Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  At first Christophe went crazy. He slept with his pupils and took to drink. They had just had plans drawn up for a new house, to be constructed in fields by the river, five minutes’ drive from the town. It was a part of the valley that was unusually blessed, and where plants grow thick and waxy and there are flowers all year round. It was to be a house for his wife, where she might start to be happy again.

  Christophe was going to cancel the project, but Luc persuaded him to go ahead with it. You have to continue; you have to build a house for someone to come and live in. You can’t keep on sleeping in women’s beds and leaving in the morning all your life. So the house was built, and Marie-Lou arrived.

  There was an age difference of twenty-eight years between them. Christophe was short and stocky—he cut down his drinking when he met Marie-Lou, so his face lost a lot of fat, but not the flesh to contain it, which gave him a deflated look. He had an incredibly deep voice, big forearms and a graceful walk. Marie-Lou was a clown, twice his height, always throwing her arms around him and kissing him, gasping and shrieking at her own mistakes. She called him “mon amour.” Together they put on end-of-year shows for Marie-Lou’s dance school at the Salle de Spectacle. Christophe introduced her to his record collection. You got the impression they spent a lot of time in bed. Marie-Lou’s parents hated Christophe because he was a communist, and refused to let him meet Amelia. Marie-Lou saw her daughter just once a week, in the front line of her ballet class.

  One night, during a village fête, we were all sitting at the Central drinking. Marie-Lou screeched, leaped to her feet and dragged me across the square to where a young man from the local rugby team was dancing naked on a table. After a while we came back. I hadn’t found it very exciting, nor had Marie-Lou; it was just in her nature to goggle and applaud and notice the world going on around her. Later, I noticed Christophe hadn’t spoken to her for an hour. She went to a stall opposite the café and bought a huge bag of sweets, disappeared behind the Roman wall and ate them all in one go. Then she dived into the Central, and came out again ten minutes later smelling of sugar and sick. They went home. Two days later I met her wearing a hat in the street. It was July, so I asked her why she was wearing a woolen hat. She took it off and showed me where she had ripped out all the hair from the crown of her head that night when they’d got home, because Christophe had said he wasn’t prepared to live with a woman who catcalled at naked men. He’d said it would make people think he was too old to get it up.

  We often ate at the pizzeria in summer. Marie-Lou would order three pizzas—plain margheritas, with tomato, cheese and a thin crust—and eat one after the other. If anyone had a dessert she would say, “I’ll have another pizza please.” She burned it all off dancing, and probably in bed with Christophe. She was always angling for the last glass out of the bottle of wine whenever we went to a restaurant, so that she could declare, according to custom, that she would marry within the year. But Christophe didn’t want to marry her. He couldn’t imagine them married, though they’d been living together, in the house he’d built for his wife, for six or seven years. He said if he married again he would turn into an old man overnight.

  Gigi had been one of Christophe’s lovers for a short time. One day Annie, the pharmacist’s wife, and Gigi were shopping in Perpignan together. Gigi was about to say to her, “Listen, you’ll never guess, I slept with Christophe last night!” when Annie got in first and said, “I’m so in love with Christophe, I can’t eat.” So instead Gigi said, “Oh, you can’t want him; he’s far too old.”

  Gigi didn’t approve of Marie-Lou because she said she was stupid and had no grace, despite being a dancer. She was powerful and astonishing, but she had no grace. Nothing in Gigi’s shop fit her. But on a Saturday morning, while Christophe was raking through the CD stall at the market, Gigi beckoned Marie-Lou inside. Just stand there, she said, and slip this dress on. It was a wedding dress by Ines de la Fressange. I came into the shop to pay for a skirt I’d taken the week before. Gigi was always happy to give credit if you agreed to wear the piece of clothing all the time so that others would come and buy the same. Marie-Lou looked extraordinary in the dress. She turned round, and there was Christophe looking at her through the window. Gigi smiled her wide, pale smile, and shrugged and went out to talk to him, leaving Marie-Lou feeling stupid in the dress. Gigi was so seductive it was absurd; she made insincerity captivating, and yet she was terribly fond of Christophe, and of Luc, too, so it wasn’t real, only fake insincerity. She took Christophe off for a coffee over the road, and Marie-Lou and I went off to the market to buy things for lunch.

