Instructions for Visitors Read online

  Praise for Helen Stevenson’s heartfelt memoir

  INSTRUCTIONS FOR VISITORS

  “An utterly charming, evocative memoir of renting in a small, southwestern French village, of falling for the lifestyle and a Frenchman. Beautifully written, colorful, and romantic; I loved it.”

  —The Bookseller

  “A startlingly original work. . . . This memoir is striking for its bright images, its elegant originality, and its poignant understatements.”

  —Harper’s & Queen

  “This clever, gripping and elegantly written account . . . [is] her elegy for the end of a powerful, life-shaping love affair.”

  —Independent (U.K.)

  “Stevenson’s village attains life beyond the stereotypes, a vividness that goes deeper than Gallic hauteur and great bread.”

  —Scotland on Sunday

  “As voyeuristically pleasurable as rooting through the owner’s letters and photo albums in a rented cottage.”

  —Sunday Times (U.K.)

  “Helen Stevenson has written a brilliant memoir about how it feels to fall in love not only with a place, but also with the man who embodies it. . . . In haunting, delicate prose, she explores the painful realization that she will always be a stranger—to her lover and her home.”

  —Eve

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  To all those whose stories enriched this account and whose lives touched mine, I am indebted with gratitude and great affection.

  1. INSTRUCTIONS

  DIRECTIONS

  Leave the highway at the last exit in France, where the eastern blade of the Pyrenees shelves down to the sea. The peaks to the west are granite hard; but from mountain to hill to lower slope the rock softens, first to scree and stones, then later into crumbly earth. Down on the beach the endless tiny lapping movement of the sea mills them to yellow salt, mingled with stale crustaceans, the nail clippings of the ocean bed. The sun has a simple journey to make each day, rising from a sea and setting in an ocean.

  Or you could take the night train south from the Gare d’Austerlitz, where a mix of diesel fuel and Gauloises smudges the air, underlaid, say the southerners, with a scent of gardenia. The orange- and gray-painted night train, colors of evening and dawn, goes south. It has been marked out for a special journey, and will not be stopping at Lyons. There are other trains, trains from different stations, going to Avignon and Provence. But the Paris to Port Bou is a special train, a train that leaves the capital at night and arrives in the early morning by the sea. It’s the train you would take if you were a resistant, escaping into Spain, the train that Jessica, the communist Mitford, took, and by which Laurie Lee returned to the Civil War. It is always full of soldiers whose shaven heads you’d almost like to stroke, for a dare, and Parisians en route to see their families in the south.

  Last time I came down it was early July. I shared a compartment with an elderly woman and a thin, ginger-haired girl called Geneviève. She wore platform shoes made of foam rubber, so she walked as on a bouncy castle, which helped in getting in and out of the top bunk while her grandmother slept. She was going to stay with her country cousin for the summer. On the bottom bunk, Geneviève laid out her grandmother, drugged by the heat and her own enormous weight. I was stretched out on my bunk, reading, with my head facing east and feet facing west. She was tall in her platforms and her eyes met mine.

  “You’re not afraid to travel alone?”

  “Afraid?”

  She tutted her tongue against her teeth. “My sister came down here last summer. She was attacked on the train. Me, I’m spending the night with the soldiers next door.”

  In the middle of the night, too hot to sleep, I thought I’d go out into the corridor and watch as the train passed through station after empty station, and some people got off, but no one got on; the train emptied and became lighter as it went south. I twisted the doorknob, but Geneviève had locked me and her grandmother in. The compartment was stifling and buzzed with the vibrations from Grandmother’s chest. Geneviève was with the soldiers, telling them dirty stories about what she and her girlfriends got up to at the ice rink in Lille down by the Eurocentre on a Saturday night.

