There is space on the edge of language where it is quiet but far from empty. It is the space where life is at it should be. I happened upon it by chance one summer between my first and second year of legal existence while scratching at the wall next to my crib on the first floor of the Au Style Modern’ tailoring shop in the village of Tauves in the Auvergne region of France.

I lived with my maternal grandparents, then, because my mother worked sixty-hour weeks in a medical diagnostics lab in a town about two hours away. My mother needed to work because she had walked out on my father when I was only nine months old. To punish her, my father gave her no financial support, not even to feed and clothe me. It was the mid-sixties, and she was the first wife from her village of 1,100 souls to just pack up and go with infant daughter and dog in the back of her Citroën 2CV. Her parents, the tailor and seamstress who lived and worked in the small, two-story house with a storefront instead of a living room, the house adjacent to the post office and only a few feet from the eleventh century church, had welcomed the three of us with open arms in defiance of the local populace.

My father did not report to the French IRS the considerable amount of cash that he earned under the table so that, even after their divorce was finalized in 1967, he was only ordered to pay the equivalent of twenty Euros in child support, and no alimony, which put considerable pressure on my single mother. And yet, even though money had become tight in my grandparents’ household, my grandfather Marius could not allow his daughter to live with a man who needed to keep his wife subservient to feel like a man.

Relations between men and women in France in 1964, when my mother walked out on my father, were still embedded within the framework of the 1804 Napoleonic Code that forbade women to work without the consent of their husband and that also forbade them to keep their own wages. Indeed, my mother would have had to wait another year for the July 1965 reforms to French family law to have been able to undertake employment and open a bank account without consent from her husband. But, with her father’s consent, my mother had already started working before marrying my father. She had finished university and started teaching biology in an all-boys high school while De Gaulle kept her fiancé stuck in the Algerian war.

In 1963, shortly before my birth, however, my father insisted that his wife should stop working. Women could not just do what they wanted as that would truly be the beginning of the end of the world! Just like animals, they had to be taught who was boss. So, he’d thrown a heavy log her way and injured her knee. Still, she’d stayed. He’d said that he hadn’t done it on purpose. I don’t know where I was, then, just a few months old. Perhaps in my bassinet, or maybe in her arms? The log had missed me. But it’s only after he’d kicked Marco Polo down the flight of twenty-five cement stairs at his parents’ house, where he and my mother had been vacationing for the summer, that she’d left. Had she not, my father would have killed Marco Polo, the British pedigreed cocker spaniel who had been one of their wedding presents.

My grandparents, who were still making a decent living but turning sixty and saving for retirement, had not planned on raising their granddaughter. Still, they took me in, along with Marco. The understanding was that my mother would look for a job and that, as soon as she found a stable, well-paying job, she would take me back. That’s how Marco ended up downstairs in the kitchen or in the shop in one of two beds built to his measurements and stuffed with woolen cushions, and I upstairs above the kitchen in a crib in what had been my mother’s bedroom since childhood.

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, people still don’t pay much attention to infants and toddlers. But in the sixties, surgeons still operated on babies, infants, and young children without anesthesia. Science, then, had reached the conclusion that the brains of youngsters were not capable of registering pain. Conveniently also, pain had to be self-reported to exist within a medical framework, so functioning adults certainly did not have to be concerned with causing pain to young ones, animals, and other nonverbal beings. In 2024, surgeons operate on anesthetized young children, and science has also learned that when children feel safe, seen, and soothed most of the time, they can develop secure attachments, which is the best overall predictor of a successful life. And yet, at least in the United States where I currently reside, early childhood learning and care investments are usually first on the chopping block of budgetary cuts. Parents, and especially single parents, are still struggling to raise their infants, toddlers, and very young children with little help from the government if they don’t have trustworthy and available family members nearby. We still live in a world where the lives of children matter only if and when they become fully able to express themselves verbally. My experience on the first floor of my grandparents’ live-in sewing and alterations shop, however, although anecdotal, indicates otherwise.

