“French For Beginners”
You want the book about the mole, which you’ve been reading with your mother all the time lately, but it’s in French, a language I speak badly—“You do know French, Dad,” you say, to encourage me. I was expecting you to complain, even cry, but instead you talk to me as if you were the father and I a boy with stage fright.
I search your shelves for that elusive little rectangular book with the hope of not finding it, but I see it right away. I consider pretending I can’t find it, but I don’t want to lie to you—I don’t want to lie, and at the same time I want you to believe, to go on believing, that I know French. Or maybe what I want is for my mere desire to read you this book to cause a solid prior knowledge of the French language to miraculously appear inside my head. Because I want to read it to you well, without omissions or hesitations. I want there to be music. The first thing we do every morning is listen to music and dance. And when we flop onto the sofa to read, I want literature to be a natural continuation of that music—I want it to be another kind of music.
Reading doesn’t fall under the category of things that we do for you until you learn to do them alone.The mole book is a great story, and it also harmonizes with your recent zeal for all things scatological: someone has pooped on the mole’s head, and instead of cleaning it he decides to use it as evidence to find the culprit, so off he goes to talk to the pigeon, sporting the turd like a topknot or a crown. The pigeon claims innocence and straightaway produces a spontaneous evacuation that looks nothing at all like the turd the protagonist is wearing on his head. The poor mole is brave and dignified as he confronts his other suspects, but the hare, the goat, the cow, and the hog all produce their own fecal samples that serve as irrefutable alibis, so he has no choice but to consult the expert opinion of some flies who land on his poop crown and conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt…
You already know how it ends. Endings, for you, are not tied to closure, they don’t represent the finish line but rather an intermediate position, like when a cyclist completes a lap but still has several rounds to go before the race is over. And really, that’s how literature for adults functions too, though we tend to ignore that fact; we tend to surrender to the superstition of the ending, the denouement, because sometimes we need to assume that stories end, obediently, on the final page.
I do my best to translate, improvising different and hopefully funny voices for the animals in the story. There are moments when I feel like I’m getting away with it, but no, it’s not going well, and you know it. I can tell you’re not focusing, as you usually do, only on the pictures: you’re also looking at those obscure words that you associate with the characters’ familiar phrases. Though you know that reading with me is not the same as reading with your mother, you’re put off by how different my version is from hers. You correct me, perfect my translation as we go. In the rereading, the first rereading, I incorporate those nuances that I missed the first time and that you’ve just explained, so the story flows better and my performance can evolve—the mole’s voice, for example, can be funnier.
*
You know the mole’s story to perfection. By this point you could almost read it yourself, although for now reading is something you do through your mother or me or your grandmother or any other adult who’s nearby. There are days when you say “Read to me,” but you also often say “I want to read,” which of course doesn’t mean you want to learn how to read for yourself, but that you want me to read for you, or maybe more precisely that you want what happens when we read to happen, because what happens is different every time, we know that by now: between reading and rereading, in a matter of seconds, the book has changed and we have changed, too; we pause at different moments, we play a game made up of interruptions and continuations that is always new.
Back when you were just starting to walk, you would see me reading and you’d climb up on my lap to get between the book and my eyes, the way cats do, though you had the courtesy not to scratch the pages. You soon lost that deference, though, and your curiosity turned to rebellion: seeing me read alone, in silence, became intolerable for you, and you would snatch the book away or tear the page. And it’s true that silent reading does seem individualistic, stingy, shabby. These days when you catch me in the miserly act of reading to myself, you ask me to read out loud and I always do, so you’ve already heard a few sentences by Jenny Offill and a couple of lines by Idea Vilariño, and even two or three paragraphs of The Magic Mountain.
