ANNA AND YVES
• • •
YVES. YVES. However many times Anna Stein says it, she cannot find anything attractive about the name. She would have preferred something else, not so unfashionable, less dated. A Lucas, a Serge, or a David. Something less “French,” more international, more cosmopolitan, a name that did not smell of the earth beneath our feet: I can’t get used to the idea that he’s called Yves, the idea that I’m in love with an Yves.
Yves, then. She has called him three times already, for reasons that are only too obviously excuses. Saying “Hello, Yves?” is exhilarating. That in itself is an adventure, feeling the breath leave her as she pronounces his name. She likes his voice, on the telephone, how he holds on to every word for a moment, slowing the pace, she is unsettled by the way he seems to struggle to find the words, the way he concentrates and hesitates. She likes his intonation, his timbre, his almost writerly turn of phrase. She sees an intensity in this, and that intensity cuts right through her, she reads a spirit of life into it, something he carries in him, not something she could manifest. This man owes her nothing. He did not wait for her to get on with his life, and the foreign territory of a man’s past in which she does not exist draws her in like a whirlwind.
Until now, Anna only knew one Yves: Yves Beaudouin, her manager. Usually when she came home from work she would simply tell Stan: Yves this, Yves that. But yesterday she added his last name: Yves Beaudouin, as if this specifying were needed.
Stan was taken aback and asked his wife, rather sardonically, “Is there another one?”
Anna looked at him, frowned, feigned bafflement.
“Another Yves,” he explained.
She concealed her embarrassment, smiled: “You’re so silly.”
Of course an answer like that was an admission. She would have liked it if Stan had guessed and pressed the matter, but because he did not notice, because he refused yet again to open his eyes, her guilt feels correspondingly slighter, and now look, he’s even more guilty than she is.
ROMAIN
• • •
THERE IS A SIGN ON THE TALL OAK DOOR in the lobby of the School of Medicine. It has an arrow pointing the way to a study seminar on “The Genetics of Language” and adds: OPENING CONFERENCE BY PROF. ROMAIN VIDAL. 4–6 PM. The Linnaean Auditorium no longer has a single seat free, and the age of the audience proves, as is rarely the case, that it includes more lecturers than students. There are two men on the stage chatting and smiling. One can only imagine they are united by some complicity of learning, so utterly are they separated by physical appearance. The first—almost a giant, barely forty, wearing a white shirt and faded jeans—is checking the wires connected to his laptop. The older, chubbier man, in a blue suit with a salmon pink tie, is tapping the microphone.
“Hello, can you hear me? Please take your seats, there are still a few places at the front, please use them … As director of the Department of Medicine at Paris V University, it is my privilege to welcome a friend, Dr. Romain Vidal. He is the first contributor in our cycle of lectures. Romain will speak in French, but if you use the headphones supplied at the door, there will be a simultaneous translation into English. Romain directs Unit 468 of the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, which deals with ‘Language and the Nervous System.’ He teaches biological chemistry at Paris V University and was professor of genetics at Princeton for several years. Some of you still know Romain Vidal for his reader-friendly book, cowritten with the Nobel Prize winner John Vermont, on proto-language in animals, Animals That Speak.”
“… That Speak?” Romain lets his voice hang in the air, to indicate the question mark.
“Animals That Speak? Sorry, Romain. Was my accent any good, at least?”
Romain Vidal’s pout provokes some chuckling.
“I see … I’d better leave you to speak, then.”
Romain nods his head, amicably. He stays standing, checks his microphone. His voice is clear with precise diction, professional.
Thank you, Jacques, for that brief introduction. I’m very happy to be back where I studied cellular biology twenty years ago. So, this inaugural conference goes by the title “Keys to the Genetics of Language.” I’m going to try, in the hour I have, to share the extent of my findings with you. In order to do that, I need first to give you an acceptable definition of language, then to ask you to consider its role in the evolution of mankind, before looking into how it has mutated and changed, from three different points of view: genetic, evolutionary, and linguistic. Finally, I shall outline the position on what hopes there are in the field of gene therapy. To conclude, I will explain why I have high hopes of one day holding a conversation with Darwin. Darwin is my daughters’ cat. When you leave this room, I hope you will know more than when you came in. Which will make you all the more ignorant, given that, as someone—I can’t remember who, oh, actually, I can, it was Henri Michaux—so rightly said, “All knowledge creates new ignorance.”
The audience smiles. Romain Vidal has earned a reputation as an entertaining speaker who respects his audience. It is also his own recipe for avoiding boredom. The hesitation on Michaux was partly a ploy. Louise taught him, years ago now, a lawyer’s trick: “If you want to keep their attention, darling, make them laugh from time to time, and quote Flaubert, just like that, as if it was nothing, but always make it relevant. Or Dostoevsky, or Borges. You can’t invent this stuff, my love, you have to work really hard to make it look natural. They’ll never forget you. Even if they don’t remember a word of the case you made, they’ll remember the sentence from Flaubert. And never deliver the same author twice to the same people. They would take far too much pleasure in saying you rambled.”
