When in French (22 page)

In Russian, you can't call the sky “blue.” The language obliges its speakers to make a distinction between
siniy
(dark blue) and
goluboy
(light blue), so that what is in English one color becomes in Russian two. This is the sort of quirk that dinner-party linguists love to muse about, but the researchers were able to measure its effect on visual perception in an objective way. Russian speakers, they found, could distinguish between dark and light shades of blue 10 percent faster than English speakers. (Universalists will point out that the difference is only 124 milliseconds, in the course of making an argument that typically proceeds from “There are no Whorfian
effects” to “Okay, there are, but they're really small.”) To test whether this edge was due to language, the researchers then asked the subjects to perform the same exercise while memorizing an eight-digit number. With their language processing disrupted, Russian speakers were no better at the color-sorting task than their English peers. The color of the sea depends, to some extent, on the language we speak.

Every language, we know, has its blind spots—until recently, there were no crustaceans in emoji, other than the fried shrimp. But emojis constitute a surprisingly eloquent new language. They seem not only to articulate feelings but also to create them—hundreds of previously unregistered micro-sentiments. Emojis are, of course, pictograms. And while scientists might dismiss an argument for their uniqueness as the latest variant of the Eskimo problem, those who use them can testify to their strange expressive heft. Sometimes I scan the rows of characters looking for the emotion I want to get across, rather than the other way around. There's the winged bundle of money, blameless as an angel, that can make you believe a splurge was preordained. The sulky pumpkin, the jocose ghost. There is no word for “bashful face with pinkening cheeks that obliquely suggest I'm both embarrassed and pleased.” You just have to send a text.

“Do you see things if you don't know what they are?” Geoff Dyer asks. You can, but the carved edge of a table seems more conspicuous once you know it's gadrooning, a pouchy cloud more memorable once you can call it a mammatus. This is why technical vocabularies develop. It's why, according to researchers, Mandarin—which has eleven basic number names versus more than two dozen in English (“eleven,” for example, is “ten-one”)—may be a better language for learning math. Such is the power of language in the perception of identity that a group
of English-speaking white children told researchers that they thought themselves more likely to grow up to be English-speaking black people than white people who spoke French. Maybe the best metaphor for Whorfian effects is predictive texting. Even if the prefabricated chunks of expression can be overridden with a bit of effort, we often choose to accept them.

 • • • 

B
ILINGUALS OVERWHELMINGLY
report that they feel like different people in different languages. They do so for a multitude of reasons, some of which are less attributable to any language in particular than to having a new language itself. A person may be a loan shark in his new language when he was an ophthalmologist in his native tongue. Perhaps he spoke Polish to his first wife but speaks Portuguese with the second. He may have scaled or slid down the ladder of class. He may have changed his politics, or his name. During the transition from one language to another, people undergo deaths, births, traumas, triumphs, displacements, adjustments, and the simple fact of aging.

One Saturday morning Olivier and I woke up early, packed overnight bags, and got into the car. We were driving to the mountains to see Hugo, who was there on a ski trip during his winter break. He and Marie and two of his friends were staying in a one-bedroom condo, so we'd booked a hotel room for the night. Olivier started up the car and typed the hotel's name into Google, intending to enter the address into the GPS.

“Putain,” he said. “It's saying that Hotel le Montana is in Chamonix.”

This was odd. Chamonix was two hours north of La Tania, the village in the southeast of France where Olivier's family had been going to ski since he was a kid.

I entered “hotel montana la tania” into my phone. The same listing for the Hotel le Montana in Chamonix popped up.

Olivier dialed the number. We had in fact booked a nonrefundable room for the night in the entirely wrong village.

We couldn't figure out what had happened, why the Hotel le Montana in La Tania—one of the few accommodations in town—had disappeared from view. But we didn't have time to stick around and sort things out, knowing that it was
le
chassé croisé
—the designated changeover day for French vacationers, who, as orthodox in their holiday schedules as their lunch hours, traditionally hand in their rental keys and descend upon the nation's autoroutes at exactly the same moment, causing traffic jams as dense and reliable as the steps of a quadrille, from which the phrase comes. Despite not having a place to stay, we pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward La Tania.

Apartment blocks flattened into farmland, and I Googled. Grass gave way to rock and I Googled some more. Everywhere I called, the answer was the same: no vacancy. I expanded my search to the surrounding area, hoping that, of the millions of French people traveling that day, at least one of them must have also committed some logistical screwup, freeing a room for us.

I dialed a guesthouse with a website decked in edelweiss.

“Hello?” the man who picked up said.

“Hi, I'm wondering if you have a room for tonight?”

“You'd have had to have booked it months ago,” he replied, his English accent becoming clear. “You do know it's half term for the UK, and the rest of the world?”

“I asked for a room, not a lecture,” I said, pressing the red button as I lamented one of the great downsides of the digital age, the extinction of the flamboyant hang-up.

“Quel con,” Olivier grumbled.

When we got to La Tania, we parked the car and set out on foot to investigate the situation. Passing by a
traiteur
(offering both
blanquette de veau
and English breakfast sausages), ski rental shops, a pub, and a tent under which the tourist authority was ladling out free cups of Chartreuse-spiked
chocolat chaud
, we followed the village's only road to the Hotel le Montana. It was indeed still standing. We walked in, knocking the sludge from our boots. A rugby game was playing on a number of flat-screen TVs.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” Olivier said to the woman sitting behind the reception desk.

She squinted at him. “Do you speak English?”

“Non.”

The woman looked distressed. She was barely twenty—a chalet girl in a polo shirt, clearly out of her depth—but Olivier was unmoved. We waited as she went to fetch someone.

