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

by Mark Greenside

  By 11:15, we’ve finished the salad and cheeses. It’s still light out, almost dusk, and everyone wants to go to the fête. I follow Henri and Philippe outside and am surprised to see the town is jammed. The entire quay and both sides of the street, several thousand people, with more wedged up to pay at the barricade. We make our way through the crowd toward Place Charles de Gaulle, where everything is. The concessions are going full bore: cotton candy, sausages, candies, nuts, beignets, beer, soda. Philippe goes to a shooting gallery, picks up a rifle, and quickly shoots five ducks. He walks away with a bear the size of Annick. He goes to two other shooting galleries and wins a truck for Deniel and a stuffed rabbit for Estelle.

  The one activity I’m familiar with—besides games you can’t win, like tossing the coins that bounce off the plate, shooting the balls that won’t fit through the net, throwing the balls that can’t knock over the bottles—is bumper cars. I pay my way and get in a car. The first time I’m hit, my teeth rattle. I’m thankful they’re still mine—if they weren’t they’d be on the floor. The only time I’ve felt anything like this was in an actual car accident. Bang—my neck snaps back. Whip-lash. The five-year-old girl who hit me, dressed like a young Loretta Young, giggles maniacally at the sound of my howl and rams me again. My back hurts, my stomach aches. If this ride were in the U.S., lawyers and doctors would be handing out cards, doctors to fix you, lawyers to fix them. The only thing I can figure is it’s like those horror movies they show in driver’s education classes: this is what an accident feels like, though it certainly hasn’t had a deleterious effect on the driving I’ve seen.

  I bought tokens for five rides, but one is enough for me. I stand up, half bent in pain, and wobble off to have a beer with Messieurs Charles, Jacques, and Robert. It’s the right thing to do socially, but not gastronomically, after the meal, the wine, and the ride. All I want to do is lie down.

  As we walk back toward the house, I see people are still paying to come into town. The wedges at the rides and concessions are thinning as people start to wedge up on the quay. Lots of people have chairs and blankets, a few have tables. Some are standing, others kneeling. There are kids on shoulders and hips, dogs on leashes, strollers with kids and dogs, and somewhere a couple of cats. Again, I’m surprised at the number of families, including teenagers, and the lack (or invisibility) of cops. There’s no pushing, no yelling, just several thousand people wedging up at 11:30 at night waiting for something to happen. It’s a fête nautique and people are facing the river, but I don’t see a thing.

  I ask Henri, “What are we waiting for?”

  “The boats.”

  “What boats?”

  “Floats.”

  “When does it start?”

  “When it gets dark.”

  We go back to the house and sit on the stone wall facing the river: Monsieur and Madame, Henri, Renée, Philippe with Annick on his lap, Estelle with Deniel on hers, Charles, Jacques, Robert, Kathryn, and I, waiting. Finally, all the lights in the village go off, as if the entire village failed to pay its electric bill, and a voice booms out of the dark.

  “Bonsoir!”

  “It’s the mayor,” Philippe says. “He’s welcoming everyone and telling them the theme.”

  “What theme?”

  “The theme for tonight.”

  “There’s a theme?”

  “Yes, sure. There’s always a theme.” He says it like How could you not know?

  I look around. No one is in costume, or at least anything I recognize as a costume, unless everyone is pretending to be an American in their Nikes and Adidas and “I heart Florida” T-shirts. There are no banners, bunting, buttons, flags, nothing out of the usual, except five thousand people in a village of five hundred.

  All of a sudden there’s wild applause. I think it’s because the mayor has stopped speaking, but Philippe nudges me and points to a pinpoint of light on the river. The light appears to be moving toward us. In a few minutes it’s followed by another pinpoint of light. Something or things are slowly making their way down river, hence a fête nautique.

  As the light gets closer, I hear the putt-putt of a tiny out-board engine but still can’t see a thing. I wait more patiently than I usually wait for anything. When it finally comes into view I’m baffled. There’s a pink papier-mâché car perched on a tiny float with three people in suits getting into it, sitting down, tooting the horn, and getting out. The action is repeated nonstop.

