Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
All of us here en France are struggling. Of course they’re fake struggles, the struggles of the first world. The ways in which the civilized individual tousles with itself, and I’m worn out apologizing to myself for that. But. We’re all tired of cheese, as well.
Tired of Turkish toilets, of neat little piles of French dogshit everywhere on the street. Broken bottles and everyone’s litter, but all the shops close at seven o’clock at night. Of sausage with everything. Of weird little pillows with buttons in the center.
The French LOVE to ask, ‘What surprises you about France?’ Toujours, this is the question. Out teachers (who are French) ask us; our host families ask us; the people we meet ask us. What surprises you? What kind of question is that? I ask myself if this is something we demand of people in the United States, and I honestly don’t know. If it is, then I’ve learned how irritating is this query. Why irritating? Well, why the question? It’s because one perceives the glee behind the inquiry. Perhaps one envies the ability to ask such a question, because to ask it implies an intimate acquaintance with the thing interrogated. I know France; let me see how your assessment measures up. Because you don’t know it. Okay, fine – I’m well aware of that. And that knowledge is the rhizome of that elusive malady called homesickness. No, it’s not that you’re weak, you miss your mama, or your friends, or your favorite hamburgers. What you miss is that peculiar understanding of your surroundings. The conventions of commonplace everyday interaction. Knowing how something will feel, before you touch it. How to call a thing by name.
I was taught a month ago / to bide my time and take it slow / and then I learned just yesterday / to rush and never waste the day / Now I’m convinced the whole day long / that all I learn is always wrong / And things are true that I forget / but no one taught that to me yet. – phish, character zero
This is something that I’m well aware is not a unique sentiment, but if I have been surprised by one thing, it’s that I had to come so far from home to acknowledge things I already knew. Case in point – I had a meeting with my advisor here recently in which she, in her gentle manner, remarked that one of my biggest handicaps (in French, en France, in life) is that I hate to inconvenience people. Thus my rabid independence stems less from some overflowing fountain of courage and intrepidity than from a desire to avoid at all costs any instance wherein I might have to ask for help, or impinge upon the time, space, patience of another person. As we say in the South, I don’t like to be beholden, not to anyone. But it’s a problem for me here, because in order to get through the demands of my program, I have to essay into the community and work with people who don’t speak English, and who have to put up with my wretched and sickly French.
I hate that. I hate it more than anything here. I hate it nearly as much as I hate beaurocracy, and given my dealings with such things of late, that’s saying something.
What do I love about Toulouse?
I love a market called Afro Don Ton. They have pisco and tortillas and an absurd number of spices and hot sauce, and banana beer, and fufu, and hair extensions, and key limes, and datura root, and purple potatoes. And a lovely balding man who is always there behind the counter, always in a short-sleeved blue buttondown, always remembers that my name is Avie and who has never told me his. I go several times a week, who can say why, perhaps to smell pimante forte, perhaps to look at spiky horned legumes, perhaps to remind myself that forty-six kinds of hot sauce do indeed exist, and someone is buying them … perhaps to be the sort of person who is comforted by a place like Afro Don Ton. From time to time, the lovely man whose name I think I will never know, because he’s never told me, because I don’t know how to ask, because it doesn’t really matter, gives me a banana beer. Gratuit. And I take it home and drink it, the same day, and it tastes like beer, and it tastes like bananas, and it doesn’t matter at all that it’s warm.
You already know that I love the glaces at Cornet d’Amour. Ugh – have discovered a new favorite flavor – excuse me, parfum. The honey-and-pine-nut. It’s absurd. This is a disaster of epic proportions. I may exit France having become someone who likes ice cream. What will the neighbors say?
I love the Argentine girls at my favorite empanada shop, who laugh when I try to speak French and laugh when I try to speak Spanish, who play fantastic music and make absurdly delightful empanadas. One is tall and slim, with café crème pale skin and hair, always in long stovepipe black pants and an apron that looks like a starched tablecloth tucked into her waistband. She makes the empanadas, and she doesn’t really speak French. The other is shorter, darker, speaks patient French and rapid Spanish. She takes the orders, runs the cash register, and fiddles with the dial on the radio. Wears crazy tight jeans with random frayed and patched bits. Has a tiny braid of hair near her right ear. Rolls her own cigarettes. Like anywhere else in France, half the workday involves chatting with the people who wander in. At this place, there are faded Argentine glories who come in for huge sacks of empanadas in long coats, uncomfortable-looking shoes with large ornamental buckles (like Pilgrims), scarves, dyed hair combed like lacquered candy floss. Delivery guys with big plastic trays who interrupt whoever’s talking. Men in black jeans and leather jackets.
