French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  After my first full year in France, gaining confidence and remembering that I had acquired a degree in a previous life, had even taught French, I suddenly realised all the gruesome mistakes I’d been making, and every solecism started ringing in my ears like the angelus. I yearned to revoke every word I’d ever uttered. Overnight, it all shot downhill and I lost the key to the whole thing – which is, of course, confidence. Up to then, I’d felt that the French were looking marginally less bemused every time I spoke to them. Sometimes their eyes even glimmered with the light of comprehension. But now … nothing. Nada. All gone.

  Don’t despair. Everyone hits this wall, like marathon runners at the halfway stage. That miserable moment when you think: (a) I can’t do this, (b) it’s not even worth trying any more, (c) they’re all laughing at me, and (d) let’s move to Tasmania. It’s a wretched moment, but it’s just the darkest hour before dawn: stay with it, and the sun will rise. Soon.

  About a week after I hit this wall, a friend picked me up off the floor and persuaded me to come to a dinner party. No, I pleaded, I won’t understand them and they won’t understand me. I’m sick of having to think out every sentence, and they must be even sicker of waiting for me to string it together. I thought I was much better than I was, but now I can see it was all just a comedy of errors …

  This is a dangerous moment. Lose your nerve now, and it’s gone for good. You will spend the rest of your life in France hovering on the edge of every conversation, never quite sure whether you’ve grasped its point, never mind its finer points. You will wonder whether you dare tell the mechanic you think the clutch is the problem, or might he think you mean the brake discs? Will he think you’re asking him to sell you his first-born, or abscond with him to Hawaii, or is he in favour of vivisection, or what?

  Fortunately, my friend was adamant. You will come to this dinner, she asserted, and you will tell your funny story about Michael Flatley and the bottle of wine. (I’d met the dancer in Berlin and blithely drunk his wine like water, not realising it was a 1966 Chateau Latour.)

  No, I whined, I won’t. Can’t.

  Then, she said, I will never speak to you again. Unless you change your mind, au revoir. Forever. You’re not worth bothering with any more.

  So I slunk along to the blasted dinner party and, at an opportune moment, was encouraged to tell the tale. Perhaps because it involved wine (and I’d had four glasses by then), the French guests grew quietly attentive as I embarked on a story that made me look a fool in any language.

  It’s one thing saying hello to the postman. It’s quite another relating an entire anecdote to a raptly expectant audience, especially as humour is the most difficult of things to translate. I demurred, stuttered, stumbled … and eventually took the plunge, noting that everyone was starting to smile, and then to grin openly, no doubt at my utter imbecility. But suddenly I didn’t care, and what was more, the dots seemed to be joining up, there weren’t any of those excruciating pauses while I rummaged for the right word. When I finished the tale, they all laughed.

  But, incredibly, not at my French. At my story. They understood, and they were amused? Clearly, there must be some misunderstanding. I collared my friend.

  ‘You bribed them, didn’t you, or blackmailed them? Warned them to laugh, or paid them?’

  But no, she hadn’t. She’d actually been amazed herself, she confessed, by the growing fluency with which the story had miraculously emerged. Inwardly cringing, she’d braced herself for the mumbles, the mispronunciations, but there’d been virtually none. The whole thing had been perfectly comprehensible and, even though she’d heard it before, she’d found it funny herself.

  It was a defining moment. Conquering K2 could scarcely have been more defining. It was as if my application for membership of an exclusive club, after having been rejected dozens of times, had suddenly been accepted. I was in. I could speak French.

  No, you won’t get a swelled head. You’ll simply catch your mistakes, from now on, in time to correct them. You’ll see that subjunctive looming, and you’ll field it like Babe Ruth catching a baseball. You’ll never – ever – remember the gender of every last noun in the French lexicon, but you’ll remember 90 percent and guess the rest. If you can’t find the precise word you want, you’ll have something similar on standby. Magically, like a written recipe turning into a casserole, you’ll hear that ‘ooh’ turning into ‘eu’, and one day you’ll cough up a proper ‘rrrr’, like Garfield on a winter’s morning.

