Mistakes Made at Les Deux Magots

It began with a simple “Un café, s’il vous plaît.” The waiter, a man whose mustache seemed to hold more authority than the entire French parliament, didn’t even blink. He simply pointed at my open textbook—Bescherelle’s Conjugaison—and sighed. It was the sigh of a man who had seen a thousand Americans try to order coffee in 1954 and fail the same way.

Je m’étais promis de ne pas parler anglais aujourd’hui. (I had promised myself not to speak English today.) But the subjunctive is a cruel mistress. I wanted to say “I hope that it is good,” but instead, I think I told him “I hope that I am a piece of bread.”

The city doesn’t wait for your grammar to catch up. Outside, the Citroën H Vans rattle over the cobblestones like percussion in a jazz ensemble I haven’t learned the sheet music for. Every “merci” I utter feels like a small victory, a tiny flag planted in the soil of a foreign culture.

“To learn a language is to gain a second soul, even if that soul currently only knows how to ask where the library is.”

By noon, my notebook was stained with a single drop of espresso—a permanent record of my struggle. I looked at the word “pamplemousse.” Why does a grapefruit need such a beautiful name? It sounds like a dance or a very elegant cat. If I can learn to say “pamplemousse” with the correct nasal ‘un’, perhaps there is hope for me yet.