Nathalie.
‘Don’t ask questions,’ Nathalie said with a typically Gallic shrug. ‘Take the permit and get out of here.’
Which is what I did.
But the next day I started asking questions all the same. Carefully, of French acquaintances, certainly not of French bureaucratic officials who might want to take the permit back. And that’s how I discovered that the French government’s unexpected generosity wasn’t a miracle, just a practical arrangement for the sake of the baby in the pushchair with the broken wheel. I was no longer the undesirable étrangère from Africa; I was the mother of a French child. I’d earned a certain status. The French had opened their arms to me. And I wanted to tear off these arms with rage.
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?!’ I raged at the baby’s French father. ‘Surely they could see that I was pregnant every time I had to hand in another stupid piece of paper at the préfecture! And now I find out that all those papers were unnecessary!’
But Alain just shrugged, like Nathalie at the mairie, with a look that said, Don’t ask questions.
5 Marry at leisure
‘Shouldn’t we just get married?’ Alain asked one afternoon when I once again lay crying in a miserable bundle on the bed. ‘It will at least solve a few of your problems with the bureaucracy.’
Not exactly what you’d call a romantic proposal, is it?
But at this stage nothing in my life was exactly romantic. I was living in the loveliest Provençal landscape, but I was so vehemently battling the French bureaucracy that I scarcely noticed the landscape. I was still hunting for official papers, and like any hunter worth his salt I had my eye on the prey rather than the scenery.
‘It won’t help,’ I sobbed with red eyes and a wet nose. ‘They won’t give me a driver’s licence just because I’m married to someone who has a driver’s licence.’
For that was what this afternoon’s crying bout was all about.
Well, actually it was about more than a driver’s licence. Let’s call it a cultural problem. National legislation leading to international misunderstandings. All symbolised by that shred of paper you need to drive a car.
I needed an insurance policy for the 15-year-old Golf I’d recently bought from a neighbour. The insurance company wasn’t satisfied with the temporary international driver’s licence I’d managed with until now. If I wanted to insure the rusty little car with its torn seats, I needed a French driver’s licence. But with this new French driver’s licence I’d have to pay exorbitant monthly premiums on the policy – because as a ‘new’ driver I’d be considered a danger on the road.
I therefore had to prove that I’d been a responsible driver for two decades. All I needed was a photocopy of my twenty-year-old South African driver’s licence. Did I say all? In the New South Africa the new government had just introduced a new system of driver’s licences in the form of laminated cards. Therefore my South African driver’s licence was also brand-new.
My previous driver’s licence was, alas, in my previous identity document. This identity document had been replaced the previous year with the new identity document for which everyone in the New South Africa had to apply. In short, I had no proof that I’d been driving for years on some of the most dangerous roads in the world.
Of course I couldn’t blame the French for the new laws of my fatherland. I’d simply have to put up and pay up.
But I did blame the French for refusing to issue my French driver’s licence unless I relinquished my (brand-new! expensive!) South African driver’s licence. I have to travel to South Africa regularly, sometimes at short notice, and over there I need a local driver’s licence. The alternative, which is to apply for an international driver’s licence every time I travel to South Africa, is too awful to contemplate. Here in France it’s not a matter of quickly popping into the nearest AA office and walking out with your international driver’s licence. Here you have to complete forms, as for anything you want to do here except go to the toilet (and for all I know you’ll soon have to start completing forms for that), and then you have to wait. Sometimes for months on end.
It was this checkmate situation that made me sob my heart out that afternoon. And all it produced was a marriage proposal.
Of course it wasn’t the first time that the word ‘marry’ had come up in our conversation. I’d moved to France boots and all because I was crazy about this man, but I’d resolved to get all my official papers in order, and only then we’d talk about marriage or no marriage. Just in case the man might think I was marrying him to make the paper trail easier.
But how was I to know that the paper trail would continue for more than two years? Or that in the meantime we would have a baby girl who would be crawling all over the house when I was still crawling around in front of French officials trying to get my hands on yet another essential document? To be completely honest, by now I didn’t mind quite so much that my husband might one day reproach me because my reasons for marriage hadn’t been entirely noble. I was beginning to think that I might be able to live with such a reproach.
And then my brother came to visit and Alain and I looked at each other and said, pourquoi pas? Why not pop over to the mairie and ask the mayor to marry us? Then at least I’d have a relative from South Africa as witness to the event.
Maybe I’d gone temporarily insane. Maybe I was imagining that I was living in Las Vegas where you could marry just like that, on the spur of the moment. Surely I should’ve known that no official transaction could be so effortless in this part of the world.
If I’d known how difficult it would be to arrange a simple wedding at the mairie – just the bridal pair and their children, I foolishly thought, just the briefest little ceremony imaginable – then I’d bloody well have remained unmarried.
Does anyone still remember the terrifying slogan for the movie Jaws II? Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water … Indeed, just when I thought that it was safe to live in France, that there couldn’t possibly be an official document left to complete, I decided to get married.
Then I was exposed to a new torrent of forms and papers.
One of the many requirements was a complete birth certificate – requested from Pretoria and translated into French by an official translator – with a date stamp less than three months old. Sound familiar? Don’t forget that I’d been on this absurd merry-go-round before when I had to prove that I was my own child’s mother. By now I knew that it took three months to get your hands on such a certificate.
By which time my brother would have been back home, his French visit little more than a memory.
And if by some miracle the certificate arrived before the three-month deadline, we’d have to get married straightaway – no time to invite friends or family from afar – or we’d have to apply for the certificate again. And again hope in vain that it would reach us within three months. And again …
In the end we asked a family friend in Pretoria to collect the certificate in person and send it by express delivery, and so gained a week or three. But we were still rushing around to collect the rest of the papers.
As a prospective bride from a foreign country I needed, for example, to hand in a doctor’s certificate at the mairie. The prospective groom wasn’t expected to visit a doctor. It made no
