Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  Painters have always been drawn here. Matisse and the Fauves painted the glossy fishing barques at Collioure against a background of pink stone and childish blue jiggles of water. Picasso came with Braque in 1911 and spent three summers here. Their letters to friends and dealers back in Paris mention that they had discovered a beautiful place. But they painted it out of all recognition, twisting its features and redrawing its contours with willful strokes of the brush. Picasso’s women had to be sure of their beauty; how else could they have stood being made to look like queens in a lunatic set of playing cards? Here was a landscape similarly assured.

  Pause at the traffic circle. Fold up the map. The river valley spreads before you in soft geometric shapes, a canvas from Claude Lorrain. The road runs straight from here, lined with a row of plane trees—platanes—on the river side. There used to be a parallel line of plane trees on the other side of the road, and the two joined branches in the middle, forming a canopy beneath which people rode into town under a full day’s sun. They cut down one side in the 1960s because the tree cover was so dense that people kept crashing into each other in the midday dark.

  People say this is all that’s left of Arcadia, but there are no mythological figures, no cavorting fauns or maidens swaddled in young white fat reclining by pools. A farmer walks through the vines, squeezing the new grapes thoughtfully and watching the pull of the western wind on the night clouds as they are tugged away and up toward the highest peaks. Adolescents lean against their motocyclettes on the dirt path that leads down to the lake where they will swim, do their homework, eat burgers from the café or make love behind it. When we drive back up the valley from the beach, or even sometimes from Montpellier or Toulouse, Luc says, “Look at me, stealing back like a guilty husband,” as though he’d committed an infidelity just by leaving home.

  DEVIL’S BRIDGE

  Get off the bus. Cross the Devil’s Bridge. The world authority on devil’s bridges, Gaspard Dupont, lives in the village. He had a job in computers, went off to Africa with it, came back without it and didn’t move from the counter of the Café Central for the next three years. His eye sockets grew slack as his eyes shrank, preserved at half volume in pastis, into the back of his head. His cheeks grew sprigs of purple capillaries, which fanned out over his face like alpine plants on a rockery.

  Gaspard was walking home one summer night after a drinking bout with the insurance broker, Maurice. Maurice had a broken heart for which no solace could be found, no restitution made. He took Gaspard to the bridge, shook his hand and said, “Adieu; this is where it ends.” But there must have been a protection plan somewhere with Maurice’s name on it. When he tried to launch himself into the air he found the muscles in his legs were swamped with liquid. He sagged, defeated, to the ground at Gaspard’s feet, and soon fell into a restoring slumber. Alone on the Devil’s Bridge under a full summer moon, Gaspard experienced a moment of quiet epiphany and fell in love with the stones.

  He measured and paced it, and photographed it from down by the river and up at the top of the hill. Then he discovered that this Devil’s Bridge was not the only one. It had cousins and relations all over Europe. One evening he sat down at my table on the café terrace, looked me steadily in the eye and said, “Kirk—by Lons—dale.” “Yes,” I said, I knew it quite well. I had jumped off it as a teenager. Someone else had jumped off it that summer and been killed. He was delighted. It was as though, for him, all other devil’s bridges were virtual. My affirmation of its existence at some point in the past brought that virtuality forward a little, and we both sat there at the café table, watching it nudge into focus in our imagination, he looking forward at it, as something new, and I looking back at it, as something old, once known.

  There are three bridges over the river as you come into the village. The Devil’s Bridge, on your left, is for pedestrians only. It’s called the Devil’s Bridge because legend says the devil built it and invoiced the village for the soul of whoever should cross it first. The villagers sent a cat, but the devil was not deceived. It’s an unsatisfactory story, because it doesn’t say who was sent in place of the cat. To your right is the old railway bridge, and the middle bridge for the D115, which joins up with a traffic circle. Here they sometimes build traffic circles just in case they need them later on, even though there are no roads to feed into them yet, and no plans for any. Town planning becomes a giant exercise in joining up the dots. The big house on the left by the fruit shop with the surreally cheap prices—twenty avocados for five francs! thirty kiwis for ten!—is where Picasso stayed during his first summer in the village in 1911. A bit further on up the valley is a fourth bridge, made of metal, which used to carry the railway line back across the river. It is known as “La Tour Eiffel: reclining.”

