I didn’t know what to make of the situation. Violeta did, sending me a long e-mail with the subject line “Couple.”
There, in my in-box, was the answer key, straight from his mother’s mouth, to all the questions about Olivier that had harrowed me for years. I holed up for hours in front of my laptop, cutting and pasting phrases into Google Translate, consulting pronoun charts, trying to untangle prepositional phrases, checking the dictionary for shades of meaning, parsing tenses as though my future depended on it, which in a way it did. But reading the message was far beyond my abilities, and its content was too private to ask for help. I didn’t know whether I was looking at a letter of recommendation or a death sentence.
So I zeroed in on what I could understand: “votre histoire d’amour,” “vous êtes complémentaires sur tous les plans,” “il t’aime.” From what I gathered, this was positive. “Vous êtes faits l’un pour l’autre,” Violeta had written. “You are made for one another.” I decided to go with it.
Four
THE PRESENT
Le Présent
BRADLEY COOPER IS THE CATALYST. I’m sitting at my desk one afternoon, surfing the Internet, when I come across a clip of him giving an interview on TF1, the French television channel. He’s gargling his r’s like they’re mouthwash. He even throws in a couple of heins.
The interviewer asks how he learned French. He says that during college he spent six months living with a family in Aix-en-Provence. TF1 calls him “la coqueluche de Hollywood,” using a word that has the unique distinction of being a homonym for heartthrob and whooping cough.
“Our viewers appreciate the fact that you spoke to us in French tonight,” the interviewer says.
I click on another video, this one from an American channel called CelebTV.
“Who knew Bradley had this secret weapon for getting the ladies? He’s totally fluent in French!”
Like the presenter, I’m impressed. An excellent command of French seems like a superpower, the prerogative of socialites and statesmen. The prerequisite for speaking French, I have always thought, is being the kind of person who speaks French.
I need French like a bike messenger needs a bicycle. I consider myself a fish. One day I see a woman named Alessandra Sublet on television and pronounce her name “sublet,” like what you do to an apartment, achieving a sort of reverse Tarzjhay effect. But there’s Bradley Cooper, nailing his uvular fricatives on the evening news. I tell myself the same thing I do when faced with such challenges as doing my taxes: if that guy can hack it, I can too. Maybe you don’t speak French because you’re privileged; you’re privileged because you speak French. The language suddenly seems mine for the taking, a practical skill. Herbert Hoover was fluent in Mandarin.
On a blustery morning in mid-March, I report for my first day of school. The class I’ve signed up for is being held at the Service Culturel Migros Genève headquarters, which occupies a big limestone building just off rue du Rhône, Geneva’s main drag. While technically Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain—the one with no booze and the Hitler coffee creamers—Migros has also cornered the market in the instruction of such disciplines as jewelry design, ikebana, equitation, Bollyrobics, and foreign language. On the last count, the fact that the school’s body-conditioning course is called “Good Morning Wonderbras” does not inspire tremendous confidence.
The entryway is shaded by a metal canopy, which bears a pistachio-colored neon sign in the sort of fusty font that a New York restaurateur would die for. Inside, a canteen offers hot meals, eaten on damp trays. Sleepy-eyed students take their coffee at tables of teal linoleum. Smoking is no longer allowed, but its accretions remain, adding to the sensation of having enrolled in a Laundromat in 1970.
I climb the stairs to room 401. We’re a dozen or so, sitting at four tables arranged in a rectangle. For the next month, we will meet five hours a day. The professor introduces herself. She is Swiss, in her sixties, with leopard-print bifocals and a banana clip.
“I am Dominique. Just call me Dominique. Not Madame—Dominique. I will tutoyer you. You can tutoyer me, too,” she says, indicating that we’re all to use the informal form of address. “I’m from Lausanne.”
Lausanne, by train, is thirty-three minutes from Geneva.
“The genevois,” she adds, “consider the lausannois very provincial.”
