Читать книгу When in French: Love in a Second Language - Lauren Collins, Lauren Collins - Страница 7

I HADN’T WANTED to live in Geneva. In fact, I had decisively wished not to, but there I was. Plastic ficuses flanked the entryway of the building. The corrugated brown carpet matched the matte brown fretwork of the elevator cage. The ground floor hosted the offices of a psychiatrist and those of an iridologue—a practitioner of a branch of alternative medicine that was popularized when, in 1861, a Hungarian physician noticed similar streaks of color in the eyeballs of a broken-legged man and a broken-legged owl. Our apartment was one story up.

The bell rang. Newlywed and nearly speechless, I cracked open the door, a slab of oak with a beveled brass knob. Next to it, the landlord had installed a nameplate, giving the place the look less of a home than of a bilingual tax firm.

A man stood on the landing. He was dressed in black—T-shirt, pants, tool belt. A length of cord coiled around his left shoulder. In his right hand, he held a brush. Creosote darkened his face and arms, extending his sleeves to his fingernails and the underside of his palms. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. He actually wore a top hat. I hesitated before pushing the door open further, unsure whether I was up against a chimney sweep or some sort of Swiss strip-o-gram.

“Bonjour,” I said, exhausting approximately half of my French vocabulary.

The man, remaining clothed, returned my greeting and began to explain why he was there. His words, though I couldn’t understand them, jogged secondhand snatches of dialogue: per cantonal law, as the landlord had explained to my husband, who had transmitted the command to me, we had to have our fireplace cleaned once a year.

I led the chimney sweep to the living room. It was dominated by the fireplace, an antique thing in dark striated marble, with pot hooks and a pair of side ducts whose covers hinged open like lockets. Shifting his weight onto one leg with surprising grace, the chimney sweep leaned forward and stuck his head under the mantel. He poked around for a few minutes, letting out the occasional wheeze. Coming out of the arabesque, he turned to me and began, again, to speak.

On a musical level, whatever he was saying sounded cheerful, a scale-skittering ditty of les and las. Perhaps he was admiring the condition of the damper, or welcoming me to the neighborhood. He reached into his pocket, proffering a matchbook and a disc of cork. Then he disappeared.

Minutes went by as I examined his gifts. They seemed like props for a magic trick. More minutes passed. I launched into a version of rock, scissors, paper: since the cork couldn’t conceivably do anything to the matches, then the matches must be meant to light the cork. Action was required, but I feared potentially incinerating the chimney sweep, who, I guessed, was making some sort of inspection up on the roof.

Eventually he returned, chirping out some more instructions. I performed a repertoire of reassuring eyebrow raises and comprehending head nods. He scampered away. I still had no idea, so I lit a match, held it to the cork, and tossed it behind the grate. The pile started smoking and hissing. After a few seconds, I lost my nerve and snuffed it out.

The chimney sweep resurfaced, less jolly. He had appointed an assistant who, it appeared, was actively thwarting his routine. This time he spoke in the supple, obvious tones one reserves for madwomen, especially those in possession of flammable objects. Reclaiming the half-charred piece of cork, he lit a fire and, potbelly jiggling, sprinted back out the door.

Finally, he returned and reported—I assume, since we used the fireplace without incident all that winter—that everything was in order.

“Au revoir!” I said, trying to regain his confidence, and my standing as chatelaine of this strange, drab domain. “Hello” and “good-bye” were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn’t apprehend. It felt as though the instruction manual to living in Switzerland had been written in invisible ink.

I HAD MOVED to Geneva a month earlier to be with my husband, Olivier, who had moved there because his job required him to. My restaurant French was just passable. Drugstore French was a stretch. IKEA French was pretty much out of the question, meaning that, since Olivier, a native speaker, worked twice as many hours a week as Swiss stores were open, we went for months without things like lamps.

