I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do)

by Mark Greenside

  I take out my book, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and start reading. This is my summer for French lit. Along with everything else, I’m carrying Stendhal, Proust, Flaubert, Hugo, Balzac, Sartre, Camus, Voltaire, Maupassant, Bataille, Sarraute, and Réage. Kathryn is carrying the poets and reading Baudelaire—in French. Our plan is to sit for a while, read, look out the window, and buy lunch on the train when we feel like it.

  Ten minutes out of the station, everyone, as if on cue, starts removing food from bags, boxes, sacks, purses, coats, scarves, pockets, day packs, backpacks, suitcases, socks, you name it: breads of every size and shape; sausages; cheeses that are round, square, wedged, rolled, and rectangular, white, gray, black, blue, green, and yellow, with aromas that go from sweet honey to bathroom; there’s fruit, casseroles, chicken, chocolate, crêpes, crackers, chips, and liters and liters of water: Evian, Vittel, Volvic, Isabelle, Perrier, Badoit, Vichy. In no time at all everyone is eating, except us.

  The sight of us sitting there without any food must have been too much for them. The woman in the aisle seat next to me reaches over and hands me a hunk of bread and a slab of sausage.

  “Merci,” I say. For me, it’s the end of the conversation. For her, it’s the start. She speaks rapidly. I nod and nod and say a few “ouis” and hope she will quit, but she doesn’t.

  Kathryn switches seats with me and speaks with her and translates. “The bread is a multigrain, made the old way in a brick oven by an artisan. The sausage is an andouille. It comes from her brother’s farm near Saint-Brieuc.”

  Upon hearing her speak French and understand it, everyone around us joins in, first by giving us more things to eat, then by telling us what we are eating, where it comes from, how it’s made, the ingredients, locations, specialties, what’s homegrown, homemade, artisan-made, natural, fresh.

  The conversation switches back and forth from the serious—food, family, the land, weather—to the hilarious: what kind of water to buy; no sodium, too much sodium, not enough sodium, carbonated, noncarbonated, flavored, natural. At one point I think a Badoit person is going to bean a Vittel. There’s lots of “offs” and “bawees” and laughter, and a strange sucking noise that sounds to me like the whistle of an incoming aerial bomb.

  About an hour and a half out of Paris the woman sitting directly in front of me, who has yet to say a word to us, turns around and asks, “Vous habitez en Angleterre?” You’re from England?

  “Non. Nous sommes américains.”

  Everything changes after that. I expect to have to duck and cover and answer questions like, Why is your country ruining the Earth? Instead they ask about us, where we live in the United States, how long we’ll be in France, why we’re going to Brittany and Finistère, and what we’re going to do there. When Kathryn tells them we’re writers, that we’ve come to visit and write, they all make that sharp sucking sound and say, “Bien sûr,” as if it were preordained. The woman sitting behind me then says something about Chateaubriand. The fellow next to her, a round portly gent with a nose the color of eggplant, says, “Non, non, non,” and goes on and on about Max Jacob and Jules Verne. The woman who first gave me the bread and sausage stops him, points to my book, and tells us to go to Camaret, where Céline lived out the final years of his miserable life. At the mention of Camaret, a man dressed in blue-and-green plaid pants and a green-and-blue striped shirt, and who doesn’t look half bad, takes a harmonica out of his jacket pocket and begins to play “The girls from Camaret,” a little local ditty like “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” and follows it up with some down-home James Carter Chicago blues.

  The closer we get to Brest, the more jovial everyone becomes. More food is passed around, foods we hadn’t seen earlier, pastries and cakes with Breton names: kouign amann, far Breton, and galettes from Pont-Aven that make Danish butter cookies taste as if they’re made with lard. There’s cider and wine and more conversation about local specialties—oysters, crab, mussels, langoustine, salmon, monkfish, and what else to see and do in Brittany. Just before we arrive at the station, a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, comes over and shyly asks in broken English if Kathryn would write a note in English to a girl he met in Dublin the previous summer. She does, of course, and when she gives it to him and wishes him “bonne chance,” he blushes and thanks us and kisses us both on each cheek. Everyone around us hoots and whistles and claps.

