Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  “No, it is the way in which you Americans communicate approbation. It is not, however, how we do it in France. I am not your pom-pom girl.” I bit my lip to keep from laughing at the image of Bernard in a pleated miniskirt. He continued, “I am not going to tell you your work is good in the hope that such a lie will encourage you. You will either take intelligent criticism and work harder and or you will fail. Un point, c’est tout,” he said and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers.

  I tapped my foot in annoyance. “You know, you’re right. This is a French thing. We, les Américains,” I said, deciding to speak for my nation, “think you work better if you are given encouragement and accurate direction, whereas you think scathing criticism is the only way.”

  “I was not scathing,” he said, studying his fingernails.

  “You threatened to fire me! And it’s not like I really care about how good a translator I am. It’s not my life’s work,” I shot back. It wasn’t true: I did care about the translation, but I was taking refuge in snottiness.

  “Yes, but this book is someone else’s life’s work, and you will either do it justice, or I will find someone else,” he said, leaning forward.

  “Why are we even having this conversation? Why don’t you just find someone else?” I asked, infuriated by the repeated threat.

  “Because the other chapters were good.”

  I was silent.

  “You look surprised,” he said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I kept paying you,” he said, as if this were sufficient proof.

  “You could’ve told me,” I said, reproachfully.

  “Mademoiselle, do you think I don’t have other egos to massage? The egos of writers? Is that not fatiguing enough?” He scowled at me. It’s a good feint, exasperation, a variation on impatience, usually the first line of defense with the French.

  “Monsieur, do you seriously think I worry about your level of fatigue?” I asked, with equal exasperation. The ensuing tense exchange of glares felt like our first real conversation. I searched his severe features for a sign. A smile at that moment would have won me over forever, but his face didn’t change.

  I plucked at a ragged bit of cuticle, peeling the skin back. Blood oozed out, lining the edge of my thumbnail in red. I made a fist around it and stood up. Monsieur Laveau held out a stack of pages across the desk.

  “Je ne comprends pas,” I said, not taking them.

  He shook them at me. “Rewrite it. It’s too soft, too sweet. If you read it again, you’ll see it’s more subtle than purple. And though we are near the end—”

  “We are? But they’re just getting to know each other!” I said, taken aback.

  “Though we are near the end,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t interrupted him, “I will not need it for two weeks. I am going out of town for a short trip.”

  “Merci, monsieur.” I put the pages in my bag.

  “Je vous en prie, mademoiselle.” Bernard walked me to the door, and for one startled second, I thought he was going to pat me on the shoulder, but he reached over and handed me my umbrella.

  “A bientôt,” he said.

  20

  You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris? They got the metric system. They wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is. They call it a “royale with cheese.”

  —QUENTIN TARANTINO AND ROGER AVARY, Pulp Fiction

  I climbed the stepladder in the kitchen and put the translated pages on top of the cupboard next to a dusty red ice bucket shaped like an apple. Of course, I had a pretty good memory of the old translation, not to mention a copy of it on my hard drive, so the gesture was purely symbolic, but I wanted to start from scratch, see if I could trick myself.

  I reread the French chapter. At first, I couldn’t concentrate. The words gamboled around the page, and I kept reading the same phrases over and over again, hearing them like annoying riffs from a bad song that was stuck in my head. I forced myself to focus: the narrator and Eve back at the hotel, the conversation about masks, the blow job. It all looked the same to me, and I heard the same English words in my head, familiar, obvious. Writing it differently would be a matter of nuance, not meaning. Less sweet, he’d said.

  Eve’s hair tumbled around her face. I couldn’t see her expression as she made her way down my body…

  Did “made her way down my body” sound stupid? Affected?

  She unzipped my pants and pulled my cock—

  I had used “cock” in the previous version. “Cock” was not a word you’d find in “un roman à l’eau de rose,” I thought self-righteously. What was Bernard talking about?

  She wrapped her lips around—

  Do lips wrap? I couldn’t think. Was it possible to say “wrap your lips around a sandwich”? Did “she wrapped her lips around my penis” sound right? The languages blurred; I felt uncertain of my command of either one.

