French Lessons: A Memoir (11 page)

The next day I got a note that said: "I'm sorry Alice. Hier
soir j'avais trop bu. J'espere que to ne m'en tiendras pas xigueur. Tendresse. Andre." Which means: "I drank too much
last night. Don't be too hard on me." I received this note like
a haiku and pasted it in my diary.

That week I kept running over his speech in my mind.
What was the difference between his words and my words,
his world and my world? When I said a French word, why
wasn't it the same as when he said one? What could I do to make it be the same? I had to stick it out with him, he was
transmitting new words to me every day and I needed
more. In fact, while Barbara and Buffy and Kacy (Andre
dubbed us " l'equipe"-the team) rolled their eyes about
what a raw deal I was getting from this creep, I was all the
more determined to be with him. He was in all my daydreams now. I wanted to crawl into his skin, live in his body,
be him. The words he used to talk to me, I wanted to use
back. I wanted them to be my words.

The last weekend I spent with Andre, we went to a sleazy
hotel in Toulouse. He was on another drinking binge and
we both got bitten up by bedbugs-or so I thought at the
time. When I got back to the dorm my neck was swollen and
my ear was all red. I was hot, and I went into a long sleep that
I thought was due to exhaustion from being with Andre.
Within forty-eight hours the swelling on my neck felt like a
tumor and the whole side of my face was swollen. My right
eye was shut. I hid in my dorm room. When I had to go for a
meal I wrapped my neck in a scarf and put a hat down over
my right eye. I was almost too sick to care that Andre was
spending the night down the hall from me with Malte, a
French woman who was one of the assistants in charge of
orienting us. She was part Basque, like him, and lanky like
him, only softer; she dressed in Indian prints and sheepskin
vests.

The doctors didn't really know what was wrong with me,
so they did tests. They tried one medicine, then another. Finally they sent me to a convent, where I got free antibiotic
shots in my behind daily. I went there every day for seven
days to get rid of the infection. The stark white cot where I
submitted to the treatment, the nuns' quiet efficiency, had a
soothing effect on me. I was cleansed by charity.

When I came out of the worst of my sickness I thought
about it like this: it was the two of them against me. Two
people who had the words and shared the world and were
busy communicating in their authentic language, and me,
all alone in my room. Maize had something I couldn't have,
her blood and her tongue and a name with accents in it. I
was burning with race envy.

I spent a lot of time reading, and sitting in cafes with
" l'equipe," my team of girlfriends, and writing in my diary
about Andre and what he meant. He wanted me to be natural, and I wanted him to make me French. When I thought
back on the way the right side of me had swelled up, my
neck and my ear and my eye, it was as if half of my face had
been at war with that project. Half of me, at least, was allergic to Andre.

The day our group left for Bordeaux, Andre and Maite
were standing together at the bus stop and Andre gave me
the ceremonial cheek kiss right in front of her, and whispered the possibility of a visit in my tender but healed ear. I
could count on his infidelity working both ways.

In Bordeaux we signed up for housing with Monsieur
Garcia, the administrative assistant of the University of California program. "You can live with a family or you can have
liberty," Garcia said. A family meant nice quarters and no visitors; liberty meant scruffier quarters. Everyone knew that
liberty really meant liberty to have sex, and life in France
without sex was inconceivable to me.

Andre showed up in Bordeaux two or three times that
year, strictly on the run. Once he claimed he was in town
doing a two-week stage (the French term for a miniapprenticeship) on bug extermination with his friend Serge. He rang the doorbell in the middle of the night and leapt
into my bed. His breath smelled like rotten fruit and he had
one of those stubborn erections that doesn't even respond
to sex. Finally he rolled away from me, muttering what I
thought was "Je suis costaud" (I'm strong), falling into a dead
sleep. After a few days of thinking about the phonetic possibilities ("choo-ee co stow" or "choo-ee co stew"?), and looking through dictionaries, I decided he had actually been
saying, "je suis encore saoul" (I'm still drunk), only drunkenly: "j'suis 'co soo," as a way of explaining why he hadn't
been able to come. I was still putting up with Andre, for his
beauty and for his words.