  It just takes time, is all. Pride goes before a fall, but after you fall, you pick yourself up again, finding that you’ve learned from your mistake. Gradually, the mistakes become fewer, and the vocabulary grows. Mind you, it’s still hugely frustrating when a conversation gets really complex and subtle, and you just don’t have that one damn word, that exact word you want – the one that’s worth a dozen merely passable substitutes. That’s when you say to yourself: it’s time to go home. Back to Ireland, just for a weekend to friends and family, who understand every syllable I utter.

  And then you go back to Ireland and, instead of saying something is ‘so-so’, you’ve shrugged the dreaded bof. Before you can stop yourself, you’ve called a pie a tarte. A cinema has acquired a ridiculous accent on the ‘e’, and every second sentence seems to start with ‘Beuh …’

  And everyone’s looking at you wishing you’d go back home where you belong, to France.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ wailed an English friend. ‘These French lessons just aren’t working. The language graft is not taking.’

  And here’s the bad news. It might not. Ever.

  Some people simply don’t have an ear for languages. Some have an ear for German or Russian or Urdu, but not French. Some take private tuition for two years and still can’t ask the barber for a short back ‘n’ sides. Some freeze when the postman starts babbling about ‘the accused’, not realising that an accusé is merely a delivery receipt. Some spend three-quarters of their classes doodling, or leching after their teacher, or thinking bloody hell, will this ever end?

  Others pay close attention and write down every single word, do their homework religiously every night, ingest Ferrar’s French Grammar in a gulp – and still can’t speak in the street, because they are surgically welded to their pencils, clinging to that trusty Faber as if it were a log in the churning ocean. I know this for a fact, because I’ve taught English to French students, and they’re exactly the same in reverse, frantically jotting down everything I say including ‘good morning’.

  Look. Some day, you’re going to have to let go of that pencil, okay? Whether you like it or not, it’s the only way. French is not Latin. It’s a living, luscious language, and the idea is to speak it. After a year, chuck your pencil, your notebook, your grammar book, your dictionary, your Michel Thomas tapes, your Rosetta Stone and every other tangible aid into the Seine. Think of yourself as a toddler learning to swim: water wings are handy when you’re four, cute when you’re five, but when you’re twenty-five, or thirty-five? As the Americans would say, puh-leez.

  You are a grown adult, no? So, you can’t whip out your notebook every time you go to the hardware store or newsagent and start riffling through it for the relevant page – seventy-four, or was it forty-seven? – while the staff have a hernia trying to stifle their laughter because, for God’s sake, you’ve been in here a hundred times already! Some day, you’ve got to say your piece, without notes! Walk upright!

  ‘Huh,’ says my English pal Norma, ‘that’s all very well if you’re eighteen, or maybe even thirty. But the older you get, the harder it gets … in my mind, a rabbit has been a rabbit for decades, it can’t just turn into a lapin overnight.’

  Yes it can. If you concentrate. Maybe it’ll take a while, but one day a lapin will bounce into your brain, if you want it to badly enough. If you love France enough to work hard at it. (Not everyone does: some people are just economic migrants, here for the health care or cheaper housing, with no intention of learning
anything.)

  ‘Well yes, I do love France,’ concedes one of my anglophone pals, ‘but I can’t even count up to a hundred. I get stuck after sixty. I can’t say the alphabet, didn’t even realise it’s different …’

  So, turn on your telly. Yes, French! Unplug the BBC! Watch the children’s programmes along with all the other beginners. You may feel like a dork, but you will learn to count up to a hundred, and you will learn to pronounce ‘A’ through ‘Z’. Guaranteed.

  Still can’t let go of your pencil? Okay, here’s your punishment. Go out and buy a crossword. Yes, that’s right, in French. Your nearest Maison de la Presse will have a whole series of crossword books, graded from one to ten in degrees of difficulty. Buy number one. Go home. Sit down. Get up. Make tea. Sit back down. Sigh heavily. Read clues. Lick pencil.

  And stay there until you’ve solved it, no matter if you’re there till three in the morning or next Easter.

