The Mother Tongue

3 août 2010 mardi

Language is a fickle friend, and jealous beyond reason. Having ignored my mother tongue for a solid two months, imagine the bastardized English that came out of my mouth at my first opportunity to use it extensively this weekend. English, like most small children, pets, and family members, does not respond well to neglect. It shrivels down, vocabulary words go missing, and grammatical structures tumble out backwards. I suppose this is the price I pay for plunging into the French language sea; after a few weeks of gulping water and nearly drowning, I grow gills. And when I come back up to the surface, I’ve forgotten how to breathe air. It’s no longer language acquisition, but rather language adaptation.

It is thanks to language adaptation that such gems as “keep looking for a couch comfy” (instead of “comfy couch”) or “you have the chance” (instead of “you’re lucky”) have appeared in my mouth. It’s barely worth mentioning the number of times construction such as “the car of” or “the house of” (instead of the regular possessive construction “Eric’s car” or “Kevin’s house”) have popped up in my conversation while talking with my parents or friends on Skype. And of course, classic flubs such as: “what day are we?” or “we are how many?” or “I have 20 years” or “I have hungry” are practically unavoidable at this point.

In the words of Nicky Re, my English is broken. This weekend, I had the chance to have live interaction with someone who truly speaks my own language (ie: English) for the first time in nearly a month and a half. Franglais bubbled up from my days at the fac in Avignon 2009, when I spent all of my time with French speaking Americans. “I feel like mange-ing” for when I’d like a bite to eat, or “what a piece of merde” for when I find something particularly disagreeable. At the caisse (cash register . . . no, check-out is better) at Auchan, when Nicky was buying a new maillot (er, swimsuit), we dissolved into giggles because we honestly couldn’t remember in what language Nicky had responded to the cashier. Broken English it truly is.

That being said, a few words about my tremendous weekend. As mentioned above, I had the chance to practice my English a bit this weekend with Nicky Re, who had come down from Paris to the Avignon area to visit her friends and family, who live in Miramas, a small town near Marseille. It wasn’t until leaving Avignon that I understood to what degree I had been quietly suffering from cabin fever. Apart from my brief adventures in Arles a few weekends ago, I have for the most part stayed in the Avignon area. My idea of “getting out” had been taking Courgette and heading into town for the theater festival or a soirée with friends in town. But good heavens, the countryside did me good.

Regardless of the impressive size of the de Lannoy estate, where I spend the majority of my time, it nevertheless has four (massive) walls. I walk in circles around the pool, transporting dishes from the kitchen to the dishwasher across the courtyard, or pace back and forth between the kitchen and the living room and the library. There are only so many geometric shapes one can make before going crazy, or feeling like a tiger in a cage.

There’s no remedy quite like poplar and sunflower lined streets, watermelon and a barbeque, hearty laughs and new friends, and drives through the mountains at sunset. I was wholeheartedly welcomed both among Nicky’s group of friends and at her family’s table. Leftover taboulee, homemade orange wine, and good Brie never tasted quite so good. I was reminded that a table, no matter how well stocked with wine and cheese and meat and bread, is never complete without laughter. And laugh we did.

Michel, Nicky’s French cousin, was more than delighted to act the tour guide and take us around to all of the hidden corners of la Côte Bleue region. Nicky and I were quite literally cradled to sleep like little children who fall asleep on car rides on a late night tour of l’Etang, an expansive inland bay, just inshore from the Mediterranean Sea. Saturday, we tried out a bit of geocaching, one of Michel’s favorite hobbies. In Miramas-le-Vieux, we followed the directions given on the geocaching website and deduced small riddles to find clues here and there in the tiny village. The clues combined to form a GPS point, where a treasure was supposedly hidden. Nicky and I were delighted to find not only the treasure (a logbook of former geocachers and little nonsensical gifts left behind), but a fruit tree lined route that lead from the final destination back to the car. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about plucking fruit directly off a tree and eating it, warm and juicy.

Our second geocaching of the day took us to Martigues, a town justly nicknamed the Venice of Provence. The town spans the two banks of a river and the tiny island crisscrossed with canals that splits the river in two. With its boats, canals, winding alleys, and bright blue bridges, I am compelled to put the town of Martigues in a glass bottle and display it on my mantelpiece.

Nicky and I would not be content until we made it to the beach, so we headed to the Mediterranean just as the sun was setting. We swum upstream against a crowd of sun weary beach-goers and installed ourselves on the beach to watch the sunset (which was magnificent, but that could just be my France/Mediterranean-lust speaking). Despite the frigid (I exaggerate) temperature of the water, we took a quick swim. Summer simply isn’t complete without a dip in the sea, and I always sleep better when I close my eyes and feel as though I’m still in the water, being rocked by waves.

In short, I rediscovered two things this weekend: the English language, thanks to the first American I have seen in person for a month and a half, and the French countryside that I truly do love, that rests just on the other side of the courtyard walls. And one thing is for sure: we live in a beautiful world, regardless of the language we employ to describe it.