I love the availability of wonderful cards and stationary. (In passing: a librarie, en France, is a bookstore, while a library as we think of it is a bibliotheque, but a bibliotheque only has books; anything else comes from the mediatheque, which is a separate entity.) I discovered the mediatheque recently. Here’s another time when one traverses the globe to learn what one already knew: I love libraries. This one reminds me of all the ones I love back home. In Boulder, in Memphis, the library is the same: painfully modern architecture and so forth. The funny thing here is that, of the books they have in English, they’re nearly all fantastic books. In the same manner as the English language section at the Librarie Privat (my favorite bookstore, and the place where I spend too many hours pretending that it’s raining too heavily to go back home), the selection includes many of the books you really ought to read and precious few that you really oughtn’t. Also, they all come from Britain.
I love the girl at the vendor at the corner where we all buy lunch, inaptly and obscurely referred to as the pizza cart – obscure because there’s no suggestion, even, of pizza there, only salads and sandwiches on baguettes and yogurt and crepes and apple tart every day. She’s heavyset, rare in France, with blonde hair pulled severely back from her face and in a blue apron with stripes, and she makes your food precisely when you order it, slicing the eggs and tomatoes for your sandwich right in front of you. She never smiles, until she finishes her methodical and unhurried architecture, hands you your food and its accoutrements, never forgetting your little knife and fork, your spoon if you got yogurt, your single napkin (because more than one of anything is unheard of in France, double-bagging groceries is a totally foreign concept, but that’s a whole other posting), and slips your change into your palm with Voila and a beaming grin. Every day.
I love the way you can buy a drinkable bottle of wine for less than a euro. Really, it’s far cheaper than soda. And a decent bottle costs you around five euros.
I love seeing people at museums, gazing at paintings with little dogs tucked under their arms.
I love the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi. I love his little pencil and ink sketches, his lithographs.
Oooh. How have I failed to share with you the changes I have wrought in my host family? D’abord, I have introduced them to hot sauce. I suppose it’s a condition of the French palate; perhaps the food is so fresh and so perfect in itself that they don’t require spices with which to mask any unsavoury flavours. Alors. I require them. And coming to France, I discovered that I didn’t wish to live without spices. So (at Afro Don Ton, of course) I bought Mexican hot sauce and chipotle sauce and cayenne and cumin, and set them on the table, and there was evening, and there was morning, and now everyone in my host family has to saturate their food with extra sauce – that it’s from Mexico is my own private joke, and yes, I do chuckle to myself often. Maybe it’s politesse or maybe they really like the stuff, but either way it’s fun for me.
I think, perhaps, that I’m always going to want the thing that shouldn’t be wherever I am. The immigrant, the import, the bizarre. I don’t know if it’s a fascination with the unobtainable, a desire to appropriate the mantle of the exotic, the continual reinforcement of the grass on the other side of the desert.
I also think that I’m never going to be happy, unless I relinquish whatever it is that I keep looking for. Thanks, Dorothy. Not sure if I can, though, to be fair.
The less I seek my source for some definitive / the closer I am to fine.
All that shit I cared about back home is still here; I’m still dragging all that worry and self-doubt around. It seems a chronic malaise. It’s drowned and forgotten sometimes, by adventure, by anguish, by work, by books, by opium dreams. But it’s easily exhumed. Yes, I question everything, and most of all I question and second-guess myself. Am I doing it all well enough? I’m old enough to know better. When will I be tired enough, far enough away, working hard enough to forget to ask? Ay, me, Juliet says. It’s when you’re tired and far from home that it means the most. If I am ambivalent then I have not yet chosen, and if I have not chosen then I have not settled. There’s no challenge more difficult for me than contentment. It is, I think, a peculiar sort of depravity, of cowardice. It makes me tired.
When you’re three days down the highway, / and you’re lookin’ like I feel, / and it takes a lot to keep it goin’ / and it takes a lot to keep it real, / take some time for yourself / and learn to yield. – indigo girls
