Mom and I finish our breakfasts and go back to customer service. The same lady is still there, and she has Mom’s bag. She found the person who mistakenly took it, called him on his cell phone, and had the bag back at the airport in ninety minutes. Had I been the person she called, I wouldn’t have understood a word she said. Illiteracy does have its downsides—like if the French Publisher’s Clearing House knocked on my door, I’d probably send them away. Ignorance is bliss, and what you don’t know can’t hurt you—until, of course, it does.
Le Mal Mot: The Wrong Word
When I first arrived in France, I couldn’t say much, so I didn’t. I pointed and used lots of nouns, some of which were actually correct, and I spoke in first person present tense, making me the be-here-now-live-in-the-moment kind of guy I always wanted to be in California and an idiot in France.
The good news is every year I learn more words. The bad news is I use them.
One day, in a mood of joyous enthusiasm, I say to Jean, “J’aime beaucoup mon vie en France.” I love my life in France. I say it because I can, and it’s true.
Jean shakes his head. “Marc, do you know what you’re saying? You love your dick. You love your dick in France. Mon vie is your dick. Ma vie is your life.” All the while, he’s pointing to his crotch, repeating, “Mon vie, mon vie . . . ”
I now say, “J’aime beaucoup ici,” I love it here, and leave it at that.
I return from an afternoon at the beach and see Madame lugging a five-gallon bucket of water from the shed to the veggie garden she has at my house—a distance of about seventy feet. I take the bucket from her and make three trips, then drive to Leclerc and buy a hundred-and-twenty-foot hose so neither one of us has to carry the bucket again.
The next day, Monsieur Boom-Boom, the neighbor who cuts my grass every two weeks, stops by to give me three bottles of his homemade cider. LeRoy and I call him Mr. Boom-Boom, because the first time he came to the house and saw the large dining room-living room with its two huge fireplaces, he said, “Deux chambres, deux cheminées, deux femmes, boom-boom,” and banged his fist into his palm in one of those universal ways men have of conversing about sex.
I start to tell him about the hose so he won’t run over it and shred it when he cuts the grass, but stop because I don’t know the word for hose. “Moment,” I say and open the English-French dictionary I always keep handy. “Je achete Madame P le chaussette.”
His eyes become disks.
I knew it was good to get the hose, I didn’t know it was that good, so I add, “le longe chaussette.” The long hose.
The disks become wheels.
After he leaves, I open the dictionary again and see chaussette is the second definition for hose. The first definition, the one I want, is arroseur: garden hose. Chaussette is hose—short for hosiery. I just told Monsieur Boom-Boom I gave Madame P a pair of stockings . . . Long ones . . . And it gets worse.
It’s four in the afternoon, goûter time, and I want some tasty-zesty-creamy French artisanal ice cream: two scoops of chocolate in a handmade waffle cone with a dab of whipped cream on top. I step up to the counter and immediately forget the word for cone, which is cornet. This happens to me often, and when it does, I do one of two things: I get flustered and frustrated and say anything French that comes out of my mouth—like bonjour when I’m leaving. My other, more thoughtful response is to conjure the word. For example, placing the accent on the last syllable of an English word often makes it French: attach-ment, continu-er, préserva-tif—which also unfortunately means condom—conspirat-eur, terr-asse. It works about half the time, which are pretty good odds until I realize it fails half the time.
This is one of those failed times. The word I conjure for cone is con, which is a word, but not one you use out loud, in public, with strangers. It refers to female genitalia, which normally don’t have much to do with ice cream—unless you’re kinky, or me. It also means asshole, as in You idiot!
“Monsieur,” I say, “Je voudrais une con avec deux boule chocolat et un peu chantilly, s’il vous plaît.” I would like female genitalia with two chocolate balls and a little cream, please.
The suntanned fellow behind the counter stands there and stares at me.
“Je . . . voudrais . . . une . . . con . . . avec . . . deux . . . boule . . . chocolat . . . et . . . un . . . peu . . . chantilly, s’il vous plaît,” I repeat, a little slower.
