Bitter Almonds (9 page)

When children grow up like this, she continues, only seeing their father once a year, they don't know him, “is no respect, is no good relation.”

The numbers are called, one by one. Number 15, number 16. Édith asks Fadila whether she would prefer to go to the interview alone or accompanied. Accompanied, opts Fadila, without hesitating. Clearly she has noticed that she is the only one in her particular situation, for when the manager walks by, she stops her and says, “I is coming with is lady teaching me to write. Is okay she come enrolment with me?” The woman has no problem with that. As soon as she is out of earshot Fadila leans closer to Édith and says, “Must to always telling truth, like that is no trouble after. I is always telling truth.”

The fact remains that she is probably the oldest of all those who have come to enroll. She sits unmoving, slightly slumped on her chair, observing those around her. Fadila has that swarthy face with heavy eyelids, thin lips, and the impressive implacability often found in old women from a poor background, whatever the continent, as if age made them all alike. In fact, she looks much older than her sixty-four or sixty-five years. Which won't argue in her favor today.

Fadila's turn has come. Fate has it that she is interviewed by an exquisite young man, as friendly as can be. Fadila states her identity, her address, her telephone number. When he asks, “Are you married?” she replies fiercely, “No.” Édith breaks in: “You're living alone now. But you have been married, you have children and grandchildren.”

“And is children is granddaughters,” adds Fadila. “I's old.”

The young man asks her if she has any notions of reading or writing. She shakes her head and says, “No a lot.” “Well, still,” corrects Édith, “you can write your first and last name, and read a few things here and there.”

Édith in turn—careful to do it in front of Fadila—asks whether it is true that there will not be room for all the candidates. The young man seems surprised. “We do have a lot of people this year,” he says.

The classes will begin in a week, on the 14th, at the same time and place. They will call all the candidates beforehand to confirm their enrolment.

 

But no one calls Fadila. On the 13th, the evening before the first class, Édith calls to find out what is happening. A young woman answers; Édith does not recognize her voice, and she confirms that Fadila Amrani has not been accepted. The reason? She doesn't know. She is not familiar with the case.

Before telling Fadila, Édith calls other literacy centers she had located, which offer classes at the end of the afternoon. The only one that has a class at six
p.m.
is an association run by the
mairie,
the town hall of the sixteenth arrondissement. The classes are held at the
mairie
itself, it's not very far from Fadila's place, with a direct métro: it might work.

Enrolment has been closed since July, says a pleasant woman on the telephone, but very often people who have signed up drop out after a few weeks: Fadila can come and fill out a form, and they'll have a place for her as soon as someone drops out.

Édith explains that the reason she has been so late in calling is that she was counting on another literacy center, but that Fadila was turned down because of her age. “Do you think that might be a problem?”

The woman is not surprised. “Well, obviously, a young person can learn to read and write in two years, an older person takes ten years. These are people who have never learned how to learn. Some of them have never even held a pencil.

“But we won't exclude anyone because of their age. We are prepared to give everyone a chance.”

 

Fadila does not seem surprised to find out that she has not been accepted at Saint-Landry. It's a well-known fact in her milieu: “Is Filipinos they taking all the places.”

 

The very next morning she goes to sign up at the
mairie
in the sixteenth arrondissement, where they do indeed put her on a waiting list, assuring her that they will contact her the moment a spot becomes available.

The likelihood seems slim. The prospect of resuming her lessons with Fadila leaves Édith with a weariness that merely serves to emphasize how much she had been counting on being relieved of her task.

Fadila, however, when they meet the following week, says to Édith, “We is going on together you and me” with so much good grace and enthusiasm that Édith is moved. This is all about Fadila, but she doesn't seem either discouraged or skeptical.

Does she have the impression that she's made progress with Édith, that she's learned a lot? Or if she knows that she has learned very little, does it mean that for her even that very little is important? Does she prefer their private meetings to a class with others?

 

“Let's do some reading to start with today, if that's all right with you,” says Édith.

On a sheet of paper she writes

 

RER C FADILA

AMRANI RER B

RER A LARBIT

 

and hands the paper to Fadila: “These are all words that you know.”

Fadila does not seem convinced. She looks at the sheet, immobile. All the same, as if moving a pawn in chess, she slides her index finger over to the word
AMRANI
and says, “That one, is Amrani.” Then, taking heart, she points to
FADILA
and relaxes. “That one is me.”

“It's your first name,” says Édith. “That's good, you recognized it. But it's not you, you cannot say, ‘It's me,' it's your first name, Fadila.”

Before Fadila's eyes she writes
ME
: “This is the word me. Look, here you have the word
FADILA
, and this is the word
ME
: they're different. Do you understand?”

Apparently not altogether, for when Fadila points to
LARBIT
, she says, “Is Nasser.”

“It's Nasser's name,” says Édith, “the name you see on your telephone when he calls.”

“Is Larbit.”

“Exactly. There is the man who is your son, then there is his name. You know that it isn't the same thing.”

Édith writes
NASSER
. “There's something special about this word. Do you see what it is?”

Fadila cannot tell.

“It's your son's first name, Nasser,” says Édith. “Surely you know it.”

She has Fadila pronounce the word, insists on the sibilants, writes the letter
S
—“a new letter”—and points out that there are two
S
's in
NASSER
. It is the first time they have seen a double letter. Fadila copies the
S
, the two
S
's, the name.

“Let's keep going,” says Édith. She writes
AÏCHA
. “Your daughter's first name. Look: it begins and ends with a letter you know well.”