No one taught you anything about music—there was no need. Music was just there, from before you were born; no one had to explain what it was, what it is, how it works. No one has explained literature to you either, and hopefully no one ever will. Silent reading is a sort of conquest; those of us who read in silence and solitude learn, precisely, how to be alone, or maybe it’s more like we capture a less aggressive solitude, a solitude emptied of anxiety; we feel inhabited, multiplied, accompanied, as we read in our sonorous silent solitude. But you will learn all this for yourself in a few years, I know. You will decide for yourself whether you’re still interested in the form of knowledge that literature enables, so strange, so specific, so hard to describe.
We read in the morning and sometimes also in the afternoon, and every night your mother or I read you three stories at bedtime. You won’t accept one story or two, it has to be three. And you never ask us to repeat any of the three bedtime stories. It’s now, in the morning, when you seem to prefer the repetition of the same story. Maybe diurnal books function for you more like music and the nocturnal ones are properly stories, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions, because on the other hand they’re the same books, it’s not that there are separate repertoires of daytime and nighttime stories (the only stable and enigmatic category is the one you call “poop books,” which, oddly, does not include the mole story). It also sometimes happens that in the morning you ask me for the story we read the night before, as if during the eight or nine hours you slept the book had been hanging there, hovering above you in your bed.
Every night, storytime builds an imminence or a threshold: it’s the stretch of the journey we can only traverse by sailing. When we read, flashlight in hand, The Game of Shadows by Hervé Tullet, the ceremony lengthens out interminably, and a similar thing happens with The Book with No Pictures by B. J. Novak, which makes you cackle ferociously, or with The Smelly Book by Babette Cole, or with almost any of the magnificent stories by Gianni Rodari. Really there are a lot of books that work against us, because instead of building to the brink of sleep, they wake you up a little more: suddenly you seem convinced that sleeping is a waste of time. But what the hell, literature’s function has never been to induce anyone to sleep. Sometimes reading riles up your imagination, which is always pretty riled up anyway, but even so it helps to end the day on a high note. What matters is the ritual, of course, the ceremony. The company.
In his beautiful book Reads Like a Novel, Daniel Pennac laments that he and his wife stopped reading stories to their son when he learned to read for himself. But maybe it wasn’t the mother’s or father’s fault. Maybe it was the boy himself who decided to leave them out of the reading ceremony. Your mom and I don’t want that to happen. Reading doesn’t fall under the category of things that we do for you until you learn to do them alone. It’s not like brushing your teeth or trimming your nails.
Nor is it like walking, although I tend to think it’s similar. We carried you in our arms until you learned to walk, and we still carry you when you’re tired and sometimes you’re not tired and we carry you anyway, and we will go on doing it as long as we can bear your weight and you can bear the symbolic weight of having us carry you. Now you read through us, but once you can read for yourself it might stop seeming fun to have us read to you. We’ll have to come up with something, some way to continue the ritual, which is the most important one of the day; may it change shape, but may it go on happening.
After the stories comes the music, the last music of the day. Always, since your very first days of life, I sing “Beautiful Boy,” but the other songs are not lullabies. Maybe “Two of Us” has something of the lullaby about it, though it’s not a song about fathers and sons but rather love and companionship, and that’s why I sing it to you. The rest of the songs—by Violeta Parra, Silvio Rodríguez, Andrés Calamaro, Los Jaivas—are love songs or protest songs or songs of love and protest.
Your mother and I take turns every night with the ritual of the three books and the three or four (or five) songs. Mornings, however, always start with me. I, who used to be a night owl, now get up early with you: we have watched the sunrise together almost every day of your life. You haven’t always appreciated that I was your unconditional morning companion, though. In times that now seem remote, you would give me a look that was a mixture of suspicion and something serious or haughty that I don’t know how to define. You would cry for twenty seconds, sometimes a full minute, before accepting my consolation. I guess the living room was like the bar where you came to cry out your breastfed heartaches, and I was the bartender who knew just how you liked your orange juice, or the bland but friendly regular who was always willing to listen and laugh at your jokes and pay your tab.
