"A woman can walk miles without making one single step forward..…To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing."
Fatema Mernissi
But no, that is the madness talking. Better to stretch my new outlaw’s skin in a different way.
Pascal, do you remember when we broke the law, you, Loup and I? And how good it felt? It was merely trespassing, nothing too brave, but I started thinking about it today, when I transgressed for the fifth time here in France. It all starts like that, doesn’t it, a minor misdemeanour here, a petty theft there, an accidental abuse of public services, a slight case of domestic violence and before you know it, you’re gambling your life away with scar-faced men, spending your winnings on their tattooed prostitutes who fuck you, and then those putes get fucked in turn by their scarred pimps. And it’s too late to pull out, in the back of a dingy delivery van in the putrid tic-drunk swamps oozing out from the black forest.
Not the kind you want to eat.
Well, apparently that’s what the clairvoyant has told your sister, about the way your father ended up. I’ve tried to block out those ‘revelations.’ But an image insinuates itself into the bedrock of our marriage, your brother’s and mine, like rusty water.
Drip drip drip.
Perhaps you alone discovered what became of your father? Is that why you stopped sleeping washing eating? Stopped engaging with the world outside your fortress? Perhaps that’s why your Psychiatrist, the Doctor whom your sister Odette would spear if she got close and none of us would blame her, sent you a letter ordering,
‘Monsieur Pascal Zorn, you must on the following day present yourself at our clinic to be confined in the Psychiatric Ward until we determine it is safe for you to leave. Failing to do so will eventuate in your immediate incarceration.’
Excuse me if I haven’t got the translation word-perfect, but this is the gist of the letter, and I agree with your sisters and Loup, that to find this in your letterbox one fine morning in June must have signalled the death-knoll for you. To be threatened, no told, that you were about to lose your personal liberty.
Why wait? You thought, ‘why give them the satisfaction?’
I admire you for taking the option away from them, Pascal. For taking your life into your own hands: funny expression that, because a person can do a lot wrong with their own life, in their own hands. Chèr beau-frère, I admire you for not giving in to incarceration, but I wish you could know how much that hurts those of us left behind. I wish you had asked Loup to stop you.
Do you remember? Ours was a banal introduction to law breaking. It was Christmas Eve 2 a.m. and you and Loup arrived bleary from France. At the airport, you were playing the clown, blending in, in your Akubra hat, into the country you’d never seen. Whilst here, you upgraded that hat with an RM Williams top of the range, but how often did you get to show yourself to the world in it? I hope at least Nicole took pleasure from the shadow it cast over your eyes. Brim and eyes both turned up slightly at the outer edges, in tune with the swaggering sweep of your moustache… revealing a glint of something that only you two knew.
Anyway, there we were, driving all the way at 3 am up to the Dandenongs, to a little hideaway where we would recuperate, spend a quiet Christmas, and then drive the long way, to arrive at Cape Bridgewater for the wedding. I have to confess Pascal; I’d been wishing it were only Loup and I.
After all, your brother and I hadn’t seen each other for five months, and we were on the cusp of our wedding. Ungracious thoughts as it turned out. Having you there brought us an unexpected joy. Warmth, depth, and a word I use without really knowing it, soul… Maya knew though, my husky…yes, you and she were instant soul mates. She sensed it, as only a dog can.
Are there dogs where you are? I believe so. Perhaps you’ve met the hero husky that the Russian family told us about? Remember, on Christmas Day, when we went for a long walk through the forest under towering trees and ferns taller than a building, shadowing deep gullies absent of people. We gripped Maya’s lead, to not upset the native animals. We met other orphans of Christmas, as they waited for their dream to unfold in this foreign land. In their excitement at meeting a fellow-husky, they gave us the gift of a story.
Loup retold it to me the other day. A story the Russian family knew intimately. They were at pains to tell us it was not a myth….
A group of their friends had set off by canoe to explore a remote gorge.
They had with them their trusted husky Sitka. Upon reaching rapids, they were forced to portage their canoes up and over cliffs. It took them longer than they expected, the weather turned foul, mists obscuring their way. All of a sudden Sitka started a low growl, then a high yelping …
The group thought perhaps a bear. Sitka planted herself in their path, her yelp becoming a long howl.
They froze, but there was no bear, or any other threat that they could see. They were in a hurry to get their canoes down to the river again before night set in.
So they advanced, but Sitka repeated her performance. They tried to console her, still approaching slowly through the fog, their canoes starting to weigh heavily above their heads.
