Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 29

It’s a warm dusk, and the breeze kicking around Les Halles smells of fresh electricity. A storm is dickering with us tonight; the clouds look bruised and apprehensive.

Emile Zola called Les Halles ‘the belly of Paris’. There’s a Welsh expression, llond bola o ofn, a belly full of fear, which suits the occasion of my imminent meeting with the Paris Welsh at a café nearby. Les Halles means ‘the Marketplace’. From 1100 – one hundred and eighty-two years before Wales lost its independence – until the mid 1970s an immense wholesale food market occupied this area. Now there’s only a shopping mall, the name Les Halles, and a feeling that something’s missing.

I walk past a string of cafés that reputedly specialize in onion soup and pig’s feet. Au Chien Qui Fume – The Smoking Dog – sounds nice, but the Welsh are awaiting at Le Comptoir. I spot a table of people all looking past one another expectantly; there’s a keen crack of thunder as it occurs to me, good god, it’s me they’re looking at. Boyd Williams isn’t at all what I’d imagined. He’s about my age, with shoulder-length, greying hair tied in a pony-tail and a kind of toss-away elegance. With him is Eluned, a violinist o Gaerdydd, Arwel from Amlwch, Iori’s home town on Anglesey, and Nesta from around Bangor, and older than the rest of us by a good thirty years.

This is the Cylch Cymraeg, the Welsh-speaking circle of the Paris Welsh Society, and they’re already doing it. After Nesta tells me that the society has between seventy-five and a hundred members, around thirty of whom speak Welsh, and I give my spiel, which I’ve nearly memorized by now – Dw i’n ysgrifennu llyfr am bobl o gwmpas y byd sy’n siarad Cymraeg … I’m writing a book about people around the world who speak Welsh – multiple conversations begin to sprout. It occurs to me that there’s a geography of comprehension at work here. I’m sitting between Boyd and Nesta, both of whom I can understand fairly well, but beyond the ashtray in the centre of our round café table, I’m sunk. Eluned and Arwel might as well be speaking Turkish. Physical proximity influences 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.