Daddy Cool

I lost my cool this evening, for the first time in a long time. It happened so fast and in such specific circumstances I feel as much distracted by thinking about them as by the fact that I’m still red-eyed and sniffly with tears of distilled frustration.

(As an index of how rarely I boil over, I’m still surprised by the physical feeling of sniffing with a straight septum–it’s like a wind tunnel up the nose!–and I had that surgery at the end of ’03.)

An older gentleman in my French class is prone to sweeping statements, I have noticed, both in English and in French. Additionally, he tends to repeat these statements from week to week, waiting for the pause in the conversation so he can interpolate them. I have noticed Yvette frown and set her expression to teacherly stun when he iterates that “pour les Français, le topique est toujours ‘le problème’”, and heard her this evening indicate that she did not accept his oft-stated assertion that the trains in France are continually late, always and everywhere.

From such little banalities come larger blowouts, as I have learned.

I found myself sitting with this gentleman this evening, but figured I’d work with him since his rapid-fire fluency (of a sort) might encourage me to lift my verbal game. It might have helped to become more on my guard when an imaginary dialogue about changing a booking at the train station turned into a series of refutations: would sir care to take the 9pm train? No, I must be in Paris at 10 and need a full half-hour to ride the metro! At what time would sir like to travel? What times–specific times–were available?

All was tolerable until, later and on a new topic, he appeared to be talking about some kind of giant forest chicken which, he claimed, was widespread in America and France at Christmas time. (This may not have been his intent but that was the size of his grammar.)

Of giant chickens I know little, I said, since I don’t eat meat.

Oh, said Yvette, passing by–you’re a vegetarian?

But you must eat meat if you are a real New Zealander, said my partner, for the sake of the economy.

Now this is a question in which I actually have some interest: the relation of the individual to the nation, the worker to the economy, and what happens when one’s own beliefs are contrary to the cultural mainstream. But this, regrettably, was not the turn our conversation took. As I struggled to conjugate the verbs that drive the questions that would clarify his opinion on these matters, he continued to say the same thing over and over again. You must eat meat, for the economy.

It was so stupid and annoying.

But would you also say, by extension, I asked, that each individual must support a war in which their country is engaged? Or that every New Zealander must like rugby because it’s the national sport?

Why yes, he said, and went off on the same sloganeering tangent.

The thing is, I could tell he didn’t really care. It was just the statements for the sake of repetition, of saying the same thing over and over. And, working in French not in English, I didn’t have the verbal chops to get it back to a comfortable level.

When he said, what about the little lambies, wanting you to eat them for the sake of your country, I felt such a rush of frustration and anger I thought I was going to spit.

I don’t understand your point about the lambs, I said. What are you trying to say?

The same response, repeated.

Ça suffit, I said. Je suis fini.

J’ai fini, said Yvette, passing by again.

I think I’d better go, I said. And I did, scooping up quelques devoirs from Yvette and staying in the corridor outside the classroom long enough to start crying like a girl and muttering slurs about totalitarianism under my breath to my sympathetic teacher.

It was the combination of someone not responding to reason, of feeling on the back foot in another language, of talking about something I care about on two levels (the vegetarianism and ideas about the individual and the collective) and of realising too late that I was being dicked around that did it. In English I can pull back and say, “that’s interesting that you think that”, but in French I’m still all eager and serious, and I got sucked in.

But damn, it felt good to get mad as hell in response to someone being a jerk, since getting mad is something I don’t, in my professional guise, get to do any more. A burst of righteous anger does the work of a much larger number of deep cleansing breaths, and might in intensity make up for the slightly embarrassed aftertaste. Did I really tell my teacher my partner was a fascist?