  She crept back in and packed my leather jacket into her suitcase while I slept, emptying the pockets and leaving a pile of receipts and Métro tickets at the foot of my bunk. In the morning, a man I recognized, who had been standing out in the corridor all night in a shiny suit and Fred Astaire shoes, drinking whiskey from a miniature Evian bottle, came in and sat down with Geneviève and her grandmother. It was five-thirty and we had passed Toulouse. He placed himself in between them, so they went up in size as they got further from the corridor and nearer to the window, and began to tell them made-up stories about the war. At least they weren’t his true stories. They may have been somebody’s, but I knew they weren’t his. He was the cousin of the butcher in the Rue St. Florian who had swallowed a crown in the dentist’s chair. He had been caught out in 1942, delivering British airmen and French and German Jews into the hands of the Germans for ten francs a head, and was sent, for his own safety, to a labor camp in Germany. After the war he returned to the village, where people spat at him in the street. In France, post 1945, it was good to have someone to spit at. He still wasn’t popular fifty years later, but he had managed to use his notoriety as a basis for a new, post-war personality, even if nobody, not even his own cousin, actually liked him. This was not what he was telling Geneviève and her grandmother.

  Out of the carriage window, the train passes, at dawn, pale, wide beaches, fringed by the Sigean marshes, soft violet with green rushes. The gray sky turns silver, then the grayness drains, all last pigment of night departing, to reveal only morning blue from here to Africa. This part of the world is a color wheel; wherever you find a color you find its opposite, too. Violets and greens and oranges and grays and blacks and whites. The marshy waters, a birdwatcher’s paradise in September and March, suck and lap at the edges of a Moorish fortress, which has one eye on the bay to the north and the other on the Iberian south. For all its fierce posturing, its windswept grimace out to sea, it never saw much action. It’s a sort of display model that’s been sitting out there on the forecourt of history for seven centuries. Here is where the border used to lie. Queen Amelia, wife of Louis Philippe, kept nudging it south so that Spanish chocolate imports could land in France and be sent up to Paris duty free, without the knowledge of her fiscally scrupulous husband. Pink flamingos stalk among the reeds, prodding at plankton, like park keepers gathering scraps of paper and leaves on pointed canes. In the evening I’ve seen them stand with the eastern breeze sculpting their feathers to their skulls, gazing west, watching the ghosts of their flamey cousins streak across the sky.

  Just north of here is the beach at Gruissan, planted with wooden huts on stilts, made famous in the opening scenes of Betty Blue. The original French title was 37.2 degrés, so that in French it was a fiery red film, and in English a sad blue one. Stefan, a retired Maoist revolutionary, ran a restaurant here at the end of the seventies, where they served salads and fish with no sauces, and bowls of fresh fruit. An assault on classic French cuisine, he said, is an assault on the state. A colony of Zen monks was living in the huts and went out in rowboats to catch fish fo
r the restaurant every morning.

  Inland lie the Corbières, a slice of spaghetti-western country, layered artfully into rural France. At the eastern end, the Cistercian abbey of Fontfroide sits buried in the rock like the skeleton of a prehistoric bird. It was here that St. Bernard supped and rested, belched and prayed, before moving inland to smoke out the rebel Cathars.

  You pass, but the train does not stop at, the village of Tautavel, where Europe’s earliest man is laid out on display—crusted in the earth from 450,000 B.C. until 1971, when he was dug up to a world where Serge Gainsbourg was singing “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus” and the Baader Meinhoff was blowing up shopping centers. They make strong wines here: a red Fitou, and a sweet white wine, Rivesaltes, named after the village from which all traces of a former concentration camp have smoothly been erased. A man who makes pigments lives in Tautavel. Painters from as far away as Nice and Barcelona pay him twice-yearly visits and come away with little vials of color, condensed down to something so powerful you could spill a droplet in a summer storm and the sea would be awash with that color from here to Africa. It’s a country of painters and cowboys. Just inland from Narbonne, where the train stops for half an hour, is a village where you can buy Bob Blooming saddles and saddle soap and bridles from a man who, in his head, lives in the American Far West. He teaches cowboy-style riding: how to bring your horse to an instant standstill from a flat-out gallop. There is no practical application for this skill, unless you have it in mind to go for gallops on the British Airways runway at Perpignan airport, or impress girls at the beach.

