Letters From Paris

Language Arts

A second letter in the batch from ROSECRANS BALDWIN about moving to France, where he discovers, much to his co-workers’ amusement, how to make faux pas in another tongue.

Also by Rosecrans Baldwin

• Things We're Denying Ourselves (Of Recent Note)
• The Last Great Thing You Downloaded (Of Recent Note)
• Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down (Letters From Paris)

» SEE MORE

Also in Letters From Paris

• Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down (March 19, 2008)
• Bonne Année (January 10, 2008)
• Le Coq Sportif (October 17, 2007)

» SEE MORE

A senior manager in my office and I go to the kitchenette together to fill up cups of water. The faucet on the water fountain has tremendous pressure; it can puncture a hole through a paper cup if you’re not careful. I delicately pour my drink, but the other guy holds the button too hard, too long. Water squirts all over the place. We both laugh. I make a joke about it in French—something like, “Wow, the water comes really strong.”

Which isn’t exactly correct. But even with a dictionary, I would probably not be able to assemble “The water comes out with force,” or, “Now that there is what you call water pressure.” But it doesn’t matter, the manager doesn’t hear me. He turns and says, “What?” and I repeat the joke, though this time I gesture with my hands, pointing at the faucet, because I’m worried my French isn’t clear, and he leans forward to listen better, and with all the commotion I dump my water down his pants and into his shoes.

He doesn’t know what to say. Desolé, I repeat several times, desolé Monsieur, désole. Sorry, sorry, sorry. He pats himself with a wad of paper napkins. I pass through a minor stroke. Should I go, I wonder, leaving this high-level person at my company disliking me, and only on my second day? Should I towel him off myself?

Some unconscious impulse decides I will try one last time. What situation is so dire it can’t be improved with a laugh? This has become my survival tactic in Paris, that it is always better to be embarrassing than embarrassed. “Well,” I say, gesturing to his ankles, “I guess, like the water, I come pretty strong, too.”

When I am writing an email to my wife a few minutes later, I realize that, even in Paris, I may have crossed the line of appropriate office conversation.


* * *

In French I am desperate to be understood but eager to please. I have been told, as well, that like many Americans doing business in France, I swear too much—like a bumbling Speak-and-Spell, my co-workers suggest, with Tourette’s. In the beginning, particularly when drinking, to boost my eloquence I would translate idiomatic American phrases into French, to try and seem casual. That lasted about a weekend, and I had to do some damage control afterwards. Telling a stranger enthusiastically during a party, and having them take you at your word, that you do not give a shit, leads to a pause. Possibly a cultural misunderstanding.

But I am determined to practice and improve. I’ve entranced several co-workers with riveting, long descriptions of my apartment (“It has a kitchen. There is a room for the living. And there is a bedroom, also”). Last week I thought about writing postcards in French to Madame Lauten, to Madame Anastasio, my middle-school French teachers, because I wanted them to know I was in Paris, that I’d arrived. It was they, after all, who inoculated me with the dream to make it to France someday—as though it was the afterlife, at least for middle school teachers.

Wanting a can of Coke, and not knowing the word for “can,” I will ask for the Coke that is not of the bottle.Back then my first professeur was a lawyer named Monsieur Thibaut. He was stiff but gentle, a quiet man of stable character. His wife, an attractive Parisian blonde, was a homemaker. They had two young, polite children, a boy and girl whose names I don’t remember, perhaps because they didn’t make as much of an impression. Monsieur Thibaut and his wife were generous in sharing details about their family life: what they ate for dinner, what sort of objects they owned, where they went for family trips. They were always taking trips. Looking back, their lives were modest and respectable, if slightly two-dimensional—a French take on Ozzie & Harriet, though with more vacation time.

But we didn’t really have a bond. Monsieur Thibault and his family were the main characters in the language system used by my school. To learn French, we were shown slides of the Thibaults while we listened to reel-to-reel narrations of their experiences. Over dinner a few months ago in Brooklyn, my friend Michael recoiled when I brought up Monsieur Thibault. He confessed he’d known him, too, but not very well. Michael has a severe disability in audio processing—he can’t process foreign accents, can’t even sound out foreign words—and was hopelessly lost in ninth-grade French in Philadelphia when the teacher refused to speak English. The only way he was able to bear the Thibaults, he told me, was by inventing his own captions for the slides. It worked like this: The teacher would click on the projector, the tape would play in sequence with the images, the class would parrot the narrator, and Michael would decipher the cartoons for himself, about what life was like in France, at least in his mind.

Slide no. 1: Cartoon drawing of a man wearing a suit and cap
Narrator: “Voila Monsieur Thibault.”
Class: “Voila Monsieur Thibault.”
Michael’s interpretation: “That’s life. There you have it. What can you do. C’est la vie.”

Slide no. 2: Cartoon woman, similar to the man, professional looking, handsome, tired
Voice: “Voila Madame Thibault”
Class: “Voila Madame Thibault”
Michael’s interpretation: “It’s even harder for women.”

Slide no. 3: Cartoon of a boy and a girl, neither smiling
Voice: “Voila Paul and Catherine”
Class: “Voila Paul and Catherine”
Michael’s interpretation: “Kids are fucked.”

Language molds to circumstance, to what one needs it to do. In the beginning, after two weeks of setting up our new Paris apartment, I could have gotten a job selling hardware. A trashcan is a poubelle. A light bulb is an ampoule. An oven is a four. Our electric stove is called a plaque, or a plaque electronique. Generally, though, I work less specifically, and often in the negative. Wanting a can of Coke, and not knowing the word for “can,” I will ask for the Coke that is not of the bottle. Or the sandwich that is not the one which contains ham, nor the other beside it with tuna. It makes for weird daily existential traps. It’s with relief I greet situations where I can say what I want.

