How is it that different cultures suffer from different maladies? Back in 19th century England and America the Dyspepsia had the privilege of bossing around Anglo-Saxon bowels, wrecking havoc throughout the peptic quarters and causing terrific discomforts aggravated by rudimentary plumbing and the corset. Charles Darwin, it is said, suffered so terribly from flatulence that he spent most of his time in the garden to avoid society. Who would have thought the unlikely combination of genius and gas could advance the life sciences as it did?
Meanwhile, across the Channel and the Atlantic, the French carried on as if angels presided over their digestion. They had their complaints, of course they did, but they saw the liver, not the bowels, as their nexus of suffering. As far as I know the Crises de Foie (which literally translates as “liver crises”) happens only to the French. Americans certainly do not have them. We have nausea, dizziness, stomachaches, headaches etc, but basically we leave our livers out of the picture. Basically, we believe the liver too serious an organ to burden with pedestrian complaints.
The French think otherwise. They will sit down to a dominical repast of foie gras sur toasts, potage Ambassadeur, cailles à la minute, trou normand, faisan à la Sainte Alliance, assortiment de fromages, charlotte aux framboises, petits fours et cafés – all washed down with champagne and a velvety Château Latour –, then take a postprandial along the river Seine in weather slightly too cold for the constitution, or so they will claim the next morning when the inevitable crise de foie grips them. Rich food paying a visit to a hypersensitive liver that suddenly takes chill will bring on the Crisis, but for some confounding reason this only happens to the French.
I was skeptical about the crise de foie up until a few years ago, when I experienced one myself. This occurred due to a curious convergence of circumstances on a train and which involved a pun that convinced me, more than the official confirmation letter I received from Jacques Chirac in 2001, that I must at last be French. Here is what happened:
I had spent a week in Touques, a village near Trouville, where my friend Marion had lent me her little fisherman’s house so that I could get some writing done. At the time I was trying to breathe life into a novel I had recently begun and feared might end up stillborn. I spent the week like a frantic neonatal nurse tracking a erratic and feeble heartbeat; by the time I had to leave, I was feeling thoroughly ambivalent about the work, disheartened and ready to shelf it along with another I had miscarried not long before.
(A picture of Touques where there are five hair salons, one boulangerie, one boucherie and a Proxi supermarket. A good place to go to get coiffed.)
Around eleven or so I got on my train in Deauville with my backpack, computer, and a ham sandwich. Twenty minutes later, when the train stopped in Lisieux, home of the ever-popular Saint Thérèse de Lisieux (watch scene from Alain Cavalier’s amazing Thérèse below), a group of some twelve American priests got on and settled into the rows of seats just facing mine.
After my initial “Oh no, a posse of padres!” reaction, I decided to settle down and get accustomed to the view. The priests wore their white clerical collars so they must have been on duty of some sort. Had they been on a retreat in Saint Teresa’s sanctuary? As pondering invariably makes me hungry, I got out my ham sandwich and promptly took a bite, still regarding the Pères. Suddenly I began to have pains in my right side — mute, stabbing pains. The aches were shouting from the liver region, but what were they saying? Sandwich? I wondered. Was the sandwich bad? But it tasted perfectly fine and furthermore my stomach would be screeching if the ham had turned, not my liver. I determined there could be no possible connection between the sandwich and the ache and that if I ignored the pain it would go away. But it did not subside. For the next four days it continued, growing increasingly insistent until I at last decided to make an appointment to see Dr. Portes.
Dr. Portes is a generalist who practices naturopathy, homeopathy and high rates. I only see him if I really have to. His consults from his plush, high ceiling cabinet in the 17th arrondissement where he writes out prescriptions that list at least ten remedies, all of which are natural but difficult to come by and as pricey as the consultation. Nevertheless he is excellent and most often worth the trouble and cost of journeying to him. In this case he proved priceless.
“Qu’est-ce qui vous amène aujourd’hui, Madame ? (What brings you here today, Madam ?)
« J’ai mal, docteur, ici, j’ai des douleurs depuis quatre jours,” I explain pointing to my liver, where it hurts.
Dr. Portes looks at me and nods his head ever so slightly. He lifts an eyebrow and says, “Madame, vous avez une crise de foie.” (Madam, you have a liver crisis)
I’m afraid I’m going to have to interrupt this sequence just a moment to address my non-Francophone readers. To grasp the key pun about to play out, one must know that in French the words “foi” meaning faith and “foie” meaning liver are homonyms. They sound the same but are spelled differently.
(This is “foie”)
(this is “foi”)
So what I hear when Dr. Portes makes his pronouncement is not “crise de foie” (liver crisis) but “crise de foi” (faith crisis); and what flashes in my mind at just that moment are the American priests in the train who I could not help but stare at given our seating arrangement. Seeing the American priests, these Fathers of Faith, had triggered the pains in my liver. I had indeed been undergoing a faith crisis; I had spent the week doubting my work, my abilities, my hopes for the future, but of course I didn’t want to admit to such despairing feelings. I thought it better to just push them down and get on with it. But emotions don’t just flit away and the body sees right through such cheesy self-deception schemes. It will find a way to make you real. Gentle Friends, THE BODY PUNS! And in my case, it puns in French, which proved to me once and for all that despite my Californian origins and occasional faulty grammar, my love of log cabins and patchwork quilts, I am firmly French, like it or not.
People say that when you dream in a foreign language you are on the road to mastering it. But when your body puns in a foreign language? It is at this point that the language has mastered you.