Pardon My French

by Allen Johnson

  The spirit of the group was warm and playful and generous, and I was feeling guilty that I had nothing tasty to contribute to the revelry.

  “This has been a great experience for me,” I said, “and I’m disappointed that I have nothing to share. But I can offer a song.”

  “That would be terrific,” Jean said. “Attention, everyone, Allen is going to sing a song.”

  Now I felt a little embarrassed that I had offered. Would they think I was showing off? Of course I was showing off, but would they think it? That was the question.

  Two years earlier, I had prepared a twenty-four-measure a cappella piece for a theatrical audition I did in Seattle. I thought, what the heck, maybe it’ll work in the mountains of Languedoc. It starts off dramatically with the chorus of a 1929 Noel Coward tune “I’ll See You Again.” From there I coupled snippets of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” At the end, in honor of the French, I decided to add a few French lines of the Jacques Brel standard, “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“If You Go Away”).

  I cleared my throat and belted out the first tune. When I got to “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” I suddenly forgot the lyrics midway through, and in unison the French hikers finished the phrase for me without losing a beat. That is one well-known tune in France.

  There was a round of applause.

  “Bravo,” Tani said. “Now, this is a song that I like.”

  Tani stood up. Suddenly he looked much bigger than his five-foot-six-inch frame. His chest expanded, and he sang the first lines of a beautiful Spanish folk song—in Spanish, of course. His voice was stentorian—almost operatic—and as lush as summer at twilight. If we had been auditioning for the same part, he would have won hands down.

  “That was wonderful,” I said after he had acknowledged the applause with a deep bow from the waist.

  “Eh oui,” Tani said matter-of-factly.

  Then with the concert over, we strapped on our backpacks and headed up the trail. An hour later all the aperitifs, wine, and coffee (with an occasional slug of water) were beginning to have their impact on all of us. We stopped near a grove of olive trees, and the hikers scattered. I paused for a moment, trying to calibrate the urgency of my bladder, and then, yes, decided I needed to find a rock or clump of brush after all. When I returned, adjusting my zipper, thirty smiling hikers were standing stock-still staring at me.

  “What?” I said. “On ne peut pas pisser en toute tranquillité?” Can’t a guy take a whiz in peace?

  “No,” Jean said smiling, “not when you wait that long to find a bush.”

  “Geesh.”

  We adjusted our packs for the next stretch of the trail. But some of the women were happily chitchatting and, consequently, a little slow in slinging their packs over their shoulders. That was when Tani eased over to me.

  “This reminds me of an expression that you should know.”

  “I’m always looking for new expressions.”

  “You’ll like this one,” he said with a nod and raised eyebrows. “If women are moving too slowly, say ‘Allez les pisseuses!’ ”

  I tried it out in my mouth. “Allez les pisseuses! Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Tani said with a lopsided grin.

  So, always one to incorporate new vocabulary, I cinched up my backpack and shouted, “Allez les pisseuses!”

  It was not one of my finest moments. Claudine, a devout Catholic with doctrinaire notions about what is proper, whipped around and came within six inches of my face. “How dare you say that! That is a terrible thing to say, just terrible. And I thought you were a nice man.”

  “I am a nice man!” I pleaded, just as dismayed as she.

  “Not when you talk like that.”

  “Yes, but Tani taught it to me.”

  The woman turned to Tani, which I confess was a relief to have the heat off of me. “Is that true Tani?”

  Tani was the picture of innocence. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

  “Tani!” I roared.

  What I learned later on the trail was that pisseuses had two meanings. The first was a reference to an individual with a weak bladder. That’s bad enough. But the second meaning is a pejorative reference to a female. For most the word is only mildly offensive. But for a puritanical Catholic the expression must have had a wallop equivalent to saying, “Let’s get going, you bitches.”

  Despite falling all over myself with apologies, I don’t think Claudine ever forgave me. Even playing “the naïve-American card”—claiming I just didn’t know any better—fell flat on its face.

  And the rascal, Tani? I immediately forgave him. After all, he and I were much alike—each of us swimming in a gene pool of mischief. In fact, the incident became a running joke between us. Occasionally one of us would say to the other, “Are you ready to go, pisser?”—but only in private and especially far from the disapproving ears of Claudine.

  After the pisseuses affair, we leaned into a steeper section of the trail. It culminated with a vista that stretched from Saint Guilhem-le-Désert to the north—with its magnificent eleventh-century abbey—and, if you looked hard enough, a sliver of the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Guarding the vista was a dolmen, a prehistoric stone tomb composed of two six-foot slabs of limestone still standing straight and tall like two primal centurions. A third slab had fallen from its perch, and was now wedged between the two weathered monoliths. We were suddenly silent. We all stood in wonder at how the massive stones could have been positioned by the ancient Languedoc mourners.

  Twenty feet in front of the tomb was an engraved metal placard.

  “Allen, look at this,” Tani said.

  I walked to where Tani was standing. He began reading the French text.

  Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished.

  Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.

  Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits.