He had already been living in Geneva for a year and a half. Meanwhile, I had remained in London, where we’d met. The commute was tolerable, then tiring. In the spring of 2013, as our wedding approached, it was becoming a drag. Finally, that June, a visa fiasco abruptly forced me to leave England. Memoirs of immigration, like memories of immigration, often begin with a sense of approach—the ship sailing into the harbor, the blurred countryside through the windows of a train. My arrival in Geneva, on British Airways, was a perfect anticlimax, the modern ache of displacement anesthetized amid blank corridors of orange liqueur and fountain pens.

When Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland for an extended holiday in May 1816—fleeing creditors, gossips, and his wife, from whom he had recently separated, after likely fathering a child with his half sister—his entourage included a valet, a footman, a personal physician, a monkey, and a peacock. That summer he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, the tale of a sixteenth-century Genevan monk, most of whose family has been killed in battle or burned at the stake. “There were no stars, no earth, no time / No check, no change, no good, no crime,” the poem reads. As a description of the local atmosphere, that seemed to me about right. Geneva was unlovely, but not hideous, as though no one had cared enough to do ugly with conviction. The city seemed suffused by complacency, as gray and costive as the clouds that hovered over Lac Léman.

The main attraction was a clock made of begonias. Transportation was by tram. At the Office Cantonal de la Population, I was given a “Practical Guide to Living in Geneva,” ostensibly a welcome booklet. “It is forbidden and not well looked upon to make too much noise in your apartment between 21:00 and 07:00,” it read. “Also avoid talking too loudly, and shouting to call someone in public places.” The booklet directed me to a web page, which listed further gradations of bruit admissible (acceptable noise) and bruit excessif (excessive noise). Vacuuming during the day was okay, but God help the voluptuary who ran the washing machine after work.

Geneva had long been a place of asylum, but its tradition of liberty in the religious and political realms had never given rise to a libertine scene. Even though nearly half of the population was foreign-born, the city remained resolutely uncosmopolitan, a tepid fondue of tearooms, confectionaries, and storefronts selling things like hosiery and lutes. Every block had its coiffeur, just as every coiffeur had its lone patroness, getting her hair washed in the sink. It wasn’t as though Genevans enjoyed the advantages of living in the countryside. Many of them, native and nouveau, had means. So why hadn’t some son or daughter of the city, after traveling to New York or Paris or Beirut—to Dallas or Manchester—been inspired to open a place where the bread didn’t come in a doily-lined wicker basket? Was there a dinkier phrase, in any language, than métropole lémanique?

After a month or so of heavy tramming, we decided to buy a car. We purchased insurance, which included coverage for theft, fire, natural disasters, and dommages causés par les fouines—damages caused by a type of local weasel. I traded in my American driver’s license for a Swiss one. The process took seventeen minutes flat. One sodden afternoon not long after, we trammed over to the Citroën lot.

Alexandre, a customer service representative, greeted us. He smelled of cigarettes and was wearing a tie.

“So, voici,” he said. (Switzerland has four official languages—German, French, Italian, and Romansh—and people tended to switch back and forth without warning, with varying degrees of success.) He led us to the car, a used hatchback parked outside the office on a covered ramp.

It was pouring, each drop of rain a suicide jumper, hurling itself onto the ramp’s tin roof. We circled the car, hoping to project a discerning vibe, as though any painted-over weasel damage would never get by us.

Olivier stopped on the car’s left side and, because it seemed like the thing to do, opened the backseat door.

“You will soon have des petits enfants?” Alexandre said.

“Um, we just got married.”

“Ah, bon? It was a Protestant or a Catholic ceremony?”

Our city hall wedding was an unimaginability for Alexandre. I was beginning to understand, only very slowly, that the city’s conservatism was neither an accident of demographics nor an oversight but an enactment of its founding values by conscious design. In 1387, more than a hundred years before the Catholic Church began to loosen its prohibitions on usury, the bishop of Geneva signed a charter of liberties, granting the genevois, alone in Christendom, the privilege of lending money at interest. The elite became financiers. The aspirant became Swiss mercenaries. Famed for their ferocity with the halberd and the pike, they poured cash into the economy in an era when most of the world’s population was getting paid in eggs.