In the U.S., I would have been punched in the nose or bedded on the spot. In Brittany, I get two scoops of chocolate ice cream in a cone with a little whipped cream on top—and not even a wink.
Françoise invites Donna and me to her and Bruno’s house for apéritifs. Françoise speaks a little English, tries not to, and understands a lot. Bruno is truly bilingual, and Donna, who actually studies and practices her French, is an excellent speaker and listener. In situations like this, as at Monsieur and Madame P’s, where their son Henri is fluent in English, we speak French so Monsieur and Madame and Françoise won’t be left out. After all, it’s their country. Someone periodically stops the conversation and explains to me what’s being said, and occasionally I add something that fits, or doesn’t.
Bruno is watering the garden when we arrive at seven. Bruno is always working at something: mowing the grass in the dark, cutting trees in the rain, building a barbecue in ninety-degree heat, making a fence, planting, cooking . . . The only times I’ve seen him sit still are to eat, drink, or read. I’ve yet to see him wear long pants.
He puts down the hose, and we go into the house to start apéritifing. Bruno has the largest liquor cabinet of anyone I’ve ever met in France and the U.S. He even has twenty-five-year-old single malt Speyside Scotch, which hardly anyone I know drinks in France. Several times he’s opened a bottle of fifty-plus-year-old cognac just to offer me a taste. He’ll call on the phone and invite me over to try a particular wine, and then tell me all about it, giving me my own private wine tasting, all of which means Donna and I are in for some serious drinking.
Luckily, French people do not drink without eating—except for work, they don’t do much of anything without eating—so there are sliced dry sausages, cashews, chips, and green and black olives to nibble while we drink white, red, and rosé wines. By nine thirty, I’m sloshed and hungry.
At ten, Bruno begins cooking dinner. He makes individual, fluffy, mushroom-onion omelets, which we eat with bread and butter and whatever wine is best to drink with eggs.
We drink and eat until one thirty, when Donna and I stand while we can. I kiss Bruno once and give Françoise the four-cheek kiss, and say, “Au revoir. Bonne nuit. Merci. La prochaine fois à chez nous. À demain. Merci.” Goodbye. Good night. Thanks. Next time at our house. See you tomorrow. Thanks . . . It doesn’t get much better than that from me.
The following evening, Donna and I are going to dinner at Sharon and Jean’s. I’m waiting for Donna, who’s upstairs changing socks or sandals or shorts or shirts, trying to decide what to wear. There’s a knock on the door. I open it and see Bruno and Françoise. Bruno is clean-shaven, wearing a pressed Hawaiian shirt, and pressed shorts—the first time I’ve seen him do so. Françoise is dressed as usual—clean-pressed slacks, bright, cheery blouse—and smells terrific. I’m perplexed—until I see an Île de Ré brochure in Bruno’s hand and remember there was some conversation about their vacation on the Île the previous night.
“Merci,” I say, and reach for the brochure. Bruno releases it, looking slightly befuddled.
“Entrez, entrez,” I invite them in. “Mai, j’ai dix minutes parce que nous mangon à mes amis ce soir.”
Bruno looks at Françoise in a way that makes me wonder what I just said. I repeat it in my head: I only have ten minutes because we are eating with friends tonight . . . It’s clear to me, though it doesn’t seem too clear to them, so I offer them a beer.
“Une bière?”
“Oui,” they say, in unison.
I open two Heinekens, empty them into two glasses, and the three of us sit
at the table looking through the Île de Ré brochure, waiting for Donna.
She comes downstairs and looks at them the way Bruno and Françoise looked at me. She kisses them twice on each cheek, says, “Bon soir,” and sits at the table. Everyone is obviously confused.
Bruno and Françoise sip.
Donna and I peruse the brochure.
When Bruno finishes his beer, I pick up the glass, put it in the sink, and say, “Bon.” I do the same when Françoise finishes hers. I wave the Île de Ré brochure, and say, “Merci.”
Bruno stands, and says, “Merci.”
Françoise stands, and says, “Bonne soirée.”
They leave fifteen minutes after arriving—a record short visit in France.
