When in French: Love in a Second Language

“They don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

“Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

“Their capillarity isn’t very good.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not even a word.”

Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed a piece of paper lying in the printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

capillarity noun

1: the property or state of being capillary

2: the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those of the solid

Ink to a nib, my heart surged.

There was eloquence, too, in the way he expressed himself physically—a perfect grammar of balanced steps and filled glasses and fingertips on the back of my elbow, predicated on some quiet confidence that we were always already a compound subject. The first time we said good-bye, he put his hands around my waist and lifted me just half an inch off the ground: a kiss in commas. I was short; he was not much taller. We could look each other in the eye.

But despite the absence of any technical barrier to comprehension, we often had, in some weirdly basic sense, a hard time understanding each other. The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and inside languages. You are performing a feat of interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.

In addition to being French and American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host of Steiner’s categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren’t attempting to stretch ourselves. I had been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity, but Olivier valued a more disciplined self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang out, to him that constituted a form of thoughtlessness. In the same way that Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick, or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional maquillage, in which people took a few minutes to compose their thoughts, rather than walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of sweatpants. For him, the success of le couple—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended on restraint rather than uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice, he saw artfulness.

Every couple struggles, to one extent or another, to communicate, but our differences, concealing each other like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he said to the point of parsimony; I spent my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods and tones, while he had a transcriptionist’s recall for the details of our exchanges. Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.

“I’ll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I’d say. “First, I’m going to read my book.”

“My dinner,” he’d reply, in a babyish voice. “My book.”

To him, the tendency of English speakers to use the possessive pronoun where none was strictly necessary sounded immature, stroppy even: my dinner, my book, my toy.

“Whatever, it’s my language,” I’d reply.

And why, he’d want to know later, had I said I’d clean the kitchen, when I’d only tidied it up? I’d reply that no native speaker—by which I meant no normal person—would ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living with Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man. His literalism missed the point, in a way that was as maddening as it was easily mocked.

For better or for worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we homed in on each other’s sentences, focusing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume down a notch too low. “You don’t seem like a married couple,” someone said, minutes after meeting us at a party. We fascinated each other and frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast, or excruciatingly slow, but we often had trouble finding a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control. We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.

IN GENEVA, my lack of French introduced an asymmetry. I needed Olivier to execute a task as basic as buying a train ticket. He was my translator, my navigator, my amanuensis, my taxi dispatcher, my schoolmaster, my patron, my critic. Like someone very young or very old, I was forced to depend on him almost completely. A few weeks after the chimney sweep’s visit, the cable guy came: I dialed Olivier’s number and surrendered the phone, quiescent as a traveler handing over his papers. I had always been the kind of person who bounded up to the maître d’ at a restaurant, ready to wrangle for a table. Now, I hung back. I overpaid and underasked—a tax on inarticulacy. I kept telling waiters that I was dead—je suis finie—when I meant to say that I had finished my salad.

I was lucky, I knew, privileged to be living in safety and comfort. Materially, my papers were in order. We had received a livret de famille from the French government, attesting that I was a member of the family of a European citizen. (The book, a sort of secular family bible, charged us to “assure together the moral and material direction of the family,” and had space for the addition of twelve children.) My Swiss residency permit explained that I was entitled to reside in the country, with Olivier as my sponsor, under the auspices of “regroupement familial.”

Emotionally, though, I was a displaced person. In leaving America and, then, leaving English, I had become a double immigrant or expatriate or whatever I was. (The distinctions could seem vain—what was an “expat” but an immigrant who drinks at lunch?) I could go back, but I couldn’t: Olivier had lived in the United States for seven years and was unwilling to repeat the experience, fearing he would never thrive in a professional culture dominated by extra-large men discussing college sports. Some of my friends were taken aback that a return to the States wasn’t up for discussion, but I felt I didn’t have much choice. I wasn’t going to dragoon Olivier into an existence that he had tried, and disliked, and explicitly wanted to avoid. Besides, I enjoyed living in Europe. For me, the first move, the physical one, had been easy. The transition into another language, however, was proving unexpectedly wrenching. Even though I had been living abroad—happily; ecstatically, even—for three years, I felt newly untethered in Geneva, a ghost ship set sail from the shores of my mother tongue.

