Christi Phillips

“Menteur! Menteur! (Liar! Liar!),” Monsieur N. cried, pointing a long finger at the woman who sat cowering before him. “You say that you work on Sundays, but I know for a fact that you do not work on Sundays! Say it!” he demanded. “Say it! ‘I do not work on Sundays!’”

The woman’s face flushed red. Her eyes darted around the room, searching for an escape. The gears of her mind whirred frantically: could she get out of this? Was it possible to simply shrink up, to disappear? Or could she actually…say it?

“Je…” she began slowly. “Je…ne…Je ne travaille pas á dimanche,” she finally blurted out. She cradled her face in her hands. The effort had nearly killed her.

“I knew you did not work on Sundays!” Monsieur N. declared triumphantly, then turned away from us to the blackboard.

No, this wasn’t a French police interrogation—it was my weekly French class at the local adult school, presided over by the masterful and sometimes intimidating Monsieur N. My husband, Brian, and I attended along with a congenial group of about a dozen people, including a nurse, a high school teacher, a classical musician, a documentary filmmaker, two young Christian missionaries, a few small business owners and a couple of attorneys, most of whom wanted either to brush up on their high school French or learn enough of the language to better enjoy their upcoming vacation in France. Brian and I had never studied French before, but we had always wanted to learn. I was researching a book set in France, we were planning a trip there, and we knew that speaking French—or at least trying to—would help us befriend and connect with the French people we met. We thought it would be fun to learn French together, a belief that in retrospect seems sweetly naïve, like a couple’s fateful decision to take salsa dancing lessons that leads to one half of the couple discovering that he or she has two left feet, and leads to the other half salsa-ing off into the sunset with the comely dance instructor.

The class was held, appropriately enough, in a high school classroom where French was taught: maps of France and French posters covered the walls. We sat in small, hard metal chairs with attached wood-laminate desktops, the sort that most of us hadn’t sat in for at least two decades. They were arranged in rows along two sides facing the empty middle of the room, so that everyone could see everyone else. Monsieur N. stood at the front of the class near the lectern and the eight-foot-long blackboard. To the surprise of some students (not us, however) this beginning French class focused on grammar and pronunciation, so that we could learn to communicate our thoughts, not just parrot a few traveler’s phrases.

What did surprise us was just how difficult those first weeks were, when even the simplest sentences appeared to us as indecipherable as Sanskrit, sentences that are now so clear: Mon bébé avalé vos clés de voiture, or Les oreilles sont essentielles. We felt some consolation that no one else in the class was doing much better than we were, and the trauma of speaking a few halting words of utterly wrong and poorly accented French in front of a bunch of strangers was a trauma shared by all. Monsieur N. would stalk the room, picking out sacrificial lambs at random, asking questions in rapid French and expecting answers. Everyone would slink down in their chairs and try to avoid making eye contact with him. But it was no use; one of us would inevitably be singled out, and we would blush and stutter and silently wonder why we hadn’t decided to study something more sensible, like salsa dancing, while Monsieur N. regarded us with an expression that made it clear he would rather be teaching a bunch of deaf-mute baboons, as they would learn French faster than we did. I couldn’t hold it against him, since it was so obviously true.

Even though he applied himself more, Brian didn’t pick up the language any more easily than I did, and his response to this early phase of our studies was to speak English with an exaggerated, nasally French accent: huh huh, we take ze taxi to ze hotel, heh heh?—as if speaking English with a French accent was a milestone on the path to speaking French. This went on for so long that I began to hope that some big French guy would come along and beat  ze crap out of him.

As one of two married couples in the class, our fellow students assumed that we would learn the language more quickly than they, since we had a partner to study and speak with. In theory, yes, but in practice, no. However, this was not my fault. My father had died just a few months before we began the class, and I was flying to Southern California to stay with my sweet, widowed mom (violins here, please) at least one week out of every month, and I was on deadline for my second book. I didn’t have time to study! I suppose I should also mention that my dog ate my homework. Although, to be honest, this happened only a few times, after I smeared it with bacon grease and gave it to him.

As an employed adult, Brian didn’t have time to study, either. But in the evenings, he would do something I found almost incomprehensible: he would get out his French class binder and our French workbooks and our French dictionaries and put them on the dining room table, and sit down to do his homework. Often this happened at nine or ten o’clock at night, when my brain had already closed up shop and was putting its metaphorical feet up on a metaphorical footstool. But Brian always looked so serious and diligent as he did this that I would be shamed into sitting down across from him and opening up my French binder, too.