But Sitka would not shut up! Each time they took a few steps, she blocked their progress. Then in a blink, she was gone.
Right before their eyes, she threw herself over the edge, to show them once and for all, that they were in immediate danger of crashing to their death.
Sitka alone had sensed the precipice.
Our impromptu clan poised on a narrow track under sizzling eucalypt-air, seemed a long way from an ice-shrouded cascade in Europe. But we bonded instantly, sharing through Maya some kind of magic. And Pascal, you held onto her more tightly, and I hugged her more closely and Loup never forgot her.
But first there was Christmas Eve.
Before reaching the ridge-top hideaway, I wanted to show my guests the view, from One Tree Hill. A view of nostalgia; my flat city of Melbourne hugging tight the Bay and then stretching out toward the foothills. With my child’s eye, I would spot the lighthouse and its yellow arc that backlit the way down the dirt track behind the big bend in the Bay, where the ships made their sharp turn in the channel, the light sweeping down to the bowered end where my grandparents once lived. As a young girl, these galaxies of human-light were a marvel. As a young woman, my first boyfriend and I would tear up to the Mount to catch a summer storm marauding across the bay as the lightning struck out suburb after suburb. And our galaxy city would disappear down black holes. A shameful memory was when I got my first car, a Kingswood Holden with the gears on the steering column, and I shot defiantly up the serpentine road to the ‘Dandies’ after a horrible fight with my Mum. Not long after, my conservative parents acknowledged that their 21 year-old-daughter needed to bolt.
But when we arrived this Christmas Eve, the viewpoint was closed, wasn’t it Pascal. Barricaded and locked. A lot can change in 30 years. ‘One Tree Hill’ was now a thousand trees, obscuring the galaxies below. You and your brother were patient as I persisted. We crept through dense ferns, dampness up to our thighs, staking out the high cyclone fence until we found a way to climb through. It was 4 am. The City I wanted to share with my guests was still asleep under a billion lights: the shipping channel a lone indigo ribbon; Santa’s reindeers pulling sleighs, the ‘Skipping Girl’ still smiling down upon the Yarra and remnant bush beyond the trams of Victoria Street. To all of us who grew up here, an icon of wonder.
‘Oh shit, we’ve been sprung!’
‘I told you Freya! Putain, we’ve only been in the country an hour… you’re going to get us kicked out!’
‘It’s ok,’ I bluffed as the Security Guard bore down upon us.
‘Aahh…I’m very sorry sir, but my guests have come a long way to see the lights of Melbourne…they’re just off the plane from France…it’s my fault…I insisted on bringing them here…didn’t realise it would be all locked up, it’s all changed!’
You were brilliant Pascal…. You and Loup just smiled and said désolée and looked sheepish. You won the Guard over.
‘Strasbourg?’ repeats our new friend, ‘Well I’ll be buggered… my niece is over there on…whadyacall it…gap year? The bro and his missus are flying over for New Year’s…what’s that big market you have? Seen a bloody amazing video of that Cathedral…jeez the lights! Wouldn’t mind going meself…but not winter…nah, do they have the light show in summer?’
And so the four of us stood there on the slope, under the mountain ash silent in the night, exchanging warm nods handshakes and ‘Joyeux Noël’. Until the scent of freshly cut grass and eucalypt could no longer keep us alert, and the idea of sleep suddenly took hold. And the helpful guard shone his torch so that we could find our way back out through the hole in the cyclone.
Now is a very long way from that Australian Christmas: my first and last with Pascal. Today as I was driving home form the Laundromat and doing the shopping, I saw a traffic jam up ahead. So I turned off on a side road, intending to buy water, perishables and ice from another supermarket. I had already spent the maximum 16 euro-voucher at the first shop. This is how I did the shopping: doing the rounds with Loup’s lunch vouchers. (And making him sandwiches each day instead.) It was a time consuming and stressful task, when I ran out and had to use my credit card. My weekly challenge: to buy water and groceries for two people with the weekday-allowance of eight-euros lunch money was simply impossible. No sooner had I turned off, but I see two police motorbikes, and straightaway am waved to the side of the road.
‘Bonjour Madame’, the Gendarme peers through my window. ‘May I see your Permit de conduire?’
I rustle around in my sac. Sweating profusely. Hoping like hell the policeman doesn’t detect my un-bathed body odour of three days.
‘Ah, je m’excuse Monsieur, but it’s de l’Australie,’ red in the face guilty without knowing why. He regards my Australian licence with amiable curiosity, but then taps on my windscreen with a frown. Not like the obsequious prefect, but still with an air of admonishment.
