The first year that Olivier and I were together, Violeta sent a package from Nespresso as a gift for Olivier. It was a surprise, so she wrote to me, asking that I hide it away until his birthday.
The postman came. I signed for the parcel. As soon as he left, I proceeded to the computer, where I assured Violeta, quite elegantly, that I had taken delivery of the gift.
“J’ai fait l’accouchement de la cafetière,” I typed, having checked and double-checked each word in my English-French dictionary.
Months went by before I learned that, by my account, I’d given birth to—as in, physically delivered, through the vagina—a coffee machine.
• • •
GROCERY STORES, as much as cathedrals or castles, reveal the essence of a place. In New York I’d shopped sparingly at the supermarket on my block—a cramped warren hawking concussed apples and a hundred kinds of milk. One day I bought a rotisserie chicken. I took it home and started shredding it to make a chicken salad. Halfway through, I realized that there was a ballpoint pen sticking straight out of the breast, like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. The next day, receipt in hand, I went back to the store and asked for a refund.
“Where’s the chicken?” the cashier barked.
“I threw it away,” I said. “It had a ballpoint pen in it.”
The closest grocery store to our apartment in London was almost parodically civilized. A cooperatively owned chain, it sold bulbs and sponsored a choir. Nothing amused me more than shaving a few pence off the purchase of a pack of toilet paper with a discount card that read “Mrs. L Z Collins.” I’d hand it over to an employee-shareholder in a candy-striped shirt and a quilted vest, who would deposit the toilet paper into a plastic bag emblazoned with a crest: “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen Grocer and Wine & Spirit Merchants.” If the store made a show of a certain kind of Englishness, its shelves were pure British multiculturalism: preserved lemons, gungo peas, mee goreng, soba noodles, lapsang souchong–smoked salmon. One November a “Thanksgiving” section appeared, featuring a mystifying array of maple syrup, dried mango chunks, and pickled beetroot.
As national rather than regional concerns, British supermarkets played an outsize role in public life. Every year, the launch of their competing Christmas puddings was attended by the sort of strangely consensual fanfare—everyone gets into it, even if it’s silly—that Americans accord to each summer’s blockbuster movies. The feedback loop of the food chain was tight: if a popular cookbook called for an obscure ingredient, the stores would quickly begin to carry it, a fact about which the newspapers would write, leading the cookbook to become even more popular, and the ingredient to materialize simultaneously in every British pantry. There was a coziness to the stores, amid their great convenience. Shopping in them always reminded me that London was a big city in a small country. From the £10 Dinner for Two deal at my supermarket—it included a starter or a pudding, a main course, a side dish, and an entire bottle of wine—I could extrapolate something about, and participate in, if I chose to, a typical middle-class British Friday night.
Food shopping in Geneva was a less idiosyncratic affair. For fruits and vegetables, I went often to the farmers’ markets. They had nothing to do with yoga or gluten. They were just a cheaper place to buy better carrots. The selection, though, was limited. For everything else, there were the Swiss supermarkets—two chains distinguished, as far as I could tell, by the fact that one of them sold alcohol and the other didn’t. I frequented the former, whose breakfasty theme colors made it seem like it was perpetually 7:00 a.m. Despite a few superficial points of contrast—you could find horse meat hanging alongside the chicken and the beef; the onions, taskingly, were the size of Ping-Pong balls—there wasn’t much to distinguish the experience. Cruising the cold, clean aisles, I could have been in most any developed nation.
My nemesis there—my imaginary frenemy—was Betty Bossi, a fifty-eight-year-old busybody with pearl earrings and a shower cap of pin-curled hair. Betty Bossi was inescapable. There was nothing she didn’t do, and nothing she did appealingly: stuffed mushrooms, bean sprouts, Caesar salad, Greek salad, mixed salad, potato salad, lentil salad, red root salad, “dreams of escape” salad, guacamole, tzatziki sauce, mango slices, grated carrots, chicken curry, egg and spinach sandwiches, orange juice, pizza dough, pastry dough, goulash, tofu, dim sum, shrimp cocktail, bratwurst, stroganoff, gnocchi, riz Casimir (a Swiss concoction of rice, veal cutlets, pepperoni, pineapple, hot red peppers, cream, banana, and currants).
