Boucles-du-Rhône

A passable night s’est passé at the boîte; I was only asked “ça va?” one intolerable time. After a few hours of joyless dancing I drank too many paillassons, heavy on the pastis, with the predictable effect of feeling like I was being walked on, and that my function in life was forever to lie, flat and unremarked, on some kind of seuil. Soon I realized that I truly loved Stephane, the coloc who never was, as his red vest shone through the crowd, and a nymphet in a pantsuit popped a chili-peppered chocolate in my mouth; half I laisser tomber in my lap. Upon our return Romain and I found our apartment infiltrated with marins-pompiers, whom I half-hoped I knew, and Manon slumped in a wheelchair, having trop bu, à l’américaine.

My students are mostly assholes, especially Zakaria, a skinny pariah who flatly refuses to complete his worksheets. Most of these worksheets, granted, are inane, heavily focused on anagrams (LRAISUNJLTO? are you serious?), which are so lightly delightful in modernist literature precisely because they serve only for convoluted self-reference, figurative only in the sense of being both literally and not at all à la lettre. But I adore some of the gamest gamins, most notably a little boy with soft blond hair and a huge head who speaks to me in sweet quick French. On the last day before la Toussaint I was helping him with his rédaction on Karim, the Rebel of the Forest, when the sonorous bell a sonné, at which point he stood and said gravely: “Madame, c’est les vacances là.” I also harbor good humor for Rafiq, who when asked to approach the board and write a sentence in English produced instead his mnemonically-optimized phone number and a sly clin d’œil in my direction. Thug life.

I’ve finally been paid, in euros Gott sei dank, and I celebrated by buying a cahier for students preparing for their bac in German and an expensive hair product that holds, I'm told, the key to making boucles de rêve of my undreamt-of locks. Liz and I tried to come up with costumes for Halloween, but the best we could do was sexy assistante de langue, sexy fetish of cultural capitalism, or un enfantôme, a perversely Siamese calembour nabokovien for an aborted fetus.

leavesdropping

I’ve developed deeply textured emotional attachments to every male figure in a position of power vis à vis me: the forlorn proviseur at my school whose square and sloppy bisous eschew decorum, the soft-spoken English teacher who wears chemises of clean white linen, my antique-featured roommate Romain, the arbiter of my unappetizing tastes. The other day, as I was cooking dinner, he leaned over my leeks and accused me of having fouiller dans sa chambre…I bristled, not unpleasantly, before remembering that I had, to recover my purloined chewing-gum. I blamed Liz, ma copine new-yorkaise, which he thought was hilarious.

I have the most senseless desires. I eat food that doesn’t taste like anything; I drink our Tuesday two-euro vin mousseux like water. Mornings I step out onto the balcony and can’t tell if it’s cold. The sun is so present, but I can’t tell in what capacity. I make useless resolutions daily. Don’t drink so much, don’t participate in drunk anglophone debates about which city has the world’s craziest drivers, go to the mountains. I went to the mountains. It was breathtaking, heartbreaking, but it didn’t last long enough. Now what? I’m going to visit Jamie at Cambridge, insha’Allah…it will be just like that time at Les Deux.

Mr. Bricolage

I packed too many clothes, all of them wrong. We’re going to the South of France, let’s bring lots of pretty dresses! I would have done better to exchange my amour-propre for a sale amour…hélas, Marseille is a properly dirty place. The problem is less that your pretty things will get dirty and more that the prettiness is an affront to the dirtiness, that some unspoken code of squalor has been violated. The other day I wore a white frilly number that elicited complete sentences from passerby, all in low level monotone, like some collective and automatic communication of a warning.

En tout cas my home life improved briefly when I cooked for my roommates; they loved this little tart I whipped up, the fennel was an inspired addition. Romain regained his zest for literalizing the rhetorical by pointing out my pieds noirs, the product of flimsy flats in the muck of Marseille and in turn an apt figure for my being literally dépaysée, and I impressed Manon, a big fan of “Les Experts: Miami,” by telling her I know David Caruso’s daughter…which is a lie, I can’t even see her Facebook profile. But then Marwan absconded with my clé, continuing a key metaphorical strain in literary tradition and my recent life. Because I could never go home again I waited for Liz outside her school, chainsmoking like a sullen lycéenne. Chez Liz our viewing of Arrested Development, my only pleasure, was arrested by the arrival of her colocs’ friends, who warmly and repeatedly complimented Liz on her French…I asked where to get good pomegranates, but nobody knew.

it's a well-known mystery

Dinner with Liz again and another American with mindless aspirations for travel and books. We made lentils and talked for a while about European cities in the vaguest terms. Ohhh, let’s take EasyJet to Amsterdam! Meanwhile Manon sulkily skulked around the kitchen, licking the cap to her yogurt and staring into space. She has most recently accused me of eating her canned petits pois; nothing is more unlikely.

The most acute foreignness I experience here is in the unexpected inversions of the familiarly strange to the strangely familiar. The other day, rejected by the hardly welcoming Acceuil after arriving too early for work, I was browsing in the euro-fifty section of my local librairie when I stumbled across a volume that literally (à la lettre) and literally (literally!) had MAHMOODY emblazoned on the spine…of course it was nothing other than Jamais sans ma fille.

