Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  As I spoke, lifting my chin so I could see more of him over the desk, I took in more details about Monsieur Laveau: well-preserved, maybe late sixties but looked younger, with blue eyes, a lined face, and high, almost Slavic cheekbones. He wore a chevalière, a ring with a family crest, an accessory with a certain amount of snob appeal. Nestled inside his white shirt was a loosely knotted cravat, and though his cuffs were frayed, he had a certain shabby style. A few wiry white hairs stuck out from his neat gray head, and his mustache limped at the corners like Droopy Dog’s jowls.

  “Can you be discreet?” he asked, cutting me off as I rambled on about my English major in college, my love of nineteenth-century literature, and how that had led to my stint with a big entertainment public relations firm and subsequent freelance PR work.

  “Sure. Why?” I asked.

  He sat back in his chair and frowned. It was a powerful frown, emanating disapproval and deepening the furrows all over his face.

  “My client is quite well-known,” he said. He ran his fingers along the edge of his desk. “He has published very serious books about politics and sociology. But recently, he has written a novel, his second, very loosely inspired by le grand amour de sa vie. It is this erotic novel we are talking about. I do not know the extent of your familiarity with contemporary French writing, but it is not inconceivable that you might imagine you know who the writer is.”

  I squirmed. His manner was condescending, borderline insulting.

  “Thus,” he continued, “he wishes to remain anonymous. The book will be published at next year’s rentrée, but he wants it translated into English. I don’t know whether this is because of some clause with his publisher, or something to do with the foreign rights. I simply said I would be of help in finding a translator. A woman, of course—”

  “Why a woman?” I interrupted.

  “Mais enfin, mademoiselle, this is the story of his great love,” he said reproachfully, as if I’d asked a crazy question.

  “I’m sorry, monsieur, I don’t understand.”

  “It is of no importance.” Waving his hand in the air, he droned on at length about nuance and translation. A chair spring dug into my rear. The book was probably some ghastly novelette full of details the rest of humanity should be spared, but that might be good for laughs, and it would beat teaching English or waitressing.

  “As I have had a hard time finding good translators, I will ask you to take this first chapter home with you and give me your best effort by, shall we say, next Monday.”

  “Like homework?” I smirked.

  “Precisely. If he likes your work, you will be hired. If he doesn’t like it, I will write you a check for two hundred euros and we will go our separate ways.” He gave me a large envelope. I shook his hand and walked outside. Half my rear had fallen asleep. Pins and needles poked at me all the way to the place Edmond Rostand, where I knew I’d find Bunny upstairs at Dalloyau.

  Stirring his crème, The Economist open in front of him, he neighed when he saw me. “He-e-e-y! How the hell are you?”

  “Pretty good.” I kissed him on the cheek and sat. “I took your advice. I may have a translating job.”

  “Let’s celebrate! What is it?” he asked, ordering his two favorite pastries, which also happened to be mine: an éclair au chocolat and an opéra.

  “An erotic novel, written by some anonymous guy,” I said, grinning.

  “Even better!” he said, rubbing his hands together with a leer. “Seriously, I’m pleased. You need something to keep your brain busy. It’s the only remedy,” he said.

  We split the pastries and ate them while Bunny told me about his day. He’d been to one of the trois-fois-rien discount stores and laid out his finds on the table: an Astérix coffee mug, a pocketknife, and glow-in-the-dark lip gloss.

  “What are you going to do with this?” I asked, pointing to the last item.

  “Use it. I have chapped lips.”

  “It’s lip gloss, Bunny, not lip balm.”

  “You still can’t have it,” he said, wanting me to argue with him.

  “I bet it smells girlie, like bubble gum or something,” I said.

  “I like bubble gum.”

  “It’s shiny. Shiny is not a good fashion statement for a man your age.” I picked it up. “Shiny with glitter?”

