Originally appeared in The Dallas Times-Herald
MUDDLING ALONG IN FRENCH
Among the problems American-born WASPs face is that sooner or later they are required to speak a language they were never required to learn. Growing up in a cattle town in New Mexico in the 1950s, the closest I ever came to a foreign tongue was when I ordered enchiladas in our town's sole Mexican restaurant and when I watched Pepe le Pew cartoons. To my innocent way of thinking, courses in Latin, French or Spanish were about as necessary to my curriculum as homemaking or art.
Naturally, at the time I never dreamed that one day I'd be sitting in a cafe across from the Louvre trying to tell a sly French waiter why I could not possibly have ordered the washtub of beer he and another waiter lugged out to my table and planted under my nose. I never knew then I'd have such a trenchantly vivid suspicion that I was being snickered at, or that I'd be wishing I hadn't believed studying foreign languages was silly "because you never use them." What I didn't know then was that foreigners use their foreign languages about 99 percent of the time, and if you're wandering among them, it's very helpful to be able to avoid saying, "Please see to it that I walk away from here with ice cream on my head" when you actually mean, "Give me a roast beef sandwich on whole wheat, light on the mayo."
I might not have known it back then, but naturally I realized far before our plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport that if I was to spend two weeks in Paris and the surrounding countryside, a working knowledge of the lingo would be helpful. For one thing, I didn't want to be one of those American tourists I saw in the souvenir shops along the Rue du Rivoli who apparently believed that to make yourself understood to someone who doesn't speak your language you just say your piece very slowly and very loudly, a word at a time, as in "GIMME! ONE! OF! THEM! DEALLY-BOBBERS! RIGHT! NEXT! TO! THOSE! RED! THANGS!!" By this time in my life I no longer cared if I was a sissy and had come to regret that, despite six hours of college French, I hadn't been able to speak even so much as a merci beaucoup without feeling my manhood was in question.
Alors, je regrete... What I'm leading to is that six weeks prior to my trip I bought a set of conversational French lessons on tape and dutifully sat down for an hour or so a day in a well-intentioned attempt to make amends and to rehabilitate myself. My ear is slightly better than average, and so after hours of drilling I got to where I could say "duh" instead of "day" when I saw "de," although I never could in three lifetimes master the oddity of "heureux," as in "Je suis heureux to make your acquaintance." (It sounds like "error" to me, only said with the tongue plastered firmly against the roof of the mouth.) After a few weeks, I gained confidence — I could say that things were good or bad or near or far or very near or very far, or that they were hot or cold or like another thing; I could properly ask for the date, the time of day, the month, the season, the year; I could count to 1,000 and upwards; I could go around like Adam naming animals, appliances, household articles and a good many foodstuffs. I could ask, take, give, say, speak, look, search for, go, come, return, go out, see, have, eat, buy, be obliged to, name, prefer, believe. Add a fistful of adverbs and a passel of pronouns and prepositions and voila!, we're parlay-ing boo-coo of that Francaise! I was ready (j'etais pret) to speak to the French natives in their indigenous argot.
Now that I look back on it, I think what went wrong that day with the washtub of beer was basically that the waiter gave me enough rope to let me hang myself. Wanting to avoid being taken for a greenhorn tourist in Paris, I was in the habit of carefully framing a request before arriving in a cafe, then rehearsing it so it would sound fluid and spontaneous — "Let me see, I think I'd like to have a half of a roast chicken with fried potatoes on the side and, well, how about a tomato salad to go with it, yes that sounds good," or something to that effect.
Naturally, the trouble with this strategy is that if you succeed in sounding as if you actually speak the language, the next step is that the French person to whom you are speaking is very likely to speak some entirely unscheduled bit of French right back at you. Or at least you will presume it to be French; you will not recognize it, in any case. The waiter on your language tape says, very distinctly, "Est-ce que vous desirez quelque chose, Monsieur," thus inviting you to place another order, but this living, breathing Frenchman standing before your table has just uttered a string of unintelligible gibberish which might be "What's your pleasure, bub?" although it could just as easily be, "I'm not your waiter, I'm a veterinarian, stupid!" for all you know.
Nice waiters don't do this to you. Nice waiters nod as if they've understood, then bring you what they think you might be wanting, though I found out it was not always what I thought I was asking for. Nice waiters help you to persist in the fond delusion that you can speak their language. They know that eventually the game will play itself out and they will have to resort to their rudimentary English, which will ultimately make you feel foolish for having posed as a fluent speaker, but for a few brief moments when you were addressing the issue of the roasted chicken you are allowed to feel superior to the usual stammering tourist.
