Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Each word I learn in Mo’s class is a little treasure I add to my trove. The French language is as beautiful and subtle as it is difficult to learn. All French parts of speech are annoying for one reason or another, verbs especially. If they don’t feel like acting rational, they don’t. If they prefer to be indirect and subtle, they are. Take the verb manquer, which means “to miss” or “to lack.” You’d think that if you wanted to say, as we so sensibly do in English, “I miss you,” you’d say, “Je manque vous.” But no, that would be too straightforward. Well, then, what about “Je vous manque.” I you miss, now that we’ve learned that the pronoun always precedes the verb in the French language? You’d still be wrong. The French would have you say, “Vous me manquez,” you are missing to me. And don’t even get me started on the subjunctive. Of course English is at least as difficult to learn as French, but you’re missing the point. I’m not trying to be fair. I’m trying to be French.

  Larry and I have different speaking styles in class. I talk a lot. I’m a glutton for attention. When Larry is finally able to get a word in edgewise, he shows himself to be very strong on nouns and verbs but weak on all other parts of speech. And sometimes his efforts to roll the French letter r bring on fits of glottal stoppage. As a result, he speaks like a French Hemingway, very spare and muscular. Whatever words he doesn’t know he simply leaves out, and you get to fill them in and make sense of it all.

  I prefer to talk rather than to listen, another flaw I’ve imported from my real life, which is undoubtedly why I, more often than Larry who does listen, do not understand what Mo is saying. Since I’m not fond of humiliation, when I don’t understand what’s being said, I sometimes fake it. Usually this happens near the end of the classroom day when I’m as overstuffed as a goose’s liver. I affect a fixed, interested smile, not too wide in case she’s talking about a murdered loved one, and I nod but not too vigorously, hoping that she won’t ask any questions that will betray my deception. I worry that she may detect the absence of intelligent light in my eyes. Perhaps she can smell my fear.

  Sort of but not quite understanding is just as perilous. I pick up a word or two. I think I get the gist. Somebody is building something very large, something très grand in her backyard. I fairly vibrate with frustration. A very large what? It’s like standing on tiptoe, trying to pick a delicious, ripe pear that hangs just a millimeter out of reach. When I actually do understand, I tend to get extravagantly animated. My eyes sparkle, as if Mo were saying the most exciting things to me. Now I’m not faking. To me, merely understanding is a very big deal. I cry out “d’accord,” I understand, or “tout à fait,” absolutely! I hang on her every word.

  Mo is determined that we should learn to tell time in the traditional French twenty-four-hour system, this in spite of the fact that lots of French people will make a dinner date for sept heures, seven o’clock, instead of dix-neuf heures, nineteen hours. No matter how hard I try, I rarely get it right, which is why René and Danielle show up at nineteen hours, my time 7:00 p.m., an hour early for our cocktail party. I had meant to invite them for twenty hours, eight o’clock my time. They sit stiffly in the salon while I rush about preparing hors d’oeuvres and apologizing for getting the time wrong. “Je suis désolée,” I tell them. “I’m sorry.” (One adds an extra e if the speaker is feminine and an s if two or more people are désolés, or a double e and one s, désolées, if the speakers are both feminine. Even French adjectives are sex-driven.)

  “Désolé” to my ears seems an overly dramatic way to say you’re sorry for getting the time wrong. “My best friend is dying.” That’s désolé. And then there’s merde, which sometimes means “shit” and at other times means “good luck.” Go figure.

  There are many more French utterances that seem over the top to native English speakers. For instance, I stifle a giggle every time I ask directions from a stranger. Mo has taught us to say, “Excusez-moi de vous déranger,” literally, “Excuse me for deranging you,” as if the person might otherwise go bonkers. When introduced to someone, it is proper to shake that person’s hand and say “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance,” or just plain “enchanté.” Maybe I really am happy to meet you, but enchanted? It also seems to me that “Je t’embrasse,” I kiss you, is a bit of a bodice ripper of a sign-off at the end of a letter, when all you really mean is “Love.” But, hey, they’re French.

