Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  Two men were leaning against the cab, smoking cigarettes in the moonlight. One of them was the spitting image of Fred West, the notorious child abuser and murderer. They had brought my possessions. For the moment, we decided, it could all go in Luc’s father’s garage. It looked like junk. Just as we were finishing, Marnie arrived, clutching a white pack of Silk Cut cigarettes, extra mild, so she looked as though she might be connected in some way, thematically, with the van—gaunt, and as though if you bent her in two she would snap at the waist.

  “Look,” Luc said, pointing her out. “Isn’t she like you?” She said her husband was arriving the following morning to take her home. She had disappeared the last few days, she said to Luc. Some Portuguese friends of hers had been doing a gig in Tarragona and she’d gone to hear them. The Arabic translation was nearly finished. Luc said to me afterward, “She wanted to know so much about you.” She kept asking, “Is she beautiful?” as though that would make all the difference. She had a bruised look about her that made you think of someone carrying heavy suitcases down unsuitable dirt paths and brushing away flies.

  She left the next morning. Luc and I had come down to the market to buy supplies because we were going off riding for a couple of days. I saw her slipping around a corner in a short white skirt, her feet bound up in complicated sandals, with a very tall man at her side, holding her hand. Two days later I got back from the riding trip and let myself into the house. It was quite late at night, and I listened to the messages on the answering machine while standing at the doors onto the terrace. There was a dark, heavy blue sky, with star stitches in it and a lemon moon rising behind the hill, where Luc would be brushing down the horses and leading them into the field for the night. A woman’s voice on the tape spoke to Marnie, and the address was so direct it was unnerving. It reminded me of those scenes in films where someone is writing a letter and you hear the words in their voice, making you jump, because you feel you have woken inside them and that you are at the source of their thought. The girl had a deep grazed sort of voice, like Marnie’s. She said where she was, in London, the sky was dramatic and sad, that there were great clouds rolling over the moon, and she could see all the lights of London and wasn’t sure if it was them or the moon that was lighting the clouds. She said she had filled in Marnie’s absentee ballot, as she’d been instructed to do. She left long pauses. She said, “I don’t know, maybe you’re there, babe, listening to me. Maybe you’ve gone.” The tape wound slowly forward, while she thought, or struggled to speak. “You’re not coming back, are you?” There was one more long silence, then the voice said fiercely, tenderly, “I love you.” When I heard the words I gasped, because I’d never heard them said like that. I suppose you rarely hear someone say “I love you” to someone else and know it’s real, not just acting. Hardly ever, in fact.

  WEDDING

  Marie-Lou eventually convinced Christophe of the fiscal advantages of marriage. The phone rang one Saturday morning and it was Christophe asking Luc to be his best man. Luc was thrilled. He bought them a huge book on the history of the theater as a wedding present, and ironed his shirt. Gigi called and said all the female friends were pitching in together to buy Marie-Lou a special wedding present, a surprise. What? The dress, she said. Barbara’s already given me a thousand francs. I told Luc I thought it was wrong for Gigi and the other women to buy Marie-Lou’s dress, especially as Gigi stood to make a profit from it.

  “Look on the bright side,” he said. “At least you won’t have to wear it now.”

  On the morning of the wedding I asked Luc what time he needed to be there. Oh, three-thirty, he said. Don’t you need to get there early? No, he said, just when it begins. He didn’t want to ring Christophe to check, because he didn’t want to disturb him at a busy time. It seemed a bit odd. Why couldn’t he just ring to make sure what was expected of him, and at what time? Instead he rang Gigi, and she said oh, definitely, the wedding began at four. Her boyfriend had ordered them a special silver Cadillac.

