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Homage to Falicon
Falicon, Southern France

Welcome to Falicon– the village seal

“Where in Falicon?” the taxi driver in Nice wants to know. “Raymond and Joseph’s bench, of course.” That’s what I want to say, but reminding myself that the paunchy, flannel-shirted stars of my favorite language-learning video series are unlikely to be household names along the Riviera, I say, “Oh, the square will do…”

It’s a steep, curvy road lined with olive trees. The driver misses the final turn and calls his dispatcher to locate the elusive village. For my husband whom I’m dragging along on this pilgrimage on our one free day in Nice, Falicon is just another funny-sounding name, but for me, it’s tinged with possibility. After all, it was in this village that, with the help of elderly busybodies Raymond and Joseph, I have made stumbling progress in the language known as Intermediate French.

When I spot the “Falicon” sign, I half expect the jaunty theme music to start up and then stop, seconds before it has a chance to get seriously annoying, just like in the “real” Falicon of the videos.

“This is where they taped the language videos used in my French class in the Alliance Française in San Francisco,” I tell the taxi driver in my carefully rehearsed Alliance-Française-San-Francisco French. “Really? Your language videos were set here?” he says. The young man’s attempt to sound impressed is all the more endearing for its obvious failure.

We come to a down-at-the-heels bar not featured in the videos. The driver stops in front – how long will we be? “Merci, we’ll take the bus back,” I say, authoritatively, as if I commuted from Falicon every day. On second thought: “Let me see if there is a bus.”

I knew I’d have to go to Falicon someday ever since I discovered that the sleepy motherland of Français Intermediare could be located with a good map of France and a decent magnifying glass. In the empty, sweltering bar, the barmaid knows the schedule by heart: there`s a bus to Nice at 12:30, 3:20, and -” I thank her, thinking: “Here I am! Speaking to an actual Falicon person! In French! Just like in the videos!”

Pocketing the fare, the driver yells “Bonne chance” and loses no time turning back to the city. Richard takes my picture next to the town coat-of-arms on the stone wall across the road from the bar. We climb further uphill, past a tiny grocery store, towards the square.

The square. The very spot where, when the music pipes down, old Raymond and Joseph spring into action. Figuratively speaking, of course. Without leaving their bench, they gossip, reminisce, quarrel and make up. Meanwhile, a couple from Paris and their teenage daughter move in and renovate the village’s only restaurant-slash-café. Raymond, ever the optimist, is sure the newcomers will succeed. Joseph, gleefully pessimistic, knows they will fail.

For a while it looks like Joseph will be right. But finally the clumsy outsiders integrate themselves into the life of village – just as the floundering learner may, against all evidence to the contrary, someday feel at home in the French language.

In Raymond and Joseph’s Falicon, the more things change like when the Parisian couple brings abstract art exhibits and internet access to the café – the more they stay the same. Everything falls into its proper place, just as the grammar in the lessons – the pesky pronouns, even the subjunctive – will someday fall into place in the language learner’s brain. When that happens, the learner, too, will be accepted into the mythical community of Falicon. That is the promise, anyway, that brings me here.

The Author at Falicon

In the videos, the camera occasionally cuts from Raymond and Joseph’s bench to their contemporaries playing petanque on one end of the square. Someone squints in concentration as he sends his ball spinning towards a rival’s ball. You see just enough of the game to understand that it is languid yet intense, and probably diabolically complex beneath its apparent simplicity � a lot like the French language itself, come to think of it.

In the real world, at 12:12 p.m. on an August Wednesday, the square is empty. There are two benches, but they both turn their backs on the village and look out over the hill towards other, far-off hills. If the villagers meddle in their neighbors’ affairs, they don’t do it from this spot. No sign of a petanque ground, either.

And where is the stone restaurant-café “Bellevue” that Raymond and Joseph spy on from their bench? Further up the hill, behind the church and town hall (the “Wedding Episode”!), there’s a glass-walled restaurant with the wrong name. A sign says it’s closed for lunch on weekdays.

Across the road, to the left, a narrow cobblestone path flanked by multistory shuttered stone houses goes uphill and down before depositing us back out on the main road just below the square. We have just “done” Falicon, in under five minutes. Luckily there is still the grocery store.

A few plastic chairs have been set up under the shade of the store’s canopy. At one end a young woman sits next to a little boy. Seated apart from them, a broad-shouldered, tight-lipped old man with wisps of white hair sticking to his forehead gives us a wary, hostile stare. Or maybe he’s just tired. I throw a bonjour in the general direction of the tables before we walk inside.

It’s the woman – an animated, petite brunette in a pixie cut and tank top and shorts- who follows us in, the child in tow.

“Oh, yes, the videos!” she says, smiling, when I tell her why I’ve come. “Oh yes, of course I remember! That was quite an event – they even made a petanque ground on the square…a ‘folkloric’ one. I mean, there’s never been a petanque ground in Falicon. And they had townspeople play petanque for the taping. Did you notice that man sitting outside? He was one of the petanque players.” I decide that his stare was mysterious, wise, intriguing.

“Let’s see,” she says, “for lunch, “Le Rendezvous des Amis” down the road isn’t bad at all. No, you’ve had enough soda today, honey. Yes – tell them that you’re coming from the Falicon grocery and they’ll take good care of you.”

She tells us to where to get off the bus, five kilometers out. She draws a map in magic marker on the back of an advertising flyer. “Say you came from the Epicerie de Falicon.” She writes it down for good measure.

“Main Street,” Falicon

Outside, the interesting petanque star has vanished. Not a soul in sight. Headed for the “Rendezvous des Amis,” we board the 12:30 bus when it arrives at 12:40. I’ve spent a total of 30 minutes in Falicon – the length of a video in the series.

It’s true I didn’t exactly expect to share a beer and a quip with Raymond and Joseph. But…no Bellevue? No gossip bench? No petanque ground? And yet: I have touched Falicon’s walls! I have breathed its air! I have made small talk with the grocer! With the corny symbolism of language videos, and of real life too, sometimes, she has drawn me a map to a place called “Meeting Place of Friends.”

I can hear old Joseph, now: “Hah! She thinks she can master French! C’est ridicule!” All signs are he’s right, but in my other ear I hear another voice in the same sing-song accent of the South telling me that all I need is faith and “un peu de patience.” It’s Raymond I choose to believe.