Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  It wasn’t the thing to do to squeal or hide your eyes. Squeamishness was a pale, milky thing. The women were particularly bloodthirsty. They dressed to the nines and tucked lace handkerchiefs up their sleeves. You didn’t wear trousers. You carried a hat. If you found a torero particularly pleasing, for whatever reason, though it was meant to be for his grace and prowess, you cast your handkerchief into the ring and he would turn his back on the bull, showing him his tightly hosed buttocks in an act of bravado bordering on madness, since it invited not only danger but also indignity.

  Life in a village has these strange moments of taut inhalation, where the collective breast constricts. Any piece of theater is more genuinely collective in the round than in a classic row-behind-row auditorium. In the amphitheater nothing is invisible, even from the cheapest seats. At the outer lip you can still hear the slightest scuff of the matador’s ballet-shod toe in the sand, the noise of a nervous banderillero clearing his throat behind his hand. The only difference is that if you are in the front row you are much more likely to get charged by the bull. It is the nervous bulls who leap over the rail and into the crowd. They aren’t charging, but fleeing, so the best thing is to clear a path for them, and not stand in their way.

  The solemnity crushes and uplifts you. The matador is often a fiddling little dandy in his silk suit of pink and blue, but he is also a Promethean, and prepared to die in the course of a common Saturday afternoon. People say that the odds are not equal. The picadors have the look of tobacco-chewing roués who have spent nine years in jail for rape and are off for a first night back on the town. They entice the bulls up to the flanks of the horse and then stab them, creating a huge loss of blood. The justification given is that, were it not for this particular maneuver, the matador would have no way of assessing the charge of the bull. There are bulls who simply do not want to fight, who will put their horns down on the ground and scratch at the sand with their hind legs. Then all the boos and whistles are for the man who has raised the bulls; he is in disgrace with the crowd and the matador alike. It is not the bull who is booed. Nobody wants to see a bull put in the ring who has no fight in him.

  There are religious overtones only insofar as there is an awareness of death. Death in the afternoon, as Hemingway noticed, will always have a ring about it that is more sinister and disturbing than death at twilight or death in the small hours. As the crowd shouts “Olé!” the sense of collaboration between matador and spectator increases. Few people actually understand the movements the matador makes, but they know when he is placing himself in danger and when he isn’t.

  A bull is an unpredictable animal, and the torero’s skill lies in predicting him. Most bulls don’t charge exactly when you expect them to. Even a bull who appears to have no fight in him at all will make one crazed charge at some time during the twenty minutes—the entire length of a bull’s training period. Before this he has had no contact with the mind of man. People say this is further evidence of the unfairness of the proceedings, but it doesn’t take a very sophisticated understanding of the process of evolution to work out that fairness simply doesn’t come into it. A man is not as strong as a bull. A bull is not as clever as a man. It is true that the torero has spent his life training for this, ever since, as a child, he first flailed his shirt in the plaza between school and supper shouting “Toro! Toro! Toro!” at his obliging younger sister as she scrambled in the dust, practicing the various movements that can fool a bull, entice him and destabilize him, in short, lead him where he does not want to go. The bull has not been given this opportunity. Nobody told him that one day he would be required to flout death, to outfox this stripling dandy, whose smell he has probably never encountered before, whose weapons he has never seen, whose speed and agility he has had no chance to measure, whose rules and procedures he must work out even in the moment of combat. But then a man doesn’t have horns.

  There is no point talking about fairness. It is true that the torero saddles the bull with all sorts of handicaps. He places him in an alien environment, confuses him with music and fanfares and the smell of his fellow creatures’ blood, dazzles him with colors and meaningless gestures, and gets other people to make lacerations in his flesh, through which his blood gushes and squirts, alarming, angering and weakening him. At the same time it is the torero’s job to display the bull’s magnificence to the crowd, to bring out the best and bravest and most powerful in him, and a good torero will do a good job of making his adversary’s strong points apparent. In the end the man will say he is a man, and that he has every right to employ whatever skills are particular to his species to subdue and ultimately annihilate the bull. After all, he could just spray the beast with bullets or tranquilizers, if he chose. The absence of technology is important. The man will rely on nothing but his prowess, his own acquired skills. The combat is as equal as it can be while still remaining a combat. The man has his sword and his brain, the bull his horns and his might. Sometimes a bull will display more intelligence than the man, and sometimes the man may not be very good at using his sword.