  We went to Luc’s father’s house after lunch with our clothes, ready to change into. At a quarter to four I came to get Luc from in front of the television, where he was watching the Tour de France with his father and the poodle. There’s plenty of time, he said, it’s only three minutes away. We left the house at three minutes to four and arrived at the mairie at four exactly, to find a huge crowd in front of it, and Christophe and Marie-Lou climbing into the silver Cadillac, Gigi fluttering confetti over the car and blowing kisses in their wake. Luc said, “Je m’en fous”—it’s only a ceremony. When Gigi came weaving over to us, I ducked away as she leaned to kiss me and said, “No thanks, I’ve already got my makeup on,” because she always left a huge lipstick print on my cheek. Men look foolish with lipstick prints on their cheeks, somehow. It’s never, under any circumstances, chic. Rubbing at his crossly with his sleeve, Luc said, “What time did you say?”

  “Three-thirty,” she said. “Darling, Christophe is absolutely livid. I doubt whether Marie-Lou will ever speak to you again.” In fact, Marie-Lou was very gracious about it, and said Gigi had achieved an impressive double, getting back at two of her favorite lovers in one go. The reception was held in their garden. Amelia was the bridesmaid.

  Luc was broody. I was talking to Joe, an English friend who was magnificently tipsy, along with Selina, his French wife, who was small and bullet sexy and never wore any makeup and had very firm opinions. She hated Luc. I told them I had come back from Barcelona the previous day, and had hitched a lift on the road between Figueras, where the train dropped me off, and the village. An old man had screeched to a halt at the roadside and said he could take me over the border. He set off driving down the middle of the road, then swerved to the left. I screamed as I saw a huge truck bearing down on us, dust rolling, and he laughed, filling the car with billowing alcohol fumes, so that I imagined that if we did collide with the truck we’d ignite and burst cloud high in flames. Just at the last moment he swerved and avoided the truck, then got back on course for the next one. I was still screaming, but he didn’t understand French and I couldn’t remember any Spanish, so I yelled, “STOP!” He laughed. I grabbed the steering wheel just as we were about to disappear under a Dutch juggernaut, and the car spun and stopped dead in the dust in a ditch. For a couple of horrible seconds I couldn’t work out the central locking system, then I did, and I tumbled out of the car into the road. He pulled off at top speed and was soon around the corner, gone. I was shaking like a wet dog who’d fallen into a freezing lake in winter, though it was a scorching July day. I got to a gas station, found some Spanish coins and called Stefan. Eventually he managed to sort out what I was saying and said, “Wait, I’ll be there.” When his car drew up half an hour later, he held me till I’d finished shaking, then drove me slowly home on tiny roads and dropped me at the green gate of the farm. Luc said it was stupid to hitch on that stretch of road near the border—only prostitutes did it there.

  When I told Joe and Selina this story at the wedding picnic, Selina shook her head slowly, turned her black chip eyes on me and said, “I don’t believe you.” She said there was something in the way I’d told the story that didn’t ring true. She said, “Either it didn’t happen, or you weren’t as frightened as you say.” Meanwhile, her husband was watching Luc talking to Gigi under a tree, and he said, “Do whatever you like for now with that man, but never marry him and never have his children.”

  PARENTS

  Luc said maybe we should get married and try to start a family. Then he said maybe we should wait till my next book was published, the one I’d gone to London to sign for. Whenever my agent called it unsettled him for hours afterward. He said she had a voice like a woman in an airport. I developed terrible stomach pains and had to go to the doctor, who demonstrated to me how to stand balanced on a plank of wood with two rolling cylinders underneath. He said it would cure my equilibrium problems, and with it my stomach pains, but it didn’t.

  My parents came out to stay, and met
Luc for the first time. Serge Collier, the handyman with the fostered twins, gave my parents a basket and a ladder each and took them cherry picking. On their last evening we met up in Luc’s father’s house. Luc had called him and told him to put some champagne in the fridge. My parents were stunned by the house, all the lace and mahogany and the Mirós on the walls, and this fine, stammering man with his energetic poodle, who tried to remember the gestures his wife would have made to welcome the future in-laws, whose Britannic genes might one day be mingled with his own.

  Luc said, “Papa, where are the glasses?”

