“Quand il pleut dans le ciel, il pleut dans ma couer,” he said to me, more than once.
“When it rains in the sky, it rains in my heart.”
It sounds like the rehearsed line of a work-shy schoolboy trying to butter up his teacher. His speech doesn’t sound that fluent, now that I think of it. He speaks slowly and deliberately, like he’s remembering some well-worn lines. Quite like my own attempts at foreign languages. The way you can come across as knowing more Vietnamese than you do because you’re familiar with the usual order of the questions posed by a stranger; your nationality, age, marital status. Maybe even your name, if it’s a kid.
“Trop triste”, I chuckle back at him.
“C’est romantique!” he laughs with a cheeky shrug; the same little schoolboy.
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I’m at my local café – local in the Irish sense, where it’s not necessarily the closest one to my house, but close enough – and I make chit-chat as they serve order upon arrival. I’m interrupted by a familiar face, offering his hand before taking up a seat beside me. White hair, wise face, softly browned skin and traditional pyjama outfit; he could have been the subject of a thousand different pictures spanning a century or more. I recognise him from when he sat beside me in the same chair a few weeks ago. I made polite enquiries in Vietnamese and he surprised me by responding in French.
Since then I’d periodically thought back to the charming moment when he gently ‘shushed’ me silently with his hand, and a pointed refusal to acknowledge what I’d asked him, and just gestured towards where the café’s music was coming from: “Ah… melodie…” he sighed in a perfect French accent, the words hanging in the blurry, humid evening air. He smiled, and gently hummed along, and swayed a little in his chair, content.
We speak a bit but he also seems pleased to just sit in and soak in the atmosphere. He offers small pieces of information in French or Vietnamese depending on his whims. He is or was a maths ‘master’, He lives on the 3rd floor at number 1 down the street.
I’ve only met a small handful of Vietnamese who speak French. The ones who have have all had beautiful accents. I ask how he knows the language – he travelled there in 1945 to study – he tells me this in both French and Vietnamese, as if to make sure I’ve received the information, or to emphasise the two worlds he’s inhabited.
He studied his Baccalaureate and then became a ‘master de mathematiques’. The mixture of French and English makes the phrase as exotic as possible, a rare case where the English translation of a French word achieves that.
“J’ai quatre-vingt quatre ans,” he informs me, before I ask. I felt like it would be rude to ask. He casually drops it like it’s the answer to many of my questions. It kind of is.
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The first time we met we spoke in a mixture of French and Vietnamese. He quickly sussed out that I wasn’t overly fluent in either. It could have been the slowness with which I stumbled, pausing to wince over certain words on the tip of my thoughts or my tongue. It could have been the constant mixing up of languages I did; certain phrases coming to mind more easily in one or the other, certain words sounding like they fit where they didn’t.
In any case, he knew. He knew that I didn’t know enough.
“Tu doit d’apprendre plus de langues pour pouvoir parler à tout le monde de nombreuses choses intéressantes et importantes.”
If I knew more I could talk to more people – to anyone I met – about more interesting and important things. I wish I knew more of either language. If only he spoke better English! This was all on me and we both knew it.
I yearned to ask him about his life; about how he came to be in France at the end of the Second World War, aged around 11 or 12; about what it was like to travel there; to live there; to come home to Floor 3, House number 1, Vĩnh Phúc Street. So many questions.
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He spots me dismounting from my bike and ushers me over to the seat he pulled out from the table next to him. He’d been chatting to a contemporary. A serene smile gazing over the road under his customary beret.
I ask him his name, perhaps too early. He shakes his head with a coy smile.
“J’ai quatre vingt trois ans, je suis entre-tete vieux”.
I struggle to translate in my head. (“I’m… between old heads?!” Had he forgotten his own name? Or is it just not polite to for me to ask so forthrightly? I sensed the latter, I knew it anyway.)
I ask about a family. “Non…” he shook his head. He explains something in French that was just out of my grasp… mimed things falling out of his head with a gesture like blood spurting and falling like rain. Long gone… so long the details had been forgotten? I can’t tell. I want to know so much more. He has forgotten and soon anyone who could remember those times would be gone too.
“J’ai quatre-vingt trois ans” he offered by way of explanation. He deliberately enunciates the liason of ‘twahzzzahn’ to demonstrate his mastery of the accent.
“I’m eighty-three years old.”
No longer 84. Had he forgotten this too? Had he just mimed the tragedy of senility? Or was it a trivial mistake – in Vietnam they count their ages differently to us; in any case lots of people make the same slip-up at that age? I thought about how each of our conversations had followed the same pattern, with him offering thoughts and information with little regard to my contributions or the flow of the chat. Perhaps the conversations had been rehearsed from back when he was a schoolboy. Was he just remembering old lines, the rest of it long forgotten?
I want to ask for a photo; I practice and recite the correct French my head as we sit in comfortable silence.
“English teacher?”, he interrupts – a rare deference to my native language.
“Bien sur”
“Which school?”
“ Lycée secondaire de Marie Curie”.
A lady sitting, working, chopping vegetables beside us explains to him. I try to explain to her that I’d spoken with the gentlemen before. She nods and smiles and stares, as is typical when you haven’t a clue what the foreigner has just done to your language. She tells me he was a maths teacher at Chu Văn An – the most prestigious school in Hanoi.
I’m desperate to know more. My mind races with wild possibilities which for a moment seemed entirely plausible given the history of the city in which I live, which this man was from and returned to. Is he famous in Vietnam? A legendary figure in modern Vietnamese history? Was he a student of Ho Chi Minh’s? Most likely he was just some guy. So much to ask about. If only I knew more languages.
I was tempted to lie and ask for a photo “pour mes grandparents.”
Ou mon père.
“Mon père a soixante-quinze ans et je veux vraiment faire une photo avec vous, pour lui.”
He arises from his chair suddenly, before I get a chance to say it out loud.
“Au revoir”, he bids with a smile, and I’m left with the fully-formed sentence stuck in my head. He turns and leaves. I’ve missed my chance, for today. He spins back softly and makes a whimsical gesture of eating with chopsticks. “Manger”, he smiles again, before shuffling off home.
I never did get his name.