French Lessons: A Memoir (12 page)

I think a lot about that Petain scarf and the way Papillon
wanted me to wrap up in it. I always go back to him for understanding France: the Third Republic, Gaullism, the Spanish Loyalists, French myths about the U.S. For each mystery
about France I can think back to Papillon barking out some
absurd slogan that would turn out to be soaked in politics,
and I remember his bottles and his jars and vases like a stage
set.

He was always taking things down off his shelves, as an
offering: a stamp, a handkerchief, a pharmaceutical vase.
Things, but always things with history. He had enough
things, it seemed, to give to all Bordeaux and still there
would be more.

Each of the children followed in the family's medical
tradition: Francois became a pharmacist, Sylvie a dentist,
Florence a pathologist. Papillon died in 1987; the next year
Francois bought a pharmacy, and Sylvie married Richard.
The family dog, Virginie, a puppy when I was nineteen, was
blind and emaciated like a skeleton when I was thirty-four.
No one could bear to put her to sleep.

I measured the passing of time by that house, that dog, as
our lives mingled and meshed. They became my French
family and I their American friend.

From the beginning I loved the fact that Micheline healed
people with language troubles. "Dr. Micheline Veaux: Maladies du langage" (illnesses of language) was inscribed on a
bronze plaque over her doorbell. Micheline Veaux is a phoniatre, a physician who specializes in problems, physical and
mental, that show themselves in speech. People recovering
from throat operations, stutterers, aphasiacs, immigrants
with psychological traumas in their newly acquired tongue.
People who, for one reason or another, speak in the wrong
pitch-too high or too low-and hurt their voices. She
works with them on a keyboard, and helps them find their
register. Her perspective is psychoanalytic; she believes, for
example, that it is dangerous to treat a symptom without
treating the cause. It is dangerous to cure someone of stuttering if the stuttering fulfills a psychic need that the person
hasn't understood. Language is not a machine you can break
and fix with the right technique, it is a function of the whole
person, an expression of culture, desire, need. Her respect
for everything that is alive in speech was profoundly new to
me, and it corresponded to my need to wonder about language. Inside our language is our history, personal and political. This is what Micheline showed me.

When you ring the doorbell at Micheline's house, the first
sound you hear is Virginie, the dachshund, whining and
scraping her nails over the tile floor in the hallway. Micheline's office is to the left of the hallway, and it is decorated in the style favored by French doctors: Empire. The
furniture is straight-edged and commanding. A desk, glasscased etageres full of books and toys. An analyst's couch. She
is the chef, the boss. But not in the style of Napoleon: physically she is big, sitting behind her Empire desk, with her
warrior's beaked nose, her olive skin and frosted hair. She is from the Auvergne, the Massif Central where her Protestant
ancestors are buried-there is a trace in her looks of Vercingetorix, the warrior of Ancient Gaul who held off Caesar
in that very region. She wears big swathes of expensive
fabric, but she can't be bothered with shoes-hers look
squashed. There are tape recorders around, and records,
along with the children's toys, and on the wall is a model
of a throat and mouth with tongue, tonsils, and teeth.

Micheline gave me one of the psychological tests she
gives her patients:

"My father is a tailor," I was supposed to write. "Mon pere
est tailleur." But many of her patients write instead, "Mon
pere est ailleurs" ("My father is somewhere else.") French
lets you make dramatic puns this way, because of "liaison": a
fact of French pronunciation which means that a consonant
at the end of one word (the "t" in "est") can hook up with
the subsequent word beginning with a vowel ("ailleurs"),
creating an ambiguity as to whether the word you are hearing is "ailleurs" or "tailleur." The French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan would have appreciated Micheline's test sentence. He believed that the child gains access to language
only when it perceives the existence of the father, which allows it to break out of infantile dualisms-self and mother,
inside and outside. "Somewhere out there, somewhere
else, is my father": this, says Lacan, is the child's inauguration
into language, the symbolic order, and the law. But it is
mothers, traditionally, who teach language, who listen and
correct, it is mothers who are the first to hear new words. It
is mothers who break or heal a child's tongue.

In spite of her testing, Micheline is not a Lacanian. "Dictation is a police state," she told me, "with grammar as the law.
Dictation can ruin a child's relationship to language."

Dictation is one of the permanent rites of French educa tion. You listen to the teacher's voice and you write down
every word. For every wrong accent, every wrong verb ending, you lose points; your listening and your knowledge of
the transition from voice to writing must be exquisite.
Around the time that Micheline was analyzing its dangers, I
was learning to give dictation in the French classes I taught.
How I must love the law, I thought; how I love getting every
word perfect, and now giving them and getting them back.
Micheline's resistance to dictation, the deep seriousness of
her critique, made the dull pedagogical exercise seem like a
rebellion. She wanted me to relax with my French, to live
with it. I wanted to control every word.

I went in to her office wanting to work on my French, and
she recorded my voice on her tape recorder. I heard my foreign intonation, which she called my "song." "You'll never
get rid of that song, " she said, "but what does it matter?" I
wanted to hire her, pay her thousands of dollars, to rid me
of it.

"Speech," Micheline told me, "is the highest and lowest
human function, the endroit charniere [the hitch] between the
mechanical grunt of the vocal chords and the poetry of
cognition."

