Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 28

The goat cheese sits like a bruiser on Marguerite’s sister Nina’s cheeseboard, bullying the Camembert and Port Salut. Nina’s three kids, all under ten, looked at it when I presented it to the family as if I’d brought the goat instead of the cheese. Their father, Bernard, a Frenchman whom Nina met while also studying in Paris, valiantly tried some, pulled his mouth down, raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He hasn’t eaten any since.

When we return from the Louvre Nina is excited.

‘You’re never going to believe this.’

‘What? HarperCollins called and wants to give me more money?’

‘No. There’s a Welsh movie on TV tonight. Isn’t that incredible?’

At ten-thirty I turn on the television, still astonished by this marvel of good timing. Below us on the street are the sounds of migration: laughter, footsteps, the hollow ring of aluminium lawn chairs bumping together. Every evening at this hour half the neighbourhood – Nina and Bernard live in the ‘decidedly unchic’ nineteenth arrondissement, in north-east Paris – wanders down to the Parc de la Villette, where a series of free films are being shown en plein air, beneath a city sky the colour of dark amethyst. Tonight’s feature is Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. We, however, shut the windows and tune in to Une Si Jolie Vallée, ‘Such a Pretty Valley’, as Nina begins her nightly ironing.

It’s the story of a love triangle between Kevin, an unemployed miner (a Welshman but a monoglot English-speaker), his wife Sian (bilingual in English and Welsh) and Nahuel, a dashing, horseback-riding writer from Patagonia who is fluent in Welsh and Spanish, but speaks no English. The dialogue alternates between English and Welsh, with French subtitles. I sit like a pointer spaniel throughout the whole thing, still and tense, with my language brain in hyperdrive. As it is I blurt out French words when I want Welsh ones, and vice versa, but this verbal-visual stew of (for me) half-cooked languages is too much. Thank god Argentina is still four months away. It’s a huge relief when Sian decides to stick it out with Kevin (you knew she would), and Nina zaps off the set.

‘Is South Wales still so depressed?’ she asks, folding up the last of the clothes.

‘Actually Cardiff was tops on the list of UK cities last year for economic growth. A lot of high-tech companies, Japanese especially, are moving into the old mining valleys. But coal mining itself is finished. The movie review in Le Monde described the valleys today as vertes comme des choux tendres – green like tender cabbages. Honestly, the French are too much.’

‘Didn’t that one mine reopen?’ Marguerite asks. ‘There was that photo of guys covered in coal dust in the New York Times.’

‘Oh, that’s right. The Tower mine. It was the last working mine in South Wales – four and a half miles straight down – not far from Merthyr Tydfil. After it closed in 1994 the miners pooled their savings and bought it, and they’re working it again. But that’s just one mine, pulling, I think, around 400,000 tons of coal. In 1920 there were 620 mines operating in Wales. Think about it: Cardiff once exported over 36 million tons of coal and was the largest port on earth.’

At a quarter to one everyone else has gone to sleep, so it’s safe for me to plug into the family phone jack and do E-mail (which would otherwise become child’s play, literally). The Welsh chat group is in a furore because someone has surmised that Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was Welsh, and asks if anyone has noticed the number of professional baseball players with Welsh surnames. One person responds, ‘What’s your point? – that everyone with the name Davis is of Welsh descent, or that Jefferson indirectly fathered a lot of pro baseball players?’

I stay out of it, thinking instead of Welsh coal. That was the real Welsh diaspora. By the late nineteenth century Welsh anthracite had travelled to western France, northern Spain, Italy, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, India and throughout the Far East. I’ll be doing a good job just to keep up.