Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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scrupulously sober, but not drunk, though I’ve got a wine glass in my hand again. Rosemary’s desk is set up as a bar, but Johan doesn’t drink. I’m getting evil-eye looks from Rosemary that I’m spending too much time with him and that, as the evening’s human centrepiece, it’s time to mingle, but I pretend not to notice.
Johan is an enormously tall Swede with knobbly knees, long, straight hair, and rectangular granny glasses that give him an ardent, scholar-punk look. He’s wearing shorts and high-top sneakers, and is the first person in Norway I’ve recognized as a socio-economic, style-and-age compatriot. He first went to Wales on a mountain climbing trip, then returned to study Welsh in Aberystwyth; now he’s getting a PhD from the University of Oslo in Welsh literature. As far as I can tell, he and I are the only ones speaking Welsh in the house. It was easier when my conversation partner was replying in Pakistani.
Rosemary sweeps by and tops up my glass. ‘A lovely boy, but so boring,’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Come meet Jean, Pamela.’
‘Dwy funud,’ I stall, two minutes.
My mind’s eye does its gravity trick again, and I’m treated to a rare view: an American trying to talk to a Swede in Welsh on the outskirts of Oslo. By the time I re-focus on Johan, who can effortlessly switch from Welsh to English like a native, Welsh words are clinking around in my brain like ice cubes, but my tongue is beyond getting a grip on them. I’ve been topped up about a hundred too many times. It’s a relief when the door opens and a Welsh voice shouts in English,
‘So, who here is from Verona, New Jersey, then? How about those White Castle hamburgers?’
This literally stuns me. I was beginning to think I actually might be Welsh, and it’s a slap in the face to be reminded I’m from New Jersey. The husband of one of the CLs, now a high-up in the British embassy, tells me he went to university near my home town. It’s my sad duty to tell him that Verona’s White Castle hamburger franchise – the chain was the first with the vision to serve square burgers – has gone out of business.
As the party winds down, Iori, who arrived with Lynn a few hours ago, but whom I haven’t spoken to at length, takes me aside and gives me a gift that I won’t have to declare at customs.
‘I’ve been wanting to tell you,’ he says, ‘that I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t hear your American accent when you speak Welsh. You have a pure De Cymru – South Wales – intonation, with a Ceredigion lilt, like Rosemary’s. I thought you’d like to know that.’
Like to know that? I’m sure this can’t be true, but it’s a finer music to my ears than Rosemary singing, ‘Where’s your glass, Pamela?’ I let the wine confuse my brain into a welcome identity crisis. Tonight all the gossip, the references, the Norwegian prices translated for my benefit into pounds, all that I have in common with these people, has been filtered through Wales. When I began a sentence with, ‘Well at home we …,’ I found my listeners thought I was talking about Lampeter.
‘Oh,’ interrupted one woman, ‘it’s probably different in the north.’
As the Trip continues, it is Wales that more and more seems to be the starting point, not the States. The more I use this word ‘home’, and the farther I get from it (wherever home is), the more I’m beginning to wonder what I mean.
Deffro to Wake Up
Four a.m. Last night I went to bed with my contacts in. Thank god I’d noticed that Liv’s indoor stars looked like bits of fluorescent paper, and wondered why. One night in Wales I put my lenses in a glass on my night-table instead of cleaning them, woke, and drank them in the morning.
Every neuron in my brain feels like it’s been on a forced march across the desert. Because of Norway’s drunk-driving laws, Rosemary can’t take me to the airport (the police, who’d be aware she had a party last night, would almost certainly breathalyze her if she tried to drive anywhere before noon), so I must take a red-eye train to make my seven-thirty-five flight. As I’m creeping out the front door Rosemary appears in her pink housecoat. It’s the only time I’ve seen her without pearls, though her hair is perfect. She gives me a hug, and I feel a sudden respect for her that she hasn’t given a damn about having a writer in the house.
Seven o’clock, Fornebu Airport. My digestive system seems unconnected to my head: the one is comatose, the other spinning like a dervish. There will be no Y Trip on this flight – or rather these flights, as I have to fly first to London and then Zürich in order to wind up tonight in Paris. A television monitor by the gate asks, ‘Have you dressed properly for the occasion?’ Rosemary, I think, has found her niche in this country.
FFRAINC (FRANCE)
Dychwelyd to Return
The Louvre is half-price after 3 p.m. on Sundays. This afternoon the air in the galleries is thick and still, varnished with a stifling July heat. People ramble haphazardly in and out of my vantage point like pieces of curdled cream, surfacing, sinking and resurfacing in a stirred cup of tea. I look into the depths of Leonardo’s dark, seductive ‘John the Baptist’ but see instead that the humidity has made my hair curl.
Why do I get goosebumps here? Maybe it’s a heat rash; maybe it’s because art, like language, flirts with the impossible. In the Louvre I can cheat time. I like to think of landscapes as immutable, but they change – reafforestation programmes have altered parts of the Welsh countryside, bald for centuries, beyond recognition – yet I know when I look at Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove’ that I’m seeing the same young man in the same position in the same light exactly the same way Titian saw him over three hundred years ago. It’s less a glimpse into the past than a chance to look through the eyes of the dead.
‘Have you noticed that of all the galleries we’ve been to, only the French ones have been air-conditioned?’ I ask Marguerite, who frowns.
We move to an open window to catch a feeble breeze. The air in Norway was so sharp and pure it felt new; continental air, by comparison, breathes like it has some mileage on it. Rosemary told me that visitors to Oslo often feel sick at first, they’re so unaccustomed to the freshness. The really telling thing for me was the shade: one afternoon I sat in a sweater writing on a shady corner of Rosemary’s deck, while two feet away one of her daughters roasted topless in the sun. Here in Paris, where I’ve been for two days now, even the shadows are suffocating.
‘Too bad you didn’t get to see more of Norway.’
‘I was on golf courses.’
‘You were getting drunk in Rosemary’s kitchen.’
‘… and speaking English,’ I add, heart-sick.
‘You know, that’s probably the best thing that could’ve happened to you. Now guilt will propel you to speak nothing but Welsh for the rest of the trip.’
She’s got something there. Marguerite and I met fifteen years ago in Paris, and she knows how receptive I am to language angst. We were both studying French and living with an ancient woman named Mme Peneau, who looked like Samuel Beckett in drag, had a voice like a truck driver, and used to beat us with her cane whenever she caught us speaking English. Mme Peneau watered the wine and vigilantly corrected our genders during dinner; it was under her roof in the elegant seventeenth arrondissement that I learned to fear foreign languages.
Particularly on the telephone. A short time after I’d arrived in Paris I’d fallen into an informal match at the university tennis courts, and my partner had offered to call me to arrange another game. When he’d asked my name I’d thought he said, ‘What’s that on your finger?’ and replied casually, ‘A band-aid.’ I can still hear Mme Peneau’s deep croak when he rang a few days later. ‘Vous voulez parler avec qui? Abandaid? Qui est “Abandaid”?’ My subsequent conversation with the tennis player reminded me of Thomas Hobbes’s description of life: not nasty, but certainly brutish and short.
So far I’ve refused to speak