Well, there’ll be none of that kind of talk at the Orléans train station, where I easily recognize Sylvie from her Facebook photos and take the plunge, confidently initiating a two-cheek bise before shaking hands with her fiancé, Antoine, saying, “Enchanté.” This is the last intelligent thing I will say in French for the rest of the day. As we walk out of the train station, Sylvie says something to me in French. “Pardon? ” I ask, not catching it, so she says it in heavily accented English.
“Non, non, en français,” I say. “Mais plus lentement.”
She repeats, as I’ve requested, more slowly.
Huh?
She repeats again.
Whazzat?
Finally, returning to English, she says, “I was just trying say, ‘Thank you for coming to Orléans.’ ”
Oh, of course. I knew that, I lie. But Sylvie and Antoine speak differently, rapidly and more colloquially than the Millefeuille instructors or the waiters, who are used to dealing with tourists, and I can hardly make out a word from either of them.
We make our way through the streets of Orléans, where in 1429 an illiterate teenage girl named Jeanne d’Arc drove out the occupying English army, an event still celebrated annually. Orléans, Antoine tries to explain to me in French, is famous for something else. I have no idea what until Sylvie presents me with a gift. As the Meetup class clown might’ve said, I may not speak French, but candy I know. Orléans, Antoine tells me, is the birthplace of pralines, the confection made of almonds and caramelized sugar, and the company that made these has been manufacturing them using the same recipe since the sixteenth century.
We make our way through town, Antoine, a graduate student in history, serving as proud ambassador and guide, leading us into shops and past statues and fountains, until we reach an outdoor café at the foot of Orléans’s Gothic cathedral, which, three centuries older than the pralines, is in only slightly worse shape. Sylvie and Antoine do both seem genuinely glad to see me, convincing me that Sylvie’s financial excuse for not coming to Paris was sincere. It is a beautiful afternoon in a beautiful city, exactly how I’d imagined this long-anticipated meeting to be—if, that is, you substitute Antoine for Sylvie, and English for French.
Neither French nor Sylvie have made much of an appearance as we sip some very strong Belgian beer (Antoine’s civic pride does not extend to the local brew). I keep trying to switch to French, but Antoine would like to actually converse, so he keeps reverting to English, and after a while, exhausted, so do I. His impression of the United States has been formed largely from TV shows such as their favorites, Supernatural and Smallville, which sounds hazardous at best, and he has many questions: What movies and TV shows do Americans watch? Why so many jokes about New Jersey? (That’s a hard one to answer—New Jersey is just . . . funny.) Why are you treating DSK like a criminal? Oh, jeez. Here we go again. “Our system of justice is different in France,” he says. “Here, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Now wait a cotton-pickin’ second, I want to protest. We practically invented that phrase while your ancestors were lopping off heads in the Tuileries! But I let it drop, because the French newspapers have been indignantly reporting the headlines (FRENCH WHINE, FROG LEGS IT, PEPÉ LE PEW, BOOTY GAUL, and CHEZ PERV, to name a few) running in the New York tabloids, which have already tried and convicted Strauss-Kahn, and I figure the less I say about this whole business, the better.
Antoine goes on about the differences between French and American attitudes regarding sex and politics. “We had a president who died in the bed of a prostitute.”
“We had a governor,” I reply, “who died in the bed of his mistress.”*
I take one more shot at switching the conversation back to English and Sylvie. The same woman who’s been writing me long, warm, chatty e-mails for the past few months has barely said a word. It’s like I’m with a different person. “Et toi,” I say, trying to draw her out, “tu voterais pour DSK? ”
She thinks for a moment before giving a shrug and finally saying one of the few words she will utter all day. “Puh!” I’m not sure whether this means “Hard to say” or “I have no idea what you just said.”
“Mon français est très mauvais,” I apologize.
“But you write so well in your e-mails.”
“I’m a writer,” I joke (or half joke), rather than confess that I spent hours on each note. Exhausted from gabbing, Sylvie lets Antoine continue the conversation as we order another round of beers. Antoine and I chat some more about this and that, he in English, and I, as much as I can, in French, and Sylvie has been so quiet for so long that it occurs to me there might be a good reason.