“You know,” Donna says, “I think they think you invited them to dinner tonight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I said ‘we have to do this again.’ ‘Next time at our place.’ Not tonight. ‘Next time,’ some time in the future . . . ”
She points to the door, at the now departed, clean, and spiffily dressed Bruno and Françoise.
“Shit!”
We hurry next door where Bruno is already watering the lawn. Françoise is standing there, looking lost. “Bruno,” I say, “J’ai une question—en anglais . . . Did I invite you to dinner tonight?”
He hesitates and looks at Françoise, who immediately answers in perfect English, “Yes!”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was embarrassed. I thought I made a mistake.”
He was embarrassed. He’s fluent in English, totally bilingual, understands French and English grammar better than I ever will, and he thought he made a mistake. Oh, my God! The social pressures on these people are unbearable. It’s enough to make me feel sorry for them.
I invite them for dinner the following evening, and for the rest of the summer we joke about “dix minutes.” It’s dix minutes to do this, dix minutes until that, but the truth is I’m mortified I made Bruno feel bad because of my mistake, and I wonder how many others I’ve made I don’t even know about.
You’d think after mon vie, con, chaussettes, and dix minutes, not to mention buying the wrong mattress cover three times, I’d have enough incentive to start seriously studying French. Nope. In this regard, I’m like French people: they don’t want to speak bad English; I don’t want to study French if I can’t learn it—and there’s no doubt in my mind, I can’t.
There’s not a single non-French person I know—including those who spent a junior year in Aix, lived on and off in Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, have a doctorate in French from U.C. Berkeley, taught French at San Francisco State—who considers him or herself proficient in French. All of them express concerns that their French isn’t good enough, clear enough, current enough, and that some French person will notice and say something, correct their use of an article or an archaic tense, or tell them that what they just said is now said in a new, cooler way and embarrass them.
I listen to all of these people speak French, watch them go back and forth from French to English to French, and I’m amazed at how they not only switch languages but thought processes and paradigms as well. To me, it’s a miracle, but they only hear what’s missing and wrong.
Peggy is quadrilingual, speaking and reading Italian, Spanish, English, and French. Her husband Larry speaks and reads Latin. Joanna taught herself Tamil and Vietnamese when she travelled to those countries. George taught himself Japanese. Leslie has a degree in French, teaches French at U.C. Berkeley, and has lived in France. Donna studied and speaks Russian and Japanese. None of them feels the need for perfection in any language but French. It takes Peggy three days to write a one-page letter for me in French, and that’s only because I take it away from her and make her stop. I’ve seen Donna spend two hours with a French dictionary and grammar book answering a three-sentence email. Even Sharon, who grew up in bilingual Quebec and has two French sons and is married to Jean and has lived in Brittany for forty years, does not feel fluent. She still makes mistakes in word use, spelling, tense, and gender that Jean and her boys correct. And Rick Steves, who has made a bazillion dollars writing French guidebooks says his French is “terrible,” and that he’s tone-deaf to French—but not to Italian or German.
Knowing this, and knowing I will never, ever (no matter what I do) approach the fluency of these people—and seeing and feeling their angst, doubts, concerns, and fears about what they don’t know, I ask myself, who needs it—and I answer, not me.
Especially since the better you speak French, the more critical French people are. I’ve seen it with Donna. Because she speaks French well, people think she’d like to speak better—so they help her, and when they do, she does feel better because she knows more, and then she feels worse, because she’ll never know enough. But when French people hear me speak, they say nothing. Often, actually, they’re speechless, which personally I prefer, because if they did speak, I’d have to respond.
French people and I seem to have reached an agreement—unspoken, of course. I speak like an imbecile, and they give up correcting me. One sentence, a phrase, sometimes a word—con—and they understand it’s fruitless.