• • •
THE CLASS IS INTENSIVE French B1—a level into which I’ve placed after taking an online test. According to the diagnostic, I can get by in everyday situations, but I can’t explain myself spontaneously and clearly on a great number of subjects. This is true: like a soap opera amnesiac, I’m at a loss to articulate things of which I do not have direct experience. Still, I’m pleased that after eight months in Geneva, my piecemeal efforts at picking up the language, which consist mostly of reading free newspapers, have promoted me from the basest ranks of ignorance. One day, when the front-page headline reads “Une task force pour contrôler les marrons chauds,” I grasp that Geneva is about to sic the police on the vendors of hot chestnuts.
Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the erotic intention amounted to a “sublime hunger” for the other, the more foreign the more delectating. It is no accident that the metonym for language is a tongue, not an ear, an eye, or a prehensile thumb. A willingness to take one on—to take one in, filling one’s mouth with another’s words—suggests pliancy, openness to seduction. It worked for Catherine of Valois (Henry V, English), and Jane Fonda (Roger Vadim, French). One can only hope that one day the hardworking farm boy from Rosetta Stone dazzles the Italian supermodel with his command of the congiuntivo trapassato.
Lust can be an accelerant to learning, feeding flares of insight. Scholars of Flaubert dream of recovering the manuscript of Madame Bovary that he mentioned in an 1857 letter to his Parisian publisher: “An English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.” The translator was Juliet Herbert, an Englishwoman who had come to the family estate at Croisset—Flaubert’s riverine sanctuary of honeysuckle twining iron balustrades—to serve as governess to Flaubert’s niece. At night, she instructed Flaubert in English. “I am still doing English with the governess (who excites me immeasurably; I hold myself back on the stairs so as not to grab her behind),” he wrote to a friend. “If I go on, in six months I will read Shakespeare as an open book.” The translation that they made together is as lost as a love letter. Imagine, if it were wrought with such care and tenderness, what perfect correspondence they may have attained.
The sublime hunger may have gnawed at even as doughty a character as Queen Victoria. At the age of seventy she took up Urdu, promoting Abdul Karim, a twenty-four-year-old table servant—he had been a gift from India upon her Golden Jubilee—to the role of munshi, or private tutor. Each afternoon, the pair met to practice the language. As Shrabani Basu writes in Victoria & Abdul, “Karim would write a line in Urdu, followed by a line in English and then a line of Urdu in roman script.”
In the final years of her life, Karim became Victoria’s closest confidant. She built a cottage for him at Balmoral and tried to have him knighted, to the dismay of her entourage. She rebuked Lord Elgin, the viceroy of India, for failing to acknowledge a Christmas card that he had sent. “Young Abdul (who is in fact no servant) teaches me and is a vy. strict Master, and a perfect Gentleman,” she wrote to one of her daughters in 1888. It’s impossible to know the exact nature of their relationship, as less than a week after Victoria’s death, her son King Edward ordered their letters burned. Over the course of the years, Victoria had filled thirteen red-and-gold copybooks:
You may go hom
e if you like
Tum ghar jao agar chhate ho
You will miss the Munshi very much
Tum Munshi ko bahut yad karoge
The tea is always bad at Osborne
Chah Osborne men hamesha kharab hai
The egg is not boiled enough
Anda thik ubla nahi hai
Hold me tight
Ham ko mazbut Thamo
• • •
LOVE IS THE CAUSE and the continuance of my commitment to learning French, its tinder and its fuelwood, but, pedagogically, I’m having less success with the soul mate method. Olivier does not materialize at the tinkle of a handbell, attired in turban and sash, nor does he proofread my letters, blotting my mistakes with light pink paper. More prosaically, he is completely deaf in his right ear (meningitis, when he was three). He’s freakishly adept at keeping up with conversation—even in his second language, at a 50 percent disadvantage—but in order to hear, he has to turn his head so that he’s looking almost directly over his right shoulder, which forces him to speak out of the far left corner of his mouth, as though he’s perpetually telling a dirty joke. Enunciation is not his strong suit. His syntax can be equally askance. He starts sentences and lets them trail off, circling back after he’s put whatever he was going to say through another lap of thought.