Each room in my boardinghouse had a sink and bidet.
Outside was the outhouse, with maggots. The other boarders were immigrant workers. Across the hall was Camera,
from the Republique of Guinee, who had a job in construction and was trying to study math on the side with do-ityourself tapes. He helped me set up a camping gaz so I could
make omelettes. He took me to the African Student Association dance where I started dancing with the biggest creep
there. "Il ne vaut rien, " Camera warned me, "he's worth
nothing; a first-rate hustler." The hustler danced like a wild
marionette and told me what he liked: "fun, acid, women,
music." I made a rendezvous with him, which I didn't keep.
Camera was angry with me, and we stopped speaking.

For weeks I didn't want to open the door of my room, for
fear of seeing Camera, his disapproving glance. I kept the
door to my room closed, as though some father had
grounded me. When I was out I had the energy of an escaped convict; when I was home the righteousness of a
cloistered nun. It felt familiar.

I had to go to the bathroom all the time. The more I dreaded the outhouse, the more I had to go. I planned outings to cafes, to use the bathrooms there. I knew which cafes
in my part of town had clean bathrooms, with seats, and
which ones had stand-up Turkish toilets. If I timed it right I
could go to the best cafe in town, the Regent, anesthetize
myself with steamed milk, go to the bathroom, and make it
home for a night of dreams. When I walked home from the
cafe it was pitch black and sometimes a clochard, a bum,
yelled obscenities at me. I was too lost in my thoughts to be
scared.

The room became my world. Clean sheets once a week. I
began to recognize the people on my street: the man with
no arms, the tabac lady with the patchwork shawl, the old
concierge and his creaking keys, and Papillon, the pharmacist around the corner. My room and I were together now;
night and morning rituals established themselves with
pleasantly passing weeks. The bidet was no longer exotic; I
soaked my tired feet in it. I had a wool shawl that I wrapped
around my nightgowned shoulders and that transported
me into timelessness. I put the shawl on to read: Le Pere
Goriot, about a nineteenth-century boardinghouse, and Les
Liaisons dangereuses, about a woman who controls her world
through letters but is destroyed in the end. My room could
exist in any century, in any French city.

The administration of the California program arranged all
kinds of outings and connections for us students. I babysat
for a rich family who lived in a modern house. Their floor
was made of polished stones. I was invited to a chateau and I
wore my best dress, ready to discuss literature. I got there
and my French hosts greeted me in sneakers. They were
growing Silver Queen corn in their backyard, and they
wanted a fourth for tennis. Of all the Americans in my group the one they liked best was the freckled jock who could
hardly speak French and went everywhere on his ten-speed
bike. I was waiting to be rewarded for my good French, but
he got all the attention. He was having fun playing the American mascot, while I was doing all the hard work of learning
their language and what I thought were their social customs.
I would have been ready to pose as the Marlboro Man to
get the kind of attention he got from the French. But I had
veered off in the other direction; I was trying to be French.
Besides, I knew his ploy wouldn't work for me: a girl can't
be a Marlboro Man.

I was always watching and pretending, pretending and
watching. I met a guy from Colorado. We were sitting at the
French student restaurant together and I was peeling my
pear so carefully, he said, he didn't know I was American.
We went to the French student restaurant to meet people
but no one spoke at the table, just peeled their fruit and left.
This guy (his name is gone) and I made up stories instead of
going to bed together (we weren't supposed to go to bed
with each other: we were on our junior year abroad). In one,
I would be a prostitute who specialized in American men
wanting to meet French girls. The joke would be that I
wouldn't be French at all. We figured out where I would
have to go and what I would wear and say, and what they
would say. He would be my proxenete, the entrepreneur, and
we would make tons of money and live well.

He went off and found a French girlfriend, a real one, and
the next time I saw him they were on his moped, her arms
around his waist, her hair in one of those high French pony
tails waving in the breeze. When he saw me he waved
proudly, a little sheepish to have me see him like that in the
middle of his fantasy. I waved back and laughed.

I wanted to travel on my own, be brave, but I wasn't. I was
always afraid of making a faux pas. I took a taxi to the train
station to catch a train and I opened the taxi door just as a car
was racing down the street. The car smashed into the taxi
door, crumpling it. It was a fancy taxi, a top-of-the-line Renault, and the driver was screaming at me about his insurance and how much my foreigner stupidity was going to
cost him. He was so disgusted he wouldn't let me pay the
fare. I skulked into the station, my head hung low: this was
my great adventure.

