ESSAYS
Language and LongingIOWA CITY, IOWA 27 November 2006 |
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I went to college in a small farming town that has become, according to the New York Times, a quaint haven for gourmets and oenophiles.
While I was “studying” there, a few wineries were around but the best restaurant in town served a three foot tall glass of beer as its signature dish.
The college I attended is, apparently, an excellent liberal arts school full of brilliant professors and wonderful facilities.
I don’t know about that.
I made a concerted effort to squander my education and, despite my professors’ best efforts, avoid learning anything. In addition to dodging an education, my list of accomplishments while enrolled at Whitman College is as follows:
- Receiving a letter from the dean of students accusing me of assaulting my RA with a butterfly knife.
- Participating in a raid of an all woman dormitory during which I used a battery-powered squirt gun, a perfect replica of an M16, loaded with tomato juice.
- Accompanying someone named N8Ball to purchase marijuana at the penitentiary-adjacent home of a man named Butch who was employed by the Washington State Department of Corrections as a prison guard.
Given the preceding curriculum vitae it shouldn’t be surprising that I was lucky to graduate. In my senior year the difference between an F and a D- in Spanish II was the difference between a diploma and a blank sheet of paper.
I begged and pleaded and somehow my professor granted me a D-. Upon receiving that grade I drove ecstatically to a scruffy bar in town called the The Blue, sat down on a barstool, smiled at Pedro and said, “Una cerveza, por favor.”
Then, for a long time, I didn’t think much about speaking a language other than English.
When I decided to move to Paris I bought a set of CDs called “Speak French Like Émile Zola in Twenty-Four Hours” and drove around Los Angeles asking, “Ou est la banque? Ou est la banque?”
After a few days I decided that I had a natural gift for the language and figured I’d become fluent by simple immersion.
That word, “immersion” is one you hear often when people talk about learning a new language. Schools advertise “full immersion” and people are frequently off to the south of France to “immerse” themselves in French culture. It’s a great image, some cheerful young student floating like a croûton in a bouillabaisse of French language, slowly becoming soggy with it until there is little difference between student and soup.
That’s what I figured would happen to me. I wouldn’t have to learn rules or memorize irregular verbs or try to understand what the subjunctive was or what it was for or what it meant or why it existed.
When I arrived in France I had never in my life taken a French class and spoke essentially no French. Aside from a large food vocabulary, I knew how to say please and thank you and where’s the bank, a question, by the way, I have to this day never asked.
I’ve lived in Paris for five years now and while I still don’t speak French I imitate people who do pretty well. My accent, relative to many foreigners I hear hacking away at this beautiful, inflexible, grumpy language is pretty good. The problem is that my accent often implies a fluency that I don’t have.
I’m sort of like an actor who memorizes his lines in French, works with a dialect coach, throws on a beret, and convinces people that he’s as smooth as Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Ok, perhaps I don’t convince anyone of that. But still, I wait for my cues and repeat my lines pretty well.
“Bonjour,” someone says.
“Bonjour,” I say.
“Ready to order?” a waiter asks.
“Yes, I am,” I say.
But when someone throws out a question I’m not prepared for, or asks the same question in a different way, a different accent, a different cadence, I’m in trouble.
Recently I went to a lab to have some blood tests done. My doctor had written me a prescription and I stood in line waiting to hand it to the receptionist reigning over the crowded reception room.
“Bonjour,” I said to the young woman at the desk.
“Bonjour,” she said accepting my prescription.
Everything was going well. The usual questions. Have you ever been here before? Address? Phone number? Insurance?
And then she said something that I didn’t understand.
I asked her to repeat her question.
She did.
Responding to my befuddled expression she asked the question again.
Again, I didn’t understand but this time I did what I always do when I find myself in situations like these. I chose from one of three responses:
Yes, No or I don’t know.
I immediately ruled out, “oui” in fear that she might have been offering a discount on a medical procedure. Something like, “Would you like to have your testicles removed? It’s half off today.”
And anyway, I find that answering in the affirmative in France is generally frowned upon. You don’t want to agree to anything too soon. Whatever it is.
“Non” is the national response to all questions, “C’est pas possible” the patriotic cry.
So once I’d narrowed it down to “no” or “I don’t know” I gambled.
I went with “Je ne sais pas.” But I said it like this, “Shaypas” which is a cool, Parisian way to say the same thing. Along with my response I offered the following obligatory gesture - I shrugged my shoulders, raised my eyebrows, widened my eyes, pouted my lips and led with my chin. All of which essentially meaning, “I don’t know, I shouldn’t have to know, nobody else would know, and life is always like this, people asking you stupid questions you couldn’t possibly have the answer for.”
This is something you see constantly here – people turning their ignorance or inability or lack of desire into an accusation. Of course, if you’re going to take on a posture of belligerent ignorance it is a good idea to speak the language perfectly. But, hell, “I don’t know,” is usually a safe bet and I figured well, she’s probably asking me about yet another number I’m supposed to provide and it would make sense that as an idiot American I wouldn’t know the answer.