  When it comes to numbers, I’m in deep trouble. The left side of my brain, the side that’s thought to be in charge of numbers, is the size of a garbanzo bean. On the college math aptitude tests, I scored 30 percent of a possible 100. I add on my fingers. If I can, I secrete them under a table and count by pressing them on my knees. I also can’t program the TV or balance my checkbook. This is not because I am lazy, or rather not merely because I’m lazy. It is also because I am hardwired numerically hopeless. If, God forbid, Larry should predecease me, I would have to move to assisted living in order to watch Netflix.

  Larry has no difficulty with numbers. When he’s bored on the road, he adds and multiplies the numbers on license plates, which makes him very adept at dealing with the way the French count. I have no trouble counting to twenty in French, since there’s a single word for each number. But once past twenty, or vingt, all hell breaks loose. Twenty-one is vingt et un, twenty plus one. The seventeenth century is le dix-septième siècle, or ten plus seven. And it gets worse. If someone is ninety years old, he “has” quatre-vingt-dix ans. That’s four times twenty plus ten. And that’s not all the “haves” you have to worry about. One isn’t hungry, thirsty, or cold; one has hunger, thirst, and cold. But the weather doesn’t have hot; it makes hot.

  And why does every article that precedes every noun have to be either masculine “le” or feminine “la”? I complain to Monique. Why couldn’t they settle for a simple “the” like normal Americans? It’s not as if le or la make any sense. One might conclude that the French are oversexualized. The word for magnet is the same as the word for loving, aimant, but when it comes to gender, they are merely bewildering. The word for vagina is le vagin, and it’s masculine. The coarse word for penis is la bite, and it’s feminine. The word for garbage can, la poubelle, is so lovely that I want to dab some behind my ears.

  Larry and I like to pit masculine words against feminine words to determine which gender wins the moral high ground. Peace, la paix, is feminine, I submit, but so, counters Larry, is war, la guerre. Yes, that’s true, I allow, but la vie, life, is feminine, but so, says Larry, is death, la mort. Fed up, Monique has to separate us like the class clowns we are and explain that the le-ness and la-ness of French derives from ancient Latin and would we please stop wasting time.

  Talking French with Your Mouth Full

  At noon, after two hours of French grammar cum culture, Larry and I go downstairs to Mo’s dining room where Ange joins us.

  Mo sets a pretty table, with tablecloth and matching napkins. The first course, what we would call the appetizer, the French call the entrée which in this case consists of pâtés and sausages accompanied by the ever-present baguette. Then she serves a soupe au pistou a vegetable and bean soup resembling minestrone but seasoned with a mixture of basil, parmesan cheese, and garlic. Just when I think that’s got to be it, Mo presents le plat, the main course, a brined pork served with her own onion jam. That is followed by the requisite green salad and a cheese plate.

  In the South of France, we learn, they eat their major meal at noon. That way they can eat and drink themselves into a stupor, just in time for their siesta, which starts at around two o’clock and goes on until about four. Eyelids and shop doors close for at least two hours.

  Without being aware of it, we have been drinking a mild Provençal rosé throughout the meal, and we’re pleasantly looped. In vino we find not veritas but a soupçon of uninhibited fluency. Lunchtime conversation chez Mo—at Mo’s house—while sometimes incomprehensible, is never boring. However, to stand a chance of participating,
we must remain in a state of heightened awareness. Ange, we learn, is Corsican, which is why this household is so well supplied with figatelli, a Corsican sausage that tastes like Genoa salami but chewier and more gamey. He is a retired naval engineer and helixophile, someone who collects and sells antique corkscrews, a popular hobby in France. Ange displays his collection at a booth in the antiques section of the Sunday market in L’Isle sur la Sorgue. Occasionally he sells one.

  Ange tells us that there’s a corkscrew museum in Mènerbes, another pretty nearby hill town. We decide to go. The corkscrews are all just corkscrews at the operative end, but each of the more than thousand handles are different—a dog, a sailboat, a pencil, a crescent moon, a rainbow, a pig, a cart, a hat, a wine bottle, and, our favorite, a naked man with his legs spread wide. There’s a bottle cap museum near our home, but in forty years it has never occurred to us to go. Here, out of place, devoid of our usual cynicism—a corkscrew museum? Let’s go! We’re up for anything. We like ourselves better this way.

