The young woman is sitting in the chair opposite me, still talking on the phone. I don't know who she's talking to or what she's saying. The conversation is in an unknown language. She's got one leg crossed over the other, and her left hand occasionally presses on her right knee, as if she's suffering from some hidden bone pain.

I follow her incomprehensible conversation, my gaze lost beyond the window, unable to focus on anything clear. All I can hear is her deep voice, the words she whispers, which reach my ear intoxicated, melodious, magical, divine. They have no meaning, but they evoke emotion, sensation, awe, and enchantment. Never before had a conversation in a foreign language, incomprehensible to me, so completely captivated me.

Your French is otherworldly - it is divine.

I silently cursed the dictator who had prevented me from learning a word of French.

As she hung up, the young woman turned to me and asked in English:

"Do you understand French?"

"No," I replied curtly. "At most four or five words like bonjour and au revoir."

"You seemed to be listening intently," she said.

"Forgive me," I replied. "I was really listening, but I didn't understand anything."

"Then why?" the girl asked curiously.

"Because the French you spoke sounded to me like a divine language." Once again, I cursed the Albanian dictator.

"What has the Albanian dictator got to do with it?"

"It's a long story," I said. "Even if I told you, you might not believe it."

"Please, tell me," she insisted.

"In the 1980s, I was a student in Tirana," was the beginning of my story about French. "One day I went to a bookshop and bought a French dictionary and a method for learning French. At that time, the entire elite of the capital was learning French. Professors who dreamed of specializing in a university in France were learning French; young poets, writers, doctors, journalists - everyone was learning it.

"One day I asked myself: Why did all the young intellectuals I knew learn French? If you asked them, they'd say it was because French is a great language of culture, civilization, and progress. But I knew they were lying. The truth was that they were learning it because French was the only foreign language the dictator spoke, and so it was his revered language. Whoever learned French in those days was looked upon favourably, as someone with a promising future.

"I immediately gave up learning French, leaving the dictionary and method to gather dust on a bookshelf.

"I paused for a moment and added:

In a way, this was my revenge on the dictator.

The girl smiled distractedly. She opened her bag and looked for something, but obviously didn't find what she was looking for. She turned to me and asked:

"Can I have your phone number?"

"Of course," I said, grabbing a blank piece of paper to write it down.

"No," she said, "I'll put it in my phone and call you so you have my number too."

After exchanging numbers, the girl smiled and said: "Every time we talk, I'll teach you a word or a phrase in French."

She stood up and leaned close to my ear and whispered:

"I'm leaving for France tonight, but we'll meet again. You have so many stories to tell me.