Bonjour? Bonjour!?
It was bound to happen. The faux pas of all faux pas. Every YouTuber warns against ever beginning any conversation with a French person without it, and I know better. Yet, I managed to make the most basic of errors in French society this week, and this after living here for more than a year. I failed to say Bonjour.
I suppose it’s also a sign of how comfortable I am just living my daily life here that it wasn’t top of mind as it usually is. Looking up phrases on Google, or practicing an opening line before I walk through the doors has been part of my life since moving to France. So, going into my local corner grocery to buy a bottle of cider for a dinner I was preparing, didn’t require any pre-thought or rehearsal. Only, once inside, I couldn’t locate the stuff. I saw a man stocking the cold case with beer and approached him. After sliding around the boxes blocking the aisle and making eye contact, I politely asked, “Vous-avez du cider?”
From across the stack of cardboard boxes I could only see his face and what I saw next were two eyes that began to bulge.
“Bonjour?” He stared at me.
I froze, confused.
“Bonjour?!,” he said again, with more emphasis this time.
He was admonishing me for not acknowledging his presence. His humanity. His well-deserved right to be recognized not as a robotic helper who happened to be working in a store at the moment, but as a man, a Homo Sapiens, a human being worthy of my respect. And I had failed to make that basic required recognition necessary for any interaction in this country.
And then it hit me, what he was telling me. And I was crushed with embarrassment.
“Mon Dieu! Désolée! Je suis tellement désolée. Oui, bonjour.” (My God. Sorry! I am really sorry. Yes, hello.) My face now five shades of red darker.
His face softened. He could see I meant it. And as if nothing had happened he pointed to the bottles just behind me and said, “Là” (there).
I grabbed the bottle from the shelf, which was just the store’s brand, nothing authentic or fancy from Normandy. Then he told me in French that it wasn’t that good, though. He was being nice now. And I told him I was only using it to cook with as a braising liquid.
“Oh, c’est bon.” he finished. (Basically, good enough or it’ll work.)
I walked out of the store feeling terrible. I had let my guard down. I had gotten cocky. I was starting to feel like I belong here and I had gotten my wrist slapped.
This morning I made the trek to the large farmer’s market close to my apartment. I have been traveling the past few weeks and my fridge was an echo chamber. I stopped at my favorite stand for nuts and olives, the men there are from Liguria just across the border in Italy and I think they recognize me now. They let me try lots of things, so I feel like maybe I am “in” now.
Next I stopped for my favorite eggs. €0.80 a pop, but they are extra large and the yolks are the color of the setting sun. Worth every cent when I make my fluffy French omelettes. Absolutely delicious.
The fruit and vegetable stands are so abundant in this market that they are uncountable. I have my favorites, but it’s not as though these are the only good stands and the rest are poor. Everywhere you look, each stand you pass this time of year, the produce is pouring out and it’s unbelievably fresh, organic, and real. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Thick white asparagus, green beans, heirloom tomatoes of every shade, carrots that are still covered in wet black compost from being picked early this morning, candy sweet strawberries, delicious melons from the French city of Carpentras in Provence. If I see something particularly beautiful I stop and buy it.
Normally the vendors have small round baskets or metal bowls that you use to pick your produce before handing them over full so they can weigh things and let you know what unbelievably reasonable amount you need to pay.
I spotted a vendor with perhaps a dozen different apples for sale. Big, beautiful apples of every color. I grabbed a chartreuse greenish-yellow one I had recently seen at another place and I immediately heard two people yell at me “Ne touchez pas!” One was a customer standing next to me and the other was the vendor about 20 feet away from me at the other end off the stand.
Again, I was frozen and confused. What did they mean don’t touch? How do you shop at the farmer’s market if you can’t pick up the food you want to buy?
“J'ai demandé comment on l’achète?” (How do you buy it?)
This was met again with an even more forceful “Ne touchez pas!”