Who was she? Where did she come from? What kind of name was Betty Bossi? Her corporate biography revealed that she was the invention of a Zurich copywriter, who had conjured her in 1956 in flagrant imitation of Betty Crocker. “The first name Betty, fashionable in each of the country’s three linguistic regions, was accepted straightaway by the publicity agency,” it read. “Equally, her last name was widespread all over the country. Together, they sounded good and were easy to pronounce in all the linguistic regions.”
Switzerland, like Britain, was a small country, but due to any number of historical and geographical factors—chief among them the fact that the population didn’t share a common language—it didn’t have a particularly cohesive culture. The political system was heavily decentralized. (Name a Swiss politician.) There was no film industry to speak of, no fashion, no music. (Name a Swiss movie.) With the exception of Roger Federer, who spent his downtime in Dubai, there weren’t really any public figures. (Name a Swiss celebrity.)
Swiss francophones looked to France for news and entertainment; German speakers gravitated toward Germany, and Italian speakers to Italy. (Speakers of Romansh, which is said to be the closest descendant of spoken Latin, made up less than 1 percent of the population and almost always spoke another language.) Gainful as it was, Switzerland’s multilingualism rendered public life indistinct, a tuna surprise from the kitchen of Betty Bossi. The country was in Europe, but not of it. Its defining national attribute, neutrality, seemed at times to be a euphemism for a kind of self-interested disinterest. The morning after Russia announced that it was banning food products from the European Union due to its support of Ukraine, the front page of the local paper boasted “Russian Embargo Boosts Gruyère.”
A few months later, it emerged that the supermarket chain that did not sell alcohol was selling mini coffee creamers whose lids featured portraits of Adolf Hitler. After a customer complained, a representative apologized for the error, saying, “I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls. Usually, the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes, and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem.” Betty Bossi as an icon; Hitler as a polemic. It was this bloodless quality that depressed me so much about Switzerland. My alienation stemmed less from a sense of being an outsider than from the feeling that there was nothing to be outside of.
The consolation prize of Geneva was the grande boucherie—a ninety-five-year-old emporium of shanks and shoulders and shins, aging woodcocks and unplucked capons, their feet the watery blue of a birthmark. The steaks were festooned with cherry tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. The aproned butchers, surprisingly approachable for people of their level of expertise, would expound on the preparation of any dish. One day, craving steak tacos—Geneva’s Mexican place only had pork ones, and a single order cost forty dollars—I convinced Olivier, who wasn’t big on cooking, to chaperone me to the boucherie. I explained to him that I wanted to buy a bavette de flanchet, the closest thing I had been able to find to a flank steak, after Googling various permutations of “French” and “meat.”
“Bonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s’il vous plait.”
The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards: rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf. Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.
“Malheureusement, je n’ai pas de flanchet aujourd’hui,” he said. “En fait, on n’a
généralement pas de flanchet.”
“What?” I said.
“He doesn’t have a flank steak.”
The butcher reached into the case and pulled out a small, dark purse of beef.
“Je vous propose l’araignée. C’est bien savoureux, comme le flanchet, mais plus tendre.”
“What did he say?”
“He has an araignée.”
“What is that?”
“No idea. Araignée means spider.”
“Okay, whatever, take it.”
“Bon, ça serait super.”
The araignée is the muscle that sheathes the socket of a cow’s hock bone, so called because of the strands of fat that crisscross its surface like a cobweb. In francophone Switzerland, as in France, it is a humble but cherished cut. Different countries, I was surprised to learn, have different ways of dismantling a cow: an American butcher cuts straight across the carcass, sawing through the bones, but a French boucher follows the body’s natural seams, extracting specific muscles. (American butchers are faster, but French butchers use more of the cow.) If you were to look at an American cow, in cross section, it would be a perfectly geometric Mondrian. A French cow is a Kandinsky, all whorls and arcs. You can’t get a porterhouse in Geneva, any more than you can get an araignée in New York: not because it doesn’t translate, but because it doesn’t exist.
A flank steak, I would have assumed, is a flank steak, no matter how you say it. We think of words as having one-to-one correspondences to objects, as though they were mere labels transposed onto irreducible phenomena. But even simple, concrete objects can differ according to the time, the place, and the language in which they are expressed. In Hebrew, “arm” and “hand” comprise a single word, yad, so that you can shake arms with a new acquaintance. In Hawaiian, meanwhile, lima encompasses “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.”
