5
‘Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.’ — FLORA LEWIS
One of the joys of living in a country where the language is not your own is that even the most mundane transactions and interactions are a chance to acquire new snippets of the native tongue. Every single day, every single thing — be that a trip to the post office, a phone call, neighbourly chat, hair appointment or piece of admin — is a lesson, an opportunity to learn. It’s tangible progress. Sometimes the progress is glacial, but it’s progress nonetheless.
How often in your native land do you return from the supermarket with a litre of milk and three fresh pieces of vocabulary? I call that a bargain. Even if you think the avocados are overpriced, or the quality of the potatoes disappointing, you’ll come back semantically wealthier. Even if, during the shopping itself, you can’t locate the spices aisle, you still get to accost a store worker, lob a few hopeful sounds in their direction and congratulate yourself when the word you drag up from the dusty filing cabinets of your mind — épices — turns out to be the correct one.
When it comes to comprehension, I’ve found not all words are created equal. There are whole bits of sentences you can readily dispense with — while certain players carry a greater weight. Misinterpret those, and you’re really down a dead-end rue.
One day, for example, we were in our favourite shop — the Boutique d’à Côté. This little artisan produce store is a popular hub for locals on a Saturday morning, but you have to get there early to snap up the more in-demand items, like the free-range eggs. We made sure to be there on the dot of 9 a.m., but were disappointed to find the shelves egg-less. ‘Bah oui,’ one of the shop assistants began to explain with a sad shake of the head. ‘Il a passé le Renard.’ ‘How terrible!’ I commiserated. I didn’t know Renard, but I wanted to show that the omelette-shaped hole in our lives was nothing compared to the loss of this poor chicken farmer. ‘Was he sick?’ I asked. The woman looked startled. ‘Mais non! Le renard… il a mangéles poulets!’ Then it hit me — Renard of course, as well as being a man’s name, means ‘fox’. And the assistant’s rather quaint euphemism — ‘the fox passed by’ — explained why those particular fowl would not be laying eggs that day, the next week, or ever again.
This kind of misinterpretation is how rumours start. Had we not clarified the situation, we might have passed on the sad news to our neighbours, and before we knew it the whole hameau would be alight with talk of the mysterious dead farmer.
And that’s the danger with language. Any language. Our narratives should all be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism; facts get twisted, crucial details misunderstood, essential words missed.
One day after I was lamenting the lack of restaurants open in the evening, Alistair told me about the wonderful (and ironically named) Hôtel de la Paix. I’d seen the grand cream brick building slumbering peacefully on the edge of the town square, its shutters closed in what looked like a permanent siesta. It had been out of business for two years, Alistair told me. The Hôtel de La Paix had been a favourite with the locals — great food, genial atmosphere, open all hours. And then sadly the owner had stabbed one of the customers and was now in prison. This is what I firmly believed for months. But when we later mentioned the scandalous tale over lunch to our neighbour Antoine, he frowned and said ‘Non, that is not correct — I not know the ’ole story but he definitely stab no one. Per’aps he ’ave retired.’
So the restaurant owner, far from being guilty, was himself the victim of grievous linguistic harm. Alistair or some English person before him had misunderstood the sequence of events. Perhaps the actual story was that a salesperson had gone into the Hôtel de la Paix touting his dazzling sets of steak knives, and convinced the exhausted proprietor to go into business with him selling kitchen utensils. Or perhaps the owner had stabbed himself by mistake with a meat cleaver in the kitchen, thrown his hands in the air and declared ‘That’s it! I have had enough of this crazy bordel of a life. It is like prison! I move to Provence!’ Who knows? I am only glad that, unlike the poor chickens, the wounded customer is a fiction. And that the hotel owner is not eating diluted onion soup in some grim state institution but more likely than not playing pétanque by the Med.
Alistair and I have had a fair few disagreements about French — or rather, the boundaries surrounding my role as translator. When I first arrived at the moulin, he was so delighted to have an in-house interpreter to help him navigate French life that he would use me at every opportunity. Which in some ways is fair enough. But he’d give me no warning or time to prepare. Little swot that I am, I’d have liked a heads-up so I could look up the words for ‘septic tank’ or ‘slow broadband’ or ‘unblock the chimney’. But no. Alistair would be in the middle of a heated phone conversation when he’d suddenly and exasperatedly hand the phone to me, with the instruction ‘Here, you speak French. Tell them that blah blah …’ Invariably I’d find myself midway through negotiations about complex insurance claims or boiler parts or — the worst one — playing piggy-in-the-middle in a long-running dispute between Alistair and the gas company. I’d be left mouthing silently like a landed trout, not saying anything but staring wide-eyed and panicked.
