A hole in the universe

At the age of eight,
while seated at an outdoor dinner party,
I discovered a hole in the universe.

My mother,
busy talking to the other guests at our table,
had not noticed me
sorting the red bell peppers
out of my tabbouleh
and pushing them neatly to the edge of my plate, so she did not make me finish them.

Pleased with this small victory, I quietly ate around my abandoned pepper bits, then
settled in for the Long Wait for Dessert,
daydreaming and drowsy,
lulled by a full stomach and the grownups' chatter.

And then something happened.

One of my red bell pepper bits began to move.

In the blink of an eye,
it had slipped off my plate,
scuttled across the dinner table,
slid down the tablecloth,
and disappeared.

It would be understating things
to say I was astonished.

A great wind had blown through my life.
I remember feeling quite grave:
I was going to have to reconsider everything I know about the world.
Also, my mother and I were vegetarian, and
I wondered what we were going to eat from now on.

I felt a little excited. If bell pepper bits could walk,
then the world must be brimming with hidden talents.

I looked up to see if anyone else had noticed
this dramatic turn of events,
and noticed a family friend
fiddling with his laser pointer,
whose bell-pepper-red light was now dancing across the back of someone's chair.

My disappointment was leavened by the arrival of chocolate cake.

But I have always treasured that moment,
that tiny sliver of time in which
my world turned upside down.
I have never forgotten what powerful magic
is misunderstanding
and what marvelous and unlikely holes it can rip in our realities.

Pictures in words, needles in haystacks, and the price of a suntan

If you have ever done archival research, you know
that it can be a bit like
searching for a needle in a haystack.
(which, by the way, the French do, too, though they prefer
to look for their needles in bales, not stacks, of hay:
chercher une aiguille dans une botte de foin)

I would even argue that haystacks (or bales)
are easier than archives:
although the pen is mightier than the sword,
it's hard to prick your finger on a word.

Most of the people who generated all that paper disappeared without
ever suspecting that the things
they were scratching out on those pages would be preserved in a heavy box
and trundled from dim shelf to dim research carrel
by people wearing cotton gloves.

And thank goodness they never suspected:
the most unsuspecting of their pen scratches
are the unexpected pinpricks that keep you awake as you work,
winking reminders that the past isn't always a blur,
that boredom has ever been the same
and that no matter how dusty and dry the task,
we all enjoy a bit of whimsy.

This doodle was drawn by a list-maker in Tunisia
at the turn of the last century.

And speaking of mysterious words (see my last post),
his list is full of them:
apparently,
1 suntan, 1 khodfu, and 1 chasuch
will set you back 3,360 francs.

I'm sure such glittering treasures are worth the money,
but the legs on that officer are really priceless.

All that glitters

When I was a child, I thought a "chester of doors" was a complex and wonderful construction that promised to open the way to a million new worlds. I can still feel that magical possibility when I write those words, even though it's been years since I figured out that a chest of drawers was merely where my socks and undershirts lived. And I still love the mysterious glamor of a word or phrase whose meaning is completely obscure to you, whether it is because you have misheard it, have no idea of the context, or simply don't know.

When your job is words, these moments become rarer and rarer, though technical terms do afford a certain pleasure: how lovely, the moments I spent imagining that "pléochroïque" was the era of rainbow-colored dinosaurs, rather than a crystallographic term. Charming, the few seconds I dreamed of "calandreuses," which in my mind ought to mean ladies who make calendars. (They're actually a kind of leather embossing press.)

That is why I am so grateful to the fashion world. Just one fashion event can give you enough of these mysterious phrases to last a lifetime. My favorite of them all, the one I carry with me happy in the knowledge that it will never be elucidated, is one I picked up at a Lanvin runway show I attended last year. I was working for an agency whose job it was to transcribe and translate post-show interviews, which are so esoteric they require an eyewitness to make any sense of them at all.

