Foreign Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page A

drove home. I’d thought about how dogs’ mouths were supposedly more hygienic than humans’. I’d thought about the dog lovers I knew who let their dogs lick them on the lips and how it made me appreciate cats. I’d thought about the bad kissers I’d kissed and the ones who made my knees weak—Timothy, of course, but also Robin, a fireman I’d dated for a month. It was true I’d kissed men I wouldn’t sleep with, partly because I didn’t like the way they kissed. But he’d been right about the intimate part.
    I flipped to the ubiquitous “con.” It always puzzled me how cavalierly the French threw around a word which literally meant cunt but was used to mean dumb, stupid, or useless. They use it everywhere, and while it’s nowhere near as strong or offensive as it is in English, at least American English, it wasn’t the sort of word I’d have used in front of my proper French grandmother. Harrap’s entry showed: “con, conne. n 1. a F : bloody stupid 2. F : bloody idiot; cretin; faire le c., to fool about 3. nm V : cunt.”
    On the other hand, the dictionary of slang said: “con n,m. Sexe de la femme (vulve et vagin):…se dit d’un homme stupide…” is used for a stupid man, and listed other uses: “faire le con,” to play at being an imbecile; “à la con,” meaning ridiculous, without interest; “se retrouver comme un con,” to find oneself alone and in a grotesque situation; “si les cons volaient, tu serais chef d’escadrille,” if idiots flew, you’d be squadron leader, et cetera.
    As the train lurched into Châtelet, I remembered the famous feminist critic I’d heard lecture years ago. She’d worn a skirt made of men’s ties and transformed all words with “con” into “cunt.” It was both disturbing and hilarious to hear her speak matter-of-factly about things cuntentious, cuntemplative, and cuntroversial. Her point was that women’s sexuality existed in the English language; it had just been subsumed into the structure and made invisible. It’s not invisible in France.
    I flipped back through the pages, looking for a definition of “la chute des reins,” a phrase I’d always wondered about. It was intriguing to me that this particular part of a woman’s anatomy had a name in French. It’s the place on a woman’s back that begins where the waist starts to flare out. The literal translation is the fall, or slope, of the kidneys, which doesn’t sound pretty, but in French, it’s poetic. To me, it meant that the French language had mapped out this part of a woman’s body; it wasn’t undiscovered territory, semantically speaking: it had a name, a location.
    On the other hand, maybe it was just a fancy phrase for “ass.”
    I nearly missed my stop, rushing out as the buzzer sounded at République. A newsmagazine headline at the corner kiosk read, “Qu’avez vous fait pour les seins?” What have you done for the breasts? I did a double take. Peering closer, I saw the word was “siens,” meaning your close ones or family.
    Did merely looking up naughty words in a dictionary make me feellike everything in the world was about sex? Had I regressed to adolescence? Did the words have some kind of effect, or was it merely the suggestion of the erotic, emanating from the shapeless, anonymous text in the brown envelope in my bag? Was it awful? Was it brilliant? Was it hot? It was titillating, not knowing.
     
    I raced up the hill and picked up some Chinese takeout in Belleville. At home, I took out the manuscript and squinted at the poorly photocopied pages.
    Chapter One, I translated in my head. The last time I saw Eve, she was laughing and dancing on a table.
    Of course she was. I put my feet up on the coffee table and read on.
    She was the kind of woman who would have you believe she danced on tables every night, but I knew she’d come a long way from the affluent suburbs of Alexandria, Egypt, where no one dared do such things.
    I have often wondered about that last time,