Back in September, French Level 4 at the Cambridge Center of Adult Education started off with a robust class of 14 wanna-be Francophones, proud of their ability to speak and understand austere French phrases. Over the course of the semester, the number of attendees gradually dropped: dix, sept, quatre. Gone was the beautiful medical intern who liked faire du jogging and wanted to learn French so she could interact with her Haitian patients. Gone was the father of three who wanted to brush up on his college french for a planned Parisian trip next summer. Gone was the funky-hat-wearing young woman with a weak chin who introduced herself by saying that she didn’t know any French but she thought her knowledge of Spanish could carry her through Level 4. It did… for about two minutes.
Soon, there were trois: A bizarre young man from Brazil whose employer was subsidizing his French and Italian language acquisition, a mild-mannered electric company engineer who seemed to be on a personal quest for betterment, and me, the beleaguered American wife of a persnickety Frenchman. The native French teacher seemed to find me to be the most interesting pupil and would pepper me with questions about my French family.
“Ils mangent beaucoup de lapin,” I mentioned last week. “Quand ma belle-mere est venue aux Etats-Unis, nous sommes allees au supermarche, et elle a dit ‘ou est le lapin?'” (Translation: They eat a lot of rabbit… When my step-mother came to the United States, we went to the supermarket, and she said ‘where is the rabbit?'”)
The teacher laughed and said something about how different regions eat more rabbit than others.
“Et aussi, la famille de mon mari, ils mangeaient cheval,” I said in a hoarse whisper. (And also, the family of my husband, they would eat horse.)
“Ah,” the teacher said, going to the blackboard and writing out various vocabulary associated with the butchering and eating of horse. The Brazilian got excited in his bizarre way, while the mild-mannered engineer seemed oblivious to what we were talking about. “Do you know what Meredith is saying?” the teacher asked him. “She is saying that her husband’s family eats horse.”
His face silently imploded as she turned to the board and draw what looked like a little horse’s head on a spike. “The butchers hang a tete de le cheval outside the store,” she was saying, before opining on the economic motivations for eating horse. I didn’t want to say that they did, actually, like the taste.
At first the Brazilian seemed bizarre due to cultural and linguistic barriers, but soon I realized that he was a freak in any language. One class, we practiced how to compare things in French (for example “il mange plus de chevaux que moi” — he eats more horse than me). We had to partner up and pick two things about which we could write 10 comparative sentences. “How about Obama and Lula?” he suggested.
“Lula? The president of Brazil?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we pick something a little… easier?”
He insisted; I acquiesced. We wound up writing ridiculous sentences like “Lula is taller than Obama,” “The wife of Obama is prettier than the wife of Lula,” “Lula watches more movies than Obama,” and “Obama is a better driver than Lula” — a statement that caused our normally-staid French teacher to giggle. “How do you know this?” she asked.
I broke down too. “C’est tres drole,” I said to the Brazilian, who seemed mystified at our mirth. The mild-mannered engineer looked lost. “They said that Obama is a better driver than Lula,” the teacher translated.
“Now, we will move onto the superlative,” she said, going to the board and writing an example sentence:
Sarkozy est le meilleur chauffeur parmi nous.
(Sarkozy is the best driver of them all.)