Seeing a runway show in real life is kind of like seeing the Tour de France in real life: an immense amount of hype and chaos for something that is over in a flash. After the show, it was my job to push through the crowd to listen to the press conference. As I was pushing I saw two men who looked like they'd been dressed by André 3000 from Outkast. For all I know, they may have been André 3000 from Outkast. In any case, as I pushed, I heard one of them say to the other,

"Yeah, I need to get some more, though. It's like all my diamonds are falling out."

I have turned this phrase over in my mind a million times, and it never looses its sheen. What must it feel like when all one's diamonds fall out? Sometimes I think it must be a chilly, shivery sensation, not entirely unpleasant. Other times I imagine it's painful, like those awful dreams where your teeth get wobbly and you can't keep them in your mouth. And what could you get more of that would keep them in place? How many diamonds do you need to have before you casually can say the words "all my diamonds"? Three? Seventeen? How big do they need to be? Oh, the possibilities are endless.

Listen-if-it’s-raining

Rain has been a major preoccupation this week in Alba: we’ve had nearly a foot of it.

Il pleut: it’s come down hard – in buckets, you’d say in both English and French. It’s been pouring, as we say – or raining spouts, as they say. (Il pleut des trombes) The French find it amusing that we English speakers complain it’s raining cats and dogs; I hope you find it amusing that here in France it rains ropes (des cordes), and, if things get really bad, it comes down like a cow pisses (comme vache qui pisse).

Over the past week we’ve had it in ropes and buckets and cats and cows. In a village full of farmers and broken down old houses, you feel torn between happy for the crops and sad for all the cooped-up stonemasons, and of course irritated you left your laundry out on the line.

But then on Friday morning we woke up and began to feel nervous. We live right next to the River Escoutay, which, on most days is barely more than a cheerful trickle. But early Friday morning there was a lull in the rain, and we realized the roaring we heard was the Escoutay. It rose and rose. On Saturday night, my husband filled up sand bags for my mother-in-law, who lives on the ground floor and didn’t sleep much listening out for the river to stop roaring and begin to clank, which is how you know it has rolled all its rocks right up into to the back yard and is about to flood your kitchen.

Luckily, the river subsided, and the rain died back down to a drizzle (which the French describe in diminutives of il pleut, as if we were saying “it’s rain-ish-ing” – il pleuvine, il pleuviote, il pleuvasse).

Lying in bed with the sound of those drops falling and falling on our skylights has made me realize how much country living is full of listening for rain; it has made me nostalgic for a French expression that died away as we and our language have drained out of the countryside and flooded into cities, with their clothes dryers and indoor jobs.

The expression is ecoute-s’il-pleut (listen-if-it’s-raining). It was what people would call a river like the Escoutay that runs slow and lazy until it roars up into your back yard, or a mill that didn’t work too well in the dry seasons. By extension, it was used to describe the a kind of lazy person who sat around waiting for a stroke of luck, or who was too busy listening for the rain to get out and get anything done. Or someone like me, who’s waiting for the sun to come so she can get those wet clothes in off the line.

French vocabulary nos. 2 and 3: faux ami and quid pro quo

Translated literally, faux ami means “false friend”:

it’s a word you ought to be able to snap like a Lego

out of English

and into French

(or vice versa)

but you can’t.

One false friend that still occasionally trips me up is “isolation,”

which means “insulation” and not “isolation.”

If, when describing Alba to a Frenchman, you mention the "isolation," he may start thinking about

fiberglass versus cellulose and thermal coefficients

as you try to conjure a solitary village perched on a hill, looking out over endless rows of grapevines.

Of course, insulation can be a confusing topic even when you’re not worried about translation –

or maybe I should say that translation can be a problem even within a language.

I’m thinking of what the French call a quid pro quo, which, as it happens, is another example of a faux ami.

In Latin, quid pro quo means “this for that.”

In English, it denotes a tit-for-tat exchange.

In French, it is what tends to occur when you bring together the two main populations of Alba,

the good ol’ boy set

and the organic-crunchy-yuppie set.

At a recent party, we overheard Rafael,

who is a builder,

chatting

with Daniel, who quit his office job to move to the country and build straw bale houses.

