They never stop talking

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I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a bad day. A dear friend is ill. His daughter — let’s call her qvnr, for Queen Victoria Meets Nurse Ratched — has declared that if he sees me — any woman, but in practice that basically means me — without chaperone, he will never see his grandchildren again. The man is dying. He is frightened and alone. Teenagers have lives, so he doesn’t see them much anyway. And the rest of the time? SOL, Pops. You can sit there in solitary and think about your impending doom.

Well. As part of his farewell tour, he organized a day of presentations and asked me to talk. As I listened and waited for my turn, I couldn’t help but wonder whether French people, at least the ones I seem to have fallen in with, ever stop talking. A key presenter arrived late and spent a good ten minutes explaining why. Then he explained again. Then we all started again, with Mr. Late frequently interrupting. And this seemed to be expected. Absolutely no-one seemed surprised or annoyed. Finally, my turn, but my introduction was so complete that it may have taken longer than my presentation, especially as it included about half of what I planned to say.

Of all things, at lunch a woman leaned toward me and said, “That was fascinating. Could you speak at an event in July?” Of course I said yes. Why not? When in rural France….

I couldn’t help but think of Christmas dinner, when they went around the table and asked, basically, what have you accomplished recently and what is coming up for the next year? And we were expected to have major life events to recount. One guy received a national award for his work in physics. Another was graduating from one of the more prestigious French universities. It went on like that. If I had declared that I had just winter-pruned my roses, it would have brought down the tone of the whole event. So I told them about a paper I had agreed to write. By next Christmas I’d better have made substantial progress on the thing, too.

It looks like people are expected to make public presentations and that they are expected to be involved in public life. I’m amazed at the number of people I meet who are adjunct mayors, or real mayors. The painter that invited me to speak also has gallery showings at her house. At the last one, the mayor came, not for social reasons; it was part of his job. It was a public event and a medium-sized deal. Jean-Yves was head of a Europe-wide professional association. In the States that’s a somewhat unusual thing. Here, no, folks just do it. And when the presentations are done, everyone goes for lunch/drinks/dinner and they talk some more.

So here I am, several years into my blog, writing at length about people who never stop talking. Maybe I’m going native. Really, all I want to do is shut out the noise and wrap my arms around my wonderful friend. I want him to know that although he is going where we can’t reach him, until then, he won’t be alone.

16 thoughts on “They never stop talking”

  1. Hopefully he will read his, and know. But you are right – certain French people (and German) seem to have a hidden button that get pressed and away they go, on and on …. and gongorhism isn’t dead!

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    1. No, there is nothing literary about it. They just talk. And talk. In a more formal setting, yeah, the language can be impenetrable. One advantage to my limited French is that I have no choice but to keep things simple and clear. Today was people who just didn’t want to cede the floor.

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  3. La vie associative, an essential of life in France in whichever niche of society you find yourself. I liked it….But, by all that’s holy, do they talk!
    Used to committees where you cut to the chase and devil take the hindermost, it seemed to me that the devil had taken all those participating and encouraged them to gas as long as they liked. It was rude, it appeared, to ask whatever their current state of lumbago or difficulties with a publisher had to do with the point in question. And as for the soi disant intellectuals! Playing verbal games to gain points with each other seemed to take precedence over the matter in question…until one realised that point scoring was the whole point of the meeting.

    As to qvnr, is he likely to see his grandchildren anyway? Does this woman live with him, to control his life and his choices? What does she imagine that you – or any hypothetical woman – will do if left alone with him….change his will? Not very likely in France! Remove valuable items? Don’t worry, she will have an inventory.
    Does he have nursing care? Can it be suborned?

    We saw this situation in action when a dear friend had had a long association with a chap whom she had first met when teaching. His parents scotched the match, they both married elsewhere and met up when both were widowed. The minute the chap fell terminally ill the family descended, took every item that he had possessed and banned my friend from seeing him.
    Why? Another friend described it as resentment for him not honouring the memory of his wife….I took it as an example of the possessive greed of the French bourgeoisie.

    I hope you can manage to see him.

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    1. You nailed it, Helen, as usual. I like all these people but I can only take so much. The great thing about JM is that he studied in the States. When he speaks English, he’s a direct as the next guy. Once he switches to French it’s a whole other thing.

      Ugh, the daughter. You’re right again. It’s all about the Alzheimer’s wife, who has recognized no one in over a decade. I feel bad for the dark hole that woman must be living in but does tossing my friend in another dark hole help that in any way? As for the stuff, they can have it. They can be as greedy and bourgeois as they want to be. And frankly they have already taken nearly everything of value, right down to the decent kitchen knives. What I want is time with my brilliant friend. And sure, he saw the kids the last time she pulled this; he does have a bit of a history. This time, I think he’s worried that there will be some kind of emergency. If he is where the kids are, three hours from my house, who will he call? An ambulance, I know, same as when he is at his house near mine, but he’s frightened.

      I’ll see him a couple of times before he heads back to purgatory. Then, I think that’s it.

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  4. Your poor friend…the ties of family, nomatter how false, take precedence over the love of friends. How deep the indoctrination goes, to trouble a man when dying.
    Do you know Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers? When all those you revered, admired, have died and you face it alone?

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    1. I didn’t find that line. Terrific poem, though. I know so little about English literature. I know Chaucer but Gower and Lydgate? I basically pick up the thread with Seamus Heaney: maybe, for this discussion, his poem “A Dog was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also.” ‘Great chiefs and great loves in obliterated light.”

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        1. Well, as you are in Costa Rica, you might want to try Pablo Neruda, especially the racy stuff. He was Chilean, but close enough. Or Jose Luis Borges, who was Argentine. Or Gabriel Garcia Lorca, who was Spanish, but Leo might like that. The stranger the world gets, the less I want to deal with facts. I’m getting to be all about magical realism.

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          1. I know and read these chaps…we even ‘did’ Lorca at school, though the maiden lady running the course was not keen on his politics or his morals.
            Cavafy’s non arrival of the barbarians is running through my mind at the moment….how it would have been a solution…of a sort.

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          2. She didn”t assign Neruda, then. I just ordered a copy of Cavafy’s poems. He sounds pretty interesting. Have you tried a Portuguese guy, Fernando Pessoa? A little larger than the entire universe. When I was coming of age the Beat Poets got all the attention. I’m just discovering these other, much more interesting guys.

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  5. I think Neruda would have uncurled her permanent wave….
    I’ll try Pessoa, totally new to me. I could not get to the wavelength of the beat poets then and have not tried again since. Perhaps I should.

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    1. Nah. Forget the Beats. All that drama and posturing. At least back then. Lawrence Ferlinghetti will last, as will Gary Snyder. But most of the rest, I don’t know. Pessoa is an absolute hero in Portugal. Definitely worth a try.

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      1. Right, I’ll forget them again, then. I have a faint bell ringing that he wrote a book about Portugese towns…to reintroduce people to a sense of being Portugese? I could well be wrong.

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        1. There is a book about Lisbon. I don’t know of any others.

          The Beats. San Francisco Renaissance. It depends on your feeling about the California Zen vibe. I happen to love it, even though it’s not often found, any more. But if you’re okay with it, try Ferlinghetti. He ran a publishing house and a bookstore, so he was a little more grounded than the posers. Gary Snyder is 92, looking very Grand Old Man, quite distinguished. You could try “Turtle Island” or “Mountains and Rivers without End.” Maybe Kenneth Rexroth? He taught at Santa Barbara when I was a student there. Lovely man, absolutely revered.

          I can write haiku. If it’s anything more complicated, forget it.

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