The Inviolate Self

August 29, 2015

     I have taken to driving to Saint Vincent church in Carcassonne for Mass on Saturday evenings.  It gives me an opportunity to leave Beau alone for a few hours, continuing the training I started in June.  Thankfully, the separation anxiety that scotched my summer cycling plans appears to be under control.

     I could go to Notre Dame du Cros on Sundays at 6:00 p.m., but prefer to go somewhere I can be anonymous.  And the organ at Saint Vincent is extraordinary, as are the organists.

     I'd be less than honest, though, if I did not admit that having gotten to know the personalities that frequent the village church, I prefer to keep a respectful distance.  There are some great gossips among the parishoners, people who greet you, then ask personal questions.  Then there are people who just talk --and talk-- and talk.  There's one woman who, whenever I see her, never ceases to try to engage me in a long limitless conversation.  I always have to say I've got an errand to run if I'm going to break away.

     Some lives are interesting, some are made interesting by knowing the business of others.  In villages, that is a fact of life.  There's a fine balance between being friendly and having everything about you broadcast around Caunes.

     At Saint Vincent I see the same people from where I sit --off to the side, at the front.  The eucharistic ministers sit together: a rotund woman with bright blue eyes and a ready smile who always wears a turban; a man with black hair, very tanned skin and large black eyes; and a woman with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, also tanned.  She always goes up to the altar at the end of Mass to pick up communion for the homebound.  They and the other parishioners are incurious about visitors, and I like that.  They're "big city" folk, and know Carcassonne's churches are the object of great interest from tourists, so they've no need to investigate every new face.

     In a small village like Caunes, the opposite is true.  Someone new is an object of curiosity, particularly if they are not French.  I have made wonderful friends in the village, but I have also learned that "good fences make good neighbors".  Keeping my distance is a way of preserving my inviolate self, which remains American at its core.  Much as I love France and the French, I always know that in speaking the language there is a level of nuance that I will always approximate, never master.  It is wonderful that as many of the people I meet as I do seem to believe that for a foreigner, I have integrated myself into life in Caunes as well as I have.

     From a French national, there is no greater compliment.  The curious thing about the French is that they don't expect you to become French, just to respect to the fullest, French ways.  Becoming French, that's a lifetime's work, if you would want to undertake it.  Anyone who has succeeded at that --for instance, the British writer Julian Green-- has a statut (standing) of "more French than most French" --and will be honored by the government for exceptional promotion of French values.

     So the French expect you to remain English, or American --or whatever country they associate you with.  You earn their regard by managing to do two things at once: remain who you were born, but manage to adapt to France.  So I can remain my inviolate, Americaine d'origine espagnole self (American with parents from Spain), while managing happily among the French.  In fact, upon learning I was not a "pure" American, but had Spanish parents, a gentleman told me, "Ah, yes! I thought so --you have that imperturbability the Spanish have."

     Perhaps it's a function of being the most visited country in the world, and the country at the top of almost everyone's "trip abroad" list, that gives the French the confidence to accept the national differences in their midst without feeling threatened by the number of foreigners who choose to make France either a second home or a primary residence, let alone the millions that visit as tourists.  Foreigners bring money in, so they are welcomed, as long as they don't try to become French citizens.  That is virtually impossible, even for those born of foreign parents but raised in France.  From the point of view of many French, it takes generations to be fully French, and in some cases, not even then, if "foreign habits"  persist.  (A funny example: using granulated sugar rather than sugar cubes is Not French, and looked down upon as offering sugar you would bake with, rather than entertain with, a faux pas.)

     So France is a great country to be a foreigner with some means who is happy to be nothing more than that.  It's only when you try to pass yourself off as French that the inviolabillity of the pact between France and its foreign friends breaks down.

     It's a little bit like Japan, in that sense, as the story of Lafacadio Hearn makes clear.  Hearn was a gifted journalist and travel writer who started out in New Orleans.  He travelled to Japan and fell in love with the country.  Feted everywhere, he decided Japan was where he would live out the rest of his days and sought citizenship, which he received.  However, once a citizen, he was no longer a guest and entitled to the hospitality he had so loved.  Not being ethnically Japanese. he fell into the lowest status in the Japanese caste system.  He died scorned by the country and the people he had celebrated.