  “What’s that?” I ask Philippe.

  “Don’t know.”

  He asks Estelle. She asks Monsieur Robert. He asks Monsieur Charles, who asks Monsieur Jacques. No one knows.

  “What’s the theme?” I ask.

  “The European Community.”

  Renée says, “It’s a scene from a movie.”

  “What movie?”

  She doesn’t know, except it’s English. The word goes around. That’s England. “Angleterre.” Everyone accepts it as normal, c’est normal, and applauds.

  The next float has a washing machine perched on it and two women washing clothes by hand. We go through all twelve countries, and no one can figure out which one it is, but we all applaud as it passes.

  The third float is a windmill—Holland. It lists, and zigs and zags from one side of the river to the other until it runs aground on the other side and gets stuck. A fellow in clogs emerges from behind the windmill and slumps beneath the rotating sail, tending his jug of grog. We applaud and encourage him on.

  The last float is France: three guys with red, white, and blue balloons attached to their clothing, who are banging into each other and falling down. I think it’s an educational display, like an atom exhibit, maybe nuclear power or a cyclotron—touting French education, science, reason, rationality—until I see the bottles in their hands and realize the balloons are grapes, and the guys are wine. They’re falling down smashed, laughing and singing, drinking from the bottles and waving them in the air, jiggling their grapes like pom-poms, the merriest guys in the European Community. I cheer as they float past, amazed they can stand at all.

  The lights go off again and the mayor begins speaking in that deep, resonant, grave, official French voice, as if he’s telling us the village just won the war or lost the war or is going to war. He makes Winston Churchill and Edward R. Murrow sound like Pépe LePew. I’m thinking about where that French voice comes from, how they conjure it—when a deafening cannonlike blast explodes and reverberates off the stone buildings, followed by a shower of gleaming white stars in the sky. Feu d’artifice! That’s what Monsieur P was telling me! Fireworks! Fireworks and Mozart.

  Rockets, flares, twirly things, sparklers, blossoms on top of blossoms on top of blossoms, reds, blues, whites, greens, gold—for twenty-five minutes, people “Oui-ing” and “Bonne-ing,” cheering like it’s the coup du monde; Mozart, Vivaldi, Dvor?ák, Ravel amplify and interpret every blast. They are the most incredible, amazing, startling, beautiful, mesmerizing fireworks I’ve seen and heard. Whatever people paid, it isn’t enough. The show is better than any Fourth of July or Memorial Day celebration in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. This little village of five hundred people is putting on a world-class fête. The finale is the Big Bang beginnings of Earth: Beethoven and huge blinding explosions followed by darkness, then Debussy and lights.

  I’m thrilled and exhausted. Kathryn is, too. We’re about to say bonsoir to Madame P and her family when Philippe taps me on the shoulder and introduces me to the mayor, Monsieur L’ Guillennec. At forty-seven years old, I’ve never met a mayor. I’ve been in the village less than a month and the mayor knows me. “Bonsoir, Marc,” he bellows, shaking my hand and adding in English, “Just like in New York, yes!”

  “Oui,” I say, “Meilleur. Merci, merci beaucoup.”

  That’s it for me. I’m done—but Madame P’s not. She calls us in for dessert. Kathryn and I look at each other and understand that any excuse would be hopeless. We shuffle back and take our previous seats, all of us, including t
he dog. Madame, Renée, and Estelle bring forth platters of desserts as if no one has eaten in days: butter cake (kouign amann); a denser butter cake (gâteau Breton); egg-and-butter pudding (far Breton); butter cookies (galettes); two peach tarts; warm crêpes with butter, strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice creams; orange sorbet; several jams; coffee; several teas; and more of Monsieur Robert’s all-purpose lambig, which after dinner is called a digestif. The kids are with us the whole time, tired but not cranky. Most of the conversation is about the washing machine and what country it represents and the name of the English movie with the car. There’s lots of discussion and disagreement and no conclusion, and no one cares.

  At 2:30, Kathryn and I are the first to try to leave. We stand and offer to help clean but we’re les invités and no one will let us. The only help we can be is to leave and let them do what they need to so they can go to sleep.

