When I was 16
I decided to live in France for a year.
One of the teachers from my highschool was going there to teach English,
and I decided to tag along. It
was one of those haphazard decisions – the kind that you don’t realize you’ve
even made until it comes to fruition. The kind of decision that makes you question
your identity. The kind of decision
over which you panic, once realizing what you’ve gotten yourself into.
Well, my panic
was more than warranted. The gravity of my situation was cruelly unforgiving.
Of all the places for me to go: France. A country whose language I had
been trying to learn since Kindergarten, but failed miserably at year after
year. I suppose it wasn’t entirely painful: I may have had no earthly concept
of how to form a sentence, but at least I could count pretty high and I knew how
to make my way around the tactile dome version of “Le Jardin de Luxembourg”.
(Thanks to both Mureille et Robert, of ‘French in Action’ fame.)
This would have proven very helpful, I’m sure, had I been going to
Paris (and had I had the urge to pretend to be blind there). But instead, I was
embarking on a 9-month journey into the turbulent depths of the Alabama twang
equivalent: Montpellier.
Montpellier
was an odd little town – full of emaciated geriatrics and their miniature
dogs, whose fecal productions appeared to be at an all time high: perhaps one of
their only industries far more advanced than ours.
Both owner and pet begged to be drop-kicked, but I refrained, of course,
so as to make a good impression on my new surroundings.
Equally odd was the fact that Montpellier seemed (apart from their canine
commerce) to be set in a tacky 1980s-inspired unabashed time warp. Where at that
time in America one might go into a store to hear any number of 1992’s biggest
hits: “Under the Bridge,” It’s a Shame About Ray”, “Even Flow” or
“Outshined”, Montpellier’s stores bombarded the shopper with tunes like,
“I Love Rock and Roll,” “Beat It,” “RIO” and “One Night in
Bangkok.” It was not necessarily
the integrity of these songs that I questioned.
On the contrary, I very much enjoy those songs and prefer them to the
former. For me it was the
fact that it was 1992 – and while I had already experienced these songs when
they were first released, Montpellier had not. Similarly distressing was the
fact that I could spoil the entire synopsis of each week’s “Beverly Hills”
(Pronounced Beveerlee Ills, minus the zip code) by about 2 years. And had I
actually watched them, I could have done the same to a number of their other
favorite prime-time shows: “Sauvé par la Gong” (Saved by the Bell), “Les
Rûes de San Francisco” (The Streets of San Francisco), “Hawaii Cinq-Zero”
(Hawaii, 5-0) and “MacGyver” (MacGyver).
In retrospect,
I’m not sure if Montpellier was really that odd or not. I mean sure, they were
a bit dated, but maybe they were simply more relaxed. When you’re stuck in
1982, who really cares about getting the laundry done on time?
There was no “gridlock” – unless you count the slight bottlenecking
of dogs and Peugeots near the 3rd Century “Innercity” Aquaduct.
And who really cares about anything when you can go to “McDo”
(McDonalds) to indulge yourself in a “McBierre.”
After a few months of life in Montpellier, I almost began to idolize this
unflappable temperament. And after a while, I came to the realization that I was
odd man out.
For many years,
my problem with the French language was not the fact that I couldn’t handle
it, but rather the fact that although my teachers claimed to be teaching it to
me, I was convinced that in actuality they were teaching me some form of uncanny
gibberish, meant to derail me should I ever actually make it to the country. And
of course, this conviction only intensified when I arrived in Montpellier. When
I should have been excited and curious about my fresh new milieu, I was simply
paranoid and weird. I felt my way through conversations with my host family the
way that a mute might recite the pledge of allegiance.
Or something. Each word ended with a question mark, and as a result, it
took me ages to get each sentence out. Luckily, after just a few days, I was
trusting my rudimentary French, embracing my no longer sordid years of French
tutelage and getting myself into all kinds of trouble.
My suffering
began during one of my first “family” dinners in Montpellier. After our meal my “father” asked me if I was finished.
Not knowing how to say “Thanks, I’m satisfied,” I opted for the easier but
less refined “Thanks, I’m full.” Or so I thought. As it turns out, I
actually opted for the more curious and more archaic, “Thanks, I’m pregnant.
Like a bear.” Naturally, I got a
few strange glances and under-the-breath smirks, but all in all my new relatives
took my idiosyncrasies in stride. They certainly didn’t embrace them, but they
traversed them unscathed.
A few
evenings later I asked my “brother” if he had a penis. I was trying to ask
him for a pushpin, but I guess my subconscious preferred knowing whether or not
he was anatomically correct. “Punaise”/“pénis,”
It was an easy mistake. Still, it
was fairly obvious that my family thought I was a sex-obsessed maniac for a
while. For example, when one
“is” hot in France, they “have” hot.
