The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [31]
I pointed at myself and made my first attempt at conscious spoken language:
“Ooh, no.”
I almost slapped my hands over my mouth—maybe I even did slap my hands over my mouth in astonishment at the dangerous magical noise that had just come out of it! It was a word! It was——it was my own name!
Of course my clumsy infant tongue could not curl itself around the complexity of the initial consonant sound of my name—the labial plosive B tumbling immediately into an R, demanding of the tongue a tricky little maneuver of mid-mouth acrobatics—but the two distinct vowel-tones of my name—a narrow-mouthed oooh followed by a wide-mouthed (n)ohhh ( / ’u:nυ / )—these I nailed on the first try, and even managed to partition them with a quick trip of the tongue to the top of the mouth to make a feeble and breathy but definitely distinctly audible N.
In response Haywood screamed in glee and shook his keys so obstreperously I feared they might explode.
For the rest of that evening we simply took turns pointing at each other and intoning each other’s names. There was no way that Haywood could have known that my actual name was “Bruno.” I’m sure he assumed that my name was “Uno,” which indeed is plausible enough nomenclature for a chimp. I’m not even sure Haywood gave much thought to such issues as the plausibilities of chimp nomenclature.
The next night, when Haywood returned, we began our nonversation with our game of pointing first to ourselves and then each to the other, and stating in turn our own name-sounds and then the name-sound of the other. What followed after was a typical session of ecstatic gibberish, but when the hour had passed and it was time for Haywood to go, we signed off in this way as well. This exchange of pointing and stating of name-sounds became the traditional way of beginning and ending our nonversations—which I had come to crave and rely upon like therapy sessions. I so enjoyed my nightly nonversations with Haywood that I no longer even bothered to display any sign of protest or dislike when the end of the work day came and it was time to sequester me again in my cage, because I knew this meant my session with Haywood was soon forthcoming. Once Haywood even pressed his hoop of many keys against the bars of my cage, and allowed me to play with them. This was an important moment, Gwen. Perhaps I imagined, or even believed, somewhere in my soul or burgeoning mind, that the seat of Haywood’s animal charisma lay in that hoop of many keys: it was his juju, his phylactery, these keys were like rosary beads, they somehow protected him from evil, or made him great, made him powerful, gave him the ability to speak with animals. I shook them and jingled them, and admired their shimmering music.
And we spoke and spoke and spoke. And through our gibberish I gradually developed my sense for the shapes of human words, I accustomed my mouth to the making of consonants and distinct vowel-sounds, of the plosives and the approximants and the labiodentals and the taps and flaps and fricatives, of the nasals and the glottals and the sibilants and the sonorants—I learned them all in nonsense form first. Through the ecstasy of nonsense I learned the musicality and the rhythm of human speech. Gradually my communication skills developed at night with Haywood Finch. After the first five or six months (the basic monotony of this period of my life provokes me to accelerate time here) I had not only learned to say “Haywood,” with the consonants basically distinct and correct, but also to properly articulate the first consonant-sound of my own name, Bruno. At first it came out as “boo-no,” but after obsessive independent practice I learned how to slip that ticklish r in between the b and the beginning of the first vowel, and in fact I found this combination of consonants so much fun to say that by endless repetition I quickly mastered the pronunciation of my name.
However, for many months, I never spoke my name to the researchers who populated the lab