  Althea called this the Franglais syndrome, when you can’t speak either language, and when you do, the words feel awkward, borrowed, slightly wrong. Among the symptoms were forgetting how to spell words like “realize” (réaliser) and “sympathize” (sympathiser), or confusing French and English slang, like saying you were going to the ATM to get liquid, forgetting that “liquide” meant cash but “liquid” did not.

  The slang was more confusing considering there were a slew of English words that French had appropriated but given different meanings: “cool,” in French, meant laid-back and relaxed, not hip; “space,” an adjective, meant weird; and “destroy,” also an adjective, meant grungy-punk. There were even stranger ones: “hard” meant hard-core or gnarly; “trash” meant trashy, but in a punk, reprobate way; and “roots,” an adjective, described the neohippie youth culture trend of wearing baggy clothes and shunning designer labels.

  Even entire phrases made their way over the ocean: “Spare me the gory details” became “Epargne-moi les détails gore.” My current fave was “partir en live,” a hybrid construction. It meant when things go to hell, and was derived from the chaos that can ensue when a program is aired live on radio or TV.

  I looked down at the text, seeing the word “cock” again. There was also the inevitable stupid factor. Obscene words in another language always seem tainted with school yard childishness, as if saying them makes you a foulmouthed tot. “Suce-moi” sounded idiotic to my ears, idiotic and embarrassing. It meant “suck me,” but there was something about the double sibilance, or maybe it was the long “u,” that made me want to snicker. Were vowels inherently ridiculous? Or smarmy and insidious? Dr. Suce. Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss-moi. Suce-ie and the Banshees. Suce-alito, California. I suce-spect I am suce-ceptible to suce-urrations.

  Maybe it was the onomatopoeia aspect: “suck” sounded like the end of the act, the “ck” like the final pop when you remove a suction cup. “Suce” sounded like the act itself, as if to say it was to do it. The “s” sound insinuated itself into the ear like a hiss and lingered; it didn’t have an ending.

  I picked up a pair of manicure scissors and trimmed seven split ends, a nice time-suce. I was getting nowhere. I e-mailed my friend Marielle in New York. She spoke four languages fluently and her current boyfriend was French: “Does ‘suce-moi’ make you squirm?” I wrote. I got an answer from her BlackBerry in minutes: “Ha! Know what’s even worse? When Raoul says ‘léche-moi les tétons’! I hear ‘lick my teats,’ like he’s a cow, and it makes me practically spit with laughter. Why do you ask?”

  “Am trying to figure out why sex and slang words sound so lame in other languages. My internal four-year-old is running around the playground shouting bad words and screeching with laughter. I can’t make her stop,” I wrote back.

  Maybe repeating the words over and over again would neutralize them. Maybe that would peel away the layers of association until I got to a core, a neutral agglomeration of letters.

  Cock. Cock, cock, cock, cock. Bite. Bite, bite, bite. Zizi. Zob. Cul. Ass, ass, ass, ass. Chatte. Foufounett
e, foufoune, founette. Minette, mimi, moule. Minou, minou, minou. Pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy galore, pussy ad nauseam. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt…

  It didn’t work. I couldn’t make myself hear them any differently. The meanings stuck, stubborn and defiant; I couldn’t peel them away, reduce them to sounds.

  She wrapped her lips around my cock and pulled me into her mouth. I felt enclosed in a soft, tender prison.

  “Suck me,” I breathed, raking my fingers through her hair. The slickness of her mouth contrasted with the agile muscle of her tongue, as she explored me, learning the dimensions of my sex. She fondled my balls, teasing them into tight, swollen stones. I closed my eyes as she began moving up and down, letting myself drown in the sensation, feeling how simple and uncomplicated pleasure was, could be. I opened my eyes to watch her wide mouth curved around me, her swaying breasts, the nipples a dusky pink, the color of arousal.

