Chapter 30

I Have Gas, Therefore I Am

THE MOST IMPORTANT DOCUMENT you will ever possess in France is a gas bill. It’s not much to look at, just your run-of-the-mill utilities bill—blue header across the top of a white page, boring government-inspired utilities logo in one corner, large boldface font enumerating how much you owe in the other corner. Yet gas bills in France are gold dust. Get yourself on the receiving end of one of these babies, and the rest of your French existence is pretty much assured. For the entire French system is built on the premise that once a person is connected to—and presumably consuming—gas, they are a fully functioning human being and a worthy member of French society. Until such time as a person is gassed up, they simply do not exist.

As any new arrival in France knows only too well, you cannot get a bank account without a gas bill, yet you cannot get a gas bill unless you have a bank account. Similarly, you cannot get an apartment without a gas bill, but you cannot get a gas bill until you have an apartment to which to connect gas. Most people decry this organizational catch-22 as another example of illogical French bureaucracy. But I preferred to give the Frogs the benefit of the doubt, seeing it as a canny immigration-control mechanism, a hidden test of a person’s intelligence, enterprise, and cunning. If you aren’t clever or conniving enough to wheedle your way around the system to get a gas bill—if you can’t work out the riddle—you have no business being in France.

Clever and conniving had never been much of a problem for me. As a result, I had managed to get a gas bill within weeks of arriving in France. But law-abiding and regulation-heeding were apparently two areas in which I needed a bit of work. As a result, what I seemed not to possess, as my human resources manager was carefully explaining to me now as I sat in her office, was a valid residency permit.

“So when you say I am illegal, what exactly do you mean?” I asked, assuming that this being France, there were bound to be shades of legality.

“I mean you are illegal,” she replied matter-of-factly. “You are not supposed to be living here in France. We are not supposed to be employing you. It seems we have been employing you illegally for the past four years. You were supposed to renew your residency card every year, and you apparently didn’t. If the French government finds out, you will be deported, and we will be in big, big trouble.”

Right, I thought to myself. Not much in the way of shade there then.

To say that I didn’t know I had been an illegal alien in France for four years would be to stretch the truth—but just a little. It wasn’t so much that I was acutely, cunningly aware that my status as a foreigner in France was what the authorities like to call irrégulière; it was more a case of me sort of knowing it, but preferring not to dwell upon it. The situation, when you looked at it, was quite absurd. Here I was, the holder of a relatively senior executive position at a respected international organization whose relations with the French government went to the highest level, and I had been an illegal alien for the past four years. It was a situation born less out of shrewd design than out of abject laziness. For to renew my so-called carte de séjour (or residency card) each year would have required me to visit the préfecture de police at least once every twelve months, take my place in the line-with-no-end and lose at least a day and a half of my life to inefficient French bureaucracy.

I could never be bothered, was never apprised by my employer of the seriousness of this oversight, and therefore had no reason to think that lacking a valid carte de séjour was any kind of serious problem. God knows I had been in and out of the country almost fifty times in that four-year period and had never been questioned about my vastly out-of-date residency permit.

As I walked back to my desk, a little freaked out, I began to ponder the options before me. They weren’t numerous, as far as I could see. I could throw my hands up, admit defeat, and slink back to Australia, never to return. I could stay in France illegally and continue to live under the radar, but that would mean holding my breath each time I crossed the French border, not knowing whether I would be allowed back in. Or I could throw myself at the mercy of the French immigration officials, plead ignorance, and work on getting my papers properly sorted. This latter option, while the most sensible, had one major drawback. It would mean jumping headfirst into a world of bureaucracy that I had hitherto been carefully avoiding.

Being of the firm opinion that rules and regulations were for everyone but me, I had, until this point, led a relatively stress-free existence in France by simply avoiding anything that looked vaguely official.

Among the hard and fast rules I had developed to evade the system were:

• Never answer the door to strange men bearing clipboards.

• Never answer in the affirmative if someone calls the home phone and asks, in French, “Is this Monsieur Corbett?”

• Never, but never pick up registered mail from the post office.

I had learned from painful experience that the only time French people bother to register mail is when they want to entrap you. They have a vested interest, usually legal, in proving that they have notified you of something unpleasant. Better not to know, I always maintained. Then at least, if they ever caught up with you (which they rarely did), you could plead ignorance with absolute honesty.

I lost count of the number of times I would sit in my living room, reading a book or watching television, as the postman knocked fruitlessly on my door, brandishing a registered letter for which he wanted my signature. He knew I was home, I knew he was outside the door, but no way was I crossing my threshold and stepping into whatever trap some nasty bureaucrat had set for me. The postman would eventually give up and slide a yellow slip under my door, informing me that there was a registered package with my name on it at the nearby post office. So it was that I developed an almost weekly dance with my local post office. I would appear at the window brandishing my registered mail slip and wait to see whether the letter looked official; if it did, I would turn on my heel and run. Many was the time I was unsure of the contents of my registered correspondence, but I always figured it was better to err on the side of caution, declining to sign and leaving the letter to rot in the unclaimed bin at the back of the post office or to be returned to its sender.