  Sometimes, especially in the valley of the Corbières, where the stone is gaunt and the vegetation dry as an unseasoned saddle, you come around a corner to discover, almost to your surprise, not a hacienda or a cattle ranch, but a lush vineyard and an eighteenth-century villa. You could leap from the train with your luggage and tramp past the Cistercian abbey, buy paint from the pigment man in Tautavel and make your way on up the iron-red road to the Château de Puig. Madame Estère would brush you down and find you lodgings, and if you were beautiful and talented and male, she might even show your work.

  Madame Estère’s husband owns the vineyard. She is a generous patron of contemporary art, and on the opening evening of their exhibitions they serve their own fragrant vintage, with labels designed by a North African artist from Nice. Last summer the staff of Air Inter went on strike on the day of the opening, and all the Parisian gallery owners and critics were grounded. Only the locals turned up, and the odd dealer from Nice, Barcelona and Toulouse. There was a high wind, and I stood at the window on the first floor while they served drinks outside, watching the tramontane, which blows from the north, sculpt the ladies’ skirts around their thighs as the wine grew choppy inside their glasses. At dinner, under the pergola, I sat next to a famous English writer’s fragile widow, so fragile she might have been reconstituted from ash, who complained about the loud-mouthed lover of a former Lagerfeld model across the table. The former model was only in her forties, but she had platinum white hair and was wearing running shoes and a crushed-silk skirt down to her ankles, bunched about her waist. Even beautiful women no longer knew how to dress. Especially beautiful women, added a woman next to her. The loud-mouthed lover had painted a picture called Woman Met in Martinique, Who Left Me, and was looking for his cigarette lighter under the table for an hour. There was a crushed car by César in the forecourt. The painter of honor was a sad American married to a beautiful, rich and efficient Frenchwoman. He’d almost died three years previously, and was planning to leave his wife of twenty years for the doctor who had cured him, who was not beautiful, nor rich, though she was efficient at curing bone cancer. He poured these secrets into my ear throughout the meal, so everyone thought it must be me he was planning to run off with. He kept saying, “She’s so hot! Boy, is she hot!”

  All this just behind the fold in the hill where the train goes past. The guidebooks say it is a landscape full of surprises. Out of the corridor window, the Canigou appears, stately, outlined against the thin gray sky at dawn, a sail, the skirt of a ball gown caught in a moment of grace. Snow caps the summit from October to May, catching a few minutes of peachy light every morning. The sun sets behind it in the evening. An insurance company tried to buy the mountain once, because they’d heard that Virgil had said it was the most beautiful mountain in the world, but no one could work out who to buy it from. So the insurance company bought a mountain in the Alps instead. That’s the difference between the Pyrenees and the Alps: you can buy the Alps.

  Don’t miss the recorded voice saying, “Perpignan, ici Perpignan.” It rolls and chimes; there are bells and the white flutter of an agitated sea in her diction. She is waking you with a caress and a catch in her throat. It is a voice that makes you feel hopeful for small things. Welcome to Perpignan. Welcome to Catalunia. Disembarkation takes place here. Do not forget your luggage on the train. Passengers slam back the doors, step out and stretch their creases, bladders full, skin tight, eyes strained. The soldiers, elastic because they are young, swing their bags into the corridor and uncrumple their cigarettes.

  Even before the train stops, we dissolve and separate, night travelers who have all dreamed the same dream, just this once. Already we are looking for eyes that are looking for us, for friends who will grasp our bags and lead us away to our various, individual destinations. Sometimes it is good not to be met off a train, to carry on dreaming, prolonging the night state so that the new place seems like a continuation of the dream, from which fellow travelers have woken before you.

