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Authors: Alice Kaplan

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In Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses, I found an expression of the overlapping spheres of words and things. Ponge
chose the most ordinary objects as the subjects of his
poems-the oyster, the orange, and the cigarette. Each of
his objects is a worker, sweating and straining to make its
place in the world. Language speaks about itself through
them. The oyster, in French-l'huitre-is spelled with a circumflex accent marking the place where, as recently as the
Renaissance, there used to be an "s"-uistre. Huitre, the
word, hides an "s"; huitre, the object, hides a pearl. Ponge's
oyster poem was peppered with words containing circumflexes, all of them necessary to describe the object:
"blanchatre" (the whitish oyster shell); ` opiniatrement" (the
stubbornly closed oyster), "verdatre" (the slimy greenish
sack inside), "noiratre" (the black lacy fringe edging the oyster meat). I understood from Ponge why I could lose myself
in language. Why I could read the same sentences over and
over, different meanings or possibilities coming to the surface each time:

Parfois tres rare une formule perle a leur gosier de nacre, d'ou l'on
trouve aussitot a s'orner.

Sometimes, very rarely, a saying pearls forth from their
nacreous throats; we get to decorate ourselves.

I am walking down a road in Versoix. I know I'm in
Switzerland because the road is antiseptically clean. I
could eat on this street. I've bought a piece of Malabar
brand bubble gum from the tabac. I am proud of my conversation with the storekeeper. She is ruddy and round. Each of her transactions is utterly formulaic. I've said the
right words, as though buying a piece of gum in French
were totally normal. I've said' Je vous remercie, Madame"
(I know the verb "remercier," meaning "to thank"; I know
how to conjugate my thank-you's now, instead of saying a
simple "merci"). I open the Malabar wrapper, revealing a
cartoon tattoo on the inside. Directions say it can be transferred to any surface using water. I spit on the cartoon as I
walk. I roll up my sleeve. I slap the cartoon onto my arm
in the spot where I get vaccinations. The tattoo takes. I'm
marked. I use so much spit that the outline of the tattoo
streaks. I stop to examine my upper arm. It's a mush of
red and blue and yellow. I can't read it.

I stayed up all night working on my final project for Ann
Smock's poetry class: a book of prose poems, including language dreams, etymologies, collages of advertisement snippets, and bilingual puns. I turned in the poems as my final
paper. I was buzzing with energy and creative satisfaction.

A phone call from Louise took me by surprise. She was
celebrating the end of her first year at Vassar. There was tension in our conversation from the beginning:

"Who are you hanging out with?"

"Trip Murphy."

"Oh yeah, I knew that guy. Sort of a snob."

"Maybe to you."

[silence]

"What's California like?"

"It's great, I'm in this poetry class and I'm in the movement here. You know, fighting capitalist pigs."

The phrase slid out before I realized what I had said.

"How dare you! How dare you talk about capitalist pigs after all my father has done for you!"

Louise was usually so reserved. I had never heard her raise
her voice to anyone.

"Louise! I wasn't talking about your father."

"Well, who were you talking about then? He IS a capitalist.

And you're saying that capitalists are pigs."

"Louise!"

It was one of those conversations that should have had subtitles, making clear what we were really arguing about. For
example:

"I shared him with you!"

"You'd never tell him anything. All he wanted was to talk
with someone who would really talk to him. No wonder
he liked me better."

"He's my father, not yours. Don't you ever forget it."

"You don't even appreciate him. If I had a father like
him. . ."

"How much do you appreciate him? You acted like he was
your father. He took you to Aspen, he showed you Paris.
And now, suddenly he's a 'capitalist pig.' How dare you!"

She was right-I hadn't written to Mr. D for two years, I
hadn't thanked him. He had taught me to be active, not just
brood about life, and I was being active in Berkeley. It would
have been hard to explain to him exactly what I was doing,
but I should have tried. I could have risked it.