Romain continues:
We have always been preoccupied with the question of animal language. We say “animal,” “language,” “we,” and each of these words supports a concept. In the book of Genesis, only Adam can name things. But do animals name things too? If they do, then man is not alone in speaking, he is not alone in deciphering the world. What new position does he hold in the world then? Advances in biology give rise to ethical, philosophical, and political questions. The genetics of language pose a phenomenal number of these questions. I shall be covering birds, primates, and dolphins, but first I’d like to talk about man, because man constitutes the most straightforward subject—paradoxically, given that his language is the most evolved. It would be extremely difficult for us to identify language problems in animals, but there must be chimpanzees with stammers out there, and dyslexic dolphins …
“After a joke,” Louise also advised, “never play up to it. Don’t pause, take a sip of water instead.” Romain brings the glass to his lips.
Some people have pathological problems with speech. This sort of “specific language distortion” is not related to mental handicaps. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the genealogy of a Pakistani family from the East End of London was studied in detail because several members of the family had trouble with articulation, with constructing coherent sentences, sometimes even with identifying sounds. The researchers managed to identify a deformity on a short section of chromosome 7, the gene FOXP2. FOXP2, which stands for Forkhead box P 2, is a protein characterized by a sequence of about a hundred amino acids connected to the DNA in a butterfly-shaped pattern. On this slide you can see highlighted in red the site of the mutation on exon 14. The guanine in one of the nucleotides is replaced by adenanine.
This FOXP2 gene plays a decisive role in the production of language in all animals. It acts like the conductor of an orchestra when the neural pathways are being laid down during embryo development. A “knockout” mouse (one that has been genetically modified) in which FOXP2 has been altered does not squeak like a normal mouse but almost like a bat, in the ultrasonic range. I’d like to refer you to the work of the team comprising Shu, Morrisey, Buxbaum et al. This gene also codes the swallowing process, tongue movements, etc.
In Homo erectus, FOXP2 mutate
d radically some two hundred thousand years ago. In other words, shortly before the advent of the Neanderthals and ourselves, the Cro-Magnons, Homo sapiens. This FOXP2 mutation is found in both types of Homo. It supports presumptions of a common ancestor, but that’s a whole other debate. So language appears less as a tool than as an organ. An organ which requires an indispensable process of apprenticeship. Mastering it goes hand in hand with the development of the cervical lobes: the brain is then arranged around language just as language structures the brain. That’s why we cannot acquire a so-called mother tongue after the age of six … but I’m not here to talk about the ontogenesis of language, other contributors will cover that, and I don’t want to encroach on their territory. In any event, I’m not interested in distinguishing between the acquired and the innate, but in knowing, first, when in the genetic history of a primate population the mutation facilitating speech occurred, and second, at what point in an individual’s development the neural connections that make language possible are established. We are still waiting for breakthroughs in the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language.
Let’s say that, just as there was a proto-eye before the eye and a proto-hand before the hand, there was also a proto-language before language. A language of a few dozen words, but one, I fear, we know nothing about, because language doesn’t fossilize very well. I have nothing against Plato when he explains in his Cratylus that words appear in relation to natural sounds. Here I’d like to refer you to Jakobson’s famous article: yes, “mama” is almost certainly a universal that is systematically reinvented for the simple reason that ma is the first sound a baby can make. I’m also happy to accept that the word “tiger” comes from the roar of that grr. And I won’t devote my energies to disputing Merritt Ruehlen’s affirmations about mother tongue, the protonostratic language, although, to my mind, archeolinguistics is far too speculative, except for writing poems.
I will confine myself to one certainty: this proto-language must have conferred a decisive competitive advantage. Of course, there is the utilitarian vision: language means you can warn the group of unseen danger, tell them where to find food, and share experience. But I am even more keen on what I shall call the “litterarist” hypothesis: in social primates such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, language means first and foremost being able to tell a story. The new tradition says: “Don’t kill your neighbor because someone once did that and you just listen to what happened to them.” Myth then reinforces the group’s social cohesion and acts as a counterbalance to the effects of intelligence and individual self-interest. Not forgetting that, according to some evolutionists, language constitutes an advantage in the sexual realm: a female would choose a male who masters language over one with a more impressive physique: Rimbaud rather than Rambo. This theory is very popular with academics, particularly those not endowed with much muscle.
Romain the svelte turns toward the pudgy Jacques; his schoolboy joke makes the audience laugh. It works every time.
Romain will not reveal how, ten years earlier, he spent his first evening with Louise stammering and stuttering while his future wife—perfectly at ease and perfectly in control of her emotions—affectionately made fun of him, even then. The young academic did not win her, it was more she who chose him. For his natural decency, for the almost naive purity in the way he looked at her, and for his acute intelligence made all the more dazzling by his terrible gaucheness. But Louise very quickly realized that this peculiar difficulty with words that initially seduced her would end up exasperating her. Turning Romain into an incomparable orator struck her as a worthy challenge. And he soon became one. But his newfound assurance did not draw solely on exercises in diction and the quality of his notes. It owed much more to the pride he felt in being the man whom Louise Blum allowed to walk beside her in the street.
