Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  The French aren’t known for their patience.

  Nothing?”

  My mom’s decided she wants to take down what few paintings and decorations our studio has.

  “Nothing,” she confirms, this time with more certainty.

  She carefully tucks a framed print of a sunflower field under one arm, gathers the vase with sixties-style straw flowers in the other, and walks them to the closet.

  “These too,” she adds, reaching for the Chinese calligraphic paintings on the wall. “Let’s make the walls disappear.”

  I’d been thinking of how to make it cozier, because it felt sparse to begin with, maybe buy a bright throw blanket for the Click-Clack, some pretty French posters for the wall. She’s so certain about wanting this, though—uncharacteristically certain—that I don’t say anything but just watch her move deliberately from one object to the next.

  It reminds me a little of how she behaved in Plovdiv, when she got suddenly sad but just let herself feel sad without feeling the need to explain herself. And I like that even though she clearly has no idea why she wants blank walls, she’s acting on her impulse. I’m beginning to suspect that more times than not, she’s ignored, or felt the need to justify, wanting certain things for herself.

  Maybe it’s a good sign; wanting a house and things to fill it with didn’t exactly work for her before. Perhaps like the wind that blows Avignon’s skies clear, emptying the apartment of all things will create a tabula rasa for my mom to reinvent herself at midlife.

  A few minutes later the room is nearly bare, just white walls, a white floor, a white desk, and black leather chairs. She strides to the middle of the room, laces her hands behind her head, and stares out the giant windows. The walls have seemed to disappear, as though our apartment is nothing more than a platform elevating us skyward and putting us eye-level with the birds squawking in the trees.

  “It feels like we’re living outdoors,” she says happily. “I’ve always wanted a house of mostly windows.”

  I’m glad she’s pleased, so I don’t add that (a) we’re not wood nymphs and (b) when we close the shutters it’ll look like a mental ward’s isolation room.

  While she’s looking out the window I dump out the brochures and pamphlets we picked up at the tourist bureau and spread them out on the bed. An incredible number of museums, churches, and monuments are stuffed within Avignon’s rampart walls, and within an hour’s drive there are well over a dozen of the quaint Provençal villages and small cities that this area is so famous for. There are museums for absolutely everything: bicycles, lavender, wine, perfume, fruits and vegetables. Even garlic gets its own exhibit.

  “Ooh, look!” my mom says excitedly, showing me a brochure featuring a gathered silver brocade ball gown. “There’s going to be a special Christian Lacroix fashion exhibition in Arles. And check these out.”

  I take the matte, eggshell-colored cardboard brochure from her and examine the gorgeous, dramatic, larger-than-life sketches of nude or partially clothed women with the word “Extases” written below. Ecstasies.

  The local cell phone we bought suddenly rings from my mom’s purse. She looks quizzically at me.

  “Mom, pick it up before it stops ringing.”

  She hesitates one more second before answering haltingly, “Bonjour?”

  She looks at me like a deer in headlights, so I nod encouragingly at her like a toddler. Telling my mom not to bring her electronic translator was incredibly dumb of me; I’ve taken its place.

  “Un moment, Isabelle, s’il vous plaît. Oh, yes, sorry, tutoyer, s’il te plaît and I don’t understand anything else, un moment.”

  She then thrusts the phone at me like a hot potato.

  Lesson Three: The French love their language in a way that’s impossible for an American to understand; it’s central to their identity. The French are verbally clever and quick, they assess and opine strongly and well and adore spirited conversation. Patrice Leconte’s Oscar-winning Ridicule depicts brilliantly how a particularly clever turn of phrase, preferably one with cruel wit, could in a single instant win or lose you favor with the king, something that determined your entire fortune, if not your very life. There’s even a government body, l’Académie française, that protects, with force of law, the purity of the language by dictating grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

  The French can also sometimes be a nervous people; in Paris, often impatient. Doing anything slowly can be a trial for them; speaking slowly feels like slow death. However, if they speak no English and you’re both stuck with your mediocre French, all is not lost—

  Lesson Four: The French are like magpies, they love the new, the stylish, the interesting, they love panache, l’esprit. You are automatically new to them, and if you are also intelligent, lively, and dressed with even a modicum of style, quelle différence. If you speak away fearlessly, as if you love the language as much as they do, they’ll overlook every mistake, or if they do correct you, they’ll come hurrying back down the block or store aisle to apologize for correcting you (this has happened to me in real life, three times).

