When in French (25 page)

The island's motley culture has long sat uneasily within the centralized one of mainland France. After the world wars a nationalist movement arose that has lobbied for the past half century, often violently, for Corsican independence. In 1998 the
préfet
of Corsica was assassinated—three bullets in the neck—on his way home from the theater. His killer was not apprehended until 2003, when images from an infrared camera led police to the mountains, where he had been hiding in a shepherd's hut.

The centerpiece of the Corsican nationalist movement is the preservation and revival of the Corsican language. Like French, it derives from Latin, but it is heavily influenced by Italian dialects, mainly Tuscan. Italian speakers can follow Corsican, but French speakers can't. Corsicans speak French, but many of them consider it a colonial imposition, as one nationalist wrote, “a pretentious language that has nourished itself on the cadavers of other languages.” Though only 65 percent of them speak Corsican, it remains the repository of their heritage and the emblem of their pride. Another Corsican graffito reads “Morta a lingua, mortu u populu”—Kill a language, kill a people. On the island's bilingual road signs, it is common to see French place-names painted over in black.

Corsica is sparsely populated, but somehow it's a loud place, the host of a racket as layered and heterogeneous as the maquis's scent. In all the noise, articulation is crucial: lore has it that the
mazzeri
—local seers who could both predict death and inflict it—were the products of botched baptisms, at which the priest had bungled the words or the godparents repeated them imprecisely. Until the late nineteenth century, Corsican
was primarily a spoken language. One of its most cherished expressions is the ancient tradition of polyphonic singing, in which, under the right conditions, the voices of four singers combine to conjure an invisible interlocutor—the “ghost tone” or “fifth voice.”

 • • • 

“L
ET'S BREAK THIS UP,”
Olivier said, padding out onto the patio to the sight of a table laid with napkins and forks.

We were a two-person
decryptage
unit, experts at extracting meaning from the slightest clues.

“What does
éclabousser
mean?” I'd ask.

“Like when you jump on a pond,” Olivier would say.

“Oh, ‘splashing'! ” I'd respond, rapid-fire. There was no one in the world who could have bested us in a game of Taboo.

Violeta and Teddy were waiting for breakfast to begin. Olivier approached them, explaining quietly that Americans, at least the ones with whom they were vacationing, typically began their days by walking into the kitchen and eating such things as granola bars and leftover egg rolls. The French chef Jacques Pépin, spending the weekend at Craig Claiborne's house in the 1960s, had greeted this sort of program—the poached eggs kept in a bowl of ice water; the sandwich fixings; the pouring oneself a glass of wine in the afternoon––as a liberation from the “ordeal” of the rigidly structured French meal. Olivier's family seemed less sure. Still, they proceeded to the kitchen. Posted against the countertops, the table gone but their orientation to it and each other replicated precisely, they appeared to be throwing an underwater tea party in the air.

The Americans, unbriefed by me, gravitated toward the patio. The seated breakfast, drawing converts, had prevailed. Every morning Teddy and my father, in silence or Spanish,
made a joint mission to the
boulangerie
. Croissants were eaten. Baguettes were broken. Exotic beverages, hot and cold, were drunk.

“I had some of that sparkling water,” my mother told me. “It was actually pretty good.”

One morning, as we picked at the remains of a watermelon, the conversation turned toward the baby, who would be the first grandchild, the first niece or nephew, on either side. My brother, it emerged, was not a fan of women breastfeeding in public.

“You're not going to do that, are you?” he said.

“Matt, you're not wearing a shirt right now,” I replied.

Melissa jumped in.

“What is it about seeing a woman's breast in public that bothers you?”

“I don't know, it's awkward.”

“Breastfeeding—it's a question of having the desire to do it,” Violeta added, speaking in French, with Olivier translating. “It's a moment of complicity between the mother and the child, a moment of pleasure that's not with a lover. There's nothing like it.”

“I think your breasts will triple in size,” Hugo chimed in.

“Matt, are you possessive?” Violeta went on. “It's not erotic in the least.”

