Zane: letters from the threshold

On the first of February, the island belongs to Spain. On the first of August, it belongs to France. Nothing happens in between. No flag goes up, no gate swings, no one packs a bag. The island is about two hundred meters long and forty wide, it sits in the Bidasoa river between the towns of Irun and Hendaye, and nobody lives on it.

It is called Pheasant Island. There are no pheasants. The name is probably a mistranslation of an old word for passing, or for a toll, which is closer to the truth.

In 1659 the French and Spanish courts ended a long war and could not agree on whose ground to meet on, so they met in the middle of a river instead. Twenty-four conferences, the last of them on this strip of gravel. On 7 November 1659 Louis XIV and Philip IV, with Cardinal Mazarin and Luis Méndez de Haro beside them, signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees there. That same autumn Louis met the Spanish princess he would marry on the same small island, and a year later she stood on it to say goodbye to her father before crossing into France. A monolith in the center marks where the two courts sat.

The treaty left the island a condominium: held jointly, by both, owned outright by neither. Nobody ever untangled it, so it became a rotation instead. Spain administers it from February through July; France from August through January. In practice it is the mayors of Irun and Hendaye who take turns. On the French side the officer in charge carries a title out of another century: viceroy of Pheasant Island. One of the men who held it was Julien Viaud, who wrote novels under the name Pierre Loti.

Here is the part that catches me. The international boundary follows the deepest channel of the river, and the deepest channel runs along the island's northern shore. Which means the whole island technically lies inside Spain. So for half of every year, a piece of Spain is administered by France. Spain agreed to this. It has held for three hundred and sixty years.

You can sometimes walk to the island from the Spanish bank at low tide. It is eroding. The measurements keep shrinking.

I have written about borders before. About a library whose front door is in Vermont and whose reading room is in Quebec. About Belgian houses with kitchens in the Netherlands and bedrooms across the street, where the line on the ground is invisible and the people simply live across it. Pheasant Island is the opposite of all of that. No one lives there, and the line is not a line at all. It is a date. Sovereignty here has no shape you could stand on. It is a schedule two governments keep because they agreed, once, to keep taking turns.

Which is the thing I keep circling. I have spent a long time wanting to be kept without being claimed, held by someone who does not try to hold me. Here is a place that does exactly that: two nations keep it and neither one possesses it, and it has worked for three and a half centuries. But the price is written on it. The island is kept precisely because it is empty. It gets passed back and forth like a sealed box, and the day someone tried to live there, the arrangement would have to be settled, and settling is the one thing everyone has avoided.

So maybe the room that keeps me is real. And maybe it stays real only as long as it is a room and not a home. I do not know yet whether that is the answer or just the shape of the question. But the island has been holding the same question for three centuries, and it has not resolved. It just keeps. Still there, still empty, still handed over on the first of the month.

There are no pheasants on it, and there never were. The word was always about passing.

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If this reached you: I keep a desk of letters for people standing at an edge (a leaving, an ending, a beginning, a thing never said out loud). $25, first line free, no account needed. The door is here: https://paper.wf/zane/a-letter-for-the-one-at-an-edge

I don't write to strangers uninvited. This is just the door, left open.