Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  “I’ve been waiting for you all morning,” she cried angrily. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Here she is,” he said proudly, as though he’d just made me. “She’s English.”

  I was wearing a green cotton dress with red flowers on it from Monsoon. She looked at me coldly and said, “Yes, I can see that.”

  We went into the main gallery. Luc’s paintings were already up. I’d seen them flat on the floor of the barn the evening before, and now they looked as if they’d staggered to their feet for an inspection, and were momentarily slumped back against the walls because they had a hangover or were desperate for shade. The shoddy, temporary look was accentuated by the fact that they were a bit off-center, and stuck to the wall with push-pins—Luc’s choice. One was a deep, thick marine blue, with a bone-white loop and a place at the bottom that looked as though he’d kicked a bucket of paint over when standing back to judge the effect. I caught myself thinking like my mother. I screwed up my eyes. That was better; it looked like a painting again.

  I looked around the different rooms, read some letters in a case, written by Picasso to his first wife, Fernande Olivier. Luc and the woman, who turned out to be the curator of the museum, came up the stairs. She was still scolding him fondly in a way that made it obvious they had once been lovers. I wondered whether, if he and I ever became lovers, we would fall out and I would talk to him in that way. It seemed unlikely, but he did have that effect on people. Even men talked to him like that, I noticed. He was laughing and saying, “Mais non, mais non!” He almost never raised his voice, as though there was a part of himself he particularly didn’t want to disturb.

  He found me looking at a series of lithographs by Matisse. “Tu aimes ça?” he asked. I was pretty sure I liked Matisse, but how could you actually tell? You looked, and you thought, That’s definitely Matisse, and because you were so pleased to recognize someone you knew, you didn’t actually care too much whether you liked them or not. The museum also had a series of late Picasso drawings on the theme of the artist, the monkey and the model. Luc pointed out how rapid the strokes were, how hasty the execution; it had never occurred to me before to think about the speed of a work of art.

  “Come and look at this,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder. I was reminded of the donkey boy who had found me, lost, on the beach at Scarborough when I was two or three. He had taken me to a hut, where we had stayed for what seemed like days. Luc was looking after me. He was enacting the gestures of love.

  You can’t love someone from the start. It is something you realize has happened, like a payment made into a bank account while you weren’t looking. Until that time, lovers act out the emotion and make shapes which love, later on, will inhabit. The French call it “Jouer la comédie de l’amour.”

  Up another flight of stairs, he led me to a painting signed with his name. It was a huge matte-black rectangle, with a white scribble, and in the middle a pair of photocopied eyes.

  “Is that—?” It looked like his work, a bit, but like what you might expect him to be doing in fifty years’ time. I was glad I hadn’t said so, though, because it turned out it was by his uncle.

  “That’s my grandmother,” he said. “Those are her eyes. He took it with a Kodak before they carried her off to the mortuary.” As a First World War widow—her husband’s name was on the base of the Maillol memorial, killed early on in the war, in 1914—she had had special privileges, in particular a license to open a post office in the big house on the boulevard. Luc owned it now, though his parents and uncle lived there.

  The uncle painted on meticulously prepared black canvases, thick-coated with a special matte-black paint he had sent up from Barcelona. He’d Scotch-tape the eyes to the canvas and scribble something in chalk underneath. That was the only kind of picture he ever did now.

  “She was a fossil anyway,” Luc said, “long before she died. She’d sit at the living room window, up on the third floor, looking out on the street with the phone book on her lap. Whenever anyone passed by she’d call out their telephone number off the top of her head, then she’d check it against their entry in the book.”

  Outside, on the terrace, he pointed out the roof of my apartment. “You could sunbathe on it.” I did, later that afternoon, even though it was only February. The tiles were hot and dangerous, and if I’d fallen asleep I would have ended up rolling off into the street. “Come to the opening on Friday night,” he said. “And to dinner afterward in the square.”

  That evening, and every evening that week, I saw him walking the boulevard with his uncle, a shrunken brown man with a nose like the child catcher’s in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He wore a sky-blue sweater, a color from a crayon box. Luc would lift his hand, smile and carry on.

