Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  A cruel trick for fate to play on me. A TV reporter was interested in my opinion of the one exhibition in the whole of Paris I didn’t want to go to. And if there was the slightest chance that Nadialie might be interested enough to give Alexa TV exposure, then of course I had to make damn sure that Nathalie went along.

  ‘No, I’m sure it’ll be very good,’ I said. ‘I just think I’ll be sick with jealousy’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Nathalie very nearly gave my hand a consoling stroke. But she stopped herself at the last moment and turned slightly away from our eavesdroppers. ‘Well, we can go together tomorrow, then you will at least be there with a lover. Even if her photo is there with twenty of her lovers.’

  She seemed to find this irony highly amusing, unlike me.

  If only Alexa knew how much suffering I was going through just for her.

  4

  MEANWHILE, I HAD to put myself through some pain of a different kind.

  It had been all too easy to set up a small business in Paris. I’d imagined that I’d have to spend days crawling on my knees from one government office to the next, begging a series of sadistic pen-pushers to add their stamp to my dog-eared application form until I finally got to the last hurdle, only to be told that the ink had faded too much on the first stamp and that I had to go back to the beginning and start again.

  But no, all I did was go along to a massive domed building called the Bourse du Commerce and pick up a form. I returned at the same time the next day with the filled-out form and a cheque for less than the price of a small bottle of Chanel No. 5, and I was the ‘président’ of my very own company.

  The only bit of the form that I was slightly concerned about was the section where you had to choose exactly what kind of business you were setting up. There were various types of limited-liability companies with different tax régimes and different ways of screwing money out of you if you went bust, but I didn’t intend to go bust anyway, so I opted for a ‘micro-entreprise’, which sounded small enough not to attract too much attention from the bureaucrats.

  How wrong I was.

  Signing that form was a bit like pricking your finger with a needle then dipping your hand into the Amazon.

  The first piranha to reach me was a guy in a sleeveless fleece and a check shirt.

  It was late, just before closing time, and I was resting my feet, reading the newspaper over a cup of Orange Pekoe. I didn’t really pay any attention to the guy at first, except to do a double-take at his impeccable colour coordination. Sand-brown fleece, beige-and-green shirt, khaki chinos, light-brown suede shoes. Even his hair matched, a kind of chestnut-and-grey flecked combination. Here, I felt, was a guy whose sock drawer was graded in a strict spectrum pattern.

  I returned to reading the football pages. I couldn’t work out why there was never any mention of Alexa’s new stepfather. He buys one of the biggest clubs in England, and no one talks about him? He had to be even shadier than I suspected.

  But my attention wandered back to the sockdrawer man again when I realized that he was arguing loudly in French with Benoît, who wasn’t an arguing-loudly kind of guy.

  ‘You must translate everything,’ the sock-drawer guy was saying. ‘Cup of tea, for example.’

  ‘But every French person knows what a cup of tea is.’

  ‘How do you know this? Perhaps I do not know this?’

  ‘Don’t you know what a cup of tea is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes you do, you ordered one when you came in.’

  ‘Perhaps I was just curious to know what this unknown thing was on the menu.’

  I realized I had to intervene. Benoît was clearly up against a mind more fiendish than he could possibly imagine. A French bureaucratic mind.

  I introduced myself and asked what the problem was.

  The guy didn’t introduce himself. He simply snapped back a question, in French of course. ‘What is a moog?’

  ‘Moog?’

  ‘Oui, moog of tea.’

  ‘Ah, mug,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Oui, mag.’

  ‘Mug.’

  ‘Mog.’

  ‘Mug.’

  ‘Maaahg.’

  ‘Oui, c’est ça,’ I congratulated him. ‘Un maaahhg est un grand coop.’

  ‘Coop?’

  ‘Cup.’

  He snorted triumphantly. ‘You see, even you do not know what a cup is. This is why you must translate it as tasse de thé. You must translate everything on your menu.’