In many places of the world, I’d be the crazy uncle in the attic and avoided—but in Plobien, Loscoat, and Brittany, I’m a curiosity. People come to my house to visit. They stop me in the village to speak. People want to know more about me. Unfortunately, I can’t tell them very much—so their desire to know more increases. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. It’s a wonderful dialectical circle. The dumber and quieter I am, the more interesting. All I can figure is what I say is so inane people must either correct it in their own minds, thereby making it interesting or profound to themselves, or they turn it into metaphor and search for hidden meaning, like Jerzy Kosinski’s Chauncey Gardner and his dumb-ass garden. Instead of being the incomprehensible, boring, illiterate dumb guy, I’m the writer/artist/professor/ homeowner whom no one can understand. I have my own argot and patois. I’m the Brother from Another Planet, the Noam Chomsky of Plobien, L’Enfant Sauvage . . .
Somehow, I’ve joined the pantheon of untamed Americans who French people—with their zillions of rules and social constraints—appreciate for being unconstrained, natural, and free. People like Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Jerry Lewis, Lucky Lindy, Harpo, Charlie Parker, James Dean, the Three Stooges, Clyde and Bonnie, and me . . .
10 Things I’ve Learned about Speaking French
1. Now that Brexit has been voted in and England will be separating itself further from the European Union, more and more French people are speaking English. In some circles, it’s even the cool and classy thing to do. Someday, perhaps, French people—like many Europeans—will be bi-, tri-, and English-lingual. Until then, When in France, speak French. When speaking with a French person, speak French. When in a French-speaking country or region, speak French. If a person speaks to you in English, speak French, as the odds you’ll misunderstand are greater than the odds you won’t.
2. Think like a three-year-old, or the parent or grandparent of a three-year-old: When asking for something, say please: s’il vous plaît. After getting what I asked for, or any reasonable facsimile of what I asked for, or after any serious effort to get what someone else thinks I asked for, say thank you: merci. When meeting anyone, a dear friend or a stranger, and when entering any shop, business, office, enterprise, or agency, including the post office and bank, say hello: bonjour. When leaving any of the above, say goodbye: au revoir. Anything more is gravy, so ladle it on. Bad French—at least for a foreigner, especially an English-speaking foreigner—is better than no French. C’est vrai.
3. Nouns are more important than verbs, and pointing is often clearer than speech.
4. There’s no way to know how to pronounce the words weight, knack, like, and cease just by looking at them. It’s the same with a lot more words in French. The best way to learn how to speak French is to listen to Frenc
h and repeat what you hear. If I look at the word, I have to figure out how and when to pronounce the last letter, which syllable to accentuate, and what to do with the all but impossible to pronounce ou and r. The downside is if I don’t look at the word, I won’t know how to spell, read, or write it—which doesn’t matter when I’m speaking, but is hell when writing or reading a note.
5. Familiar words are the most dangerous. In American English, mercantile means commercial. In French, it means money-grabbing. In American English, I go to an art exhibit. In France, I go to an exposition. In American English, the word expose has the smell of sex. In France, exhibit does. You don’t want to say, “Je vais a l’exhibition,” unless, of course, you did, and you want everyone to know.
6. Americans speak in positives and superlatives; it’s wonderful! Great! Terrific! Incredible! Amazing! French people say bon—everything is good: bonjour, bonne journée, bon dimanche, bon shopping, bonne lecture, bien mangé, bonnes vacances, bonne fête—or merde. Ask an American how he or she is feeling and you’re likely to hear great—terrific, perfect, wonderful, couldn’t be better. Ask a French person, and it’s ça va, it’s going—and it’s said in a way that tells you they don’t expect it to be going too long. French people do speak of grandeur, magnificence, and the incredible, but they tend to reserve those words for lofty things like food, art, history, statecraft, and football—the first four of which most Americans pooh-pooh. American superlatives are reserved for themselves and Michael Jackson, especially now that he’s dead. To French people, if you’re always happy and everything is wonderful, you’re a liar, a jerk, or American, none of which is a compliment . . . Unlike the U.S, criticism is what counts in France, not agreement.
7. French people don’t casually sneer, which is probably why there’s no world-class French rock and roll. They excel at love, loss, pain, malaise, romance, nostalgia, melancholy, outrage, ennui, passion, ridicule, fatalism, and mockery. For in your face, up your ass, drop dead, eat shit, go to hell, fuck you, motherfucker, they rely on Americans and Brits, and seldom are disappointed.
(Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living Page 22