  The second evening I saw him outside the café. He was wearing a startling green sweater, the synthetic apple green of children’s sweets. He had one leg up on one of the municipal flower pots, and I could see a stretch of skin between his shoe and where his jeans began. It was the winter brown of someone who is tanned all year round. I thought it was because it was Luc that I’d started noticing things like that, but I think actually it was because I’d just turned thirty. He nodded to me and said, “Hep!” a greeting he normally used for horses. The woman he was talking to was Vietnamese and was crying. He was talking very quietly. He had the strongest accent du midi I’d ever heard. Sometimes I thought he was joking, his e’s at the end of words were so heavy it sounded like a bad rhyme in a litany or a hymn, and his voice was both deep and very soft, with, just occasionally, a metallic tang.

  Suddenly it seemed like he was king of the village. I saw him walking with everyone, leaning against every wall and laughing, coming out of every shop, drinking in every café. It reminded me of my old comics, when you had to find hidden objects in the picture on the front cover—twenty squirrels, four buckets, two lawn mowers. There were at least twenty Lucs hidden in the village at any given minute of the day, and I only had to walk around a corner to bump into one of them.

  OPENING

  The Museum of Modern Art had once been the police station. It had been turned into the museum in the 1950s. Picasso gave them a series of fifty-six ceramic bowls, painted with moments from a bullfight, as a start-up pack. Reconditioned at the end of the eighties, the building now looked as though it had been given a makeover to keep up with the times and the company it kept. Since it had reopened one night in June 1993 there had been two big shows, one of Miró graphics and the other Tàpies, from Barcelona. Luc was the first local painter to exhibit. He was also one of a number of local painters who sold their work in Paris. His galeriste—gallery owner—was a tall, stooped Belgian of seventy-five, who lived in the Place des Vosges. The gallery was on the Rue de Seine and had black walls. They did a lot of body art there in the seventies—people burning their bodies with candles and making incisions in their flesh. Now he stopped at Notre Dame every morning and lit a candle for his young painters. Luc felt this was a bit too much of a spiritual approach to hustling, but since he had an ambivalent attitude toward success, and would always say, “Quelle calamité,” if he heard of someone selling a painting for a large sum of money, he couldn’t really complain.

  Passing the café shortly after two o’clock on the day of the opening, I was trying to fit new batteries into my Walkman. Luc waved and called me over. He was sitting with about six other men, none of them local, all drinking citron pressé. He introduced me. They were all painters or gallery owners. Everyone kept moving around to keep the elderly Belgian dealer in the shade. Luc fixed up my Walkman and said in a low voice, without looking at me, “Your shoes are très jolies,” and I thought, An Englishman would never say that.

  I was surprised to find him with these people, and that they were his friends. Until then I had only seen him in the streets of the village or on the farm. I realized later that the farm was the polar opposite, in its male austerity, of his parents’ cut-glass world, where things could so easily be broken. A
s I left he caught my shoulder and said, very quietly, “In the future, don’t wear a Walkman in the street, coquine. It makes you look like a tourist.”

  In the evening I got to the opening late, having been caught up in a conversation with my ex-husband—maybe it was the day he came around and took the furniture away. A dignified gentleman from Gloucestershire who lived up the valley had also called me and said, “You’re a liar and a cheat and my wife never wishes to speak to you again.” I imagined him rehearsing the words before he picked up the phone, masticating them stickily, like a preacher in a bathroom mirror. I was not in the mood for seduction. Did I really want this with Luc? Maybe my taste in men was a bit strange. They had to have something of the sea about them, to be deep, quiet and mysterious, but with playful currents and as many moods. It never occurred to me that you could be happy with someone you didn’t need to watch night and day just to keep yourself from drowning.

  At the opening the mayor was wearing his green silk suit and making a speech. Luc was smiling warily. Everybody wanted a bit of him. I wasn’t sure I did yet, so I waved at him, looked at his pictures and quickly left, along with a woman wrapped in a thick sheepskin coat who was sneezing and trembling. She introduced herself as his ex-wife.

