Paris to the Moon (13 page)

I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get
exactly
the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, postinter-view, that a theory checker would be calling them. "It's been a pleasure speaking to you," you'd say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. "And I'm going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you."

Alarmed, suspicious: "A what?"

"You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing."

"What do you mean?" the American would say, alarmed. "Of course they do, I don't need to talk to a theory checker."

"Oh, no, you don't
need
to. It's for your protection, really. They just want to make sure that the theory hangs together. . . ."

The American subject would be exactly as startled and annoyed at the idea of being investigated by a theory checker as the French are by being harassed by a fact checker, since this process would claim some special status, some "privileged" place for theory. A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it's apparent (to us Americans) that people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation
is.

Well, replace
fact
(and
factual)
for
theory
in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking. People don't speak in straight facts; the facts they employ to enforce their truths change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation
is.
Not, of course, that the French intellectual doesn't use and respect facts, up to a useful point, any more than even the last remaining American positivist doesn't use and respect theory, up to a point. It's simply the fetishizing of one term in the game of conversation that strikes the French funny. Conversation is an organic, improvised web of fact and theory, and to pick out one bit of it for microscopic overexamination is typically American overearnest comedy.

"Does this bus go across the river?" the man from Chicago demands of the Parisian bus driver, who looks blank. "I said, this bus goes across the river, or doesn't it?" I myself have been in this position, of course, more times than once, in Venice and in Tuscany, but (I choose to believe, at least) I try to make up for it with the necessary abasing looks of ignorance and sorrow and multitudes of thank-yous and head ducks, as the Japanese do here. The American in Paris just
demands,
querulously—"Now, you remember that pastry I showed you in the window. Now, I want that one"—in English, and expects the world to answer.

Sometimes the French response is muttered and comic. "Hey, does this bus go across the river?" the woman from California says, mounting onto the steps of the 63. "I wouldn't come to your country and not speak in your language," the driver says, in French. A sensitive listener would detect some frost in the manner, but the American woman doesn't: "No—I asked you, does this bus go across the river?" Or, worse, Americans ordering in English at French menus, specifying precisely, exigently, what they want in a language the waiters don't speak.

For it turns out that there is a Regulon in the Semiosphere stronger even than the plug, more agile than the fish. It's language. Language really does prevent signs or cultures from going universal. For all the endless articles in the papers and magazines about the force of globalization and international standardization, language divides and confuses people as effectively now as it ever has. It stops the fatal "exponentiality" of culture in the real world as surely as starvation stops it in the jungle. It divides absolutely, and what is really international, truly global, is, in this way, very small.

The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is likely to feel at home in the other bits. You can join this global community by speaking English yourself, but that's about all. The space between the average Frenchman (or Italian or German) and the average American is just as great as it's ever been, because language remains in place, and it remains
hard.
Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Yet there
is
a kind of authority associated with the American presence right now that is both awe-inspiring and absurd. At the Bastille Day fireworks, for instance, over on the champ-de-Mars, there is always a nice big picnic feeling, but no one pays minimal respect to the notion that people ought not to stand up in front of other people when other people are trying to watch fireworks. As happens so often in France, it is a designated bacchanal, like the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens. At the Bastille Day on the champ-de-Mars this July, in the midst of the anarchy— over on the fringes, of course, there were
flies, gendarmes,
busy arresting the vendors of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces; now, there was a
real
crime—a single American woman rose to bring order to the multitudes. She was the kind of big-boned East Coast woman you see running a progressive day camp, or working as the phys ed instructor at Dalton or Brearley, high-flown but (as she would be the first to tell you) down-to-earth. She just started ordering people around: Sit down, you down there (all this in English, of course), now make room so the little kids can see etc. And people, at least the few hundred in earshot, actually did it. They
obeyed,
for a little while anyway.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

It is, still, amazing to see how vast a screen the differences of language can be—not an opaque but a kind of translucent one. You sort of see through it, but not quite. There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical
Royal Wedding,
for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal—like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English
H
, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al—Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. "But what shall I say to Hal—that I have never loved him?" Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says,
"Et Al—qu'est-ce que je vais lui dire?"

My other favorite subtitle was in some contemporary comedy that we went to see—we see about a movie every six months, where once I saw three a day—in which there was a reference to American talk shows. "And what do you want me to do: go on Oprah, Geraldo, or Sally Jessy?" the character asked. The translator did fine with Oprah and Geraldo but could make nothing of the last, so Sally with her glasses became a non—non sequitur question.
"Oprah, Geraldo—et sale est Jesse?"
the subtitle read— Oprah, Geraldo—and Jesse is dirty?" This network of distant errors obviously occludes itself in front of us all the time, every day, and mostly we don't know it.

