Claudine Toutoungi

The Linguisticator meets you at Carrefour. Un vrai galant, he buys you rouge à lèvres. Teaches socially accepted forms of extrication. If someone gropes you, say Arrête tes bêtises. If someone wonders why your hair is mussed, say C’est le mistral. If someone asks you to admire their ugly baby, say Je me sauve and leave. The Linguisticator is a veritable language experience. You programmed him in Oregon but he caught a virus. Now his Frenchness is cent fois off the spectrum. Sings Aznavour as you tour the centre historique and Piaf on the tram; Padam, Padam, when it clangs. The Linguisticator can stop a tram with one raised eyebrow, one soi-disant eyebrow. A fatalist, he has abandoned caution with certain potent liquors of the region. Ask him if he’s OK, 
he’ll say Le silence éternel de ces vastes espaces m’effraie. Ask him what irony means, he says Tout pour le mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles. But if his ennui peaks, he suspends all conversation. Broods for hours muttering Putain, je suis rien qu’un two-bit trompe l’œil. Malaise on a loop. It never fades.

in the blackest recesses of Bistro Malatesta entre les heures du quatre à cinq (forgoing his liaison with Odette for the third time in as many days) Prudhomme observes a snailfish undulating round the hat stand’s spine, the stalagmites of candles (its sad, small eyes, its cryptic lack of scales) wants to cleave to it wants to shake the dipsomaniac in the corner, hiss Ay caramba! Have you seen it? Here on the Rue Mouffetard — so far from deep-sea canyons, so far from home? considers eating it flavored with rosemary, flavored with dill whiskery thing sees it, loses it in Gauloise furls, catches it again, its curl/uncurl progression along a velveteen banquette it stirs him — its decision in oblivion to be a thing of  light and so gelatinous thinks of turtles nibbled at by surgeonfish wonders if perhaps he’s lost his grip, and if  he has, likes it