But not having the right vocabulary is only one issue. You see, Alistair doesn’t just want me to translate for him. He wants me to be him. ‘No, no … don’t be all nice. Tell them we want it delivered TOMORROW or else they can go to hell and we’ll go with another provider!!’ ‘No, don’t apologise to them! Tell them we’ve had enough and that they are incompetent … What did you put the phone down for? I had five more questions!!’
Mon dieu — I have agreed to translate, not have a personality transplant.
Despite some of my translation challenges with Alistair, picking up new foreign words is actually such fun. At first, they are nothing more than random sounds made by other people who might as well be miaowing for all that you understand their noise. Then, over time, you recognise the shapes of the sounds, attach meaning to them and finally, one day, you begin to pick them up and make them your own. A new word popped into your repertoire is a wonderful thing. And the best part is it’s not like collecting rare Amazonian butterflies or seventeenth-century toothpicks — it’s a collection you can readily add to (and show off ) every day.
I have gathered some gems over the years. A long-held favourite is prestidigitateur, because of its manic, percussive ra-ta-ta-tat rhythm. Pres-tee-di-gi-ta-teur. It’s a word in tap shoes that comes skittering into the room then lands ‘Oof!’ in a heap on the sofa. It means ‘magician’, for which there is also the French word magicien. But why would you settle for a mere three syllables when — with a ‘Hey presto!’ and a swirl of your cape — you can bust out prestidigitateur?!
Another one I love is crépuscule, because it’s just delicious to wrap your tongue around and sounds exactly as the word for ‘twilight’ should … soft, whispery, delicate. A light creeping towards darkness.
But a new favourite acquisition is enjoliveur — because it quite literally means ‘the thing that makes pretty’. So much lovelier than its English equivalent, ‘hub cap’.
The other joyous thing about learning a new language is that it doesn’t just allow you to purchase corn plasters or a train ticket to Lille. It sheds light on a culture. It tells you what matters to people, what makes them tick, both on the macro and micro level.
Take the phrase bon appétit. It’s one we all know and frequently use in our Anglo-Saxon lives, but we toss it around in a rather cavalier fashion. It’s more often than not a light-hearted quip, rather than — as in France — a most sincere wish.
At the doctor’s one day, I heard every single patient call out to the nurse or doctor on leaving, ‘Bon appétit!’ The clinic was about to close for lunch, and these parting remarks showed a respect for the impending midday meal and a shared relishing of the gastronomic pleasures to come. Because in a land where food is so revered, lunch is a sacred fixture. Perhaps not so much in the cities, but in the countryside everything stops. At noon — if not before — people put aways their tools and stethoscopes, pull down shutters, close shops, and shut down their laptops. I once visited a hair salon that had been recommended to me, a good 45 minutes’ drive from our home. (The wonderful Cedric, I was promised, will transform you. The only downside is that you don’t have a say. He views himself as an artistic saviour, not a hairdresser. He will survey your untidy mop, assess your facial features, and unilaterally decide how to rescue you from this ongoing tragedy.) We decided to make an outing of it and stopped for lunch at a cute little bistro before my 2 p.m. appointment. Walking into the salon after lunch, we were greeted by Cedric gaily brandishing his scissors. ‘Ah, we just saw you in the restaurant!’ he beamed. ‘The staff and I always have lunch there. It’s nice to have an apéro, and a few glasses of wine, just to give you that break during the day.’ I’m happy to report his snipping was still on point.
For me, however, there is also a frustrating side to speaking a different language. In the early stages at least. And that is a sense of loss, a sense that I no longer have access to a certain part of myself. It’s like I’m trying to create something in a workshop but someone has waltzed in and nicked my favourite spanners. I don’t have the tools I want at my disposal. Take humour, for instance. Humour is my way of building bridges, breaking the ice with strangers. But in France, my remarks get lost in translation. On the rare occasion when I do assemble the words in time, they are delivered with such lack of confidence and such un-comedic timing that they miss the mark.