  He introduced himself as an inspector from the Ministère de la Francophonie, the government department that tries to protect the French language from attack by such foreign invaders as ‘le marketing’, ‘le Walkman’ and, it seemed, ‘le cup of tea’.

  He flashed his ID card at a wide-eyed Benoît and me and informed us that it was illegal to have a menu that did not give French translations for every foreign ingredient or dish.

  ‘What, even sandwich?’ I asked. I pronounced it à la française, ‘son-dweetch’, though the French spell the word as it is in English.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘OK, so if it is an English word that is used in French, or known by the French, I don’t have to translate it.’

  ‘English? But sandwich is French.’ His cheeks flushed for a moment, but realized they were disrupting his colour scheme and quickly returned to their normal shade of grey-green.

  ‘What? Sandwich is English.’

  ‘Ho!’ This was by no means a laugh. It was a cry of indignation. He appealed for support to Benoît, but by this time the poor lad was gaping at us mutely, stroking the tea urn for moral support. ‘It is like les frites,’ – French fries – the inspector went on. ‘The whole world knows they are French, except the English who say they invented them. As do the Belgians, but who cares about them? We French have been eating sandwiches for much longer than you. The traditional baguette is the perfect bread for a sandwich.’

  Apart from his wild rewriting of culinary history, he’d left himself open to attack here, and I darted in.

  ‘No it’s not. It’s the worst bread in the world for a sandwich. You can’t get it in your mouth.’ I mimed the impossible task of closing your teeth on a baguette sandwich without first crushing it flat. ‘And when you squeeze it, all the ingredients fall out the other end of the sandwich on to your trousers.’

  His eyes narrowed at me. ‘I thought we were having a linguistic conversation, Monsieur, not criticizing French table manners.’ When a Frenchman uses ‘Monsieur’ at you in the middle of an argument, you know you’ve offended him badly.

  ‘I wasn’t criticizing French table manners,’ I assured him. ‘But sandwich really is an English word.’

  ‘Nonsense. What is its meaning? Something to do with sand, no doubt?’

  ‘It’s the name of the man who invented it.’

  ‘Ah oui, Monsieur Sandwich, a cousin of Monsieur Fish and Chips?’ He bowed as if acknowledging polite applause at his rapier wit. Even Benoît accorded him a nod of appreciation.

  I could see that I was rapidly sinking into the quicksand of an intellectual discussion that was only going to drag me under. This guy was a professional quibbler, after all. His clothes and his ID badge proved it.

  And as everyone knows, once you’re in quicksand, the last thing you should do is flail about and hope you can fight your way out.

  Trouble is, some of us are just born flailers.

  ‘Well, it’s an English word so I’m going to translate it on my menu,’ I told him.

  ‘You will not translate it. It is French.’

  ‘It is an English word and I demand the right to translate it.’

  ‘I forbid you to translate it.’ By this time we were practically nose to nose.

  ‘I will translate it, as “traditional English food with two slices of bread and, er, something between”.’ My French let me down at the end but the blow struck home.

  ‘That would be a gross misrepresentation. The law forbids
incorrect translations.’

  ‘Oh yes? Well, we will see what Bruxelles says about that. Or Brussel as the Flemish residents call it. Bruxelles is just a bad translation, n’est-ce pas?’

  The inspector took up the gauntlet and threw it back in my face. ‘I will return, and if there is one mistake in the French translations on your menu, you will be obliged to reprint all of them, or face a heavy fine.’

  No one throws gauntlets in my face and gets away with it, even if my face is the only part of me still sticking up out of quicksand. ‘Oh yes?’ I replied. ‘We will take the train together to Brussel to discuss the case.’

  As the glass door clanged shut behind him, I’m sure both of us were feeling that peculiarly French sense of satisfaction at having created mutual outrage. Nothing at all had been resolved, but we’d had a damn good row and each of us had emerged feeling sure we were in the right. I was as exhilarated as a poodle strutting away after a damn good yapping match.

  ‘Do you think we will have a problem?’ Benoît asked.

  ‘No, we’ll never hear from him again,’ I said, and almost believed it.