They work on the A, the one that occurs twice in
FADILA
, twice in
AÏCHA
, twice in
AMRANI
, once in
NASSER
and
LARBIT
. Édith would have liked so much for Fadila to have noticed this. It's still too early.

The
A
is also what makes the difference between
RER A
and
RER B
or
RER C
. Édith reaches for a Paris transport map and shows her the spots, at the end of the RER lines, where it says A, B, or C: it's like a little label stuck to the line, so that you will know that this line is the A, this one the B, and this third one the C.

Fadila has often seen people looking at these little folders in the bus or on the métro, she says. She wondered what it was.

Édith points out the stations: each little white circle stands for an RER stop.

But she is afraid that all of this is far too abstract for someone who can hardly tell the difference between a name and a person, between a word and the thing itself.

 

She looks again on the internet, types
Teach illiterate adult to read
in the search engine
.
She has to know what is at stake, so that she can improve her own method.

There is a huge amount of information about the subject on-line. One particular site,
French as a foreign language
, is a veritable encyclopedia. In addition to the references it provides to all sorts of publications on learning, on theories about the learning process, on cognitive psychology, and on the contribution of neuroscience, among other things, it also offers a free audiovisual learning method in
333 reading games
, which looks extraordinary.

On other sites, pedagogues share their experience, and there are manuals for sale written by teachers who concluded that none of the existing textbooks are satisfactory. There are reports commissioned by international organizations, containing proposals for eliminating the inefficacy of adult illiteracy programs. Édith spends hours on these websites, entire evenings, taking pages of notes.

From a practical point of view she is relieved to see that, empirically, she has been doing just what is universally recommended. First and foremost the learning process has to have meaning; avoid working on information that has no significance (letters or syllables removed from any context); choose subject matter that represents a meaningful investment of time, such as first and last name. The teacher must not display any authoritarian or dogmatic behavior. Find out as much as possible about the student. Look for the single method best suited for each case.

Regarding theory, Édith reads dozens of times that motivation and commitment on the part of the student are fundamental, that the emotional side can play a decisive role (empathy of the initiator, quality of the relationship). There are fascinating pages describing everything that has come to light over the last century thanks to the contributions of psychology and, more recently, neuroscience. Experience—in other words, a lack of it, or gaps in experience—can be key in determining how easily a student will learn. Successive periods of learning have a lot to do with piling up the blocks. If the blocks at the foundation have been poorly placed, the pyramid cannot be built, it will collapse. Worse still, there are critical periods for certain stages of the learning process. Once these critical periods, and their particular dispositions, have elapsed, learning is no longer possible. Worst of all, if certain fundamental processes have not been learned when they could have been learned, other processes that depend on them (which are superimposed upon them) become impossible in turn, just as a pyramid cannot be built on a foundation that does not exist.

No one in the present day would dare to assert as aggressively as Luria did, at the height of the Soviet Union's influence, that illiterate adults from predominantly oral cultures can display deficiencies in the mechanisms of perception, generalization, abstraction, deduction, and inference; but nor can anyone rule out that possibility.

Édith stops right there. She needs to have at least a minimum of faith in a positive outcome. Because she will go on. Whatever her faith, she cannot abandon what she has begun. She cannot picture herself saying to Fadila: it's not going to work, let's drop it.

But there is one thing that is striking. On every site, in every story or analysis, no matter the approach or the method, the initial learning stage consists in showing a few letters and teaching the student to make basic combinations. And nowhere does it say that there are students who fail to assimilate this elementary ABC. The overall implication is that this basic knowledge is accessible to everyone—if there are difficulties, they will come later.

And this is where Édith has come a cropper, faced with such resistance to what is the basic cornerstone of learning. There are individuals to whom one can give an
F
and an
A
and who cannot combine them to make either
FA
or
AF
.

Édith has read hundreds of pages and nowhere is there any reference to such individuals. Well, there is, indirectly, in the two-fold conclusion that, on the one hand, all too often there are people who give up on their literacy classes—regrettably, since they were the ones who asked to take them; and on the other there are, invariably, programs on offer to the crowds of hopefuls that remain ineffective.

When Fadila comes in, her expression is inscrutable.
“Is everything all right?”
“Is no sleeping. Watching television all night. I seeing three programs is Special Correspondent, is shit. Is bullshit all over, everywhere.”

“But when you watch television like that at night aren't there times when your eyes just start to close by themselves? Don't you just drop off after a while?”

“Sometimes, yes. But sometimes is no sleeping all night. Is good thing television working. I is all alone. If I switching off television, I seeing things is no good. So I leave switched on. Is not easy being alone.”

 

The
Alphalire
method offered online on the French as a foreign language website,
lepointdufle
, is so well conceived, and playful at the same time, in both its written and oral components, as well as being full of imagery and not just graphic, that Édith describes it enthusiastically to Fadila and suggests they give it a try. On screen they can work without pencil and paper, at least at the start; the student doesn't have to make the effort to write, only recognize and identify, and compose syllables with a click of the finger; it's a game.

Fadila is sitting at her usual place, on Édith's left, at the table where they've become accustomed to working. But instead of a sheet of paper, Édith places her little laptop computer between them. She notices at once that Fadila is sitting well back from the table, deep in her chair. She does not lean toward the screen the way she would lean over the paper.

Édith shows her the first of the three hundred and thirty-three exercises, and she does not need to act cheerful: it really is a game.