Last summer, sitting in a quiet garden outside Paris that belonged to my friend Frédéric, I indulged in my favorite fantasy — living elsewhere, where I would become a different kind of person. Less fretful, better organized, more creative. I could see myself in a garden like this.
Frédéric's young son was teaching his baby brother to play catch, along with the words "la balle." He helpfully turned to me and made me repeat after him several times. I study French, but I'm not fluent, so I added a 7-year-old French coach to my garden and more-perfect-life fantasy.
The only problem, I explained to Frédéric, was that I didn't think I could cope with French bureaucracy. "No one can," he said. "Just remember that they exist to make your life miserable, and you'll be fine."
A few days later, my husband and I traveled to the Loire Valley. Having served with the Royal Navy at Normandy, he enjoys seeing France in peacetime. Every year or so, we try to look at a different part of the country.
My husband kept falling asleep on the trip but insisted he was fine. Shortly after reaching our hotel, in a little town south of Tours, he complained of severe chest pains. I was panicky, but the concierge called a taxi and helped explain to the driver that we needed a hospital emergency room.
The small country hospital was much like an American one: anxious people lined up in a waiting room, a television blaring, vending machines along one wall. My husband speaks no French, so I explained as best I could to the gatekeepers at the front desk what the problem was, the douleur dans sa poitrine, sa fatigue and so on. We were U.S. citizens, not British, and we didn't have an E.U. passport, so we didn't have reciprocity for insurance coverage.
After a few minutes, someone came for my husband. Even though he didn't speak French, they wouldn't let me go with him. I sat down to wait, trying to breathe deeply. Among the waiting crowd was a woman about my own age, clearly as worried as I was about her own family member. She was already in the waiting room when I arrived, and after perhaps half an hour, she went up to the front desk and asked, in a hesitant soft voice, for news.
The man behind the counter demanded to know if she'd heard him call her name. "Non," she whispered. "Then you have no reason to come forward," he said.
Of course, he spoke in French, but even I could follow it. I remembered Frédéric's mantra — bureaucrats exist to make our lives miserable — and I watched the clock slowly sweep off another 30 minutes.
At that point, I couldn't take it anymore. I walked up to the desk and asked for news of mon mari. The gatekeeper turned to his colleague: had Madame been to the counter already? No? This was the première fois? Very well. He called into the back, and in a few minutes, a technician came to fetch me.
I was escorted to my husband's cubicle, which he was sharing with a Frenchman who collapsed while getting off the Paris-Tours train. A doctor arrived. Her English was worse than my French, so with my little Collins dictionary I translated my husband's symptoms. They took him and also his cellmate away for X-rays and left me and the cellmate's partner to sit on their beds.
The partner, a chic young woman, blond, extremely thin, was carrying a fat book called "L'Anorexie." Judging by her own size, I wondered if it was a guide, but she explained that she was training to help people with eating disorders. Bulimia and anorexia were severe problems in France, she told me: women, and increasingly men, are prey to a cultural mystique that proclaims they must be both fashionistas and foodinistas. Bulimia in particular is widespread, she said, and people smoke heavily to suppress their appetites.
Meanwhile, my husband's heart and lungs were examined inside and out. He and his cellmate were both suffering from pneumonia, not heart attacks. They were given antibiotics.
At 2 a.m., when we were discharged, I offered my MasterCard to the surly gatekeeper. He said they would send us a bill. The doctor apologized for having to bill us, but we were not citizens, after all.
Six months later, the bill arrived. For X-rays, an EKG, 10 hours in the emergency room, a doctor, a cardiologist, technicians, nurses, drugs and even the surly gatekeeper, we were required to pay $220. I might put up with a lot of ugly bureaucrats for that.