*
“Let’s keep going, Dad,” you say to me now, on this particular morning. I don’t feel like reading the mole story for a third time, but I know that in this case keep going means keep reading the same book. In the middle of this third reading, your mother appears in the living room and attentively salutes the sun while we read the mole story for a fourth, a fifth time, and judging by her sly smile I figure I am barely scraping by in the French literature lesson. “Thank you,” you say to me, in any case, before leaving with your grandmother, who has just come by to take you to Chapultepec Park. I’m pleased and proud whenever you remember to give thanks, but this time it also throws me off and moves me, because it’s the first time you have thanked me for the reading or the company or whatever it is you’re thanking me for—I’m really not clear on it. Thank you for having read that book in French even though you don’t know French. Thank you for trying to overcome your intellectual limitations to entertain me. Maybe you mean something like that.
I should head to the service room on the roof where I usually work, but before going up I make more coffee and return to the sofa to read the story of the mole again, I don’t know why. Well, there’s no mystery there: it’s because I miss you. It happens to me a lot, and to your mom, too: just when we finally have time to work, we’re distracted by your absence.
I turn the pages, in training to read you this story again in the near future. Though it doesn’t have many words, this is, strictly speaking, the first book I have read in French. It’s a funny realization, because French is the language of Marguerite Duras, Flaubert, Perec, and Bove, among other authors I have tried to read in the original. In those cases, though the results may sometimes be decent, they’re always false or fraudulent, since I’ve already read those authors’ books in Spanish translations, and there are passages that I know by heart and unfamiliar words I figure out from context or don’t mind not knowing.
Yes, the story of the mole is the first book I have truly read in French, and the fact that you were the one who helped me read it strikes me as a crucial, beautiful, telling detail. Only now do I notice the story’s title, because with children’s books—this is obvious, but I have only just discovered it— titles fulfill a different function, they matter less. The truth is I don’t know the titles of many of the books we’ve read together; like you, I don’t identify them by the title but by the animal or color on the cover or the size of the book, so it’s not at all strange that I don’t know the grandiose title of the mole story: De la petite taupe qui voulait savoir qui lui avait fait sur la tête, which in English would be something like About the little mole that wanted to know who had done that on his head (I see online that there’s an English edition called The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit).
Titles aren’t important in children’s literature, and perhaps authors matter even less. That’s what I think when I notice the perfectly German names of the author and illustrator of the mole book: Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch. Only then do I comprehend that our book is a translation, as I confirm in the tiny print of the credits: Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat. That’s the original title.
It seems impossible, it’s true, to imagine you reading my books: the ones I’ve written or the novel I’m trying to write now.I ask your mom why she bought the book in French and not Spanish. She says they were out of the Spanish edition, and that she would have bought it in German or Japanese or in any other language because she thinks it’s great and she knows it by heart, her mom used to read it to her when she was little. When she reads it with you she barely glances at the printed words, she just operates on memory; she’s sure that she is reading with the same words her mother read in the Spanish book—the Spanish translation—that they had in their house. I ask what happened to her old Spanish mole book. She tells me that at some point her mom donated all the books they used to read together to a library.
*
I go up to the rooftop office thinking about that earnest and outraged mole who moves down through the generations with a funny turd on his head. Your grandmother, your mother, and you are suddenly one single person who speaks, listens, and smiles. You also have storybooks at your grandmother’s house, books I don’t always know about. “These chocolates are going to get a coup d’état,” you said one day, and I spent hours thinking about where you had learned the expression coup d’état, and even started to feel guilty for having let it slip carelessly without explaining its horrendous meaning to you. But then I went to your grandmother’s house and saw the big Mafalda collection and understood. I read you some jokes in an Argentine accent, like I do with books by Liniers or Isol, but you just stared at me, disconcerted and then furious, because your grandma “translates” them to Mexican. “Mafalda isn’t Argentine, Dad!” you yelled, on the verge of tears.