“She's throwing oil on the fire,” Olivier whispered into my ear. He refused to continue translating.

We could have listened to the argument all morning, though—the categories that had defined our life together dissolving and realigning, languages melding, allegiances shifting from French and English into women and men. The addends of our backgrounds didn't cancel out into neutrality.
French plus American was not Swiss. Violeta got out her iPhone and started playing a Georges Brassens song about a woman nursing a cat.

 • • • 

I
HAD SEEN A SIGN
nailed to a telephone pole, advertising a traditional Corsican concert in Solenzara, a village about forty minutes from the house. It was to start at nine thirty, a tough time to tear a crowd away from poolside cocktails, but I was determined to go. I started lobbying the household. One by one, people acquiesced. The night of the show, the dozen of us crammed into two cars and set off for Solenzara.

We arrived at Saint-Paul, a modest church just uphill from the village port, a neon blur of ice cream parlors and promenading families. We paid admission and entered through a wooden door into what had once been a stable, where the village monks had allowed travelers to board the horses that transported hauled logs downriver from the mountains to the coast. An iron cross, like a weathervane, topped a stone bell tower. The sanctuary was tiny—a nave, with a checkerboard floor, that ran directly into the altar, a simple table covered with a linen cloth. Oak beams girded the ceiling. Painted wooden statues of the apostles adorned whitewashed walls.

We hustled into the pews just as the leader of the group was introducing the first song. Its title, he said, was “Cantu eternu”—the island's eternal song, linked to the land, to a way of life, to the calls of the shepherds, ricocheting from one valley to the next. The group consisted of four men, dressed in black jeans and black button-down shirts. They could have been bouncers. They moved close together, forming a half-moon. Then the shortest among them cupped a hand to his
ear, as though he were listening to a seashell, and gave the pitch.

“
Issu cantu di a terra
,” he began in a clear bass. “
Hè muscu di a vita
,” he sang, drawing the syllables out several notes, adding almost Arabic-sounding melismas, as strong and delicate as the scrollwork on an iron gate.

A second voice came in, higher and quavering.

“
S'hè pisato la mio voce
,” he sang, as the other three rocked him on a hammock of sound. The music was so full, so filling, that I felt the roof might lift off the church.

There were laments and lullabies. One song memorialized Maria Ghjentile—the Corsican Antigone, a teenager who in 1769 risked her life by giving a proper burial to her fiancé, a resistance fighter who had been tortured by the French and left in the street to die.

The singers moved into the middle of the church. The lead singer struck a low note, and some of the members of the audience stood up, clasping their hands and joining in. Having not really understood the introduction, I assumed it was another eulogy. Olivier explained later that it had been the Corsican national anthem.

After the concert, we walked across the street to a pizzeria and ordered pies to take back to the house. They were slow in coming, and while we waited, we loitered on the restaurant's terrace. A band was playing rock music. My dad was teaching Hugo movie lines.

“I coulda been a contenda,” he said.

“I cood 'ave bean ze contender,” Hugo echoed back.

“I coulda been a contenda!”

“I cood 'ave bean ze contender!”

We got the pizzas and piled back into the cars. The radio crackled. Hot wind whooshed through the windows.
Conversations, bleeding into each other, rose and fell. I heard bombs and bumblebees, polemics and punch lines, the buzzing of a thousand organisms far and near. Amid the din, I thought I could just make out an extra voice—our own complex polyphony, which sounded like none of us and all of us, the cry of something not from the hereafter but right on the cusp of
life.

“A
LLEZ, ALLEZ,”
a woman will be screaming into your ear. You will feel like it's the Albertville Games of 1992, and you're in the luge competition. All that will be missing is the cowbell.

“La première fois, bien, mais la deuxième, zéro!” the woman will say as you push, joining her thumb and pointer finger together to make the international sign for zilch.

