There’s a scene I love in the movie “Husbands,” when John Cassavetes, performing in his own film, is attempting to smooth-talk a beautiful blonde in a London casino. “What languages do you speak?” he asks her. None, she answers. “I’m going to give you a little bit of French,” he says, before launching, with seductive gravitas, into a language that sounds like French. But the words are nonsense. It’s fake French. “You like Italian?” he asks, and then he does his fake version. The woman laughs and says, “It’s not real.” “It’s real to me,” he replies.
I saw that film at a cinema in the Latin Quarter with my husband two decades back, when we were first dating and he was showing me “his Paris,” a place where he had lived for a time. My husband is American but reads in French and also translates it. French history and culture, its writers, philosophers, filmmakers, were a big part of his life, and eventually mine, too, except that the only French I spoke was the pretend version Cassavetes uses to hit on a woman in a bar. I had studied Italian in college and kept it up, on and off. I enrolled in intensive Spanish when I first moved to Los Angeles, long ago, but as I progressed I noticed that I was losing my Italian, as if, to make room for the Spanish, it was being trundled to some remote storage facility, perhaps never to be seen again. I quit the Spanish and focused on preserving my Italian.
Some people are fundamentally monolingual, I decided somewhere along the way, and I might be among them. This liberated me from the idea that it’s “virtuous” to be a polyglot. Every true polyglot I’ve known either had foreign languages at home or went to fancy schools or otherwise had access to learn them from a young age. They weren’t morally superior, just luckier.
After we had our son, we enrolled him in a French school: He could be among the lucky. We visited France every summer, but I considered it impossible that I would learn French deep into adulthood. A big part of it was the accent: I felt condemned, a priori, for my failed “r.” Even people who had merely taken high school French could do that “r.” I could not, and I wasn’t willing to broadcast my coarseness by attempting to try.
Three years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine had taken it upon herself to learn French well enough to write and deliver an artist’s statement at a museum, my certainty that it was “too late” was undermined. This friend is uniquely driven and brilliant, but the essence of her achievement was something simple: willingness. Why couldn’t I, too, be willing?
I found a teacher who came highly recommended but was hesitant; she did not often teach beginners. I wanted to show her I wasn’t a lost cause. We made progress, which was satisfying for both of us. My family was less impressed. Stop talking so loudly, they would say, and don’t make it sound so fraught. Focus on intonation, they advised, not the accent. French words, my son informed me, just didn’t fit well in my mouth. My husband described a fluent American he knew who rolled around Paris with a flat “r” and was perfectly understood. Just do that, he suggested. But it was too late for me to preserve a flat “r”; I was already deep into my botched accent and unable to turn back.
Two years into this pursuit, I was at a film festival in Lisbon surrounded by Europeans who kept switching into French. I confessed to a Portuguese filmmaker, Marta Mateus, that I was trying to learn it, and she, and then others, took up a concerted project of always addressing me in French, an act of generous optimism that I would eventually catch on. I was a judge at this festival, and after long days at movies, I forced myself to interact in French at midnight dinners and then returned to my room, depleted and without hope. I could not really converse. I didn’t have a mind for languages.
Doing dumb exercises in a book, it turned out, was a different world from trying to have an intelligent conversation with Jean-Luc Godard’s longtime collaborator, Fabrice Aragno. Marta, who had the most faith in me, had a radical suggestion: Go to Paris, she said, and get a teacher to talk to you for several hours every day. This was what she had done, and now she spoke French with ease. That’s because you’re European, I whined. But she was unconvinced that I should take shelter in low expectations.
I was, in fact, planning a trip to Paris, to write for a month. I skipped the plan to write and instead enrolled in intensive daily language instruction. By the end of that stay, I turned a corner. I can now hold a conversation; I can speak in French for an entire meal, although with close friends, I do that for only so long before veering into English and a higher level of communication than I’m capable of in French. My pronunciation is less labored now, and though I still have a long way to go, the more I learn, the better I understand what I’m up to. I don’t exactly need French for practical reasons. But I’m attracted to it: It’s a realm where I am unmoored, stripped of what comes easily to me. The writer, the artist, uses rhetoric and imagination, intuition and irony, to conquer reality. They take in cues, and form reactions, always with their secret mental notes about everything. French, meanwhile, is an authoritative structure. To follow it, I can’t just “hear” as I do in my native tongue. I must stand at attention and go beyond what’s real for me, as Cassavetes puts it, to what’s real for others: an expanded world I have no need to “conquer” and, instead, to which I can only ever modestly hope to submit.
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