to manufacture all that paper.
The other emotion that regularly overwhelms me in a préfecture is a little less worthy of me. It’s a kind of blind envy of the Voortrekkers of days gone by who could embark on their Great Trek without papers. Anyone who tried to stop them along the way was summarily mowed down. It’s not a tactic of which I approve, of course. But on more than one occasion in the past few years I’ve had to fight a primitive urge to threaten an unhelpful French bureaucrat with an old-fashioned muzzle-loader.
I don’t want to haul an ox wagon across a mountain. I am genuinely grateful that I was able to load my earthly possessions onto a sturdy ship. But my life would’ve been so much easier if my modern Great Trek was a paperless saga.
It’s not just foreigners who can be driven insane by the French obsession with papers. Every French child receives a carnet de santé at birth, a 96-page book in which every doctor’s visit, inoculation, disease and injury of its first few years will be recorded in detail. After that the carnet is supposed to accompany the child throughout its entire school career. When I wanted to enrol my five-year-old son at the local school, the headmaster refused to admit him because he didn’t have such a book. Who knew what horrible diseases he’d brought with him from Africa? I waved his official inoculation certificate about. So it was just a single sheet of cardboard, I protested, but it contained all the necessary details. What more could they want?
They wanted more. About 95 pages more. No French official will be satisfied with one page if he can get 96.
No, it’s not just foreigners who struggle to keep head above paper, but it’s worse if you’re from another country. The French are used to it. I suspect that French babies are born with a piece of paper in their hands, a tiny certificate that grants them permission to leave the womb. If you were born elsewhere it can take a lifetime to get all these papers together. If you’re an adult by the time you start this paper trail, you’re like a lame marathon runner who starts the race an hour after all the other runners. You’re never going to catch up. By the time you’ve got your hands on every possible piece of official paper, they’ll have thought up a few new ones.
Sometimes you end up in situations so absurd that it would make Kafka gasp. With me it has happened a few times. Once it was on a sweltering summer’s day in Valence, which was my administrative capital at the time. Soon afterwards it became Avignon, and now it is Valence once again, because I’ve moved house twice, just a few kilometres from my previous address in each case, but each time I ended up in a different administrative department and a different geographical region. Not that I blame the French for that. It was my own ignorance that made me decide to settle exactly on the border between several departments and regions. But I do blame the French for the abyss of red tape into which each of these moves plunged me.
Valence is a good four hours’ drive, there and back, from the village where I first came to live. Every time I had to drive to Valence to hand in yet another obscure piece of paper, an entire day was therefore lost because once you’ve landed inside the préfecture’s enormous fortress you usually have to wait a few hours before it is finally your turn to talk to an official. Assuming that by this time the official hasn’t disappeared to uphold that all-important French tradition known as the extended lunch.
And then you still have to reckon with the unpredictable hours kept by government offices. I kept Daniel out of school one day because he had to be identified as the child on the picture I had to hand in – and we ended up outside a dark, deserted building. I’d chosen the one day of the week on which the préfecture of Valence closed its doors. Which is not necessarily the same day on which the préfecture of Avignon – or the bank in the neighbouring village – closes its doors.
It’s so much easier in a country where you know that from Monday to Friday, between nine and five, you work (or pretend that you’re working), and on weekends you rest. Nothing is ever that simple here in the south of France. Our local supermarket is closed on Sunday afternoons and all day on Monday; the bar is open all day on Sunday but closed all day on Monday; the baker and the hairdresser close on Wednesday; my favourite café in the vicinity closes on Thursday. The post office is open every day (in theory anyway), but for barely two hours in the morning and less than two hours in the afternoon. The library is open only in the morning on some days and in the afternoon on others …
It’s a logistical nightmare. You have to consult a complicated timetable on the fridge every time you want to buy a loaf of bread.
These days I don’t drive to a préfecture without first making sure that I’ll find somebody home. I learnt my lesson the hard way. But in those early days I had quite a few lessons yet to learn. For example, that Catch-22 wasn’t just the title of an entertaining novel.
On this scorching hot day in Valence the woman at the préfecture refused to give me a temporary residence permit unless I had a social security number. So I walked over to the Sécurité Sociale, yet another enormous fortress a few blocks away, to get the required security number. But here a grumpy monsieur refused to give me a security number unless I had – wait for it – a temporary residence permit.
Catch-22.
Back to the préfecture to explain. Back to the Sécurité Sociale to plead. Back to the préfecture to explain, to plead and to threaten …
I was seven months pregnant, heavy and sweaty with swollen feet, and on each slow journey between the two buildings the sun burnt a hole right through my scalp. After a few hours of this absurd form of torture I subsided onto the steps outside one of the two buildings and started to cry inconsolably. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. For the first time I really understood what Elizabeth Smart meant when she chose this sad title for her novel. While outside a government building in Valence I sat down and wept.
Another day, another low. This time in Avignon, which had in the meantime become the seat of all my administrative resentment. One of those days in late winter when the mournful mistral sucks every last bit of the life-urge from your body.
Let me first explain about the mistral.
I promise I’ll never complain about the Cape southeaster again. The Cape southeaster is a pleasant breeze compared to the Provençal mistral. Yes, it’s true that the southeaster flings you against lampposts and in front of cars, but it lasts only a couple of days and, once you’ve survived the onslaught, the peninsula always looks more beautiful than before. The clean air above Table Mountain is enough to make you instantly forget the annoying wind. The Provençal mistral is stronger than the southeaster, colder than the southeaster and, above all, more persistent than the southeaster. The mistral blows for up to thirty days at a time. During my first spring here, there were exactly three windless days in the whole of April.
According to our local meteorologist Jean-Pierre, the fertile Rhône Valley acts as a kind of bellows for a wind that is born in the Alps – although its icy breath sometimes makes you suspect that it comes straight from Siberia – and then blasts open its way to the warm Mediterranean Sea. A simple explanation, therefore, but not the sort of thing you’re likely to read in tourist brochures. If all those sun-starved crowds heard that their hard-earned Provençal holiday could be blown away before their eyes, day after day after day, they certainly wouldn’t come here in such droves.
Be that as it may. It was on one such wind-ravaged day that we stood in Avignon in front of the desk of a clerk who had to issue a temporary travel permit to Daniel so that he’d be readmitted to the country at the end of a family visit to South Africa. No happy holiday lay ahead of us. My mother had died in South Africa in the same week my daughter was born in France. Now, about two months later, the baby was strong enough for us to embark on the long journey to go and bury my mother’s ashes. Well, in actual fact the baby had been strong enough a month earlier, but it had taken
