I thought a very long time went by between visits, and then I would see him again. It was only a week, but many things always happened in a week. For instance, I would have a bad fight with my son one day, my landlady would serve me an eviction notice the next morning, and that afternoon my husband and I would have a long talk full of hopelessness and decide that we could never be reconciled.
I had too little time, now, to say what I wanted to, in each session. I wanted to tell my doctor that I thought my life was funny. I told him about how my landlady tricked me, how my husband had two girlfriends and how these women were jealous of each other but not of me, how my in-laws insulted me over the phone, how my husband’s friends ignored me, and then how I kept tripping on the street and walking into walls. Everything I said made me want to laugh. But near the end of the hour I was also telling him how face to face with another person I couldn’t speak. There was always a wall. “Is there a wall between you and me now?” he would ask. No, there was no wall there anymore.
My doctor saw me and looked past me. He heard my words and at the same time he heard other words. He took me apart and put me together in another pattern and showed me this. There was what I did, and there was why he thought I did it. The truth was not clear anymore. Because of him, I did not know what my feelings were. A swarm of reasons flew around my head, buzzing. They deafened me, and I was always confused.
Late in the fall I slowed down and stopped speaking, and early in the new year I lost most of my ability to reason. I slowed down still further, until I hardly moved. My doctor listened to the hollow clatter of my footsteps on the stairs and told me he had wondered if I would have the strength to climb all the way up.
In those days I saw only the dark side of everything. I hated rich people and I was disgusted by the poor. The noise of children playing irritated me and the silence of old people made me uneasy. Hating the world, I longed for the protection of money, but I had no money. All around me women shrieked. I dreamed of some peaceful asylum in the country.
I continued to observe the world. I had a pair of eyes, but no longer much understanding, and no longer any speech. Little by little my capacity to feel was going. There was no more excitement in me, and no more love.
Then spring came. I had become so used to the winter that I was surprised to see leaves on the trees.
Because of my doctor, things began to change for me. I was more unassailable. I did not always feel that certain people were going to humiliate me.
I started laughing at funny things again. I would laugh and then I would stop and think: True, all winter I did not laugh. In fact, for a whole year I did not laugh. For a whole year I spoke so quietly that no one understood what I said. Now people I knew seemed less unhappy to hear my voice on the telephone.
I was still afraid, knowing that one wrong move could expose me. But I began to be excited now. I would spend the afternoon alone. I was reading books again and writing down certain facts. After dark, I would go out on the street and stop to look in shop windows, and then I would turn away from the windows, and in my excitement I would bump into the people standing next to me, always other women looking at clothes. Walking again, I would stumble over the curbstone.
I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.
French Lesson I: Le Meurtre
See the vaches ambling up the hill, head to rump, head to rump. Learn what a vache is. A vache is milked in the morning, and milked again in the evening, twitching her dung-soaked tail, her head in a stanchion. Always start learning your foreign language with the names of farm animals. Remember that one animal is an animal, but more than one are animaux, ending in a u x. Do not pronounce the x. These animaux live on a ferme. There is not much difference between that word, ferme, and our own word for the place where wisps of straw cover everything, the barnyard is deep in mud, and a hot dunghill steams by the barn door on a winter morning, so it should be easy to learn. Ferme.
We can now introduce the definite articles le, la, and les, which we know already from certain phrases we see in our own country, such as le car, le sandwich, le café, les girls. Besides la vache, there are other animaux on la ferme, whose buildings are weather-beaten, pocked with rusty nails, and leaning at odd angles, but which has a new tractor. Les chiens cringe in the presence of their master, le fermier, and bark at les chats as les chats slink mewing to the back door, and les poulets cluck and scratch and are special pets of le fermier’s children until they are beheaded by le fermier and plucked by la femme of le fermier with her red-knuckled hands and then cooked and eaten by the entire famille. Until further notice do not pronounce the final consonants of any of the words in your new vocabulary unless they are followed by the letter e, and sometimes not even then. The rules and their numerous exceptions will be covered in later lessons.
We will now introduce a piece of language history and then, following it, a language concept.
Agriculture is a pursuit in France, as it is in our own country, but the word is pronounced differently, agriculture. The spelling is the same because the word is derived from the Latin. In your lessons you will notice that some French words, such as la ferme, are spelled the same way or nearly the same way as the equivalent words in our own language, and in these cases the words in both languages are derived from the same Latin word. Other French words are not at all like our words for the same things. In these cases, the French words are usually derived from the Latin but our words for the same things are not, and have come to us from the Anglo-Saxon, the Danish, and so on. This is a piece of information about language history. There will be more language history in later lessons, because language history is really quite fascinating, as we hope you will agree by the end of the course.
We have just said that we have our own words in English for the same things. This is not strictly true. We can’t really say there are several words for the same thing. It is in fact just the opposite — there is only one word for many things, and usually even that word, when it is a noun, is too general. Keep this language concept in mind as you listen to the following example:
A French arbre is not the elm or maple shading the main street of our New England towns in the infinitely long, hot and listless, vacant summer of our childhoods, which are themselves different from the childhoods of French children, and if you see a Frenchman standing on a street in a small town in America pointing to an elm or a maple and calling it an arbre, you will know this is wrong. An arbre is a plane tree in an ancient town square with lopped, stubby branches and patchy, leprous bark standing in a row of similar plane trees across from the town hall, in front of which a bicycle ridden by a man with thick, reddish skin and an old cap wavers past and turns into a narrow lane. Or an arbre is one of the dense, scrubby live oaks in the blazing dry hills of Provence, through which a similar figure in a blue cloth jacket carrying some sort of a net or trap pushes his way. An arbre can also cast a pleasant shade and keep la maison cool in the summer, but remember that la maison is not wood-framed with a widow’s walk and a wide front porch but is laid out on a north-south axis, is built of irregular, sand-colored blocks of stone, and has a red tile roof, small square windows with green shutters, and no windows on the north side, which is also protected from the wind by a closely planted line of cypresses, while a pretty mulberry or olive may shade the south. Not that there are not many different sorts of maisons in France, their architecture depending on their climate or on the fact that there may be a foreign country nearby, like Germany, but we cannot really have more than one image behind a word we say, like maison. What do you see when you say house? Do you see more than one kind of house?