Hearing my response, someone in line behind me laughed out loud. The receptionist, failing to contain her smirk, told me to forget it and scribbled something on my prescription, handed it to me and asked me to find a seat.
While sitting there waiting to have someone drain blood from my arm I tried to figure out what she’d asked me. Often in these cases, only minutes later I realize what I hadn’t understood. I toss the sounds around in my head, I try to visualize them and make them words. But this time, nothing came.
Then I glanced down at the prescription in my hand. And there she’d written:
Age: ?
Weight: ?
And then in a flash I realized. She’d asked three times for my age and weight. And I told her, in front of the entire waiting room, that I didn’t know how much I weighed or, worse, how old I was.
Yet another moment of public humiliation.
* * *
Paris, more than anywhere I’ve ever been, inspires in me an intense and nearly constant sense of longing. Every day I feel it.
Yesterday evening crossing the Pont Alexandre III, I watched the sky burning red. It made me want to be somehow part of what I was looking at – not just the sunset but also the city itself.
Walking in the late afternoon through the Bois de Boulogne, red and yellow leaves covering the paths that wind through the trees, I feel the same vague sense of longing.
Running along the Quai des Tuileries in the early evening and looking across at the Musée d’Orsay, the cobblestones littered with leaves, alone with the rain coming and going I’m overwhelmed by desire.
But for what precisely?
Finally, I think it is a desire to belong, to somehow become part of the landscape I move through every day. The problem with living in such a beautiful city is that you’re constantly reminded of the separation between yourself and the place. In Los Angeles I was always swearing I’d leave, the longing I felt there was a longing to escape. The architecture of Washington Boulevard was never a seducer. But Paris makes me want to consume it, press into it so tightly that I somehow become part of it.
The most obvious entry into any place is language. The contrast between my desire to speak French flawlessly and the daily reminders that I don’t is symbolic of my desire to be fully part of this city, fully part of the place I live.
I am not, like many of my friends, blessed with an innate gift for language. My good friend Andy speaks French and English and Swedish and Italian fluently without a hint of an accent. The world is full of people like these, people who move fluidly from language to language and culture to culture. What a gift that is and what a waste to be so cavalier, so arrogant about my Spanish classes and still how embarrassing that D- is.
But then even if I’d had superb grades in Spanish, I wouldn’t ever have had the fluency; I’m afraid it is simply a question of genetics.
I think of my mom in the small southern town of Cereste, talking to a butcher. She’s trying to buy eggs, asking the baffled man over and over, “Vous-avez ooofs? Vous-avez ooofs?”
And the large, kind-faced man trying so hard to understand her, but not having even a remote idea what she’s asking for despite my mom repeating the question louder and louder, hooking her thumbs beneath her armpits and frantically flapping her elbows.
This effort to communicate and to belong isn’t always painful. Sometimes it’s charming and sweet.
Recently I spent a week in Normandy writing a travel article for an American newspaper. My French girlfriend, with whom I speak a combination of French and English, was with me on the trip.
One day after spending way too much time in the car we returned home grumpy and exhausted. Feeling responsible I told her, in French, that I’d make her a bath, then adding with seductive flare, “and I’ll even wash your hair.”
She smiled but it wasn’t the smile of a swooning woman. It was the smile of a woman trying, unsuccessfully, not to laugh at her boyfriend.
The word for hair is “cheveux.” The word I’d used was, “chevaux.” The difference in pronunciation is a sixteenth of a millimeter of lip movement. The difference in meaning is fairly profound.
Rather than offering to wash her hair, I’d offered to wash her horses.
And it works both ways of course. Later in the trip I was sitting in front of the fireplace reading when she walked in and asked me sweetly, “Can I come on your knees?”
I happily agreed but oh the difference between her question and asking if she could sit on my lap.
These stories are endless and everyone who has ever lived in a foreign country has her own. If you happen to love where you live you want so badly to become part of that world but you cannot. Of course, it is not only Paris that has inspired this desire in me. I’ve felt that way in Sydney, Taveuni, Rio, Carvoeiro, Barcelona, Byron Bay, Honolua Bay, Verona and a thousand other places. But I fail because I’m a foreigner. I will never, no matter how long I live here, no matter how well I speak French, change the fact that I’m foreign.
Being alien may isolate me but it also prevents me from becoming numb to the place I live. It prevents me from becoming blind to the physical world I move through. Here, I am always thinking, always watching, always being thrown off guard. Every day I am misunderstood, separated and excluded. Finally though, no matter how painful that exclusion can be, it is a privilege. To be constantly compelled to look at the world around me without laziness or boredom is worth every embarrassment I’ve ever suffered. To live in a place that fills me constantly with desire is an immeasurable gift.
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wonderful. the last paragraph speaks to me like the train departure scene in “Cadeaux: A Love Letter” published here. these same feelings are certainly a privilege, an honor. it’s exciting.