Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Since I was able to roll an r better than the other guy and do the fancy twist of a tricky French transition word like dont as in “dont vous faites partie” (of which you belong or are a part of), I never really buckled down on other specific grammatical principles or subjunctive uses, the stuff an advanced knowledge of French requires. I picked up bad habits, taking short cuts through phrases I knew were wrong but that I thought perfectly conveyed my point. I also tried physical gestures to reinforce what I was trying to say, instead of just phrasing things correctly. Once during a case of stomach flu, I needed to tell the doctor I’d been vomiting, but instead of shifting into the imperfect, I used the present je vomis (I’m vomiting), then stood up from his desk and mimicked a fake retch. The doctor in question pushed back from his seat thinking it was the real thing, only for me to fake retch again then say “dans le passé” (in the past), moving my arm as a way to signal time past. He quickly wrote me a prescription and handed it to me at arm’s length.

  Although exhausting, this way of talking has become the norm for me, and the Frankenstein delivery I’d cobbled together I eventually took to be proper French, a proper French that would forever betray me no matter how quick my cadence.

  French tourists looking for something in my neighborhood have stopped to ask me countless times where the Canal St. Martin or the Gare de l’Est is. And when I start giving directions, proud that I can finally be of help, they hear my accent and wave me off, gunning the car and thanking me cruelly, in English, of course. “No tank you. We find it ourself. Bye bye.”

  Otto and Bibi were no different. When I’d pick them up at school, I’d say hello to their friends and try to crack a joke in a pathetic dad attempt to gain fifth-grade street cred, lacing some of my speech with slang I’d learned along the way. It bombed, of course, but what was more painful was the way Bibi and Otto cringed, embarrassed by their father’s accent. Here I was thinking I was a cosmopolitan figure in their eyes, someone who’d lived in New York and Paris and wrote for magazines. Instead, to them I’m Luigi from Mario Brothers who says in botched English, “I work hard for that you go to school! You will be beeeg success my niños.”

  Meanwhile, Anaïs over time morphed from coach to crutch, one I’d use too often for things I probably could have explained, but didn’t want to. I’d be caught up with some horrible technical support call, something involving the Wi-Fi router, the technician blaring on about a WEP password or a reboot button. But instead of gutting it out (which would have helped me more in the long run), I’d turn tail and run down the stairs pushing the phone in her annoyed face like a child whose school principal just called.

  “It’s the guy from Orange. He’s explaining how to hook up the Livebox thingy.”

  “Why do I have to deal with this shit, can’t you?”

  “Please!” I’d beg, close to tears, pointing at the phone. “He’s waiting!”

  I never wanted to admit I didn’t understand. I never asked people to repeat themselves or to just slow down. Instead, I developed an impressive tic of laughing on cue or dropping throwaway expressions, such as, “Ah, bon?” (really?) or “dis donc” (well, then) or “vraiment?” (you’re kidding me), which gave people the impression I understood (which I didn’t). They’d buy into my sham, taking it as a cue to speak faster, use more slang and subjunctive, and thus leave me to respond only with more dis doncs and ah bons and vraiments, all the time nodding and laughing and gulping wine, hating them for making me do something so strenuous.

  And each time, without fail, there’d be that invariable fork in the road of the conversation. The person might be discussing something hideously boring like the French thirty-five-hour work week, starting with “Une fois, il y a eu un type du bureau” (Once, there was a guy from the office), but I’d forget the word type in this case didn’t mean kind. It meant guy. And because of this, I assumed he was describing a type of office, not a guy from the office. The conversation soldiered on, my friend telling me this type du bureau was being liquidé meaning fired (liquidated), me off the reservation imagining a type of office being cleaned. When he told me his union was going to fight it, I responded in turn, “Yeah. If anything, just ask them to clean it over the weekend.”