  As the train pulls into the station, people begin saying their good-byes—au revoir, bonne journée, à bientôt. Clearly, this is important to them, this business of getting together and leaving. They say their good-byes cheerfully and with smiles but also with a sense of loss. It was the same with the stewards and stewardesses at Charles de Gaulle when they said their au revoirs as we deplaned. They said it as if they meant it, as if something significant had happened between us. And, as if to make that point, the woman who first gave me the sausage and bread comes over to me, shakes my hand, kisses me twice, once on each cheek, and pats my arm. I stand there and wave bye-bye.

  We have an hour’s wait for the commuter train that will take us to our village. Kathryn goes to the office to buy our tickets. I push and pull the luggage carts into the station and look for a place to leave them. There is none. No Baggage Claim. No Left Luggage. Zip. On my third or fourth circle around the station, I find a bank of about ten lockers that are camouflaged to look like the wall, none larger than a bread box. All of them are locked, in use. It’s extraordinary, really, the number of ways France finds to make daily life a difficulty. I look around for a bench to sit on. None of those either. Not a chair or a seat, unless you count the floor, which several people are already using. It’s just like the airport while we waited for our baggage.

  I push and pull the carts outside and wait. Except for the signs in French, the station and everything around it is Anywhere, U.S.A., 1950s–’60s postwar, ugly, cheap. I studied European history in college and know a little about France and the war. Brittany was occupied by the Germans, and Brest, which had been one of the chief naval ports in France for centuries, served the same function for Germany. The Germans based the submarines they used in the Battle of the Atlantic here, and the Bismarck was heading here when it was sunk. Brest was liberated by the U.S. Army under Patton in 1944, and in the process was completely destroyed by the constant bombardments and house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat. That’s why it looks like Newark.

  I leave the luggage—something I’d never do in the U.S.—and cross the street to look at the bay. Bright yellow cranes unload a red-and-green tanker. Sailboats of all sizes and shapes—including three old tall masters with rust-orange sails, painted rowboats, barges, yachts, trawlers, ferries, even a kayak and a racing scull—move in and out and around the harbor. It’s a lovely, tranquil sight: bright yellow cranes, primary-colored boats, white cotton candy clouds, silvery light, and the blue-green sea. I try to imagine what it was like before the war, and during the war, and how beautiful and awful it must have been.

  I return to the station and find Kathryn. We go to the track, and this time I manage to post my ticket correctly on the second attempt and board the local commuter train, which is like the Toonerville Trolley, two little green cars with tiny baggage compartments. As before, the people are reticent, but also as before, become friendly and funny and curious. One woman wants to know where we’re from, another where we’re going, and all want to know why we’re there. Kathryn, in her perfectly accented and conjugated French, explains.

  I nod while she tells them, periodically say “Oui,” and shrug, while stealing glances through the windows at the lush, verdant land, a quilt of greens, tiny squares, rectangles, and triangles divided and subdivided by rows of hedges, stunted trees, and stone walls. The land is hilly, roly-poly, looking beautiful, wintry in the early evening mist, and hard to sow. Cows and sheep graze everywhere. I don’t see a single person, but dotting the land like punctuation are huge rolls of hay and small, two-story stone houses with dark slate roofs. There’s a fixedness
to it all that’s comforting.

  We arrive in Loscoat forty minutes later, where a taxi is waiting at the station. On the ride to the house, Kathryn once again explains who we are, where we’re from, and why we’re there, as I oooh and aah over the shops in the village—boulangerie, pâtisserie, crêperie, charcuterie—the old stone bridge we drive over, the river, sailboats, people fishing along the quay, the flowers—bright red geraniums and fuchsias perched on windowsills and hanging from lampposts, pink, white, and blue hydrangeas lining the road—the sky, and that light again, even with the clouds, the vitality and durability of everything, including the old men playing boules and finally our village, Plobien, a one-road hamlet with a row of three-story stucco houses and an occasional stand-alone house facing the river, and our house, Chez Sally: a blue-shuttered, white stucco row house thirty feet from the quay. As we step out of the cab, the driver points up. A double rainbow dusts the sky. The three of us watch until it fades and disappears. Then the driver leaves and Kathryn goes next door to get the keys from our contact, a Madame Piriou, the person who will change my life.