“Now I would like to cut to the quick of the subject …” Romain goes on.
When, an hour and ten minutes later, with that appropriate runover on time, the speaker stops talking and invites his audience to contribute in a discussion, there is one man in the back row of the Linnaean Auditorium who has not taken a single note. When the question-and-answer session begins, the man does not ask any questions either, even though, like all psychoanalysts, he would have liked to hear the word “subconscious” pronounced at some point in this conference on the cognitive sciences.
Thomas Le Gall has not taken his eyes off Romain Vidal for a moment, though. This is the man who wakes every morning beside Louise Blum, the woman he is falling in love with, and whom he has just made love to for the first time. Romain Vidal is not his rival, because no one ever has a rival. Thomas had no urge to confront the image of “the husband.” He wanted to see the man that Louise Blum had loved and still loved, and also, perhaps, wanted to put his own feelings to the test. Thomas feels the beginnings of sympathy for this great tall boy whose secret shyness he can see, whose fluid logical train of thought he admires, and whose friendship he knows with regret he can never have.
ANNA AND STAN
• • •
IT HAD BEEN SUCH A HOT SUMMER. Anna and Stan spent it near Grignan, in the house they rented every year. The heat wave sent statistics through the roof. Twice as many forest fires, homicides, multiple pileups, and old people dying in hospices. The drought affected sixty regional départements. There was a ban on filling swimming pools, and those that were filled had to act as reservoirs for the fire department. On the radio and in bistros, all the talk was of global warming. When Karl and Lea sat down in the car, they squealed because the seats were so hot. Anna ran a damp sponge over the plastic surfaces to cool them, and the children begged to have the air conditioning on but kept the windows open.
They were bored. They devoted the morning to making a list of things they needed to buy, went into town to buy them, and had a coffee on the town square, then the temperature started to rise and they went back to the house. They ate lunch, cleared the table, and did the dishes before the ants invaded. It was too hot to have a siesta. Karl and Lea squabbled constantly to fill the time.
There were wasps. Stan made a trap by cutting open an Evian bottle and putting very sugary wine into it. They soon came to die in there, dozens of them. Anna could not bear to see her children entertained by their endless paddling, the hours they took to die. Particularly Karl, who called her in a state of great excitement every time a new victim ventured into the fatal opening. She did not recognize her own son in this cruel delight. He was the one who, with morbid fascination, emptied out the insect juice at the bottom of the garden every morning.
There was also the pool. It was unfit for use before five o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun dived behind the old farmhouse. The children watched the line of shadow advance very slowly across the blazing hot paving stones, as if watching the progress of a column of ants.
“Mommy, mommy,” they cried every minute, “another stone in the shade!”
“Great!” Anna replied, from the sofa in the living room.
In the evening, when the children were in bed, Stan and Anna stayed out on the terrace to make the most of a coolness that never materialized. Stan rubbed the back of his wife’s neck, she ducked away from his touch. It was so hot, or she was reading, or she didn’t feel like it. One night, Stan took her. She consented despite how clammy their bodies were, and even reached orgasm; she fell asleep right away.
At the end of August they packed their bags and went home to Paris. On the trip back, because the children were hungry, Stan wanted to stop off, and they went to one of those highway restaurants that straddle all six lanes. It was awful, awful and expensive. Anna grew tetchy, exasperated. She almost screamed that it was “disgusting, completely disgusting,” and Lea, like something from a film by Godard, asked, “What does disgusting mean?” Anna walked out of the restaurant, leaving the children with Stan, and went to the car. She opened the back door, sat down among the toys, hid her head in her hands, and, quietly, started to sob.
LOUISE AND ALAIN
• • •
THAT SAME SUMMER, it had not been quite so hot in Oslo. Romain had suggested Louise should go to Norway with him, while he attended an international colloquium: a wealthy foundation was bringing together the world’s top language geneticists for three days.
“The high society of genetics will be there,” Romain whispered to Louise.
He was so proud to be a part of it now.
They were put up at the Radisson Plaza, a luxury hotel close to the city center, where a welcome reception awaited them. The organizers had guessed that the colloquium would not be of much interest to partners: they handed out maps of Oslo, a history of the city, and a guide to its museums.
Romain introduced her to “John Vermont, Nobel Prize winner,” pretending to forget that she knew him. Then Daniel Reynolds, “Nobel winner of tomorrow,” and Janet Bilger and Tomomi Tsukuda, “Nobel winners of the day after tomorrow.”
“You’re the most beautiful,” Romain whispered to Louise.
She agreed.
As they were sitting down for dinner, Romain suggested to a delighted Vermont that he should sit beside her: the Nobel laureate was, as usual, smug and boring, and still had the same terrible bad breath. Louise left the table before dessert, claiming diplomatically to be tired from the trip. Romain took her hand for a moment, adding that he would join her later, and continued his conversation with Reynolds. She was not unhappy to get away. Romain was putting on his overzealous little boy act, and she loathed any dent in the respect she felt for him. The scene reminded her of one evening when they had argued after she watched, disappointed, as he tried like a bewitched child to get close to some obscure movie celebrity.
Enough About Love Page 5
