Herve Le Tellier - Enough About Love

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Y VES. 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.

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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: 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.