But even then I’m thrown wrenches. Take the Metro. Coming from New York, I know how to excuse myself when exiting a packed commuter train. You say, “Excuse me,” or “Getting off,” and New Yorkers respond and move to the side. Not Parisians. Arriving at my stop, especially if no one else is exiting, I have to say “Excuse me” loudly several times to the French commuters and Italian teenage tourists and German package tours—Pardon! Pardon!—and still people barely move. This morning, thinking of one guy in particular who’d refused to budge, I cursed with every step I took out of the Metro station—asshole (step) asshole (step)—until I realized people could hear me.

Striving to be polite, I am forced into rudeness. Like some Graham Greene character I’ve never seen inside myself before, I become the American aggressively pardoning everyone else for their faults: an American in Paris sure of what he’s not, but not of what he is.

But it is probably harder for women, I think. And kids, they are fucked.


* * *

More on the Metro: One morning I am fined 40 Euros for not having a proper identification card. I say to the Metro officer, no one told me I had to have an identification card. The woman in the uniform replies, if you buy a weekly or monthly pass, you must also assemble an identity. Why? I ask. Because it is the rule, she says. But the vending machine that sold me the ticket didn’t tell me about the rule, I say. There was an office nearby, says another woman in a uniform, staring me down with her arms crossed across her stomach. That is where you should have obtained the identity card, she says. And how was I supposed to know to go into the office nearby and ask about the identity card that I did not know about?

Everyone else around me floats right through security, all showing their special IDs, apparently clued in to the secret instructions I missed. You owe 40 Euros, says the first woman.


* * *

After work, particularly the first week, I collapse every night on our sofa with a bad headache. Working in another language for nine hours cripples the brain. I’ll sit in a meeting at work, following everything fine, and then someone will use a word I don’t know and I fall out of conversation, trying to pin down that single noun. I’m even wrinkling prematurely. A few moments listening to someone, I notice I’ve clenched my forehead into a swatch of corduroy.

It’s especially worse when I can’t see the person I’m talking to—if they’re facing away or it’s over the phone. I avoid the phone at all costs. Setting up voicemail for the first time on my cell phone, I had little idea what the French computer voice was saying. Press numero un for boeuf Bourgogne. Numero deux for Jacques Pepin. At least that’s what it sounded like. I managed to leave a message on my phone, but then, feeling cocky, I pushed a button to a question I didn’t understand, just to see what happened. It took several more calls before I realized I’d turned on voice-activation for my phone’s commands. I had locked myself out. To get my phone to do what I wanted, I now had to give it instructions in proper French.

The difference between “I’m sleeping standing up” and “I adore some beef” depends, I still believe, on the speaker’s accent.But even face-to-face, and with friends, there can be problems identifying what’s what. At a dinner party where I was the only native English speaker, I thought I was doing great. It was late in the evening after a long Saturday night. There were eight of us sitting around a dinner table finishing off the last of the wine, and one guy was telling a story I believed I was following: how his mother, who lived out in the country, had gone to the market one day and bought a piece of goat cheese. However, when she brought it home, she smelled it and realized it was bad. And as only a proper French countrywoman would do, she decided to get rid of it by throwing it out the window, hitting a cow outside.

This got a big laugh. Naturally I joined in. Which is when my friend, whose dinner party it was and who checked on me occasionally to make sure I was following the conversation, asked me if I understood. I said, of course, about the cheese? The room seemed to quiet down. What cheese? my friend asked. Well, I said, and I recounted the story about the mother, the market, the goat cheese tossed out the window, the cow. The pause only lasted a second. Parting the waves of laughter, my friend explained that the story was in fact about the guy’s mother walking through the woods one day and being run over by a cow. The cow, in fact, broke the mother’s leg.

For the rest of the party I sat next to the stereo and listened to Young Jeezy rap about Atlanta’s cocaine industry. I thought, I don’t know the first thing about the drug trade, but I do know what it is, and I know what it’s not. If someone describes it using slang I’m not familiar with, I can still figure out what they’re saying. But hand me French countrywomen, a livestock disaster—I may as well have studied Korean in school.

I thought while listening to the stereo, Young Jeezy, you and me are complete strangers. If we met, we’d have nothing to talk about. We wouldn’t end up friends. But right now you’re all I’ve got.


* * *

On the way to lunch, a Parisian co-worker says, I’m so tired, I’m sleeping standing up. I say, me too. She says, really? I say, yes, I like it also. She says, what are you talking about? Beef, I say. I adore beef as well.

The difference between “I’m sleeping standing up” and “I adore some beef” depends, I still believe, on the speaker’s accent.

Last week, there was an office party for an employee who is leaving the company. Everyone gathered in the lounge, at least fifty people. There was music and cocktails, and lots of paté, bread, small cakes. I didn’t know the guest of honor, but by then I knew a few people, and I saw a friend on the other side of the room. As soon as I’d fixed myself a large rum cocktail I started threading my way through the crowd, and it was about when I was in the center of the room, in the middle of everyone, that I slipped on a puddle and went down in a full split. My drink shot out of my hand. Everyone stopped. The cup exploded on someone’s feet, the feet of the employee in whose honor we were gathered, a tall guy with a ponytail wearing flip-flops.

He stared at his rum-soaked toes. I picked myself up. I wiped cake crumbs off my pants. I knew exactly what to say to him, because nothing else fit: That’s life. There you have it. What can you do? C’est la vie.