Interestingly, Alistair — who speaks less French than I do — is far better at this than I am. One day, in the aforementioned Boutique d’à Côté we were buying eggs (honestly we do have other interests) and Alistair knocked the carton off the counter, smashing two on the floor in the process. Switching to my default people-pleasing mode, I immediately began to profusely apologise for the glutinous puddle, check that no one had been splashed, and mop up the mess. Alistair merely handed over the money for the shopping and quipped, ‘Some replacement eggs, perhaps?’ Everyone laughed good-heartedly, and took it as the joke it was intended rather than a serious piece of impertinence. These artisan eggs, as I’ve said, are a precious commodity. ‘How do you do that?’ I asked. ‘It’s all in the eyebrows,’ he replied, twitching them playfully. He’s right. I need to get fluent in eyebrow.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. —PETER F. DRUCKER
Speaking of Alistair, here is an example of someone whose language really does tell you a lot about the way his mind works.
I’m learning that if I want to air a grievance, or express an emotion, I have to be extremely specific. In short, I have to speak like an engineer or a computer scientist. Because this is how Alistair interprets the world. It is the language he understands. In the very early days — and I refer you back to those two misunderstandings — Alistair accused me of ‘stress testing’ (a computer science term) the relationship. In other words, I was manufacturing a crisis to see how much pressure his affection for me could stand. He warned me that this was counterproductive.
In another argument, he cried out in exasperation ‘It’s Boolean!’ That one actually stopped me in my tracks. It was a good choice of word because we had to take time out while he explained this computing term. Turns out it simply means that something can only be true or false. By the time we’d discussed the terminology, we had cooled off and the tiff was forgotten. Science-speak will do that. It’s a passion killer.
It’s not that Alistair is clinical and unfeeling, not at all. But having trained as a civil engineer as well as in computer science, then spending much of his career project-managing, he needs you to give him components he can work with. Ennui, vague sadness, a sense of restlessness … these are simply no good to him. He wants to dismantle the problem, examine its parts, and only then can he find a way to fix it.
On another occasion my heightened emotion leaves him utterly speechless. The ingredients in this particular disagreement are eggs, potatoes and garlic. But first, a little background.
As I’ve alluded to before, Alistair is utterly competent. It’s maddening. He’s a skilled driver, experienced motorcycle rider, he can sail, horse-ride, snowboard and ski. Oh, and he’s an expert white-water rafter, as I discovered one evening going down the river in a makeshift raft on what was meant to be a fun jaunt. Alistair kept critiquing my technique with the paddle until finally I snapped back ‘I KNOW HOW TO ROW!!’
‘Maria,’ he said, trying to control his mounting frustration. ‘Just listen to what I am telling you. I did an advanced white-water rafting course so I know what I am talking about.’
At which point I threw the oar in the river and yelled back, ‘Of course you bloody did because you are bloody James Bond!’
You get my point.
When he’s not being 007, Alistair can also pull apart a car engine and fix it, mend the plumbing, do the re-wiring, tile the roof and re-calibrate the sound system to perfection.
But back to the eggs, potatoes and garlic.
The kitchen is the one place where I feel I can contribute something. As far as I know, Alistair doesn’t have any Michelin stars so finally it’s a sphere in which I can relax and create something. I’m not a great cook, but I have kept two children alive for 24 and 26 years respectively, so that counts for something.
On the evening in question I am making a Spanish omelette. Traditionally, a Spanish omelette — or tortilla — contains only potatoes, onions and eggs. I’m all for riffing on a recipe, but in this case I like to respect millions of Spanish domestic cooks and chefs before me and stick to what works. Yes, you’ll find omelettes purporting to be Spanish that contain all kinds of randomness and honestly, I don’t have a problem with people using up their cold peas and bits of ham. However, I like my version to be old-school.
Alistair asks if he can do anything so I reply, ‘Yes, please. You can chop some vegetables.’ To be fair, this is not a precise instruction. I had meant vegetables to go with the tortilla, not in it. He begins frantically chopping garlic, because he likes garlic, then wanders over and holds the chopping board over the pan in which I am frying an onion.
‘Where is that going?’ I ask, trying to keep things light but with an edge of hostility in my voice that would warn less courageous men to back off. ‘In the omelette,’ he says in a carefree tone that I’m not sure I like.
‘It’s not,’ I retort. ‘This is a Spanish omelette. A Spanish omelette never, ever has garlic in it.’
What ensues is a ten-minute debate in which Alistair accuses me of being a garlic-hating, uptight, recipe-following automaton and I accuse him of being a garlic-dependent, tradition-despising ignoramus.
When we finally come up for air, Alistair pleads, ‘Just tell me this. What is so wrong with garlic?’
‘It’s NOT about the garlic!’ I snap back. If Alistair were a painting right at this moment, he would be titled Speechless Man with Knife, Garlic and Chopping Board. He is standing stock still, and all vocabulary has drained from him. After a full minute he says weakly, ‘It isn’t about the garlic?’
