Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

late 1960s, watching our elders scream, “Fuck the pigs!” at anti-Vietnam rallies, she should have been a gift from the gods: the ultimate fossil to satirize and send up.

Yet no one ever uttered a disrespectful word in her classroom. Other teachers had to bellow to get our attention. Miss Fitzpatrick could silence a class of rowdy adolescents with the raise of an eyebrow. When she read us the poetry of Verlaine and Ronsard, the room became so quiet that the only sound was the rhythmic pop of tennis balls from the courts outside. She transfixed us with French novels. When she read Antoine de St. Exupéry’s memoir of his desert plane crash, I held my breath as she reached the passage where the downed pilot sees the nomad coming to his aid. In French, she read St. Exupéry’s mellifluous paean to universal humanity and, looking up over the wire spectacles perched on her nose, translated it in her sweet, soft voice: “You are the well-loved brother.…” In the pause that followed, I wasn’t the only one snuffling into my Kleenex.

Miss Fitzpatrick spoke French with an impeccable Parisian accent, and spun tales of regional life in Normandy and Provence as if she had supped on soupe de poisson in every portside café and cheered the boule players in every sycamore-shaded square. In fact, she had never left Australia.

Every afternoon, in French class, she drew us a little bit further into her illusory world. As the cicadas drummed in the eucalyptus trees outside the classroom window, I filled exercise books with essays on French culture so detailed that in one, on cuisine, I noted that a satisfactory accompaniment for saumon au beurre blanc would be a Puligny Montrachet 1961. The only salmon I had ever tasted had come out of a can, and wine, in our house, meant sweet sherry.

Unfortunately, when it came to the language itself, I didn’t turn out to be the prodigy I’d hoped. I could read and write well enough, memorizing great swaths of obscure vocabulary. But when the words left the page and floated out into the air, they might as well have been Swahili. Because I learned words by writing them down, my brain stubbornly clung to the way their spelling was supposed to sound in English. And because I had trouble understanding correct pronunciations, I had trouble reproducing them. My spoken French was a raspy collection of diphthongs in which I habitually swallowed the consonants that should have been stressed and barked out the ones that were meant to remain silent.

When I told Miss Fitzpatrick that I wanted a French pen friend, she said she’d be delighted to help.

I forgot to mention Paris.

I had imagined fiery dispatches from the Paris barricades, scrawled in haste on table napkins. Instead, Janine wrote to me on delicate azure stationery, her letter folded as carefully as a piece of origami, her penmanship impeccable. Her address was a placid village in Vaucluse, Provence, a village so tiny I searched in vain for it on all the school library’s maps of France. St. Martin de la Brasque, population 516, didn’t even have a high school. Janine boarded during the week in a town called Manosque, near Marseilles, where the disciplinary regime sounded tougher, if possible, than the tyranny being exacted upon me in Concord.

In some ways her letters were a great advertisement for the French education system. Written half in French, half in English, they rarely contained a grammatical slip. Janine had started studying English two years earlier than we had begun French. After receiving my first letter, she kindly wrote that my French wasn’t très mauvais. But then, she hadn’t heard me try to speak it.

Her proletarian credentials, at least, seemed impeccable. Her father was a farmhand who made his living pruning and cultivating the vines of the Lubéron. The farmer’s daughter in her showed an avid interest in Australian sheep populations and wheat-growing acreage. To my mortification, and in confirmation of my own worst fears, the only Australian culture she’d heard of was agriculture.

But when I probed her for working-class consciousness, all I got was a dissertation on the aggravating behavior of the minets, or beaucoup snob, who peopled her school. Instead of being feted for her peasant origins, as I imagined she would be among the Maoist student radicals of Paris, it seemed she was enduring a quiet torment from the bourgeois pupils at her boarding school.

It soon became clear that there wouldn’t be any epistolary discussion of French philosophers. Janine wrote that she preferred “adventure books.” But what really shocked me was the arrested state of her knowledge of popular culture. Janine had never heard of my heroes du jour, Leonard Cohen and Dustin Hoffman. Her knowledge of modern music ended with the Beatles. When I asked her about French cinema, she replied that she adored Brigitte Bardot. She had seen no Jean Renoir, no François Truffaut.

I stared at the charming valediction, “I kiss you on the two cheeks,” and wondered at the paradox of one so French yet so unsophisticated.

In one letter Janine opined that the Côte d’Azur youths who experimented with drugs sont idiots. Since I was avidly tending the seedlings that had sprouted from my marijuana seeds, I found her views on this subject pas sympathique. Engaging as she was, Janine was no alter ego. Or at least not that year. I was longing to taste life and push limits, and I couldn’t understand anyone my age who didn’t feel the same.

But corresponding with Janine had done wonders for my cultural cringe. Sydney, it seemed, was nowhere near as cut off from the world as St. Martin de la Brasque. I began to consider that I might not be so close to the ends of the earth as I had always imagined.

7

Which Side Are you On?

“Today’s the day Nixon (aargh!) became President,” wrote Joannie in her first letter of 1969. “We had to watch it in school