  Mo and Ange seem genuinely sad and hurt by how anti-French so many Americans seem to be because the French oppose the war in Iraq. The French we know are very well versed on American politics. They are bewildered that the US Congress has recommended that the french fries served in the cafeteria be listed on the menu as “Freedom Fries.” (Never mind that so-called french fries actually originated in Belgium.) The French, say Monique and Ange, love Americans even when they dislike our political leaders. Why then, they ask, can’t Americans disagree with their government and still love them? They seize upon us as exceptions. Inadvertently we find ourselves cast in the role of ambassadors of good will from a country of ill will.

  Both Larry and I are surprised by how much the French people we meet know about America and about their own culture. Our sample is small, but that doesn’t keep us from leaping to conclusions. Monique, Ange, and others we will meet at chez Mo may or may not be college graduates, but they seem to know as much or more about our culture than we do, and a great deal more about France than most Americans know about America. The first may be due to the high quality of France’s public education; the second to the worldwide dominance of American culture.

  We laugh a lot and tell stories about children and grandchildren, likes and dislikes, our friends, their friends, the pros and cons of dog ownership, what we did yesterday after school, and whether or not we should buy a French Scrabble set (too many e’s). Many of our conversations are political. Mo and Ange are liberals who are horrified, as are we, by our doctrine of preemptive wars, our country’s increasing conservatism, and failure to properly separate church and state. We discuss the differences between our legal and educational systems. Other big topics, upon which we agree, are the shameful rise of French anti-Semitism, terrorism, and the increasing hostility toward the peaceful Muslim citizens in their midst.

  A particular lunchtime conversation starkly contrasts French and American attitudes toward marriage. Is the idea of commitment learned or felt? Mo wonders. But what Mo and Ange, both of whom have been divorced, find laughable is the whole concept of “for better or for worse, until death do us part.”

  “Why suffer?” they ask. What’s the point? And they practice what they preach. Ange will soon be replaced by Marc, and Mo by another woman. And it won’t stop there. Before we leave Provence for the fourth time, Monique will have gone through three lovers, and Ange will be in Canada living out of wedlock with his first wife.

  And why bother to marry at all? We Americans, they say, are too earnest in our attitudes toward marriage. I am so eager to be French that I find myself questioning my fidelity. Why did Larry and I marry? And why haven’t we split up? God knows those thoughts have occurred to us both. We’ve stuck it out through plenty of “worse.” What was the point anyway?

  For the moment, I seem to have forgotten that I am not French. Part of immersing oneself in a foreign culture can be a temporary loss of one’s moral compass. To prove I’m not a hopeless bourgeois, I tell them about my late, free-spirited aunt Lily who had five husbands and didn’t waste any time in between. Lily practiced what she called “serial monotony.” As soon as one husband lost his allure, she’d move on to another. Mo and Ange express their admiration, but they fault her for bothering to get married, especially after the first time.

  It is at Mo’s table that we first meet her good friends Sylvie and Alain Prétot. Sylvie is a dark-haired, lively, bright-eyed charmer, a proud housewife and mother of two teenage daughters. Alain, a tall, sturdy fireman by trade, sports an impressively full, long, black, Provençal handlebar moustache that reaches to his jaw line and encloses the lower part of his face in bold parentheses.

  He speaks French with a twangy, Provençal accent. The difference between the Parisian accent we study with Mo and Alain’s is as distinct as clipped New England speech is to an Alabama drawl. For instance, the way to say “tomorrow morning” is demain matin, pronounced “deh-meh meh-teh.” Alain pronounces it “demang matang.” He speaks slowly. I find his accented French easy to understand. His manner is gentle, even courtly. I develop a crush on him. He speaks no English. I hardly know him. I don’t need to know him. He is my fantasy man, the living embodiment of ancient Provence.

