While I was sitting alone in the media room at a volleyball tournament in Montreal, someone wearing a volunteer shirt entered the room and asked “vous travaillez ici?”
Fiddling with my camera, I felt the swell of irrational pride born of grasping the most mundane interaction in a foreign language. It was the same swell felt navigating the metro station earlier in the morning (the ubiquity of English training wheels everywhere notwithstanding).
In France, my French is, at best, survival level—adequate to (mostly) read signs, order things, ask questions, understand enough of a brief direct response to guess at the rest … and that’s about as far as it goes. In Quebec, it descends even further, to mostly useless.
But I understood this question! I was indeed working here, to a given value of “work.”
I smiled and replied “Oui, je travaille,” aware that this likely wasn’t the most grammatically nimble response but not confident enough in the conjugation (je suis travaillé?) of anything else.
Her brow furrowed slightly and she pointed at the floor and said … something. My run of comprehension ended abruptly. She beckoned me over, pointed again at a small puddle of water on the floor and repeated herself. I offered the universal helpless smile of ignorance.
Was she accusing me of spilling the water? It felt that way. J’accuse! After a morning in the hot sun, I could have assured her I valued every drop of water in my cup (although I would have struggled to assure her that in French).
“Mop,” she pantomimed in English.
Then she harrumphed, turned and left the room. A bit rude, I thought.
At which point it dawned on me that my shirt was the same light blue as those worn by the volunteers on site.
One domino tumbled into another.
If I asked someone “You work here?” I would almost certainly not be asking if they were, at that moment, engaged in the act of working in that space. I would be asking if they were employed there. Obviously.
But suffering from the heady combination of happiness to be at the tournament and understanding an unprompted question in French more complicated than “Ca va?” I had interpreted the words in the most literal manner possible.
It was a media work room, I was, more or less, media. I was working.
In reality, to her, I appeared to be a volunteer being a slacker in an empty room.
Vous travaillez ici, indeed.
I went back out to the courts. When I returned a few hours later, someone had mopped the puddle. Merci.
Graham Hays 