  I sit on the steps and look at the river. On the other side is a crumbled old stone house with broken-down walls that once must have been a château. Around it are open fields where cows graze and horses run wild. A fish leaps out of the water and lands gracelessly with a flop. From upriver—or down, I can’t tell—a sailboat heads my way. It doesn’t get any more perfect than this. I take Céline from my backpack and start to read. I’m expecting to wait fifteen or thirty minutes because nothing in France, except the driving, seems to go fast. Kathryn returns in a paragraph, a Céline paragraph, which surprises, pleases, and bothers me. I don’t know what it means, but I know it means something. This is France, and every human thing does.

  I put the key in the lock and fiddle with it and finally open the door. Dankness engulfs us, followed by a funeral smell. “It’s an old stone house,” Kathryn says. “It’s normal—C’est normal,” a phrase I would learn to hate.

  I pull the bags in and leave them in the hallway. I also leave the door open to let in the light and out the smell.

  “Look, a stereo, TV, VCR, and dozens of English and American movies on tape.” I follow her voice, with a mixture of hope and dread, into the combined living room–dining room. The windows are shuttered so I can’t see out. There are a table and four chairs for eating and a couch and three chairs for sitting, all pretty ratty looking, which is fine with me: nothing here to destroy.

  “There’s a dishwasher, clothes washer, and dryer, in the kitchen.” I peek in and see that they, along with the stove and refrigerator, are Whirlpool, Philips, and Brandt, American, Dutch, and German. For some reason that reassures me.

  We go upstairs to the second floor, which the French call the first floor, le premier étage, and find a small study at the top of the stairwell. The window is unshuttered and looks out at the river, the hills and fields, and the sky, an encouraging sight. It’s a little nest, this room, with its writing desk, captain’s chair, and three-shelf bookcase filled with English and American books. Kathryn looks at me and I look at her, and we smile, knowing this is going to be a fight: Who’s going to get this room? We leave it as fast as we can.

  I push open the door to the adjoining room and enter the bedroom. It’s big and airy and has an even larger window than the study and lets in the same view, only more of it, and oodles and oodles of light. Everything glimmers, including the dust and the spiderwebs. I sit on the double bed facing the mirrored armoire and watch myself bounce up and down. Then I lie down and roll over and over again. “The mattress is firm,” I pronounce.

  “That’s what the lady said,” Kathryn says, as she disappears into the bathroom. I follow her. It has a shower, thank God, and a bidet—something I yearn to use. The toilet’s in a separate room—a great idea, right up there with evolution, and probably responsible for saving thousands of relationships.

  On the third floor, le deuxième étage, there’s another bedroom with a double bed that isn’t so firm (I find out later that summer), a tiny sitting room with a torn sofa, a scuzzy sink and toilet, and, to my great relief, another study. It has the same view as the first one, and it’s a little larger, has a bigger desk, a leather chair, more books, and a radio. I can’t believe our luck. The house has two studies on three floors—a floor for each of us to work on: the third for me; the second for her. “You did it,” I say, giving her a hug and a kiss. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “I’m beat.”

  It’s nine o’clock in the evening and still as light as if it were three in the afternoon. We’ve been traveling twenty hours, door to door. I follow her down the stairs to the second-floor bedroom, on le premier étage, where she lies fully clothed on the bed. I continue down the stairs to close and lock the door. Then I go back to the bedroom, open the window, and lie down next to her and fall asleep. Sometime in the early-morning hours I wake up, then she does too, and we lie there in the light of the moon as the breeze from the river washes over us. The last thing she says before I fall asleep is “Bienvenue en France.”

  “Merci,” I say, and mean it, and I still do. Merci, merci.

  Over the next two months we drive each other crazy and fall out of love, and in spite of that, or to spite that, or despite that, or having nothing at all to do with that, I begin to fall in love with Brittany, Finistère, the end of the world.