  It’s the last good time Kathryn and I have together. A week later we drive to Caen, Bayeux, the Cotentin Peninsula, and the Normandy beaches, where we do to each other what the Americans, French, British, and Canadians did to the Germans. We finish the summer in a truce, me on the third floor, she on the second, I writing fiction, she writing poems, each of us getting the last word. For appearances, we maintain a front for Monsieur and Madame P and Sharon and Jean, knowing it isn’t necessary and suspecting they already know. They’re French—romantic, nostalgic, sentimental, and fatalistic. When it comes to love, there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything is possible and nothing.

  “C’est la vie.”

  Buying a House

  A week before I’m due to return to California, Madame P knocks on the door and tells me she wants to show me something. She tells me this by taking my hand and leading me to her car, saying “Allez, allez,” which I’ve already learned means, Don’t think about anything else.

  I know she’s going to show me something beautiful or important, something I should see before I leave, because all summer she has made certain I saw, ate, smelled, touched, and heard what was spécial in Finistère, and that I appreciated it as much as she does.

  I get into her car and buckle up. She reaches over and checks to make sure I’ve done it right. Then she pulls out of her driveway like she’s entering the Grand Prix, and we’re off to wherever we’re going. All the way she talks to me as if I’m retarded, repeating words, using her hands—both of them!—gesturing, grimacing, encouraging, hoping, for her sake more than mine, that I learn the difference between vingt (twenty), vin (wine), and vent (wind); cheval (horse) and cheveux (hair); and pêche (fishing), pêches (peaches), and péché (sin) as fast as I can.

  Thirty minutes later I see the sign, Une Petite Ville de Caractère, which is not an advertisement but an official ranking. The French rank everything: restaurants, hotels, water, roads, beaches, wine, each other, me—probably a remnant from the old days and their Cartesian belief in order, when they thought that the world still made sense and they could control it. We drive into the village, and it is beautiful, like Locronan, a combination medieval town and flower garden: bumpy cobblestone streets and fourteenth-century gray stone, yellow moss-covered buildings, every one covered with flowers. Begonias, fuchsias, and geraniums hang in pots and planters from windowsills, lampposts, fences, stone walls, the entire façade of the hotel de ville and the poste. Manicured flower boxes are in front of every shop and line the road. Also along the road and in public and private gardens are the largest, brightest, red, white, and blue hydrangeas and red, yellow, orange, pink, and white roses I’ve ever seen. It’s a medieval fortress in bloom.

  Madame parks in front of yet another thirteenth-century Breton chapel with another ornate Gothic spire and stark, scare-the-hell-out-of-me sculptures of saints and calvary. And in case I still haven’t gotten the hint that this is for real and forever, there’s an ossuary, which thankfully this time is full of old living and moving bones selling post cards instead of old dead bones turning to dust. I sit in the car and oooh, and ahhh, and mean it. The setting explains the Crusades and the Inquisition and all those French Huguenots living in St. Louis and Quebec.

  We get out of the car and I begin “c’est joli-ing.” The town, “c’est joli,” the flowers, church, gardens, people, the tea we have, cookies—galettes—all are “C’est joli.” I know joli means pretty, but I pronounce it and hear it as “jolly.” The jam is jolly. The bread. Sky. Fish. Cows. Car. Everything is jolly—especially the rolling land dotted with huge rounds of hay and the heather-filled countryside; the skies and clouds and storms and rainbows; the texture and fabric of it all—small, sturdy granite houses with slate or thatch roofs, green lawns, geraniums and hydrangeas blooming everywhere, all under blue skies or gray skies or black skies filled with an illuminating light. It’s enough to make me believe in elves and leprechauns, something I haven’t done in forty years. I could almost, but not quite, reread The Hobbit.

  As we walk back to her car, Madame asks me if I like the village. She asks me this by smiling, doing a 360, and holding out her arms like St. Francis talking to the sun. “Oui,” I say, “c’est joli…” and I add the sentence that will change my life. “Mais je prefer Plobien. C’est magique.”