It will be the end of March. Someone will have given you zwieback for breakfast. You will be in a white room with casement windows. Beyond a scrim of branches—some scratchily aloof type of yew you never saw as a child—you will glimpse the late-afternoon sun demulsifying, a mansard roof. For a minute you will wonder where you are. Then you will hear the doctor call for
la ventouse
. The word refers to a thing you never will have heard of, in any language, until a few weeks earlier. You will later identify it, in English, as the vacuum extractor that facilitates a vacuum-assisted delivery (of a baby, not a
cafetière
).

Your thinking will start to muddle like that. Your speech
will become an admixture, your private thesaurus a dual-language edition, like one of those airline magazines with two contiguous columns of type.

“A
LLEZ, ALLEZ, ALLEZ
!” Olivier will yell, strong and low and urgent. “A
L-LEEEEEEEEEZ
!”

You will push with everything you've got:
la ventouse
must be averted, zilch lady must be shown what's up. Twenty seconds later, the blood, the cry, the perfect head. The doctor will take her. She will be cleaned and dressed.

“Mon amour!” Olivier will cry, rifling through the bag you've packed. “Did you forget to bring her underwear?”

“Babies don't wear underwear,” you will reply, too dazed to try to figure out what word he's searching for, what he really means to ask.

“Ah, okay!”

You will realize he actually meant underwear, not diaper, that gender can be a sinkhole to the language gap.

The doctor will give her back to you, smelling of petals. You will hold her to your chest as though she could stop your heart from falling out. You will have given birth in French.

 • • • 

I
F SOMEONE
had told me this story, twenty or ten or even two years ago, I never would have accepted myself as its protagonist. How could the woman laboring to the sounds of a third-group verb be me, how could
ma fille
—in French, my daughter and my girl—be destined to fill in forms for the rest of her days with the birthplace Chêne-Bougeries? You imagine the events of your life against certain backdrops: the kiss on the bus, the graduation in the auditorium, the wedding at the church. Most people's projections turn out to be somewhere in the ballpark.
When they're not, the effect can be as disorienting as time travel: America in the Pleistocene era would have seemed only slightly less likely a setting for the birth of my first child than a clinic in a Swiss suburb.

Jacques drove all night to see us. He arrived, stubble-cheeked and elated, spent an hour, and turned right back around to make it back to work. Violeta gave me a diamond necklace. She had had it made from her late mother's engagement ring. When she and Teddy left, they stashed a pot-au-feu in our refrigerator.

“Would you like to place an announcement in the newspaper?” a hospital administrator asked.

We declined, not knowing anyone who took
Le Chênois
. But the question moved me, presuming, as it did, that our daughter's existence would be of interest to people other than us, that she was already part of something, even if we weren't.

We should have said yes. It was a kind gesture. Besides, I was a fiend for birth announcements, wedding announcements, and obituaries, the “hatch, match, and dispatch” trinity that once comprised the only three times a respectable woman's name should appear in print. I read them with the attention that other people devote to important novels. It fascinated me to think about the way the lives of others hewed to or swerved from their probable trajectories, how they were or were not products of the shaping forces of time, family, and place. The greatest one I ever came across paid tribute to Giorgio Carbone, “a bewhiskered grower of mimosa from a family of mimosa growers,” who had proclaimed Seborga, a five-square-mile patch of northwest Italy, an independent principality, and convinced his neighbors to elect him prince for life, calling him His Tremendousness.

Our insurance policy provided for five days at the clinic, a standard stay in Switzerland. The morning after the
accouchement
, I heard a knock at the door.

“Entrez.”

“Quel menu préféreriez-vous?” a woman in white scrubs asked, handing me a printed sheet. “Première suggestion ou deuxième?”

I scanned the offerings—two choices for each meal. For lunch did I want
carpaccio de boeuf à l'huile de truffe, saumon d'Ecosse sauce coriandre, blé aux herbes, blettes à la tomate, et tarte fine aux pommes
(beef carpaccio with truffle oil, Scottish salmon with cilantro sauce, buckwheat with herbs, chard with tomatoes, and an apple tart), or
salade frisée et madeleine au parmesan, suprême de volaille au gingembre, pommes purée, carottes jaunes, et mousse fromage blanc et coulis de framboises
(endive salad with a parmesan cracker, ginger chicken, mashed potatoes, yellow carrots, and cream cheese mousse with raspberry sauce)?

