When in French (13 page)

That year we went to my parents' house for Christmas, and then to Mexico, where we'd rented an apartment for a week.
The trip was tense. Deranged by our stalemate, I pushed in every direction, preferring any sort of movement to the status quo. I made passive-aggressive proposals of my own. I said we could get a civil partnership; I tried to gin up family pressure that didn't exist. All the while, I assured myself that Olivier was being manipulative, a wily European debaucher toying with the prospects of a straightforward American innocent.

The afternoon of New Year's Eve, we went snorkeling. Watching the angelfish swarm and scatter, I felt a momentary respite from months of disquiet, probably because I was physically forced to stop asking questions to which the answers would inevitably disappoint. The sea grass gesticulated; I was silent. That evening we drank margaritas and listened to a scruffy mariachi band in the town square. I said that I had to know now. We passed the saddest night trying to come to some sort of resolution. After the sun came up, we went for a walk.

“I just can't,” Olivier said.

I called a taxi, decisive at last. At the airport, I ran up an enormous phone bill, speaking English to my American friends.

I boarded the plane. We sat on the runway for three hours before the pilot announced that our flight, the last of the day, was being canceled due to a mechanical glitch. Everyone disembarked. After great chaos, we were loaded into vans. I actually told the person sitting next to me that I was in transit to a family funeral, to justify my bursts of weeping. It was midnight before we arrived at a brightly lit tower complex. I spent the first night of the new year alone in a double bed on the twenty-first floor of an underbooked hotel on the Cancún strip.

Six days later, Olivier called. He was all in. The answer to
why he felt the way he did, he explained, had been none of the above. I had been giving ultimatums to someone who preferred to come to his decisions in freedom.

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.

B
RADLEY 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
hein
s.

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.”

 • • • 

T
HE 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:

 • • • 

L
OVE 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.

 • • • 

“A
LORS
!
”
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.