Enough About Love (6 page)
Authors: Herve Le Tellier
“I couldn’t have hoped to see you again so soon,” he says with that courage peculiar to the shy.
“I wanted a free session.”
“There is no such thing as a free session. It’s like with meals. There’s always a price to pay.”
“I’ll pay. So, tell me. How do you become a psychoanalyst?”
“Oh. Do you want the quick answer or the long answer? The long one takes five years.”
Louise wants the quick answer. Thomas explains the Jardin du Luxembourg, his pointless dilettantism, his rejection of self, the violent intrusion of death with Piette’s suicide, his metamorphosis, how he met the mother of his two daughters, and the sudden fear, when he was thirty and finishing med school, that he had no genuine longings, that he was nothing. He talks for quite a while, openly. He has already said it all, to a different person, in a different way.
“I had no idea what I really wanted. There was a wall in front of me. My life was behind that wall. I started in analysis, to live. It took time. It was a big wall.”
“And now?”
“The wall’s still there, but I know how to get through it, sometimes.”
Louise listens to him, looks at him. Thomas’s face is gentle, serene. His dark eyes and deep voice soothe her. She so rarely feels soothed, so rarely feels secure.
“Thomas … this morning, I was just leaving, and Romain didn’t ask me anything … but, even so, I told him I was having lunch with a client.”
She picks up her cup, puts it back down, waits, but Thomas never asks his question. She raises her eyebrows, tilts her head.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why? I thought you were a psychoanalyst?”
“That’s just the point: it’s not up to the analyst to say anything.”
Rather earnestly, Thomas takes a notebook and felt-tip pen from his pocket, and carefully writes the date at the top of the age.
“Mrs. Blum, I never charge for the first session. We can set the rate for our meetings later. Let’s start again. I’m listening.”
“Good. So, first of all I answered a question Romain didn’t ask. That surprised me. Then, I made you a client. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. In ten years I’ve never lied to Romain.”
She stops talking. Thomas watches her. She has a bead of sweat on the tip of her nose, her eyes are focused on the dregs of Thomas’s coffee.
“You see, I must have lied because I feel guilty about seeing you. Of course, I could have not told Romain anything, or told him all about you and the dinner the other night. But it would only have been to make me feel less guilty.”
She pauses, takes a sip of tea.
“But mostly, confessing to him would have been like trying to protect myself from how much I wanted to be here, and
even from the pleasure I would get out of it. When, in fact, that was something I didn’t want to do.”
The bead of sweat slips off her nose. Louise is slightly short of breath.
“I’m completely nuts talking to you like this. In fact, I must seem …”
“No. You don’t seem anything at all.”
“In fact, I’ve never dared behave like this. It must be some kind of analyst effect.”
She looks at him, her eyes are shining, but not with mischief. Thomas really has been taking notes.
“So? What do you think, Doctor?”
“Mrs. Blum, the analyst can confirm that you very frequently use the expression ‘in fact.’ He suspects this is some form of denial. Precisely because it is not a ‘fact,’ it is an unconscious admission of a fantasy.”
Louise makes a face, rather prettily.
“But,” he is quick to clarify, “the analyst has restricted himself to collating fragments of speech which may prove relevant—or not. As for the man, he …”
“Yes? The man?”
“I’ve been dying to see you since I left you that evening. I came up with other strategies in case you weren’t free today, and was trying to find some pretext in case you didn’t agree to see me. You know everything. And, to be honest …”
“Yes?”
“I haven’t had anyone to lie to in the morning for a long time. Mind you, I don’t lie either.”
“I wouldn’t want you to … I’m not sure I like ‘agree to see me’ … I’m not that …”
“You don’t have to justify anything.”
Louise stands up, puts on her coat, and turns up the collar.
“Thomas, I’m not hungry at all. It’s half past one, I have a hearing at the law courts at three-thirty. And it’s a beautiful day.”
“Would you like to go to the zoo? Did you know that when iguanas can’t get enough food, their skeletons shrink?”
“So the skeleton is to the iguana what the brain is to man, hen?”
“Let’s put it like that.”
Thomas is delighted to find he is quite devoid of malice or calculation. He finds the Galápagos marine iguana interesting again. They leave, walk a few steps, and he takes her hand which she has left by her side. Under the first awning—who leads whom?—they kiss. He finds her lips taste of ripe blackberries and licorice, familiar; she recognizes his aftershave, Romain used to wear the same one, a long time ago.
The kiss goes on a long time, they are offering themselves to each other, unhurriedly, Thomas holds her to him. Louise pulls away, whispers something in his ear. Thomas smiles, shakes his head. An empty taxi approaches. Thomas hails it. The iguanas can wait behind their glass.
• • •
Y
VES
. Y
VES
. 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.
• • •
T
HERE 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: O
PENING
C
ONFERENCE BY
P
ROF
. R
OMAIN
V
IDAL
. 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 mutated 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.