  The most important feature of the bullfight is that it is conducted in public, in the middle of a town, before a thoroughly mixed public. There is nothing clandestine or elitist about it, and the matador is quite likely to die in the demonstration of his skill. If the bull gets hold of him between the ribs and punctures his lungs no one will step out with a gun and shoot the animal, they will only try to lure him away with colored scarves.

  Everyone is exhausted by the time the sixth bull has been towed from the ring, and the matadors are awarded their accolades: an ear, two ears, an ear and a tail. The carcasses are driven down to the butchers, where there will be lines the following morning, for the corrida bulls are a delicacy, and it is the thing to do to invite your neighbors to taste your corrida stew. They say that it has a different taste from abattoir beef, because of the hormones the bulls secrete during the combat—a taste of fear and the hormone that makes the blood boil. The crowd disperses, fluttering with the sense of having witnessed something the rest of the world has ignored. Later there is a meeting at the Salle de Spectacle, where the aficionados analyze the corrida step by step. Then everyone, without exception, goes out and gets drunk.

  VISITORS

  Luc was peeling sycamore twigs to make the égouttoir. The windows were wide open onto the late evening, so the mountain was our guest. We were discussing the future.

  I said, “Sometimes this feels like an odd place for me to be.”

  Luc looked surprised. It was the most normal place on earth. It was home. “Maybe this is just your place.”

  “Why should it be my place?”

  “Because I’m here.”

  “When I was little my father used to take a blank piece of paper and write on the bottom, ‘A cow eating grass.’ I’d say, ‘Where’s the grass?’ And he’d say, ‘The cow’s eaten it.’ And then I’d say, ‘Where’s the cow?’ And he’d say, ‘It’s eaten all the grass, so it’s gone away.’ ”

  “Yes,” Luc said, “but what would have happened if you’d said, ‘Where’s the cow?’ first?”

  “It didn’t work if you did that.”

  * * *

  I didn’t go to Scotland, but flew back to London again in July. One lunchtime I met up with a friend. She had a boyfriend who every time she moved from one city to another to be with him got posted again. Each time she neatly gave in her notice, applied for a new job, and moved to wherever he’d disappeared to this time. Now she was off to Edinburgh in a rented van. She invited me to lunch at Mezzo—she had saved up coupons cut out of a Sunday paper and we had a weekday lunch for five pounds each. Chlöe was energetic, choosing her sesame roll with care, sending back the water—it was the wrong kind—asking for her vegetables to be served on a separate plate. I thought, I used to be like that. Then I thought, If I don’t get out now I’ll never get out. I’d called a number I’d found in an ad in a magazine the day before. The ad said, “Lovely sunny room in north London.”
The woman had said, “Come over tomorrow at three.” That morning I’d thought, Don’t be stupid, you live in France now, with Luc. He’s bad-tempered, but also good-tempered. You’ve been with him too long, burned too many bridges because of him, tailored yourself to him, cared what he thought, ached for him, bought a house to be near him, moved from one country to another. And now you’re going to see a room near Hampstead Heath? But because Chlöe was so positive about her rolls and her boyfriend, I walked to the tube at Goodge Street in the summer rain and took the Northern Line.

  I rang the bell of a huge house near the hill. A child with solemn eyes pulled open the door. A woman with a beautiful face and gray, lit-up eyes quite unlike her daughter’s came forward, drying her hands on a towel. I told her I’d ring her from France by the end of the month.