Another young woman appeared. Olivier asked whether it was possible to book a room, refusing to rescue her as she tried to explain, in tortured French, that the hotel no longer took independent bookings and was now exclusively dedicated to housing the participants of package tours. Olivier was normally polite to a fault. I'd rarely seen him so belligerent. I found his fight sort of amusing, even though the gambit left me muted, in danger of giving up the game whatever language I picked. I understood then why people insist on different languages, even if they can say the same thing equally well in more than one of them. The integrity of Olivier's memories—of the twelve-hour car rides from Bordeaux; of his family milieu; of his first taste of freedom, flying past his parents on squeaking powder—depended on the persistence of the medium through which they were formed. He needed to speak
French in La Tania, and for La Tania to speak French to him, to be who he'd always been there.

It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. And in many ways it remains the primal vehicle, the first and most effective responder in moments of celebration or crisis. A person who has spoken English most of her life is always going to speak English when she stubs her toe. But if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed. A Swiss friend who speaks Spanish with her parents and siblings and French with her husband and children told me that she feels a certain freedom in English, where she occupies the role of neither sister nor mother. People are more likely to say they'd push a man off a bridge—in order to save five other people, about to be hit by a train—when the dilemma is presented in their second language. Scientists call this the emancipatory detachment effect.

 • • • 

F
OR ME, FRENCH
—
though it could have been Arabic or Swahili—was a reprieve from the relentless prerogative of individualism. The crazy thing about learning a language is that once you've internalized the vocabulary, you have to figure out how it goes together—according to Steven Pinker, in a language with 60,000 words, there are approximately 100 million trillion ten-word sentences that make grammatical sense. Knowing which permutations work is, to some extent, intuitive. But fluency is also a function of familiarity, as grammar offers few clues as to the parts of speech that are not so much idioms as loose affinities. How is one to know that
inclement
almost always goes with
weather
; that aspersions are cast but insults hurled; that observers are keen; that processions are orderly; that—as someone apparently decreed sometime in the
early years of this century—e-mails must be shot and drinks grabbed? In English, I strained to avoid such formulations. But in French, conformity was my goal. Speaking offered a sense of community, the rare chance to crowd-source my personal thesaurus. I was trying to join in, not to distinguish myself. It was such a happy thing to strive for cliché.

I had my pet words.
Rocambolesque
: extraordinary, fantastical.
Bled
: one's village, an almost genealogical “hometown,” borrowed from the Arabic.
Se debrouiller
, with its mess of vowels, suggested resourcefulness far more strongly to me than its trig English counterpart, “to manage.” “Gerrymandering” was
charcutage—
as in
charcuterie
—
electoral
, the lexical calf of the irregularly carved French cow. More than that, I began to warm to the strictures of French, the elegance of its form. When I spoke English, I desperately missed the subjunctive, which could lift a confusingly flat eventuality into a far more delicate realm. With thousands of repetitions,
vous
versus
tu
and the concatenations that they set into motion begin to feel like a secular catechism, its recitation both comforting and sublime. The correctness that French requires revealed itself as not vanity but courtesy, guaranteeing that every person, however weak or humble, commanded a measure of respect. So much could be conveyed with so little.

The sangfroid of French was beginning to seep into my English. “I got my ticket!” I told Olivier. “Sorry, sorry,
the
ticket.”

A month later I flew to New York. In the immigration line at JFK, I stood behind a dazed older man.

“Who are you?” the Homeland Security officer bellowed when he fumbled to produce his passport. The undifferentiated English “you” hit me like a bludgeon. Whatever had regenerated in its place felt twice as dexterous.

On the plane I had read about a barber taken hostage in Paris, and felt a surge of darkly amused pride.

“I'm going to be sixty-five the 22nd of December, I'm about to retire, I don't want to die with a bullet to the head!” he'd told his captors, according to the news report. “Also, I would prefer that we didn't
tutoyer
each other, given my age.”

 • • • 

B
ERTHA PAPPENHEIM INVENTED
the phrase “the talking cure.” The daughter of a wealthy grain trader, Pappenheim—her doctor, Josef Breuer, gave her the pseudonym Anna O.—had received the typical education of a Viennese bourgeoise, with instruction in religion, piano, horseback riding, and foreign languages. She was possessed, Breuer wrote, of “a powerful intellect” and “an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition.” When she was sixteen, her parents pulled her out of school. It could not have been easy for her, watching her brother continue his studies while she passed her days doing little but needlework and helping her mother prepare kosher meals.

In July 1880, when Pappenheim was twenty-one, her father contracted quinsy, a complication of tonsillitis. She devoted herself to caring for him, neglecting her own health. In December she took to bed, complaining of headaches, impaired vision, paresis of the legs, arms, and neck. The walls of the room, she said, looked as though they were caving in. According to Breuer, she alternated between two mental states. In one, she was melancholy. In the other, she threw cushions at people, shredded her bedclothes, and suffered hallucinations of black snakes.

Pappenheim's most unusual symptoms occurred in the realm of language. In her agitated periods—Breuer called
them
absences
, using the French—“she used then to stop in the middle of a sentence, repeat her last words, and after a short pause go on talking.” In the afternoons, she became catatonic. An hour after sunset she would wake up, repeating the words “tormenting, tormenting,” but otherwise hardly able to speak. Eking out fragments of the six languages she knew—German, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Italian, and English—she made little sense. “Later she lost her command of grammar and syntax; she no longer conjugated verbs, and eventually she used only infinitives, for the most part she omitted both the definite and the indefinite article,” Breuer wrote. Postulating that her sickness was a suppression, that some great upset had induced her inarticulateness, he encouraged her to discuss it. Doing so, she regained movement in the left side of her body, and her paraphasia receded. She appeared to understand German, “but thenceforward she spoke only in English—apparently, however, without knowing she was doing so.”