  I then went back to the café to wait for the others. Christophe had bought sliced saucisse de montagne for us to eat out of waxed paper with our aperitifs. He was telling Luc about the wedding dress. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t want to marry her. I can’t be faithful. I have been so far, but what if I met another woman?” At that point he flicked his head around, afraid Marie-Lou might have come up behind and overheard him. We saw his eyes fix on a woman in a red shirt, making her way up toward the top of the market. He said, “Wait there, I’ll be back.”

  He followed the woman up past Etienne’s spice stall, and the trout van, where a man in a white coat whacked each fish over the head to order. The crowd was thinning out as it was past midday, but Christophe had difficulty keeping up with the woman.

  “I had to talk to her,” he said later. “I felt her pass. I had to follow her. I thought it was her.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The woman I was meant to . . . I can’t remember. I just had to speak to her. It was the woman I was talking about. I tapped her on the shoulder; she turned around.”

  “And?” we both said.

  “It was me,” said Marie-Lou.

  THE BEACH

  If you live near the sea, you have to go there every now and then. At some time people must have started wandering down to the sea’s edge just because they wanted to be close to it, not because they were setting sail or hoping to catch fish. Is it because we came out of the sea in the first place, at the start of evolution, that we now feel pulled back to look at it, be close to it, play, flirt or read our newspapers alongside it?

  The English, in particular, feel comfortable by the sea. Not that our sea does much for us; it’s cold, unapproachable and cement-gray most of the time. There was no way I was ever going to live near the Atlantic. But having the Mediterranean so close was very different from knowing you were only forty-five miles from Skegness, the face of the sea in my childhood. On summer holidays the family would go for outings to confront the sea, as though it was us versus Poseidon and the tideline was a net. The sea would always win, either retreating so far off behind the base line you simply couldn’t engage with it, or zooming in and flooding your patch of ground, sending you scrambling back up to the parking lot. The Mediterranean is round. That makes a difference in the way you feel about it: there is no confrontational shore.

  The village is only thirty kilometers from the sea, and there is only one beach anyone goes to. There are other, nearer beaches, and there are hidden coves once you get over into Spain, but this is the backyard beach, a little bit of the village by the sea, where you can always find room to sit and meet people you know.

  A straight Roman road runs from the village to the sea. As you approach you can see another Templar castle at Collioure, set up high on the cliff. Like the one further up the coast, it was never used. The French have always been strong on the unactivated deterrent.

  Cut into the cliff is a monument to Walter Benjamin, the Jewish scholar from Berlin. This was not where he should have died. In wartime people die in places they were never supposed to, in places meant to be a passageway, not a resting place. It’s like dying halfway up the stairs or in the shed. Commissioned to construct a monument for the centenary of Benjamin’s birth, the architect constructed a rectangular iron shaft, maybe two meters high, two meters wide and 200 steps deep, and laid it n
ot vertically, but at an angle to the cliff, like a staircase. If you stand at the top of the cliff, looking down the funnel with the light behind you, your reflection is thrown down onto a glass sheet, fixed just short of the surface of the sea. You see your own body, prostrate, as it would hit the water if you fell.

  No one knows where Benjamin’s body lies or where his bones might be. He disappeared in 1940 after a three-day hike across the border shrubland. Thirsty, unfit for further travel and bewildered by the place of refuge, which often provokes a violent nostalgia for the dangerous place one has been forced to leave, he slept for a night in a guest house in Banyuls. It’s said that the woman who ran the guest house where he slept denounced him to the Germans, who killed him. He was a bespectacled, academic man, one of those timid, unexpected wartime heroes whose bravery is of the kind acknowledged only in peacetime. It would have been easier to kill Benjamin than a fly, and then flick the body away into the sea.