“Do you understand Antoine when he speaks English?” I ask in English.
“Yes, I understand most.”
“And when I speak French, do you understand me?”
“No.”
QUEL DÉSASTRE! I TAKE the train back to Paris, numbed over my inability to converse in French. I hope that James fared better on his exam in Fontainebleau.** Why, I wonder, can I converse with a waiter but not with Sylvie and Antoine? And I realize that there are two kinds of French: there’s situational French, the kind taught in all the courses, and then there’s everything else. Situational French makes good use of all those little clusters you’ve learned (est-ce que je peux, j’ai besoin de) and you can substitute a word here or there to borrow a pen, try on a hat, or move your table. Yet the French of “everything else,” the French of normal conversation, requires vocabulary, grammar, and, especially, speaking and oral comprehension skills that I’ve barely scratched the surface of in my hundreds of hours of study.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at my difficulty speaking French with Sylvie and Antoine, for even after two weeks of immersion, while I could (usually) place pronouns in the proper position and figure out whether to use the passé composé or the imparfait, I still couldn’t understand much from the school’s guest lecturers or even the other students. Perhaps I expected too much from Millefeuille. Looking back, I’d say that whatever you come in doing, you leave doing a little better. Students who arrive speaking a little French leave after two weeks speaking a little more French. Those who come in speaking excellent French, like Inger Stevens, leave speaking even more excellent French. As for me, when I came to school, I didn’t speak French. I still don’t speak French, only now I don’t speak it better.
Did I give immersion in France enough time? Would I have learned French if I’d stayed at Millefeuille another two weeks or two months? Based on the French of the two students there who’d previously done four weeks of immersion, I’d say, maybe if I’d stayed for another two years. Deux ans. Or is that deux années? And why do the French have two words for “year” but the same word for an office and the desk in the office?
How can anyone be expected to learn a language like that!
The next day, my last full day in France, my situational French does at least allow me to locate and buy a ticket to a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, the stunning Gothic church on the Île de la Cité, a small island that sits in the Seine, and the site of the original settlement of Paris. With the setting sun streaming in through the soaring stained-glass windows, I listen to a quartet performing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the strings resonating magnificently throughout the chamber. I hear the silvery pizzicato notes depicting tinkling ice in the “Winter” concerto, the “drunkards falling asleep” in accordance with Vivaldi’s instructions for “Autumn,” and the languor of “Summer.”
I recognize them all, and it seems fitting that my trip to France, to learn a language, ends here, where music written four hundred years ago by an Italian composer and performed by French musicians speaks clearly to this twenty-first-century American. I take some solace in discovering, in the most unexpected and beautiful of places, yet another universal language that, like deceit and the periodic table, spans centuries and cultures. And one that even I can comprehend.
TWELVE HOURS LATER, I am on the
rail shuttle approaching Aéroport Orly for my flight home. As the train pulls into the South Terminal, a garbled announcement seems to be saying that this is the last stop, everybody off! But, un moment, s’il vous plaît. This isn’t my stop; the train’s supposed to continue to the West Terminal—my terminal. I exit with the other passengers into chaos—crowds, police, long lines. Something is going on. Must be yet another grève over the retirement age. Using a word I have down pretty well by now, I ask a young woman from my train car, who is wearing a backpack and a very disturbed expression, “Quel est le problème? ”
She says something about une bombe.
“Vous avez dit ‘une bombe’? ” I repeat, disbelievingly. Even more disbelievingly, finding myself performing another famous Inspector Clouseau routine (“You said . . . a boomb? ”). Well, not an actual bomb, most likely, but a bomb threat, enough to shut down the shuttle to the West Terminal but, mysteriously, not the terminal itself. The young woman looks at her watch; I look at mine. She asks an airport employee for assistance getting to the West Terminal as I tag along, accompanied by a third person from our train, an Asian student in the same predicament. The Frenchwoman gets an explanation in rapid French, then summarizes it in simpler French for us. There is a bus. However, because of the boomb threat it will take a long time to reach the other terminal, and, I figure based on recent experience, the bus is sure to be full, or at least the French version of full.