  Alain, who is deeply devoted to his Provençal heritage, is the first contemporary person anywhere to make the long, narrow barque-like fishing boats called les nego-chin, pronounced “lay nay-go-sheen.” Extrapolated from langue d’Oc, it means boats so skinny and shallow that even a dog standing in the widest part, the middle of such a boat, is likely to fall into the Sorgue and drown. Chien is the modern word for dog. Noyer, to drown, is the modern infinitive for nego. Alain tells us that during the Middle Ages, when the pope was in Avignon, fishermen wielding implements similar to Neptune’s trident, speared trout each Friday and delivered them in les nego-chin, and then, when the river narrowed, by cart to Avignon as a tribute to His Holiness.

  Alain has made almost 150 of these boats so far. They are his passion. After lunch one afternoon, Alain invites us into his world. He shows us his workshop. He demonstrates his age-old chiseling technique.

  Would we like to go for a ride? We walk a couple of blocks toward the center of town, where he keeps his boats tied on the banks of the Sorgue. Larry and I go on separate trips. Three people in a nego-chin is asking for trouble. Alain stands in the back of the boat, propelling it forward with a pole, like a Venetian gondolier, while each of us scooch down on all fours, like a nego-chin.

  That first season we also meet Ellen Grenniesen, an American transplanted in Provence and one of Mo’s former students, who occasionally joins Mo’s table to visit and to get a French language booster shot.

  She makes her first appearance at the end of a lunchtime conversation class. It has been what I call one of my dreaded “days of malediction.” I can’t put a French sentence together. Mo likes to joke that mon cerveau est en panne, that my brain has broken down, the same phrase they use to describe a car that won’t start.

  Ellen is married to Bob, the European representative of Back Roads International. Along with their three young children, they have been stationed in Provence for almost two years. Bob, because he deals mostly with Americans, has managed to avoid fluency, but Ellen has seized the opportunity to go native, to integrate herself into the Provençal culture with élan. She trades English lessons for French cooking lessons with her next-door neighbor. She tried to raise chickens in her backyard. The foxes literally raided the hen house, putting an end to that earnest effort, but her vegetable garden thrives. She now speaks French well enough to serve on the PTA of her daughter’s school, where wine is served at the meetings. I am charmed by the fact that as her children outgrow their shoes, she fills them with dirt, plants flowers in them, and lines them up on the stone wall in front of her house.

  We go on hikes with Ellen and Bob who are so well integrated into la vie Provençale that they know the territory and its hidden d
elights. We are their tourists. When we’re with the Greeneissens, we don’t have to pretend we’re French; we just have to pretend we’re young.

  On one of our frequent hikes, we follow their lead on what must be at least a three-mile-long, uphill trail through the woods to a restaurant biologique called La Pause. How so specialized a restaurant can sustain itself in the woods, so far from anywhere, amazes me. When we arrive, I need more than the pause that refreshes. I need a massage, a nap, and a performance-enhancing IV drip.

  As we are eating our biologically correct crêpes and salads at the outdoor picnic table, the owner comments on how the children have grown since their last visit. “Ils poussent comme des mauvaises herbes.” They’re growing like weeds.

  After lunch, Ellen has something else she wants to show us, an abandoned hamlet called Barbaranque. Amidst the cluster of tumbled-down stone houses and underbrush, we find a plaque to the memory of its citizens who were massacred on that very spot by the Nazis during the Second World War, a grim reminder that Provence is not all sunlight and lavender.

  On the way down, trailed by a gang of goats, we pass the two-story troglodyte dwelling, carved into a cliff, where the local goatherd and his wife live; the goats on the first floor, the couple on the second. Ellen’s been trying to get the goatherd to teach her how to make goat cheese. She’s been phoning him for days, but he hasn’t returned her calls. In spite of its primitive appearance, his cave is equipped with a phone and a fax.

  Never Try to Act Out “Sausage” in a Supermarket

  Our first attempt to figure out a French supermarket is a disaster of confusion. No matter how hard we tug at the last cart in the cart corral, we can’t get it loose. Then we realize that, as in an airport, one must insert a euro into a slot in order to release a cart. French women still push supermarket carts, but even more of them come equipped from home with large canvas bags on casters, which skip the middleman by serving as both cart and bag.