  Car drivers take the last exit off the first traffic circle, the last exit off the second traffic circle, the first exit off the third traffic circle and then the second right at a sign for the parking lot. The new road, Acacia Avenue du Midi, sweeps past the firehouse and up to the equestrian center, where ten or eleven horses graze and a few lone rangers sit around under a beautiful grass-hut construction, lamenting the departure of the cowboys for the Far West Club near Tautavel. The town is built in concentric circles around a fountain in a square. Though it is technically a town, and in Italy would be called a city, the locals always call it “le village.” To say “the village” is like calling a woman by her maiden name because you knew her before she married someone you didn’t like. The fountain head is a carved stone lion, which, when the town was Spanish, used to look south toward Spain. During the seventeenth century, when it became French, they took the lion’s head off and turned it to face France. One year, during the feria, there was a fight over it, and a group of men from Barcelona tried to wrench it around again. The manager of the pizzeria found it in the gutter on the Monday morning and took it to the mairie—the town hall—where it now sits in the in-tray of an idle councillor.

  The house is built into the sixteenth-century ramparts and is two minutes on foot from the fountain. Park in the top corner of the parking lot and walk through the little stone arch, past the round fortress tower where washing hangs in place of flags. A group of teenagers sits smoking and kissing on the stone wall at the foot of the tower. In France, smoking and kissing have never been seen as antithetical, and both activities tend to be embarked on young. In a niche in the outer wall of the house opposite, a stone cat sits watching. No. 11 is the last house on the right, the one with the bulge in the wall and the double garage doors. The woman next door sits outside because there is nowhere to sit inside her house, not because she is curious or waiting for anyone. She will smile at you as you pass her door and bare the gaps where her teeth should be. She went to Luc last year saying she’d lost her dentures; he made her a new set. She went back a week later and said she had lost them, too. They decided between them that the reason she kept losing them was because she didn’t really want any teeth. There were no words she particularly wanted to say that couldn’t be said without them.

  The key is in an envelope pinned to the door. It’s a tiny modern Yale key and it fits the top lock. There is a key from a completely different kingdom that fits the bottom lock, but it’s so big it’s kept in a tin bucket under the sink. Objects have a way of finding their proper places that isn’t very different from the way people or animals find places to settle into—arbitrary and unaccountable, but, if you’re lucky, just right. Pull the door sharply toward you, turn the key twice to the left, push with your knee and, at the same time, turn the huge metal ring which once would have been used for tethering your horse or mule. Hang the key on the hook just inside the door. If you lose it there is a spare behind the bar at the café under the plane trees.

  THE HOUSE

  The house was built in the sixteenth century, according to the documents in the mairie, and in structure, at least, it’s a typical village house, on three floors, with the living accommodation on the second and third floors
, and car or animals at ground level. The terrace on the second floor at the back is what realtors call a selling point. At the moment it overlooks the old cobblestone piggery, where strange, unauthorized things grow up between the stones, but if extended out to cover that dingy space, gaining another fifteen feet, it would be quite an addition to the house. Year after year, though, for lack of money, it remains the same, rather scruffy, perfect patch of light, with a purple bougainvillea growing up one wall and a pink bougainvillea growing up the other. People come and shake their heads and say, “That’ll never take,” or, “That’ll dry out,” and “I’ll take my hat off to you if that survives!” Occasionally, freak conditions bring about a rare coincidence of colors in bloom. In the middle of May, like two eyebrow-raisingly ill-matched lovers at a ball, pretty blue plumbago and orange California poppies, the very color of pollen, appear side by side, unannounced. The rich dirty-golden poppies, for all the brazenness of their flowers, are delicate, and their fragile stems will easily break unless you sow them so thick they stand in a dense frondy thicket. Plumbago has an unusual characteristic: just as its name doesn’t match its shape, its flowers don’t match its foliage, either in shade or form, so that it’s never quite as beautiful as it should be. Its woody stems bear cold blue flowers with tiny forget-me-not petals, hesitant and pale.

