When in French: Love in a Second Language

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s’il vous plait.”

The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards: rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf. Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.

“Malheureusement, je n’ai pas de flanchet aujourd’hui,” he said. “En fait, on n’a généralement pas de flanchet.”

“What?” I said.

“He doesn’t have a flank steak.”

The butcher reached into the case and pulled out a small, dark purse of beef.

“Je vous propose l’araignée. C’est bien savoureux, comme le flanchet, mais plus tendre.”

“What did he say?”

“He has an araignée.”

“What is that?”

“No idea. Araignée means spider.”

“Okay, whatever, take it.”

“Bon, ça serait super.”

The araignée is the muscle that sheathes the socket of a cow’s hock bone, so called because of the strands of fat that crisscross its surface like a cobweb. In francophone Switzerland, as in France, it is a humble but cherished cut. Different countries, I was surprised to learn, have different ways of dismantling a cow: an American butcher cuts straight across the carcass, sawing through the bones, but a French boucher follows the body’s natural seams, extracting specific muscles. (American butchers are faster, but French butchers use more of the cow.) If you were to look at an American cow, in cross section, it would be a perfectly geometric Mondrian. A French cow is a Kandinsky, all whorls and arcs. You can’t get a porterhouse in Geneva, any more than you can get an araignée in New York: not because it doesn’t translate, but because it doesn’t exist.

A flank steak, I would have assumed, is a flank steak, no matter how you say it. We think of words as having one-to-one correspondences to objects, as though they were mere labels transposed onto irreducible phenomena. But even simple, concrete objects can differ according to the time, the place, and the language in which they are expressed. In Hebrew, “arm” and “hand” comprise a single word, yad, so that you can shake arms with a new acquaintance. In Hawaiian, meanwhile, lima encompasses “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.”

In a famous experiment, linguists assembled a group of sixty containers and asked English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers to identify them. What in English comprised nineteen jars, sixteen bottles, fifteen containers, five cans, three jugs, one tube, and one box was, in Spanish, twenty-eight frascos, six envases, six bidons, three aerosols, three botellas, two potes, two latas, two taros, two mamaderos, and one gotero, caja, talquera, taper, roceador, and pomo. Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, identified forty ping, ten guan, five tong, four he, and a guan.

“The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” the linguist Guy Deutscher has written. We don’t call an arm an arm because it’s an arm; it’s an arm because we call it one. Language carves up the world into different morsels (a metaphor that a Russian speaker might refuse, as “carving,” in Russian, can only be performed by an animate entity). It can fuse appendages and turn bottles into cans.

ALMOST AS SOON AS I’D arrived in Geneva, I’d begun to feel the pull of French. Already, I was intrigued by the blend of rudeness and refinement, the tension between the everyday and the exalted, that characterized the little I knew of the language. “Having your cake and eating it too” was Vouloir le beurre, l’argent, et le cul de la crémière (“To want the butter, the money, and the ass of the dairywoman”). Raplapla meant “tired.” A frileuse was a woman who easily got cold. La France profonde, with its immemorial air, gave me chills in a way that “flyover country” didn’t. I found it incredible that Olivier found it credible that the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 could have been in some part attributable to a breakdown in the distinction between vous (the second person formal subject pronoun) and tu (the second person informal). Before the crash, the airline had promoted what was referred to in the French press as an Anglo-Saxon-style management culture in which employees universally addressed each other as tu. The theory was that the policy had contributed to the creation of a power vacuum, in which no one could figure out who was supposed to be in charge.

French was the language of Racine, Flaubert, Proust, and Paris Match. It wasn’t as if I were being forced to expend thousands of hours of my life in an attempt to acquire Bislama or Nordfriisk. Even if I had been, it would have been an interesting experiment, a way to try to differentiate between nature and nurture, circumstance and self. Learning the language would give me a raison d’être in Geneva, transforming it from a backwater into a hub of a kingdom I wanted to be a part of. I wasn’t living in France, but I could live in French.

As long as I didn’t speak French, I knew that a membrane, however delicate, would separate me from my family. I didn’t mind being the comedy relative, birthing household appliances, but I sensed that the role might not become me for a lifetime. There were depths and shallows of intimacy I would never be able to navigate with a dual-language dictionary in hand. I didn’t want to be irrelevant or obnoxious. More than anything, I feared being alienated from the children Olivier and I hoped one day to have—tiny half-francophones who would cross their sevens and blow raspberries when they were annoyed, saddled with a Borat of a mother, babbling away in a tongue I didn’t understand. This would have been true in any language, but I sensed that it might be especially so in French, which in its orthodoxy seemed to exert particularly strong effects. “Do you want to see an Eskimo?” Saul Bellow wrote. “Turn to the Encyclopédie Larousse.”

Our first New Year’s in Switzerland, Jacques and Hugo decided to visit.

“They said they want to come in the morning,” Olivier told me.

“Okay. When?”

