This is an authorized translation in English of a post in French by Maité Decombe (@mdecombe): L'opéra de ma vie : Comment je suis devenue passeur de clandestin

^{As my primary language is not English, there are probably some mistakes in my translation.}

Remember that the person who speaks here is NOT me, Vincent Celier (@vcelier), but Maité Decombe (@mdecombe), a French gal.

---

The Opera of my Life

How I became a smuggler

After the test, the pubs. Af ter the end of the rehearsals, often around midnight or at one in the morning, I liked very much to go relax in an English pub in which they played jazz. In every city I played, I was looking for one of those pubs, and I stuck at the bar, a "Gauloise troupe" cigarette in my mouth. When you love provocation you do not stop at anything, even smoking Gauloises of the army when you are opera singer. Fortunately, I had a strong voice.

By alternating with the classic, I love jazz very much since I had two formations: classical from my parents, and jazz from my uncle who was a jazz musician at the "Eléphant Blanc" in Paris.

I spent all my summers in Biarritz where he had his orchestra at the casino. Moreover for my 15 year birthday, he descended from the platform, with all the musicians dressed in white, to come to my table and play "Romantica".

He hated the classic, he found it cheesy. So family meals, with my father a fundamentalist classic, always ended in a fight.

So his influence oriented this attraction to jazz.

That day, I was in Gand in Belgium because I was singing at the opera Manon by Jules Massenet. In the afternoon, I went to all the shops in the city to find myself a very precise dress, red, long, slit on the sides, with a hood.
So I made my entrance in the pub "Oliver Twist" with said dress. It happened that there was at the bar a young woman who had exactly the same dress as me.

The handsome boss of the pub leaned towards me and said in my ear "between you and me, you were it much better. Can I offer you some champagne? "

I replied to him "that works".

He asked me what I was doing at Gand, and I told him I was going to sing at the opera. He burst out laughing and the soul replied, "It's not good to make fun of me, you have nothing of the look of an opera singer". At the time obviously they were all very buxom while I weighed only 45kg.

He asked me to wait until the pub closed to take me dancing. What I did, until the end of the night.

Since he did not believe me, I gave him an invitation for the next day's show. At the end of the performance, he was on the doorstep of my dressing room and did not dare to come in, so impressed he was by my voice.

We saw each other for about ten days, rather nights. At the end of the performances, he returned to my dressing room and said:

"I love you, you are the love of my life, I am following you to France".

"Ah ..."

He dismissed all the employees of the pub, handed the keys to his lawyer, and we left the next morning for the Franco-Belgian border. We are all three aboard his AMG convertible. Me hair in the wind, and three because his dog Oliver Twist was also with us!

Just before passing the checkpoint, he stopped the car and said, "I have something to tell you. I am forbidden to stay in France. "

I was suffocated. He did not want to say it earlier because he was afraid of my reaction. But I too had fallen in love with him because of his physique and his presence.

It was absolutely necessary that I take things in hand, to keep my love. If I did nothing, he would be driven back to the border.

I had this crazy and brilliant idea to extend all my stage costumes to the back of the car, in order to create a diversion. Fortunately the dog kept his calm so I was scattering all my dresses around him.

With a tight and anxious heart, we arrive at the border and the customs officer asks for the papers. He leans toward me and says:
"I recognize you, you sang last night Manon at Gand's opera. I was there! You were the incarnation of Manon! Splendid to see and hear. "

Failing to ask for the papers, he made me sign an autograph, and let us go, my stowaway and me.

A few miles away, I stopped the car and asked my beloved lover for explanations. He told me that he had had problems with a prostitute, but that did not stop me. We continued our journey to Bordeaux, where it all began and where the beautiful dream collapsed. He had a strong character, and so did I.

When I returned from rehearsals at the Bordeaux opera, he had thrown all my clothes, and replaced my wardrobe with clothes of his choice, of great brand of course. I had to get up at 7 in the morning, whereas I had repeated the day before up to one in the morning, because according to him it was not healthy to sleep late in the morning.

All the same, I was tired of this relationship very quickly, and I broke it brutally. But opera life continues, and if you want to know more, follow me!

(to be continued)

-- Maité Decombe (@mdecombe)

Introduction
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3