“Straw bales are the future,” Daniel enthused. “Have you read much about them?”

“Not sure exactly you’d need to read about them,” said Rafael.

“That’s how I feel,” Daniel exclaimed. “It’s what’s so great – they’re just intuitive.”

“I guess so,” said Rafael.

“The only thing you really need to know about straw bales,” Daniel observed, taking a gulp of his artisanal beer, “is that you have to be careful not to pack them too tightly.”

Rafael poured himself another pastis. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Because if you pack them too tightly,” Daniel went on, “the straw gets crushed, and then you lose the hollow part in the stem that holds the air, and it’s not as effective.”

Rafael took a long, thoughtful sip of pastis. “Well I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said. “You know, you bale it, you roll it, you stack it, I don’t think your animals are gonna be that picky – if it’s straw, they’ll eat it.”

The Densest Object in the World

Today it is time for a cautionary tale about a little detail that might trip you up as you toggle between numbers in French and English.

Once upon a time, shortly after I moved to France for good to live with the man I would later marry, the postman delivered a little blue envelope to our house. It contained a blue, handwritten square of paper with the following information on it:

I arrived: March 31, 2005 at 11:30pm

I weigh: 3,650 kg

I measure: 52 cm

You may visit me on Sunday, April 9, between 9am and noon.

There was no signature. It was some kind of party invitation, but who would have a party on a Sunday morning?

And who would couch the invitation as a riddle?

I had never heard of anything that dense.

Was it an asteroid?

Surely I would have heard of an asteroid landing near our village. It would have made a big hole, too.

Besides, only quarks and stuff are dense like that. You can’t even see them.

This is ridiculous, I thought.

No one is going to come to their party.

I tossed the invitation on the table and forgot about it until my husband came home. “Any mail?” he asked.

“Just this stupid riddle,” I said, handing him the blue piece of paper. As I passed it to him, I noticed there was something on the back of it. It was a picture of a newborn baby, whose birth his parents and grandparents were very happy to announce.

“Ah, Fred had his baby,” Julien said, tossing the birth announcement back on the table. “I guess we should buy them a present. What do you mean, riddle?”

And that is why you should never forget that the French use commas where Americans use decimal points, and vice versa.

The world's most powerful word

My husband and I used to have an ongoing argument about the merits of French versus the merits of English. “Come on,” I would tell him. “English is so much more descriptive. The language of Shakespeare. There’s so much more you can say.”

“That’s because Shakespeare went around inventing words,” he’d scoff.

“But that’s exactly my point,” I’d counter. “Look how many more words English has than French.”

He pooh-poohed this. “Toothbrush, flatiron, hamstring, fairytale - it’s just because you count compound words. That’s cheating.”

“Serendipity, retch, doodle,” I parried. “Or how about silly? Your language doesn’t have a word for silly, for God’s sake.”

“But that doesn’t stop us from being silly. Or describing it. We’re simply more efficient. We do more with less. Eventually, we’ll have reduced the whole of French down to a single, extremely expressive syllable. Like bah.”

My husband may actually be right about this, but he’s got the wrong syllable. If I had to bet on French boiling down to one syllable I’d bet on doux, which, might be the most versatile word I know.

This one little word can mean:

sweet

gentle

soft (in texture or in sound)

temperate

loving

slow

nice

pleasant

warm

easy

mild

Imagine a language in which your baby’s hair, your lover’s gaze, the weather this afternoon, the pace at which you’re getting things done, the way you woke up, the breakfast you ate, the volume of the radio, your cat’s nap, and a million other things can all be described with a single word. Double it into two syllables – doudou – and it becomes your child’s security blanket, a nickname for your lover, a way to describe a cuddly person. Roll it over your tongue a few times and it fancies up into douillet, adding coziness and luxuriance to the mix.

Doux is so shy and unassuming, and yet so powerful. If the meek shall inherit the earth and language is slowly distilling itself down into a single super-syllable, let this be the one.