  * * *

  All that summer, while my house was rented out to visitors, the farm was full of friends, who came for three or four days, ate with us, drank, reacquainted themselves with the feelings they’d had the last time they were here, and left.

  Marcel came and spent the night with his girlfriend, a beautiful Mexican woman in her sixties, who ran the computer programming section of an airline. She was upset because one of her employees had hanged himself and left a note blaming her for overworking him. Luc said it could have been worse: he could have flown an airplane into a mountain. The programmer had shown admirable restraint. We were all due to meet up at a concert at the monastery on Sunday night, but my lodgers had a problem with the gas in the house, so I didn’t make it. Afterward Marcel said, “Luc was looking for you.” It seemed like a sentence I’d never heard before and would never hear again. Luc said, “You didn’t come,” and Marcel said, “It often happens, that we expect her, and she doesn’t arrive.” I thought, Why didn’t somebody mention that before?

  Friends of mine came to stay in the summer house next door. The children climbed trees. The girls made up dances on the terrace, skipping left and right, then running off after lizards. They hung their washing from the windows and stayed out late at night on the terrace, drinking wine, with the children asleep on their knees. They were so happy they felt like they would stay forever, and they never quite unpacked. Luc’s father came and looked on, never entering the house, just watching from the car, with the poodle yapping at flies in the passenger seat.

  Luc was sometimes a good host. In a restaurant one Sunday evening, at the end of a hot day, Aurilly, the elderly dealer from Marseilles, was telling us a story about eating rats during the war. Both Luc and I were tired and only half listening, because we’d heard it before and it was one of those stories you are quite pleased to hear come around again, but feel no obligation to listen to in detail. But we sat up sharp when we realized Aurilly had trailed off in midsentence. His head sagged and the hand holding his cigarette fell to the table. Luc plucked the cigarette out of his fingers, and shook him gently, saying his name.

  I thought, Oh no, he’s dead, but after about half a minute he opened his eyes, which were the same ashy gray as his skin and eyebrows.

  He said, “Where am I?”

  Luc said, “You’re in the restaurant in the Rue St. Florian. It’s Sunday evening. Look, here’s your cigarette.”

  He said, “Have I been gone long?”

  When you are that old, the loss of time must be very frightening, because it is the thing you most fear about death, that time will no longer be the same.

  “No,” Luc said, holding up his cigarette. It had burned about a third of the way down. “Look, you were only gone from there . . . to there.”

  Aurilly recovered, though he still had lapses of consciousness from time to time. My stomach pains got worse. In the pizzeria one lunchtime, Henri said, “Why aren’t you eating? Have you got palpitations? Low blood sugar? Are you depressed? Tired? Neurasthénique? Cholérique? Why don’t you go to the clinic?” The French are always interested in illness. In England illness is seen as less-than-wellness, a falling short of the normal state of things. The French think of illness without intrinsic value attached, so it can be made quite positive, interesting, just as an account of a disaster can be made into an exciting piece of writing. A Portuguese poet who was staying with Luc grabbed my arm and shouted, “I am taking you there now myself!” At the next table sat Laurent, head of radiology at the clinic. He peered through shaggy eyebrows, waved his spoon and said, “Come at the end of the afternoon and we’ll check you out.”

  I went and lay down on the machines, removing, in response to Laurent’s instructions, all sorts of bits of clothing that could hardly have impeded the photographic process, and staring up at the ceiling thinking, Maybe these are my last hours of not knowing I’m ill. Enjoy it. It was difficult to enjoy it, though, as Laurent was pointing the machines at parts of me which even my rudimentary knowledge of physiology and pathology told me had no connection with the pain. The consultant came in and looked at the pictures and said, “Very nice. No problem,” and left for the beach for the weekend. Laurent came and placed his hand on my breast and said, “Does it hurt there?” Paralyzed, I felt nothing at all, and then a nurse came in and Laurent leapt back and started writing out notes.