  After that, you can move on to Scrabble. Mmm, bilingual. You invite your French neighbours in – yes, the ones who want to learn English – and they can play in your language and you can play in theirs and next thing a bottle of wine’s nearly empty and, well what do you know, you’re all much better than you thought … it really isn’t rocket science, is it?

  ‘No,’ admits Norma. ‘I suppose I could do that. Maybe I even will do it, because as things stand, when I try to speak to anyone, I feel like I’m playing tennis without a stick.’

  That’s the spirit. Mix all the metaphors you like, so long as you just do it.

  But even if you don’t do it, nil desperandum. If you wait long enough, the French language will come to you instead. It’s not très speedy, but it’s definitely en route. Hang in for another fifty years, and monsieur le president will probably be addressin’ y’all with a Texas drawl.

  22.

  À La Recherche du Temps Perdu

  In Normandy, my Irish friend Sheila and I have established a tradition of celebrating our birthdays by taking each other out to lunch. Hers is in autumn and mine is in spring, and we look forward to the chance to dress up and go out somewhere nice; often the weather is good enough that we can flaunt our finery and stroll in the soft, silken air after we’ve eaten.

  Today, my turn to be fêted, is such a day. The March sun is shining for the third day in a row, caressingly warm as we emerge from the restaurant to find the nearby newsagent attaching the freshly delivered newspaper headlines to the stand outside his shop. Adjusting the sweater around my shoulders (it’s warm, but not scorching), I suddenly think of something so absurd it makes me laugh. Sheila wants to know what’s so funny.

  ‘Oh, I was just thinking, after three days of sun, that newspaper headline is probably some doom-and-gloom yelp about droughts and hosepipe bans and farmers demanding heatwave subsidies!’

  She gives me one of those looks that says ‘Oh, you have such a nasty mind’, and giggles at the absurdity of such a notion … until the newsagent stands back to reveal the headline: ‘Normandy facing summer-long drought!’

  That’s all it takes. Three days of mild sun, and France fears the worst. Terror strikes, and the cafés start to hum with anticipation of meteorological horror to come. The previous year, we celebrated my birthday in the riverbank town of La Bouille, which actually lost one of its best restaurateurs to this paranoia. A charming, talented young chef-patron, he said he was moving to the Antilles because ‘At least there, they’re used to the sun. I won’t have to listen to them whining about the unbearable heat every time it shines.’

  Being Irish, Sheila and I are of course thrilled when the sun shines. We love bright hot weather, can’t get enough of it after our waterlogged childhoods in grey old Ireland. But even now, in early spring, the French are already revving up to grumble.

  Throughout April and May, the sunshine continues and increases, gathering warmth as wisteria whizzes up the walls. By early June, it is deliciously hot. The chestnut trees glow with ‘candles’, fields blaze with fierce yellow rapeseed, apple orchards float on a cloud of blossom, the cows are knee-deep in clover and every lilac tree drips under the weight of its laden boughs. It is like living in one of Monet’s landscapes. Picnics and barbecues rev up, everyone’s in shorts, gone fishing, out canoeing, zooming to the beach to swim on their lunch hour, windsurfing, cycling, playing tennis long into the slow, fragrant dusk. It is divine.

  Already, I have quite a tan. The temperature is in the thirties, and I’m beaming like the Cheshire cat, loving every dazzling drop of sunshine, soaking it up, purring with joy. But the French are not happy. Eh non. It is too hot. Fanning their fevered brows, they begin to visibly wilt, muttering in the markets, predicting the chaos that will result, the heatstroke, the scorched crops, the shrivelled hydrangeas, the dried-up streams, all the looming disaster that will surely strike any minute now. In the bakery, the bank, the doctor’s surgery, everywhere long queues form, it’s the same story: too hot! Pas normal! Insupportable!

  I yearn for a stout hurley with which to smack each and every one of their resolutely miserable skulls. And, after a month of this thankless gloom, apparently the gods yearn for one too, because suddenly – splat! At a stroke, summer shuts down. Thick black clouds descend on the horizon and the bright light snaps off. The gleaming, soaring sky collapses, turning charcoal grey as lightning cleaves the clouds and the heavens open. Very heavily, it rains.