Tired waiters who can see very clearly down their stretch of road will answer your request for roast chicken with a snatch of English like, "And what to drink?" which is as much to say, "OK, cut the crap, j fella, we both know you don't speak French and I don't have the energy to humor you."
What I learned while sitting with my nose over my I washtub of beer (which, incidentally, came to around $13, plus tip) is that it's far better at that critical t moment to admit defeat and answer in English than i to risk further misunderstanding by trying to bluff. When he said, "And what to drink?" in English, my pride was wounded. So I answered in French (or so I thought), "A large mug of draft beer." From that point things got very fuzzy.
I guess my waiter must have asked, "Hey, you wanna big or real big or really, really big mug? I can get you one the size of a washtub if that's what you want. That what you want?" But I didn't know it, then. I got that look on my face that people get when they're being spoken to in a language they don't understand — you know, suspicious and helpless and panic-stricken — and all I saw in his expression was, "Are you sure now?" Naturally, I wasn't about to admit I wasn't sure or that I didn't really understand him, so that's how I wound up with the washtub of beer, with everybody sitting around looking at me in disgust. Crazy American pig.
It didn't always go that poorly, I admit. Once, with a shopkeeper in a village, I corrected something I said, and she replied with, "Perfectement!" although an hour later I realized that even my correction needed correction. People in the villages understood me much more quickly than did the Parisian waiters, and when they formed a reply to my French question they displayed the delicacy of their good manners by speaking slowly and simply.
Once — this was the climactic occurrence of my speaking French — we stopped into a little Mom and Pop tavern, said, "Bonjour, Monsieur," to the proprietor, and he said, "Bonjour, Madame et Monsieur" back, then he asked us if we wanted to eat, we said yes, sat down at a table, ordered a three-course meal and wine without a hitch, and after a few glasses of wine I found myself asking without even thinking about it, "Est-ce que je puis avoir un autre verre pour de l'eau, s'il vous plait?" because I also needed a glass for my water, and he said, "Oui, Monsieur." Later I understood him when he asked if we would like cheese or cake for dessert, and I politely refused, patting my belly. I felt I had carried on my first conversation in a foreign language, even if not everything I said was grammatically perfect. This stuff actually worked! The glow on my face at that moment was only partly from the wine.
But eventually, having to worm your way through the language barrier each time you need to eat becomes exhausting. The day came when I longed to be waited upon by somebody's gum-smacking grandmother in a hairnet and a polyester pant-suit who'd slip the pencil out from behind her ear and ask me, "Yew want Thousand Eye-land or blue cheese dressing on that salid?"
The morning we left Paris I arose punch-drunk from lack of sleep and in a violet, drizzly dawn engaged a cab driver for a trip to Charles de Gaulle Airport. He asked me in French what time my plane was scheduled to leave, but he had to repeat it twice before I understood. My mind went blank, but eventually I came up with "huit," the right number, but I was too slow to form a complete sentence. Since it was then about 6 o'clock and it only took a half hour to reach the airport, I knew there was no rush, so I muttered, "Depechez-vous." He stomped the pedal to the metal, fishtailing on the damp cobblestones, and lit out for the airport as if we were bleeding to death, pausing from moment to moment to lift his hands from the wheel to blink his fingers at us, saying, "Vingt-cinq minutes!" I kept saying, "Bon, bon!" to let him know I understood, but it took me about 10 miles into the trip down the slick freeway — on which he was driving a good 75 to 80 mph — to realize that what I had mumbled back at the hotel was not "take your time," but, rather, "hurry up!" Which was why he had been trying to convince us we weren't late. He must believe we're absolutely nuts, I thought.
I tried to think of something pacific to utter to let him know we were calm, so I said, in pidgin French, "This our first visit to your city. It is very pretty," only for "very" I said "muy" and not "tres." I was so stupid from not sleeping that I was speaking Spanish to him. As we zoomed toward the airport, I thought of explaining my error, but my brain was mired in quicksand. It seemed to me as the miles rushed by that my ability to speak French was slipping off of me like a heavy cape and that by the time we reached the airport, the best I'd be able to manage would be "Merci, Monsieur," and even that would be uttered through a thick Texas accent and come out as "Mare-say, mon-sewer." It seemed to me that my capacity to speak French was going to stay in Paris, and I'd have to return to retrieve it.
On the plane home, there was a young Frenchman who spoke perhaps three words of English. He told my wife he was going to Dallas. Gleefully, I pictured him running into my aforementioned waitress, who might eye him balefully and say, "Yewkin gitcha-sef sum salid atha salidburr.” I felt a little bit of compassion for him.