There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory; the chair restorer who looks at your beautiful Thonet rocker and then announces, sniffily, that it isn't worth his time; the woman who sells you a poster and then announces that she has no idea where you might go to frame it; the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman off the front door of the bus (you're supposed to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. It affects Martha much less than me, leading me to suspect that it is essentially a masculine problem. My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. As Cioran said, it's hard for me to live in a country where everyone is as irascible as I am.

At the same time, I find myself often reduced to an immigrant helplessness. We went to BHV, for instance, earlier this year to frame our
Paris to the Moon
engraving. I have had it up in my study, an icon to write under. There's a nice do-it-yourself framing shop up there, and lacking a framer to go to, we thought we just ought to, well, do it ourselves. Back in New York we knew a framer who did our frames, and I prided myself, within limits, on having learned a thing or two about what made the right edge for the right picture. We began to sort around with simple white mats and black wooden frames. As we were doing it, a lady came up to us: a Frenchwoman in her seventies, with pearls and a strong jaw and silver hair. She had a couple of handsome flower prints that she was framing for herself. "No, no, children," she said. "You are doing that quite incorrectly. This, you see," she said, "is a nineteenth-century print. It needs a nineteenth-century mat, a nineteenth-century frame." She took the white-and-black frame away from us—put them right back—and chose a cream mat and a fake, "antiqued" gold frame. "There," she said.
"That
is the French nineteenth century," she said, and took the frame and the print and the mat all up to the counter for us. We looked at each other sheepishly and went ahead and bought them. I used to know something about art, or thought I did, I muttered to myself, all the way home. The print actually looks pretty nice in its gold frame. When I remember the moment now, I remember my utter helplessness and how she smelled of a wonderful tea-rose perfume.

The other side of French official arrogance is French improvised and elaborate courtesy. The men from the department store Bon Marche, the deliverymen, called last night, to deliver the wicker kitchen organizer. "We have to be there early, because it's a small street. Six-thirty."

"It's a little too early for us," I said. "Let's make it later." "Ah, no. Its impossible. Six-thirty or nothing." "All right," and I hung up the phone, silently cursing French arrogance and the lack of any kind of service ethic.

Then, the next morning, at six forty-six, I was just awakened by the sound of the gentlest possible knocking on the front door—so butterfly quiet that at first I imagined that it must have been Luke Auden stirring in bed. But then there it was again, quiet but insistent. I got up, put on my robe, got to the front door, and stared out the spyglass. There were two workmen in the hallway, leaning over gently, knocking with their knuckles, as lightly as ghosts. I slipped the door open and got not a smile, but a look of acknowledgment, and they brought the kitchen organizer in with balletlike light-footedness. Thank you," I said, "the baby is sleeping." They nodded.
We know.
I signed the invoice, and they were gone, and I went back to sleep.

And then there is the chair. It started by accident one rainy Monday, after we had been to the Musee d'Orsay, and I had failed to get Luke much interested in my old favorites, Monets and Manets. I still find going to the Musee d'Orsay an infuriating, maddening experience. (Apparently, despite my superficial essays at amused blandness, I realize, reading this, that I'm a real pepperpot, a hothead. Billy Martin in France.) That vast, handsome railroad station so horribly done over in Wiener Werkstatte fashion by Gae Aulenti; the stupid, unquestioned dominance of the worst
pompier
art of the nineteenth century in the main hall as though saying,
here
are our real treasures. And the greater pain that only the
pompier
official art could look any good in such a vast and frigid space. I no longer find the taste for nineteenth-century French academic art, which can be amusing if seen small on a slide screen, the least bit likable. It is horrible, depressing beyond words, the revenge of official culture on life and youth, on reality itself. I swear to God I would take a razor to
The Romans of the Decadence
without a moment's hesitation.

And then having to take the escalator up all the way to the far upper floors—a garret, in museum terms, in order to see the great pictures, every one of which looked incomparably better in the old Jeu de Paume. It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration against everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation—and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.

Paris is marked by a permanent battle between French civilization, which is the accumulated intelligence and wit of French life, and French official culture, which is the expression of the functionary system in all its pomposity and abstraction. Perhaps by French civilization I mean the small shops; by French official culture I mean the big buildings. There is hardly a day when you are not wild with gratitude for something that happens in the small shops: the way that Mme. Glardon, at the pastry shop on the rue Bonaparte, carefully wraps Luke Auden's chocolate eclair in a little paper pyramid, a ribbon at its apex, knowing perfectly well, all the while, that the paper pyramid and ribbon will endure just long enough for the small boy to rip it open to get to the eclair. And hardly a day when you are not wild with dismay at something that has been begun in the big buildings, some abstraction launched on the world in smug and empty confidence.