  It wasn’t until I’d reached the bottom of the staircase postparty that I’d realize why his confused face flashed pity. By then it was too late to clear things up, just as it was too late for the retort I wanted to make at another dinner the Thursday before or that incisive position I could have taken up at the lunch on Sunday had I understood that faire le pont meant take a long weekend, not build a bridge, in Provence. All of this “passable” French I practiced was a day late and dollar short, and it always seemed to end with me at the bottom of a stairwell kicking a wall.

  Mind you, this wasn’t the first time my French betrayed me. Twenty-five years earlier, I’d spent my junior year abroad in the town of Aix-en-Provence, and even then, I was learning the hard way that language can turn on a dime, word order can make you look like a fool, and the placement of one tiny insignificant letter can get you into hot water. Over the Easter holiday, my American friends and I took a three-day trip to Bordeaux, and our hotel room was burglarized. When we made the declaration at the police precinct, I mistakenly told the gendarmes that we’d been (violé) raped instead of (volé) robbed. I couldn’t understand why they were so shocked by my story and kept insisting over and over that we reaffirm we’d really been raped. “Of course we were raped! I was raped. They were raped. We were all raped! Why do you think we’re here?” The women with me didn’t understand much French either, so when the officer asked them if all this was true, they smiled and said oui.

  Determined to not make the same errors this go-round, I started to bone up on my mechanics, riffling through Bibi’s grammar book late at night, or buying some Rosetta Stone software, or reading the daily Liberation in the morning out loud to Anaïs. But as I gradually improved, I sensed French friends’ disappointment. To them this improved French of mine was plastic surgery gone bad, and it was clear after talking to me for five minutes, this new full-of-himself quasi-fluent John was indigestible, frightening almost. It was as if I’d become a witch. They liked the older John better, l’Américain who could speak French—not another French guy. There were enough of them already.

  And because of this, they quickly lost patience with me, as if to say, “All right, John, you want to play in the big leagues? Here we go.” They didn’t slow down when talking about Derrida. They made references to fringe politicians and TV hosts from the eighties, people I couldn’t possibly have known. And all of a sudden, I found myself back in the same place I’d been before—laughing and slamming back wine in between ah bons? and dis doncs.

  The problem wasn’t just the accent, though. It was context. No matter how well I could pronounce words or expressions, there was no terroir in my vocabulary. Words all meant the same to me—almost like those black and white letter magnets you stick to a refrigerator. Table, chaise, connard, pute, vélo, merde were all interchangeable and nondenominational, standing next to each other in my brain like a bad haiku. Since they had no meaning to me, I’d invariably say something I shouldn’t.

  Once at Bibi’s birthday party, I pulled aside one of her friends, Gaspard, who was the same age as Bibi and who was struggling to clip together one of his Beyblade tops. Beyblades, if you don’t know, are a Japanese invention, where your top is given a name and is constructed according to its power or speed, and they were the craze at one point in Paris.

  “Gaspard,” I said. “Ta toupie—elle est foutue, tu sais?” (Gaspard, that top of yours is fucked up, did you know that?”)

  Gaspard stopped and looked at me. He didn’t know what foutue exactly meant, nor did I really, but simultaneously, both of us sensed something was off. And not until Gaspard’s mom swooped in to let him know that “John speaks French as a deuxième langue” did Gaspard grasp that I was handicapped. D
eep down, though, I think, I did know the difference and said the word anyway. Only because, for once, I wanted my words to have impact; to generate a reaction from someone, a change from my usual emasculated attempts to speak. Sure, it was extreme to call a kid’s toy fucked up, but in a way, it made me feel whole again.

  But what I actually said was worse. Foutue is the past participle of foutre, and in parlance it means ruined or fucked up. But if you look it up, foutre literally means “sperm or vaginal secretion.” Yup. I told a kid his toy was covered in sperm.

  I’d been using foutre and foutu willy nilly for a decade almost, not realizing how often I was saying the word sperm. It’s a miracle I’m not locked up. The more I thought about all the variations of foutre the more I wanted to vomit.

