When in French

by Lauren Collins

  “Reality can be sexist,” I say, fixing Carlos with a stare. “What if this was Saudi Arabia instead of Mauritania?”

  Carlos is, for a millisecond, speechless.

  “Ladies,” he says, regaining his composure. He opens his chest to the room, like a lawyer addressing a jury. “Do you prefer a man who shows it all, or who keeps a little hidden?”

  “I think people should wear whatever they want,” I say.

  “No, but what if a guy is walking around in collants?”

  Merde, what are collants? I whip out my little dictionary app like a gunslinger in a saloon fight.

  “What do you think of a guy,” Cristina is yelling, “who wears tights to show his intimate form?”

  My pistol requires a password. I can’t type fast enough. Lana raises a manicured hand.

  “It’s not the same for a man or a woman,” she says.

  Carlos replies, “That’s why I asked what you ladies think.”

  “Women aren’t the same as men,” Lana continues. “They care what we wear. I care what he feels, what he thinks.”

  Luisa rustles her papers, trying to regain control of the conversation.

  “Frank?” she says.

  “Uhh.”

  After class, Cristina approaches me in the canteen.

  “That was very American of you, what you said.”

  “Thanks,” I say, sawing away at my veal cutlet.

  Repeating “I think that’s sexist” doesn’t exactly qualify as rhetorical pyrotechnics. But I’m pleased that I’ve managed to say something that sounds reasonably like myself. Until now, I’ve thought of learning as something passive. I’ve been hoarding words as though they were rare doubloons, tucking them away in the velvet pouches of my cerebrum. But they’re worthless, I realize, out of circulation. A language is the only subject you can’t learn by yourself.

  • • •

  ONE SATURDAY, we drive up into the mountains. For the first time in my Alpine career, I’m not the worst skier in the party. The honor falls to our friend Ankit, who grew up in Sydney. It’s his first time in the snow. He’s arranged to spend a few hours with an instructor, to get the hang of the basics.

  Olivier and Victoria, Ankit’s girlfriend, are lifelong adepts of skiing and French, my tandem Genevan nemeses. I’m extremely jittery on the slopes, but after a winter in Switzerland, I can more or less keep up. We pass an easy morning surveying the runs—a roving isosceles triangle, me bringing up the vertex. From the lift, we catch a glimpse of Ankit sliding backward, electric yellow, down the bunny slope, as though he were streaking through an optical fiber.

  We’ve made plans to meet for lunch at noon, at a restaurant the instructor has recommended. Olivier, Victoria, and I ski halfway down a bumpy red run and turn off toward a log cabin that’s barely visible from the trail. Smoke is rising from the chimney. The path that leads to the cabin is steep and narrow. After veering several times into the drifts that line it, I give in to my survivalist instincts and snowplow the whole way down, kneecaps torqueing. We’re waiting at the bottom when Ankit blazes into sight.

  He’s going fast and frantic. He takes a hard fall at the turn-off to the restaurant, but gamely dusts himself off. The path proves no easier for him to navigate than it was for me. But after a suite of brittle tumbles he arrives, standing, at the cabin’s doorstep.

  “Bravo, l’artiste!” I yell, letting out a cheer.

  Olivier looks at me quizzically.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “La plus belle voix!”

  Olivier is cracking up.

  “You realize that’s like going around saying, ‘You’re kind of pitchy, dog,’ right?”

  I hadn’t realized. I’m just regurgitating what I’ve been fed. To be successful at learning a language, one has to undertake a form of time travel, regressing to a childlike state of unembarrassed receptivity, in order to stand a chance of turning into a respectable adult. The unformed speaker has no more way of evaluating her influences than a baby does her parents. She eats whatever they feed her whole. People are playing God, we say, when they arbitrate mortality, but what about vocabulary? The patrons of my French, I realize, have created me as fully as though out of bone and hair. There is so much power in giving words.

