For as long as I can remember, I have been a rebel from the depths of my soul.
No matter how much I have tried to fit in, to get along, to have the desire to change things, routine took over inexorably at one point or another!
At no more than five years of age I had escaped with my father, only to see bombs raining on the allies who defended northern Europe.
At the convent boarding school, I was the black sheep among the good sisters in their white robes.
For the sixteen years after the death of my mother, living with my father who had survived the hell of the concentration camps as a war resister, died barely a year after his return. I fled from the convent to Paris where I join my older sister and then met my husband, the father of my future children.
At nineteen, I met and married the Man I loved and had my first child.
I had everything, I had done everything, and I had seen everything: casinos, great wealth, extravagant sports cars, luxury travel, love, children, grand hotels, great European restaurants, and more — yet I would always be put in the position to start again somewhere — from scratch!
Ten years later, there I was with my twins in a juicy overflowing professional life I shared with my husband. But one winter afternoon, I came home to our opulent apartment in the neighborhood of Paris 16°, and found him with another woman in our bed!
My Polish blood had gone one round! I packed my clicks, my bells, a bottle of Wiborowa vodka that I always kept in the freezer, and left to create a revolution by leaving all our accumulated wealth in the safe of our bedroom as well as my three children, each of which were still in their rooms!
It was the night before Christmas Eve!
After a break-out party with student friends that lasted several weeks, it was now my turn — to find myself in a maid's room during the barricades of the May '68 uprising in which I participated with great conviction.
I had fallen in love during the barricades episode, with a tall and handsome oriental man. I grew fascinated by astrology and studied it frantically in my spare time. On the advice of my older sister, I bought a garret on the top floor of a building in the ninth neighborhood that I transformed into a beautiful duplex where I could finally welcome my three children!
On the advice of my older sister, I bought a garret on the top floor of a building in the ninth neighborhood that I transformed into a beautiful duplex where I could finally welcome my three children!
Six years later, when I fell in love with a charming French woman Lea who, like me, frequented a group of Michou artists with whom we had unforgettable evenings..
Following a quarrel with my sister I abandoned everything once again. This time I was in the company of my lover, her monkey, my daughter, our two cats Puceau and Clitoris, via Mexico! Farewell Parisian life! Baguette! Romance! Lights! And fast forward into new adventures!
What a relief it was upon take-off. I realized that another door had just been closed — forever!
Our arrival in Mexico City was, to say the least, folkloric. It was almost impossible to find a hotel that would accept our menagerie. We ended up in a room at the Hotel Edison in the center of the city. It had a small concrete yard where we could leave our cats who asked themselves many questions, roaming in semi-freedom whilst Mali the Capuchin monkeyremained locked in his cage.
After a good week at the hotel, we spent a few weeks with a friend of Lea's parents, and finally found a decent apartment in the neighborhood of "Chapultepec" in "Edificio Condesa".The building was very well maintained and in the heart of the capitals central district. We found a few French fashion houses to import traditional Mexican dresses and another three months escaped us. But I was not happy so we packed up and left Mexico City, not even six months after arriving, to visit the country.
We left the cats and monkey with my daughter when we left to shop for some transportation, and found an old green Chevy van on the border of Laredo. We filled the back with our three suitcases, two guitars, two cats, one monkey, a big mattress on the floor, a brazier (kind of small coal stove), and the three of us, up front. This Mexican adventure began at the wheel of this Texas-registered van, my fourteen-year-old daughter, my girlfriend of twenty-six, and me at thirty-six.
It was 1974. Our American registration did not inspire a grand welcome at all, even if our blonde heads aroused the curiosity of many a villager who saw us pass-by.
Many villages had never seen foreigners, especially the likes of us with our short shorts and braless tops. They remained speechless, mouths gaped, shocked to their limits. Out lasting impression was beyond even our imaginations, reflecting only years later upon this shock value.
The women were furious and the men were delighted. We traveled 2000 kilometers, stopping here and there, before arriving on the Caribbean coast with Cancun under construction, which in Mayan meant Snake's Nest. It was still a very small village with a tiny market of vegetables and fruit under a long roof of black cardboard.But there was something strange happening…
We slept in the van every other night, except when we could use our camp beds to sleep in under the stars. A truck carrying Mexican workers with passengers crammed together like cattle, transported me to a memory of my father standing in a truck driven by the Germans to escort prisoners to the camps — at the age of four and a half — a scene from which I had never recovered and which had resurfaced instantly. It was too much for me!
After this trauma, accentuated by a lot of drama and weeping, we were on the go again. This time we headed north to an incredible region marked by a very strange accent, and a population with a notably small and plump morphology. We discovered the Yucatan and specifically the village of "Chuburna Puerto." This was the place where we wanted to settle at any price, even despite the refusal of their inhabitants to sell us food or to rent us a house. It was only after a month of insistence that one of the fishermen agreed to rent us a straw hut with a palm roof for one month. I won!
I was finally going to live near a huge beach approximately thirty kilometers in length and absolutely deserted!
And so it began, the discovery of these precious shells never seen on my continent as well as the beginning of my love story with this Mayan village in Yucatan.
It lasted a good thirty years, during which there was necklaces manufacture in shells, trips and adventures, a return to creating the characters, even more travels, and finally the last journey there to complete my life and be buried in the place I loved so very much.