the window as the Canigou appeared on our right and we were nearly home, he said thoughtfully, in a voice expressing nothing but pleasure at being there, alive, in the car driving back from Spain in the early evening: “Je suis plein d’amour. Je suis plein d’amour.”

  ELECTIONS

  Luc had been told by one of his patients that his astrological chart for what was left of the year was not all that promising, but that the following year he would be able to do whatever he wanted with success. Stefan sourly suggested he might like to run for mayor.