The mentality had persisted: do your hell-raising—your eating in restaurants without doilies—abroad, and retreat to a place of imperturbable security. Voltaire wrote of Geneva, “There, one calculates, and never laughs.” Stendhal, passing through seventy years later, concluded that the genevois, despite their wealth and worldly networks, were at heart a parochial people: “Their sweetest pleasure, when they are young, is to dream that one day they will be rich. Even when they indulge in some imprudence and abandon themselves to pleasure, the ones they choose are rustic and cheap: a walk, to the summit of some mountain where they drink milk.” Monotony, then, was an economy. So that we could collectively accrue more capital, a curfew had been set.

Weekends were the worst. All of the shops closed at seven—except on Thursdays, when some of them closed at seven thirty—rendering Saturdays a dull frenzy of provisioning. Sundays were desolate, a relic of the Calvinist lockdown mentality that had sent the young Rousseau scrambling to Savoy. A relocation consultant furnished by Olivier’s company said that there had been talk of easing the Sunday moratorium, but to no avail. “Approximately ninety-nine percent of Swiss people support it,” he said, sounding to us approximately one hundred percent like a Swiss person.

Geneva had its graces—the trams operated on an honor system; even the graffiti artists were mannerly, defacing the sides of statues that didn’t face the street—but I took them as further proof that the city was second-rate. You could, of course, escape to any number of attractive places within driving range, and we passed many afternoons wandering the relatively bustling streets of Lyon. It seemed sad, though, that the main selling point of the place where we lived was its proximity to places where we’d rather live. And while the mountains that surrounded us were magnificent, the twenty-five or so times a year that we managed to take advantage of them didn’t make up for the three hundred and forty times we didn’t. On Sunday nights, after an outing, we’d return to our stockpiled supper and take out the recycling, casting bottles and cans into the maw of a public bin. This was our version of indulging in an imprudence: you could get fined for recycling—for recycling, I had not missed a negative adverb—on the day of rest.

Behind its orderly facade—the apartment buildings with their sauerkraut paint jobs; the matrons in furs; the brutalist plazas; the allées of pollarded trees—Geneva was, if anything, faintly sinister. Its vaunted sense of discretion seemed a cover for dodginess, bourgeois respectability masking a sleazy milieu. What was going on in those clinics and cabinets? Whose money, obtained by what means, was stashed in the private banks? What was a “family office,” anyway?

One day I received an e-mail from the Intercontinental Hotel Genève, entitled “What You Didn’t Know about Geneva.” I did not know that the Intercontinental Hotel Genève “continues to cater to the likes of the Saudi Royal family and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates,” that the most expensive bottle of wine sold at auction was sold in Geneva (1947 Château Cheval Blanc, $304,375), that the most expensive diamond in the world was sold in Geneva (the Pink Star, a 59.6-carat oval-cut pink diamond, $83 million), or that Geneva “has witnessed numerous world records, such as the world’s longest candy cane, measuring 51 feet long.” I developed a theory I thought of as the Édouard Stern principle, after the French investment banker who was found dead in a penthouse apartment in Geneva—shot four times, wearing a flesh-colored latex catsuit, trussed. Read any truly tawdry news story, and Geneva will somehow play into it by the fifth paragraph. Balzac wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. In Switzerland, behind every crime seemed to lie a great fortune.

Around us Europe was reeling, but the stability of the Swiss franc, combined with the influx of people who sought to exploit it, made the city profoundly expensive. The stores were full of things we neither wanted nor could afford. I reacted by refusing to buy or do anything that I thought cost too much money, which was pretty much everything, and then complaining about my boredom. Geneva syndrome: becoming as tedious as your captor. The expanses of my calendar stretched as pristine as those of the Alps.

