From Mantis 2

The Mother Tongue

by Fanny Howe

A child stares out the window into the caves of leaves that deepen with the arrival of Fall.
Outside birds sing, music plays in a distant house, cars squeal around a corner.
The air lies against the glass pane like a cold hand.

She is in a schoolroom. She has been forbidden to sit near her friends because of her behavior. Set apart, near a window. The teacher’s lips catch spit. She is explaining algebra. Her voice is high and girlish. She is old and severe, always tired and untouchable.

When the bell finally rings, the child rushes into the hall to writhe around and make animal faces and try to evoke laughter from her classmates. Two of them smile mildly at her performance. Others look away. But they all trail into a room that faces east now, and where the chairs are placed the opposite way from those in the math classroom.

This child grabs the chair next to the window.
The class is French, but the teacher is American, both soft of voice and face, a little wistful.
The child hears a fire engine racing to a fire. She wonders if it is going to her mother again. It is certainly going in that direction, she hears as it veers north up her own street, and the siren abruptly stops.

Now the teacher is taking out the textbook and so are all the children. The child at the window who is naturally gifted at languages and nothing else—they all agree—is invited to read some lines from a poem by Paul Verlaine. “Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut dans la ville.” She reads slowly, shyly, her eyes fastened on each word.

“Il . . . Pleure . . . Dans. Mon. Coeur . . . Comme . . . Il. Pleut . . . Dans. La Ville.”
Again: “Il pleure . . . Dans mon coeur. Comme il pleut . . . Dans la ville.”

She gazes afterwards at the French words and tries in silence:

I am crying inside my heart as it rains on the city.
It rains inside my heart the way it weeps on the town.
Tears are raining in my heart while sadness falls on the city.

The teacher praises her for her French. It is the high point of her day.
The sky outside the window is wash-gray.

The teacher reads aloud: Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux. . .

The sound of the line is summer gone: in its lilt the cry (coeur, choir) of whippoorwills, cardinals, sparrows, seagulls and geese that clamored as they sped (joy-voltage) through the sky overhead, necks extended, as if they breathed their honking.

The summer past: a shingled house and bent screens, the hours of liberty.
Hours of reading:
illustrations, in black and white pen, and gray wash, of animals and characters. The large pressed words on the yellowish paper.

She listened extra-acutely in summer as the sun thinned: her mother’s voice slurring, a shift towards slop, slight tone changes, a bitter flammable breath.

But every illustration in every book preceded the words in their interest for her. Pictures were better ways for the lost letters to think and find themselves alive, formed as shapes, faces and gestures.

Which came first? The slurring mother, the lyrical laugh, a new language?
The influences came in a rush, together.

But the child felt that foreign words always came from the past. So they came first. They preceded English rising from elsewhere, like a song floating through a windowpane with an unknown source.

Foreign words seemed to drag hairy seaweeds and green slime, chipped edges and glossy forms along with them.
It was like standing in the sea and saying it was beautiful even as monstrous and unknown life twirled within it and brushed against her legs.

Was beauty just a distraction from horror?
Were words?
Calme, luxe, et volupte . . . ?

There were many words for bread—pain being one, pane another. So the ground under English (everywhere growing like grass) was unstable and wildly associative.
But the words and sentences all seemed to aspire for one thing only: an aura larger than the substance of their letters.
The words were kindly trying to distract the mind from recognizing its true speculative terror.

Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nouages . . .

Who knows how and when she heard that line as a surrealist might:
“The navy ruled the seas . . .
“A ceiling was a solid cloud . . .
“The vessel unrolled a sky for ages . . .

She loved to translate from the Latin too. The same teacher again there did not make anyone read Latin out loud, so she was saved from that embarrassment, but she would have to speak her translation.

Spuma spumante . . .?

“waves foaming
“spume spinning
“silvering moon
“gushing foam

Which came first—the look of the letter or the sound of the phrase? Who thought of those conjunctions of sound and object and appearance?

Spuma spumante
Asti spumanti? Champagne on the shelf?
The bubbles carried from lip (word) back to bottle.

Way down the street an organ grinder played every day at the same time. When he began, she knew there were only two hours left of school. His tunes were mechanical but melancholy.

She changes tenses.
She is a school-hating child. It is an affliction. Every weekday is formed in the hell of subordination. But her ears free her and her eyes fixed on the shuffling branches. Gladly, she translates one sound into another. She bends a word, a noise, an image around and around in many versions. She listens to and looks at the Latin.
She memorizes the French. The slur of the sound. The la, the le, the il, the elle . . . then hic, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius . . .

(If it is foreign to me, I am foreign to it.)

Le Bateau Ivre . . .

The Drunken Boat.

The boat is drunk!
The sea under the boat is drunk
Drunk sea, rocking boat.

On its way where, that bateau adult, that beast, that Eve, battling the ivy-green waves, drunk and evil? Drunk on evil?
Very drunk.