We don’t speak French as regularly as we should. We try, but it’s hard, with English at our disposal, to summon the willpower to dial back to a frequency devoid of complexity, color, and jokes. Had my language skills developed in tandem with our relationship—the ability to say things mirroring my desire to say them—we might have gotten into the habit. But the moment for languid afternoons, naming the knees and the eyelashes, has passed. Our classroom is the kitchen after a long day, extractor fan howling. Olivier’s uptight (he can’t let an error go without correcting it). I’m impatient (the moment I make one, I abandon the effort). We can’t seem to lower our inhibitions and just let the conversation flow, the way you’re supposed to do to enter another language. When I try out a new word, I feel conspicuous, as though I’m test-driving a car I can’t afford. It’s hard for me, as someone for whom English is a livelihood, to embrace my status as an amateur in French. I’m the opposite of Eliza Doolittle: I don’t want to speak like a lady in a flower shop, I want to speak grammar.
Sybille Bedford captured the stylized pugnacity with which the French often confront foreigners, describing the pattern of “a great verbal roughing up at the beginning followed by showers of charm and goodwill; one might nearly get thrown out for expecting a table then end up dinner with brandy on the house.” The Swiss, however, make no such fetish of banter. Theoretically, I’m living in an immersion environment, but even outside the house, my exposure to French is limited. I feel as ridiculous about this as I would if I had moved to Europe and found myself eating a cheeseburger every day for lunch. I always begin in French when I enter a store, sit down in a restaurant, ask whether a seat’s taken on the tram. But language isn’t the totem of pride and identity in Switzerland that it is in France. It’s an instrument. Three times out of four, my interlocutor, hearing my accent, answers in English.
The solution seems obvious: push on in French. But the situation is tricky. My neighbors are essentially offering me cheeseburgers, prepared at some expense, and to turn them down seems unappreciative. Speaking English is a status symbol. It can also be a form of one-upmanship, a gauntlet being laid. “I’ve paid my dues in English,” I feel I’m being told, “now don’t waste my time with your rickety French.”
On Wednesdays I meet with a conversation partner for a language exchange: an hour of English for an hour of French. I’m hurrying to the café, trying to take in every billboard and notice and poster—the street’s own flash cards, shuffling by—when I pass a restaurant with a large, expensive-looking slate affixed to its facade:
IN HAMBURGER WE TRUST.
BECAUSE WE LIKE IT.
WHEN IT’S HURT HARD.
I double back, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the building. That’s really what it says.
Mistranslations are supposed to be funny, the stuff of bathroom books and Internet memes. But I’m blindsided by rage—a territorial desire to inflict upon whoever wrote this gibberish the shame, the self-conscious constraint, that I experience in his language every day. I want one person, one time, to know that you can’t explain someone something, to say furniture without putting an s on the end, to use funny to mean “humorous.” Geneva feels like a reverse Babel, with everyone, from everywhere, speaking a common language—my language—poorly. International English is beginning to be my bête noire, which I’d probably call “beast black” if I were speaking International English.
Half seriously, I fantasize about going through my days pretending to be Russian—“Nyet,” I’d say, and steamroll my way through the doctor’s appointment en français—thinking how much faster I’d progress. French is a secret garden, but English, somehow, is everyone’s property. While I was gone, strangers have moved into my childhood home, ripped down the curtains, and put their feet up on the couch.
• • •
“ALORS!” Dominique says.
For our first classroom assignment, we’re to conduct a conversation with the person next to us, and then introduce him or her to the group. We spend the next ten minutes chatting haltingly—an awkward silence passes over the crowd roughly every twenty seconds—before Dominique calls the class to attention.
“Lauren, you will be my first victim!”
A hacky sack, confirming that I have the floor, comes sailing across the room.
“Je vous présente Lana,” I begin.
