FRENCH DISCONNECTION
The journalist Murray la Vita on Facebook is not just making soup, he is making French soup, he writes. What is it with all this French stuff?
I’ve been dogged (now how do you put that into French? Chienned?) by the language since I was a kid.
As a child I used to ponder over the word hors d’oeuvre. Pronounced “or derve” when it is spelled hors d’oeuvre. “It’s French,” my mother said. After that I approached French with caution. I was frightened of it.
My mother’s solution to French was to speak English with a French accent, very loudly. In the hushed and pious surroundings of a cathedral, she would shout, “C’est tres old, la cathedral.”
In Franglaise everything was feminine, la teacup, la bedroom.
I had more French lessons than the queen, so when we went to France I could translate. “What does this say?” my mother shoves directions for an appliance at me. “All those French lessons and you can’t even translate simple instructions.”
My latest French lessons took place in a sordid flat where two young men, one with chemically enriched mahogany coloured hair, fought in vivid Parisienne argot. One was an artist and one day the other ate his still life. That is when I learnt merde .
I began to suffer from dreams in which all the food was covered with blood-dark feathers and the puddings looked like formal gardens. Like Bloom in James Joyce’s
Ulysses, when I ate kidneys I could smell the urine.
So the other night when I was asked to a small dinner, I might have refused had I known that French was involved. The host was an old Etonian, in a perfect Gieves & Hawkes jacket, with a boom-boom voice that extinguished anything anyone else said. He boomed away for an hour while we switched into listening mode.
Then his younger wife appeared. “Ay em Frrrengch,” she gargled. She had on a short skirt over stocky legs but because she was French she got away with it (in France women of 80 wear bikinis). She moved her hips in such a French way you felt she might break into Je ne regrette rien, a song that has done serious damage to those slouching on the edge of Frenchdom.
I tried to pour a glass of water. “No, no, in Frrangche (she had a way of saying this word that was like a West Coast Afrikaans
brei combined with a choke) we never dreenk just water, these eez not right, you must have Evian, in Frangche we put leetle lemon, you see, I am Frengch. These Cape Town water it is stinking.”
It was all manageable skirmishes until it came to the cheese, then it was the April Uprising, Taksim Square in Turkey. Everyone knows that the French are the only people in the world who can make cheese. “No, no,” she leant over the cheese benevolently as if she had just produced it from her own womb. “You see in Frangche we do soft cheese weeth ’ard cheese, you see in Frangche, we would never just . . . no, no you are doing it wrong, it is ’ard wif soft. I am Frengche.”
Perhaps because the scars of youth are never lost, and although I now live in a country of fly-overs and McDonald’s burgers with the consistency of a granola bar, I still believe that San Pellegrino is sourced in the cooling depths of the Pyrenees, and that if I had been born French I would have better hair and be able to wear a bikini.