  His father looked puzzled. My father looked a bit puzzled, too, standing there reading a framed letter hanging on the wall of the sitting room from a widower who had summoned the doctor one day and left this letter pinned to the front door: “I have decided to end my life this afternoon; in the interest of good order and in order to cause minimum disruption in the lives of those I leave behind, including yours, good doctor, I shall hang myself in the shower, thus conserving the corpse intact for scientific research.”

  Luc’s father produced some glasses, the ones we usually drank out of, which were originally mustard jars, the kind with a red plastic lid, and perfect for drinking wine.

  “No, Papa,” Luc said, “the champagne glasses. Maman had champagne glasses, remember?”

  His father pointed vaguely at the cabinet on the wall. There? Luc went over and opened it. No, there were only plastic cups from the beach house. Try under the bookcase there? No, these were whiskey glasses. The third cabinet? No, there were the family skulls, powdered with gold leaf. Luc’s father got the maid to retrieve incisors, canines and the odd molar from the trash bin in the clinic for him when she was doing her evening cleaning, and he would insert them into the jawbone and fix them with superglue.

  Luc passed his hand over his face and came up smiling, saying, “Papa, you’ve put the incisors where the canines should be.”

  His father waved a plastic cup. “Let’s make do with these; it tastes the same.” But Luc wouldn’t give up: “How about the closet over there by the window with the key?”

  “No,” his father said quickly. “Not there; there’s nothing there.” Luc turned the key, and inside we found champagne glasses balanced high, stacked in pyramid form, etched with patterns, gray with age, but dozens of them. He took five of them out, wiped them with a cloth and we drank the champagne.

  My parents left the next day, waving cheerily and saying, “See you next month!” when Luc and I planned to go to Scotland. He’d been to Britain once before, on the Eurostar, having flown up to Paris. His plane had been delayed by an incident at the local airport. Another plane, flying in cash for one of the banks in the village, had been held up at gunpoint in an extremely well-organized heist. Stepping off the train he was radiant, because he’d seen Battersea Power Station from the window of the train and stepped out into the new station at Waterloo. “C’est magnifique!” he said, gazing up at the web of blue girders. But he hated everything else after that, and within forty-eight hours was demanding to go home. The next day, in Paris, he bought a paper and discovered one of his patients had killed himself. He was an employee at the bank whose money had been stolen, had two small children and was building a swimming pool in his back garden. “C’est une coïncidence,” Luc said darkly.

  At the café on the evening my parents left, he was grinning with relief: “Tiens. I have news.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to Scotland! I’m not leaving here. You go if you want to. See your friends.”

  “But I want to go with you.”

  “Tant pis pour toi,” he said. “If I start doing things like that there’ll be no end to it. I’m staying here.”

  CORRIDA

  The corrida came and went. Stefan built a wooden stall in the street and served drinks from it for seventy-two hours nonstop to raise money for the tennis club, while Luc, who was fed up with Stefan’s carping, walked up and down in front of the stall and said, “Oh, look, Stefan’s become a shopkeeper at last.”

  Stefan no longer considered himself my friend. He said he was really only nagging me to sleep with him out of politeness, and it wasn’t as much fun anymore. It’s difficult when your friend does something irrational for love, particularly when you believe it will make them unhappy in the long run. “C’est un pauvre petit con,” he said of Luc. He was angry with me because I had gone back to Luc, I believed in love, and worried about money and work. And I was angry with him because he lived with a woman he loved, who earned his keep while he played tennis all day and slept with women he fell for because of the way they walked their dog or leaned on a bar when ordering a coffee.

  Stefan ought to have been passionately opposed to the bullfight, but found a splendidly casuistic defense for it, saying it was basically a democratic sport, which combined elegance, fair play and respect for the beast. Instead, if Stefan opposed anything, it was sanctimoniousness and vegetarians. He said there was no point in being a vegetarian unless you loved meat and blood. Nothing was worth giving up unless you were passionately drawn toward it, as Nietzsche had been passionately drawn toward God. He admired physical prowess of any kind, and he thought ritual was a good thing. In his role as Mr. Testosterone, he always bought a cheap ticket and sat in the full blaze of the sun.