I met her most successful former patient, a Vietnamese
boat person named, like the past participle, Vu. He no
longer stuttered. One spring he came to New York and
looked me up, and we walked down Riverside Drive together to Grant's Tomb. It happened to be the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30, 1985, and this made me
feel that we ought to be together, on that day. I took him to
dinner, Texas barbecue. When I was in Paris he called me.
We started to compete. We got annoyed at one another. He
wanted to be my French teacher. I wanted my French to be better than his. He worked for the bureau of standardization and wanted to write novels. We picked at one
another-he found every wrong word I uttered-in fact we
argued about the meanings of words and their usage. "His
usage is standard," I thought, "merely standard." Micheline
was disgusted by my lack of generosity where Vu was concerned. "Perhaps he doesn't have every quality," she told me
"but you have no idea what he has been through, how he
has rebuilt his life from nothing. Losing his mother and sister in a boat-we haven't a clue what that was like." I was
jealous of his success, his transcendence of the worst odds,
his pain conquered. It was a measly feeling.

Every time I went back to Bordeaux they told me whether
or not I'd lost my French. "You've still got it." Or, "You're
starting to lose it but you'll get it back." "It" seemed to depend on nothing-not whether I'd been teaching, not
whether I'd been spending time with French people. Some
fluke of memory and forgetting was involved. Sometimes I
would call them from the States, after months of silence,
and my simplest comments were unfathomable to them.

Micheline helped me study for the GRE's in French from
a practice book: "Is France sometimes referred to as a pentagon, an octagon, or a hexagon?" This made us laugh,
because we had traveled through the entire hexagon, Micheline and the kids and me, and in the car they had instructed me about the shape of France. Micheline's children knew the green Michelin guidebooks so well that they
could imitate them effortlessly, and as we drove into the
next one-horse town, Francois would elaborate a parody:
"Autin-sur-mer, pearl of the Atlantic. . ." I learned to swear
in traffic jams, listening to Micheline in the driver's seat. My
family snapshots from those trips show the Chateaux of the Loire; force-fed geese of the Dordogne; Sylvie, Micheline,
apd me on a bench, looking exactly alike in our posture and
pose. Sometimes an American would walk into the restaurant, the hotel, the church where we were, and I felt safe and
warm with my French family, protected from myself. I
heard the American voices and they were foreign to me.

Not that France didn't change. France became more
American every year, even as Americans longed more and
more for the traditions they had lost that France still had.
That was part of what we wanted in each other, in the beginning: me the ritual of France, Micheline the ease of
America.

In the seventies, as the American middle class abandoned their soup cans and frozen food for lengthy recipes
a ' la Julia Child, Micheline was moving in the opposite direction. Around the time that wine became weekly, if not daily,
in American middle-class families, it disappeared from Micheline's lunch table altogether. In fact I first learned the
word for "daily"- quotidien-at lunch when Micheline described a magazine article about "daily alcoholism" in
France, the thousands of French people who were alcoholics without really knowing it, merely because of the
amount of wine they drank with every meal. Around the
time that instant mashed potato flakes and TV dinners became an embarrassment in bourgeois Minneapolis, they
appeared in bourgeois Bordeaux. The first action she took
the day after her divorce, Micheline told me, was to buy a
freezer. This was her freedom.

She took me to the cafeteria at the hypermarche, so big it's
not a super- but a hypermarket, on the outskirts of Bordeaux. The food was Woolworth's only worse, frozen veal
covered in Cheese Whiz and pizza sauce. I ate with relish, this dish I would have rejected at home but which in France
was exotic. The place was decorated American Western
style, big painted cowboys with neon lassos. I marveled at
the novel decor with my French family.

Usually we didn't go out. There was no hanging around
in cafes. And then, when Papillon got too old, even the obligatory Saturday lunch at his house ended. Meals shrank.
Sometimes dinner was salmon spread on packaged toast, or
a piece of cheese from the glass cheese cage. Often it was
only out of respect for the visiting francophiles that tradition was trotted out. Florence made a crusted fish or her endive in bechamel and a tart; Francois, with his pharmacist's
nose, brought just the right wine from the inexhaustible
cellar.

I went back there every summer, every trip, for no reason,
as though it were my family. Each time, I felt the same mixture of anticipation and annoyance, as though it were my
family so I had to go. I expected to be bored there, quiet. I
went just to go to the same places: the bus stop at the Barriere de Pessac, the big bookstore, the street where I
shopped for clothes when I was a student. I went because I
needed to make sure the places were still there, to make
sure I really once lived there and I was really attached to this
foreign place.

There in Bordeaux is where my mouth and my eyes and
my ears for France started to work. When I was fifteen and
had my first conversation all in French, in Switzerland, it was
a religious awakening. In Bordeaux it became regular, boring, real. Quotidien.

Celine

I

There was a dead rat the size of a German Shepherd
puppy in the gutter in front of my boardinghouse the morning I began to read Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. It was
pitiful, with wet slick gray-brown fur that stuck together in
dumps. Since I'd never seen a rat before, this one looked
sweeter and more vulnerable than I had imagined a rat to
be. No teeth were showing.

Winter solstice held sway; it was still dark in the mornings
when I left to take the bus from the Cathedrale St. Andre to
the suburban University of Bordeaux campus at Talence,
where "Twentieth-Century French Literature for Foreigners" met. Barbara, of "1'equipe," had given our literature
professor the nickname "the Drycleaner" because of his tailored, spotless appearance, incongruous in the academic
barracks at Talence: going to the bathroom was a struggle
not to gag because of the violent graffiti and the shit
smeared on the walls.

The Drycleaner dared us to understand Celine, whose
French, he promised, offered the most idiomatic, difficult,
and lively sense of the language we would get in the course
of the semester, perhaps in our lives. Scenes of New York and Detroit in journey might help the Americans-the majority foreign population represented in our class-through
one section of the book.