“Hmm,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “La première, si vous plaît.”

Half an hour later, a second knock,
très discret
. Another woman in white, hovering in the doorway.

“Bonjour, Madame. Je suis l'esthéticienne.”

“Pardon?”

“L'esthéticienne.”

“Oh,” I said, comprehending now that she was some kind of beautician.

“Je n'ai pas pris de rendezvous,” I told her. “Vous vous êtes trompée de chambre.”

She did indeed have the right room, she explained, and I did have an appointment—each new mother was entitled to a
soin postnatal
, just a little pick-me-up to help her feel more like
herself. Would I like a manicure, a pedicure, a foot massage, or to have my hair done?

I chose the foot massage, feeling like the years in Switzerland might actually have been worth it.

 • • • 

W
HEN OUR DAUGHTER
was old enough to travel, we took her to Andernos for a weekend. Violeta and Teddy thought that she was “superbe.” They had set up a changing table, a crib, a mobile—the works. When I walked into the bathroom, I realized that they had been on a full-fledged home-improvement kick. I am quite sure that it was their desire to experiment with new technologies, in the seventh and eighth decades of their lives, rather than their fumbling daughter-in-law, that had led them to put in a stand-up shower.

Olivier and I, with Hugo, took Jacques out for a birthday dinner. The restaurant was across the bay from Violeta and Teddy's village. To get there we called a water taxi, which sped us through the twilight, eyes watering and hair tangling, just as
les pinasses
—the brightly colored, snub-nosed wooden boats of the region—began to deliquesce, blue and then black, into the horizon. After forty minutes we reached the opposite side of the peninsula. Ten feet from land, the driver cut his motor.

“Allez-y!” he ordered.

We jumped into the water, shoes in our hands, splashing into the foamy shallows where the sea lapped the shore. Behind us loomed the Dune du Pilat, a three-hundred-foot massif of sand. We walked down the beach. When we reached the end, we ascended through pine forest to a lookout point. There, the restaurant twinkled in the distance. To enter it, we passed through a courtyard equipped with a giant chessboard, pawns
and queens and rooks the size of fire hydrants. The place had a dreamlike quality, a purity of mood. Tea lights flickered under billowing canopies. Everything was white.

It was an enchanted night, even by the standards of people who had not been on house arrest for a quarter of a year. After oysters and Champagne, meat and wine, cake and coffee, we made our way back to the water to catch our ride. It was long past midnight. Earlier, the beach had been deserted, but now it teemed with people, a nocturnal society of campers and surf fishermen, their illuminated lures arcing like comets as they cast. Olivier and I stopped and stared up at the moon, orange and gibbous. Phantasmagorical clouds passed over it: a shark fin, the exposed root of a tooth.

“I'm ready,” I said, my voice catching.

It had been a while since I'd been on a beach at night, or had more than half a glass of wine.

“I just want to figure out where we're going to be and find a place and never move.”

I stopped, aware that weepiness, as a mode of expression, never went over well with Olivier. But he pulled me close.

“I do, too.”

 • • • 

T
HAT SUMMER,
we went to North Carolina. I'd left America a heartsick monoglot. I was returning with a husband and a daughter and a second language that, for the rest of the members of my new family, was a native tongue. In the five years that I'd been living abroad, I hadn't been home for more than a week. We planned to stay a month.

I flew with our daughter, backtracking the journey it had taken me years to make: Geneva to London to Raleigh-Durham,
a two-hour drive from my parents' place. (Olivier was joining us later.) The trip took fifteen hours. On the plane I screamed, having become convinced that her foot was caught, perhaps fatally, in the airplane seat's armrest; she didn't. At last I stumbled through the doors of the baggage claim, bearing three suitcases, two carry-ons, a diaper bag, a stroller, and a surprisingly unfazed four-month-old.