  He let me have it, conceding with a loud sneeze. Afterward, I walked to Gibert Jeune, the student bookstore, to buy a dictionary of slang, or at least obscenities. I’d wanted one for a long time, and I was sure I’d need it for my translation, which I’d decided was going to be flowery and rude, and would probably reduce me to fits of giggles. I wanted to be prepared to understand every single thing.

  4

  Pourquoi vos genoux me donnent-ils envie d’inventer des verbes transitifs?*

  —FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER,

  “Spleen à l’aéroport de

  Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle”

  How I loved reference books: their heft, the joy of randomly opening them up and finding some interesting morsel of knowledge. In L.A., a collection of them edged the far side of my desk, my first line of defense, but the only thing I’d seen in Tante Isabelle’s apartment was a dilapidated paperback dictionary, brown with half a century’s age. I’d need more to do any translation justice.

  Or rather, that’s how I justified springing for some major reference book booty: the indispensable Larousse Dictionnaire de l’argot, a Harrap’s French–English/Anglais–Français two-volume set, a paperback Dictionnaire des synonymes, and a Petit Robert—a pricey dictionary at sixty-seven euros. In the métro, I ripped the cellophane off the dictionary of slang and flipped through it like a sweaty-palmed kid.

  On a graph-paper pad, I scribbled some notes on rude language, trying not to laugh. Some words I already knew, like the fact that “pussy” in English is the same as “la chatte” in French, meaning both a cat and women’s genitals. But I hadn’t known that “une moule,” a mussel, could also mean pussy (genitalia, not feline), or that “un zizi” could be both “pénis ou vulve.” Or that “un papillon du Sénégal,” a butterfly from that country, was slang for penis.

  I flipped to “baiser.” As a noun, it means kiss, as in to give someone “un baiser.” But in the verb form, to “baiser” someone means to fuck someone. You’ve got to wonder about a language that uses the same word for both “fuck” and “kiss.”

  Or not. I remembered a conversation I’d had at a party in Venice. As usual, I was nursing a bottle of beer and trying to figure out how soon I could leave, when the man sitting next to me said, out of the blue, “You know, I would never kiss someone I wouldn’t fuck.” I nodded halfheartedly, trying to remember where I’d parked.

  “Ah, you, too.” He’d looked impressed, as if this meant we had something important in common. “Kissing is just as intimate as fucking. More, maybe.”

  I’d thought it over as I drove home. I’d thought about how dogs’ mouths were supposedly more hygienic than humans’. I’d thought about the dog lovers I knew who let their dogs lick them on the lips and how it made me appreciate cats. I’d thought about the bad kissers I’d kissed and the ones who made my knees weak—Timothy, of course, but also Robin, a fireman I’d dated for a month. It was true I’d kissed men I wouldn’t sleep with, partly because I didn’t like the way they kissed. But he’d been right about the intimate part.

  I flipped to the ubiquitous “con.” It always puzzled me how cavalierly the French threw around a word which literally meant cunt but was used to mean dumb, stupid, or useless. They use it everywhere, and while it’s nowhere near as strong or offensive as it is in English, at least American English, it wasn’t the sort of word I’d have used in front of my proper French grandmother. Harrap’s entry showed: “con, conne. n 1. a F: bloody stupid 2. F: bloody idiot; cretin; faire le c., to fool about 3. nm V: cunt.”

  On the other hand, the dictionary of slang said: “con n,m. Sexe de la femme (vulve et vagin):…se dit d’un homme stupide…” is used
for a stupid man, and listed other uses: “faire le con,” to play at being an imbecile; “à la con,” meaning ridiculous, without interest; “se retrouver comme un con,” to find oneself alone and in a grotesque situation; “si les cons volaient, tu serais chef d’escadrille,” if idiots flew, you’d be squadron leader, et cetera.

  As the train lurched into Châtelet, I remembered the famous feminist critic I’d heard lecture years ago. She’d worn a skirt made of men’s ties and transformed all words with “con” into “cunt.” It was both disturbing and hilarious to hear her speak matter-of-factly about things cuntentious, cuntemplative, and cuntroversial. Her point was that women’s sexuality existed in the English language; it had just been subsumed into the structure and made invisible. It’s not invisible in France.