  “Fuck you” in French is Va te faire foutre. And it’s a phrase I’ve used tons. What I now know I’m really saying is, “Go shoot sperm on yourself.”

  Another John specialty is “I don’t care,” which in French is Je m’en fous. Literally translated? “I’m shooting sperm on myself.”

  At times, if I’m really angry, I might say, “I really don’t give a shit,” which in English isn’t great but at least it’s not “J’en ai rien, mais rien à foutre,” which technically means (yes, you heard it right), “I have nothing, and I mean nothing to shoot out in terms of sperm.” How did Anaïs not crack up laughing when I’d told her I “had nothing to shoot out in terms of sperm” if we got a parking ticket, or that “I’m shooting sperm on myself” what someone else thought? And did these French parents know what they were saying when they told their kids to stop bullshitting them or to stop lying? Because I swear I just heard one mother say to the word, “Stop ejaculating on my face, Oscar, and pick up your toys!”

  This language my mother had always told me was the mother tongue of Voltaire and Baudelaire and Rimbaud was sounding more and more like the language of PornHub.

  * * *

  I once asked Anaïs what the first sentence was she remembers learning in English.

  “Brian is in the kitchen.”

  “Sorry?” I replied, looking over my shoulder to see if a man was actually standing there in our kitchen.

  “No, idiot,” she reassured me. “That was the first sentence I ever learned.”

  “And the second?” I asked.

  “Where is Jenny,” Anaïs said, “the sister of Brian?”

  Anaïs told me she remembers these phrases perfectly because Brian and Jenny always intrigued her. Were they twins? Why was Brian the only one in the kitchen? she wondered. And more important, where was Jenny? Where was Jenny!?

  I love listening to Anaïs’s English, almost as much as I do her French. She has a solid base, sure, better than my French probably, but it is her hiccups that stand out, like when she asked if we could rent a canooie (canoe) on the canal over Easter, or when she’ll repeatedly order carrot cake in an Elmer Fudd accent, pronouncing it cowit (carrot) cake. She’ll also sometimes mix British words into her jargon, such as jumper to describe a sweater, or use old-fashioned words like trousers to show me what she just bought at Zara.

  I’ve learned a lot about French indirectly from her, especially in the questions she poses to me about English, questions I find petty only because I never know the answer. “What’s the difference between I could and I might, for example?” she’d ask. “Or between shouldn’t and shan’t.” When I told her I didn’t know, she didn’t believe me, because for Anaïs, the rules of language are set in stone, and if you don’t have rules, well, you don’t have a language. Remarks like “It’s just like that. You just say it that way” don’t cut it with her.

  And now I know why. French is a complicated, rule-obsessed mess, and it’s been that way for a while. In 1685, France created L’Académie Française, a council that has overseen the preservation of the French language throughout the centuries. L’Académie is made up of forty members ranging from historians, to poets, to novelists, to philosophers and scientists, all called “immortals.” Meetings are held once a week in private, and once a year in public (the first Thursday of December), and each member wears a long black coat with swanky green leaf motifs. Every member enjoys Supreme Court judge–type tenure, meaning they’re members for life.

  L’Académie serves as the official arbiter of the rules and usage, vocabulary, and grammar of French, compiling new words each year for an all-encompassing dictionnaire that’s been published only nine times since the late 1600s. None other than the president of the République himself is the “protector” of the institution, no different from how Donald Trump, I guess, stands watch over English. Many have credited L’Académie with helping the French language to evolve while maintaining a fundamental link to the past. This, they say, has allowed France to preserve its culture while other countries have watched theirs washed away by globalization. Others say L’Académie is a conservative institution that has made French sexist, obtuse, full of contradictions—what the French love to call “poétique.”

  I realized this poetic-ness the first time I read one of my own pieces translated into French, because my first reaction was “Who is this pretentious asshole?” The text was fluffy and built to impress. There were lots of roundabout descriptions and tissued phrases and metaphors referencing French things I’d never heard of. Plus, it was peppered with nauseating jeux des mots (puns), which you often find in headlines of French newspapers, puns I wasn’t smart enough to come up with. There’s a special embarrassment one feels when you know people are reading what you wrote and finding it pompous. It’s like looking out your window and realizing the entire block has been watching you play air guitar in your bedroom. (This has happened to me.)

