OF LOCKS AND KEYS

The other day I went to the local locksmith because we needed two keys copied. One was straightforward, and I was sure it wouldn’t be a problem, but the other was for a bicycle lock. The locksmith shop is on Papineau; I’ve been there several times and so I know that the proprietor doesn’t speak anything but French. On the way, I figured out how to ask for what I needed. Once inside the shop, we greeted each other, and I handed him the first key and asked for two copies. He nodded and asked if that was all. I said no, and handed him the other key, asking if he could make a copy of it. Suddenly, there was a torrent of French – an explanation, I assumed, of why he couldn’t copy the key – but I could hardly understand any of it. From his inflection, I realized he had ended with a question – which of course I couldn’t answer, so I stood there, staring at him dumbly, helplessly. He repeated the question – it seemed he was confirming whether or not it was a bicycle key. I said yes, it was a bicycle key. More incomprehensible French. I shook my head and said thank you. He handed me back the key, looked at me with a certain disdain, and set about making the first copy while I dropped the bicycle key into my purse feeling, well, vulnerable and not very happy. I didn’t blame him – he’s a nice enough man – after I paid him he started waiting on a French woman who had just come in, and he was smiling and making polite chatter. If I had been able to banter with him, he would have been just as pleasant to me.

So then I walked down Marie-Anne several long blocks to the bike shop where we bought our bikes last summer. The shop was bustling and packed to the handlebars with bikes and accessories. The young clerk I remembered from last year was there, waiting on someone at the counter, so I stood in line until he was free. He doesn’t speak anything but French either, but he’s a different sort of guy. I asked my question, told him I had lost one of the bicycle keys, was it possible to obtain a replacement? So far so good. “C’est perdu?” he confirmed. “Oui.” He looked at a loss, and asked if I had gone to a locksmith. I said I had, but now, two or three sentences deep into the subject,  I was running out of explanatory words. He motioned to me to wait, and gestured toward the other clerk, who I gathered spoke English. He was busy, and a young Asian woman - another customer – who spoke flawless French and English kindly offered some suggestions about who might be able to replace the key for me. I thanked her and the clerk and then asked about a pannier, a basket for the back of my bike, trying to go back to French, and we concluded our discussion in the usual two-language back-and-forth I’ve come to expect in most places here.

But somehow, this experience, on that particular day, threw me. I left and started walking home, feeling like I might cry. “It doesn’t matter how long I live here or how hard I try,” I said to myself, miserably, “I’ll never master this language completely, and I will never, ever fit in. What are we doing, choosing to live in the Plateau where anglophones are already resented?” Luckily I saw that I was passing a favorite bakery, so I went in and bought a couple of cookies – a transaction for which I didn’t need any specialized language. But even chocolate didn’t lift my spirits quite enough, and the helpless, isolated feeling haunted me the rest of the day.

Yesterday, though, I found myself taking care of my former landlady’s little girl, as a favor while the mother did an emergency errand. Left alone with the daughter, and a menagerie of stuffed animals and plastic dinosaurs, I was able to think back to last May when we first lived here and I would try to play with M. and barely understand a single word she said, while she’d look at me like some strange dumb animal, screwing up her little face in puzzlement and frustration and demanding, “Quoi???” She’d never had to deal with non-French speakers in her short, highly animated and very verbal life.

But there I was yesterday, able to talk to her, able to understand much of what she said, even able to concoct some games and comfort her when she decided her mother was never coming back. “So, that’s it, I’m at a three-year-old level,” I thought, wryly, feeling a bit more able to laugh at myself. “Everyone who finds themselves in a foreign country must feel this, and yet they learn the language, they manage.” I told myself, “Come on, you’re doing your best, look at all you’ve learned.”  Gradually I did feel better, and I was grateful to my little friend for giving me a yardstick for measuring some progress. Still, there is something about feeling cut off verbally that is deeply disturbing to me, and it obviously goes to the core of who I am.

As I thought about it more, I decided that it wasn’t so much an inability to make myself understood – for I’m pretty good at that, using language or not – as it was not being able to understand others, and how humiliated I feel when they instantly switch to English, or turn their backs – whether the gesture is real or only felt. The switching, I’ve found, is often Canadian politeness, and most people will continue in French if you tell them you’re trying to learn and improve. I recognized that discomfiture was also coming from a bruised ego. I am not only a word person, and someone who wants to communicate and know other people, but I’m an over-achiever, and I can’t stand feeling stupid or unaccomplished, especially in this sphere. That’s a hard thing to admit, and a deeper one to face squarely, but I’m sure it’s yet another lesson in humility that’s important for me to experience -- or it wouldn’t be happening in such a total and unavoidable way, with my own willing, if sometimes uncomfortable, participation.

Comments

[fitnat]

I have just finished reading your comments on the emotional intricacies of speaking a language which is not your mother tongue; I had to respond because I felt that you had hit the nail on the head with your verbalisation of a dilemma which I can completely identify with. I am British yet I moved with my husband to Frankfurt ( Germany) several years ago. Although now I speak german, I would never go as far to say that I am fluent in the language I fear that that is something that I will never be able to do, for me this lack of complete competence is a little torture. Like you I see myself as an over achiever I am a post-grad., avid reader, radio journalist... words and communication to me are an intrinsic part of my personality. Yet since I came to Germany I feel as though I am in a psychological straitjacket due to my inability to freely and without inhibition express myself. Every mistake I make is not just a jar on my nerves it is a blot to my ego which was totally unexpected and I have never really come to rights with it. Needless to say your not on your own and I felt pleasantly surprised to read from your blog that I too am not on my own with my inner peceptions. My husband is German and we only speak English to one another so he never truly understood my dilemma strangely he always assumed my competence as an individual would automatically translate into German?! I know it spoke volumes for his respect for me but that high bench mark left me standing more than once.