  Every year Luc declared that he wouldn’t go to the bullfight, that he’d had enough of all that macho crap, that he wasn’t interested in what went on in the village anyway, he’d outgrown it when he was about eight and a half; it was an event for neovillagers, and he loathed the corrida because of the risk to the picadors’ horses and the way they were dressed up in ribbons and fluttering strips of paper, like a birthday cake. Every year, on the day of the corrida, he’d go down to the Saturday morning market and come back with two tickets his father had pressed into his hand, always for seats in the shade—his father, once the official corrida doctor, was given expensive tickets for free. So we always found ourselves directly opposite Stefan, who would keep an eye on me, across the sand circle, to see if I flinched when the sword was driven in.

  * * *

  The corrida takes place on the first weekend after le quatorze juillet, the national holiday to celebrate the storming of the Bastille. On the day itself, the mayor gives a heartwarming speech in the Place de la Liberté and a brass band marches around the town. It’s like a scene out of a Jacques Tati film, as though for a day the village is prepared to pretend to be a normal small French town, trumpeting allegiance to l’état and fluttering the tricolor. Then, the minute it’s over, out come the Catalan flags, stripes of yellow and red, and the brass trumpets and bugles are put away to make room for reedier instruments and the four-stringed double bass.

  Preparations begin early in the year, organized by the bullfighting committee, a butcher, the garage mechanic, a doctor—not the vegetarian Buddhist—and a few others. The members of the committee are all aficionados. People say the red silk sashes they wear around their waists are meant to restrain any physical manifestations of macho excitement due to their temporary elevation to positions of power, and to the scent of blood and the sight of women fainting. As the whole thing seems to be about something oversized, overexcited and engorged with blood trying to escape a tight circular enclosure, it seems like an appropriate reflection of the central idea.

  At the Salle de Spectacle, on a rainy evening toward the end of April, the aficionados had shown a video of the bulls grazing peacefully in their landscape in southern Spain. Afterward the owner of the stud farm declared that these were the most powerful bulls ever to be fought in a village arena. Although the village has a very small bullring compared to the two other major arenas, at Nîmes and Béziers, the committee always brings in giant-sized bulls; they seem to get bigger every year. It isn’t the thing to do to make your opposition to the event—it’s never referred to as a sport—too manifest, but it’s fine to pass comment on the inappropriateness of the size of the bulls, to say it
is dangerous, will end badly, is a sign of démesure. El Manolo was there, too, a tiny torero with a huge reputation. Like soccer players, toreros wear good suits and write books. El Manolo was an Eric Cantona of the bullring, given to aphorisms that didn’t translate well. I first read about the corrida in a book called Pour Pablo, written by a famous torero called Dominguin. He wrote that there must be something sublime about it for a man to be prepared to dress up in pink stockings on a Saturday afternoon in the atomic age to go and fight a bull. They call the pink of the bullring “Picasso pink.” El Manolo, too, had written his autobiography, a philosophical work about the atavistic origins, the Jungian significance of his art. It also talks a lot about his sex drive.

  The corrida begins at five in the afternoon. There is not much that begins at five in the afternoon. It is after siesta and before early mass. The start is heralded by solemn music and is punctual to the second. A hush descends over the crowd as the all-male procession comes out into the arena, and people stop wriggling and craning their necks to see who has come with whom. There is an uneasy, semireligious atmosphere. Knowing that you are here to witness a sacrificial death creates intimacy. There is no possibility of pretense. You could not have come here by mistake. It generates the same feeling of nervous unease I have always felt when taking communion among friends with whom I rarely attend church, at a wedding or at Easter. It would probably feel the same attending an orgy. I found that after I had sat at the corrida within yards of the woman who ran the launderette, and had seen her cheeks flush a dull Rioja at the moment when the sword was driven in, and the moist imprint left on her seat as she rose to fan herself in between bulls, it was difficult ever to think of her in the same way again, to greet her in quite the same cheery manner by the soap dispenser.