The kiss of death
What are the rules of engagement for the always tricky peck hello?
We have some wonderful Italian neighbours who have become good friends over the last few years. But I confess there is always an awkward moment whenever they come for supper. As I welcome them over the threshold, I shake his hand, but then end up nearly planting a smacker right on the lips of his delightful wife. And it never does to kiss a Neapolitan’s wife in front of him.
I plead innocence.
This is not the latest “middleaged man confesses to harassment” story. The problem is that long years in France have made me a practitioner of la bise — the French double-cheek kiss: left cheek, right cheek.
Our neighbours are, by contrast, more familiar with il bacio, and that seems to go right cheek, left cheek. The result of this dangerous incompatibility is that our lips head for the same spot and we appear to lean in for a quick snog. What cheek! Where is the relevant European Union regulation on conformity?
These are not the only perils of the kiss hello.
Most people draw the line after a couple of pecks negotiated without a black-eye from a jealous husband.
But for others, custom can mean another go around — mwah, mwah, MWAH! By that stage I am all ready for the fourth, which makes me look an even bigger gooseberry when it never arrives. And let’s not even get started with those Russian generals in the giant hats who seem to kiss each other back and forth forever until they collapse into a vodka-induced stupor.
So I sympathize with Aude Picard-Wolff, mayor of the French town of Morette, who has grown fed up of the ritual of la bise and declared that she is not doing it anymore, merci. For if it is a rigmarole just getting a couple of friends through the front door, imagine what it is like having 73 colleagues whom you feel obliged to kiss hello each morning. Do the bins get emptied in Morette, I ask myself? Are the roads swept? The bodies buried? Frankly, it’s a miracle anything gets done all, what with the town hall chock full with 74 people lounging around kissing each other.
From a practical point of view, then, I am behind Picard-Wolff. Kissing 146 cheeks a day is, oooh, I’d say about 100 too many. Certainly, I think if I were in her position, I’d have had it by the time I reached cheek 70 or 80 (probably around mid-morning, with the sun climbing high and the overflowing bins and unburied bodies beginning to smell a bit).
Quite frankly, just how enthusiastic would anyone be to kiss the last person on the mayor’s list? By the time she gets around to kissing the 146th cheek, assuming all her colleagues have finished kissing each other hello, it will be the last of 10,658 smackers in the office that day.
And yet practicality is not the only reason that Picard-Wolff has had it with la bise. She also claims “freedom” — the freedom to be kissed or not.
“I found it disagreeable,” she noted. “We’re not as free as all that when someone sticks their cheek in your direction.”
This, too, I understand. I am all for doing what you like and so generally against obligation. So kiss or be kissed, as you like. But it would be a shame if kissing hello at all was claimed as a victim by the gender wars, if a gesture both affectionate and respectful suddenly became out of bounds. A kiss on the cheek is the very opposite of a hidden assault. It is a public, social intimacy — a sign of trust, not lechery.
Even if you do find yourself too close to a Neapolitan’s wife.