Olivier didn’t love Geneva either, but he didn’t experience it as an effacement. He said that it reminded him of a provincial French town in the 1980s—a setting and an epoch with which he was well acquainted, having grown up an hour outside Bordeaux during the Mitterrand years. His consolations were familiarities: reciting the call-and-response of francophone pleasantries with the women at the dry cleaners; reading Le Canard enchaîné, the French satirical newspaper, when it came out each Wednesday; watching the TV shows—many of them seemed to involve puppets—that he knew from home. He was living in a sitcom, with a laugh track and wacky neighbors. I was stranded in a silent film.

WE HAD ESTABLISHED our life together, in London, on more or less neutral ground: his continent, my language. It worked. Olivier was my guide to living outside of the behemoth of American culture; I was his guide to living inside the behemoth of English.

He had learned the language over the course of many years. When he was sixteen, his parents sent him to Saugerties, New York, for six weeks: a homestay with some acquaintances of an English teacher in Bordeaux, the only American they knew. Olivier landed at JFK, where a taxi picked him up. This was around the time of the Atlanta Olympic Games.

“What is the English for ‘female athlete’?” he asked, wanting to be able to discuss current events.

“ ‘Bitch,’” the driver said.

They drove on toward Ulster County, Olivier straining for a glimpse of the famed Manhattan skyline. The patriarch of the host family was an arborist named Vern. Olivier remembers driving around Saugerties with Charlene, Vern’s wife, and a friend of hers, who begged him over and over again to say “hamburger.” He was mystified by the fact that Charlene called Vern “the Incredible Hunk.”

Five years later Olivier found himself in England, a graduate student in mathematics. Unfortunately, his scholastic English—“Kevin is a blue-eyed boy” had been billed as a canonical phrase—had done little to prepare him for the realities of the language on the ground. “You’ve really improved,” his roommate told him, six weeks into the term. “When you got here, you couldn’t speak a word.” At that point, Olivier had been studying English for more than a decade.

After England, he moved to California to study for a PhD, still barely able to cobble together a sentence. His debut as a teaching assistant for a freshman course in calculus was greeted by a mass defection. On the plus side, one day he looked out upon the residue of the crowd and noticed an attentive female student. She was wearing a T-shirt that read “Bonjour, Paris!”

By the time we met, Olivier had become not only a proficient English speaker but a sensitive, agile one. Upon arriving in London in 2007, he’d had to take an English test to obtain his license as an amateur pilot. The examiner rated him “Expert”: “Able to speak at length with a natural, effortless flow. Varies speech flow for stylistic effect, e.g. to emphasize a point. Uses appropriate discourse markers and connectors spontaneously.” He was funny, quick, and colloquial. He wrote things like (before our third date), “Trying to think of an alternative to the bar-restaurant diptych, but maybe that’s too ambitious.” He said things like (riffing on a line from Zoolander as he pulled the car up, once again, to the right-hand curb), “I’m not an ambi-parker.” I rarely gave any thought to the fact that English wasn’t his native tongue.

One day, at the movies, he approached the concession stand, taking out his wallet.

“A medium popcorn, a Sprite, and a Pepsi, please.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Did you just specifically order a Pepsi?”

In a word, Olivier had been outed. Due to a traumatic experience at a drive-through in California, he confessed, he still didn’t permit himself to pronounce the word “Coke” aloud. For me, it was a shocking discovery, akin to finding out that a peacock couldn’t really fly. I felt extreme tenderness toward his vulnerability, mingled with wonderment at his ingenuity. I’d had no idea that he still, very occasionally, approached English in a defensive posture, feinting and dodging as he strutted along.

I only knew Olivier in his third language—he also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War—but his powers of expression were one of the things that made me fall in love with him. For all his rationality, he had a romantic streak, an attunement to the currents of feeling that run beneath the surface of words. Once he wrote me a letter—an inducement to what we might someday have together—in which every sentence began with “Maybe.” Maybe he’d make me an omelet, he said, every day of my life.

We moved in together before long. One night, we were watching a movie. I spilled a glass of water, and went to mop it up with some paper towels.

“They don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

“Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

“Their capillarity isn’t very good.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not even a word.”

Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed a piece of paper lying in the printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

capillarity noun

1: the property or state of being capillary

2: the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those of the solid

Ink to a nib, my heart surged.

There was eloquence, too, in the way he expressed himself physically—a perfect grammar of balanced steps and filled glasses and fingertips on the back of my elbow, predicated on some quiet confidence that we were always already a compound subject. The first time we said good-bye, he put his hands around my waist and lifted me just half an inch off the ground: a kiss in commas. I was short; he was not much taller. We could look each other in the eye.

But despite the absence of any technical barrier to comprehension, we often had, in some weirdly basic sense, a hard time understanding each other. The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and inside languages. You are performing a feat of interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.

In addition to being French and American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host of Steiner’s categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren’t attempting to stretch ourselves. I had been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity, but Olivier valued a more disciplined self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang out, to him that constituted a form of thoughtlessness. In the same way that Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick, or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional maquillage, in which people took a few minutes to compose their thoughts, rather than walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of sweatpants. For him, the success of le couple—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended on restraint rather than uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice, he saw artfulness.

Every couple struggles, to one extent or another, to communicate, but our differences, concealing each other like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he said to the point of parsimony; I spent my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods and tones, while he had a transcriptionist’s recall for the details of our exchanges. Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.

“I’ll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I’d say. “First, I’m going to read my book.”

“My dinner,” he’d reply, in a babyish voice. “My book.”

To him, the tendency of English speakers to use the possessive pronoun where none was strictly necessary sounded immature, stroppy even: my dinner, my book, my toy.

“Whatever, it’s my language,” I’d reply.

And why, he’d want to know later, had I said I’d clean the kitchen, when I’d only tidied it up? I’d reply that no native speaker—by which I meant no normal person—would ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living with Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man. His literalism missed the point, in a way that was as maddening as it was easily mocked.

For better or for worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we homed in on each other’s sentences, focusing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume down a notch too low. “You don’t seem like a married couple,” someone said, minutes after meeting us at a party. We fascinated each other and frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast, or excruciatingly slow, but we often had trouble finding a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control. We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.

IN GENEVA, my lack of French introduced an asymmetry. I needed Olivier to execute a task as basic as buying a train ticket. He was my translator, my navigator, my amanuensis, my taxi dispatcher, my schoolmaster, my patron, my critic. Like someone very young or very old, I was forced to depend on him almost completely. A few weeks after the chimney sweep’s visit, the cable guy came: I dialed Olivier’s number and surrendered the phone, quiescent as a traveler handing over his papers. I had always been the kind of person who bounded up to the maître d’ at a restaurant, ready to wrangle for a table. Now, I hung back. I overpaid and underasked—a tax on inarticulacy. I kept telling waiters that I was dead—je suis finie—when I meant to say that I had finished my salad.

I was lucky, I knew, privileged to be living in safety and comfort. Materially, my papers were in order. We had received a livret de famille from the French government, attesting that I was a member of the family of a European citizen. (The book, a sort of secular family bible, charged us to “assure together the moral and material direction of the family,” and had space for the addition of twelve children.) My Swiss residency permit explained that I was entitled to reside in the country, with Olivier as my sponsor, under the auspices of “regroupement familial.”

Emotionally, though, I was a displaced person. In leaving America and, then, leaving English, I had become a double immigrant or expatriate or whatever I was. (The distinctions could seem vain—what was an “expat” but an immigrant who drinks at lunch?) I could go back, but I couldn’t: Olivier had lived in the United States for seven years and was unwilling to repeat the experience, fearing he would never thrive in a professional culture dominated by extra-large men discussing college sports. Some of my friends were taken aback that a return to the States wasn’t up for discussion, but I felt I didn’t have much choice. I wasn’t going to dragoon Olivier into an existence that he had tried, and disliked, and explicitly wanted to avoid. Besides, I enjoyed living in Europe. For me, the first move, the physical one, had been easy. The transition into another language, however, was proving unexpectedly wrenching. Even though I had been living abroad—happily; ecstatically, even—for three years, I felt newly untethered in Geneva, a ghost ship set sail from the shores of my mother tongue.