I sigh, tell him to shove the garlic wherever he wants, and stomp into the living room. How can I explain to him that this isn’t about an ingredient, but about a threat to my very sense of self ? That the house, the workshop, the garage, the cars … these are all his domain and the kitchen is my last refuge. That Spanish omelettes have always been my thing — and now he is taking that from me too. I feel disenfranchised, de-aproned and dejected.
Yes, it sounds thoroughly ridiculous even as I note this down. But that’s the problem with words.
Perhaps I need to rely on them less. Maybe I need to lean more on the Gallic shrug and the eyebrow raise. And, when in doubt, on complete silence.
It’s stickily hot, somewhere in the thirties, and right now I’m more damp dishcloth than human. We’ve driven for two hours to the home of an English couple who have advertised their Range Rover for sale. Alistair wants something to tow his motorbikes, and this looks like a good deal at around ten-thousand quid — an older model but in seemingly mint condition. I am beginning to realise that when it comes to anything with an engine, Alistair will travel great distances to nail a bargain. To say he’s obsessed would be unfair; let’s just call it passionate.
I’d love to paint a geographical picture of the trip, the names of the towns and rivers, the churches and bridges of historical interest. But the truth is I have no idea where we are at any given point. I also shamefully don’t care — the Citroën Berlingo is air-conditioned, the croissants I pick up en route are plump and buttery, and the view is delicious. We journey through hamlet after hamlet, each one dreamily alike with their cream and grey stone, dozing town squares, boulangeries, épiceries, church spires. We pass blazing sunflower fields, and cars hurtle towards us down scarily tight lanes. These skinny roads never look wide enough for two, yet somehow always are. I swear they are breathing in and out just a little.
On arrival we’re greeted by Graham — a rotund, pink-faced seventy-something with a white ponytail and jolly demeanour. A Santa in sandals.
The Range Rover is less welcoming. It’s grubby, rusty and won’t start. Fair enough, too; it’s been sleeping under a tree undisturbed for three years and is understandably curmudgeonly about being woken on such a sweltering afternoon. Alistair lifts the bonnet and pokes around then lies down to peer underneath and is generally never still. I’m amazed at his industriousness in this heat. I loiter by with Graham, a former salesman of IT systems who is doing nothing to try to flog this dead horsepower. He just looks on and shrugs; he’s selling on behalf of a friend and is keeping out of it. Graham chats happily about grandkids back in the UK; why there’s been little music worth listening to since 1973; and his hope for a storm to euthanise the crumbling roof of the gîte next to the house (so insurance can pick up the tab). He’s funny and entertaining and I can see how he sold enough IT gear for a comfortable retirement at age 53. That’s when he and his wife Sally came here, twenty years ago. He chuckles when I suddenly exclaim, ‘Oh wow, that baguette on your windowsill has ears!’ It’s their ginger cat — one of Graham and Sally’s twelve felines — stretched out on the narrow ledge, looking for all the world like she just came out of a boulangerie oven.
Once Alistair has finished looking at the car which — inexplicably — he has decided to purchase, we sit on the couple’s patio at an enormous marble table in the shade, drinking very strong Ricard and water. Sally and Graham are warm and friendly, but here is the strange thing. Neither speaks any French. This strikes me as remarkable. They have been here for two decades, have all the time in the world, are intelligent, and they live in a small village. There’s no law that says you have to become part of a community, but that must surely be one the of the joys and main attractions of village life. Plus Graham is immensely genial and a consummate storyteller, so I wonder how such a convivial man bears the isolation from local life. When I ask him, ‘Don’t you ever feel a little cut off, not speaking the language?’ Graham pours more water into his Ricard and shakes his head. ‘No, not really. We have English TV, and the family comes out to visit.’ I find this sad, not just for Graham and Sally, but for communities like this who have wonderful people in their midst who simply can’t or won’t integrate. Maybe it’s a deep apprehension of trying to learn a language and failing. For someone like Graham, who spins such a great yarn, it may simply seem too great a hill to climb, to get to the point where he can be his entertaining self in French (it doesn’t stop Alistair, but then everyone is different). Or perhaps they just want a quiet life.
The cat on the windowsill is now sitting up, and I see how frail and tiny she is — a little old lady in a raggedy orange fur coat. Sally explains she was a wild kitten who came to their house one day and stayed. ‘Then she took off again — and didn’t reappear for twelve years. She just walked back into the garden and now lives on that windowsill.’ Cats are indeed mysterious. But then again, I reflect, thinking about our hospitable yet insular hosts, so are humans.