  She looked up, her green eyes glittering. With surprising strength, she pulled my hips closer. Her hair loosened and fell forward like a curtain, tickling my thighs. She reached underneath me and grasped my buttocks, toying with the tense, sensitive circle before delicately pushing a wet finger inside. I came with a shout…

  Didn’t seem purple to me. Nuh-uh. Not in tone, neither. I saved the new version and got up to examine the sorry state of the pantry. Three cans of kidney beans, one can of corn, bœuf en gelée (not mine), and a box of sugar cubes. In the fridge: four sprouting garlic cloves, reduced fat salad dressing, fromage blanc, and a bottle of champagne. Not much for Iron Chef to work with. I put on rain gear and went to the Galeries Lafayette Gourmet, the nearest designer supermarket.

  I bounded down the aisles, flinging exotic products into my cart with reckless abandon: jasmine tea jelly, merlot jam, Italian white chocolate almond butter, rose-petal mustard, walnut bread. I found Dutch caramel waffle cookies, stroopwafels, that you place on a mug of hot tea to let the steam soften them; tarama with baby blinis and crème fraîche; and glacéed cherries and candied pears dipped in dark chocolate. I loved food shopping in general, but a gourmet supermarket was a kind of temple, a place I went when I wanted to be reminded how much I loved the French. I picked up a bag of artisanal muesli, tied with gingham ribbon and containing mulberries and macadamia nuts. My phone rang. It was Clara.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m conducting a sociological study at Galeries Lafayette Gourmet. I think the French are obsessed with bodily functions,” I said. “I’m staring at a bag of muesli that has ‘ facilite le transit intestinal’ written on it in a red starburst.”

  “What do they put in the U.S.?”

  “High fiber. It’s succinct, it’s nicely euphemistic, everyone knows what it means, and there’s no need to mention intestines or facilitating travel therein,” I said and tossed the bag in my cart. When I saw the eight-euro price tag, I put it back on the shelf. “Also, the whole ‘crottin de chavignol’ thing,” I continued. “In America, no one would ever call a food item ‘a turd of something,’ no matter how fragrant the cheese was.”

  “But no one thinks of it as a turd of cheese, it’s just an expression for the shape,” she protested.

  “Look, you can’t avoid the meaning just because you don’t necessarily see it that way. Anything that’s a turd in English is a turd. That it’s a turd in French and also refers to one of my favorite cheeses does not take away from the fact that the description refers to a turd,” I said, taking a childish glee in the repetition of the word.

  “Tu me fais chier,” she remarked.

  “See, and that’s another thing. You don’t say ‘you’re being a pain in the ass’ or even ‘you’re being shitty’ in French; instead, you say ‘you are making me shit,’” I said.

  “I know. I was adding to your theory. Quod erat demonstrandum: we are obsessed with shit,” she said. “You have ruined my appetite,” she added.

  “Sorry.” I passed a row of brightly colored syrups in glass bottles: fig, ginger, geranium, poppy, pink cotton candy.

  “Ne t’inquiète pas, I’m on a diet. How is le beau ténébreux?” she asked, referring to Olivier as Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome.

  “Addictive.” I sighed. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning and I’m pining away.”

  “Oh, là, mais c’est grave!” she exclaimed, laughing, and hung up.

  I pushed my cart to the artful fruit stand and loaded up on barquettes of physalis, sweeter relatives of the tomatillo in Chinese lantern husks, and paper baskets of wild strawberries. A man in a black suit bumped his cart into mine. He apologized, glanced at my cart, and asked what I was going to do with the strawberries.

  “Eat them,” I answered. “Plain.”

  “Quelle bonne idée,” he said, taking a couple of baskets himself. “Would you like to eat them together?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. I wheeled over to the cheese counter and studied the display, blushing, absurdly flattered.

  “Alors, la belle dame, qu’est ce que je vous sers?” asked the cheese man. I looked up with a start. Did I look different? Was there something going on that I didn’t know about? I’d made no effort, and within five minutes, I’d been hit on and paid a compliment.

  “Un Saint-Félicien, un fougerus, et une rouelle de Tarn, s’il vous plaît,” I said, giving him a quick smile. He wrapped up the cheeses and told me to come back soon. I noticed he wore a pink heart sticker on his apron.

  By the checkout line, there was a red and pink sign decorated with hearts announcing that today was the first in a series of Saturday night singles’ shopping nights, sponsored by Yahoo! Personals France.