  Chief Seattle, Duwamish 1884

  I was so moved by the reading of the famous oratory that, in respect, I dropped to one knee and placed my hand over the noble words. At that moment Tani placed his own hand over mine. I turned and looked up at his face, obscured by the sun that was blazing overhead.

  “We are all brothers, you know,” Tani said.

  I suddenly felt my eyes tearing up. “This is just so amazing to me,” I said. “Here I am six thousand miles from home—hiking with you in this incredible French wilderness—only to be greeted by the sacred words of Chief Seattle. Can you imagine! Chief Seattle lived in my homeland—or rather I live in his. And now his spirit is here—a great Native American—right here in Languedoc.”

  “Then you are chez toi,” Tani said, covering my hand with his own.

  “Yes, I am. Je suis chez moi. ” I am home.

  CHAPTER 10

  Song and Dance

  FRED ASTAIRE has always been one of my all-time favorite actors. His screen character was always friendly, funny, and a little sassy—the kind of guy you would like to have as a best friend. As a singer he was honest and precise. The composers of the day loved to have their songs introduced by Mr. Astaire because he always remained true to the melody and lyrics. But when he put on his dancing shoes, he was magic. He could dance with a chair, a hat rack, or even a piano, and make it look like poetry. Why couldn’t I be more like Fred Astaire?

  So, it is no surprise that I should land on the i
dea of a dance course during my year in France. What better way to get to know the French?

  But dance class was not my first idea. My first idea for Wednesday night was a course on Qigong. Right. I didn’t know what it was either. The brochure I picked up at the association fair in Pérols described Qigong as an ancient Chinese discipline to clear the mind and release the hidden energy that lies beneath the stress of everyday life. The literature promised that I would become more relaxed, more creative, and more sexually vibrant. Okay, that worked for me. I could be more relaxed and creative, and as for sexual vibrancy, that had been on my wish list since 1957 when Elvis Presley swiveled his hips in Jailhouse Rock. So I decided to give Qigong a try.

  I arrived five minutes early at the salle de dance where the course was being offered. About a dozen other Qigongers were already silently walking around the room in their bare feet, shaking their hands and rotating their heads like animate bobblehead toys. They were mostly women in their fifties, some a little pudgy, a few a little too thin. I took a closer look. Hmmm. On the surface none of them looked like they were particularly sexually vibrant. Frankly, they looked more sexually repressed, like old men on cruise ships or Catholic nuns in floor-length religious habits. But I decided that I might be wrong, that under their serene exterior—way under—they might all be flaming dominatrices, clawing to get out. Or not.

  The instructor arrived on the hour. He was a short, middle-aged man with a flat stomach and a cropped receding hairline. He looked like a former wrestler—136-pound weight class I’d say. He walked directly to the cabinet that housed the music system and inserted a CD. Suddenly, the room was filled with the sound of tinkling bells, a lamenting sitar, and a couple of canaries on Valium.

  The master walked to the center of the room in front of the wall-to-wall mirror while the students selected one of the two-by-five-foot foam mats draped over the banister by the door. We scattered throughout the room, placed our mats on the floor, and stood silently—reverently—on the pads.

  Then the master said in a hushed, nearly imperceptible voice, “Let us visualize our breathing. Allow the air to flow leisurely and naturally into your mouth and deep into your body. Hold it, hold it. And now let your warm breath rise up, up ever so slowly and expel gently through your nose.”

  About this time I was wondering if it would be terribly impolite to pick up my mat and breathe my way out of the studio. In the end, I decided to stay—if nothing else but to see what we could possibly learn after breathing. How to unclutter the mind? Or, better yet, how to stop time? That could be useful.

  After breathing for ten minutes, we imagined the stress evaporating from every geographical region of our bodies: head, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, legs, feet, fingers, and toes. I had to admit, I was definitely feeling pretty loose, all the way from my North Pole to my Tierra del Fuegos.

  “This is really relaxing,” I said to one of the pudgy ladies standing beside me.

  The woman said nothing. She turned her head ever so slightly in my direction. Her eyelids were at near sunset. I think I saw the corner of her mouth turn up into what was either a smile, exasperation, or constipation.

  At the end the sensei instructed us to lie on our backs, close our eyes, and allow our minds to drift. The master narrated a story in a velvety midnight-shift radio announcer’s voice about a tropical forest with peaceable animals and a lazy butterfly that led us deeper into a land of power, serenity, and spiritual bliss. His last words were, “May you go in peace and rest in the knowledge that you are perfectly whole. You are who you are. You can be no other. For it is not in the knowing that you are one but in the unknowing. It is not in the sensing that you are reborn but in the unsensing. It is not in the being that you are found, but in the unbeing.”

  Okay. That must make sense to someone in the great somewhere who is either in the deepest state of nirvana or more heavily medicated than Cheech and Chong. But as for me, I was thinking, “It is not in the sleeping that we are made alive, but in the unsleeping.” Maybe I was just feeling irritable because we had just spent an hour and a half on deep-muscle relaxation and quiescent butterflies, without one lousy word about sexual vibrancy.