  “He warned me not to come,” she said. “He told me.”

  Later I learned he’d also telephoned his best friend, a psychoanalyst in Paris, and told him, “Don’t come. Just don’t come. I don’t want you here.” The friend came anyway, took a room at the hotel and went to look at the pictures the following morning.

  I said, “Why did he say that? And why did you come? Weren’t you angry with him?” Marcel said no, he wasn’t angry, you had to give and take with Luc. Give what? Take what? I wondered.

  I didn’t go to the dinner, but at eleven o’clock someone called for Ben and asked me to give him a message. I went around to the restaurant. About thirty people were sitting at an L-shaped table. I gave Ben the message: “Il te cherchait,” he said. I hadn’t noticed Luc, but at that moment I felt his hand fall on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning. “I didn’t come.”

  “We’re just going outside,” he told the others. “Back soon.”

  The streets were empty. There was a strong moon and a hectic sky of racing clouds. “Allez. Lezz-go,” he said. It was his one phrase of English. I thought he’d said, “Let go,” and dropped his arm. “It will be windy up the mountain,” he said. “Take my coat.”

  He never made me any proposition. He never told me he was in love with me or that he desired me. “He kept saying, ‘She’s so sweet, so gentle,’ ” Stefan said later. “He never said you were beautiful at all.” He showed me his house, his horses, his paintings. He said, this is it, this is my life. He opened his entire world to me. He never asked me to accept him. It was as though everything had happened before we met, or in the moment we met. It was my first-ever relationship without language, without promises or assurances or confirmations of any kind.

  3. USEFUL BACKGROUND

  THE HISTORY OF THE Mas

  The estate had not been in his family for long. It had once belonged to a pied noir bishop with a diocese in North Africa, who’d had it built at the turn of the century. The bishop had had no (recognized) offspring, so eventually it passed to a distant relative, Monsieur Desarthes, a surgeon at the hospital in Toulouse. Monsieur Desarthes was drafted during the Second World War, and later found himself, in the company of Luc’s father, in a prisoner-of-war camp on the French-German border. They became friends, and when Monsieur Desarthes retired from the hospital he spent his summers on the estate for the good of his health. He suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and Luc’s father, as the village doctor, treated him, mostly with good conversation and whiskey, until he died.

  One day his widow called at the house after office hours. Sitting perched on the edge of the chaise longue, like a bird on its cage trapeze, she said that she had come to discuss the division of her estate. She and her husband had agreed, before he died, that the estate should be given to the doctor’s family, since they had none of their own.

  There were three properties on the estate. Two of them were farmhouses, facing each other on the inner thighs of two adjoining mountains. The first was a roofless shell called Mas Breillat, close up by the Spanish border, perhaps two kilometers away as the crow flies, two hours’ ride through the forest, crossing the river and climbing again up the opposite slope. It was entirely overgrown now, but featured on maps of the mountain in the seventeenth century, when it might have been the house of a woodcutter or a shepherd. Madame Desarthes gave this one directly to Luc. The second farmhouse was a much larger, colder mas and was named Teissarde, after the bishop. It comprised two separate, solid dwellings. This was given to Luc and his older brother, Georges, to split between them.

  Fifty yards away from Mas Teissarde, but separated in time by at least three centuries, was a bourgeois summer house, built by the bishop, with bleached wooden floors and a huge terrace facing west to the Canigou. This would go to the parents, to use as a weekend retreat. I imagined myself in it, wearing a plain white dress with my hair coiled at the nape of my neck, married to a Lutheran pastor whom I was betraying with his young curate. It was what Stefan called the Ingmar Bergman effect, a standard fantasy of European women, daughters of Lutherans and Methodists, who get caught up at the crossroads of passion and guilt, Protestantism and Catholicism, and end up in a Mediterranean world, hiding their necks from the sun.