  The gods can mess with you. An American friend, married to an Italian, tells me, “I remember that when I was learning, I was reading a lot of Svevo and speaking like a nineteenth-century Italian gentleman. My Roman friends delighted in my vocabulary. I kept saying ‘wet nurse.’ ” In class, we complete a unit on law and order. I wonder if Migros has loosed a band of aspiring crime victims upon Geneva, reciting a series of identical complaints about swindles and scams, simply because we can. But play, and being played with, is part of the deal. With every screwup, every catchphrase I shout across a mountaintop, thinking it a commonplace, I feel my sense of who I am in French mature.

  • • •

  GOATS CAN DEVELOP regional accents. So can chaffinches and yellowhammers, whose dialect differences—city birds sing at a higher pitch, to reduce feedback from buildings—are more distinct than those of humans. French French, to the Swiss ear, sounds stiff, while Swiss French, to a French person, comes off as singsong. Much of the controversy seems to center around the words for 70, 80, and 90: soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, and quatre-vingt-dix in French French, simplified by the Swiss—perhaps as a courtesy to their bankers—to septante, huitante, and nonante.

  “Quatre-vingt-dix is not useful,” Dominique decrees.

  “Nonante is not elegant,” Luisa says, the next day. (On this she is in accord with the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who fired any civil servant who dared to utter it.)

  Soon it’s time for our oral presentations. The majority of my classmates choose to speak about their hometowns. As March melts into April, we are transported to Berlin, Buenos Aires, Verona, Lake Como. It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve ended up in the same place as the sons and daughters of the cities of which I once collected postcards, which so enticed and frightened me, as my classmates played futbol in their alleys or ate schnitzel in their rathskellers. Even Lana’s Banja Luka, with its fort and its discotheques, possesses a certain grandeur. When my turn comes, I decide to forgo Wilmington and talk about living in French.

  “Today, I’m going to speak about the differences, or the lack thereof, among the world’s languages,” I say. “There are two schools of thought on the subject, one that suggests that each language expresses itself uniquely, and the other that holds that all the languages are variations on a universal theme.”

  I grab a piece of chalk and write on the blackboard:

  I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.

  —Charles V

  “Sorry, Frank,” I say.

  Dominique likes my presentation, even if she finds it a little abstruse.

  “I think you are in a period where you want to make some more complex phrases,” she says.

  “I got a nonante-cinq on my exposé,” I brag that night in the kitchen.

  “Argh!” Olivier says, recoiling. “You cannot say ‘nonante’!”

  “Ta mère en string panthère,” I fire back, entering the adolescent phase of my life in French.

  • • •

  OLIVIER AND I are sitting in the back of a twelve-passenger van in Tromsø, Norway. We’ve gone there, 217 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to try to see the northern lights. We only have three nights, so we’ve signed up with Marianne’s Heaven on Earth Aurora Chaser Tours, Tromsø’s hardest-core aurora-hunting outfit. Unlike the big bus tours that ferry tourists to preassigned viewing points night after night, MHOEACT prides itself on being a nimble operation, able to follow the skies on the fly. For 1,350 NOK—around $200—we’ve been promised snowsuits, reflector vests, headlamps, heat pads for feet and hands,
gloves, hats, socks, boots, professional twelve-spike ice crampons, and “hot and cold food most nights sometimes heated over an open fire.” We’ve brought our passports, as instructed. “We have no limits to where we might travel to find the aurora,” the brochure reads; “200 km radius, Island hopping or North, South, East or West to Finland or Sweden.”

  It’s five o’clock, two hours and forty-five minutes after sunset. The temperature is minus three. We’re sitting in a van outside the Tromsø post office, waiting for the rest of the group to show up. I’m not surprised they’re late. There is absolutely nothing to do in Tromsø, which makes it a lot of fun. Earlier in the day, Olivier and I marveled at the icebreakers in the harbor and took the briefest of peeks at Tromsø’s wooden cathedral before running down the street—our jeans turning hard as plaster in the cold—to a bar serving wine and soup. There, the bartender told us about Norwegian speeding tickets, which carry a fine of 10 percent of one’s annual income. We flipped through the Routard guide—the francophone Fodor’s—which seemed at least as concerned about the food situation in Norway as with the northern lights. Routard warned that Norway is the capital of malbouffe—“bad food,” such as hamburgers, hot dogs, kebabs, pizzas, and meatballs—“all with an air un peu road movie made in USA.”