My state of mindlessness manifested itself in bizarre ways. I couldn’t name the president of the country I lived in; I didn’t know how to dial whatever the Swiss version was of 911. When I noticed that the grass medians in our neighborhood had grown shaggy with neglect, I momentarily thought, “I should call the city council,” and then abandoned the thought: it seemed like scolding someone else’s kids. Because I never checked the weather, I was often shivering or soaked. Every so often I would walk out the door and notice that the shops were shuttered and no one was wearing a suit. Olivier called these “pop-up holidays”—Swiss observances of which we’d failed to get wind. Happy Saint Berthold’s Day!

In Michel Butor’s 1956 novel Passing Time, a French clerk is transferred to the fictitious English city of Bleston-on-Slee, a hellscape of fog and furnaces. “I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax,” the narrator says. Geneva felt similarly surreal. The city seemed a diorama, a failure of scale. Time unfurled vertically, as though, rather than moving through it, I was sinking down into it, like quicksand. I kept having a twinge in the upper right corner of my chest. It felt as though someone had pulled the cover too tight over a bed.

The gods punished their enemies by taking away their voices. Hera condemned Echo, the nymph whose stories so enchanted Zeus, to “prattle in a fainter tone, with mimic sounds, and accents not her own,” forever repeating a few basic syllables. First God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden. Then he destroyed the Tower of Babel, casting humankind out of a linguistic paradise—where every object had a name and every name had an object and God was the word—in a kind of second fall. Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.

Without language, my world diminished. One day I read about a study that demonstrated the importance of early exposure to language: in families on welfare, parents spoke about 600 words an hour to their children, while working-class parents spoke 1,200, and professional parents 2,100. By the time a child on welfare was three, he had heard 30 million fewer words than many of his peers, leaving him at an enduring disadvantage. I wondered how many fewer words I heard, read, and spoke each day in Geneva, deducting the conversations 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 to carry it, a fact about which the newspapers would write, leading the cookbook to become even more popular, and the ingredient to materialize simultaneously in every British pantry. There was a coziness to the stores, amid their great convenience. Shopping in them always reminded me that London was a big city in a small country. From the £10 Dinner for Two deal at my supermarket—it included a starter or a pudding, a main course, a side dish, and an entire bottle of wine—I could extrapolate something about, and participate in, if I chose to, a typical middle-class British Friday night.

Food shopping in Geneva was a less idiosyncratic affair. For fruits and vegetables, I went often to the farmers’ markets. They had nothing to do with yoga or gluten. They were just a cheaper place to buy better carrots. The selection, though, was limited. For everything else, there were the Swiss supermarkets—two chains distinguished, as far as I could tell, by the fact that one of them sold alcohol and the other didn’t. I frequented the former, whose breakfasty theme colors made it seem like it was perpetually 7:00 a.m. Despite a few superficial points of contrast—you could find horse meat hanging alongside the chicken and the beef; the onions, taskingly, were the size of Ping-Pong balls—there wasn’t much to distinguish the experience. Cruising the cold, clean aisles, I could have been in most any developed nation.

My nemesis there—my imaginary frenemy—was Betty Bossi, a fifty-eight-year-old busybody with pearl earrings and a shower cap of pin-curled hair. Betty Bossi was inescapable. There was nothing she didn’t do, and nothing she did appealingly: stuffed mushrooms, bean sprouts, Caesar salad, Greek salad, mixed salad, potato salad, lentil salad, red root salad, “dreams of escape” salad, guacamole, tzatziki sauce, mango slices, grated carrots, chicken curry, egg and spinach sandwiches, orange juice, pizza dough, pastry dough, goulash, tofu, dim sum, shrimp cocktail, bratwurst, stroganoff, gnocchi, riz Casimir (a Swiss concoction of rice, veal cutlets, pepperoni, pineapple, hot red peppers, cream, banana, and currants).