  An exhausted Olivier came over after rehearsal. There were dark circles under his eyes and his jaw was blue with stubble. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with chèvre and walnut bread while he told me about having to fire the lighting designer.

  “And you? How are you?” he asked.

  “Bernard told me to redo this week’s pages. According to him, they read like a Harlequin novel,” I said.

  “I find that very hard to believe,” he said solemnly.

  “Stop making fun.” I poked his arm. “You try translating French porn.”

  “Ah bon? C’est de la pornographie?” he asked, surprised. Flashing me a wide, sharky grin, he leaned closer. “How pornographic?” he asked. He grabbed my feet. “Very pornographic?” he asked, tickling me. I shrieked, kicking and laughing until I wrenched free and caught my breath. He leaned toward me again, waggling his fingers.

  “Stop it,” I said, batting his hands away. “What do you know about it? You never told me.” He sat up and rubbed his forehead.

  “Not much. Bernard edits some interesting people. I met him for drinks a while ago to see if he might intercede with Rémi Le Jaa for me. Le Jaa is like you—complètement sauvage—but not just in the morning. He lives most of the year in an ashram in Kerala, doesn’t do interviews, and has never allowed any of his books to be turned into films, but I thought if Bernard approached him for me, it might be possible.”

  “That would be a big deal?” I asked. I went into the kitchen and brought back two mugs of mint tea.

  “To get the film rights to a book by Le Jaa? Not in Hollywood.” Olivier shrugged. “Here, yes. Enormous. But it gets complicated: now le tout Paris knows that he is coming out with a new work, his first in eight years.”

  “Does that make it more difficult?” I asked. He tapped out a cigarette.

  “I don’t know. It focuses a lot of attention on him, certes, but it might make it easier to get financing…” He trailed off. “The curious thing is that Bernard let slip that he was eagerly awaiting a semiautobiographical roman à clef, and without actually saying anything, he implied that it was by Le Jaa.”

  “So you think I’m translating his book?” I asked, confused. “But I’m not a professional translator! If Le Jaa’s new book is such a big deal, surely Bernard would find someone experienced and well-known to do the translation?” He shrug
ged.

  I didn’t know Rémi Le Jaa’s work, though his name, like a recently learned word, kept popping up everywhere. How funny to think that my author might be famous and that his characters might be based on real people. “Strange name,” I remarked. “What’s his most famous book?”

  “It’s a pseudonym. He’s only written a few. The one everyone knows is about a gay man living in Saigon before the war, La Vie de bateau.”

  “Is he gay?” I asked. Olivier shrugged again. “Well, that would be interesting,” I said. “The book I’m working on is the story of this guy’s love affair with a woman named Eve. He meets her when he’s still involved with his girlfriend, falls for her, takes her to Venice, et cetera. Laveau told me it was the author’s retelling of his great love. He also told me I’m almost done.” I tried to remember what else Monsieur Laveau had said about the author, but it wouldn’t come to me. I sat back on the sofa and drank my tea, stretching out a hand to stroke Olivier’s neck. He leaned forward to kiss me. He tasted of mint and smoke.

  “Are you going to read me any of the pornographic novel?” he murmured.

  “Maybe…” There couldn’t be anything wrong with reading him one choice scene.

  “I like very much to be read to.”

  “I could be convinced,” I said, pretending to think about it. “It might require some effort on your part.”

  “Quel genre d’effort?” he asked. His hands were warm underneath my shirt.

  “Continue, je te dirai.”

  21

  J’avais envie de voir en vous cet amour.*

  —SERGE GAINSBOURG, “La Javanaise”

  It’s funny how quickly life can change, I mused one morning after Olivier left. All of a sudden, I was half of a couple, when I’d thought I never would be again. He kept a razor and a toothbrush in the bathroom, and I knew he’d tucked a spare pack of cigarettes in the desk drawer. He came over after rehearsal, we ate at home or at a neighborhood bistro, and then we’d make love and sleep. We had dinner plans with Althea and Ivan, and brunch plans with his sister Sandrine and her boyfriend. Sometimes, he’d sleep in, but most of the time, he woke up early to buy bread and the papers, we’d eat together, and then he’d leave midmorning.