Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Pamela Petro
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my degree of comprehension! Eureka! Write that down later, I tell myself.
Some of us choose bière – beer – when the waitress takes our order, which becomes cwrw – beer in its Welsh incarnation – as soon as she sets it on the table. Boyd is explaining how he thinks there are fewer differences between North and South Walian Welsh-speakers of his generation than ever before, because of the influence of television. I want to say how interesting that is. What’s the word? Damn, damn, damn. Intéressant? No, no, wrong language! Nesta taps my arm because she’s finally remembered we’ve met before, at the Aberystwyth Eisteddfod of 1992, and launches into a story about how she used to fly for free when she worked for a travel agency.
Diddorol. Hell. The Welsh word for interesting finally arrives in my brain, but Boyd is listening to Nesta. I follow his cue as she talks on, and interject yn wir! – really! – whenever he and the others seem impressed. Most of what she says is a blur. I’m half aware of a storm of cigarette smoke and French all around us as the café fills up; the waitress eyes us curiously. A few fat raindrops have fallen, but otherwise the thunderstorm is a bust. An hour and a half passes of the best Welsh I’ve ever spoken.
Suddenly, without warning, my mind shuts down in the middle of someone else’s sentence, and the spell breaks. The next words out of my mouth are English ones. Nesta smiles and pats me again, and tells me I did very well. Satisfied for the evening, I let Welsh go without a fight and silently examine Boyd. He has a habit of looking down to think, then up at the person he’s talking to, which makes him raise his eyebrows slightly. It gives him a quizzical, amused look, which I find becoming even as I wonder just whom he finds so humorous.
Ten minutes back at Nina’s and I burst into tears because I’ve lost my address book that notes every Welsh-speaker I’ve been able to locate the world over. When Marguerite returns from brushing her teeth I’m kneeling in the middle of her nephew’s bedroom floor looking like the Pietà, with my computer case on my lap.
‘That’s it. It’s all over. Shit. We might as well go home.’
It takes her under three minutes to find the missing item stuck inside a notebook in which I’ve already looked, twice. It takes my heart about forty minutes to stop beating as if it were marching in army boots.
Cynaeafu to Harvest
The French have a genius, especially in Paris, most of all on the Ile St Louis, for combining crumbling stone, worn and ingrained with soot and patches of creeping damp (peeling plaster will also do), with freshly washed, gleaming windows, polished brass, massive front doors thick with paint, even discreet touches of neon. The result pulls together some heady disparities – ancient and modern, rough and smooth, dull and vibrant – which for me are the essence of Parisian chic.
The nineteenth arrondissement doesn’t really do disparity. Its post-war sprawl of apartment buildings and utilitarian shops is comfortable rather than chic; the people who live here, Africans, Orthodox Jews, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, French, offer more variety than the architecture. That’s why it’s a shock to come up out of the métro across town at the Charles de Gaulle – Etoile station, at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe, and see only white people.
Nesta Pierry has invited me for icecream at the Häagen-Dazs shop on the Champs Elysées. I haven’t seen this street since 1981, and it seems to have grown. It’s so wide it’s almost obscene, like it’s been force-fed with macadam. Tricolour banners – today is the thirteenth of July – snap from the streetlights in a stiff wind.
Something about Nesta reminds me of the American French cuisine queen, Julia Child. Not in looks so much; Nesta has blonde hair and glasses which magnify her pale eyes, though she and Julia have similar, sturdy frames. Perhaps it’s her unfazable common sense, her essential, no-nonsense simplicity, in the midst of so many French frills. She and I have just squeezed into the centre of a thicket of sidewalk café tables, when the clouds let loose with torrential rain. What’s with the Welsh and rain, anyway? It seems to follow them around the planet.
We find seats inside and begin to steam in the air-conditioning as we wait for our icecream sundaes. My Welsh is halting today, but a group of American children at the next table find us fascinating nonetheless.
‘They’re speaking something really weird, Mom,’ one of them shouts, thinking we can’t understand. I’ve lived for this moment.
‘You speak well,’ Nesta pronounces in Welsh, like a stern yet well-meaning grandmother, ‘but your writing is terrible. You must practise. Your letter [I’d written her as well as Boyd] was so simple, like a child’s. You do much better in person.’
I don’t doubt this – Written or Literary Welsh practically constitutes a different language from spoken Welsh, and is utterly foreign to me – but right now conversation is a struggle too. Remembering Norway, I doggedly stick with it, understanding just over half of Nesta’s answers to my prepared questions but cunningly giving an impression of near-total comprehension, or so I imagine. (My trick is to ask the meaning of a word every three minutes or so, which implies that I’ve understood all the rest of them.) The thing is, I do comprehend most of Nesta’s vocabulary, it’s just that at this conversational speed recognition often comes without time for comprehension. It’s like seeing something in the dark and not quite grasping its outline.
Nesta married a Frenchman and has lived in Paris most of her life. She’s the grande dame of the BBC Wales ‘foreign correspondents’ – basically, anyone who can speak Welsh and lives abroad – and was the first to do a live broadcast from the Continent to Wales, around 1960. I ask if she ever thinks about moving home.
She shakes her head and says that the quality of life is far better in Paris. ‘Don’t need a car here. In Wales you need a car. It’s that simple.’
Somehow we get on to the subject of Breton, which began to develop into its own language after Welsh immigrants came to what’s now Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries, fleeing the Anglo-Saxons. Today about twice as many people speak Breton as Welsh, though the latter probably has a more secure lease on life: not only are its speakers younger, but after centuries of harassment it’s finally getting a boost from the British government. Breton remains a linguistic thorn in the side of the French.
‘Do you know the French word baragouiner?’ she asks.
I’ve never heard of it.
‘Think about it.’
‘Baragouiner? Bara means bread in Welsh, and gwin means wine …’
Nesta beams. ‘Exactly. Centuries ago, when Breton farmers made the journey to Paris, they’d stop along the way and ask for bara and gwin. No one had a clue what they were talking about. They thought the Bretons were just speaking gibberish. That’s how baragouiner came to be a French verb that means ‘to speak nonsense’.
It occurs to me that this would be a great code name for my book.
After our icecream Nesta and I walk arm-in-arm down the Champs Elysées, speaking Welsh, by some wicked, unspoken agreement, very loudly. This is sweet Celtic revenge for all those dinners I squirmed through at Mme Peneau’s. I’d like to stop a woman who walks by coddling a long, small dog that looks like a badly rolled cigarette and yell, ‘Hey, you, Welsh was written down four hundred years before French, so there,’ but I just barely refrain.
‘You should have seen it, Pamela.’ Nesta is gesturing at the avenue. ‘Roedd yr holl cae gwenith.’ Huh? Did she just say it was all a wheat field?
‘Pam?’ What?
‘It was all a wheat field. One Saturday night a few years ago. I came out and the entire Champs Elysées was covered in wheat. It was a protest to show solidarity with the striking farmers, and by Monday morning there were cars again, but while it lasted it was a wonderful sight.’
For a moment, Paris, that relentlessly better place where I never wear