  I went and finished my shopping, to add to what Luc kept in his pantry, the sum of which was always just short of a meal. He stockpiled sunflower oil, white sugar cubes, eggs, pasta, rice and matches. Anything after that was detail. Whenever you went to the supermarket it took ten minutes to spend around 400 francs. It always seemed to cost 400 francs, whatever you put in the cart, which at least made housekeeping easy.

  When I got to the café in the early evening, sitting at the round table on the terrace were Luc and his friends, Morgan, my current lodger, an American academic with a strangely inverted face and a different little black dress for every day of the week, and Laurent and two of his technicians from the lab. The only place free was next to Laurent. I sat down and he put his arm around me, and said, “We looked after you, didn’t we, coquine,” and Luc said, “Is she OK then?” Laurent squeezed my shoulder and said, “She’s fine. Maybe come back in a couple of months for another look.”

  Morgan came up to the farm with me and we prepared the food on the terrace. The Portuguese poet tried to peel the green beans. He said that was what they did in his country, but he was clearly confusing them with something else. I leaned over to pour salt in the water and he stopped my arm and said, “I have been weeping. It is enough,” and Morgan said, “Hey, Mr. Organic, have some more red wine and pee in the salad dressing, could you?”

  An exhibition of Picasso’s drawings had just opened in the village, so there were lots of painters around, and journalists and poets, just hanging out for a while. I thought that evening, as we sat on the terrace and ate, that I’d never seen such a collection of beautiful men in my life; you’d have thought it was some kind of convention. It seemed to me that day that men were more beautiful than women, when they were beautiful at all. The Portuguese poet looked like a Roman who has had extremely successful cosmetic surgery, so the nose was that bit more chiseled, the cheekbones that bit sharper, his teeth just plain white and his skin a perfect mixture of soft and stubbled. Real Clinique-ad standard. My favorite, a doctor in his late fifties, looked like Paul Tortelier crossed with Samuel Beckett. He had spent a lot of time abroad working for Médecins Sans Frontières, which put him right at the top of my list of Harlequin romance heroes.

  Luc grilled the tuna steaks on the fire, with his back to everyone and the dog at his feet. Morgan’s black dress rode up high around her thighs, and she sat on the wall and watched the horses grazing, unconsciously imitating their expressions. Charles, a painter from Nice, was watching Morgan, unconsciously imitating hers. He had been one of those outside the café on the day of Luc’s exhibition, when I’d passed by with my Walkman. Since then I’d put him in a book I’d written in Luc’s house, because he had pale-blue eyes and a shambolic face, though now the flesh was starting to fall, so it looked like a garment hastily slung onto
a hanger.

  Charles’s wife was a teacher, extremely dynamic, a classic French mother of almost-grown children, hypermanicured, who shopped in heels. Charles himself was a copywriter, but had recently been discovered by Luc’s gallery and was doing well. Soon, he hoped, he would be able to give up advertising and paint full-time in the studio at the far end of the garden in their newly built house in the Vaucluse.

  “It would be a catastrophe for him,” Luc said.

  It was true. Charles needed his cage, or he’d stop rattling and produce nothing. Occasionally he’d turn up with a lover, a manicurist twenty years younger than him. She had a poodle. Charles would phone Luc and say, “I have to get away from these women, I’m going mad. Can I come?” and Luc would say, “Of course. Come this weekend. We’ll have a men’s weekend.” In between his phone call and the weekend, Charles would make it up with the manicurist and they would arrive together and lock themselves in a bedroom with a view of the mountain for three days. Luc would meet Charles on the way to the bathroom, with the manicurist’s robe clutched around him, frothing prettily at the collar. When Luc was single, and waiting for a woman to parachute into his life, he found these men’s weekends particularly trying, and usually ended up taking his horse and leaving a note on the fridge door for the manicurist, telling her where to find the eggs and rice. When he came back on Sunday night they’d have gone, leaving a note saying they’d gone to eat fish at the port and would see him soon. But this time Charles had come alone.