  Just north of here the new fast road starts to climb and you are lifted to a point where the sea is below you, dark blue and surprisingly deep, with little white scratches where a boat has passed, and pink and yellow and green and red dashes of sail, like cotton cuffs peeking out from a somber suit. The soil in the vineyards on the terraced cliffs is brick red, and the vines produce a grape that is made into a thick, black glutinous wine, to drink with the poivrons aux anchois, red peppers and anchovies, powdered with silver leaf and packed in crushed flakes of sea salt—Collioure’s local dish. Collioure is where Matisse made his home. Its distinguishing feature is the phallic bell tower on the end of the harbor promontory, a flesh-pink knob winking rosily.

  It’s the last long beach in France before the coast crumples into coves and creeks, like a wrinkled elbow joint. At one end it is still a smooth, long, sandy expanse, and at the other it is already beginning to crinkle and grow rocky. Once you are safely into Spain, and around the treacherous headland of Cap Creus, where Salvador Dali built his house, the coastline smooths out once again.

  Leave the main road here and follow the smaller one under the coast road, through a tunnel and up onto the path that goes down to the beach village. Until quite recently it was no more than three lines of houses, maybe fifteen in each, built on the beach in the 1930s to house Spanish refugees and later “enemy aliens” interned by the French during the early stages of the war. The refugees built them, watched over by the French army, who didn’t know whether they should put locks on the inside or outside of the doors.

  The beach houses are simple, usually one-story buildings, with sand paths running between them. They were sold off just after the war, and the locals snapped them up, and planted bougainvillea and passion flowers up trellises nailed into the concrete walls, and created little gardens of pebbles and cacti and sea plants that thrive in salt. Sometimes we spent the night in Luc’s family’s house, in a large, sandy upper room twenty yards from the edge of the sea. Downstairs all the furniture came from Luc’s grandmother’s house—dark mahogany dressers and a solid table covered with a washable plastic cloth, with twisted legs, wrung out like a bathing suit to remove the salt water. Upstairs the front wall is all glass. Lying in bed you see only three elements—sky, sea and, in the morning, the rising sun.

  The family spent their summers at the beach, where they had a house that had originally been constructed to house German internees—mostly Jewish, before the French decided whose side they were on—and Spanish refugees. The boys had a boat, which they sailed in competitions. Their grandmother occasionally guarded them at the beach when they were very small. She would tie a long piece of black elastic around each of their waists, which allowed them to stray from the porch of the beach house to the edge of the water, no further. If they went into the water the elastic would snap and lash them across the buttocks or the backs of their legs.

  Mothers and children spend most of the long summer holidays at the beach, while fathers stay back in the village and drive down at night to eat grilled fish after a swim or a surf and a game of volleyball with the children. The crowd starts gathering around ten in the morning. In early summer Catherine steals down to the beach when she has fed her horses and watered her garden. She brings a book and lies at first on her back, while the sun is still weak, then, as it gains strength, she turns onto her front, her breasts making small saucer dimples in the sand. Stefan sometimes comes down early, to swim, he says, before the windsurfers and motorboats take to the water, but really he goes to see Catherine, enjoying the delicious early morning tension in his loins, aroused, he says, by the sight of her pubic hair spilling from the tight band of her bikini bottoms, like coils of sand worms on a damp beach.

  At midmorning the ice cream sellers arrive—usually actors, or young men who went to circus school, as the children of many liberal bourgeois families seem to do. They weave their way through the crowd, black from the sun, with poodle curls or shaven heads and long flapping shorts to protect the backs of their thighs, the dye from the cloth washed away by June or early July, a whisper of the original color. They sell bars and cones, lollipops and fruit, which they carry in huge thermally sealed hampers, releasing quick gull-like cries as they weave up and down the beach, singing songs that have no sense but have to do with what they have in their hampers, and must be invitations to buy. If you stop them they will crouch down beside you and flip through the book you are reading and have put to one side to scrabble among the suntan oil, tissues and sandals in your bag to find change. They are never ill-humored or tired. Their teeth flash whiter than ice and they walk in the hot sand without wincing. They are strangely eunuchlike, and never seem to glance at the girls, or even the tumescent males, sprawled sleepily next to women with Botticelli breasts, enjoying the luxury of not noticing what they know is theirs to touch.