  The injustice of it, though. During my time in Paris I’d seen dozens of well-meaning but hopelessly inaccurate translations on menus, and no one went around giving out fines for those.

  I’d eaten at places offering ‘omelette with fungus’, ‘jumped potatoes’, and ‘mangled steak’.

  OK, they were translations into English, but ignoring them was just double standards. And the French were getting away with linguistic murder every day.

  For example, it always made me cringe when I heard a French person call a sweatshirt ‘un sweet’. Despite the fact that they wrote it ‘sweat’. It was like re-writing Shakespeare: a rose by another name would smell of sweat.

  And they can’t get sports right, either. They call football ‘le foot’, basketball ‘le basket’ and skateboarding ‘le skate’. They obviously don’t know that English words actually mean something, and if we put ‘skate’ and ‘board’ or ‘basket’ and ‘ball’ together, it’s because they combine to create a new concept.

  My favourite of these bad English abbreviations was one I heard from an old estate agent, who described a toilet as ‘les water’, which he pronounced ‘what-air’. Short for water closet, of course. Would I like to see ‘les what-air?’, he asked. I thought he wanted to introduce me to the neighbours, until I realized that they couldn’t be living down that little hole in the floor.

  No, I decided, the language inspector wouldn’t bother me again. What with all these howlers and the horrifically English words coming in with the Internet and phone technology, he had far too many anti-French invaders on his plate.

  Unless, of course, bothering English-speakers was his tasse de thé.

  5

  I HAD UNDERESTIMATED the importance of Alexa’s exhibition.

  But then there was no way I could have guessed how important it was unless I’d known, for example, that Parisians call their new national library ‘the chocolate biscuit’.

  Which they do.

  Officially, the library is named after ex-president François Mitterrand, but Parisians call it the ‘BN’, which is the brand name of a popular chocolate biscuit. And an abbreviation of ‘bibliothèque nationale’.

  Parisians seem to have an aversion to saying other ex-presidents’ names, too, even Charles de Gaulle, who has all sorts of places named after him. And not saying his name causes a lot more confusion than just mistaking a library for a biscuit.

  This is because Paris has two main landmarks named after the General. The city’s biggest airport is known the world over as Paris Charles de Gaulle. Your baggage stickers have a big CDG on them to prove it. But Parisians call the airport Roissy, which is the name of the little town that was lucky enough to get an airport as a neighbour.

  Meanwhile, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, beside the Arc de Triomphe, there’s a massive metro and regional train station called Charles de Gaulle Etoile, which Parisians call Étoile, after the roundabout that runs around the Arc.

  It is, of course, by no means uncommon for foreign visitors to want to go to one of these two places. So it is just as common to hear a conversation between a linguistically challenged tourist and a metro ticket-seller that goes something like this:

  Tourist: ‘Uh, hello, I mean bon-jaw, I, uh, want to go to, uh, Charles de Goal?’

  Ticket-seller (speaking quickly through perspex window above noise of busy metro station): ‘Roissy ou Etoile?’

  Tourist: ‘Uh? Er, bon-jaw, I, uh, want to go to Charles de Goal?’

  Ticket-seller (at exactly the same speed and volume): ‘Roissy ou Etoile?’

  And so on.

  My problem with Alexa’s exhibition was that there is exactly the same confusion over the Pompidou Centre.

  Georges Pompidou was the president who took over from de Gaulle at the end of the 1960s. But he died in office, just as a new art museum in the shape of an inside-out toaster was being built in the centre of Paris. So the city named the museum after him, and all us foreigners know it by its official name, the Pompidou Centre. Parisians, though, call it Beaubourg, the name of the neighbourhood of medieval buildings destroyed to make way for the museum and the hideous apartment blocks around it.

  All of which goes some way to explaining why I didn’t immediately latch on to the fact that Alexa’s show was in one of the small temporary exhibition spaces inside the Centre Pompidou. Which is a totally huge honour.

  Nathalie was understandably impressed when she saw Alexa’s name alongside the stars in the permanent collection.