Whenever I thought about the Ds in the years that passed
before I finally wrote to Mr. D, a single painting would flash into my head in its exact details in situ: the red, yellow, and
blue Mondrian, hanging over a white love seat in the D living
room. A needlepoint pillow stitched to match the design of
the painting was propped on the left cushion of the love
seat.

On a summer night when Louise and I were sixteen,
Louise, her brothers and sister, Mr. and Mrs. D, and I played
a game called "trust," with the Mondrian-its rigorous
straight lines and demand for balance and harmonystaring us in the face. Six of us interlocked our hands in a
net. The seventh player let herself fall onto us, taking the
risk, feeling the support. We formed another net, and another, until each of us had had the sensation, both of supporting a falling player and of being the one who falls.

Three years later I walked into the waiting room at the San
Francisco airport, a newly declared "French major." Ann
Smock was sending me off on my junior year abroad with a
present-Raymond Queneau's Le Journal de Sally Mara, the
intimate diary of an Irish schoolgirl, written in fractured
French (Queneau, a wicked parodist, had perfected the way
French might be butchered by an anglophone adolescent). I
was part Queneau, part Sally Mara; part precocious student
spoofing my own lessons, part enthused adolescent wanting to please her teacher. Ann acknowledged both sides:
"Here," she had said when she handed me the book, "you'll
like these language games."

I sat in the airport lounge, examining my fellow students
over the top of the beige Gallimard/nrf book jacket that I
held in front of my face like a flag. I wanted the other students on the program to see that I was no tourist. I was going
to live in France.

 

Andre

I met Andre at the first party of the year in Pau, where our
junior-year-abroad group had a six-week orientation before
settling down in Bordeaux. He came bounding into the
room at me. He was long and wiry with shiny black hair and
a devil smile on his face. He sat me down on the couch, put
one hand on each of my shoulders: "Alors, ma petite americaine, to t'appelles comment?" The room was packed with
noisy foreign students. Andre's voice drowned them out
completely. "Serre-moi," he said, taking his arms off my
shoulders and holding them out toward me. I didn't know
those words in French but I figured out exactly what they
meant from Andre's body: "Serre-moi" meant "hold me."
Ten minutes later I went with him into the nearest bedroom-I was in love with my own recklessness-and he
put his shirt on a lamp for just the right amount of light. We
got into bed and his shirt caught on fire. It was like that with
him, sudden blazes; he was always jumping up to put out
some fire or other, leaping and howling at his own antics.
His main activities were mountain climbing (the Pyrenees),
painting, and chasing women. He was twenty-seven and he worked for a graphic arts firm, but it was impossible to think
of him as an office worker.

I used to wait for him to come into the cafe around seven.
He entered the room like a mannequin, one shoulder
slightly behind the other and his legs in front of him. His
smile was subtle and controlled; no teeth showed. He had a
way of stopping to survey the room before coming over to
my table that made me hold my breath for fear he wouldn't
come. He looked down his greyhound nose at each of my
girlfriends, bent his long frame forward to give the ceremonial kiss on each cheek, all around the table. I was last. I got
four kisses, two on each cheek, with the same geometric
precision.

I liked to watch Andre sitting across from me at the cafe,
smoking his cigarette with his head tilted to one side to
show off his cheek bones. He exuded an Egyptian beauty,
his jet black hair bouncing off his shoulders, his long muscles showing through his skin. There was so much energy in
that body, it seemed to be in motion even when he was
sitting.

He was a moralist and he had theories. He talked about
his "aesthetic folly"-his drunken outings-and about "the
bourgeois complacency" of most women (their desire for
commitment and stability; his love of freedom). He thought
American women talked too much, but he liked me because I was natural. Although I shouldn't wear so much
black.

I kept a diary and I started taking notes on Andre: "Andre
ate a dead bee he found on the steps of a church."

I liked to watch him. I studied Andre showering. He
scrubbed every inch of himself with a soapy washcloth that
he wrapped around his hand like an envelope. I watched him washing, I watched all his muscles under the soap, especially the ones around his chest he'd got from climbing
mountains. I thought to myself, this is the way a man
showers when he only gets a shower once a week. I thought
of all the men I knew who showered every day, sloppily, and
who had nothing to wash off.