  And rains, and rains, and rains. Every day, almost non-stop, day and night, violent thunder strikes terror into me and all my neighbours, jolting us awake, turning peaceful dreams into nightmares. I spend a great many nights racing at 4 AM to unplug computers before bolts of lightning reduce them to ash. Our lovely Camelot is washed away as if it were a mirage. Overnight, the potentially drought-stricken farmers are replaced, in café lore, by fishermen who can’t fish, tourists flooded out, beachfront restaurants forced to close down, tragic tales of campers’ tents being blown away, and vast waves breaking the windscreens of unlucky motorists riskily parked on the seafront to gape aghast at the marine drama. Instead of dying of thirst, the crops are flattened by hammering rain, which pounds them to pulp; the plums that should have been huge and juicy are gnarled and speckled, there isn’t even a wasp to be seen. (They have, apparently, swarmed off en masse to their travel agent to book a holiday somewhere sunny.)

  The long evenings, so mellow only a month ago, now lie fallow. There’s nothing anyone can do with them, no more merry barbecuing or shrimp-fishing or falling asleep to the thwack of tennis balls; instead, everyone’s watching television with the lights on, huddled into jeans and sweaters, their silks and shorts discarded for winter woollies. The weather forecast is so bad that Météo France only doles it out in small cautious doses, a few days at a time, presumably to avert the mass suicides that might otherwise result. On the evening news, oilskinned tourists are filmed packing up and leaving in droves, drenched and spluttering as they all chorus the same thing into the microphone: ‘What a dreadful climate! Never again!’

  So, are we happy now? The heatwave is over, the temperature has gone from tropical to arctic. Is that better? No more need to worry about the parched roses, about granny’s headache, or all that terrible heat and dust. Perhaps Normandy should consider a service of thanksgiving.

  Mais non. Of course not. Normandy is absolutely furious. The summer has been a disaster, a deluge, a … a …!

  A punishment? For all that whining and complaining back in June? Even if you don’t believe in any kind of god, that’s certainly what it looks like: a fitting punishment. The Normans hated all that heat and bright light, never stopped moaning about its dismal repercussions, and so the gods simply switched it off. Clearly these people are happier in the dark, cold and wet.

  Mais non. They are never happy. Normandy, formerly outraged by the sweltering summer, is now outraged by the lack of it. Tourism statistics plummet along with the temperature, the souvenir shops bemoan a shocking drop in business, the café owners are at their wits’ end as demand fo
r all those iced drinks dries up. As am I, trying to understand all this. What is it, exactly, that everyone wants? Perfection? En permanence? Richard Burton warbling about the laws governing climactic nirvana, relayed on France Bleu every morning?

  Yes. Apparently that’s exactly what’s required. Nice warm sunshine, not too hot, regularly sprinkled with just the right amount of rain, a little wind to freshen the air, but no gales or storms, all the way through from Easter to Hallowe’en. Anything else is an affront, a reason to mumble and grumble all the way through spring, summer and autumn, to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth and focus on its one missing tooth.

  I am writing this on 28 August. The rain is drumming on the roof like Ringo Starr, the sky is a steel wall of cloud, the valley below my windy plateau is turning into a lake that will take weeks to drain off. The cows are knee-deep in mud, the beach is deserted, bikes, tennis racquets and swimsuits are stored away in basements and my mind is seizing up with horror at the thought of just how long winter is going to be, given that it started four weeks ago. On 1 August, sharp.

  A friend rings from Ireland, and I all but weep down the phone, telling her about our ruined summer. ‘Really?’ she says, and I can hear the barely contained amusement in her voice. ‘Well, I hate to tell you this, but it’s lovely here.’

  No, I’m not deceived. I know that ‘lovely’ merely means it hasn’t rained today, that there’s ‘a break in the cloud’ that normally hovers over Ireland. I can watch RTÉ’s weather bulletins online and see the true picture. But hey, I’m desperate.

  ‘Maybe,’ I speculate, ‘I’ll come over so. Hop on a flight tomorrow. Get some Irish sun.’

  ‘Good idea,’ she says warily. ‘Who knows, it might last for a few days!’