Accents Foreign

My son was about five years old when we took him to his first foreign country: in this case, the French speaking island of Guadalupe. A few days before we were to depart, we were sitting around the kitchen table trying to explain to him the concept of a foreign language. 

     The French, we told him, had a different word for everything. Instead of "water," for instance, they say "l'eau," and instead of butter, "buerre." 

     "Got it," said Jake, and he held up the pepper grinder. "Instead of 'pepper' they say 'peh,' and instead of 'salt,' they say 'sah.'" 

     Like his mother, Jake turned out to have a knack for picking up languages, which requires an ironclad memory with a willingness to look at least temporarily foolish. But all I got was the accent. 
     I'm pretty good at accents: terrible at picking up actual languages, but good at accents. This means that though I remember very few words in, say, the French I studied in high school, I can pronounce them with admirable accuracy. One of my French teachers was so wowed by my accent that she forgave my entire lack of vocabulary. 
     The problem with my excellent pronunciation is that once I have said my little piece, the native speakers with whom I'm conversing conclude that I must know the language as well as I pronounce it, and reciprocate with an avalanche of French. 
     I recognize that a multiplicity of languages has made for a world of richness and complexity, and that there are things you can say in one language that you can't quite say in your own. But the existence of any other language but my own seems as gratuitous a barrier as a jealously guarded national boundary: a hinderance to international comity and literary give-and-take. 
      Study another language for years, and you will still sound, to a native speaker, like a not very bright child. Study it for a year, and you might rise to the level of a shy, socially awkward five year-old. This seems a poor bargain to strike: a year of hard work only to regress to near infancy. And for what? So I can mingle with a lot of foreigners? 
     I have an American friend who has lived in Italy for the past forty years or so, speaking nothing but Italian. Despite a vast vocabulary and a perfect willingness to play the fool, he nonetheless speaks the language in such a way that his Italian-born teenaged daughter must issue corrections and make excuses for him. He reports that he has gotten used to this humiliation, but sometimes it makes him feel lonely.  
      The British understood that speaking with a bad accent not only alerts native speakers to your faulty grasp of their language, it also keeps the ball in their court. By speaking, say, Urdu, with a British accent, mangling the consonants and braying the vowels, they reminded their imperial subjects that an Englishman was an Englishman no matter where he might alight, and it was up to the rest of the world to make sense of him, and not the other way around. And yet mangling subject peoples' language is a tool of colonialism that historians have entirely ignored.
      My daughter and her husband speak a lot of Spanish to their toddler daughter, whose paternal grandparents are Mexican-American. I had hoped I might learn Spanish at the same rate she learns it, but it's not as though she's going to add a word a day to her vocabulary, and teach them piecemeal to her grandfather. Day by day, she is internalizing the language, and one day she's simply going to start speaking Spanish and crush her grandfather -- this grandfather, anyway -- under a foreign tongue.  

The Bidet

Last year I spent four months noisily remodeling our house: so noisily that I felt I owed it to our neighbors to show them the results. One result was that we acquired something my wife had been hankering after for some decades: namely, a bidet. And apart from the walk-in closet, it was the hit of the open house: an object of many an ooh and ah from the women of the neighborhood.


I don't really understand what the fuss is all about. As far as I can tell there isn't anything you can do with a bidet that you can't do with a shower, a sink, a tub, or a garden hose. 


But I have my own curious history with the contraption. I first encountered one in Paris en route to the States on our first home leave from India. I was about ten at the time, and I remember checking out our bathroom and asking my mother what the extra bowl was for. "Oh, that?" she replied hastily. "That's just something French women need."


As a consequence of all those boyhood hoppings around the globe,  I have always tended to arrive at premature conclusions. "They seem a happy, contented people," I am wont to declare as I first step onto foreign soil. My wife and children try to call me on this, but jumping to conclusions is about all the jumping I'm fit for these days. And admitting the truth, which is that half the time I don't know where I am or who I'm with, is conversationally dead-ended. That and something my daughter calls M.A.S., or Male Answering Syndrome,  has condemned me to spend my life presiding over my own private kangaroo court. 


I sensed from the way my mother bustled around the hotel room afterward that she was not going to tell me anything more about the mysterious fauceted bowl in the bathroom. So I was left to my own devices. I had not yet entirely worked out in my own mind the Facts of Life, which seemed to me too incredible to be factual. "They put what where?" my friends and I would ask one another, and then shake our heads with doubt and disgust. 


I knew from the way my father and older brother ogled the young women seated at cafés along the Champs-Élysées, that French women were different, somehow. They did not resemble the American memsahibs of my acquaintance, who had modeled themselves after such bovine icons of Hollywood domesticity as June Allyson and Rosemary Clooney. French women were elegant, racy, slinky, held themselves with a certain sensuous hauteur. They sipped wine, walked in heels, double-crossed their legs when they sat, pouted adorably when they spoke. 


I suppose there are all kinds of stories about people who first encounter a bidet and employ it for some mistaken purpose. I know one person who assumed it was designed to facilitate the washing of feet, and another who concluded it was intended as a laundry basin. And no doubt others have put it to far more unfortunate uses. 


But all I did back then was think long and hard about it, and to conclude from my mother's hasty reply and what evidence I had thus far assembled, that French women, unique among their species, boasted an extra appendage which had to be kept particularly clean for some reason, and which they could lower at will, like landing gear.


I'm not going to say how long I clung to this conclusion. I just very much hope I was mistaken.