“In the morning.”

“No, but when?”

“In the morning!”

Olivier, I could see, was starting to get exasperated. I was, too.

“What do you mean?” I said, a little too emphatically, as unable to reformulate my desire to know on which day of the week they would arrive as Olivier was to fathom another shade of meaning.

“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’ I meant exactly what I said.”

“Well, what did you say, then?”

“I already said it.”

“What?”

His voice grew low and a little bit sad.

“Talking to you in English,” he said, “is like touching you with gloves.”

Two (#ulink_f19789f7-35d5-5ae1-bde8-12d1a5345f0b)

THE IMPERFECT (#ulink_f19789f7-35d5-5ae1-bde8-12d1a5345f0b)

L’Imparfait (#ulink_f19789f7-35d5-5ae1-bde8-12d1a5345f0b)

THE BELLS RANG every Wednesday morning. The teacher would lift the needle, drop the record on the spindle, and then:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonny LaMatina, Sonny LaMatina,

Ding dang dong, Ding dang dong.

I was five, a kindergartner. The song was pure sound, its hushed opening lines building to a pitter-patter and then to the crash-bang onomatopoeic finale that we liked to yell, hitting the terminal g’s like cymbals. The French teacher didn’t force meaning on us. She let us revel in the strangeness of the syllables, which made us feel special, since we were only just old enough to be able to discern that they were strange. Sonny La-Matina sounded to me like an exotic but approachable friend. I imagined him as a car dealer, like the ones I had heard on WWQQ 101.3, Cape Fear’s Country Leader: “Come on down to Sonny LaMatina Honda Acura Mitsubishi. You can push it, pull it, or drag it in!”

The school occupied a low-slung brick building set back from the highway on a lot of sand and pine. I had lived in Wilmington, a beach town wedged between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, my entire life. My parents, who came from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering them lifelong newcomers, had moved to North Carolina seventeen years earlier. My father was a criminal defense lawyer, handling everything from speeding tickets to murders. My mother worked from home—from our kitchen table, more precisely—tutoring high-school students in geometry and trig. We had a redbrick house, with green shutters and a picket fence. We knew exactly one person—a Korean-born woman with whom my mother played tennis—whose first language wasn’t English.

I loved where I came from. Wilmington was anything but a soulless suburb. Its inhabitants proudly extolled its claims to fame—hometown of Michael Jordan, headquarters of the North Carolina Azalea Festival, the largest port in the state. Dawson’s Creek was filmed there. The Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant with leaves like the jaws of a rat, grew natively only within a sixty-mile radius. You could swim in March. June brought lightning bugs, and August, jellyfish: Portuguese men-of-war, sea wasps, cabbage heads.

My family’s idea of a good vacation was to spend a week in a rented condominium 4.7 miles from our actual place of residence. My mother would drive home every day to water the grass. My brother, Matt, and I would ride bikes to a hot dog stand where the owner had shellacked a quarter onto the counter as an honesty test. We’d each get a North Carolina (mustard, chili, and slaw) and a Surfer (mustard, melted American cheese, and bacon bits), with pink lemonade that looked as if it had been brewed by dropping a highlighter inside a cup of water. Fall was oysters, roasted by the bushel and dumped on a table made from two metal drums and a piece of plywood, with a hole sawed out of the middle for the shells. When ACC basketball season arrived, church let out early. Teachers trundled televisions into the classrooms, blaring Dick Vitale.

People who live in big cities get people who live in small towns wrong: they don’t want out. Wilmington was a place where people, considering their habitat unimprovable, tended to stay put. Only one member of my family had ever been abroad, once, but by local standards we were considered suspiciously urbane. We subscribed to the newspaper, which many Wilmingtonians detested, because it was owned by the New York Times. (A popular bumper sticker read “Don’t Ask Me, I Read the Wilmington Morning Star.”) We drove to Pennsylvania every year, in a Volvo, to visit my grandmother. (Another sticker, aimed at tourists: “I-40 West—Use it.”) My parents encouraged us to pursue outside experiences. They were rarely illiberal, even in matters of which they had no direct knowledge. They were both keen readers, especially my mother, whose tastes in fiction were as sophisticated as they were simple in her everyday life. Their horizons were wider than those of many of the people around us, but they extended only a few hundred miles to the north.

Soon the school discontinued French in favor of Spanish, deeming it more practical. I became Laura, not Laurence. Roosters crowed cocorico instead of quiquiriki. On Wednesdays the record player crackled out “La Cucaracha” and, regardless of the season, “Feliz Navidad.”

One day our English teacher asked us to write a poem. My parents found mine not long ago. They were coming to London for my wedding to Olivier, the night before which we were planning a big dinner in a pub. Yorkshire pudding was on the menu, and they weren’t sure what it was.

My father flipped to the Y section of the family dictionary. A piece of loose-leaf paper fluttered to the ground. I had completed the poetry assignment with a fuzzy orange marker: