When in French (18 page)

“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-vyay?” I say, cupping my lips tight and gentle around the syllables, as though they're eggs that might crack.

H
AD 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.”

The curse of Babel continued to bedevil our household. A friend of Olivier's, a
parisienne
who worked in fashion PR, was coming to visit us in Geneva. I spent days planning the menu, requisitioning the best lamb, stuffing the lamb with saffron rice, stressing out over which pâtisserie I'd go to for tiny
tartes
and
fondants
. (The how-to-be-a-French-person guides I'd read
the year before assured me that store-bought desserts were totally acceptable.)

The dinner came off well. The meat was tender. I served the salad as a palate cleanser, in the French way, and after that, a selection of cheeses of different textures, levels of pungency, and varieties of milk. The desserts were a hit. Once we'd lingered a while at the table, we moved to the living room, where we lit a fire and watched as the flames pulled like taffy toward the flue.

For my benefit, we spoke in English. Christine, Olivier's friend, was complaining about some British colleagues.

“‘Hey, lads,' it makes me insane,” Olivier joined in.

I listened as it became clear that my dinner partners believed that a group they called “Anglo-Saxons”—comprising a culture that united Britain, its commonwealths, and former colonies—were engaged in some sort of global conspiracy.

France, Britain, and America: what a love triangle. I was reminded of a letter I'd seen in a museum exhibit, an internal memo that went around the British Foreign Office in 1941. “We are regarded as a cold-blooded, calculating people, and our failure to show warmth—to ‘say it with flowers'—is perhaps the main reason why American respect for us never quite ripens into a warm, uncalculating friendship—such as they have felt for the French,” it read. “If we could, for once in our lives, shed our caution and offer our most precious possession to our best friends, then the effect would be incalculable, both to-day and in the future.” The writer wanted to make a permanent gift to the American people of the Lincoln Cathedral's Magna Carta, which had been a sensation at the New York World's Fair. Being an American, I had found the “for once in our lives” so poignant, suggestive in its mustachioed primness of a bureaucrat who, sensing the end of days, has finally worked
up the nerve to cut in on a dance. I read on. Being an American, I had been had. The bureaucrat, in the last line of the letter, said it with mordant superiority: “And, after all, we possess four copies of Magna Carta.”

“Just look at the list of countries the NSA spies on,” Olivier was saying. “It's only Anglo-Saxons that the US trusts.”

“How exactly does India fit into this scheme?” I asked.

He and Christine looked at each other as though the answer were too obvious to be worth articulating.

“South Africa?” I continued.

“Americans don't like to be reminded that they were part of an empire, do they?” one of them said.

Having had enough, I got up, slammed the door, not very chicly, and went to bed.

 • • • 

S
CHNAPSIDEE
—
the way a German would describe a plan he'd hatched under the influence of alcohol.
Pilkunnussija
—Finnish for “comma fucker,” a grammar pedant. In Mundari,
ribuy-tibuy
refers to the sight, sound, and motion of a fat person's buttocks.
Jayus
, in Indonesian, denotes a joke told so poorly that people can't help but laugh.
Knullrufs
is Swedish for postsex hair.
Gumusservi
means moonlight shining on the water in Turkish.
Culaccino
is the Italian word for the mark left on a table by a cold glass.

Words like these are marvelous. We make lists of them, compile them into treasuries, trade them over any dinner table at which holders of more than one passport have convened. (The German, armed with
Kummerspeck
—“grief bacon”—will always win the day.) They're fun to say. They're funny to think about, in their Seinfeldian particularity. They expand
and concentrate the world, making it bigger-spirited while at the same time more specific.

We like to think that the lexicon of a language reveals broad truths about its speakers. The wine will flow, and the Japanese guest will mention
komorebi
, the sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, and the Frenchman will offer
l'appel du vide
, the urge to jump off the side of a cliff, and there will be collective acknowledgment of the aesthetic qualities of the Japanese, and the nihilistic ones of the French. But the idea that untranslatable words prove that speakers of different languages experience the world in radically different ways is as dubious as it is popular, originating from “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”—the notion that Eskimo has fifty or eighty or a hundred words for snow.

Eskimo is not a language but a group of them, comprising the Inuit and Yupik families, spoken from Greenland to Siberia. Nor, as the linguist Geoffrey Pullum explains, are they actually especially rich in snow terminology. What they are rich in is suffixes, which allow their speakers to build endless variations upon a small base of root words. (If you're tallying derivations, Eskimos also have a multitude of words for “sun.”) Sticking strictly to lexemes, or minimal meaningful units of language, Anthony C. Woodbury has cataloged about fifteen distinct snow words in one Eskimo language, Central Alaskan Yupik—roughly the same number as there are in English. A cartoon, mocking our credulity, features two Eskimos. One asks the other, “Did you know that in Hampstead”—a neighborhood in North London—“they have twenty words for bread?”

Even if Eskimos did possess a voluminous vocabulary for snow, or Hampsteaders for bread, it wouldn't prove that they were subject to some separate reality, that their language sliced
up the world into mutually unavailable porterhouses and
araignées.
Lepidopterists have names for the behavior that butterflies exhibit at damp spots (puddling) and for the opening of the silk gland found on the caterpillar's lower lip (spinneret). Architects can distinguish between arrowslits, bartizans, and spandrels, while pilots speak of upwash and adverse yaw. New words are created every day by people who are able to comprehend their meanings before they exist. Novel language can be a function of time as well as space. Czech speakers came up with
prozvonit
—the act of calling a cell phone and hanging up after one ring so that the other person will call you back, saving you money—because cell phones were invented, not because they were Czech. Even if languages express certain concepts more artfully, or more succinctly, it's precisely because we recognize the phenomena to which they refer that we're delighted by
knullrufs
and
Kummerspeck
.

A language carries within it a culture, or cultures: ways of thinking and being. With the exception of Olivier, I spoke American English with the people to whom I was closest, who spoke American English back to me. For most of my life, I had assumed that Americanness agreed with me, because I had never questioned it. My alienations were localized, smaller-bore. In North Carolina, I craved the immensity of New York. In New York, I longed for the intimacy of North Carolina. It wasn't that I didn't like either culture. I loved them both. But my family's trajectory over the course of three generations—north, south, and north again, a chevron of opportunity and discontent—had left me feeling that I could claim neither place as fully my own. In one, I was an arriviste; in the other, some part of me would always be a bumpkin, marveling at the existence of “doorman buildings” and thinking the phrase “plus one” a little mean. In ways, I felt that I had already learned a
new language, “picked it up,” like Zadie Smith, “in college, along with the unabridged
Clarissa
and a taste for port.”

“Why do people want to adopt another culture?” Alice Kaplan, the French scholar, writes. “Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't
name them
.” For me, French wasn't an uncomplicated refuge. I was coming at the language, I think, from the opposite angle to Kaplan: I had accidentally become the proprietor of a life suffused by French, and for all its charms, there was something I didn't like in
it
.

In French the grid was divided differently, between public and private, rather than polite and rude. At first I felt its emphasis on discrimination, its relentless taxonomizing, as an almost ethical defect. French—the language and the culture—was so doctrinaire, so hung up on questions of form. The necessity of classifying each person one came across as
vous
or
tu
, outsider or insider, potential foe or friend, seemed at best a pomposity and at worst an act of paranoia. The easy egalitarianism of English tingled like a phantom limb. French could feel as “old and cold and settled in its ways” a place to live as Joni Mitchell's Paris. One day I bought a package of twenty
assiettes pour grillades
and ached for America, where you could use your large white paper plates for whatever the hell you wanted.

Like Mark Twain—who translated one of his stories from French back into English, to produce the thrice-baked “The Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras”—I found the language comically unwieldy. In its reluctance to disobey itself, it often seemed effete. One French newspaper had a column that recapitulated the best tweets of the week in more characters than they took to write. The biggest ridiculousism I ever came across was “dinde gigogne composée d'une dinde partiellement désossée, farcie d'un canard partiellement désossé, lui-même
farci d'un poulet partiellement désossé”—that is to say, turducken.

Even if
muruaneq
—Yupik word for soft, deep fallen snow—was basically powder, the question tantalized me: Does each language have its own worldview? Do people have different personalities in different languages? Every exchange student and maker of New Year's resolutions hopes that the answer is yes. More than any juice cleanse or lottery win or career switch, a foreign language adumbrates a vision of a parallel life. The fantasy is that learning one activates a latent alter ego, righting a linguistic version of having been switched at birth. Could I, would I, become someone else if I spoke French?

 • • • 

T
HE ACADEMY IS VICIOUSLY
SPLIT
on the question of whether one's language shapes one's worldview. The debate examines language at the structural level, seeking to determine whether the distinctions that each one obliges its speakers to make—what they
must
say, rather than what they
may
say—result in differences in memory, perception, and practical skills. So far, no one can definitively say whether Montaigne's parents were onto something in insisting that he be brought up in Latin, so that he could learn to think like the ancients. Depending on whom you ask, languages are either prescription glasses (changing the way you see the world) or vanity contact lenses (basically negligible). As one of the major unsolved mysteries of human cognition, the subject inspires theories as impassioned as they are irreconcilable.

Linguistic relativism—the idea that languages possess and inculcate different ways of thinking—gained purchase in the eighteenth century, spreading from the Romantics in France to their counterparts in Germany. As critics of the
Enlightenment, the Romantics expressed a preference for the emotional, local, and subjective by adopting the creed of nationalism, which held that the state's legitimacy rested in the unity of the people it governed. Nationalism, in their reckoning, was a means of spiritual renewal. Language was the font of national identity. “One of the most interesting inquiries into the history and manifold characteristics of the human understanding and heart would be found in a philosophical comparison of languages; since on each of these the mind and character of a people are strongly impressed,” Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, adding, “The genius of a people is nowhere more decisively indicated than in the physiognomy of its speech.” Like phrenologists measuring skulls, the Romantics sought to extrapolate the characters of peoples from their linguistic contours.