Lana, a twenty-six-year-old Bosnian Serb, likes gymnastics. She comes from Banja Luka, a town with a temperate climate, several discotheques, and a thirteenth-century fort. Lana is in Geneva with her husband, who works at a bank. She doesn’t mention a job, but she looks like a salon model, with crimson fingernails and thick brown hair, plaited like a dressage contestant. She is the second of three sisters. She takes copious notes with a mechanical pencil that she produces from a plastic case. When she makes a mistake, she scrubs at it with a gum eraser, delicately blowing the leavings, as though she were wishing on a dandelion, from the page.
It’s Lana’s turn to introduce me.
“Je vous présente Lauren.”
Lana explains that I come from a village in North Carolina. I like books and traveling. Lana does an impeccable job, except that she says magasin américain instead of magazine américain, so everyone thinks I work in an American store instead of for an American magazine. “Freedom isn’t free!” I imagine myself admonishing shoppers who question the markups on peanut butter and flag pins.
A nice thing about Geneva: the city offers an annual chèque de formation in the amount of 990 Swiss francs to anyone who cares to claim it. So the class, which costs exactly 990 Swiss francs, is populated by a group of citizens who, for one reason or another, want—need—to learn French in a less dilatory way than that of your typical adult-education enthusiast. No one is here to check off his bucket list or to prepare for a holiday abroad. The fantasy of the foreigner is a life more banal.
Sonia, a young Galician who delivers newspapers, introduces Jorge, a single Argentinian architect in his forties.
“His hobbies are playing soccer and watching soccer.”
“What else do you like, besides soccer?” Dominique asks.
“Cooking—my mother’s dishes,” he responds, reddening from stubbly neck to chubby cheeks. He seems to think that Dominique is hitting on him.
We meet Nino, a bank intern from Lucerne; Claudia, a Bolivian home health-care aide; Carlos, a Spanish bellboy; a Ja
panese academic named Satomi; and three young Italian women—Cristina, an artist; Giulia, who has followed her husband to Geneva; and Alessandra, who has come with her boyfriend. The only other American in the class is Scotty, an executive at an NGO. She comes from Alaska, which, she announces, is “not really part of the United States.”
Frank, a married German who works in development and likes running, clears his throat and launches into an introduction of the student to his left, in a baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt.
“Vic est canadien,” he says.
“Canadien ou canadienne?” Dominique interrupts, assuming Frank has made a rookie mistake in gender agreement.
Next door, the Bollyrobics class is blasting bhangra. Frank starts again.
“Il est canadien.”
The room falls silent as Frank turns to reassess his partner.
“Elle est canadienne,” he says, recovering quickly. “Elle aime bien le rugby. Elle est un chef de cuisine. Sa spécialité est poisson.”
• • •
THE FIRST WORDS we have in what can be called French troth a fratricide. The year is 842: Louis the German and Charles the Bald, grandsons of Charlemagne, are under attack from their eldest brother Lothair, who, as the nominal head of the Frankish Empire, is burning, pillaging, and murdering people in their territories. Louis controls East Francia, which aligns with much of modern-day Germany. Charles rules West Francia, covering parts of what is now France. (The word Francia refers to the Franks, the Germanic tribe that established the Frankish Empire.) With their armies, they convene at Strasbourg, pledging to unite against Lothair.
The historian Nithard, also a grandson of Charlemagne, chronicled their accord in On the Dissensions of the Sons of Louis the Pious, a sort of grisly family newsletter. According to him, Louis speaks first, addressing his troops in Frankish, an early form of German. “Let it be known how many times Lothair has—since our father died—attempted to destroy me and this brother of mine, committing massacres in his pursuit of us,” he says. “But since neither brotherhood nor Christianity nor any natural inclination, save justice, has been able to bring peace between us, we have been forced to take the matter to the judgement of almighty God.” Charles follows, making a similar speech in Gallo-Romance, a prototypical French. Finally the brothers swear an oath, each reciting it in the other’s language—the ultimate way of signaling their good intentions. (They read aloud from phonetic texts.) “With this completed,” Nithard writes, “Louis left for Worms along the Rhine via Speyer; and Charles, along the Vosges via Wissembourg.”
When in French Page 11
