| |
Lord of The Present Tense
The French Connection
by
I was traveling light when I moved to France - a single suitcase of clothes and all the confidence that a working vocabulary of six words instills in someone who has just arrived in a foreign country alone.
I made my way by train to the small ecole in the south of the country where I planned to spend the next nine months mastering the mother tongue. Housed in a crumbling chateau run by a dyspeptic young couple who had inherited more in the way of aristocratic lineage than cash, it was filled with an international mélange of students: Business types from Switzerland and Germany, wealthy Lebanese refugees, Brazilian hotel execs, a pair of Syrians with a nebulous past, and me. The beds sagged like hammocks, flies filled the classrooms, and Brussels sprouts were served with every meal. The owners openly despised our presence, but were desperate to find a way to cover the mortgage.
C'est la vie, non?
We were in class six hours a day and I learned all sorts of things at the Chateau, but French wasn't among them. The main problem was that the ecole used the methode traditional of teaching, which is akin to the process used to memorize the Koran. There were lots of verbs, lots of tenses, lots of syntax, a few nouns, and almost nothing that could be construed as a useful sentence. As we students ardently mangled one construction after another, our teachers -- out of work women from the local school district - often looked as if they would rather be strapped to a dentist chair than face yet another rape of the verb for "to go."
After a month of this, my limited command of the language was evaporating. Since no one could speak much French beyond such key phrases as "My aunt has a pen" or "The little girl is pretty," everyone spoke English outside of the classroom. One night over some wine, I considered the prospect of becoming an acclaimed graduate of the Chateau's program - a person who could properly conjugate the verb etre up and down the walls with a mouthful of Brussels sprouts, but who couldn't order a croque monsieur in a café - and decided my fate. I quit the next day.
Two days later, I arrived in Paris and began apartment hunting. Finding suitable digs in a huge city is always a challenge, but the prospect of doing it with the language skills of a two-year old definitely added some sport to the equation.
Riding the metro to check out each new place, I would sway in the darkness of the tunnels and quietly rehearse my introduction before standing in line with other applicants, all of whom seemed impossibly well dressed and self-assured. When my turn came, I would step up and began my pitch, only to be cut off by a stream of invective and an exasperated look from the rental agent. This never failed to generate a chorus of laughter and muttered abuse from my fellow would-be tenants. Although I could only catch every ninth or tenth word aimed at me, I generally understood that a consensus had been reached: My application had been denied.
After a few weeks of this, my comprehension was definitely improving -- I could make out words like "imbecile" and "idiot!" quite clearly.
Then I had a realization: My constant dismissal wasn't about my phrases would have that mocked coherence in any language, it was about the French themselves. La societe Francais was truly egalitarian in the sense that the French hated everyone, even themselves. It wasn't personal, it was cultural - people didn't like me before I even had the chance to open my mouth!
It may sound strange, but I found this wonderfully liberating. I no longer cared what anyone thought and that made me fearless - I started talking to everyone I met. If I didn't know a word, I just made it up by putting a French sounding ending on whatever the English one was.
Life in Paris suddenly got much easier.
Then I met Sylvan. He had lived in San Francisco once and now wrote French subtitles for American films. Once a week we would meet in a café for drinks and he would pull out a small notebook.
"Okay, so I am watching zis scene today and ze guy, he says: 'Man zat's bad! ' But you know, eet's not."
"Not what?" I asked.
Not bad! Vous savez -- It was good! What ze fuck is he talking about?
And so I would launch into a detailed epistemology of American street slang that had emerged since he left the states, complete with examples of contextual applications.
Once Sylvan got it and wrote down the proper idiom, I always asked "So, how do you say that in French?"
The results were swift and stunning. I was still Lord of the Present Tense --my grammar remained an exercise in linguistic minimalism, my basic vocabulary skeletal -- but my mastery of Parisian street slang was dazzling. And while I still couldn't venture much further than the passé simple, I had figured out the intricacies of verlan, the process of inverting key words that was at the core of every hipster's conversation.
And the French, once they stopped laughing, loved it. The incongruity of someone who was so totally chebran that they could blithely rattle off "Hey dawg, whazda haps" in pitch-perfect argot one moment and then struggle with a coffee order the next, made them drop all pretense. They would gently correct me, often providing quick tutorials on the street or in a metro line, and always applaud any small hint of progress.
And so it went, albeit slowly. I was still looking for an apartment, but the laughing had stopped and the agents were now letting me get as far as proving solvency. Then one, an old woman who had survived the occupation, squinted at me.
"You have an accent!" It was part question, part challenge.
I shrugged, pursed my lips, and nodded in the Gallic tradition of indifference, but inside I was ecstatic.
She drew close and asked if I was German in a whisper. I told her "No, American."
She laughed and told me that she doubted it - my French was too good for that -- but as long as I wasn't a German she didn't care where I came from.
Then something magical happened - she handed me the keys.
A refugee from the odds, vacillates between writing, brand consulting, and associating with what his mother called "the wrong kind of people."
|
|
