Lydia Davis: Break It Down

Do you remember la femme ? Do you remember what she was doing? It is still dark, les vaches are gone from her sight and quieter than they were earlier, except for the one bellowing vache who is ill and was not let out that morning by le fermier for fear that she would infect the others, and la femme is still there, peeling vegetables. She is — now listen carefully— dans la cuisine . Do you remember what la cuisine is? It is the only place, except perhaps for the sunny front courtyard on a cool late summer afternoon, where une femme would reasonably peel les legumes .

La femme is holding a small knife dans her red-knuckled hand and there are bits of potato skin stuck to her wrist, just as there are feathers stuck in le sang on the chopping block outside the back door, smaller feathers, however, than would be expected from un poulet . The glistening white peeled pommes de terre are dans une bassine and la bassine is dans the sink, and les vaches are dans la grange , where they should have been an hour ago. Above them the bales of hay are stacked neatly dans the loft, and near them is a calf dans the calves’ pen. The rows of bare light bulbs in the ceiling shine on the clanking stanchions. Stanchion is another word you will probably not have to know in French, though it is a nice one to know in English.

Now that you know the words la femme, dans , and la cuisine , you will have no trouble understanding your first complete sentence in French: La femme est dans la cuisine . Say it over until you feel comfortable with it. La femme est —spelled e s t but don’t pronounce the s or the t — dans la cuisine. Here are a few more simple sentences to practice on: La vache est dans la grange. La pomme de terre est dans la bassine. La bassine est dans the sink.

The whereabouts of le fermier is more of a problem, but in the next lesson we may be able to follow him into la ville. Before going on to la ville, however, do study the list of additional vocabulary:

le sac: bag

la grive : thrush

l’alouette: lark

l’aile: wing

la plume: feather

la hachette: hatchet

le manche: handle

l’anxiété: anxiety

le meurtre: murder

She is tired and a little ill and not thinking very clearly and as she tries to get dressed she keeps asking him where her things are and he very patiently tells her where each thing is — first her pants, then her shirt, then her socks, then her glasses. He suggests to her that she should put her glasses on and she does, but this doesn’t seem to help very much. There isn’t much light coming into the room. Part of the way through this search and this attempt to dress herself she lies down on the bed mostly dressed while he lies under the covers after earlier getting up to feed the cat, opening the can of food with a noise that puzzled her because it sounded like milk squirting from the teat of a cow into a metal bucket. As she lies there nearly dressed beside him he talks to her steadily about various things, and after a while, as she has been listening to him with different reactions according to what he says to her, first resentment, then great interest, then amusement, then distraction, then resentment again, then amusement again, he asks her if she minds him talking so much and if she wants him to stop or go on. She says it is time for her to get ready to go and she gets up off the bed.

She resumes her search for her clothes and he resumes helping her. She asks him where her ring is and where her shoes are, and where her jacket is and where her purse is. He tells her where each thing is and then gets up and hands her some things even before she asks. By the time she is fully dressed to go, she sees more clearly what is happening, that her situation is very like a Hasidic tale she read on the subway the day before from a book that is still in her purse. She asks him if she can read him a story, he hesitates, and she thinks he probably doesn’t like her to read to him, even though he likes to read to her. She says it is only a paragraph, he agrees, and they sit down at the kitchen table. By now he is dressed too, in a white T-shirt and pants that fit him nicely. From the thin brown book she reads the following tale:

“There was once a man who was very stupid. When he got up in the morning it was so hard for him to find his clothes that at night he almost hesitated to go to bed for thinking of the trouble he would have on waking. One evening he took paper and pencil and with great effort, as he undressed, noted down exactly where he put everything he had on. The next morning, well pleased with himself, he took the slip of paper in his hand and read: ‘cap’—there it was, he set it on his head; ‘pants’—there they lay, he got into them; and so it went until he was fully dressed. But now he was overcome with consternation, and he said to himself: ‘This is all very well, I have found my clothes and I am dressed, but where am I myself? Where in the world am I ?’ And he looked and looked, but it was a vain search; he could not find himself. And that is how it is with us, said the rabbi.”

She stops reading. He likes the story, but does not seem to like the ending—“Where am I?”—as much as he likes the beginning, about the man’s problem and his solution.

She herself feels she is like the very stupid man, not only because she couldn’t find her clothes, not only because sometimes other simple things besides getting dressed are also beyond her, but most of all because she often doesn’t know where she is, and particularly concerning this man she doesn’t know where she is. She thinks she is probably no place in the life of this man, who is also not only not in his own house, just as she is not in her own house when she visits him and in fact doesn’t know where this house is but arrives here as though in a dream, stumbling and falling in the street, but who is not altogether in his own life anymore and might well also ask himself, “Where am I?”

In fact, she wants to call herself a very stupid man. Can’t she say, This woman is a very stupid man, just the way a few weeks before she thought she had called herself a bearded man? Because if the very stupid man in the story behaves just the way she herself would behave or is even right now behaving, can’t she consider herself to be a very stupid man, just as a few weeks ago she thought anyone writing at the next table in a café might be considered to be a bearded man? She was sitting in a café and a bearded man was writing two tables away from her and two loud women came in to have lunch and disturbed the bearded man and she wrote down in her notebook that they had disturbed the bearded man writing at the next table and then saw that since she herself, as she wrote this, was writing at the next table, she was probably calling herself a bearded man. It was not that she had changed in any way, but that the words bearded man could now apply to her. Or perhaps she had changed.

She has read the tale out loud to him because it is so like what has just happened to her, but then she wonders if it is not the other way around and the tale lodged somewhere in her mind the day before and made it possible for her to forget where all her clothes were and have such trouble dressing. Later that morning, or perhaps on another morning, feeling the same stupidity leaving this man who is not quite in his life anymore, as she looks again for herself in his life and can’t find herself anywhere, there are other confusions. She cries and may be crying only because it is raining outdoors and she has been staring at the rain coming down the windowpane, and then wonders if she is crying more because it is raining or if the rain made it possible for her to cry in the first place, since she doesn’t cry very often, and finally thinks the two, the rain and the tears, are the same. Then, out on the street, there is a sudden great din coming from several places at once — a few cars honking, a truck’s loud engine roaring, another truck with loose parts rattling over an uneven road surface, a roadmender pounding — and the din seems to be occurring right inside her as if her anger and confusion had emptied her and made a place in the middle of her chest for this great clashing of metal, or as if she herself had left this body and left it open to this noise, and then she wonders, Has the noise really come into me, or has something in me gone out into the street to make such a great noise?