  Reading French John made me realize I could never master this language. This was the writing of some pretty boy in the west of Paris wearing Docksiders and a sweater tied over his shoulders; that or a tortured Rimbaud type without the talent. France wasn’t helping in my pursuit of the language, either. Each year, Anglicisms, it seemed, were cropping up left and right in the French lexicon, like a whack-a-mole game. And I’m not just talking about le chewing gum and le weekend, le coming out and le fist-fucking, English words the French have conveniently co-opted simply out of laziness or pretending Americans are the only ones who practice something. There were verbs as well; English verbs actually, but with an -er tacked on at the end to make them seem French. At the Apple store near Opera, I was told to rebooter my computer in order to uploader my files to iCloud before I handed it over to them for repair. And at the co-op meeting, I was asked whether we were planning to boycotter an owner’s plan to renovate the ventilation system. Bibi even asked if I would liker her photo on Instagram and become one of her followeurs. You heard it right—follow-eurs. And sometimes the English words were used incorrectly. Hip parties were called hype soirees, and if a guy was a loser, you were told he was “la loose”—they’d spell it with two o’s and an s but pronounce it looze. Odd.

  It also seemed like anything or anyone trying to position itself as young or modern had to have some English in it. I saw in a recent magazine a list of leading “start-up” (yes they say start-up) design firms in France: Be Dandy, Brand Brothers, Bug, Coconuts, Creative Room, Curious, Future Brand—and that was just to the F’s. Restaurants near us opened with names like Blend and Flesh and Big Fernand. A microbrewery on the canal was called Paris Brewing Company (PBC). There was even a British fish and chips joint called The Sunken Chip. All in Paris, all near me, all making me mad. I told a friend recently if I were ever to launch a start-up or a business, I’d make sure to go as French as possible, something like Jean-Claude Bernard et Associés. That to me would be edgy.

  Despite the tsunami of English flooding in, French society was doubling down on its effort to build a wall to keep it out. French cinema and French TV continued their age-old policy of obliging networks and studios to dub shows and movies instead of subtitling them, which in the
case of a series like Duck Dynasty doesn’t really make much sense. If anything, it creates chaos. The way the dubbing works is the English version remains, but at a lower volume underneath the French version. This means the viewer listens to a character explaining how to shoot a crossbow in hillbilly American only to be shouted over two seconds later by someone speaking proper French. Two voices run concurrently and neither is synched to the character’s lips, so if you understand both languages, your brain explodes.

  Advertising hasn’t been spared this French protectionism either. Any poster in the metro or at bus stops that features something written in English at its top, something very difficult to understand, such as U le Boss, has to be followed by an asterisk, which means there’s a French translation waiting for readers at the bottom. I’ve never noticed people scratching their heads, looking perplexed at these posters. Nor do I see them bending forward and squinting at the small type along the bottom, Vous, le Patron. In just the same way a voice comes right after the credits for the reality show Le Bachelor (The Bachelor) and says sotto voce “Le Gentleman célibataire,” these French posters and dubbed shows are meant to convey the message that “yes, English does exist, and we’re going to pretend like it doesn’t.”

  * * *

  Around this time, I can’t really say when, I regressed. Like an adolescent who suddenly starts playing with dolls again, I began to fake like I didn’t understand French, just so people would slow down or take care of me, or both. When I called the bank, I’d press the 2 button on the menu “to speak in English” as an act of protest. In the past, if Anaïs and I argued, I’d battle her French to French, going toe to toe. Now, though, I threw in the towel, getting off my chest what I had to say in English, and when she’d come back at me in French, I’d quickly deflect what she said with a shrug of the shoulders and that cop-out line “I have no idea what you’re saying.”