In the seventeen years since I met Andre, my ear has
swelled up on me from time to time, although never as dramatically as that September in Pau. When I was writing this
book, it happened again. The swelling came on so quickly
that I went right to the doctor, who took one look at me and
said, "You have herpes simplex on your ear." He'd only seen
one case of herpes on the ear in all his years of medical practice: a man who had the cold sore on his mouth kissed his
wife on the ear, and she got the virus.

As I searched back in my mind, I could see the tiny little
blister on Andre's upper lip, a neat imperfection I was determined to ignore but that turned into his legacy. My precious
ear, my radar, my antenna: the locus of my whole attraction
to French, and Andre went right for it! Maybe he bit me
there, maybe he kissed me, or maybe he just whispered
some of his words with his lip up against my earlobe, and
the virus took.

At the time, when I thought about him and Maite, I
thought, "It's because my French isn't good enough" and
"It's because she's French." When he told me I couldn't understand his language, Andre had picked the accusation I was most vulnerable to. Afterwards I thought, "I'll show
him. I'll know all there is to know about his language. I'll
know his language better than he does, someday."

After I had become a French professor, I wrote Andre,
and he wrote back. The nonconformist was still living at the
same address, and I had moved ten times. I felt glad about
that. There were a few spelling mistakes in his letter to me,
the kind I'm hired to correct. But I didn't feel gleeful about
his spelling, because it hadn't been spelling that I wanted
from him. I wanted to breathe in French with Andre, I
wanted to sweat French sweat. It was the rhythm and pulse
of his French I wanted, the body of it, and he refused me, he
told me I could never get that. I had to get it another way.

Micheline

I went into the pharmacy near my apartment to ask for
medicine for mosquito bites in my best French: "quelque
chose contre les piques de moustiques" (something against
...). But since "pique" means "spade," not "bite" ("bite" is
"piqure"), the pharmacist and I were off and running, his hilarity, my blushes, his old man Legion of Honor gallantry,
and all the rest. "Please call me Papillon," he said, and he invited me to his family lunch that Saturday. I like to tell the
story to students because it is about a French mistake leading to something good.

It was one of those endless meals you read about in language classes-a first course of foie gras and a second
course of rabbit and french fries and a salad and a cheese
course and a fancy store-bought dessert. Bottles of wine
with dust still on them from the cave tucked under the pharmacy, the kind with sediment in the bottom and a tenlayered taste you can study. I was seated up at the head of the
table, in close range of Papillon who teased me and told stories about his adventures in Chicago, in the twenties. "I am
Veaux-veal-you understand?" he kept saying in a
Maurice-Chevalier-only-more-so fractured English. He told me what it was like to sit on a park bench in Chicago and
watch the girls; he raved about the American girls and how
tough they were, like soldiers, with legs like bayonets. His
daughter Micheline was there, across the table from me, a
cautious smile set on her face. She interrupted Papillon's
flights of fancy to question me in a calm pedagogical voice,
every word with its beat. Her children were at the table too:
Florence was deeply shy; Sylvie and Francois were kids,
Francois barely out of shorts. The meal was served by a
Spanish woman named Carmen, with one eye that twitched
and looked askance. The apartment was filled with extravagant Lalique vases of all sizes and deco furniture, big red
club chairs with arms wide enough to hold two tea cups. I
walked out of there dazed, onto the street where the sun
was setting over Eleanor of Aquitaine's tower, across the
street. Five hours had passed.

I went back year after year to see this family from my junior year abroad in 1973-74. I went to Papillon's apartment
above the pharmacy, then to Micheline's house, rue de Patay, then back to Papillon's retirement house in Pessac, for
the traditional Saturday lunch. I heard many more Papillon
stories: how he went to Spain with his medicines, to help
the Republicans, and came back disgusted by their violence.
I heard about his medals, his stamp collection, his pharmaceutical vases. I heard how he controlled pharmaceutical
supplies during the Occupation. I heard about his love for
the Marechal Petain, "who was betrayed by France." He had
a scarf printed with a drawing of the island where Petain was
exiled, and a motto about France's shame. He tried to lend it
to me to wear on a train trip, he thought I would get cold,
but Micheline intervened, gently: "You're not going to send
this poor young American girl off to Corsica with a Philippe Petain label around her neck." The children rolled their eyes
and explained later what American children are rarely
called upon to explain: the connection between family history, family prejudices, and big history, with a capital H. It
would take me ten more years to figure out that if you had
been a World War I veteran and not a Jew, Petain could have
been your hero in 194o. No matter how much wrong he did
later, the memory of Verdun might have blinded you to it.