He nice, the Jesus

Last night as I was exiting the Pentagon City Metro station, there were two guys at the faregates whose cards weren’t working. As I passed them, I heard them speaking Spanish to each other. Now, my spoken Spanish has fallen woefully into disuse, so I started to imagine what my esoteric linguistic abilities might sound like had I stopped to help: “In what station commenced you all your journey? Your card cannot, uh… you all have to use the machine of adding money, for that you all may exit the station.” Yeah, baby, work that subjunctive.

Later that night Thom and I were talking about David Sedaris, and I was reminded of one of my favorite stories, “Jesus Shaves,” which is included in the collection Me Talk Pretty One Day. I forgot to link to it on Sunday, as it concerns David and his fellow students in French class, trying to explain the concept of Easter using their beginning-level language skills:

“It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and… oh, shit.”

She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid.

“He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two… morsels of… lumber.”

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”

“He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”

“He nice, the Jesus.”

“He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”

Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as “to give of yourself your only begotten son.” Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

“Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb,” the Italian nanny explained. “One, too, may eat of the chocolate.”

“And who brings the chocolate?” the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, “The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.”

My classmates reacted as though I’d attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

“A rabbit?” The teacher, assuming I’d used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. “You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have the basket and foods.”

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. “No, no,” she said. “Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome.”

I called for a time-out. “But how do the bell know where you live?”

“Well,” she said, “how does a rabbit?”

It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That’s a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth–and they can’t even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter Bunny has character; he’s someone you’d like to meet and shake hands with. A bell has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet. It’s like saying that come Christmas, a magic dustpan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they’ve got more bells than they know what to do with right here in Paris? That’s the most implausible aspect of the whole story, as there’s no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell’s dog–and even then he’d need papers. It just didn’t add up.

Hilarious. This whole story, along with many other Sedaris gems, used to be available free in Esquire magazine’s online archives, but I see now one has to pay for access. Oh, well. Go get Me Talk Pretty One Day, or better yet find the audio version, so you can hear David himself. It’s worth it.

Speaking of David Sedaris, he’s got a new story in the current New Yorker (Apr. 19 & 26, 2004), in which he finds the perfect apartment in the least likely of places (“Possession”).