I loved the tender spaces, the English greens of emerald and silence, your smell, you illuminated the air from which I defend myself
and according to my ear remains the space of your ending fingers, to doubt and blush sometimes with the pale confidences, so strange, so tender and red of my childhood.
J’aimais les espaces tendres, les verts anglais d’emeraude et de silence, ton odeur, tu illuminais l’air dont je me défends
et selon mon oreille reste l’espace de tes doigts finissants, à douter et rougir parfois des confiances pales, si étranges, si tendre et rouge de mon enfance.
Mas Lombard faces the city of Nîmes on one side, faces a potato field on the other, although neither can be seen from the property; a line of poplar trees stands to the East, clusters of fruit trees hide the city to the West. An old stone wall is hidden under madeira ivy and passion flower vines. They creep up the sides of the house, lacing through the iron grilles of the upstairs windows. In the summer, meals are taken in the courtyard, and a dense Bourbon rose is trained above the tables, extending the shade of the house.
Gaëtane and Hélène had been together for three years when they bought the Mas. The roof needed to be replaced, and the windows, and the plaster siding had crumbled in patches, exposing the stone structure underneath. The barn, which had been appropriated by the French Army to house Laotian workers during World War I, was badly in need of repair. A map of Laos was still faintly visible, painted up to the roofbeams on the South wall.
Gaëtane: On s’est rencontrés aux Beaux-Arts.
Gaëtane: We met at the Beaux-Arts.
Hélène: Aux Beaux-Arts, Poterie, c’est à dire à l’école de poterie des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, pour travailler la terre.
Hélène: At the Beaux-Arts, Pottery, that is to say at the pottery school of the Beaux-Arts of Nîmes, to work the earth.
Donc, toi tu es très vite arrivée d’ailleurs, je ne t’ais même pas repérée. J’étais tellement… J’étais préoccupée par ma boule de terre
So, you arrived very quickly, I didn’t even notice you, I was so… I was preoccupied with my ball of clay.
Je suis arrivée à tourner peut être plus vite et je tournais des pots que tu rendais des œuvres d’art.
I managed to turn a bit faster, and I made pots that you then made into works of art.
Gaëtane: Alors je… Ça fait longtemps que je voulais faire de la poterie parce que j’en avais fait un peu à l’école en Angleterre et je sentais que c’était presque ma vocation, la poterie.
Gaëtane: So I… I’ve wanted to do pottery for a long time because I did a bit of it at school in England and I felt like it was almost my calling, pottery.
Et alors ? Je suis allée aux Beaux-Arts, à l’occasion d’une rencontre avec un jeune homme qui était l’ami intime de mon amie Christine, qui étudiait la médecine avec moi.
So? I went to the Beaux-Arts, along with a young man who was a close friend of my friend Christine, who was studying medicine with me.
Et on est allé tous les deux. Et là, je me suis vite séparée de lui.
We both went, and then, I quickly separated from him.
Hélène: Tu es sûre qu’il ne s’est pas séparé de toi ?
Hélène: Are you sure he didn’t separate from you?
Gaëtane: J’ai vu que il rentré pas du tout dans le cadre et moi je me suis intégrée parmi ceux du beaux arts.
Gaëtane: I saw that he didn’t fit in at all and I integrated myself among those of the fine arts.
J’ai connu Hélène parce que je suis rentrée un petit peu tard, un soir et Hélène m’a dit
I met Hélène because I came home a little late one evening and Hélène said to me “I’ll take you home.”
The first time I visited, I was thirteen years old. I slept in the attic - I remember reading Terry Pratchett books underneath the low ceiling, and climbing up and down the spiral staircase that had only recently been rebuilt. Then, as now, the house was a work in progress – there were chickens, but no coop, and the birds ran free around the property. I spent hours in the pool, shaded by date palms and a walnut tree, splashing around with a neighbor girl named Martine, who was blunt and poised; around her, I stammered, and felt clumsy.
My parents slept in a trailer under the plum trees. When I return, twenty-odd years later, the trailer is full of firewood. It has rotted out, dwarfed now by the fruit trees that rise above it, its siding flecked with the amaranth flesh of fallen plums.
When I return, the property is much as I remember it, although everything seems to stand at a different angle, to cast a different shadow. Things have grown, been built, or begun to rot. Plantain shoots grow through the cracked cement around the pool. The chickens are now sequestered under the walnut tree, although they strain their heads through the net enclosure, their necks bald from the effort.
I am in town for five days, on my way to a writing workshop, and I use the trip to Europe to visit my French cousins for the first time in my adult life. They collect me at the train station, and we take a harrowing drive through the narrow streets of Nîmes before suddenly hinging onto a gravel road and pulling up to their gate. Gaëtane is eager to walk me around the property. She shows me the fruit trees - plum, apricot, apple, pear, fig, olive - and her little garden, tutting in disappointment at her blighted potatoes. Their dog, Témis, bounds alongside us, a manic Doberman puppy, already stronger than each of her elderly owners.