My first recollection that I mattered deeply to a beautifully, wonderfully livable universe and that, by contrast, life as I knew it was not as it should be and that I should do something about it, occurred while in my crib on the edge of my mother tongue. I was around one and a half years old, perhaps two. My grandparents were in the habit of carrying me back up to my crib after my meals downstairs so that they could clean the kitchen and resume their work. They left the bedroom door open to be able to hear me, which meant that I could also hear them and everything that went on in the shop downstairs, including Marco Polo’s barking and his zoomies on the wood floor.

I’m not sure that I could recognize the difference between the two languages that the many customers and personal friends of my grandparents used to communicate with each other, though. My grandmother, who was from the area, spoke the local Auvergnat patois with her regular customers, who also descended from long lines of local subsistence farmers who spoke Auvergnat, not French, for as long as they could remember. My grandfather Marius, on the other hand, was not a local, and he did not speak Auvergnat. He was from a southern region on the border of Spain where people spoke Catalan. Orphaned at a young age, he had followed his wife to her native region instead of uprooting her after meeting her in Paris, where he had been working for a famous menswear fashion designer and where she had traveled for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Marius spoke French with a heavy southern accent, which marked him as a foreigner in insular Auvergne. But both he and his wife could speak French, both were from humble farming backgrounds, and both had joined the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Most of their companions in arms were still alive when I moved in with them in 1964, and when they stopped by for dessert and sweet liquors, it was a festive time of animated recollections of dangerous but wily exploits against evil. I may not have understood all that they were saying, but I did sense the fear that they felt as they recounted their wartime activities in the underground. What caught my attention, however, was that there seemed to exist a kind of wall or border that only my grandfather Marius and Marco Polo could cross and remain unchanged as they crossed it. Marius and Marco Polo were equally nice to me whether they were in the shop part of the house or in the kitchen and stairs and bedrooms and toilet parts of the house. They loved me the same, and they always made me feel safe. They did not shake me, and they did not yell at me, and they did not transform into monsters with lizard eyes the way my mother did when she came home from weeks away at work and I barely recognized her, and they did not hurl words at me with the intent to kill like my grandmother did. They never made me feel the fear that the résistants felt when they were fighting evil. The dread that oozed from their storytelling, I never experienced it when alone with Marius and Marco Polo.

I had become familiar enough with the layout of the house to recognize that the wall against which my crib was pushed was the continuation of the wall that separated the shop, or public space, from the entrance to the stairs and the kitchen down below, or private space. That wall, in my young mind’s interpretation, became the physical manifestation of an imaginary dividing line that only Marius and Marco Polo knew how to cross without turning into something scary and dangerous to my well-being.

What was in that wall? And could I widen it enough, fix it enough so that, when the others crossed it, what they did to me in private could become as manageable as what they did in public?

My body was changing. I now had some control over my limbs, which could hold me up for short periods of time. My fingers could grip and hold and scratch what I previously did not know could be scratched. So, I reached through the wooden slats of my crib for the solid wall. And I went on the attack. After my meals, I spent all my time exerting myself thus. Until evidence of my progress appeared: a tiny spot of white plaster of Paris in the sea of French blue wallpaper.

I continued scratching and peeling. The tips of my fingers were in…

That’s when I heard, in a language that may have been French or Auvergnat or neither, but in a language that I could understand clearly:

“You will forget what is essential to remember to live life as it should be lived.”

I swore that I would not.

“You will, though. As you fall into language, you will forget.”

“I swear that I will not!” I repeated. “I will remember that the good life still watches when people go into private spaces with little beings. Life is about becoming good for real, not just for show.”

My grandparents later moved my crib far enough away from the wall, and I could do no further damage. But what I heard, then, on the edge of language acquisition, as the tips of my fingers dug through the wall between the public and private spaces that changed people except for Marius and Marco Polo, remained with me and gave my life a decidedly spiritual bend.