  ‘Is she the daughter of a famous artist? Or of the museum director? Or maybe she is sleeping with him?’

  She saw me flinch and apologized. The worst thing was, she hadn’t been joking. She really didn’t understand how someone so young could possibly have an exhibition in such a temple of the art establishment.

  ‘Perhaps she’s just very good?’ I suggested, disappointing Nathalie with the simplicity of the idea.

  We were directly underneath the museum’s towering, multicoloured metal structure. From a distance, and especially if you come at it through the medieval Marais district, it looks like a modernistic scar on the ancient city, but close up it is spectacular.

  It must have taken quite some cojones to put all the building’s innards on the outside like that. And quite some spanners, too. You can actually see where the beams are joined in gigantic robot elbows, with immense bolts that look all too easy to undo.

  Even though it was late afternoon, there was a queue of twenty or thirty people waiting to get into the building to see the main exhibition, a Pop Art show that would probably cause the deforestation of half of Sweden to provide enough Andy Warhol posters for the museum shop.

  Nathalie flashed her press card and we pushed straight to the front. My second time in as many months, I thought. You really know you’ve arrived socially in Paris when you never have to queue for exhibitions.

  ‘We’re looking for Des hommes, rien que des hommes,’ Nathalie told the young, black security guy, enjoying the double entendre.

  We had to go down to a basement, and the staircase bore all the scars of a 1970s building that has millions of visitors clomping around inside it. Even so, the idea that Alexa had a show on here was pretty awesome.

  I still couldn’t work out why she hadn’t wanted me to come along. Half of the Paris art establishment must have been at the opening. One English café owner wouldn’t have been noticed. Unless he’d got drunk on free wine and tried to kiss the artist’s navel before collapsing beneath a white-on-white photo of the Courrèges shop and entertaining the dignitaries with a tearful refrain of, ‘That’s me, that is.’

  OK, so maybe I could see why she hadn’t invited me.

  The show was in a large, square room, with white walls, rough grey carpet, and about thirty atlas-sized colour portraits confronting you as you walked in. At least half of these were of Alexa’s da
d, alone or with one of two or three different guys who were identified only by their first names. They seemed, to judge by the affectionate poses, to be her dad’s lovers.

  These pictures were brutal close-ups. They were grungy, often blurred, with sweeps of colour where a hand had been raised or a bright shirt had soaked up the light of the flash. In most of them, her dad was grinning at the camera or his lover, but occasionally she’d caught him in a microsecond of melancholy which jarred against the general mood of gaiety, in all the senses of the word.

  The rest of the photos were of a guy who hadn’t known he was being photographed. He was usually walking along a Paris street gazing at nothing in particular, or sitting in a café waiting for someone, or, once, squinting towards the camera as if he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing.

  These photos were grainy and grungy, too, but seemed to have been taken from a distance, occasionally through a window or between moving cars. And they weren’t ‘gay’ so much as breezy. A young guy in Paris, staring out at the city, eager to see what it had to offer.

  It was Nathalie who gasped, ‘That’s you.’

  I had, of course, realized by this time. To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. I was like a wrestler who’s just collapsed after a headbutt to the abdomen, and then feels the weight of his twenty-stone opponent crashing down to hammer the last remaining molecules of air out of his lungs.

  I walked round and round the room, gaping at myself and trying to make sense of the bubbling goulash of emotions raging inside my stomach.

  When had she taken all these pictures?

  Why hadn’t she told me?

  Why hadn’t I noticed?

  The only thing I could think of was that, when we were going out together, she’d got to all our meets ahead of time and snapped me as I arrived. I remembered that she often used to be fifteen minutes late. Now I saw that she’d spent that quarter of an hour taking pictures of me waiting.

  It was incredible.

  The photo of me outside the Courrèges shop was there, but ironically it was the one where you saw me least clearly. All you could make out was a cloud of whiteness with a face smiling out of it. In the others, you were spying on me through binoculars, getting a good look at every detail of my face against the blurred background.