  THE STATION

  Perpignan railway station—the most beautiful station in the world. Forget Grand Central, St. Pancras, Austerlitz or the Gare d’Orsay. It is the last main station in France; but the track carries on beyond, world without end. Look up to see the ceiling, painted in orange psychedelic swirls, a meditation on the direness of French wallpaper—wallpaper always goes on the ceiling in France, and since we do not have eyes in the top of our heads the ceiling is probably the best place for it. Salvador Dali declared that Perpignan had the most beautiful railway station in the world, not only that, but that Perpignan was the center of the world. Now there’s a statue of him on the concourse, in bronze. It is a fine illustration of how your worst jokes are always the ones people remember.

  When you get off the train, look for the timetable for the little green bus—the green of the wrapper for the triangle-shaped chocolate in the Quality Street box—which is in the first coach bay, opposite the Café de la Gare. They leave once an hour. You can wait in the Café de la Gare. You can get croissants at any time of day. They respect the fact that, if you’ve come this far, it might be any time of day for you. Last time I had just ordered a coffee, too hot to drink, when the bus arrived. I’d left my backpack with a man who was also waiting to go to the village. His brother was dangerously ill, he said. It was the only thing that would bring him back here. They are racist bigots, the Catalans, he said. They think this is a paradise on earth, and that if it’s paradise on earth then they must be gods. They are vain and introverted. I wondered whether he meant they were vain and introverted to think themselves gods, or whether, being godlike, vanity and introversion were two of their characteristics. He put my backpack on the bus and waved to me through the café window. I put down my coffee cup and ran. I held out my thirteen francs to the driver, but he waved me back. “Go and drink your coffee,” he said. “We are not savages here.”

  The green bus will take you to the village in anything from twenty-five minutes to an hour. Try not to look at the shopping centers on the outskirts of Perpignan, and comfort yourself with the thought that they will all fall down in ten years anyway. When the bus gets to the spa town, where there is a hint of Vichy in the water, it takes a back road and drops off rheumatic sufferers at the entrance to the thermal baths. They leave their bags at the gate for the porter and walk slowly, arm in arm, past the rhododendrons and the plumbago, eager to be soothed and cured, but un
able to walk at more than a careful picking pace. Many of them have their treatment paid for by the state, particularly retired soldiers and their wives. It’s cheaper and more effective than free prescriptions. A lot of them register to vote down here, being regulars, which helps the National Front and enrages the local Left. The National Front hugs the coast, and the communists stand their ground inland, with their backs to the mountains.

  Here the road crosses the southernmost valley in France, then burns on and away, as highways always do, this one up and over into Spain. Cars heading into Spain cross the border as though on the back of some great white bird, sweeping down into the flat land west of the fishing ports of the Costa Brava. Trucks from Amsterdam, campers from Cologne, Mini Travellers, packed to the last square, gasping inch with holiday luggage, plunge on, away, up and over, past the idling border guards, the sporadically alert Guardia Civil, stopping for breaks at service stations, the coffee getting stronger, the meat in the sandwiches saltier and the tobacco in the cigarettes rougher and more pungent as they go. But if you are arriving by car, on the highway or Via Domitia, this is where you leave it, with the sudden winded feeling you get when you leave a highway, as though you had just jumped from a moving train. You have come so far it is tempting to carry on, to follow the swallow-call of the south, to disregard this possibly unimportant place to which you have traveled all these hundreds of miles for your holiday blind date, for holidays in new places are blind dates with a landscape, a town, a temporary lodging, a place where the sun sets differently from home.

  You pay your toll at the little window, and the song of the girl’s voice as she wishes you good evening, and even the green resin smell of the vegetation expelling its evening heat, tell you your journey has brought you where you wanted to go. As you idle in the rest area, studying the directions to your final destination, you will see, if you look up at the silhouette of the dark green hills against the sky, the white, soaring bridge high-stepping over the final valley. Thirteen men were killed at one blow when a stick of misplaced dynamite went off while it was being built. A plaque sunk into the cement commemorates their death. Just south of here is where Hannibal drove his army and his elephants through a cleft in the hills, a border town now. On one side of the street you pay for your cheap leatherware and Spanish lace in pesetas, and on the other you can buy duty-free Gauloises and cognac in francs.