So we would sit across from each other, and while Brian, brow furrowed, would carefully remplacez les tirets par la forme appropriée de l’adjectif possessif ou par la forme correcte du verbe avoir my mind would wander to other, more interesting things, such as how cool it was that our French text book had been written in the 1970s, so that there was only one answer needed for the exercise complétez les phrases suivantes avec un adjective à la forme appropriée: Charles de Gaulle est mort, Phyllis Diller est morte, Yves St. Laurent est mort, Johnny Carson est mort, ect. Or I would wonder, How much chocolate have I eaten today? Is there any chocolate in the house? And while I was making a mental inventory of all the places the chocolate might be—top shelf of the refrigerator door, second shelf of the cabinet next to the stove, etc.—I noticed that he had made a printed label, “French Class,” for his binder, and that he did not have a motley collection of paper scraps with cryptic notes on them, as I had; that all his handouts had been hole-punched and inserted into his binder in the order that they had been given, and he had even used tabbed, labeled dividers, so that he could see at a glance where to find the pages about possessifs, infinitifs , futur immediat and so on; that he wrote everything carefully with a well-sharpened pencil, that he always stayed within the lines and never scribbled anything in the margins, and I experienced a moment that comes to every married person at least once, when you look at your spouse and think, Who the hell are you?

“Are you trying to copy me?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said, attempting to peer beyond his arm that crooked defensively around the top of his workbook.

Many of the people in the first class signed up for the second, and by then we had all gotten to know each other a little and felt fairly comfortable speaking “French” in public. We also discovered that Monsieur N. enjoyed a good belly laugh, even at his own expense, and the unintentional howlers that each of us made—“Elle est mon derrière” (“She is my behind”), “Je mange mon frere pour Thanksgiving” (“I ate my brother for Thanksgiving”) —were the highlights of each class. The achievement of a truly embarrassing sentence became a badge of honor, and our esprit de corps grew to the point that whenever anyone was stuck for a word or phrase while wilting under the gaze of Monsieur N., everyone nearby would come to the rescue, hissing the correct words in loud stage whispers, as if our instructor could not hear us.

But Monsieur N. taught us more than language; along with the grammar and pronunciation we learned some very interesting things about France. For instance, he told us that we could, and should, ride the buses in France without buying a bus pass as revenge for the one time, while he was a student, that he had been too broke to buy a pass, and was caught and given a ticket that carried a very steep fine. He said that as foreigners, it wouldn’t matter if we were caught riding the bus without a pass, since the ticket would be sent to our home address and the French authorities would never be able to collect on it.

I’m sure he would want me to extend this invitation to anyone reading this, as well.

Sometimes he brought in short videos from French TV that we could only assume had been popular in France. The first was a music video of an aging Johnny Hallyday—whose very existence proves that the French have never truly understood rock and roll—singing a romantic duet with a twelve-year-old girl. It was a treacly French ballad, with lots of winsome smiles exchanged between the girl and the pop star, who was old enough to be her grandfather. It was more than a little bit smarmy, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Monsieur N. told us that duets like this with a young girl and an older man were a French “tradition.” What sort of people call this entertainment?, many of us wondered.

The second video was a children’s cartoon. Clearly, since we hadn’t understood the words to the song, he needed to provide something closer to our beginner’s level. The cartoon was set in Africa, and featured two warring, bare-breasted African tribes and some very vengeful gods. By the end, everyone in the cartoon was dead, except for the gods, of course. Some of the characters, including the children, had apparently been eaten by the others. Some perished more pleasantly in a fire. When he asked if we’d understood any of it, all of us answered honestly, Not a bit.

For the final class of each term, we’d bring in some cheese and crackers, a few bottles of a French sort of beverage, and have a little party. One night Monsieur N. informed me that the French would never place their knife on the edge of their plate, as I had on mine. Anticipating a lesson on the delicate complexities of French etiquette, I asked him why—was it considered rude somehow?

“No,” he said with a diffident shrug. “We just think it is bizarre.”

The French make cartoons about naked African cannibals, and resting a knife on the edge of a plate is considered bizarre?

Brian and I toughed it out through three consecutive classes and by the end, we felt that we’d learned quite a bit, although clearly it would take much, much more study to become fluent. But I suspect that, like a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of language can be dangerous. Monsieur N. taught us some French words that he warned we should never, ever use—words that are lodged like a ticking time bomb in my brain, especially hazardous for someone who can swear with as much vigor and ease as I can. Now that I know enough French to cobble together a satisfyingly earthy retort, I have dread fantasies about our upcoming trip to Paris. Between Brian’s “huh huh heh heh” fake French accent and my unfortunate proclivity for uttering the most offensive words at the most inopportune time—“Votre tête poussé jusqu’à présent dans le cul je peux voir votre calvitie dans votre bouche” (“Your head is shoved so far up your ass I can see your bald spot in your mouth”) — “Oops, pardon, Monsieur Prime Minister”—we may receive a far worse reception there than if we had not learned French at all.

This entry was posted Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 3:54 pm and is filed under My World. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.