‘C’est bon votre permit, Madame Gordon, but you realize you are driving an unregistered and uninsured car?’
Chrissake! I have been back in France six weeks, after a five-month stint in Australia working two jobs, scrounging to get back here. French car registration had been the last thing on my mind. Although I have been harping on to Loup about having our own legitimate address. But he is hell-bent on leaving no trace. The gendarme is busily tapping something into a mobile screen,
‘Madame, your address is Chemin de l’Homme Rouge La Ciotat, n’est ce pas?’
‘Ur, en fait Monsieur, non…we live here now…en fait, we have just recently moved,’ Bloody hell, I’m no good at lying… the Gendarme will guess the truth… that we actually moved two and a half years ago!
‘I’m afraid the fine has been automatically generated to your old address. I assume you are collecting the mail?’
‘Ah oui, bien sûr, Officer.’
‘Make sure you go to the Préfecture and register your vehicle to your new address Madame. Toute de suite!
And I hope you enjoy your holiday’, farewells the Gendarme.
Unable to get his breath around the English ‘h’. So sexy, if he wasn’t a policeman who’d just sent me a walloping fine to our fraudulent address. And worse, ordered me back grovelling to the Prefects.
‘Certainement pas!’ yells Loup, defying me from going. And I certainly don’t insist.
‘We’re not paying any fucking fines’.
So I begin to flex my new outlaw’s muscles.
‘But what if they stop me at the airport, and take away my passport?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous Freya, you know most French people throw their fines in the bloody bin!’
In a country where the signage is foreign, playing dumb and breaking the law is easy. On the other hand, it isn’t difficult to work out that ‘Passage or Accès Interdit,’ means one simply is not supposed to go there. Especially when followed up with ‘Entrez à vos risques et perils’! The sign that I love most says ‘Sauf Riverains’. Except river-people? I recall my early running explorations around Auriol, seeing this sign everywhere. Why, when there was no river in sight? I then remembered rive droite and rive gauche, the banks either side of the Seine in Paris, and Loup confirms that a ‘riverain’ is someone who lives along the shore, a resident of that bank. Even with absolutely no river in sight, a shore-dweller had come to mean a local. How exquisite.
During my quest for these invisible shores, I pass by homes and gardens to envy; the centuries-old farmhouses and massive barns are best. The ‘Mas’, that tumble and ramble forever. Old France fringed and frayed with stone along her minor chemins. Today I seek out this old France. Away from Pascal and his disease. Striding out, down the bleached length of the canal, in the opposite direction from industry, across the bridge between the have and the have-not’s, emerging into a landscape transformed by water. I wind my way up past olive and wine groves, the barns in ancient stone that spill out toward me; the Lavoir Romain, a water-feature from Roman times, where the women would gather to do their laundry. The ankle-deep pool now floats with plastic wrappers and squirms with cigarette butts. For a long time, I mistook the cigarette-butt French term ‘mégot’ for ‘maggot’ and the ugly visceral association remains.
If I work the ancient pump-arm vigorously, I hear the gurgle of water surging up from the viaduct rushing through the pipes, shooting out the sculptured spout. I rip off my runners, and want to keep going, shorts and singlet and sink my whole skin in. But shyness and the maggots hold me back. Instead I admire the genius of the Romans and the aesthetic of the French. The day I introduce the Lavoir to Loup, it’s as if it were my very own discovery. For a while, he lets me coax him there after work, under the shade of two enormous plane trees, and we work the pump, excited as children. One pumps furiously, while the other peels off sweaty shoes, or the pumper races to beat the water along the pipe before it gushes out the other end.
For a while, it is our sacred spot. Calmed and soothed by the shade and water, we return to our white trash trailer better people. Loup surprises me one day by inscribing a heart with our initials into the papery skin of the majestic Plaintain tree. And later, after a quarrel, we christened it ‘ours’. Later, as stringent water restrictions impinge on the ‘right-siders’, the locals start bringing their cars there to wash them. More and more rubbish floats. More and more mégots squirm. I have since searched and searched, but in the three years passed, the skin of the plane tree has peeled and flaked, and there is no sign left of our teenage love. But the majestic twin trees and the flush of water still reign.
Today I am on a mission to get to the train station, as I have two trains and another long walk, to reach La Ciotat where Loup will meet me after work. And late, after the crowds swarm past on their way to a barbeque of sardines or moulles et frites, Loup and I will head to a deep cove, and dive into tourmaline bliss. The journey will take nearly four hours, but the sea at the end of the day is worth it.