Suddenly I let my mood darken at the evidence, which my parents confirmed, that no one ever read me stories at bedtime. It’s a self-pitying thought, weak and easy. I recall my grandmother, who instead of reading us stories would tell us all kinds of gossip about the community she lost when she was young, in the 1939 earthquake in Chillán. Almost all of her childhood friends had died in that earthquake, but their stories remained, and my grandmother savored them as she called them up for my sister and me. Then, out of nowhere she would remember that the protagonists of her fictions were all dead, and she would feel their absence and start crying, and we had to climb into her bed and console her. Those stories were our Latin, as Natalia Ginzburg would say. Maybe when I started writing, years later, I wanted to honor and imitate the swings between laughter and tears that occurred when we listened to my grandmother.
*
I try to get back into the novel I’m working on, but this time I’m distracted by the thought, also somber, that books are not like clothes that we outgrow and give away. On the spot I decide, with ridiculous solemnity, that we will never get rid of the books we read with you, because it would be like throwing away photo albums; I think of those books, your books, as documents, and I want to store them away as if they were locks of your hair or the first ultrasound images. It’s a silly thought, especially coming from me, because before moving to Mexico I gave away my entire library. I didn’t think it made sense to change countries lugging dozens of boxes of books that I would perhaps never even read again.
Your room already held a small library when you arrived. As soon as we found out you were coming, your mom and I started spending hours in the children’s sections of bookstores in search of your future books; even when we knew nothing about you, we already knew some of the books we would read together. Since then we always make sure there are new stories around so you don’t get bored, but really, we’re the ones at risk of boredom.
Your library is that other, lost, library of mine, shrunk to miniature and of course perfected, because it remains untouched by the tsundoku that spreads like a virus over the house’s other shelves, so full of books-to-read that sometimes looking at them is like checking the stack of bills to be paid. Your crowded shelves hold no unopened, ignored books. We have read all of your books, by now, at least ten times.
*
I make some progress in my novel, though while I write I keep thinking about your books, about children’s books, and about my own spectacular ignorance. After a cursory five-minute Google search, I learn that the mole story is an absolute classic of children’s literature, and that not knowing it is like having no idea who Sandro Botticelli or Martina Navratilova are. Picture book, illustrated hardcover, comic book, cartoon, graphic novel…I go over the concepts like when I had to memorize the Köppen climate classification groups, or as if I were prepping to impart a master class. But I don’t have to give a lecture. All I have to do is sit beside you, that’s all, and read to you the parts of the book that have words, while you read all the rest. And it’s perhaps more important to realize that it’s the words that are all the rest.
It seems so absurd to me that there is such a thing as non-children’s literature, literature for adults, for non-children, a literature-literature that is the real literature; the idea that I write and read a real literature and the books you and I read together are a kind of substitute or alternative or preparation for real literature seems as unfair as it is false. And honestly, I don’t see any less literature in a story by Maurice Sendak or María Elena Walsh than in any of my favorites from “grown- up literature.” It seems impossible, it’s true, to imagine you reading my books: the ones I’ve written or the novel I’m trying to write now. The stories are almost always sad and perhaps unnecessary; before you read them I would have to explain so many things, things that you could probably understand but that I’m not sure I would be able to explain.
*
I head back down to the apartment with the excuse of eating a granola bar, and I go into your room. I look at your clothes, your bookshelves. We’ve already given away a lot of your clothes, and I love seeing, for example, a friend’s little girl sporting your old solar system T-shirt. But it’s hard for me to imagine someday giving away your books or your little red guitar or your astronaut suit.
You, of course, will be the one who decides whether or not to get rid of those books, which might be in the way when you want to step down, once and for all and forever, from childhood and childish things. I stand gazing at the chaotic shelf, and suddenly understand that those books whose titles I don’t remember, written by people whose names I don’t know, are exactly the kind of books that I want to write from now on.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra. Used with permission from The Wylie Agency LLC. Copyright © 2023, Alejandro Zambra, Translation copyright © 2024 by Megan McDowell. Published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