Inside their kitchen, a pot of what looks to be apricot jam cools on the stove - it will remain there for the duration of my visit. A cluster of uncorked bottles of wine sits on the counter. That night, Hélène will sniff each one cautiously, unsure which had been opened the night before, and which had been there for weeks. Through to the living room, a baby grand barely clears the doorframe. On top of it, a carved jade ship, maybe a meter long and half as high, gathers dust next to a pile of mail and keys and dog treats. Gaëtane’s paintings hang on every wall.
People in my community talk about queer family. It is what we call our cherished friends, who see us, celebrate us, love us in the way that family should, sometimes a supplement to our own families, sometimes the only one we are left with. Queerness is not a thing we inherit, and as such, queer families are pieced together, through proximity and shared experience. Some of my friends have fraught relationships with their blood families, some in the slow process of repair, some severed forever - for them, a chosen family is a lifeline.
I am lucky. I have had two families in my adult life, one chosen and one blood. As children, our parents taught my sibling and me to trust that they would love whoever we became, and when we came out in the same year, they took it in stride. But however comfortable we were in our own home, we were both enchanted by these cousins in France. An overlap between the queer and the blood family felt like astonishing luck, and we talked about them whenever we could find a reason to.
As a teenager, I was hungry for examples of queerness in the world. During that first visit, I wanted to watch Gaëtane and Hélène just exist in their home, as remarkable or mundane as it was at any moment. I wanted to see them hold hands, to watch them interact with shopkeepers, to meet the friends they had over for Sunday lunch. But our stay was brief, and I couldn’t yet articulate what it was that drew me to them.
When I return, Gaëtane’s sister is here, their sibling dynamic on full display. I watch them from the outside; my French is fluent enough to participate, but the dry comments, the subtle sarcasm, forces my close focus. She’s always like this, Olivia says to me in English when Gaëtane puts her foot down about their afternoon plans. I try to understand how power works in their family, who is believed, who is defensive, who is the peacemaker. I recognize my mother in Gaëtane, both oldest daughters, both stubborn and independent. I recognize my grandmother, too, the way she taps her clenched hands on the table, the way it feels as though a door has slammed shut when she makes up her mind. They pass a plate of cantaloupe around the table, bickering, juice dripping off their chins and fingers.
Gaëtane’s mother Fiona and my grandmother, Dora, were sisters. They had been raised in my great-grandmother’s wealthy household in the Montreal suburbs. Fiona moved to France and married, Dora stayed in Canada. I wonder, as I watch Gaëtane and Olivia talk, about what we inherit, about how these people who I have spent so little time with feel so familiar to me.
Olivia is frustrated now, defending her right to protest as they discuss the King’s coronation. Hélène suggests following France’s example and disposing of the royals entirely. Gaëtane fixes the napkin on her lap, shrugging. Hélène looks at me and winks, a small smile on her face. I smile back, reluctant to take a side in the squabble but thrilled to be included. I feel thirteen again, bashful.
When Olivia leaves, Gaëtane begins telling me stories about her life. It’s after breakfast, and we’re sitting in the courtyard, under the Bourbon rose. Two round patio tables are pushed together, covered in mismatched plastic tablecloths. The ceramic pot of coffee is still on the table, cool now.
Gaëtane came to Canada when she was sixteen, stayed with another of her mother’s sisters, my great aunt Nell. J’étais amoureux d’elle, I was in love with her. Gaëtane told me. I wonder, for a moment, if I have misunderstood her, and try not to react with my eyes.
I remember my childhood visits with Nell. She lived in a camper most of the time, in the dry woods of interior BC. She raised horses, eked out a living taking care of other peoples’ ranches. I remember her pack of salukis, lithe, long-haired sighthounds who stood as tall as I did, and the jeans and the boots that she wore.
Later, I read a poem that Gaëtane wrote about Nell:
Ta voix me touche, j’invente des motifs de te parler. Tout prend des ombres particulières.
Tu me parles de responsabilité, de choses étonnantes et adultes et je voudrai t’entendre. Je ne cherche que le son de tes mots, non le sens et ne sais pas pourquoi.
“Your voice touches me, I invent reasons to speak to you,” she writes. “I look only for the sound in your words, not the sense and know not why.”
I think again about the way my sibling and I wanted to be close to Gaëtane and Hélène. Our interest was theoretical, but magnetic. I wondered if Gaëtane’s love for Nell felt like that, like seeing a possible future in someone else. I wondered if Nell could have been queer - did she consider its possibility, during her solitude in the years that I knew her? - or if Gaëtane had attached herself to her because she saw that she, too, was some kind of outsider at heart.