In Which Bruce Learns to Speak English
The title is a little misleading, for in fact Bruce already speaks English. If I sometimes reproduce here in his low-fidelity anglophonics the things he says to me, it is not (usually) to give the reader a cheap laugh at a Frenchman’s expense but rather to capture Bruce’s anecdotes and advice in all their Zen-like purity. That being said, I am convinced that the English Bruce knows is all the English Bruce wants to know.
Through the Brucean dialect, a world of elegant simplicity comes to life. Practically everything is made, be it dinner, a meeting with a friend, a trip abroad, or a bit of friendly “musculation.” Whatever cannot be made is highly likely instead to be taken. Coffee, pronounced with the intonation of the French café, can be both made and taken. Often in the afternoon following lunch.
Moreover, Bruce’s English knows few tenses. Away with the workaday drudgery of the present perfect progressive or the damnably difficult future anterior: past, present, and future merge into vivid simultaneity, as if the collision of French and English had by means of some linguistic miracle produced an accidental grammar of Japanese austerity whose immediacy is modified solely by ancillary signs like yesterday and tomorrow.
My favorite part of Bruce’s personal patois, however, is the way in which all of our relationships, our love affairs, practically any event that transpires over a period of time, even the descent of man and the sum of his experiences on this planet, his wars and exploits and discoveries, are boiled down to a single basic and all-encompassing term: “the story.”
— Yesterday, I think about my story with Natasha, Bruce tells me. Tomorrow I call her to ask why she does not say if she has the ticket I buy her. Yes, tonight I make some sport… Tomorrow morning, the car. Fix the car… Then I call. Or is it better, sending an email? Because it is expensive, the call….
…and so on.