Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 27

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 Welsh on the phone. A semi-familiar language without visuals – the mimed clues of the hands and face, the dance of the lips – is like a compass without an arrow: there’s nothing to point you in the right direction. A few days ago I called Boyd Williams, the president of the Paris Welsh Society, to arrange a meeting. Boyd is a native Welsh-speaker from Abergwaun (Fishguard), who wrote to me in English because, he claimed, his written Welsh was ‘full of mistakes – mutations, mostly’. I figured someone so sensitive to error would surely understand my fear of speaking Welsh on the phone. He did; unfortunately his secretary did not, and made me speak French, which was worse.

It did my heart good to know that Boyd, too, is stalked by a fear of mutations. Or mutilations, as one of my teachers liked to call them. In a bewildering grabbag of situations – new moon, high tide, to impress singular female nouns – ‘c’s become ‘g’s, ‘p’s become ‘b’s, and so on. The first letters of words shift their shape like the great magicians of Welsh folklore. But whereas the latter were circumspect about their shapeshifting, the Welsh alphabet is locked in a perpetual game of musical chairs from hell. There are soft mutations (the nicest), aspirate mutations (rarer; forgivable if you miss them), and nasal mutations (horrible). You have to use the latter, for instance, if you live in the capital of Wales. Rydw i’n byw yng Nghaerdydd: I live in Cardiff. In this case, all because of a wee preposition, Caerdydd mutates to Nghaerdydd. A bit of an over-reaction, I’d say. If you were born there you would be o Gaerdydd, from Cardiff. Right now I’m not in Paris, I’m ym Mharis. Go figure.

Actually, I admire the language’s infatuation with the ear. Mutations have no meaning, they’re simply built-in riffs and slides, so that even mundane sentences glide together like the blues. Ym Mharis is yn Paris, slurred like a late-night love song – and grammatically correct, to boot. Welsh isn’t alone in this mutation game: its first cousins, Breton and Cornish, and second cousins, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx – the world’s Celtic languages – play too, but by their own rules. The miracle is that all these tongues, even Cornish and Manx, both now extinct, have managed to incorporate flux and change into the heart of themselves and make a fixed system of improvisation. It’s almost as if they found the trick of internalizing time, put it on a grammatical wheel instead of a straight line. Speaking Welsh is the poor man’s way of flirting with immortality.