When in French: Love in a Second Language. Lauren Collins

I couldn’t make out; the newspaper headlines I neglected to absorb; the pleasantries that I failed to utter, from which serendipitous encounters didn’t occur.

      The back of our apartment overlooked a paved courtyard, where more senior residents of the building parked their cars. We didn’t have air-conditioning. Neither did anyone else. In the evening, when the weather was hot, people retracted the yellow and orange canvas awnings that shrouded their balconies, rolled up the metal shades that kept their homes dark as breadboxes, and flung open their windows, disengaging the triple perimeter of privacy that regimented Swiss domestic life. Pots clattered. Onions sizzled. A dozen conversations washed into our kitchen, the flotsam and jetsam of a summer night. There were blue screens, old songs, mean cats. Somebody was serving a cake.

      It was a disorientingly intimate score. This wasn’t the suburbs. Nor was it New York, or even London, where alarm clocks were the only sounds you ever heard. Family life, someone else’s plot, was drifting unbidden into our home. It slayed me—a reminder of all I wasn’t taking part in, couldn’t grasp, didn’t know. Olivier took my melancholy as an affront. I was angry about being in Geneva, he calculated; he was the reason we were in Geneva; therefore, I was angry at him. He got defensive. I got loud. He would shush me, citing the neighbors, a constituency with which I had no truck. I felt as though I were living behind the aural equivalent of a one-way mirror. I didn’t think that anyone could hear my voice.

      BY LINGUISTS’ BEST COUNT, there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages—almost as many as there are species of bird. Mandarin Chinese is the largest, with 848 million native speakers. Next is Spanish, with 415 million, followed by English, with 335 million. Ninety percent of the world’s languages are each spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people. According to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, eighteen of them—Apiaká, Bikya, Bishuo, Chaná, Dampelas, Diahói, Kaixána, Lae, Laua, Patwin, Pémono, Taushiro, Tinigua, Tolowa, Volow, Wintu-Nomlaki, Yahgan, and Yarawi—have only a single speaker left.

      The existence of language, and the diversity of its forms, is one of humankind’s primal mysteries. Herodotus reported that the pharaoh Psammetichus seized two newborn peasant children and gave them to a shepherd, commanding that no one was to speak a word within their earshot. He did this “because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling.” Two years passed. The children ran toward the shepherd, shouting something that sounded to him like bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. From this, the Egyptians concluded that the Phrygians were a venerable race.

      In the thirteen century, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II performed a series of ghoulish experiments. According to the Franciscan monk Salimbene of Parma, he immured a live man in a cask, to see if his soul would escape. He plied two prisoners with food and drink, sending one to bed and the other out to hunt, and then had them disemboweled, to test which had better digested the feast. His research culminated with newborns, “bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” What happens when humans are prevented from acquiring language in the normal manner is impossible to know because it is unconscionable to facilitate—“the forbidden experiment.”

      Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Emerson all tried to explain, in one way or another, how languages evolved, and why there are so many of them. The question proved intractable enough that in 1865 the founders of the influential Société de Linguistique de Paris banned the discussion entirely, declaring, “The Society will accept no communication dealing with either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language.” For much of the twentieth century the prohibition held, and the subject of the origin of language remained unfashionable and even taboo. Interest in language has resurged in recent years, alongside advances in brain imaging and cognitive science, but researchers—working in disciplines as diverse as primatology and neuropsychology—have yet to establish a definitive explanation of the origins and evolution of human speech. The linguists Morten Christensen and Simon Kirby have suggested that the mystery of language is likely “the hardest problem in science.”

      However people got to be scattered all over the earth, spouting mutually unintelligible tremulants and schwas and clicks, their ways of life are bound up in their languages. In addition to the various strangers with whom I couldn’t interact in any but the most perfunctory of ways, there was Olivier’s family, who now qualified as my closest kin by several thousand miles.

      Olivier’s brother Fabrice was thirty-two, an intensive care doctor in Paris. Their half brother, Hugo, was fifteen, a high-schooler near Bordeaux. They both spoke some English, but having to do so was an academic exercise, an exam around the dinner table that I hated to proctor. Their father, Jacques, a kind and raspy-voiced occupational doctor in Bordeaux, wrote beautifully—he’d studied English, along with German, in high school, and later taken an intensive course—but we had trouble understanding each other in conversation. I was unable to determine whether I considered Olivier’s mother, Violeta, the ideal mother-in-law even though or because we were unable to sustain more than a five-second conversation in any language. A trained nurse, she worked as an administrator at a nursing home. She was the head of the local health care workers’ union, and had recently led a strike in scrubs and three-inch heels. She and her second husband, Teddy, spoke no English whatsoever.

      The first year that Olivier and I were together, Violeta sent a package from Nespresso as a gift for Olivier. It was a surprise, so she wrote to me, asking that I hide it away until his birthday.

      The postman came. I signed for the parcel. As soon as he left, I proceeded to the computer, where I assured Violeta, quite elegantly, that I had taken delivery of the gift.

      “J’ai fait l’accouchement de la cafetière,” I typed, having checked and double-checked each word in my English-French dictionary.

      Months went by before I learned that, by my account, I’d given birth to—as in, physically delivered, through the vagina—a coffee machine.

      GROCERY STORES, as much as cathedrals or castles, reveal the essence of a place. In New York I’d shopped sparingly at the supermarket on my block—a cramped warren hawking con-cussed apples and a hundred kinds of milk. One day I bought a rotisserie chicken. I took it home and started shredding it to make a chicken salad. Halfway through, I realized that there was a ballpoint pen sticking straight out of the breast, like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. The next day, receipt in hand, I went back to the store and asked for a refund.

      “Where’s the chicken?” the cashier barked.

      “I threw it away,” I said. “It had a ballpoint pen in it.”

      The closest grocery store to our apartment in London was almost parodically civilized. A cooperatively owned chain, it sold bulbs and sponsored a choir. Nothing amused me more than shaving a few pence off the purchase of a pack of toilet paper with a discount card that read “Mrs. L Z Collins.” I’d hand it over to an employee-shareholder in a candy-striped shirt and a quilted vest, who would deposit the toilet paper into a plastic bag emblazoned with a crest: “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen Grocer and Wine & Spirit Merchants.” If the store made a show of a certain kind of Englishness, its shelves were pure British multiculturalism: preserved lemons, gungo peas, mee goreng, soba noodles, lapsang souchong–smoked salmon. One November a “Thanksgiving” section appeared, featuring a mystifying array of maple syrup, dried mango chunks, and pickled beetroot.

      As national rather than regional concerns, British supermarkets played an outsize role in public life. Every year, the launch of their competing Christmas puddings was attended by the sort of strangely consensual fanfare—everyone gets into it, even if it’s silly—that Americans accord to each summer’s blockbuster movies. The feedback loop of the food chain was tight: if a popular cookbook called for an obscure ingredient, the stores would quickly begin