  If you also happen to be young and attractive, as Mia is, you’ll be invited into people’s lives, and waiters will remember every little thing about you. We haven’t even left our little area and already Mia’s a big hit. She navigates both the streets and the language with me happily, if cluelessly, in tow.

  Our approach to French highlights a very fundamental difference between us that shows up in a lot of areas of our lives. I have to understand everything to understand anything. No continuing ed classes for me. At forty-three, I registered for college French, took four semesters, studied like mad, and made straight As. I’ve even brought a textbook with me here to study each day. I’m constitutionally unable to spit out the wrong words while looking for the right ones. Which means that I’m not only slow to understand, owing to nerve deafness and tinnitus in one ear, but even slower to speak, owing to, I don’t know, my brain, I guess.

  Mia glides through French as cavalierly as she does life, happy to be on a need-to-know basis. She’s had five years in school; her vocabulary’s great and her accent perfect. Her tenses and grammar, however, oy. But she breezes right along not caring about mistakes, telling folks that her mother will be going to Gordes ten years ago or that she’ll be sure to went tomorrow. They don’t care about her mistakes, either, because she makes them quickly and with l’esprit.

  Next to her, I’m a lumbering, linguistic dinosaur. However, in Provence, where life is slow and sweet, I’m treated, or tolerated, with patience and downright sweetness. They are not, however, so patient with one another when it comes to their language. Which can make for a very memorable evening.

  Ooo care what ze academy say! ‘Nique ta mère’* ees also correct grammaire,*!” Isabelle snaps angrily with an aggravated flick of the hand.

  Dear God, please don’t let her smack the maître d’, I’m too hungry to be thrown out of here. Here being a lovely restaurant in the quaint town of St. Remy de Provence. Anthony and Isabelle have brought us here after showing us the spectacular limestone cliffs of Les Baux. As classy and delicate as she is, you don’t mess with the language in Isabelle’s world.

  I look to Anthony but he’s gone from being shocked at her uncharacteristic profanity to interested in how much more entertaining this can get, because waiters are clustering around us, adding their deux centimes. Fingers are wagging, lips are pouffing, and words are flying around our heads. All because of green beans; rather, the pronunciation of them.

  Les haricots verts (green beans) was always properly pronounced with the h silent, lay ’areeco verrr; until an English queen who was unable to say it correctly said layzarico verr, running it together. Rather than correct a queen, the academy made a new rule allowing that pronunciation. A hundred years later, purists like Isabelle and Chrystelle still consider it a bastardization and say it the proper French way.

  That the waiters have joined in the fray is typical. Here, e
veryone’s qualified and eager to “discuss” their language. This kind of heated argument simply wouldn’t happen in public in America without someone calling the manager or possibly the police. Here it’s part of everyday life. Store clerks snap, heated discussion ensues, agreement reached (usually), everyone’s happy and on their way. Friends will have awful fights and see each other the next day as if nothing happened. A couple who never fights? We see a stable marriage, they see two boring people who have no opinions of their own or enough passion to even muster a good fight. Kind of like Paul and me. In the beginning, he thought it was walking papers every time we had a “passionate disagreement.” I called it clearing the air.

  Almost every waiter in the place has weighed in, Isabelle’s flushed with aggravation, the maître d’ keeps rolling his eyes. Things reach a crescendo, shoulders are shrugged, wineglasses refilled, and it’s once more a quiet restaurant. Mia and Isabelle continue whatever conversation they were having before and Anthony and I continue analyzing the complex mushroom bisque served in tiny little teacups.

  “Non, I don’t fink vey* are smoked, les champignons (mushrooms),” Anthony says.