  The students, looking more sedated than ever, returned their mats to the banister and filed out of the studio in silence. Only one man spoke. “I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight,” he said, his words sounding like an out-of-body prayer of thanksgiving.

  I smiled and said, “Faites de beaux rêves.” Sweet dreams.

  * * *

  ON THE WAY OUT OF THE STUDIO, I noticed that there was a group of younger people waiting to come in. One among them was a man who looked like he might be in charge. He was a husky fellow with a shimmering red shirt unbuttoned to the sternum and a cowboy buckle that kept his black pants hoisted just below the shadow of a somewhat cantilevered paunch. His hair was midnight black and swept straight back, not unlike a flamenco dancer, I thought.

  “Are you another class?” I asked.

  The man squinted, his brain straining to decipher the words lost in the fog of an American accent. It was a reflex that would be repeated every time I spoke to him.

  “You’re not from here,” the red-shirted man said.

  “No.”

  “English?”

  “No, American.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, are you another class?” I repeated.

  “Yes, yes we are.”

  “What kind of class?”

  “A dance class,” the man said. “Would you like to join us?”

  My brain ran a two-second movie of my future with the Qigong catatonic ward. “Yes, I would. I’d like to watch for a moment or two anyway if that’s okay.”

  “Absolutely,” the man said squinting.

  I reentered the studio, along with a half dozen other aspiring dancers. They stood looking at their shoes in silence.

  Oh, quand même, I thought, don’t tell me these people are Trappist monks too. Although it violated French protocol, I decided to break the ice. I figured my nationality would pardon my gaucheness.

  I walked over to a man in his mid-thirties. He had a slender body and a pleasant, boyish face. “My name is Allen,” I said.

  The young man smiled, a little nervously I thought, and extended his hand. “My name is Thierry.”

  “Jerry?” I asked. “You have an American name then?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think Thierry is American.”

  “Oh, Terry!” I said. “Your name is Terry.”

  By this time, some of the other dancers were starting to circle around us, the way kids circle around a schoolyard fight.

  “Non, THIERRY,” he said correcting my pronunciation.

  “Okay,” I said, finally getting it, “Tee-air-ee.”

  Now that I had an audience, I continued to do introductions. There was Catherine (Thierry’s wife), François and Brigitte (another couple, also in their thirties), and, finally, a single woman in spring-loaded blue jeans and short blond hair, cut and feathered to perfection.

  “What is your name?” I asked the blond.

  “Marie-France Sage,” she said, her lips pursed and her eyes smiling.

  When spoken in French, her name is lovely, the syllables mingling poetically in perfect harmony like the English word “sassafras.” It is a name that feels good tumbling in your mouth. But the name struck me as funny. It tickled me that “France” was not only her middle name but also her country of origin, and that “Sage”—meaning “reasonable and well-behaved” in French—was not only her last name, but a description of her comportment.

  So, I said, “I’m so pleased to meet you, Marie-France Sage. My name is ‘Allen, Les Etats-Unis, Mal Élevé,’” meaning, “Allen, the United States, Ill-Mannered.”

  Marie got my little joke and laughed without restraint, which for me is always the first sign of a long friendship.

  By this time the dance instructor had deciphered the mysteries of the studio CD player and tu
rned around to face the class. “Our class is a little small,” he said. “I was hoping for at least twelve dancers.” Then after a pause he added, “There’s a big soccer match tonight between Montpellier and Lyon on television. Perhaps more will come next week.”

  I immediately visualized the die-hard American football fan: a doughboy with a cheese-wedge cap, a bag of chips, and a bottle of Schiltz Malt Liquor. If the French soccer fans were anything like that, I thought it unlikely that they would be turning up anytime soon at a ballroom dance class.

  “We’ll start with le rock,” the instructor said, “and then the tango.”

  My heart leapt. The tango. Making love with your clothes on. Oh, yeah. I could see myself already: shoulders back, chest out, a raised eyebrow, and a sneer on my lips, gliding as one with my partner across the dance floor. At that instant, I decided to sign up for the year.

  “Of course, the tango is very difficult to do,” the instructor said. “Not everyone can do it.”

  I can do it, I can do it, I said to myself.

  “It requires precision and perfect synchronization.”

  Not a problem. I’m a synch machine.

  “The male dancer must be proud. He must think of himself as a god.”

  “Et voilà, c’est moi—that’s me,” I heard myself say.

  The class laughed and I blushed—as people do whenever a secret fantasy slips from mind to tongue.

  The dance instructor went on to talk about the course objectives, and I realized, true to French custom, he was not going to tell us his name. Well, that was something I just couldn’t live with. I could not imagine myself calling him “Monsieur le Professeur” for the next year.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  The dance instructor squinted.

  “My name is Allen. What is your name?” I asked bluntly.

  The instructor smiled, perhaps thinking, What a curious, yet charming question to ask.

  “My name is Marco.”

  “Marco,” I said, “may I use the informal ‘you?’”

  Marco squinted, and when he was sure he understood, smiled the same smile. “Yes, you can tutoyer me.”