  “The pain aux raisins, with glazed sugar and a touch of cream or sweet butter, are not bad, but, on the other hand, the brioches are insipid,” I read aloud.

  The guide seemed to think that the Norwegians may have even been responsible for the malbouffe in the United States.

  “Eternal question of the chicken or the egg,” I continued. “Let us not forget that the US is composed of the immigrants of many nations, a fair amount of whom come from Northern Europe.”

  Eventually the stragglers arrive and climb into the van. Marianne, a sturdy, affectless woman in fatigues and a patched sweater, is sitting in the passenger seat, looking at weather maps. Occupying the driver’s seat is her boyfriend, George, a distracted Scot who blew into Tromsø a few years earlier on a camping trip.

  George hits the gas and speeds out of the parking lot. For hours we circle around Norway’s icy highways as Marianne growls into a walkie-talkie, communicating with a network of scouts. Sometime after 8:00, George careens into a rest area. We park, and the gear is distributed. Swaddled like mummies, we tumble out of the van.

  The group disperses across a dark field. Olivier and I are standing side by side. Every once in a while we bump up against each other, as imperceptibly as bubble-wrapped glasses in a box. We look up. It’s the aurora borealis: a chemical green smear, like a glow stick leaking across the dark.

  We admire the lights at length while the photographers in the group make long-exposure shots, leaving their shutters open for fifteen minutes at a time. At 9:00, they are still beautiful but faint and, in a way, underwhelming. The aurora borealis, it turns out, is perhaps alone among natural phenomena in being more vivid in pictures than to the naked eye. By 11:00 the temperature has reached minus nine. We don’t know where we are, or when we’re going back. Marianne and George are rapt in their own camera gear. Eventually I retreat to the van, where Olivier unzips his polar suit and cradles my frozen feet to his chest like wounded birds.

  Midnight goes by. George remembers he’s supposed to light a fire. We get out and sit in the snow, drinking frigid cocoa, as he attempts to thaw a pack of Vienna sausages on a wobbly rack. Finally we return to the van, along with a Chinese woman and a pair of shivering Australians. We sit there, huddled, making intermittent conversation. We’re starting to wonder if there’s a safe word.

  Marianne, having at last noticed our collectively waning attention, approaches and opens the door, her headlamp shining like an accusation.

  “You’re not watching the northern lights,” she says.

  “We’re not,” we answer.

  “Why?” she asks, sounding hurt.

  “Elle est folle, non?” I say to Olivier as Marianne wanders away, neck cocked toward the sky.

  Olivier agrees with my diagnosis.

  “Ouais, elle est complétement maboule.”

  I put my head on his shoulder. He finds a plastic tarpaulin and pulls it around our knees like a quilt.

  It is perhaps not what the literary critic Marc Fumaroli had in mind when he wrote of “the banquet of the minds of which France was long the expert hostess, and whose memory will never be effaced,” extolling French as “the modern language of the mind’s clandestinity.” But nonetheless I feel a sly sense of enfranchisement, a growing ownership of a quality that has long estranged me even as I’ve yearned to possess it. La complicité—you hear it all the time in French. La complicité entre eux, une relation très complice. It had always struck me as a weirdly dark encomium. I was put off by its air of codependency, even while being intrigued by the naughtiness it implied. Suddenly I get it: we’re bank robbers, perpetrators of an improbable heist. A long relationship between the right people is a sort of brilliant crime.

  “Elle est dingue,” I say, exhausting my mental thesaurus of words for “crazy,” wanting to make the moment last.

  We are beginning to be a French couple, trading undetected confidences in the back of a twelve-passenger van. Tomorrow we will wake up and sneer at Tromsø’s insipid brioches!

  • • •

  A MEMORY CAN BE A long-exposure photograph, the scene it captures becoming clear only over the course of years. An image comes to me: a restaurant in London, steak, a long table, some kind of bordello theme. Olivier and me, very early days. We’re there with some of his crowd, everyone French. At the end of the night, we’re all saying good-bye. The friend I’ve heard Olivier speak about the most says something funny. “I love you!” I gush.