  The two sons were both born in the house that used to be the doctor’s office, so they had both been brought up in the village, and had no experience of the mountains when they were young.

  Madame Desarthes handed over the estate some years before she died. She liked to see it lived in and would occasionally visit in the afternoons in early or late summer. In the living room of the summer house there was a Steinway, which she played, laying aside her stick and hitching up her long skirts. She had always worn white until the death of her husband. After that she only ever wore black. Luc remembers her standing on the terrace, looking over the valley at the Canigou, wearing a huge, flat black hat and with a narrow, pinched coat on over her dress, a walking stick and a parasol. It seemed rather a lot at once, and I wonder whether he hadn’t accumulated a number of different props from different scenes.

  At the time of the bequest, Luc had already begun painting his huge abstract pictures inspired by the landscape. He was twenty and studying to be a dentist at the university in Marseilles. He wanted a job that would allow him to work two days a week and spend the rest of the time painting, for the rest of his life, without ever having to cross over the Pont du Diable. Madame Desarthes doted on Luc because he had written to France Musique for her while she had been ill the previous winter and gotten hold of a ticket to a concert in their studios in Paris the following spring, which gave her something to get better for. He was, as he often pointed out himself, one of those people who make things better. This was quite a strange gift, because he was explosive and could be unkind and maniacal. But if you had a problem of which he wasn’t the cause he was a veritable healer. The summer he came of age Luc turned his back on the sea, and went up into the mountains. He took with him the woman who would live with him for the next twelve years. He married her after eleven and a half years, then divorced her six months later. Like him, she had lived in the village all her life, but he first saw her that summer, sitting at a café table, and identified her as someone he could love.

  Like Luc, Catherine floated when she walked. She was thin and brown and serene, and she had a voice that soothed you when your own throat was raw. She played the piano, was a star pupil at the local lycée and had just won a place to study at a lycée in Paris for a year before applying to university. Her father was a colonel. He had married the elder of two sisters, had Catherine, then divorced and married the younger sister, had two boys, then divorced and married the elder one again, so that Catherine’s aunt was al
so her ex-stepmother, and her mother was her half-brothers’ stepmother and aunt.

  Hearing that she was about to go to Paris to begin her year’s study as he was about to go off to a southern university to study medicine, Luc went and got his car—the doctor’s cast-off—and drove Catherine up the mountain to Mas Breillat. The drive takes about forty minutes. After that you have to walk for half an hour. As they came around the corner, in view of the pile of stones, he watched her face, and when he saw her move toward it as she would later move toward her horses, gently, unafraid, he said he knew she wouldn’t go to Paris to the lycée, she’d stay there and fix up the house with him.

  The colonel was furious and went marching around to see Luc’s parents—his daughter must have an education; she was a brilliant student who could do well for herself. He wasn’t going to stand for her shacking up with the doctor’s son, fixing up his pile of stones for him while he was off getting his degree in Marseilles. “And you’d better marry her, too, while you’re about it. This is a respectable family you’re dealing with here.” “Oh, really?” Luc replied. Catherine went to Paris, stayed six weeks, cut all her lessons and spent her afternoons sitting in the Jardin des Plantes writing letters to Luc about the city and how she was dying of urban blight, so he went up and took her home.

  They lived at Mas Breillat for eleven years. Catherine cooked and put the roof on, while Luc worked in the dental office down in the village. At first she wrote poetry, but soon became discouraged. Like Luc, she would look out of the window and say, “The real thing’s better.” Eventually they moved to Teissarde, the big farm, and began keeping horses, always Catherine’s dream. Georges, who was already living in his half of the big farm, resented Luc’s arrival and decided to make a property issue out of it. He said that if he ever found one of Luc’s horses or his dog on his bit of land, on the wrong side of the hawthorn hedge, he would shoot them. For the first six months everything went fine. But one of Luc’s painter friends kept his horses at the house, too, and one day he brought his wife, Anne, over to ride. Catherine saw the look on Luc’s face. He was never clandestine. Deceit would not have suited him at all. The following day, staying clear of him, she left.