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And yet, and yet, there is to all this another dimension. For in speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent, more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced to basic adjectives, like "happy" and "sad," and erring on the side of including our "monsieurs," and we are obliged to grow resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child rebuilding Chartres out of Lego blocks). Think of how English sounds as spoken by Marcello Mastroianni: romantic, suggestive, helplessly endearing. Might the same not be true in reverse? Peter Falk appearing in a German movie (Wings of Desire) seems almost as exotic as Isabelle Adjani in an American one.
Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our minds, but we do willy-nilly speak our hearts. We grow more direct in another tongue and say the things we would not say at home -- as if, you might say, we were under a foreign influence. Inhibitions are the first thing to get lost in translation: "Je t'aime" comes much more easily than "I love you." Small wonder, perhaps, that spies are gifted linguists by nature as well as by training (John le Carre was one of the most brilliant language students of his day); entering another tongue, we steal into another self.
; And even when we're not speaking Spanish but only English that a Spaniard will understand, the effect is just as rejuvenating. How vivid the cliche "over the hill" sounds when we're explaining it to an Osaka businessman! How rich the idiom "raining cats and dogs!" Speaking English as a second language, we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences but just to making sense. English is the official language of the European Free Trade Association, though none of its six members has English as its mother tongue. Why? Well, says the secretary-general disarmingly, "using English means we don't talk too much, since none of us knows the nuances."
Besides, whether we inflict our French on the concierge or not, many of our transactions will come down, in the end, to an antic game of charades. English may be the universal language, but it's still less universal than hands and eyes. So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language, we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which, in every language, means that your problems are just beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical that the Argentines call The Rebel Nun. And when you say "Thank you" to him -- in Spanish -- it can almost sound like a kind of grace.