  I flipped back through the pages, looking for a definition of “la chute des reins,” a phrase I’d always wondered about. It was intriguing to me that this particular part of a woman’s anatomy had a name in French. It’s the place on a woman’s back that begins where the waist starts to flare out. The literal translation is the fall, or slope, of the kidneys, which doesn’t sound pretty, but in French, it’s poetic. To me, it meant that the French language had mapped out this part of a woman’s body; it wasn’t undiscovered territory, semantically speaking: it had a name, a location.

  On the other hand, maybe it was just a fancy phrase for “ass.”

  I nearly missed my stop, rushing out as the buzzer sounded at République. A newsmagazine headline at the corner kiosk read, “Qu’avez vous fait pour les seins?” What have you done for the breasts? I did a double take. Peering closer, I saw the word was “siens,” meaning your close ones or family.

  Did merely looking up naughty words in a dictionary make me feel like everything in the world was about sex? Had I regressed to adolescence? Did the words have some kind of effect, or was it merely the suggestion of the erotic, emanating from the shapeless, anonymous text in the brown envelope in my bag? Was it awful? Was it brilliant? Was it hot? It was titillating, not knowing.

  I raced up the hill and picked up some Chinese takeout in Belleville. At home, I took out the manuscript and squinted at the poorly photocopied pages.

  Chapter One, I translated in my head. The last time I saw Eve, she was laughing and dancing on a table.

  Of course she was. I put my feet up on the coffee table and read on.

  She was the kind of woman who would have you believe she danced on tables every night, but I knew she’d come a long way from the affluent suburbs of Alexandria, Egypt, where no one dared do such things.

  I have often wondered about that last time, where she might be now, if she knows I still think about her with a combination of pain and longing that is violent in its intensity, while at the same time soothing in its reminder of my past, of who I once was, and who I became, thanks to her.

  Wow, that was clumsy. “Thanks to her” sounded awkward, even resentful. “Grace à elle,” by her grace, literally, was more delicate.

  Just the first two paragraphs were going to be harder than I’d thought. There were intricacies in French that didn’t translate easily into English. There was also the notion of feelings being violent, which was commonplace in French and seemed rarer in English.

  The next two pages described her face (of a purity of line like that of an ancient Egyptian princess—sheesh) and her body (long limbs, an exaggerated curve in the lower spine, a swan’s neck, a softly rounded belly). Yada, yada, yada. It was a tedious catalog of this woman Eve’s physical attributes: caressing her skin was one of my greatest pleasures…it was smooth and soft, a warm golden brown with the scent of delicate flowers. I lost myself in the contours of her spine, the curve of her hip—aha! “La chute des reins.” I would have to find a better phrase than “her kidneys.” Maybe “the small of her back.”

  I could do this. It would be a challenge, figuring out how to shape the text and convey the nuances of the prose while watching out for the tricky faux amis: false cognates that mean different things in each language. Spotting the obvious ones—like entrée, which means appetizer, not main course; comédien, which means actor, not comedian; and phrase, which means sentence—was second nature. But others were sneakier: actuellement means at the present time, not in fact; éxperience means both experience and experiment; and une déception is a letdown, not a lie. Some are sly on spelling: le moral means morale, versus la morale, which means morals. Even the alphabet could trip me up on one letter: the French “g” is pronounced like an English “j,” and vice versa.

  I skimmed the next few pages, translating in my head and looking up a few words before eating dinner in front of the evening news. I missed PPDA, the nickname by which TF1’s former news anchor, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, was known. Then I went to bed.

  In the dark, I thought about the chapter, wondering if anyone would ever think about my skin like that. I ran my fingers along my body. The knob of my hip bone always reminded me of cows in European landscape paintings. I traced random patterns on my thigh, figure eights and stars.