  I say it because I can and because it’s true. With the river meandering outside our door like it’s on permanent vacation, the salmon leaping out of the water to say “Bonjour,” the two swans who became four, the heron, and all the sailboats—French, English, Dutch, German, moving upriver and down—the greenery, lush like Ireland, it is a startling, striking, beautiful, place; spiritual even, a word I rarely use now that the true believer, holier-than-thou, born-again Christian right has taken it over and all but disgraced it.

  We drive back to Plobien, Madame chatting, me nodding, “Bonne-ing” and “Oui-ing” all the way. When the river comes into view, I smile, point at the sailboats, and say it again. “C’est joli. C’est magnifique. Magique. Incroyable.” Madame looks at me for a long time, swerves to avoid wiping out a family of Brits on bikes, and says, “C’est vrai?”

  I don’t know what she means, but I can tell from the tone of her voice I’m supposed to say yes, so I do. “Oui.”

  “Bon,” she says.

  “Oui. Bon.”

  The next thing I know I’m standing in front of the bulletin board of the local real estate agent, who is called a notaire. The board is covered with photos of houses. Beneath each photo is a description I can’t read and a price I can. Madame points at the board and says something. I understand two words, vous and achetez—you buy. From the look on her face, I see she’s serious, like, If you love it here so much, buy something. For some reason, it’s a moment of truth: have I been telling it or not? I really like it here or I don’t. I love you like I led you to believe, or I’m a shit.

  I look at the photos, look at the prices, try to read the descriptions, give up, and point to four houses in the range of 450,000 to 550,000 francs: $75,000 to $85,000. Who knows why? I have less than $5,000 in the bank. I rent a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland for $800 a month and drive an eighteen-year-old Volvo I paid $1,500 for, the single most expensive purchase I ever made in the forty-seven years of my life. Madame says “Bon” and makes the sign of an X over one of my choices because of the owner, location, color, size, garden, roof, neighbors, smell—I don’t know—and leads me back to the car.

  It’s almost noon, midi, the sacred hour, lunch, thankfully, time to go home. She turns the car in the opposite direction, and I realize I’m about to go house hunting in France. I have no money, don’t speak the language, and I’m leaving in five days. As little as I know about real estate, this doesn’t seem right. Nor does driving to the house without a phone call or appointment, but she’s French, Breton, and has lived in this village for thirty years, knows everyone and every place, so I follow. What else can I do—she’s driving!

  We stop at the first house, which is shuttered and vacant. It’s on a hill overlooking the river in Loscoat, a detached two-story house made of bric
k and a concretelike stucco with a few trees, a flower and vegetable garden, patio, about an acre of land, wraparound white plastic fence, and a full view of the river. I nod to Madame and smile, happy, amazed I could even contemplate affording something like this. In California the price of this house wouldn’t buy me a garage or a fully equipped Mercedes. Madame says “Non.”

  “No?”

  “Non.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  She says something I don’t understand. I shrug. She breaks a branch off the nearest tree, hunches up, and slowly makes her way up the stairs to the house. I get it: too many stairs. When I’m old I won’t be able to live here—or someone, probably she, will have to carry me and she’s telling me now she won’t do it. Later I found out she didn’t want me to buy in Loscoat because the taxes are much higher. Plobien is designated petite, agricultural, low-income, low-employment—the U.S. equivalent of protected property and restricted use.

  We drive to the next house, which is attached, part of a row of houses, like Chez Sally. It’s cheap, a deal, right on the quay, facing the river, in the center of Plobien, near the mairie, church, and the poste. It’s also shuttered and unoccupied. I can’t see much of anything, except that it clearly has been uninhabited for a long, long time, and it needs plenty of work. There are fix-me-uppers and fix-me-uppers, but this was like Warsaw after the war. Given my French, having read Peter Mayle, not knowing what work, labor, and material cost, not to mention that I have no money, and knowing it could be an open sore, a wound that never closes, and remembering the stories Madame told about the river flooding and salmon the size of Volkswagens swimming in her living room, I decide to let this one pass.