My state of mindlessness manifested itself in bizarre ways. I couldn’t name the president of the country I lived in; I didn’t know how to dial whatever the Swiss version was of 911. When I noticed that the grass medians in our neighborhood had grown shaggy with neglect, I momentarily thought, “I should call the city council,” and then abandoned the thought: it seemed like scolding someone else’s kids. Because I never checked the weather, I was often shivering or soaked. Every so often I would walk out the door and notice that the shops were shuttered and no one was wearing a suit. Olivier called these “pop-up holidays”—Swiss observances of which we’d failed to get wind. Happy Saint Berthold’s Day!

In Michel Butor’s 1956 novel Passing Time, a French clerk is transferred to the fictitious English city of Bleston-on-Slee, a hellscape of fog and furnaces. “I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax,” the narrator says. Geneva felt similarly surreal. The city seemed a diorama, a failure of scale. Time unfurled vertically, as though, rather than moving through it, I was sinking down into it, like quicksand. I kept having a twinge in the upper right corner of my chest. It felt as though someone had pulled the cover too tight over a bed.

The gods punished their enemies by taking away their voices. Hera condemned Echo, the nymph whose stories so enchanted Zeus, to “prattle in a fainter tone, with mimic sounds, and accents not her own,” forever repeating a few basic syllables. First God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden. Then he destroyed the Tower of Babel, casting humankind out of a linguistic paradise—where every object had a name and every name had an object and God was the word—in a kind of second fall. Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.

Without language, my world diminished. One day I read about a study that demonstrated the importance of early exposure to language: in families on welfare, parents spoke about 600 words an hour to their children, while working-class parents spoke 1,200, and professional parents 2,100. By the time a child on welfare was three, he had heard 30 million fewer words than many of his peers, leaving him at an enduring disadvantage. I wondered how many fewer words I heard, read, and spoke each day in Geneva, deducting the conversations I couldn’t make out; the newspaper headlines I neglected to absorb; the pleasantries that I failed to utter, from which serendipitous encounters didn’t occur.

The back of our apartment overlooked a paved courtyard, where more senior residents of the building parked their cars. We didn’t have air-conditioning. Neither did anyone else. In the evening, when the weather was hot, people retracted the yellow and orange canvas awnings that shrouded their balconies, rolled up the metal shades that kept their homes dark as breadboxes, and flung open their windows, disengaging the triple perimeter of privacy that regimented Swiss domestic life. Pots clattered. Onions sizzled. A dozen conversations washed into our kitchen, the flotsam and jetsam of a summer night. There were blue screens, old songs, mean cats. Somebody was serving a cake.

It was a disorientingly intimate score. This wasn’t the suburbs. Nor was it New York, or even London, where alarm clocks were the only sounds you ever heard. Family life, someone else’s plot, was drifting unbidden into our home. It slayed me—a reminder of all I wasn’t taking part in, couldn’t grasp, didn’t know. Olivier took my melancholy as an affront. I was angry about being in Geneva, he calculated; he was the reason we were in Geneva; therefore, I was angry at him. He got defensive. I got loud. He would shush me, citing the neighbors, a constituency with which I had no truck. I felt as though I were living behind the aural equivalent of a one-way mirror. I didn’t think that anyone could hear my voice.

BY LINGUISTS’ BEST COUNT, there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages—almost as many as there are species of bird. Mandarin Chinese is the largest, with 848 million native speakers. Next is Spanish, with 415 million, followed by English, with 335 million. Ninety percent of the world’s languages are each spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people. According to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, eighteen of them—Apiaká, Bikya, Bishuo, Chaná, Dampelas, Diahói, Kaixána, Lae, Laua, Patwin, Pémono, Taushiro, Tinigua, Tolowa, Volow, Wintu-Nomlaki, Yahgan, and Yarawi—have only a single speaker left.

The existence of language, and the diversity of its forms, is one of humankind’s primal mysteries. Herodotus reported that the pharaoh Psammetichus seized two newborn peasant children and gave them to a shepherd, commanding that no one was to speak a word within their earshot. He did this “because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling.” Two years passed. The children ran toward the shepherd, shouting something that sounded to him like bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. From this, the Egyptians concluded that the Phrygians were a venerable race.

In the thirteen century, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II performed a series of ghoulish experiments. According to the Franciscan monk Salimbene of Parma, he immured a live man in a cask, to see if his soul would escape. He plied two prisoners with food and drink, sending one to bed and the other out to hunt, and then had them disemboweled, to test which had better digested the feast. His research culminated with newborns, “bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” What happens when humans are prevented from acquiring language in the normal manner is impossible to know because it is unconscionable to facilitate—“the forbidden experiment.”

Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Emerson all tried to explain, in one way or another, how languages evolved, and why there are so many of them. The question proved intractable enough that in 1865 the founders of the influential Société de Linguistique de Paris banned the discussion entirely, declaring, “The Society will accept no communication dealing with either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language.” For much of the twentieth century the prohibition held, and the subject of the origin of language remained unfashionable and even taboo. Interest in language has resurged in recent years, alongside advances in brain imaging and cognitive science, but researchers—working in disciplines as diverse as primatology and neuropsychology—have yet to establish a definitive explanation of the origins and evolution of human speech. The linguists Morten Christensen and Simon Kirby have suggested that the mystery of language is likely “the hardest problem in science.”

However people got to be scattered all over the earth, spouting mutually unintelligible tremulants and schwas and clicks, their ways of life are bound up in their languages. In addition to the various strangers with whom I couldn’t interact in any but the most perfunctory of ways, there was Olivier’s family, who now qualified as my closest kin by several thousand miles.

Olivier’s brother Fabrice was thirty-two, an intensive care doctor in Paris. Their half brother, Hugo, was fifteen, a high-schooler near Bordeaux. They both spoke some English, but having to do so was an academic exercise, an exam around the dinner table that I hated to proctor. Their father, Jacques, a kind and raspy-voiced occupational doctor in Bordeaux, wrote beautifully—he’d studied English, along with German, in high school, and later taken an intensive course—but we had trouble understanding each other in conversation. I was unable to determine whether I considered Olivier’s mother, Violeta, the ideal mother-in-law even though or because we were unable to sustain more than a five-second conversation in any language. A trained nurse, she worked as an administrator at a nursing home. She was the head of the local health care workers’ union, and had recently led a strike in scrubs and three-inch heels. She and her second husband, Teddy, spoke no English whatsoever.

The first year that Olivier and I were together, Violeta sent a package from Nespresso as a gift for Olivier. It was a surprise, so she wrote to me, asking that I hide it away until his birthday.

The postman came. I signed for the parcel. As soon as he left, I proceeded to the computer, where I assured Violeta, quite elegantly, that I had taken delivery of the gift.

“J’ai fait l’accouchement de la cafetière,” I typed, having checked and double-checked each word in my English-French dictionary.

Months went by before I learned that, by my account, I’d given birth to—as in, physically delivered, through the vagina—a coffee machine.

GROCERY STORES, as much as cathedrals or castles, reveal the essence of a place. In New York I’d shopped sparingly at the supermarket on my block—a cramped warren hawking con-cussed apples and a hundred kinds of milk. One day I bought a rotisserie chicken. I took it home and started shredding it to make a chicken salad. Halfway through, I realized that there was a ballpoint pen sticking straight out of the breast, like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. The next day, receipt in hand, I went back to the store and asked for a refund.

“Where’s the chicken?” the cashier barked.

“I threw it away,” I said. “It had a ballpoint pen in it.”

The closest grocery store to our apartment in London was almost parodically civilized. A cooperatively owned chain, it sold bulbs and sponsored a choir. Nothing amused me more than shaving a few pence off the purchase of a pack of toilet paper with a discount card that read “Mrs. L Z Collins.” I’d hand it over to an employee-shareholder in a candy-striped shirt and a quilted vest, who would deposit the toilet paper into a plastic bag emblazoned with a crest: “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen Grocer and Wine & Spirit Merchants.” If the store made a show of a certain kind of Englishness, its shelves were pure British multiculturalism: preserved lemons, gungo peas, mee goreng, soba noodles, lapsang souchong–smoked salmon. One November a “Thanksgiving” section appeared, featuring a mystifying array of maple syrup, dried mango chunks, and pickled beetroot.

As national rather than regional concerns, British supermarkets played an outsize role in public life. Every year, the launch of their competing Christmas puddings was attended by the sort of strangely consensual fanfare—everyone gets into it, even if it’s silly—that Americans accord to each summer’s blockbuster movies. The feedback loop of the food chain was tight: if a popular cookbook called for an obscure ingredient, the stores would quickly begin to carry it, a fact about which the newspapers would write, leading the cookbook to become even more popular, and the ingredient to materialize simultaneously in every British pantry. There was a coziness to the stores, amid their great convenience. Shopping in them always reminded me that London was a big city in a small country. From the £10 Dinner for Two deal at my supermarket—it included a starter or a pudding, a main course, a side dish, and an entire bottle of wine—I could extrapolate something about, and participate in, if I chose to, a typical middle-class British Friday night.

