by Rolf Potts
Loose-tongued on a drop of wine, the poetry comes pouring out. The popular French expression for twilight, for instance, “entre chien et loup” (literally: between dog and wolf) perfectly captures the visual drama at the tenuous border between day and night when daylight drops its muzzle of civility and darkness bares its fangs. How Chaplinesque, or rather Jacques-Tatiesque, are the Gallic takes on “to be lost”: “marcher à côté de ses pompes” (literally, to walk beside one’s clodhoppers); and “to be sleepy”: “ne pas avoir les yeux en face des trous” (literally, not to have your eyes lined up with their slits). How perfectly bobo (Bohemian-Bourgeois) is the inverted, self-mocking snobbery of the tongue-in-cheek term for tap water, “Château de la Pompe” (literally: Château Water Fountain). How anti-clerical and positively blasphemous the French equivalent expression for “not in a million years”: “à la Saint Glin Glin” (literally, when Saint Glin Glin wills it).
But French curses, insults, and idiomatic expressions really let it all hang out with true poetic license. The anodyne Anglo-Saxon nitpicker becomes a “sodomiseur de lépidoptère” (sodomite of Lepidoptera), or better yet, “un enculeur de mouches” (fly butt-fucker). The French equivalent of the English “looking for a needle in a haystack” is: “chercher un pet dans une bain à jacuzzi” (fishing for a fart in a Jacuzzi). More lustfully vulgar still, the French for “Step on it!” is: “Il faux pas tortiller le cul pour chier droit!” (Don’t wriggle your ass to shit straight!) Or the ultimate scatological French standby for “really having to go take a dump”: “avoir le cigarre au bou des lèvres” (to have a cigar at the tip of your lips). And since we’ve dropped our culottes, so to speak, what coarse Anglo-Saxon expression could possibly match the sheer lyric license of the Gallic take on “she’s got the hots for you”: “Elle a la moule qui baille” (literally: Her mussel is yawning for you).
And then there’s the division of creation by sex. How curious for an American accustomed to a neuter world in which all else outside the “I” is a swathe of “it,” to fathom that everything around you is gendered to the French eye. The logic is often perplexing. So the perennially gray sky (le ciel) overhead is a moody old masculine. But the rain (la pluie) falls in female tears. The building (le bâtiment) you pass on the street is a strapping buck, but the house (la maison) is a sleek lady, to which only a privileged few are given the pass code, inviting or forbidding entry. The person (la personne) you meet, man or woman, is a female a priori, as is the conglomerate crowd (la foule). Bread (le pain), most typically in the elongated shape of la baguette, is male, as is wine (le vin) and cheese (le fromage), the two other staples of the French diet. But the table (la table) at which you eat at is a woman. The truck (le camion) is a lumbering porter bearing his load. But the car (la voiture) is a woman that carries destinies in her metal womb. The same gender divide holds true for French states of mind. Joy (la joie) is a she, as is sadness (la tristesse). It is as if the world around us, in its stark duality, comprised infinite models or mirrors, constantly instructing us not only in how to behave, how to walk, talk and dress, but also how to think (la pensée), thought being female, and dream (le rêve), reverie being male. The gender of the French noun, furthermore, affects the adjectives that decorate and adorn it as a kind of costume jewelry and the verbs that manipulate, or rather are manipulated by it.
And what about those gender-bending homonyms, like manly liver (le foie) and feminine time—as in how many times—(la fois), or the manly mold you bake with (le moule) vs. the feminine mussel you buy at market and simmer in white wine (la moule)!
In France I walk around in a constant state of hermaphrodite grammatical confusion, my male body (le corps) enveloped by my female skin (la peau), ignorant of the distinction that every French schoolchild has categorized in the filing cabinet of a male mind (un esprit) lodged in the female head (la tête).
Speaking of gender, every Parisian, and particularly every Parisienne is a walking billboard advertising the ever-present possibility of seduction that a walk down a Paris street just might entail. Mick Jagger may not have managed to find “satisfaction” in London, but if Serge Gainsbourg, the patron saint of ’69, with his big nose, stick-out ears and droopy eyes, could bed down BB (Brigitte Bardot), surely you could too—or so the tantalizing legend would have us believe.