  There is a sour delicacy to the etiquette of topless bathing. You often see couples smiling lazily at one another; it is almost as though the social restriction imposed by the supposed antierotic aspect of naturism is welcome, since it no longer exists anywhere else, and brings a transgressional note to the slightest contact, even between couples who know each other’s bodies of old.

  The beach is a democratic place, and although there are surprises there is no judgment. It is a public place, and there is even a feeling of citizenship among the beachgoers, and of equality. Luc told me that one summer a group of friends came from the village for a holiday picnic, most of them in their mid-thirties or forties—the dress circle and all their husbands and boyfriends; in many cases both at once. Luc said that the pharmacist’s wife arrived late. In the street she looks like a slightly dumpy mom, with a pleasant face and sensibly cut brown hair. When she pulled off her dress to go swimming, the others all watched her walk toward the water. Without her clothes on she was a series of swoops and curves and lovely flesh, and as she stood with the sea just up to the very tops of her legs, tickling the crease between her thighs and her buttocks, with her back to them all, in her plain brown halter-neck swimsuit, adjusting the tie at the back of her neck, they all just lay looking after her, speechless. Shortly afterward her husband, the pharmacist with the extra spring, got up and followed her into the water.

  Grandparents encourage toddlers to walk on the soft sand, to give them an easy landing, which isn’t very good training for life, but makes falling down fun. Clusters of adolescents arrange themselves on the sand, boys and girls mixed, the dark and the fair, the gangly and tubby and bookish and the astonishingly beautiful, legs like compasses, dancing circles in the sand, with their black hair licked back by the waves and dusty with dried salt, skin glowing darkly like unglazed terra-cotta steeped in some aromatic oil. Now and then a boy leaps to his feet in anger and runs off, very fast, down the beach, and a girl shrugs and turns back to her friends. He will slouch back later and fling himself onto the sand with his back to her, and she will continue to laugh and chatter with all the hardened knowhow of a woman twice her age. Younger children are busy building things, carrying bits of the beach
over to where they are making a rival beach, or a city or a fortress, copying the world as they know it. Mothers stand around in halter tops and sarongs, holding the youngest child in their arms, the last child, the one made for sheer pleasure, as a keepsake, almost, of a time in their lives that is passing with the oldest child’s application to university or first trip to England to be an au pair. After supper the older couples, whose children are elsewhere, or off at a village dance, stroll along the shore and stop to talk with friends, much as they do at home. It seems a nice way to spend your life, ebbing and flowing like the tide between the village and the shore. Up to August 15 the sky is a hot metal press, the sea an unmarked surface. On the night of the fifteenth there are almost always green comets and shooting stars in the sky, and phosphorescence in the sea and fireflies in the air. Then there are two weeks of variable weather; it may carry on as before, but once the fifteenth has passed this is a favor, not a right. It may grow stormy, as though the season had suddenly become adult, tired of games and sunshine, and had brought on some heavy weather to call the idle to order. In September, when the children go back to school, people pack up and go back inland, and shore up and shutter their beach houses against the equinox storms with metal blinds, padlocked to stanchions set in concrete in the ground.

  Each year a house is lost, or partially wrecked by the sea, which rises spookily from its summer slumber to fling itself in a lunatic rage against the land. It is as though, courted all summer long, played with, loved, embraced and serenaded, the sea had woken to find itself abandoned and come to throw itself at the coastline with all the mad gestures of a locked-out lover.

  The beach is at its best, is most itself, in the gray, scowling afternoons of early autumn, when the wind has blown great troughs into the beach, and the sand is already piled up high against the house walls, and grit has pelted and scratched the metal sheaths, pinging and rattling, a percussion of minerals wielded by the wind. There is always a shoe and a toy, and the odd unidentifiable strut or piece of piping from a windsurfer or a barbecue grill, and a fish head dried to a husk in the corner between sill and window. Now you can walk across the rocks and into the next bay, where the vegetation is terse and acrid—garden rosemary’s salty cousin, gray with the weather and the sun and wind, with tiny pinches of lilac-blue flowers in the winter. There is a sea shrub with pink flowers edged with yellow, and sea artichokes, huge donkey thistles with stems as coarse as sugar cane, which ooze white, bubbling sap when they snap and break.