In a famous experiment, linguists assembled a group of sixty containers and asked English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers to identify them. What in English comprised nineteen jars, sixteen bottles, fifteen containers, five cans, three jugs, one tube, and one box was, in Spanish, twenty-eight frascos, six envases, six bidons, three aerosols, three botellas, two potes, two latas, two taros, two mamaderos, and one gotero, caja, talquera, taper, roceador, and pomo. Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, identified forty ping, ten guan, five tong, four he, and a guan.
“The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” the linguist Guy Deutscher has written. We don’t call an arm an arm because it’s an arm; it’s an arm because we call it one. Language carves up the world into different morsels (a metaphor that a Russian speaker might refuse, as “carving,” in Russian, can only be performed by an animate entity). It can fuse appendages and turn bottles into cans.
• • •
ALMOST AS SOON AS I’D arrived in Geneva, I’d begun to feel the pull of French. Already, I was intrigued by the blend of rudeness and refinement, the tension between the everyday and the exalted, that characterized the little I knew of the language. “Having your cake and eating it too” was Vouloir le beurre, l’argent, et le cul de la crémière (“To want the butter, the money, and the ass of the dairywoman”). Raplapla meant “tired.” A frileuse was a woman who easily got cold. La France profonde, with its immemorial air, gave me chills in a way that “flyover country” didn’t. I found it incredible that Olivier found it credible that the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 could have been in some part attributable to a breakdown in the distinction between vous (the second person formal subject pronoun) and tu (the second person informal). Before the crash, the airline had promoted what was referred to in the French press as an Anglo-Saxon-style management culture in which employees universally addressed each other as tu. The theory was that the policy had contributed to the creation of a power vacuum, in which no one could figure out who was supposed to be in charge.
French was the language of Racine, Flaubert, Proust, and Paris Match. It wasn’t as if I were being forced to expend thousands of hours of my life in an attempt to acquire Bislama or Nordfriisk. Even if I had been, it would have been an interesting experiment, a way to try to differentiate between nature and nurture, circumstance and self. Learning the language would give me a raison d’être in Geneva, transforming it from a backwater into a hub of a kingdom I wanted to be a part of. I wasn’t living in France, but I could live in French.
As long as I didn’t speak French, I knew that a membrane, however delicate, would separate me from my family. I didn’t mind being the comedy relative, birthing household appliances, but I sensed that the role might not become me for a lifetime. There were depths and shallows of intimacy I would never be able to navigate with a dual-language dictionary in hand. I didn’t want to be irrelevant or obnoxious. More than anything, I feared being alienated from the children Olivier and I hoped one day to have—tiny half-francophones who would cross their sevens and blow raspberries when they were annoyed, saddled with a Borat of a mother, babbling away in a tongue I didn’t understand. This would have been true in any language, but I sensed that it might be especially so in French, which in its orthodoxy seemed to exert particularly strong effects. “Do you want to see an Eskimo?” Saul Bellow wrote. “Turn to the Encyclopédie Larousse.”
Our first New Year’s in Switzerland, Jacques and Hugo decided to visit.
“They said they want to come in the morning,” Olivier told me.
“Okay. When?”
“In the morning.”
“No, but when?”
“In the morning!”
Olivier, I could see, was starting to get exasperated. I was, too.
“What do you mean?” I said, a little too emphatically, as unable to reformulate my desire to know on which day of the week they would arrive as Olivier was to fathom another shade of meaning.
“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’ I meant exactly what I said.”
“Well, what did you say, then?”
“I already said it.”
“What?”
His voice grew low and a little bit sad.
“Talking to you in English,” he said, “is like touching you with gloves.”
Two
THE IMPERFECT
L’Imparfait
THE BELLS RANG every Wednesday morning. The teacher would lift the needle, drop the record on the spindle, and then:
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonny LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,
Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.
I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal g’s like cymbals. The French teacher didn’t force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny LaMatina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader: “Come on down to Sonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”
The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more
precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn’t English.
I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state. Dawson’s Creek was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.
My family’s idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We’d each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked as if it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.
When in French Page 3