Now I am standing there with an apple in my hand. I don’t put it back because to my thinking, if I have touched it, then I may as well pay for it, assuming they don’t want me to put it back. But this only infuriated the vendor further. I think he thought I was challenging him and he quickly came over to me.
He looked at me obviously very frustrated. I told him, somewhat sheepishly, that I wanted to buy it and asked him for two more, actually. Then I asked for three more apples of another kind. Then some oranges. Some dried figs. Strawberries. Bananas. Now he softens.
Suddenly, he is the friendliest man I’ve ever met. He grabs two other bananas of some other kind and tells me they are for me. He then proceeds to tell me that he doesn’t want people to touch the fruit because it damages their beauty. I tell him I understand. The most used word of the week for me is désolée, which I employ again. I pay him.
Now he tells me to wait and he goes and gets two prunes, one for me and one for Chien-hui. He hands them to us with a napkin and they are the sweetest thing I’ve ever eaten. A peace offering. I have been forgiven. But when I got home I saw that the two apples he first grabbed were wrinkled and old. He must have grabbled these when he still hated me as a way to punish me.
We went to pick up our new residency cards a couple of days ago. These are the equivalent of the American green card. This is exciting news as we applied for them before our one-year visas expired back in December. Only, it turns out that there are two Prefecture offices here, the government offices where you handle all of your immigration business, and we had assumed the one closest to us was the correct one. Of course it isn’t. The one we needed is way over by the airport. And it’s only open for 90 minutes every morning and we weren’t going to make it, so we decided we’d have to go get the cards on a different morning and opted to just sit in front of a cafe and have our coffee and baguettes for breakfast.
As we enjoyed the morning sunshine and the passing parade of tourists and French locals alike, we were approached by a man in a wheelchair, carrying multiple bags of his possessions. He didn’t look like he was all there, disheveled and disconnected from reality. We’ve all been there, especially in highly trafficked tourist areas. So I told him, “No merci.”
Suddenly, he produced what looked to be a black wand, or perhaps an extendable metal pointer of some kind. He proceeds to tell me, in French, while pointing at my cup of coffee that I have bank cards and he pokes at my cup. The implication being that if I thought I could get away without giving him any cash, he knew I had other means.
I tell him a little louder this time, “Non. Merci!”
What happened next is embarrassing and also devastating.
He puts the pointer in Chien-hui’s face, just an inch or so from touching her, and yells something unintelligible. And then turns to me and rears his arm back cocking his weapon as if he is about to strike me with it. In a matter of a second I am up, towering over him, yelling at him in English that he is about to have a very bad day and to back the F off. My blood is at full boil and in the moment I am somehow okay with the idea that I am about to punch a crazy man in a wheel chair because he has threatened my wife.
He rolls backwards, looking away, he refuses to make eye contact with me and he begins to smile. He holds up some kind of abused sign of some sort. I cannot read it. No, he isn’t all there, it’s more clear, and I just as suddenly realize that his ambition all along was just to provoke me, and he has wildly succeeded.
I turn back to my table and the entire cafe is staring at me. Not judging me. More like just waiting to see what’s going to happen next. I turn back to this man and tell him, “Allez!”
He rolls off.
I watch him.
He goes all the way to the last table and approaches another man just sitting there enjoying his coffee. Deja vu. I watch the entire scene unfold again. Only this time, the man actually knocks over this man’s water glass with his pointer onto the table and onto his lap. The man explodes, in French. And like me he gets very angry but doesn’t get physical. I am sure he wanted to, however, as did I. But how do you live with yourself if you strike a crazy man in a wheelchair?
Finally, the waiters come over, and clearly frustrated at probably chasing him off for the 127th morning in a row, they yell at him and tell him to get lost. He rolls away. And I feel bad about myself.
It’s been a week. One where I felt out of place, out of sorts, out of practice, and where the sheen has been burnished off. I am not especially confrontation-adverse, I worked in corporate America for my career, one learns how to handle situations, but this week I was the noob again. But I am humbled and must dust myself off and get back to learning the rules of how to live in France.