“How was it?” my mother asked, once we'd completed a reunion so gaspingly tearful as to resemble, in the age of Skype, a historical reenactment of the airport pickups of the 1980s.

Pas mal
, I thought.

“Not bad,” I said.

I was so glad to be there. Having a child had provoked in me, as it does in many people, a renewed connection to my own childhood, a longing for its trappings and comforts. I had spent hours and dumb amounts of money importing baby products from America, not because I thought American baby products were necessarily better, but because I wanted everything to be just the way it was. I was craving familiarity and—had been, going on a year—fried chicken and biscuits. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I'd had the car keys in hand, prepared to make the not-insubstantial drive to the closest Kentucky Fried Chicken, in Chambéry, France. (Switzerland, among its other privations, did not have a KFC franchise.) Fortunately I Googled the menu before I left. In France, the traditional accompaniment to fried chicken is French fries, corn, or a salad.

These were just the most recent manifestations of a persistent malady, a generalized homesickness that craved not so much any particular home as it did a home, period. As thrilled as I was to be in America, I had been gone too far and too long to slot effortlessly back into life there. There
was always something that gave me pause, that made me feel like a geographical Rip Van Winkle. This time it was online shopping—not its existence, but its variety and ease. Free shipping and overnight delivery on an SPF 2500 beach umbrella? Yes, please.

My enthusiasm for buying things on the Internet was such that the credit card company put a block on my account. One afternoon I called to ask them to lift it.

“Sorry,” I said when my daughter's crying became audible in the background. “I've got a new baby.”

“I could not be happier for you and your family!” the operator replied. “Is this gonna be your first or your last?”

Eventually, he agreed to rescind the block.

“It has truly been a pleasure and a privilege serving you, and I hope that I've done nothing but offer you amazing customer service,” he said. “Have yourself an awesome day, much love to you and your family, and thanks for doing business with American Express.”

The operator was being friendly, but I was flabbergasted. To my French-tuned ear, his familiarity sounded crazily presumptuous—the ultimate
tutoyer
. I tried to figure out who was the weirdo: him or me. Was he an outlier, or was this the way my countrypeople now spoke? Or had they always spoken like this, and I was only beginning to notice?

At breakfast the next morning I grabbed the local section of the
Morning Star
. “New Castle Hayne Intersection a Circle of Confusion,” the headline of the lead story declared. A roundabout had been constructed in Castle Hayne, a nearby community. Local drivers were having trouble figuring it out. The article gave an eyewitness report on the confusion and then turned to a question-and-answer format:

“What are roundabouts?”

“What do drivers in Castle Hayne think?”

“How do I drive in one?”

“Are there others around here?”

 • • • 

W
E WENT TO THE BEACH
almost every afternoon, always at the same spot, in front of a club we belonged to. It was a delight to take up my old summer routine, playing Ping-Pong and eating Oreo ice cream sandwiches. En route to the snack bar one afternoon, I saw a thirtysomething woman chasing an adorable little girl in a smocked dress and Velcro sneakers. She was one of a set of identical twins who were a couple of years older than I and—along with their first cousins, a set of identical twin boys—had pretty much run the place in our youth.

The little girl was eating some chocolate. The mother scolded her, not harshly.

Turning to me in mock frustration, she moaned, “Can you believe she ganked my Reesie's Cups?”

It's
Reese's
Cups, I wanted to say, the fourteen-year-old pedant in me reawakening. Hearing “ganked” was as stirringly embarrassing as hearing a song you used to like come on the radio without warning. In the argot of our adolescence, the word had meant taken, swiped, stolen, snagged. I was at once jangled by and a little envious of the blitheness with which my old acquaintance deployed it. The audacity of using a bit of slang that had enjoyed a minute of fame twenty years earlier, and assuming that everyone would understand! But she had earned it. This was the prerogative of those who stayed: to never have to consider their audience.