And if you say “Je suis chaud” rather than “J’ai chaud,” it
means you think you’re sexy-hot. Well,
as it turns out, because Montpellier is so humid in September, I made sure that
everyone constantly knew how super sexy I really was.
I was also uncompromisingly and persistently turned on; sexually excited
turned on. I was sure to always
impress upon the natives how excited I was about my adventure. Well, in France
you don’t tell anyone that you’re excited. There’s really no word for
excited over there. Basically you just dance around it with different
adjectives. (This may be one reason
why I left the country thinking that French kids are far more intelligent than
American kids. Their analytical dexterity far surpassed ours). Regardless, I was
a big fan of the term “Je suis excité,” and as a consequence, many of my
French compatriots thought I was a dirty dirty dog.
I was a basket
case full of errors.
My
mistakes at home were always bearable. Maybe
it was simply the fact that a smaller audience lends to lesser humiliation.
And maybe it was the fact that my peers at school were relentlessly
unsympathetic. But I found that the rate at which people attempted to correct my
errors was much greater at home than at school. And some of my mistakes could
easily have been corrected, without question, but intentionally weren’t.
Most of my early months were spent maneuvering my way through throngs of
possible sentence conclusions… desperately grasping for alternate methods of
composition… problem solving, armed with the aptitude of a 6 year old child.
When teachers or students asked me how I was doing, in order to explain
to them that I was having trouble following the classes (that were taught all in
French), I simply stated that “I feel bad and I’m bored.” This was
definitely the path less traveled but I assumed that it got my point across.
Unfortunately, however, what I didn’t realize is that both “to
feel” and “to bore” are reflexive verbs.
So by announcing that “Je sent mal” and “je suis ennuyeusse,” I
was actually explaining to everyone that “I smell bad and I’m boring.”
This went on for a few weeks and no one corrected me. I shall forever assume that because my new high school was
both private and catholic, and all of my teachers were nuns, I had simply
offended them with my vulgar colloquialisms, and not with my personal hygiene,
or lack thereof.
It wasn’t
merely my inability to speak that was so distressing – my comprehension skills
were equally unrefined. One of the first days I was in France, my “mother”
tried to explain to me what she did for a living.
I remember recounting the details to my own mother in Seattle over the
telephone, “No Mom, I swear…she told me, she stands by a swimming pool and
times swimmers as they swim by.” My
Mom assured me that this was ludicrous, but I was confident in my findings and
oddly satisfied with my command of the topic.
It wasn’t until four months into my stay that I realized the error of
my ways. My mother had explained to me that, “Je fais la comptabilité pour
les personnes âgées.” In analyzing my derailment, it was clear to me that
what my feeble intellect had heard was “I do counting for people to swim,”
and my imagination took care of the rest. In
actuality, the sentence should be deconstructed as, “I’m an accountant for
elderly people.” My families
never let me live that one down.
By some miracle,
I was able to speak French nearly fluently after about 4 months. And I was proud of my accomplishment. Instead of nervously
and speedily getting through conversations, I dominated them, babbling
incessantly. I enjoyed being the
center of attention and I adored the praise I was given for my success.
One night my family hosted a dinner party to which they invited all of
their closest, most snobby French friends.
Each of the guests were very impressed by my language skills and urged me
to tell them some stories about my time in France thus far. I gladly obliged and
started in on a story about doing something really humiliating. How apropos. I
explained that (in French), “Yes…I got so embarrassed that I turned as red
as a beet!…a beet!!” Shamefully, I couldn’t remember the word for beet in
French, but I assumed that maybe it was the same as in English. After
everyone’s jaws dropped and an unnerving silence overtook the room, I knew
that I had made a mistake. As it
turned out, I shouldn’t have been lauded at all for my abilities.
In front of a roomful of respectable and established French
acquaintances, I explained that, “Yes, I got so embarrassed that I turned as
red as a…dick!…A dick!!” My
audience was even more embarrassed than me, and their reaction gave me the
impression that they had not heard this word – or even thought about its
meaning – in several decades. And
I was to blame for their puritanical tenderness.
Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that “beet”
translates to “betterave.”
My time in
France wouldn’t have been nearly as appealing without all of these adventures
– and I don’t regret a thing about my expedition.
If anything, it was a humbling yet maturing progression. I have so many more stories from my time there, and far too
many French mistakes to count. After
nearly ten years, however, my French family and I are still very close, and
sometimes I still dream at night in French (I always dream about being a
character on a French sitcom for some reason). Someday, I’m sure I’ll
make it back to Montpellier. And someday I’ll be able to make my mistakes all
over again...next time on purpose. Until
then, I have my memory, and a number of mix tapes that showcase the French
versions of tacky 1980s songs. To
get a copy, please email me at tgm at twogunmathilda dot
com.