My attachment to French gender difference is up close and personal. At the Tuileries Gardens one memorable 14th of July, I danced a dizzying valse musette with Claudie, the perky petite brunette who would become my wife, faking the steps, though she later convinced me to take dancing lessons for our wedding. I remember exactly the outfit she had on, the cinched yellow polka dot top beneath which her belly button peaked forth, and a short, white, tri-layered skirt that flared up in enticing cascades of cotton, baring leg well above the knee, and her perky brown ponytail that sashayed like the tail of a proud thoroughbred as we whirled about. I remember the rhythmic rippling notes of the accordion played by Aimable Pluchart, better known by his first name Aimable, the legendary French bandleader, already of advanced age back then, but no less lithe and supple, beaming and swaying as he played, hovering above the dusty dance floor on a prefab stage like a puppeteer directing our clip-clop with the invisible strings of his music, unabashedly fondling his instrument, as my fingers replayed the melody down the keyboard of Claudie’s spine. We swirled in an ocean of bodies, a whirlpool of humanity, when an older man, a fleet-footed hoofer, brashly reached out, plucked my fiancé out of my arms, and spun her round like he was a planet and she was the sun. Whereupon I boiled over with a cocktail of contradictory emotions, burning with jealousy, glowing with pride, seething with heretofore untapped erotic fury whipped up into a virtual frenzy by the ever-accelerating pace of the music. And when at last, after what seemed at the time like an eternity but could only have been a matter of minutes at most, he returned her to my waiting arms with a bow and a wink that betokened both gratitude and regret, my jealousy melted into boundless love leaping from my eyes (mes yeux), those masculine orbs, to my beating heart (mon coeur), that dumb male muscle, encased in my head (ma tête), that feminine lockbox of mind and emotion, for granting me this moment of beatitude.
Peter Wortsman’s travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, won a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY). An excerpt was previously selected as the Grand Prize winner in the 2012 Solas Awards for Best Travel Story of the Year. A writer in multiple modes, including fiction, drama, prose poetry, and translation, his other recent books include a novel, Cold Earth Wanderers, and an anthology which he selected, translated, and edited, Tales of the German Imagination. Forthcoming are a book of short fiction, Footprints in Wet Cement, and a translation, Konundrum, Selected Prose of Franz Kafka. He was a Holtzbrinck Fellow in 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin. This story first appeared in the 2016 issue of the Catamaran Literary Reader, Santa Cruz.
Notes
1 English adaptation by the poet Robert Lowell
2 Still fond of a drop of spirit on select occasions, years later I identified with a soused breed of spider that lives down under the Chateau de Cognac, in the pit of the former dungeon known as “le Paradis” (Paradise), where the oldest casks of spirit are left to age in a snow-white coat of fungus. Its state revealed in the asymmetrical weave of its web, the spider feeds on insect larvae and watches over the precious stash with a certain sloppy majesty.
K. M. CHURCHILL
A Love Song
Walking on the edge of myth in Ireland.
Snow rarely fell in Ireland. When it did the dusting was so light it looked like confectionary sugar had been sprinkled all over the green ivy and winter-blooming roses. So I knew our first winter storm in Union Hall, a tiny fishing village on Glandore Bay in the remote southwestern tip of County Cork—where I’d moved with Francis, my Irish chef husband, and our two young children to open a restaurant—would be nothing like the New England blizzards I was used to. The joyous, drunken raucousness of the Irish holiday season was up
on us and, even with the storm clouds spreading out against the sky, our seaside village seemed festive rather than pensive.
Pensioners made their way slowly along Main Street. Stopping every few feet to chat with passersby, “Are ye well?” They marveled at windows, trimmed with shiny silver, gold and green tinsel roping, displaying ceramic or hand-carved manger scenes: Mary and St. Joseph, along with shepherd boys, flocks of sheep, donkeys, camels, and the Magi journeying. Sometimes there would be a little drummer boy or an angel with a trumpet. All carefully positioned facing a tiny crib, empty but for a bedding of hay, where the baby Jesus would be placed on Christmas morning. And a gold star, the Star of Bethlehem, dangling from a wire above the scene.
So it must have been a few weeks after our second child had been baptized—first by my mother-in-law using a bottle of Holy Water she kept in her handbag, then by an angry priest in a ceremony at St. Brigid’s Catholic Church on the outskirts of town, across from the blue Virgin Mary grotto and the winding laneway that lead up to the village witch’s cottage.
The storm came slowly. Brooding out over the Atlantic before blowing into town. The fishermen were the first to know. Securing their boats in Union Hall’s snug harbor, they made their way to pubs to recount mariner’s tales over pints. Stories of boats trapped in raging storms. Winds that shrieked and howled. And giant waves that swept the ocean ashore and the shore out to sea, before tucking men’s boats into bed at the bottom of it.
A couple of auld ones, sitting at the back, took their turn among the men. Shaking their heads in disbelief and wonder they spoke slowly, as though they had all the time in the world, about what they’d seen and heard: the otherworldly roar of a voiceful wave at the mouth of Glandore Bay. Not just any wave mind you, but Tonn Clíodhna, an ancient thunderous wave foretelling death and disaster. “T’was nothin’ less than Tonn Clíodhna I tell ye!” When the old men finished speaking no one said anything. Each man sat quietly staring down into his pint. Until someone called to the bartender for “another round.”
When I’d lived in Dublin, years before the children were born, I’d take the train from Connelly Station and head north. The raised tracks ran through neighborhoods I had never seen before. Row after row of “attached” houses became wastelands, then fields and pastures, then sandy beaches. After half an hour, the train arrived at its final destination, Howth Railway Station, where I’d disembark and walk out along the harbor road.
Sometimes, if I was hungry, I’d stop by The Waterside & the Wheelhouse pub for a plate of fish and chips and a half pint of lager. Like a local I’d sprinkle the chips with salt and vinegar and eat them while staring out the window at a small island that lay like a voluptuous woman reclining in the sea. Once I’d asked the plump waitress who brought my lunch what it was called.
“Ireland’s Eye,” she said, holding my plate of hot food aloft while answering. Then, with the quiet pride of a good student, she repeated it in Irish, “Inis Mac Neasáin.”
“Anyone live there?”
“Ah no. Birds and seals is all. Though there’s a ferry goes out soes you can picnic and walk about.”
She leaned in to set my plate down and I could see that her wavy auburn hair was streaked with gray.
“Then, of course, there’s the murder cave.”
“The murder cave?”
She lowered her voice. “Sure didn’t a man kill his wife out there in 1852? And didn’t they find that poor woman’s body lying stone cold in a sea cave? He swore he hadn’t done it. Said she’d accidentally drowned and been washed ashore. But no one believed him.” She stood up then and, putting her hands on her ample hips, looked around to see if there was anyone else needing her attention. There wasn’t. “Sure I could get you the ferry schedule if you’d like,” she suggested, smiling down at me.
I declined the offer and, when I’d eaten my fill, I paid and said goodbye. Then I went outside and followed the green arrows pointing toward the cliff walk.
The climb from the harbor road was slow but not steep. On one side, the green cliffs of Howth’s Head fell gradually away into the sea. On the other, a sloping wild heath bloomed bright with yellow gorse bushes. A well-worn path trimmed the cliffs closely. At times too closely so that it slipped off the edge and I could see where others had plotted a new path, a little bit higher up, on the grassy verge.
Cliffs fringe the whole of Ireland. In the northeast there’s the Giant’s Causeway where 40,000 smooth, hexagon-shaped rocks jut up out of the seabed. It’s a place of pilgrimage for school children: in Irish mythology the Causeway is the remnants of a land bridge built to Scotland by the gentle giant Finn MacCool. In modern science, it’s a unique volcanic geological formation formed 60 million years ago. Like the school children, I preferred the first explanation. Either way it is a UNESCO protected World Heritage site, meaning that its significance transcends all national boundaries and belongs not just to the people of Ireland, but to the peoples of the world.
