The Oldest Person In The World

Montpellier, France. If age is a state of mind, the state of mine that morning was exultant. I’d recently turned 70 and been asked out by a man who guessed we were about the same age. He was fifty-five.

The glow lingered as I ran to catch the tram to the Place de la Comedie, Montpelier’s popular central square.

Tousled blonde hair, a scarf wound around my throat, suede boots with the stacked heels that have a tendency to cause my ankle to twist, but look good with the jeans, I had no doubt I could fly under the age radar.

I was treating myself to a three day intensive course at a Montpellier language school. Although I’d lived in France for almost two years, my French hadn’t advanced as much as I’d hoped. At best, I sounded like a precocius toddler. “I want, I like, I don’t like.”

Learning a foreign language, I’d read, was good for the ageing brain — although I didn’t want to think of of mine that way.

The crowd waiting outside the school was young. Back packs and braces and smatterings of pimples. Younger than my granddaughter. The first clue perhaps that I should have researched the school first. Kids pick up languages much faster than adults and I didn’t want be fumbling for my glasses while they were conjugating avoir and etre. I spotted an older couple which made me feel better until I realised that they were probably about my daughter’s age.

Jolted out of my reverie, I was nearly sent flying by a surge towards the front door. Inside, I looked up at least three flights of winding marble stairs. No elevator. I started climbing, hustled to the side by the rushing hoard.

I found the classroom, took a deep breath, and wondered if my mascara was running. Around me kids chattered in English and French. French? Wasn’t this an introductory course. A woman, sharp face, hair pulled back into a tight chignon entered the room.

“Quel age a tu?” she asked a girl with braces on her teeth. How old are you.

“J’ai dix-sept ans.

“Quel age a tu? She asks the boy sitting next to the girl.

J’ai dix-sept ans aussi,” he replies

Seventeen indeed; my jeans were probably older.

Then it was my turn. Chignon looked at me and hesitated. I could see her wondering what to do. Asking kids their age was one thing, asking a mature woman might be considered unkind. She was not a kind person. I could tell.

“Quel age avez vous, madame?”

I froze. The answer was soixante et dix. Seventy. I could barely announce it to myself, much less to madame and a bunch of teenagers. She waited, frozen faced. I couldn’t think of what to say. I smiled. I said. “J’ai oublier.”

I forget.

Madame was not amused. She actually rolled her eyes before she posed the next question. Flustered, I didn’t understand.

“Sorry? I mean, pardon?”

“Ou habitez vous?” she asked.

“Sorry?

She rolled her eyes and moved on to the next teenager.

I wanted walk out, to get back on the tram and go home. Drown my humiliation in a large bottle of wine. Unfortunately, I’d already paid my money for the class which I couldn’t really afford in the first place.

Still, I couldn’t face Chignon again. At noon, I stopped in at the office on the other side of the street. Cubicles full of young women talking, lounging around, speaking French. Laughing.

“I had my first class this morning,” I told a girl with eyelashes like furry caterpillars. “Perhaps my French isn’t good enough. I think I’d like to be in a different class.”

“You had difficulty understanding the questions?”

“No, I understood.” Did she actually mean could I hear? I didn’t even want to go there. “The students were very young. I think I’d feel more comfortable with older students. ..”

She nodded slowly as I spoke. “The average age of the students here is,” she shrugged. “Maybe fifty, fifty-five?”

I felt my face colour. I’d lied about my age on the application. I’m always lying about my age. I hate that about myself. “I think maybe I’d like a different instructor.”

She made a note, consulted her computer screen. “Tomorrow, I could put you in a class with a teacher, she is very patient. And perhaps the students are a little older.”

But, of course, they wouldn’t be as old as me. I was the oldest person in the room. The oldest person in the school. The oldest person in the entire city of Montpellier. The oldest person in France. The oldest person in the world.

Right then, days into my seventieth decade, it struck me. Forget the tousled blonde hair, the jeans jacket, the artful and futile attempts to shave off the years. Forget the illusion, or delusion, of youthfulness. I had crossed the border into the country of Old Age. A country just as foreign to me as France.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a place I wanted to be.

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The Memoirist

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