  There

  I wake to the sounds of a whining, screeching, squeaking, pleading piece of machinery making its way slowly down the road, followed by the pealing of church bells, again and again and again and again. Some type A farmer, I figure, out getting his worm. I roll over and go back to sleep. The buzz of a motorbike wakes me. The church bells chime. I look at the clock. It’s 5:30.

  I get up and look out the window. One story down is the two-lane country road we arrived on last night. On the other side of the road is the river, about fifty feet wide at that point, and on the other side of the river are a dilapidated stone wall and building. Beyond the ruins the dark outline of the hills flow like waves.

  I put on the jeans and shirt I wore yesterday, not bothering to shower, brush my teeth, or comb my hair. Who am I going to offend at five-thirty? I tiptoe down the stairs and turn the key I left in the lock. Nothing. I turn the key the other way, clockwise, thinking maybe the French do it backward, like calling the second floor the first. More nothing. I pull the key out, examine it for I don’t know what, put it back in, and turn it. Zero. I turn it upside-down—it won’t go in. I put it back in the right way, turn it left, right, back and forth. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. There’s no way to open the door. I’m stuck. I go into the living room to stew.

  The church bells chime, bong, bong, bong, six times. I’ve been up for half an hour and haven’t done a thing—already I’m becoming more French. I pull open the window, which opens inward, and unlatch the shutters, which open out, and watch the sun rise over the hills. As the light touches the water, the surface mists and fogs. It could be the set for a horror movie—Deliverance, Night of the Living Dead, or The War of the Roses—only it’s not scary, it’s magical, enchanting, serene. I want to go out.

  I sit on the windowsill, spin around with my legs facing out, and jump—almost landing on a woman walking by. She has a baguette in one hand and a dog’s leash in the other. I look at the dog. It looks like a rat with hair. The baguette looks like a baguette. The woman doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t even blanch—as if this is the way French people leave their houses every day, or at least the way English people do, because clearly I’m not French and this is the house of the English lady.

  I point to her bread and nod my head up and down like a yo-yo. The lady squeezes the bread to her breasts and reels in the dog.

  “Où,” I say, “Où…où est le pan?” As soon as I say it I realize what I said is, “Où est lapin,” “Where, where, where is the bunny?”

  Without blinking or laughing or wasting a single w
ord on someone to whom it would clearly be lost, she turns around and points with her baguette.

  “Merci,” I say, but she’s too far away to hear me.

  I cross the street and walk on the path next to the river. Hydrangeas the size of bowling balls bloom in reds, blues, pinks, and whites. Two swans emerge from the mist like U-boats and home in on a bucket of bread that someone, perhaps the baguette lady, left for them on the quay. A heron stands watch on the other side of the river, and black-and-white magpies do what they do, with a little too much glee, it seems to me.

  I walk in the direction the baguette pointed. Sunlight ricochets off the water onto the front of the houses, tickling the quartz in the granite and making it twinkle. The shutters are all closed. Everybody except the insomniacs, baguette lady, and I seems to be asleep. It’s idyllic, a fairyland—a land of make-believe…. No kidding!

  I stop when I see the street sign—Place du Général de Gaulle—and marvel once again at France’s willingness and ability to rewrite its history. Why else have two empires, five republics, and a revolution that not only changed the government but the names of the days, months, and years? I remember from my first visit that every village, city, town, and crossroads had its Place Charles de Gaulle or Place de la Résistance or Rue Jean Moulin or Jean Juares or Général LeClerc, as if everyone in France had the same history, had been a member of the Free French Army or the Maquis, and everyone was antifascist and no one had collaborated, and neither Vichy nor Drancy existed.

  I look around. The place has all of the requisite buildings—a church, mairie, poste, and their faithful companions, a bar and a bar-tabac. The bar is closed, but the bar-tabac is open and full. Three old guys are starting their day or ending their day or don’t know the difference between night and day, sitting at a table with three tiny glasses and a big bottle of red. On the other side of the place, where the main road turns inland, is an insurance office, and next to that is the boulangerie. A single-lane road continues paralleling the river and, according to the sign, leads to a pâtisserie, a viaduct, and a restaurant. That’s it, my village, the village I’m going to be living in for the next eight weeks, smaller than a small-town suburban mall.