A French passport, a ticket to elsewhere, another realm of floating life, indistinctly sensed, dimly dreamed. Penny, at twenty-five, imagined an enormous shuttered window flung open to the air, the wash of sky. France was a soaring feeling in her chest, romantic undoubtedly—even preposterous—but that did not make the feeling any less enchanting. She saw red poppies, wet pavements in Paris, a girl, her, painting in a room. She loved best the paintings of the nineteenth century, Gwen John in particular, the human image painted over and over, a face, a mood, a fleeting human breath, breathed into blue air. She wanted to catch that breath, to live in it, her eyes looking out through the enormous shuttered window into everything possible, into every dancing second, every roaring moment. Oh, she wanted everything: to be the breath, and the girl painting the breath; she wanted nothing less than to join her exultant breath to all the other breaths of the world. She was mad to start, to get on with being twenty-five years old and full of breath, a girl with a passport to France.
She found out about Marie not through any effort of will, not because her mother suddenly underwent a change of character, becoming open-hearted and open-mouthed instead of closed, but because of bureaucracy. Penny learned the story of who her mother was because of the record systems humans live by, their wish to name themselves, to record the births of their children, their deaths, unexpected, expected, the ruins of their divorces. As if human life can be catalogued; as if the passage of a single life across time is anything other than a streak! A record of a birth, a marriage, a flimsy buttress against the monstrousness of infinity; a passport recording the movement of a man or a woman or a child through the borders of lands with mutable borders. Pouf! There goes Penny, clutching her Australian passport. But where’s Marie’s birth certificate, proof of her French birth, so that Penny might post it off to a nameless official and secure a French passport of her own? Where is Marie’s missing life, recorded, written down?
Marie could not find her birth certificate. She acted strangely; nervy, unsettled. Possibly she was upset about Penny’s departure, which she perhaps intuited as a bid for freedom. Marie had not been overseas herself since before Syd died, not since that last magical trip to Europe. Penny thought she might be concerned for her, remembering the strain of travel, the small, multiple exhaustions that come with being somewhere foreign that is not home. Penny asked about the missing birth certificate—again and again—but she could not ask Marie about her nervousness. She did not have the language, or rather they did not share a language of intimacy and disclosure. She sensed her mother’s anxiety but she could not ask about its shape, much less investigate its origins.
The weeks were falling away, the days, the hours. ‘What’s the problem, Marie? You’ll just have to apply for a new one if you’ve lost the original. I’ll ring the embassy and get the forms.’ Penny still didn’t understand; not until right at the very end, only weeks before she was due to fly out. ‘Look, I can’t do it from France, Marie. It has to be done before I leave Australia. I’m running out of time!’ Then, a new, unhoused Marie, a Marie Penny had never seen, helpless, exposed, an aged document in her hand, no words in her mouth. In her hand a torn birth certificate, written in browning ink, recording the city of her birth, Oujda, Protectorat de Maroc, in the year 1926:
Marie Azmiya Aréne
Pére: Hippolyte Santu Aréne
Occupation: Référence du fabricant
Âge: 29
Mére: Aicha (Emma) Aréne, neé Said ben Mohammed
Occupation: Tâches domestiques
Âge: 26
Marie wasn’t even French! Or was she? She was something else, someone else entirely, and Penny’s tongue was a stone in her mouth. Where should she begin? Where should she begin to seek the truth when her mother believed the truth was not good enough to be told?
‘It’s okay, Marie. It’s okay,’ she said, too embarrassed to look at her mother’s stricken face, too mortified by her mother’s mortification, her shame.
Penny went to the kitchen and made a pot of tea, her hands shaking, using the Royal Doulton teapot and the cups her mother always used, a wedding gift, still unbroken. She didn’t know anything about Morocco, or why her mother would be ashamed of being born there. Did that make Marie an Arab? A Muslim? If her mother wanted to turn herself into someone else, if she could only live with part of herself annexed, who was Penny to object? Everyone made compromises, everyone lived with half-truths or old outgrown principles, some perishing set of beliefs that enabled them to get up in the morning. How many self-deceptions did Penny live with, how many evasions? She was in the middle of another unhappy love affair, with a man she knew was seeing other women, and yet she wilfully looked the other way. How much truth could anyone handle? Did Penny really want to know this man would never love her or that her ludicrous faith in art’s healing properties would not necessarily lead to satisfaction; that she would never reach the life she intended?
When she went back into the lounge room with the tea tray, the faded document was gone. Penny poured the tea, her hands still trembling, her mind completely swept of anything to say. Back there, in the kitchen, only moments ago, she understood the situation perfectly and all the right words were ready in her head. Now, facing her mother, she was speechless.
‘Mama never adjusted to Paris,’ Marie said, her voice small. ‘Jamais. Sa vie était finie.’ Her life was over.
Penny dared not speak.
‘None of the other women would speak to her,’ Marie said.
She wanted to ask which women but did not.
Marie took a sip of tea, a lone tear coursing down one cheek. ‘She used to take us to Belleville. Eric. Moi. We weren’t allowed to tell Papa. Her sister lived there.’
Still Penny did not speak, frightened that if she did, she would say the wrong thing and her mother would stop. It seemed that all her life she had been waiting for this moment.
She waited. She waited for her mother’s confession, for Marie to unscroll her life, starting from the top, for the people and places and smells and colours and sounds to fall magnetically into place, like a beautiful equation solved or a perfect poem or painting. She waited for the inconsistency to be explained between our vision of life and the wanting, imperfect truth of living; she waited for her mother to tell her everything.
‘Papa was from Ajaccio,’ she said. ‘Corsica has the clearest water I have ever seen.’
Penny waited. She took a sip of tea, which was already growing cold.
‘I never learned to swim. Eric pushed me in. I nearly drowned.’ She put down her cup, wiping her cheek.
‘You have no idea what it was like,’ she said. ‘They never accepted us. Never.’
‘Who never accepted you?’
‘Where is my handbag? Mon sac? I need a handkerchief,’ Marie said, looking helplessly around the room. Penny leaped from her chair and rushed into the kitchen, scooping up the handbag from a bench. By the time the bag was opened, the handkerchief procured, the cheek wiped, the moment for revelation had fallen away. Tears, leaking noses, the plainsong notes of everyday life rushed in to flood that soft discrepancy, that receding dream, that yearning gap that, wide awake, can never be filled.