Who was she? Where did she come from? What kind of name was Betty Bossi? Her corporate biography revealed that she was the invention of a Zurich copywriter, who had conjured her in 1956 in flagrant imitation of Betty Crocker. “The first name Betty, fashionable in each of the country’s three linguistic regions, was accepted straightaway by the publicity agency,” it read. “Equally, her last name was widespread all over the country. Together, they sounded good and were easy to pronounce in all the linguistic regions.”

Switzerland, like Britain, was a small country, but due to any number of historical and geographical factors—chief among them the fact that the population didn’t share a common language—it didn’t have a particularly cohesive culture. The political system was heavily decentralized. (Name a Swiss politician.) There was no film industry to speak of, no fashion, no music. (Name a Swiss movie.) With the exception of Roger Federer, who spent his downtime in Dubai, there weren’t really any public figures. (Name a Swiss celebrity.)

Swiss francophones looked to France for news and entertainment; German speakers gravitated toward Germany, and Italian speakers to Italy. (Speakers of Romansh, which is said to be the closest descendant of spoken Latin, made up less than 1 percent of the population and almost always spoke another language.) Gainful as it was, Switzerland’s multilingualism rendered public life indistinct, a tuna surprise from the kitchen of Betty Bossi. The country was in Europe, but not of it. Its defining national attribute, neutrality, seemed at times to be a euphemism for a kind of self-interested disinterest. The morning after Russia announced that it was banning food products from the European Union due to its support of Ukraine, the front page of the local paper boasted “Russian Embargo Boosts Gruyère.”

A few months later, it emerged that the supermarket chain that did not sell alcohol was selling mini coffee creamers whose lids featured portraits of Adolf Hitler. After a customer complained, a representative apologized for the error, saying, “I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls. Usually, the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes, and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem.” Betty Bossi as an icon; Hitler as a polemic. It was this bloodless quality that depressed me so much about Switzerland. My alienation stemmed less from a sense of being an outsider than from the feeling that there was nothing to be outside of.

The consolation prize of Geneva was the grande boucherie—a ninety-five-year-old emporium of shanks and shoulders and shins, aging woodcocks and unplucked capons, their feet the watery blue of a birthmark. The steaks were festooned with cherry tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. The aproned butchers, surprisingly approachable for people of their level of expertise, would expound on the preparation of any dish. One day, craving steak tacos—Geneva’s Mexican place only had pork ones, and a single order cost forty dollars—I convinced Olivier, who wasn’t big on cooking, to chaperone me to the boucherie. I explained to him that I wanted to buy a bavette de flanchet, the closest thing I had been able to find to a flank steak, after Googling various permutations of “French” and “meat.”

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s’il vous plait.”

The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards: rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf. Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.

“Malheureusement, je n’ai pas de flanchet aujourd’hui,” he said. “En fait, on n’a généralement pas de flanchet.”

“What?” I said.

“He doesn’t have a flank steak.”

The butcher reached into the case and pulled out a small, dark purse of beef.

“Je vous propose l’araignée. C’est bien savoureux, comme le flanchet, mais plus tendre.”

“What did he say?”

“He has an araignée.”

“What is that?”

“No idea. Araignée means spider.”

“Okay, whatever, take it.”

“Bon, ça serait super.”

The araignée is the muscle that sheathes the socket of a cow’s hock bone, so called because of the strands of fat that crisscross its surface like a cobweb. In francophone Switzerland, as in France, it is a humble but cherished cut. Different countries, I was surprised to learn, have different ways of dismantling a cow: an American butcher cuts straight across the carcass, sawing through the bones, but a French boucher follows the body’s natural seams, extracting specific muscles. (American butchers are faster, but French butchers use more of the cow.) If you were to look at an American cow, in cross section, it would be a perfectly geometric Mondrian. A French cow is a Kandinsky, all whorls and arcs. You can’t get a porterhouse in Geneva, any more than you can get an araignée in New York: not because it doesn’t translate, but because it doesn’t exist.