  “Maybe they brown the butter,” I suggest. I hear the word douche and Mia trying to explain to Isabelle why it’s hard to get used to saying their word for “shower.”

  Mia to Isabelle: In English, it’s a much more private kind of washing.

  Isabelle to Mia: You mean ze shower?

  Anthony to me, about the teacup: Why do zey use zis fing, I cannot make my fingers like zis.” He tries to hold it like a teacup, but his man-fingers can’t manage it.

  Mia: Well . . . kind of, but a bath only for (she points down into her lap).

  Isabelle, puzzled: Mia, I ’ave no idea what you are saying.

  Me to Isabelle, leaning toward her for discretion, pleased I actually can say it in French: C’est un bain spécialement pour les femmes. (It’s a special kind of washing just for women.)

  Anthony, nonchalantly, to anyone: Oh, I know zis fing what you say.

  Isabelle to me: Ahhh, le bidet?

  Mia to Isabelle: Well, not exactly.

  Anthony to anyone: But I know vis fing.

  Me to Isabelle: Non, c’est seulement pour des femmes (no, it’s only for women), typiquement après sexe (typically after sex).

  Isabelle, still puzzled: Do you ’ave a dictionary?

  Anthony to anyone, insistent: I tell you I know vis fing what you say!

  Me, abruptly, to Anthony: How on earth could you possibly know what we’re talking about?

  Anthony, relieved to be finally heard, proudly: Eets for ze vajeene!

  A waiter’s face registers this as he passes, Isabelle and Mia stop talking, I cock my head.

  Anthony, pleased and quite serious: Oui, pour la balance! (alternating his hands up and down) you know, ze equilibrium, een ze vajeene!

  Mia and I burst out laughing and immediately clap our hands over our mouths. Isabelle’s jaw falls in mortification.

  “Oui, chérie,” he says to Isabelle, “c’est pour le vagin, ce truc (it’s for the vagina, this thing). You tell me zis.”

  She smacks him, blushing. “I never say you anysing about zat!”

  “Oui, chérie, you did.”

  “I don’t use such a sing, eet’s not naturel!”

  We’re laughing so hard I have to turn my face to the wall and Mia buries her face in my back.

  Anthony shrugs, then suddenly says earnestly and completely out of the blue, “Do you know zat seventy-five percent of all women do zis?” He holds up a piece of bread and dunks it in his broth. “But only twenty-five percent of ze men do. Zey don’t know why.”

  This makes Mia laugh even harder. “My God, you’re as ADD as my mother!”

  Laughing till no sound comes out is typical of our outings with Isabelle and Anthony. It’s a combination of wine, complementary personalities, and the fact that none of us is fully bilingual but we have grand ideas and odd fascinations that we simply must discuss.

  One of them is language. We all spent an hour in stitches at Célestins the other night just trying to get them to pronounce the initial “th” sound, which the French tongue finds near impossible. The only reason Chrystelle can is because she was an au pair in London for a year and, well, she’s Chrystelle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Avignon

  We Are Living Like This!

  There may be a Starbucks at the Great Wall of China but no one in Avignon’s heard of it. Instead, people hang out in quaint bar-cafés; our favorite is Bar les Célestins. Marked with a neon-pink sign and smack in the middle of Place des Corps Saints (the plaza a stone’s throw from our studio), it’s a long and narrow café with an old wooden bar, bright crimson walls, black trim, and a warm, humorous staff.

  Despite making a detailed list of things to do in and around Avignon, ten minutes into our daily coffee at Bar les Célestins, we forget all about our plans. In a country where smoking and talking is a national pastime, being productive can begin to seem rather passé. Some restaurants and shops are rarely open, because whoever owns or runs them is on one of their six weeks of annual vacation, or smoking and talking at a table nearby.