I went to classes, part of our six-week orientation to
French culture. In class I spent a lot of time with my head on
the desk, nothing but Andre in it. I went to the language lab
for phonetic testing and they said I was starting to get the
regional Gascon accent in my "r"s, I should watch out. I had
been studying Andre too hard.

We read Andre Bazin and learned the difference between
Hollywood film and the French cinema d'auteur, film so
marked by the style of its director you can say it has an author, like a book. One day we were all bused to the Casino in
Pau, to watch Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima
man amour on a big screen. The movie begins with lovers, a
French actress and a Japanese architect. In the first frames,
you see their bodies close up, their sweat mixed with shiny
sprinkles that look like ash-the ash of the atomic bomb in
Hiroshima. I watched their bodies and I heard their voices.
The dialogue is sparse in this movie, the sentences are as
simple as sentences in a first-year language text, except that
they are erotic. One staccato statement after another, the
pronoun "tu"-the familiar "you"-in every sentence. The
movie taught me what "tu" means, how intimate, how
precious-"You are like a thousand women together," he
says, and she: "That is because you don't know me." The
sentences are so bare that they seem to mean everything-a
thousand sentences packed together in a few words, every
sentence an unexploded bomb. She: "You speak French well." He: "Don't I. I'm happy you've finally noticed" (laughter). After it was over, I still felt inside the bare secret world
of the movie and went to sit in a park, where I wrote to Andre in an erotic trance. "When I lose my words in French," I
wrote, "a radical transformation occurs. My thoughts are no
longer thoughts, they are images, visions. More importantthe feeling of power in not being able to communicate, the
feeling of being stripped down to the most fundamental
communication. I am with you, I see black and then flashes:
a leg, a sex, a nose. Seen, felt, tasted. The taste of your body
pursues me," I wrote. "Like an essence."

But Andre wasn't buying it. I still have the letter, stuck between the pages of my diary from that year; it has his corrections all over it. Where I wrote "la joie de la reverse," which
is made-up French for "the joy of reversal," he crossed it out
and wrote "the joy of anti-conformism." (One of his slogans
about himself was that he was an anti-conformist.)

This should have been my first clue that what I really
wanted from Andre was language, but in the short run all it
did was make me feel more attached to him, without knowing why I was attached. I can still hear the sound he made
when he read my love letter: "T,t,t," with that little ticking
sound French people make by putting the tips of their
tongues on the roof of their mouths-a fussy, condescending sound, by way of saying, "that's not how one says it."
What I wanted more than anything, more than Andre even,
was to make those sounds, which were the true sounds of
being French, and so even as he was insulting me and discounting my passion with a vocabulary lesson, I was listening and studying and recording his response.

He decided to take me out for a ninety-six-franc meal, for
my education. Tripes a la mode de Caen-the stomach of some animal, and the specialite de la maison. I ate it in huge bites, to
show him I wasn't squeamish. Before he had too much to
drink he made a speech at me, in his high moral style: "You
represent the woman I would like to love if I were older and
if I dominated myself. I am very happy to have known you.
But I want a woman I can express myself with. You understand my words but not my language-you don't even realize how great a problem it is between us." (I wrote the
whole speech down in my diary afterwards, word for
word.) He tried to pronounce the difference between
"word" and "world" in English-he thought it was funny
they were so alike, and that their similarity had to do with
us, with our problem. He couldn't make the "I" sound in
"world." He ordered schnapps for two plus a cognac, then
another. He drank them all. We raced off to a disco in his
Deux Chevaux. He leaped out under the strobe lights, out of
my sight. I stood outside the dancing piste and watched him
sidle up to four different women, one after another, twirling
each of them around him in his own athletic interpretation
of "le rock." His sister was at the discotheque. She advised
me to grab him and start making out with him if I wanted to
get home. Twice on the way home he stopped the car to
weep in my lap, sobbing giant tears.

BOOK: French Lessons: A Memoir
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