A flank steak, I would have assumed, is a flank steak, no matter how you say it. We think of words as having one-to-one correspondences to objects, as though they were mere labels transposed onto irreducible phenomena. But even simple, concrete objects can differ according to the time, the place, and the language in which they are expressed. In Hebrew, “arm” and “hand” comprise a single word, yad, so that you can shake arms with a new acquaintance. In Hawaiian, meanwhile, lima encompasses “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.”

In a famous experiment, linguists assembled a group of sixty containers and asked English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers to identify them. What in English comprised nineteen jars, sixteen bottles, fifteen containers, five cans, three jugs, one tube, and one box was, in Spanish, twenty-eight frascos, six envases, six bidons, three aerosols, three botellas, two potes, two latas, two taros, two mamaderos, and one gotero, caja, talquera, taper, roceador, and pomo. Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, identified forty ping, ten guan, five tong, four he, and a guan.

“The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” the linguist Guy Deutscher has written. We don’t call an arm an arm because it’s an arm; it’s an arm because we call it one. Language carves up the world into different morsels (a metaphor that a Russian speaker might refuse, as “carving,” in Russian, can only be performed by an animate entity). It can fuse appendages and turn bottles into cans.

ALMOST AS SOON AS I’D arrived in Geneva, I’d begun to feel the pull of French. Already, I was intrigued by the blend of rudeness and refinement, the tension between the everyday and the exalted, that characterized the little I knew of the language. “Having your cake and eating it too” was Vouloir le beurre, l’argent, et le cul de la crémière (“To want the butter, the money, and the ass of the dairywoman”). Raplapla meant “tired.” A frileuse was a woman who easily got cold. La France profonde, with its immemorial air, gave me chills in a way that “flyover country” didn’t. I found it incredible that Olivier found it credible that the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 could have been in some part attributable to a breakdown in the distinction between vous (the second person formal subject pronoun) and tu (the second person informal). Before the crash, the airline had promoted what was referred to in the French press as an Anglo-Saxon-style management culture in which employees universally addressed each other as tu. The theory was that the policy had contributed to the creation of a power vacuum, in which no one could figure out who was supposed to be in charge.

French was the language of Racine, Flaubert, Proust, and Paris Match. It wasn’t as if I were being forced to expend thousands of hours of my life in an attempt to acquire Bislama or Nordfriisk. Even if I had been, it would have been an interesting experiment, a way to try to differentiate between nature and nurture, circumstance and self. Learning the language would give me a raison d’être in Geneva, transforming it from a backwater into a hub of a kingdom I wanted to be a part of. I wasn’t living in France, but I could live in French.

As long as I didn’t speak French, I knew that a membrane, however delicate, would separate me from my family. I didn’t mind being the comedy relative, birthing household appliances, but I sensed that the role might not become me for a lifetime. There were depths and shallows of intimacy I would never be able to navigate with a dual-language dictionary in hand. I didn’t want to be irrelevant or obnoxious. More than anything, I feared being alienated from the children Olivier and I hoped one day to have—tiny half-francophones who would cross their sevens and blow raspberries when they were annoyed, saddled with a Borat of a mother, babbling away in a tongue I didn’t understand. This would have been true in any language, but I sensed that it might be especially so in French, which in its orthodoxy seemed to exert particularly strong effects. “Do you want to see an Eskimo?” Saul Bellow wrote. “Turn to the Encyclopédie Larousse.”

Our first New Year’s in Switzerland, Jacques and Hugo decided to visit.

“They said they want to come in the morning,” Olivier told me.

“Okay. When?”

“In the morning.”

“No, but when?”

“In the morning!”

Olivier, I could see, was starting to get exasperated. I was, too.

“What do you mean?” I said, a little too emphatically, as unable to reformulate my desire to know on which day of the week they would arrive as Olivier was to fathom another shade of meaning.

“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’ I meant exactly what I said.”

“Well, what did you say, then?”

“I already said it.”

“What?”

His voice grew low and a little bit sad.

“Talking to you in English,” he said, “is like touching you with gloves.”