  I remembered the summer I’d spent in Paris with my grandmother when I was ten. I’d never been away from my parents for so long, and I was shy and lonely. But I made a friend or two in the parks before they went away for summer vacation, accepted the Jardin d’Acclimatation as a respectable alternative to Disneyland, and watched Des chiffres et des lettres and Japanese cartoons on TV before bedtime. But sometimes, clutching my Snoopy at night, I’d sing commercial jingles and the TV theme songs from Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Home seemed far away and confusing, and I was no longer sure where it was.

  I punched the pillow into shape. A police siren Klaxoned its two-note call in the distance, the Doppler effect changing keys as it raced by. I could live here again.

  5

  La queue c’est féminin. Le con masculin. Question de chance.*

  —SERGE GAINSBOURG

  When Pascal, an old friend I’d met during an internship I’d had at a cosmetics company, came back from Greece, we met up for lunch near his office, at a glitzy bistro catering to the fashion industry, modeling agencies, and wealthy foreigners shopping on the avenue Montaigne. After two weeks in July on a beach in Páros with his boyfriend, Florian, he was dark brown and sported a neatly trimmed goatee. In a linen suit over a vintage metal concert T-shirt, he looked like a well-dressed pirate, as befitted the fashion editor for a men’s magazine. I kissed his cheek and rubbed his shiny, shaved head.

  We sat at a corner table. Pascal waved to the other diners, texted and talked to his office on his cell phone, and threw me apologetic glances. I ordered an overpriced salade Californienne, with avocados and shrimp, because that’s precisely the kind of food I flew six thousand miles for, and watched a group of well-dressed Middle Eastern women with perfect eyebrows stroll by, laden with Chanel and Ungaro shopping bags.

  “Alors. Raconte-moi tout,” Pascal demanded, hanging up the phone.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I missed Paris, so I found a way to come back.” I attempted a Gallic shrug. He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.

  “Je ne te crois pas,” he said. “Did you win the lottery? Did someone die?”

  Heartbreak in French is chagrin d’amour. It means a disappointment in love, and it’s like food poisoning: everyone knows what it is and sympathizes. It’s probably covered under the state’s socialized medicine umbrella. Arrêt de travail pour cause de chagrin d’amour. I told him about Timothy.

  “C’est très people!” he exclaimed. The word “people,” pronounced “pipeul” à la française, had become the term for celebrity or worldly gossip. Trendy places were described as hyper-people, celebrity sightings photographed in the paper came under the rubric “le monde des people,” chic nightclubs were where the “nice people” hung out. Pascal flipped open his phone and scrolled through the display.

  “What is his name? Timothy comment?” he asked. “I have to tell Florian. Il adore les potins!” he said, press
ing the speed dial.

  “It’s not gossip and that’s not funny!” I said, snatching the phone out of his hand. “I’m telling you in confidence. Besides, I’m still getting over it.”

  “I am sorry, chérie,” he said, clucking sympathetically. “Can I tell him when you’re over it?” he asked.

  “No!” I glared at him. He picked at his smoked salmon and blinis.

  “De toute façon, you shouldn’t date well-known people,” he remarked, watching a plate of fried calamari go by. “I should’ve ordered that.” Turning back to me, he added, “It’s always a disaster.” He frowned and picked at the knife pleat in his trousers.

  “He wasn’t well-known when I met him,” I said.

  “Still. It’s a rule. In any case, you shouldn’t fall in love with them.”

  “How are you supposed to stop yourself from falling in love with someone?”

  “You can’t. But it doesn’t matter; now you’re in Paris. Eventuellement, you will get over it,” he said, waving to someone at the other end of the restaurant.

  It wasn’t comforting. Eventuellement, the mother of faux amis, means possibly.

  We ordered dessert, but he got another call and had to rush back to the office. I took the manuscript out of my bag and ate my mousse au chocolat alone.

  My education at the hands of women had been thorough. I felt confident in my appeal, I had never wanted for partners. My current girlfriend, Daphne, was a striking, thin blonde with pouty—