I have an idea. Forgetting for a moment that I can’t speak French, like a man who temporarily acquires a strength he didn’t know he possessed when he sees his wife pinned under a car, I suggest, “Nous pourrions prendre un taxi,” tossing off a conditional tense and gurgling four r’s!
“Mais, c’est cher,” she says.
“Mais pas pour trois.” There are three of us to share the cost.
We step outside, and the Frenchwoman approaches a taxi. After a brief conversation, she reports that the driver says he’s not allowed to take fares between terminals. She glances at her watch and, looking like she’s going to cry, starts back to the terminal.
“Attendez un moment,” I say to her. And then to the driver: “Combien? ”
He shakes his head. “Désolé, il n’est pas permis.”
There’s one more universal language we haven’t touched on yet. “Vingt euros,” I offer, pulling out a twenty. I guess I have come a ways since having to pay for train tickets twice on my previous trip to Paris. “Pour juste quatre minutes! ”
He looks around to make sure no one is watching.
“Trente.” Ten euros apiece to catch our flights. A bargain.
A few hours later, midway across the Atlantic, the bilingual stewardess addresses me in French, then apologizes and switches to English. “Pas de problème,” I say with some pride. “Je parle un peu de français.” Well, as much as I needed to catch this plane, anyway.
* Nelson Rockefeller.
** In fact, I’m delighted to say that he passed.
Eyes Wide Shut
On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. (We see well only with the heart.)
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, Le petit prince, 1943
“It’s bizarre,” Dr. Chinitz says of the arrhythmias I get only while lying down, a phenomenon I’d just reproduced in his exam room. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” These are not comforting words, especially coming from a man who’s done, by his count, ten thousand cardiac ablations. “Let’s put you on a monitor for a few weeks and keep an eye on it.”
I silently groan. I’d worn one before, and it’s no fun, having wires attached to your chest 24/7 for weeks and being tethered to a customized cell phone that sends data to a monitoring center. The device arrives on Monday. On Tuesday I get a call from Dr. Chinitz’s office. “The doctor would like you to come in tomorrow.” There must be some mistake, I say. I haven’t even worn the damn thing for a full day. No mistake. He wants to see me tomorrow.
I didn’t think God, much less the Heart Rhythm Center, could get me an appointment with Chinitz in a day, but they add me on to the end of his schedule. “Come in around six.” This is one hardworking man.
I DON’T STOP TO play pétanque this time. The waiting room is empty, the office strangely calm and relaxed, like the atmosphere after a thunderstorm, and I’m seen almost immediately.
Chinitz greets me warmly. “Have a seat.”
He opens my folder. “I’m concerned about what we’re seeing on your monitor,” he says, showing me the EKG.
To my eye it looks like the same region of the Pyrenees that every other EKG I’ve ever seen looks like. “It’s hard to be certain because the monitor has only four leads, so we don’t get a complete picture, but some of these have the signature of ventricular tachycardia.” Yet another piece of percussion added to my rhythm section. But the word “ventricular” replacing “atrial” sounds sharp even to my untrained ear.
“This could be very serious.”
“How serious?”
“You could experience sudden cardiac arrest.”
Sweet baby Jesus in velvet shorts!
“I know you’ve been through a lot, and I hate to put you through yet a third procedure, but ventricular tachycardias are very different from atrial. We really need to go in and do another ablation, this one in your ventricle. And sooner rather than later.”
I nod. “How soon?”
He looks at his watch. That soon?
“It’s too late to get you on tomorrow’s schedule. Can you come in Friday?” he says, using the same casual tone as my auto mechanic scheduling a tune-up.
Thirty-six hours from now. “I suppose I could clear my schedule.”
