PART III
When I bought those books in second-hand stores their margins of course were scribbled all over. Usually in buying a pre-imbibed work, underlining and / or marginal notes are about as attractive to a buyer as bird droppings on your windshield. If they’re only occasional and in pencil you can try to erase them. For some reason aged penciling cures on the paper. It cling faster, penetrates deeper into the fibers or something as it ages, so that trying to erase them is like turning on your windshield cleaner, only to discover after two passes of the blades that you didn’t refill the fluid tank when you noticed last month that it was very low, so that now it’s empty and your windshield is a really gross mess.
In college I encountered one or two people who thought that by purchasing such a textbook that had been thoroughly highlighted and noted, would mean they were gaining something from all that effort of the previous owner. But then the previous owner’s grade was never part of the notation and so where people thought they might be stepping into the footprints of an Einstein they had actually acquired the scribbled and brightly colored work of someone who had just graduated from masterpieces in crayon.
All the same I took those books home with me. They were cheap, no doubt because they had so much of that mental indigestion smearing their pages, and small enough to fit into a pocket, even though several were hard-bound—those had actually been printed in France. I parted with about five dollars for the bunch and put them in a drawer of my bed stand. They fitted easily.
Months passed, probably a year, maybe two. The ambition, the dream, of speaking in a foreign tongue, issuing forth in a something-else more graceful (so I thought), more musical (so it sounded) and Other, steeped and simmered there with the stew of other dreams and schemes, ambitions and delusions. After paying car insurance and shopping for new tires—what the hell are all those numbers on a tire?—after a day of gibbering in computerese and horsey-back rides for the kids, the hopes of yesteryear, their job, was just to preserve a little of what I once thought my future would be.
But then we don’t want to kid ourselves either. One fine day I found myself in a university bookstore, out with my daughter on my back in her Gerry carrier. And lo, there on a spin-able floor rack, came into view teensy dual-language dictionaries. I picked one up. Its pages were as fine as a St. Joseph’s Sunday Missal, loaded with thousand and thousands of word, both French to English and English to French. It was no toy. “My book,” said Elizabeth, reaching over my shoulder. “My book,” I said, taking possession of it. “My book,” Elizabeth repeated. I bought the dictionary and put it with the others in my bed stand, where Elizabeth was forbidden to go.
By golly, sometimes the spirit moves us. Usually the spirit rests within us like a wad of dough, chilled and kept from rising, but then once in a while it moves.So it was. I now had, I thought, what I needed to open a shut door and bring into my life something so long kept away.
But, the first book I opened to resume my seriousness about language study, wasn’t one of those I acquired down on 22nd St. It was instead the play, Cyrano de Bergerac, that I had borrowed from my high school teacher and retained. It always reproached me when it came into view: Thief, it said. I belong to Mrs. Moran. I am her property. But I always responded with reaffirmation of my intent to read it,, so that when I did return it—and I always did intend to return it—I could tell her that this prodigal son had fulfilled…at least this commitment. And so a decade, then almost two decades, had gone by, sliding downstream another season, another year, trying to gain control in a tricky current.
Ye gods. Making sense of a page of printed French was a real slog. Think of having to pick up a dictionary four times for every single line, thumbing through the pages, sometimes being so distracted with the tedium that you find yourself looking for an S word among M’s. The dialog of a play allowed for more white space to write in, but I didn’t. Someone had been there before me—Mrs. Moran herself I thought—and had provided a good many of the equivalent words I needed. But I didn’t pencil in those I had to look up, because the book wasn’t mine. I was going to return it after reading. Really, I was.
You can guess what the process was like. By the time I got to the last line of a page, the first line had grown fuzzy or left my memory entirely. Time distended, drawing into its maw substantial investments while I accomplished pitifully little. I could have been doing other things, like other people did. I don’t know what; half the people I knew were watching tv, staying up past midnight to watch other people talk. A neighbor in my apartment building liked to run. I hated running—someone else at work said he got some of his best ideas while running; I said the only good idea I ever got while running was to take a walk. And my neighbor ran in the morning; certainly not at night.
But I went through it, page after page, scene after scene, to the end. Cyrano had a gigantic nose, and he riffed about it magnificently, but if somebody insulted him about it he made Swiss cheese out of the character with his épée. Cyrano out-dueled a hundred assassins set on him at…some crowded doorway or gateway in Paris. Cyrano had a tragic love for Roxane, who of course loved someone with a nicer nose; all the same under her balcony one night Cyrano supplied his own voice while the tongue-tied lover with the better nose stood in Roxane’s moonlit view.
I finished Cyrano de Bergerac, then another “book” or two of the sort I’d seen in college classrooms—essentially short stories or novelettes with spread-apart lines and wide margins—and using simple vocabulary. Then I thought I’d try a novel. I had in hand something meant for real people, a paperback with crowded pages and small margins. I thought, after all that diligent effort, I’d be able to get a good idea of what was going on.
Hah. By the time I groped halfway down any given page I was like a kindergarten kid trying to navigate the New York subway system. Dazed and bewildered. Lost and confused. Left to my own wit I found myself in some really weird places. Ancient Roman girl scouts selling cheese. Conventions of lawyers setting rules for knots, or maybe it was birds’ nests.
How can three- and four-year-olds do this?
(still more to come….)
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