Clint Martin's Blog

“Paris Visite, três jour, s’il vous plait,” I said to the man behind the plexiglas of the subway station ticket counter.  Crap.  It was my first non “merci”-only phrase I had uttered since arriving in Paris and as soon as I finished I realized that it was a mixture of bad French and mediocre Portuguese precariously held together by a strong American and Brazilian accent.  The man’s expression shifted from disinterested to less than interested.

“Quoi?” he said.  I knew what the word meant, but even if I didn’t, the meaning was clear: “what the crap did you just say?”.  I sighed and resorted to my old standby; I held three fingers up to the glass.“Paris Visite,” I said.  The man looked as if he wanted to ask me to try again – out of principle more than anything else.  This subway station was the point of entry for flights into Beauvais, which was a smallish town about an hour north of Paris.  A discount airline chose the outlying airport for its service to the city which guaranteed a steady stream of buses filled with European hillbillies and American backpackers flowing into the subway station in front this man’s turnstile.  I felt sorry for him, really.  While Europeans in general demonstrated a wider acceptance of multiple languages, no doubt this man had heard bad French attempted in a staggering number of unintelligible accents.  He looked at my three fingers and relaxed his shoulders in resignation.  He knew I could only want one thing – a three day subway pass.  I slid a twenty Euro note in the slot and he returned the change with a small ticket with a magnetic stripe.

The dirty little secret of the foreign language phrase book industry is that knowing a few words and phrases in another language is often worse than knowing nothing at all when it comes to navigating the country where that language is spoken.  Sure, you may have memorized, “Help, I’m being chased by an angry man with a baguette,” and be able to say it with perfect inflection, but if you find yourself in the situation where you are being pursued by an angry baker, you will unlikely be able to distinguish a passer-by’s “quick, duck into the Virgin Megastore” from “I actually side with the baguette man in this conflict and I will deliver you into his floury hands.”  A phrase book is a false sense of security, at best.

I had just arrived from Portugal where I spoke the language – or so I thought.  It had been five years since leaving Brazil and I discovered that not only had my Portuguese vocabulary degraded considerably, the difference in dialects was incredible.  It was like dropping a Georgian redneck in the middle of Patois-speaking Kingston, Jamaica.  I was deeply disappointed in that I often had to give up the attempt to converse in Portuguese and resorted to English.  I felt like a linguistic failure.  Could I even consider myself bilingual anymore?

In Paris, I stayed dejectedly silent most of the time.  I was in awe of the city with its beautiful architecture and museums, but my interaction with people usually was simply “pardon” or “merci”.  At restaurants or with street vendors a simple, “Anglais?” initiated an English conversation – they being accustomed to foreign tourists.  A Parisian man was able to teach me how to use the washing machines at the laundromat, but it was due more to his impressive ability to instruct through gestures than any verbal comprehension on my part.

For the next couple of days, however, I paid close attention to what people were saying around me.  I got the meaning of some conversations by their context and by picking out Latin roots.  I listened to their accents and rehearsed them to myself.  I always made sure I was relatively alone before attempting, as I was sure that a solitary American man muttering to himself on the street was sure to draw unwanted attention.

My last day in Paris, I decided to make one final attempt at French.  I singled out my victim, which was one of the many snack carts near the Eiffel Tower.  I waited in line, mentally repeating my order.  The cart was manned by two French men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent.  They seemed unaware of the verbal slaughter that they were about to experience.  I watched them as they worked.  The younger man wasn’t really a man at all.  He was probably only sixteen or so.  Seventeen at most.  Clearly he was the older man’s son, the cart appearing to be a family business.  It was eleven in the morning; shouldn’t the son be in school?  He looked up at me.

“Oui?” he asked and I realized he was asking me what I wanted.  Crap.  I had gotten distracted and had stopped repeating my order in my head.  After a moment of panic, I stepped forward.

“Crêpe Nutella, s’il vous plait.”

Without a word the sixteen-year old poured the batter onto the large griddle.  His motions were without thinking, a result of doing this hundreds, even thousands of times.  He flipped the crepe over and reached for the Nutella.  Clearly he had understood my quick phrase well enough to fill the order without asking a confirmation.  I had done it!  I was grinning with self-satisfaction when he looked up from his work and asked me a question.  In French.  I had no idea what he said and I quickly searched my brain.  What options could there be for a Nutella crepe?  I couldn’t think of anything.  Usually I would just say a simple “d’accord” as saying “okay” probably didn’t matter, but with a lack of obviously related questions, he could be asking me anything.

“How long have you been in France?”

“What are your thoughts on the American war in Iraq.”

“So, are you into bondage play?”

It was too risky; I had to abort.  “Parlez-vous anglais?” I asked.  For the tiniest of moments, he looked confused, as if he didn’t understand my question.  This expression quickly disappeared and a small grin replaced it.  For a moment, it was my turn to be confused until it dawned on me that he thought I spoke French, not just phrasebook French, but honest-to-goodness-I’ve-lived-in-Compiègne-for-ten-years-and-I-just-decided-to-come-to-Paris-for-the-day French. He was confused why a French-speaker was asking him if he spoke English.  Clearly if he had been actually paying attention to what I was saying he wouldn’t have made the mistake, but I didn’t care.  He thought I actually spoke French!

“Anything to drink?” he asked with a slight accent.

“Non,” I replied, smiling.