The rest of the appointment, the rest of the day, is a blur. I’m pretty sure this did not happen, but in my reconstruction I’ll always remember Chinitz standing up at that point, firmly grasping my hand, and with a twinkle in his eye, saying in French, “Courage! ”
FRIDAY TAKES FOREVER TO arrive. But to make sure it does, I resolve not to lie down before then, not for ten seconds, so as not to trigger any arrhythmias. I sleep, or try to sleep, sitting in a chair both nights, but every little extra or missed beat from my heart stirs me awake, and I find myself thinking of television’s Fred Sanford looking to heaven, hand to heart, crying, “Oh, this is the big one! You hear that, Elizabeth? I’m comin’ to join you, honey!”
When that grows old, I dwell on the sobering fact that I’ve been walking around with a lethal condition for months, and I visualize the headline in my town paper: local writer—no, make that HUSBAND OF LOCAL PHYSICIAN DIES OF BROKEN HEART IN FRANCE. GRIEVING WIDOW: “IT’S WHAT HE WOULD’VE WANTED.”
Is it really? Suppose I don’t make it to Friday—I almost certainly will, or Chinitz would’ve found a way to get me into surgery sooner. But suppose I don’t. Is a single-minded devotion to learning French how I would’ve wanted to spend the last year of my life? Two o’clock in the morning, while awaiting a lifesaving heart procedure, is a good time to start being honest with yourself, to parler à cœur ouvert. The truth is, not only have I failed to become fluent, or even conversant, in French, but I’ve failed spectacularly—more so than I ever imagined possible. You can’t say I haven’t tried. Over thirteen months, I’ve completed all five levels of Rosetta Stone, Fluenz French, a hundred podcasts of Coffee Break French, two Pimsleur audio courses, a fifty-two-episode season of the 1987 PBS series French in Action, a weekend immersion class, social networking, a Sartre play in French, and a dual-language book, topped off by two weeks at one of the top language schools in France.
Sitting in the dark, wrapped in a blanket as the digital clock seemingly clicks forward one minute every three minutes, I wonder, Where do I go from here? Even if I want to continue pursuing French—and I’m not at all sure that I do—I don’t know how much more time and money I’m willing to devote to this Sisyphean task. I figure that I’ve spent 900 hours—nearly double the 480 hours that the Foreign Service Institute estimates is required to achieve basic c
onversational ability—studying French. And that’s not counting the hundreds of hours spent watching French movies and television and listening to French radio, not casually, but actively, trying to decipher what I was hearing.
What else could I have done with those hours? Well, in just the first forty I could’ve built that garden shed I’ve needed for years. Then I could’ve finally gotten around to reading Proust. Tutored a struggling local student. I could have learned golf! There is a golf course right across the street from me. That’s what older guys do, not French. Why didn’t I use the time to learn golf instead?
As proof that God has a sense of humor (as well as a peerless sense of timing), I’d returned from France to find the current issue of the New Yorker opened to an essay by Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Reflecting on his failure to achieve even mediocrity in golf despite half a lifetime of trying, he writes that he has finally come to accept that “I was never going to be good. Never. Think what I could’ve done with all that time. Learned French.”
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on French.
All second languages are learned out of love.
—julia cho, The Language Archive, 2009
I open my eyes, which is a mistake, because what I see looks and feels like the inside of a coffin. The panic attack swelling inside me, making the space even smaller, is quelled by a soothing male voice: “Et le petit prince eut un très joli éclat de rire qui m’irrita beaucoup.” A week after Dr. Chinitz, in a seven-hour procedure, has exorcised the demon plaguing my heart, I’m back at work—not at my desk, but in the institute’s imaging lab, squeezed into the narrow tube of the f MRI machine. I exhale, close my eyes, and listen to the clip of Le petit prince over the rat-a-tat-tat of the magnets.
Thirteen months ago, remember, before beginning my study of French, I’d had f MRI scans of my brain taken while listening to short texts in English, French, and Japanese—my native language, the one I was going to learn, and the one that was totally foreign to me—with the intent of repeating these scans after I’d learned French. Fresh out of Millefeuille, I figure my French may never be better than it is now, so I’m back inside the f MRI machine to complete the experiment.
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 18