  We get in a taxi. Olivier is apoplectic. I chalk this up to a jealousy problem, tallying a mark in my mental column of cons. But his anger stings, especially in that my effusiveness has been a conscious effort to demonstrate an investment in his world, to show warmth to the people who mean something to him. I insist that “I love you!” isn’t a come-on but a nicety, an unmissably hyperbolic “You’re hilarious,” or “That’s great.” I don’t know then that aimer, “to love,” is in French the realm of deep feeling. (There’s a separate form, aimer bien, for “to like.”) “The girls nowadays indulge in such exaggerated statements that one never can tell what they do mean,” L. M. Montgomery writes in Anne of the Island. “It wasn’t so in my young days. Then a girl did not say she loved turnips, in just the same tone as she might have said she loved her mother or her Saviour.” I don’t know that you still can’t do that in French.

  I don’t know, either, that it’s not just Olivier and me stuck in some sort of verbal deadlock, that English and French are opposing systems as much as they are languages—the former global, convenient, and casual; the latter particular, hierarchical, and painstaking. I have no way of foreseeing that French will reshape the contours of my relationships, that I won’t always consider people intimates until proven not to be. I love my parents, my friends, my colleagues, the woman who gives me extra guacamole at Chipotle, hydrangeas, podcasts, clean sheets. Olivier has only ever loved me.

  Another restaurant: Geneva, years later, watery mojitos, a wagyu beef burger in a tall glass cloche. We’re there with a group organized by Olivier’s boss. I’m sitting next to him. He’s English. We talk about cricket, a sport of which I’m totally ignorant. Eventually something comes up that requires the input of Olivier, who’s sitting at the other end of the table.

  “Bébé” isn’t going to cut it. But neither is a massacre. I’m facing the same problem one faces when ordering a gyro sandwich: say his name correctly and sound like an asshole; say it how everyone else does and betray my hard-won knowledge, sacrificing integrity to a false tact. I feel as though I’m being asked to declare an allegiance, to plant a flag on the terrain of myself, merely by opening my mouth.

  “Oh-lee-vya
y?” I say, cupping my lips tight and gentle around the syllables, as though they’re eggs that might crack.

  Five

  THE CONDITIONAL

  Le Conditionnel

  HAD FRANCO NOT COME to power in 1939, Olivier might have spoken Spanish. His maternal grandmother came from a bourgeois family in Barcelona. (They spoke Catalan.) His Aragonian maternal grandfather—a schoolteacher, though his parents had wanted him to be a priest—was an atheist anarchist. When the civil war broke out, he joined the Republican Army as an officer. After the Republicans’ defeat, he sought refuge in France, where he worked in the resistance movement. In the fall of 1944 he was part of a band of six thousand guérilleros who invaded Spain at the Aran Valley, intending to reconquer the territory. After their defeat, he led twenty-two survivors on a month-long retreat through the Pyrenees, crossing Andorra to arrive at Foix. Later he became a local councilman, and an Esperanto enthusiast. He died before I met Olivier, but I wondered whether his experiences in the war had left him with a desire to try to piece back together the map that nationalism had dissected, to reunite Europe through a common tongue.

  One summer night, sitting in her garden, I asked Violeta about him.

  “He was an anarchist,” she began.

  Before she could finish reciting his biography, Teddy chimed in.

  “Mi parolas Esperanton!”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “I speak Esperanto too,” he continued, in French. “They had a class at the naturist resort my first wife and I used to go to in the sixties.”

  “It was an ideology,” Violeta said.

  “A way to reconnect mankind,” Teddy added.

  “The Esperanto or the nudism?”

  Teddy said that he’d reluctantly abandoned Esperanto—nobody spoke it—but his interest in naturism was still going strong. He and Violeta, in fact, owned a vacation condo in Cap d’Agde, a clothes-optional resort on the Mediterranean. Before going to bed, I typed “Cap d’Agde” into Google. “A family destination that offers many equipments and activities to children and parents,” the town’s official website read. The unofficial website had a somewhat different take: “Originally Cap d’Agde was the domain of nudists and naturists, but swingers seem to have taken over the place bit by bit.” At once I understood why all the world finds Americans puritanical. I was wondering how you say in Esperanto, “Ben Stiller, get a load of this.”