So too do the Skellig Rocks, sharp black cliffs off the southwes coast of County Kerry that for centuries have been a site of pilgrimage for Catholic penitents who have clamored aboard tiny boats, then bobbed up and down on the cold and unforgiving Atlantic Ocean to reach the Blue Cove. And from there pick their way up the steep stone-cut steps leading to St. Fionan’s abandoned beehive monastery that sits alone and abandoned atop the jagged cliffs.
So harsh and barren and isolated a place is Skellig that when Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw visited, he wrote to a friend that it was, “an incredible, impossible, mad place . . . I tell you, the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world.” And that was the problem exactly, I thought, the thing about Ireland that both enchanted and confounded me—it did seem to be part of a dream world; myth and reality mingled so often that sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between the two.
Not a soul did I meet on the cliffs and when I crested the hill just beyond the summit I sat down in the grass. It was quiet, but for the cries of gulls and the wind whistling in my ears. A breeze blowing up the hill came in salty gusts, tickling my nose and tugging at my hair. I stretched my legs out in front of me and my toes appeared to touch the green, green Irish Sea that was glittering all the way to the horizon.
From my hillside perch I could see the haunted Baily Lighthouse standing tall and sure on a high craggy tip of land reaching out into Howth Harbor. Looking southward I saw the whole of Dublin Bay, with its fleet of fat white ferryboats sailing to and from the U.K. and France, and beyond that too, all the way to the hazy purple Wicklow Mountains. What I could not see were the dark open-mouthed caves in the cliffs far below me, nor the bones of the smugglers who had died there, nor the lichen-covered, storm-tossed ships that lay silky green and sunken at the bottom of the sea.
News of the winter storm spread swiftly. We all knew it was coming, long before it was announced on RTÉ, Radio Telefis Eireann, the national news station. When I’d walked with my two-year-old son, Isaac, up to Fuller’s shop to buy half a pound of salted butter, a loaf of brown soda bread, and some smoked salmon for lunch, Mrs. Fuller asked me if I’d heard about it. I hadn’t. By the time we’d walked back home and I’d found Francis in the kitchen to tell him, he’d already heard it from Tom, the young Irishman mending our wall in the back garden.
“There’s a big storm coming, Daddy!” Isaac shouted as we came in through the restaurant’s side door. “Missus Fuller says so!”
“I know!” Francis said, lifting his son up and sitting him down on top of the box freezer next to his baby brother who was already asleep there in his infant car seat. “Isn’t it exciting?”
Francis handed Isaac a slice of green apple he’d been about to sauté with pine nuts and currants to add to the duck stuffing.
Isaac took a big bite and nodded “yes.” Then he looked down at his brother and gently poked his cheek to see if he might wake up. He didn’t.
The restaurant
phone rang.
“You remember to pick up peat and coal yesterday?” I asked, reaching over to re-tie the red silk ribbon that hung from the handle of the baby’s car seat. The ribbon was a practical precaution; red for protection and strung with small silver jingle bells to frighten away “baby stealing fairies.” (A notion I had no intention of arguing with.)
“Yep, there’s three bales of briquettes and a big bag of coal in the boot of the car. I’ll bring them down later.”
The phone rang again but it did not wake the baby.
“How many on the books?” I asked, swinging Isaac back up onto my hip and picking up our small bag of groceries to bring upstairs to our apartment.
“We’ve got three deuces and a four-top at six,” Francis said, giving the soup du jour a quick stir then turning down the heat, “a six-top at half seven, a three-top and four deuces at half eight and we just picked up a five-top—three adults, two kids—at six forty five. Oh, and they’ll be needing a high chair.”
The phone rang again and he slid a sauté pan off the burner, wiped his hands and came out from behind the line to answer it. (House Rule—never let the restaurant phone ring more than three times before picking up.)
“We’re off then.” I said, heading out the door with Isaac. “I’ll let you know when lunch is ready.”
“Better check for flashlight batteries and storm candles!” Francis called after us as he picked up the phone. I waved my hand so that he’d know I’d heard him.