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Subtle Layers

by KARA VANDERBIJL

"Up until 10 years ago it was legal for teachers to slap their students across the face," is the most accurate description of the French school system. No matter when you tell the story, it is always "only 10 years ago" that this brutality was legal, the monstrosity of it appalling to anyone unfamiliar with Gallic mores, the thrill of it fresh in our young minds as we filed into classrooms chewing forbidden gum, a single headphone dangling out of an ear turned to the back wall.

I began in a neighborhood  middle school, all gray brick and black wrought-iron fence. The boys in my fifth-grade class drew pictures of stick figures performing oral sex on one another. At recess, all the stalls in the girls' bathroom were shut tight, cigarette smoke curling from underneath and over the doors. A group of my peers asked me whether or not we had rice in America. On several occasions, it got so rowdy in math class that the instructor could only stand in the front, twitching uncontrollably. 

After I read a passage from Frankenstein out loud in French class, the teacher looked at me indulgently and told me I'd be a much better reader if I didn't have such an awful foreign accent.

We looked forward to lycée, high school, the brain-melting difficulties of which had been described to us in detail since the very beginning of our education. Our teachers effervesced with barely-contained glee. "Just wait until you get there! You won't know what hit you." Talks about electives sparked up among junior highers who, for the last four years, had spent most of their time calculating how to sneak an extra miniature baguette in the lunch line. 

Most of us had been studying Spanish for the last two grades, had even been taken on a school trip to Barcelona. Our teacher had given us very little vocabulary to cope with what awaited us there: host families that served dinner at midnight, the absence of hot water in our showers or a bidet of any kind, the desire to describe a pet guinea pig. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the contours of the language, and the continued study of it in high school — plus an additional language, perhaps Italian? — seemed a wise choice since we had been told our heads would almost certainly fall from our shoulders with the combined weight of our future intellectual responsibilities and our inability to perform them with such miniscule minds. I'd learned French and could say hello in Spanish. How difficult could another one be?

I thought I'd attend the closest high school: another drab affair that turned out more chain-smoking sixteen-year-olds than anything else. But after class one day my English teacher, a Madame Ginestet, took me aside. "You might want to look into this international school in Luynes, just outside of Marseille," she said, handing me a brochure. She explained that I'd not only be able to obtain a general French baccalaureate, but that I'd also be able to take history, geography, and literature classes in English. Along with her recommendation letter she handed me a stack of French books (including a Proust) and a note in her elegant script: Feel free to disregard any of these should they bore or discourage you.

Although the school at Luynes was public, I had to take an English competency exam to be admitted into the international section. Madame Ginestet promised that as a foreigner, I'd have no trouble getting in: the school had to accept as many native English speakers as possible to keep up its prestigious status. Our teachers were Cambridge-educated, a disparate group of Brits who I imagined kept to themselves in the staff room reading Shakespeare while their French colleagues smoked over coffee and plotted when they would next go on strike.

We were warned we'd have more work than the average high schooler, that we'd no doubt struggle during the first year, after which our place in the section would be under review. They handed out sheets of vocabulary we should master, books we should read, exercises we should complete. We were told we'd read T.S Eliot and The Great Gatsby. It was as if somebody had handed me a key to a secret garden where I might go lie in a fragrant meadow while everybody else pulled up weeds.

A pair of sisters taught Spanish at Luynes. Both were extremely strict, heavily perfumed and aside from their hair color, almost identical in appearance and teaching method, to the extent that I cannot remember which one I had in which grade. "El chicle en la papelera!" they'd welcome us. When we (in)voluntarily forgot about an assignment, it was customary for whichever sister to spend the first fifteen minutes of class yelling about our incompetency. "You will never make it through the baccalaureate exam," they spat, "you have no discipline, you are stupid, you are donkeys." Finally, completely exasperated, "Did anybody prepare the assignment?" Someone in the back would raise a timid hand. "Madame?" 

"En español," they'd snap.

I began to study Italian. It was an ill-advised decision — having had Spanish drilled into my psyche for the better part of two years, it was impossible, no matter how many times I read through a translation I had done, to catch all the els that should have been ils. There were days, in the beginning, when I crawled into the car and sat in the front seat with my ears ringing, unsure as to what language I should use to tell my father how my day had been.

