"Émile Benveniste" by Lindsay Starck
La parole est d’argent, mais le silence est d’or.
I.
By the time we’ve climbed six steep and slender flights of stairs, our breath has nearly left us. We use what remains to speculate over the word flight. Volée. The act of rising. Soaring, airborne, toward something that we need to see to comprehend.
The nurse who opens the door is stony, silent. But of course. Why would she speak? She leads us through the polished parquet atrium, across the rich red rugs of the salon, toward a tiny balcony flooded with cold silver light. There bends the professor in his chair. His bones are more prominent than they were. His glasses larger, his face smaller. He does not brighten when he sees us. He only raises an arm from the carpet across his lap and points to the city below. La ville lumière, he wants to say. The city of light. Medina-t-al-noor. Will he ever see Syria again?
Doctors say that the disorder takes many forms. Some patients utter no words, but understand everything. Others understand nothing. Some speak in nonsense. Aphasia comes from the Greek aphatos, for speechless. Linked to the French phonème, for sound. How often have we heard the professor speak of phonemes and morphemes, signs and signifieds? A phrase is an evanescent event, he once wrote. Another time, he declared: We can never get back to man separated from language.
The irony is lost on no one. We have heard him compared to Beethoven. Monet. That a linguist would be stripped of his language! In literature, one might say that his fate were too neat.
But we cannot say this, here, now, on his tiny balcony, with the violet whisper of pigeon wings drifting from the shadows of the gray slate shingles. Before we arrived, our words were simply pennies in our palms. Now, standing before our silent professor, we clutch our syllables in our hands like hard, clear jewels. We do not want to show them off. We fear to let them go.
La ville lumière, he wants to say. Medina-t-al-noor. The sun slides behind a cloud and his fingers tremble. A bee clings to a petal of the trailing bougainvillea. The nurse sets a pad of paper in his lap, but he doesn’t lift his hand to write.
In his classroom, we used to spend our words generously, recklessly, as if we possessed an infinite supply. The first person, we would recite repeatedly in unison. He who speaks. The second person: He who is spoken to. The third person: He who is absent. Now we see our mistake. Words are like heartbeats: sooner or later, we will run out.
II.
There was once a time when he came every day. He climbed through the square skylight to the roof and found me with my hair whipping in the wind and my ear tilted toward the humming hive. Beyond us: the ominous spikes of church spires, the gauzy trails of airplanes, the jeweled windows and charcoal-blue shingles of the city.
We taught each other. Does that surprise? He, an esteemed professor at the Collège; I, a coffee-pourer and napkin-folder who happened to rent in the same building.
He had studied bees behind the glass walls of a research tank. He knew the names of the dances: waggle, sickle, round. He took my hand to illustrate the movements. The sun pulled our shadows across the puddles on the roof. The bees snuck out from their wooden houses to study us. Did they wonder where the flowers were?
Some mornings, if I stand just so along the edge of the roof, curling my entire body toward the street below, I can see down to the round table on his tiled balcony. There: the cloud that twists above his café au lait; the twin croissants that shimmer gold in the morning light. If his legs are stretched out to the railing, I can watch the lump of his feet move beneath the emerald stripes of his blanket. For many hours, I wait for them to signal something. Waggle, sickle, round.
I showed him where to place his hands inside the hive, how to slow the beating of his heart. Before me, he did not know the difference between a hum and a roar. He did not understand how unhappy they become when the sun slips behind the clouds. He had never eaten honey spun by city-bees: the taste of traffic jams and windowsills and diamond stores.
Hey, hey, mon abeille, he crooned into my ear canal as we danced. You smell like coffee, sunlight, honey. Later, as he gazed at the bees buzzing ceaselessly between my pots of pink geraniums, he mused: What are we, without our work?
Before he came, these had been my secrets—the hives I’d built with my own hands, the permits I had not obtained, the choreographed air-ballet of pigeon flocks above a pewter city. But once he arrived, I found myself collecting other secrets, too: the thud of my heart when his head poked through the hole to the roof; the sting of wind and water in my eyes when we waltzed. The longing. Comprenez-vous? The potential.
Once, as he looked out across the watercolor landscape, streets shrouded in fog, he said: Language gives us the world. By then, there was no world beyond that gray slate roof, so long as he was standing on it with me.
For those of us who still possess our words—hélas! Why is there so much we do not say?
III.
Lavie
La
ville
lumi
lu
miel
lu
mi
ère
Lindsay Starck is based in Minneapolis, where she swims in the lakes and skis in the streets. Her short prose has appeared in AGNI, the Bellevue Literary Review, the New England Review, the Southern Review, Ploughshares, and the Cincinnati Review. She is the author of the novel Noah's Wife. Her second novel, Monsters We Have Made, is forthcoming in 2024 from Vintage/Anchor Books.