  Stephan is my favorite waiter, a student around my age with a sharp wit and deadpan humor. He’s boyishly handsome, with pouty, Cupid’s bow lips, wispy chestnut hair, big, brown eyes, and a daily uniform of faded plaid shirts and well-worn jeans. Then there’s Christine, a gentle and soft-spoken single mother with peaches-and-cream skin, and Edith, who has a bitsy hourglass figure, mischievous black eyes, and short, spiky red hair. She reminds me of a middle-aged Tinkerbell, flitting about the café as she washes dishes and mixes drinks with dizzying speed. This is all watched with amusement by Roman, a breezy, affable eighteen-year-old who looks like Ashton Kutcher, but with a French accent and more sensuous lips.

  During the hours we’re there, the bar fills and empties with a colorful mélange of local artists, shabby-chic dressed twentysomethings, neighborhood residents reading books or newspapers, men in business suits (a definite minority), and high school students who smoke, talk softly, and sip espressos with remarkable maturity.

  Like any proper French establishment, Célestins warmly welcomes dogs, and an immaculately groomed white Scotty named Bijoux and a floppy-eared brown mutt named Charlie trot freely from table to table. The only time I’ve ever seen Edith still is when she’s kneeling down to coo and feed them long strips of prosciutto.

  My mom and I have come to recognize Bijoux’s owner, a spry woman who’s the quintessential professor, complete with a thick plaid scarf, nerdy-chic glasses, and artfully disheveled gray hair. Charlie’s owner is a bald British expat with a round belly stretched tight as a drum and steel-rimmed glasses that continually slide down his nose while he reads the morning paper and chain-smokes.

  Entire mornings are easily whittled away, people watching, reading, talking. When Stephan’s not helping customers, he’ll join my mom and me in conversation, and we never seem to run out of things to discuss: people, art, politics, fashion, religion, books, men, history. And what better environment to discuss history than Avignon, a city with such a rich and colorful one; the papacy resided in Avignon for less than a century but it influenced the history, feel, and architecture for centuries to come.

  The kings of Europe had vied for power with the popes for decades but there’d never been quite so grand a pissing contest as the one between the French king Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII (pronounced, as I was corrected, bonAfachay—not bonyface). At stake was the issue of a king taxing clergy members without the pope’s consent, and if we think the smear tactics used by politicians now are bad, try the accusations Philip leveled at Boniface: sodomy, sorcery, blasphemy, murder, and, my personal favorite, the keeping of a small black demon as a pet (which people actually testified to having seen running around Rome). Boniface ultimately excommunicated Philip, who in turn had Boniface captured and beaten, arguably to death.

  In
came Boniface’s replacement, Clement V, a weak-willed pope who was crowned in Lyon and proceeded to appoint French cardinals to please the thuggish Philip. On his way back to Rome from Lyon, Clement stopped in Avignon and, though intending to stay briefly, never left. Rome was a dangerous city with an unruly population and murderous mercenaries. Avignon was peaceful, central to the powerful realms of France and England, perched above a scenic river, and had famous wines. Where would you rather be? It was like a seventy-year papal spring break, with so much greed and corruption that the Italian poet Petrarch dubbed it “Babylon of the West, the sink of vice and corruption.”

  Granted, papal corruption was hardly new; many popes had mistresses, and the sale of indulgences (buying forgiveness for various sins) helped finance Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica. During the Avignon Papacy, however, it reached an all-time high, particularly under Clement VI, a pope who stocked his closet with a hundred and thirty-eight ermine robes, threw lavish—and quite lascivious—parties, and created a zoo for his pet lion and bear.

  Much like the Forbidden City was built to express power and glory, the colossal stone walls of the Palais des Papes clearly convey the papacy’s dominion and infallibility. But adjacent to the palace is an area with quite a different feel. My mom and I have dubbed it “the bluff,” and while we spend our mornings in Bar les Célestins, the bluff is where we invariably spend our evenings.

  The bluff isn’t a heath-covered, Wuthering Heights–esque mountain lookout; rather it’s the elevated stone terrace of Notre-Dame-des-Dômes, a twelfth-century cathedral sitting on the hilltop adjacent to the second story of the palais. Like all Romanesque cathedrals, it’s sturdy and strong, with thick walls, round arches, and a huge tower shooting up from its brawny base. At the very top of the tower, rising even higher than the palace itself, is a tall, gilded statue of the Virgin Mary.