Food shopping in Geneva was a less idiosyncratic affair. For fruits and vegetables, I went often to the farmers’ markets. They had nothing to do with yoga or gluten. They were just a cheaper place to buy better carrots. The selection, though, was limited. For everything else, there were the Swiss supermarkets—two chains distinguished, as far as I could tell, by the fact that one of them sold alcohol and the other didn’t. I frequented the former, whose breakfasty theme colors made it seem like it was perpetually 7:00 a.m. Despite a few superficial points of contrast—you could find horse meat hanging alongside the chicken and the beef; the onions, taskingly, were the size of Ping-Pong balls—there wasn’t much to distinguish the experience. Cruising the cold, clean aisles, I could have been in most any developed nation.

My nemesis there—my imaginary frenemy—was Betty Bossi, a fifty-eight-year-old busybody with pearl earrings and a shower cap of pin-curled hair. Betty Bossi was inescapable. There was nothing she didn’t do, and nothing she did appealingly: stuffed mushrooms, bean sprouts, Caesar salad, Greek salad, mixed salad, potato salad, lentil salad, red root salad, “dreams of escape” salad, guacamole, tzatziki sauce, mango slices, grated carrots, chicken curry, egg and spinach sandwiches, orange juice, pizza dough, pastry dough, goulash, tofu, dim sum, shrimp cocktail, bratwurst, stroganoff, gnocchi, riz Casimir (a Swiss concoction of rice, veal cutlets, pepperoni, pineapple, hot red peppers, cream, banana, and currants).

Who was she? Where did she come from? What kind of name was Betty Bossi? Her corporate biography revealed that she was the invention of a Zurich copywriter, who had conjured her in 1956 in flagrant imitation of Betty Crocker. “The first name Betty, fashionable in each of the country’s three linguistic regions, was accepted straightaway by the publicity agency,” it read. “Equally, her last name was widespread all over the country. Together, they sounded good and were easy to pronounce in all the linguistic regions.”

Switzerland, like Britain, was a small country, but due to any number of historical and geographical factors—chief among them the fact that the population didn’t share a common language—it didn’t have a particularly cohesive culture. The political system was heavily decentralized. (Name a Swiss politician.) There was no film industry to speak of, no fashion, no music. (Name a Swiss movie.) With the exception of Roger Federer, who spent his downtime in Dubai, there weren’t really any public figures. (Name a Swiss celebrity.)

Swiss francophones looked to France for news and entertainment; German speakers gravitated toward Germany, and Italian speakers to Italy. (Speakers of Romansh, which is said to be the closest descendant of spoken Latin, made up less than 1 percent of the population and almost always spoke another language.) Gainful as it was, Switzerland’s multilingualism rendered public life indistinct, a tuna surprise from the kitchen of Betty Bossi. The country was in Europe, but not of it. Its defining national attribute, neutrality, seemed at times to be a euphemism for a kind of self-interested disinterest. The morning after Russia announced that it was banning food products from the European Union due to its support of Ukraine, the front page of the local paper boasted “Russian Embargo Boosts Gruyère.”

A few months later, it emerged that the supermarket chain that did not sell alcohol was selling mini coffee creamers whose lids featured portraits of Adolf Hitler. After a customer complained, a representative apologized for the error, saying, “I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls. Usually, the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes, and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem.” Betty Bossi as an icon; Hitler as a polemic. It was this bloodless quality that depressed me so much about Switzerland. My alienation stemmed less from a sense of being an outsider than from the feeling that there was nothing to be outside of.

The consolation prize of Geneva was the grande boucherie—a ninety-five-year-old emporium of shanks and shoulders and shins, aging woodcocks and unplucked capons, their feet the watery blue of a birthmark. The steaks were festooned with cherry tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. The aproned butchers, surprisingly approachable for people of their level of expertise, would expound on the preparation of any dish. One day, craving steak tacos—Geneva’s Mexican place only had pork ones, and a single order cost forty dollars—I convinced Olivier, who wasn’t big on cooking, to chaperone me to the boucherie. I explained to him that I wanted to buy a bavette de flanchet, the closest thing I had been able to find to a flank steak, after Googling various permutations of “French” and “meat.”