Every so often my mother would phone to inquire whether I had received a letter about my Australian pension fund or the Visa card PIN number notification she had thoughtfully forwarded by registered mail from Australia. I would tell her I hadn’t, express dismay, and tut loudly about the inefficiency of the French postal system. It was, I admit, a rather haphazard, head-in-the-sand approach to surviving French bureaucracy, but it seemed to work for me. Until now.

 

THE PROSPECT of joblessness and potential deportation, while certainly worrying, didn’t stir nearly as much angst in me as it appeared to stir in my friends.

“But what about your job?” “You’ll be thrown out of the country!” “You’ll be tossed into jail!” were among the grim predictions they kindly offered.

As far as the job was concerned, I didn’t much care. I was finished with the often-tedious world of international organization public relations. I had only taken the job so I could live in Paris; perhaps this was the push I needed to shuck off the golden handcuffs. And as for the deportation doomsday scenarios, I dismissed them out of hand, figuring that as a blond-haired, blue-eyed, distinctly Caucasian Australian, chances were I wasn’t on the top of the French immigration department’s most-wanted list.

Besides, as grim as the prospects of jail and deportation were, nothing could come close to the préfecture in terms of pure terror. The préfecture de police, a grand edifice on the Ile de la Cité, is the sclerotic heart of the slow-moving French bureaucratic system. Situated across the street from Notre Dame, it is a high chapel of inefficiency, a shrine to incompetence. It is the lumpen, useless cornerstone of the French republic, the place where hopes and dreams go to die.

It was a place I didn’t much like.

The French immigration system is overseen by the administrative arm of the national police force. When you arrive in the country on a visit, it is the préfecture de police that allows you into the country. When you come to France to live, it is the préfecture de police that grants you the right to stay. The préfecture’s headquarters in the heart of Paris once played host to a crucial battle between the French Resistance and the occupying Nazis, at the close of the Second World War. Now it stood as the country’s last line of defense in the face of hopeful immigrants hankering to get a taste of la belle vie française.

Every day a line of several hundred people formed outside the préfecture. Those in the line looked as if they hailed from all corners of the earth. There were Asians, Africans, Arabs, and me. We bore little in common beyond a desire for French residency and the haunted, drawn expression of a préfecture repeat visitor.

Because the préfecture worked on a first-come, first-served basis, you had to take your place in the line early in the morning to get inside the building. The wait could take up to two hours. Once inside you had to navigate a labyrinth of crisscrossing hallways to find the correct room. Once you had found the right room, you had to take a number and wait an eternity to be called. Once called—and sometimes it would take longer for your number to be called than the prefecture was actually open, requiring you to go home and try again the next day—you had to present your dossier to a bored public servant who would give it a desultory scan, decide that the photocopies of your parents’ birth certificates were not clear enough, and send you away to start all over again. And that was supposing you were in the correct branch of the préfecture de police in the first place. Several times I endured a four-or five-hour wait at the Ile de la Cité headquarters and finally presented myself to the counter, only to be informed that I was at the wrong police station and needed to repeat the exercise all over again on the other side of town.

The entire system relied on assigning a paper file to each and every residency applicant. Nothing was filed on computer. Everything you were, had been, or ever aspired to be was contained in a series of looseleaf sheafs in a grotty manila folder. I used to sit horrified as gray, cardigan-sporting bureaucrats shuffled about the office letting documents spill to the floor, no doubt condemning some poor soul to a permanent immigration limbo. They called the process “normalizing” your status, as if your entire existence were abnormal until such time as a bitter civil servant with an inadequacy complex deigned to endow your dossier with a rubber stamp. They wanted originals and triplicates of everything. They wanted parents’ original birth certificates, criminal records, high school report cards, and more gas bills than any human could reasonably accrue in a lifetime. Some documents absolutely had to be translated into French, but only by one of the twenty préfecture-approved translators. That these translators seemed to be permanently on vacation (no doubt spending the riches they’d accrued by being on the receiving end of government-ordained kick-backs) was not the préfecture’s concern.

Aspiring residents from Eastern Europe had to go to Hall F on Staircase B, unless you were from Moldova, Armenia, or Albania, in which case you needed to be in Hall D on Staircase A. Residency applicants from Asia and Oceania were requested to report to Hall B on Staircase C, or Hall C on Staircase B, depending on which countries were being serviced in which hall on any particular day—which you couldn’t know until you went there and checked for yourself.