I’m tired all the time and can’t afford any antioxidants. I might be reduced to drinking the goji berry juice I brought as a novelty but that no one seems to find very interesting. It just sits there on my desk…the rainforest-tree-bark color of the bottle matches my Ikea.

coup de Man

Last weekend I had dinner with Liz and her colocs, who are nice enough despite their reductive politics; postcards reading SARKO=BUSH are plastered on the walls among an impressive array of multi-cultural capital, including my favorite fetish of authenticity, an African mask straight out of a Sembène film. Liz and I lovingly peeled Persian cucumbers and I sneaked some skins. When Lucas cracked an egg I felt compelled to share a joke, a staple in my father’s repertoire, often inflicted upon waitstaff at moderately-priced French restaurants:

Q: Why are French omelettes so small?
A: Because in France one egg is “un œuf”!!!

Lucas doesn’t speak any English, but he got this one right away…he just pretended not to, to be polite. Later I was borne by national feeling to a boîte de nuit. My cohorts, a pair of marins-pompiers and their elfish copines, kept tousling my hair and asking me “ça va?” I found this unnerving because in most social situations, no matter how hard I strive to m’amuser, I always look like I’m about to cry…in the past this has inspired such self-fulfilling inquietudes as “Are you sure you’re ok?” and “Eat, eat, have a zooloobia!” Naturally I burst into tears and was appeased only when someone explained that en fait it’s quite normal to ask “ça va?” with great frequency over the course of an evening. The pompiers drove me home at daybreak and I awoke at five p.m. to an empty apartment; the newly installed internet router taunted me with ambiguously flashing lights. I’m pretty sure it works, but my roommates haven’t told me the password, and I don’t know quite how to ask them…the password for the password, the key that is itself a code, a metaphor for feeling like everything is a metaphor, but for what? I spent all night eating bitter pomegranates in front of TF1. Every television commercial in France features Zinedine Zidane, which brings back stark memories of last summer; he is the only celebrity who has ever figured in my dreamlife.

les pieds noirs

Everyone here eats yogurt, and at all times of day; Danone makes a great one with figs. Babies’ bottles are filled with Evian.

Yet I am plagued by a kind of homesickness that only Eric Schrode or Hannah could really understand. I really thought my roommates loved me. They have provided me with fresh basil, furniture from Ikea…my room has its own potted plant, vaguely reminiscent of a yucca. But I fear that my colocs have had a change of heart. Our bisous are fewer and farther between. In my dreams they tell me that we have to find a new apartment; sometimes these dreams end by the sea, sometimes in dark houses filled with knickknacks. I’ve begun to dream with the calculated authenticity of movies: my dream-self speaks in English, but with a heavy French accent. Romain has confiscated my cache of American chewing-gum, and in retaliation I have eaten nearly all of the chocolate-peanut butter candy I brought to impress my students. I’ll have to ask my mom to send me more, and I’ll have to lie and say my roommates ate it all…which is so unfair to them, they eat nothing but seasonal vegetables, lean protein, and yogurt.

the evidence of experience

In French, the word expérience is more often used to mean "experiment" than "experience," implying a certain resistance to the typical American fetishization of experience: an experience (e.g., the "life-changing experience" of going to France!!) is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a greater understanding, a mere although by no means purely utilitarian part of a larger epistemological enterprise.

The experience of my job orientation has led me to the understanding that little bits of linguistic jouissance such as the above have little practical effect, because there are too many Americans in France, and because in benevolent racism as in warnings about fat and sugar content in food (Pour votre santé, veuillez visiter mangerbouger.fr), France is more American than America.

Yesterday, the fresh-faced representative from the American consulate regaled us with stories of her own life-changing experience, in Guinea. Turns out, her authentic native Guinean acquaintances, concerned for the future of this jeune fille à marier, suggested that in order to obtain a husband, she should sacrifice a white cow (not all by herself ha-ha she didn't have to like kill it!), wrap the tongue of a bull in fabrics of many colors, present rare fruits to a mother of twins, and dance around in a circle. After punctuating this authentic account with some nervous giggles, she explained that were it not for her deep respect for the culture, her willingness to really put herself out there and humor the adorably godless heathens, she would, uh, she would never be the...she would never have had that experience. La tautologie encore... Luckily I was able to shoot a glance infused with disgust and smug awareness at my favorite fellow assistante, Liz, a sharp-tongued fellow traveler on the neocolonalist safari that is Marseille. Liz and I tend to fetishize our experiences of neocolonialism almost as much as neocolonialists fetishize the experience of the other...but our recidivist cultural capitalism is what makes us so authentically American.

Today, the woman in charge of our program announced that this year's crop of assistants includes two real Chinese people, whom she promptly produced and made to speak in French...she stood there between them for about five minutes, grasping their arms, waiting for someone to take a picture.

allegories of desire

Paris is exactly itself, as evidenced by this oft-repeated conversation:

"T'aimes Paris?"
"...Non."
"Mais c'est Paris!!!!"
"..."

Marseille, however, n'est pas Marseille. A sense of difference pervades the place. I feel about as much and as little chez moi as I do in LA.

Today I underwent the much-hyped and inexplicably obligatoire chest x-ray, supposedly a great affront to American modesty, and they didn't even make me take off my shirt. I was so ready to be cool about it too. On the plus side, I probably don't have tuberculosis, and they let me keep the x-ray. Un souvenir!

For lack of internet in the apartment, my roommates and I spend our days taking turns saying words in English; they say a word, after initial confusion I comprehend and repeat it en américain, hilarity ensues. It reminds me of Proust a little.

I start teaching on Friday. Tentative lesson plans include talking about movie stars and distributing candy filled with buerre de cacahuètes, an American delicacy. I've so far convinced the landlord, to whom my tenancy is and shall remain unbeknownst, that I am the petite amie of one of my roommates...again a source of mirth for all. Things are going so well I don't even begrudge not having consistent access to Facebook's vortex of insatiable desire, and am even happier for it, probably for the same reason French people don't eat that much.