This first walk is seven kilometres, and I revel in every step... tracing the narrow D70, veering off on the Chemin de la Rabassière… the Gare at Saint Chamas is at the hilly end. Once, it would have been a beautiful feature, but now it is neglected, and unmanned. At first this confuses me: where am I supposed to buy my ticket? But then when approached on the train by an officious SNCF guard, I learn I can pay on the train itself; for an extra euro or two. Today however, as on my previous two trips, I ride as a guest of the SNCF. Whenever a guard approaches, I smile, ready to reach for money, but these last few assistants have been the opposite of officious. Polite and preoccupied, they ask for nothing. So I push aside my guilt for not blurting out as I used to, ‘Excusez-moi Monsieur, but I need to pay!’
In frustration, Loup will harangue me ‘we take nothing from the system…all these taxes I pay, all these years we’ve put into this economy, paying your fucking health insurance, and still you have to pay, they haven’t figured out you are my wife yet…do I need to remind you about the Préfecture? Wanna hear more stories about my building guys who abuse the system? Freya, they know how to bend the rules. You have no idea!’
But I am unconvinced. I fear that one act of dishonesty will lead to another. So today, I travel free but uneasy on a sparkling new train, my neighbour a friendly woman about my age, from Guadeloupe. I confess to having not pre-bought my ticket, and feel less alarmed, when she admits brightly, ‘Moi non plus! Ce n’est pas grave, Madame.’
I am in the company of a well-dressed freeloader. The woman’s tight greyish curls are shaved close to her head, accentuating her cheekbones and limpid eyes. Her smile is of course, white against her macchiato-skin. I find her most elegant. My islander neighbour fans herself constantly. ‘Mon Dieu!’ she cries. ‘This heat, ce chaleur. It is unbearable, ce galère!’
She goes on and on, as if offended by the inadequacies of her motherland.
‘Chez moi, I have air conditioning partout…my work, my home, my car…I don’t even notice the heat if I don’t wish to!’
I agree that yes, this heat wave is awful, but don’t bother tell my neighbour that chez-moi, we don’t even have a fridge, let alone air-con, water or electricity. Although I know little about Guadeloupe, except that it is a French-speaking Department, my assumptions about entitlement are happily overturned.
‘Tell me about your country,’ I ask in French.
‘Alors, elle est magnifique, there are many beautiful beaches…’
‘Il y a les montagnes?’ I interrupt, not crazy about tropical beaches.
‘Bien sûr, well of course, we have volcanoes, forests, rivers, cascades…tout!’
She tells me that her sister lives in Paris, and her daughter and grandson here in St Chamas. We talk effusively about our grandsons, and I wonder if she would move to France to be near them?
‘Non, never, even though I miss them. I adore my Island home. Anyway, they come to visit once a year, and I come here twice a year.’
I pursue the question of autonomy for Guadeloupe. My exotic black neighbour scoffs,
‘Why would we want Independence? We have everything we need. Our life is merveilleuse.’
A twinge of envy pricks: that these two far-flung countries, geographically and culturally distinct, share a common language and are enriched by a long, if challenging, exchange between their ‘old’ and ‘new worlds’: content to be related. Another reason to cringe; my homeland is conspicuously un-related: white culture too easily superficial, and black culture too easily ignored.
Years earlier, on my rides through Aboriginal land, I had discovered that white-man’s ‘empty’ means overflowing out there. Abundant emptiness. An old Aboriginal Aunty spoke of the land as her skin. There, I hunted respectfully for a place to hide my tent amongst its folds. The skin absorbed my tent into itself, so that when I returned late from a hike its yellow dome was lost to me, completely. A row of sentinel ghost gums glimmered, their pearlescent limbs, dancers in the dark. After tracing and re-tracing my steps, they finally lead me home.
‘Did you feel it too, that skin, Pascal?’ Or did you not give it time… were you already impatient for the ‘Au délà’?’
Once camped by a remote waterhole in the Kimberley, my cycling friend and I experienced a sensation that had no explanation: a visitation to each of us in our separate tents. A startling tangible vision. A grandfatherly warning that we were on someone else’s ground. We had ignored the sign asking us whitefellas not to camp there. But we were on bikes. It was dark. We thought we were different. What would my pilgrim friend Ilona have thought? This was lucid, insistent, more stirring than any encounters from my former beliefs. Or was it all from the same source?