School started again and I still did not have my degree certificate translated, or my carte de séjour. This was becoming a joke, and not a very funny one at that.

I telephoned Mme Erivan at the Chamber of Commerce. I had left a photocopy of said certificate with [...]]]> Previous chapter: Exploring the local flora and fauna.

School started again and I still did not have my degree certificate translated, or my carte de séjour. This was becoming a joke, and not a very funny one at that.

I telephoned Mme Erivan at the Chamber of Commerce. I had left a photocopy of said certificate with her the previous week. I strongly suspected that if I gave her the original I would never see it again. Mme Erivan said it should be ready by Monday, but I should call before coming “in case there was a problem”. What kind of problem could there possibly be? There were only about twenty words on the certificate, I was effectively paying for a rubber stamp.

David Dabydeen, author of “The Counting House” was doing a book tour of the French Caribbean to promote its translation into French. He  just happened to be giving a talk at Leila’s school, so Abigail and I thought it would be fun to gatecrash. Since we had been invited to the reading and meal that evening, I didn’t see there would be any harm. Leila, incidentally, was nowhere to be seen. Somehow I managed to get on the local news that evening, as RFO were there filming the talk.

After that fun-packed day there was still more to come. The dinner and talk was a posh restaurant in Gosier. The food was fantastic. Leila was there and I couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be nice. She completely ignored me anyway, but I noticed that everyone else ignored her and I had plenty of people to speak to. She was wearing a strange zebra print outfit which sagged and strained in all the wrong places.

Crazy Jean was on our table, but behaved himself. In France, they don’t expect you to stand up, manoeuvre a plate, knife, fork, and wine glass and hold a conversation at the same time. Party planners take note: you are provided with a chair and a place at a table, much more civilised. During the conversation, I recounted the translation story to Murielle, who promptly introduced me to Mme Erivan. The certificate will be ready on Monday morning. Typical of the way things work here. But something else happened which was funny, in a cringing kind of way.

David Dabydeen was saying about when the book had been translated into French, and how it was difficult to render puns and word plays into another language. In one part of the book, one of the characters corrupts some Latin dictum by changing “sunt” into “cunt”

“What was this word,” asked Mme Erivan, earnestly, “That means a man’s thing?”

“It doesn’t mean a man’s thing. It’s a woman’s thing,” I said, embarrassed.

“What was the word? I need to know this slang term,” she insisted.

So I told her. Murielle (the one with the hair) was howling with laughter.

“How’s it spelt?”

How I kept a straight face is beyond me. Murielle pointed out to Mme Erivan (the translator) that it is probably the rudest word in the English language. She was duly apologetic.

“But I needed to know.”

Yes well, we left it there. What was she going to be translating with that word in, I wondered?

The certificate story ends happily, as on Monday morning, I wandered down to the Chamber of Commerce. The certificate was indeed ready and Mme Erivan only charged me a hundred francs instead of two hundred “because of the inconvenience”.