It was a Kafka novel come to life. A trip to the depths of absurdity and an exercise in patience that only the most stoic could survive. It was also a daily parade of the dispossessed. Done up in national costume and arriving at the préfecture with all the hope and optimism of new migrants, a colorful parade of people from all corners of the world would take their number, sit in the waiting room, and watch their lives slowly slip away. During one of my many visits to the préfecture, I sat next to a man from Chad. He was perhaps sixty years old, dressed in traditional garb, and seemed to be puzzling over the form he had been given to fill out.

I asked if he needed help.

“I cannot read or write,” he said apologetically, in heavy-accented French. It was his fifth straight day at the préfecture, and he was apparently no closer to being “normalized” than the day he arrived.

I offered to help him fill out the form. “It asks here for the name of your wife,” I said, pen poised and ready to write.

“Loana,” he replied.

“Okay,” I said, scribbling a phonetic interpretation of his wife’s name. “Now here it asks for the name of your daughter.”

“Loana,” the old man said again.

“No, not your wife, your daughter,” I repeated.

“Yes,” he said. “Loana.”

“Same name?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “Same person.”

I thought for a moment about his chances of being awarded residency with a spot of incest in his dossier and decided they weren’t great.

“Perhaps we’ll just write Alice in here instead,” I said, quickly scribbling the name and handing him back the form.

Aiding me in this venture into the mysterious world of the préfecture, this edifying journey into the incredibly inefficient depths of his own country’s system, was my trusted friend and advocate Julien. He had very kindly put together an enormous file on my life in France for the edification and reading pleasure of the préfecture bureaucrats. Called a dossier, it was packed to overflowing with gas bills, rental records, tax receipts, and character references, a carefully itemized, ring-bound account of the last four years of my life. As far as Jules was concerned, the dossier was so utterly complete, so blindingly convincing, there was no way the préfecture would not cede upon sighting it and grant me residency on the spot. Crucial to the case Jules had painstakingly compiled was a pile of affidavits from friends and associates in Paris, attesting to the fact that in my four years in France I had not only assimilated seamlessly but had become an integral part of modern-day Parisian society.

According to the rules set out under Section D, Subsection F of the Hoops Which Must Be Jumped Through in Order to Stay in the Country Act, a residency applicant was to be favorably considered if he/she were able to prove that Paris would be a poorer place for their absence. There was little doubt that a collection of bars in the Marais would have been poorer places if I hadn’t been in the city for the past four years, but to say the dynamic metropolis of Paris would have been infinitely less sparkling without my presence was more of a stretch.

Nevertheless my friends loyally put pen to paper, tapped their respective inner bullshit artists, and extolled (in two hundred words or less, as that was all the official form allowed) my myriad virtues. The result, carefully annotated by my faithful attorney, was a pile of florid prose about an individual whom I had difficulty recognizing.

The experience of reading through these overblown statements was immensely gratifying but also distinctly odd, like being present at your own funeral, listening to heartfelt eulogies from loved ones. Even more disturbing was the fact that, according to those who knew me best, the overriding reason why the French authorities should grant me leave to stay in their country was that—and I quote—“he’s kind of fun to have around.” Instead of affidavits attesting to my dedication to the French language, my adoration of French culture, and my commitment to the ideals of the Republic, I had a pile of statements variously declaring that I knew a lot of good bars, organized lots of fun soirées, and was great value at dinner parties.

Had there been a special clause in the Immigration Act that made special residency provision for “people who know how to have a good time,” I would have been a shoo-in.

As it was, the cardigan brigade at the préfecture considered my application, took a cursory glance through my megadossier, and finally pronounced themselves singularly unimpressed. After I had spent eight weeks constantly shuttling back and forth between one préfecture and another, a verdict was finally reached in the case of Corbett v. The Republic of France. No, it would not be possible to normalize my papers while I was in France. I would have to return to Australia and try from there.

Jules was devastated. All those Post-it notes and plastic dividers for nothing. I was pleasantly surprised, relieved even. The fact that I had escaped prosecution, jail, or even a rudimentary rap over the knuckles was nothing short of a miracle. Testament, I was able to conclude, to the overwhelmed state of the French immigration system and the complete inefficiency with which it was run. It wasn’t quite a deportation, but it was the next best thing. I was being told in no uncertain terms by my good friends at the préfecture (some of whom I knew by name, so frequent had been my visits) that if I ever wanted to be legal again in France, I would have to return to Australia and start the application process anew.

And so my compass swung southward.

I may have had to concede round one to the Republic, I thought to myself as I stormed out of the préfecture en route to planning an impromptu trip home, but there was a bit of cunning in the old dog yet. I was down but far from out.