Our Italian teacher was a laid-back gentleman who had difficulty drawing the line between student and friend and taught us nothing that we would not forget over the summer. The class almost always took place at that time in the afternoon when the sun was shining warm and golden through the windows and our carbohydrate-heavy cafeteria lunch was settling in for the night. He subjected us to medieval madrigals and weak Italian pop songs. In return, we asked him on an almost constant basis whether or not he had a girlfriend. When he gave in to the occasional bout of righteous wrath, we sat staring at our blank sheets of note paper submissively until he had finished. While much of my Spanish still lingers beneath the tips of my fingers, itching for a runny fountain pen to skip across paper in the subjunctive, my Italian has gone the way of all souvenirs you bring back from short, albeit pleasant, vacations: in the back of a dusty closet. I don't believe I could even count to ten if commanded to do so.

If ever in my life I attributed more power to words than I should have, any such inclination was beat out of me during those three years. At home we spoke English with a completely arbitrary smattering of French sifted in. At school I had already allowed myself to think completely in French, except in those classes which commanded my native Anglo attention; Spanish and Italian, however, I learned through the medium of French, and I am surprised to this day that I managed to understand anything at all. I mourn for the girl whose mind, although exhausted, although crammed with information, was then sharper than it had ever been and no doubt ever will be.

Everybody speculates on the various measures one can use to test fluency in a given language. Some claim that when you begin to dream in your second (or third, or fourth) language, you have mastered it. Others insist that you cannot call yourself a true speaker of it until you have captured its wit and laughed at its jokes. Still more assume that the truest measure of fluency is the comprehension of poetry. I am inclined to believe this, since I could not call myself fluent in French until I had understood all of Baudelaire's subtle layers.

The heart chooses its own tongue. Sometimes it is not the one you were born listening to, but rather one that you do not learn until later in life. On the day of my final oral exams in Italian, I stumbled through an unfamiliar text and attempted to translate it as well as I could under the disapproving gaze of an older gentleman who no doubt went home and grumbled about the indifference of teenagers to Dante's language. The Spanish flowed easier from my pen; all the verbs marched in unsion across the page, and as much as I had enjoyed the challenge I sighed in relief as I turned in my essays and left those two Romantic deviants in the yellow hallways of the school. I have not picked them up since. 

For a few years I believed my heart to be divided between English and French, equally enamored with both, admiring the technical beauty of the one and the ease of the other. I spoke long and fervently on the virtues of one of Baudelaire’s Spleen poems to a woman who nodded her head in approval despite the foreign flavor of my accent when I read it aloud. 

But when I arrived for my very last baccalaureate exam, one in English literature, my heart truly sang. I had not studied at all. The text was Othello’s speech at the beginning of Act V.ii, right before he smothers Desdemona, and I do not believe there are sweeter words in the English language. I read slowly, savoring them. I was asked questions to which I responded. I went on for much longer than I should have. I looked up at the faces of the examiners, who were both beaming, because I myself could not keep from smiling.

Francis Cabrel, a French folk singer, released an album entitled Hors Saison in 1999. My father had listened to it in the local Borders and, since we were moving to France in the next year and had grown tired of Celine Dion, bought two of the artist's albums. We listened to them in tandem with our Rosetta Stone software, proud when we could pick out a few words, even more excited when we'd unveil an entire sentence. As we struggled over the next decade to make the language ours, Cabrel's songs became very dear to me. Listening to them, I remembered what it was like not to understand, could laugh at the instances when simple phrases had eluded me. 

Cabrel's Je t'aimais, je t'aime, et je t'aimerai came up on shuffle the other day as I walked through the Loop to get to work. To my surprise (bittersweet), I stumbled over some of the simplest phrases, my lips moving clumsily, forming shapes to which they are no longer accustomed. 

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Madeleine L'Engle. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Je t'aimais, je t'aime et je t'aimerai" - Francis Cabrel (mp3)

"Hors Saison" - Francis Cabrel (mp3)