  Water the plants before breakfast, before the sun hits the back wall. You can really only have breakfast out there without a shade if you get up earlier than you probably want to on holiday, otherwise you’ll find yourself staggering back inside with sunstroke, singing high Cs in your head. Better to lie in bed and wait until the shadow burns off the sheets and the sun steals through your eyelashes and lights up the inside of your head, draping your inner eyelids with phosphorescent coral strands. Then you can open the windows wide and lean out and shake yourself gently awake. In summer your eyes are filled first with the light and the mountain and the sky, and then, as their focus gradually sharpens and is able to register smaller things, the lines of the houses clear. A bird appears on the wall opposite, the trees grow branches and individual leaves, hesitant flowers unfold on the wall and in the pots below, and an insect works its way down a beautifully drawn line, a fiber of color leading inward to the stamen and a grain of smutty pollen.

  At least that’s how it seems to me, with my English eyes and the English words I have to describe what I see. The French language went through the equivalent of colonic irrigation in the 1960s, when Robbe-Grillet announced that “any attempt to endow the physical world with emotion is a step toward the illicit belief in God.” Once he described the exact dimensions of a window, supplying detail upon grinding detail, ignoring the fabulous blue view beyond. Maybe he deliberately lived somewhere where you wouldn’t want to look beyond the window frame, just in case one morning he found his heart pounding and gods sliding down greasy poles from heaven to frolic below. I know a flower can’t be hesitant, because it doesn’t have a consciousness. I know a mountain shouldn’t loom majestically, it’s not a god or a prophet or a dictator. I know looming majestically is a cliché. But there has to be something between that and flatly stating its shape and measurements. Often an airplane crosses the mountain here on its way to Barcelona, soundless, scarcely visible, betrayed, as it steals over the border, by its long white tail, soft as a rabbit’s, but drawn out in time, what Stefan calls un moment Godard. Stefan’s officially with Robbe-Grillet when it comes to descriptive language; but he knows that when he calls me in the quiet early afternoon and says, “Look out the window, ma belle, it’s a moment Godard,” the words exhale a puff of softest innuendo.

  Over the terrace wall, the backs of the houses of the Rue des Commerçants describe a chaotic D, like an amphitheater whose back central stage is this little terrace. It wiggles, up along and up, from the Place de la République to the Place de la Liberté. The Rue des Commerçants is cobbled and treacherous, with water gushing along the gutters on either side. You can shake hands with your neighbor opposite without leaving your front room. The houses are tall, very tall, but all of different heights, creating a crenellated kind of effect, with mountain views for some. Each house, so grim and sheer seen from the sunless well of the Rue des Commerçants, bursts out onto the gardens, which are their shared, delicious secret. It is as though, backstage, away from public view, every idiosyncrasy of color and shape has been indulged. Each house looks like a children’s dress-up trunk that has been plundered, contents spilling out into the sun.

  The ground floor is empty. You can hang your washing out in the piggery. There is a tiny bathroom, a pile of wood for the stove in winter, wine storage and a back room full of gummed-up paint pots. The iron banister rail has a few sharp places; don’t grip it too tight or it will tear shreds out of your palms.

  On the second floor there’s the terrace and a pair of portes fenêtres through which to step out onto it from the living room—wooden floor; one table; one sofa; two cane chairs from the market in Figueras; one etching of a shepherd sitting on the grass, looking at Hillsborough House; one painting by Luc, who painted nothing else in this house. Small toilet with a weak flush. Kitchen—one Welsh dresser, with fragile panes of glass; stove new; fridge new. Telephone numbers and addresses for doctors and dentists, and emergency numbers, are on the sheet of paper stuck on the side of the dresser. In the corner, for winter, there’s a cast-iron stove with zinc pipes leading to the chimney. There’s cutlery in the drawers, pans hanging from the wall, plates and cooking equipment in the dresser, napkins and tablecloths in one drawer; pegs, screwdrivers, tape, pliers, possibly corkscrews, push-pins, curtain hooks, caulk in a tube, superglue and shoe polish in the other. I like the way you discover day by day, when you move into someplace new, what you really need in life, what the bare necessities really are.

  The staircase winds up from the kitchen to the third floor. On your left, at the front of the house, overlooking the street, so you can exchange vowel sounds with the woman next door by hanging out of the window, and catch a glimpse of the top of the mountain if you hang out dangerously far, is the smaller yellow bedroom with gray doors. All the floors are wooden, and make a lot of noise unless you tread lightly as you go. Walk down the short corridor to the main bedroom, where the sun wakes you if you choose not to close the flaking shutters before you go to sleep. White walls, blue window, the same view as the terrace. The house opposite was bought by one of the four village pharmacists, the one who’ll write you out prescriptions in his room above the shop so that, if you are a tourist and uninsured, you can avoid a doctor’s bill by going straight to him. Beyond, with gardens spreading up the sides of the hills, is the house where Picasso lived in his later summers, with forty-two windows, each with a painted pair of gray-blue shutters. From the same window you can see the house Le Corbusier’s partner built for his own retirement; slim, white, rectangular, like a video cassette slid into the mountainside. From this height you can see more of the southern hills, though not the lakes that lie behind, and the particular mountain that leads you up over the Route des Evadés into Spain. Every eleventh of November the mayor follows it up to the border with his entourage and some of the surviving Spaniards who left Spain under Franco, to sing a republican hymn around a stone which says, “By this path, 500,000 Spaniards escaped from the Falangists between 1937 and 1939.” And the last building on the road before Spain is the farm where Luc sits rolling his cigarettes hour after hour and looking up in silence into the leaves of a tree. Luc felt well placed, living on a path called the Route des Evadés, along which people had escaped in both directions—Spaniards, and later Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich. Whenever I got restless and felt the need to go off for a while and see the world, he would point up the hill to the border and say, “It’s that way.” In 1959 Picasso visited the village, and Luc’s father took him up there to look out over Spain. Picasso had planned to build his Chapelle de la Paix up there, so the farm would have become a sandwich shop for pilgrims, but according to Luc’s father,
he spat on the ground when he realized that from the top of the hill you could see not only the whole of the sweep of hills and the plain as far as the bay of Cadaqués, but also the point of land on which Dali had built his home at Port Lligat. Picasso built his Chapelle de la Paix in much-visited Saint-Paul de Vence instead, where, as Luc points out, they never get a moment’s peace.

  This is the theater of my life, a little hidden-away theater where the dramas are domestic, and entrances and exits are marked by nothing more dramatic, usually, than the closing of a door, the clasping at night of a pair of shutters, someone looking for a lost toy in a garden, finding it and stepping back indoors again. A child in the house to the left with the garden plays the piano in that tense, unsure way children do. Her mother jogs every morning with the pharmacist’s wife. They are both beautifully tanned and sleek. They run along the edge of the river and down through the peach orchard, past the horses and through the parking lot, their light running-shoe fall pattering through the dreams of the travelers sleeping in campers parked up on the grassy shoulder. They come home and drink lemonade in the garden, eat Swedish crackers from the health-food shop and talk about their children while, in late summer, heavy fruit falls into the soft grass. But from here you can never catch what they are saying, so I don’t really know if it is the little girl or one of her brothers who plays Scarlatti with ill humor, and sometimes Chopin with reluctant, halting tenderness.