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I said “let’s go” to my cat and he came, so I had to write this book.
My reaction is not at all disproportionate. Here is the scene, and everything in it matters:
I’m on the terrace smoking. It’s an autumn afternoon, cool but not tragically cold. Winter announces itself the way all great changes do to those of us living beings capable of anticipating them: storms, night, death. There’s no sense in thinking about it constantly.
My cat has come out too. He sat down nearby and is now watching the far end of the terrace and the sky, alert to flying things I don’t know how to see. We’re not alone, because I actually have another cat, who has settled a little farther away, flanking the first.
Time for names. My cat’s name is Moriarty, after the villain in Sherlock Holmes. For a long time, though, he had a very silly, playful personality, so the name of a mathematician and criminal mastermind was too big for him, and we shortened it to Morty. Morty has been with us for eleven years and has lived through it all: a wedding, several moves, a female dog with a hunting instinct who nearly killed him, the birth of our daughter and the way she grew up, acquired a personality, developed language, expanded her territory inside the house. The stages through which the human cub became the adult-in-the-making she is today all took place before the cat’s eyes. Changes bring wisdom, and Moriarty’s temperament mellowed over time. Today he has the look of an older gentleman, shrewd and serene, and the name fits him now. But it’s too late; we still call him Morty.
The other cat is a female. Her name is Lisa, because Morty has a tabby coat and Lisa is, well, plain (lisa in Spanish). That was my daughter’s reasoning, and we agreed. After all, Lisa only came into our lives two years ago. The world was already in motion and everything had been named; she had no choice but to adapt to that reality.
Lisa is devoted to just one member of the household, and that’s Morty. Morty, on the other hand, is devoted to me. Either way, they’re cats, and the general impression is that they answer to no hierarchy—as dogs and humans do—or that they follow a secret hierarchy only they understand. A hierarchy that’s not fragile but is flexible, prone to mutinies, mood swings and self-imposed exile: Lisa and Morty have access to other neighboring terraces, coming and going as they please, without even answering to the logic of confinement. I think they patrol, but I’m sure they have no other homes. They live here. They live with us. That’s why I’m not surprised to see them both sitting beside me, at a prudent distance, sharing the moment, this cool autumn afternoon when the air seems to bring news of the world.
I finish smoking and stub out the cigarette. Then I go into the apartment. As I’m about to close the door behind me, I see that both cats are looking at me. Their eyes are wide open, their pupils small because of all that late-afternoon light, and they’re in that classic pose some animals strike, with their whole body pointing one way but their head and ears turned the other, alert to something that might require a quick reaction or, on the contrary, might not warrant the slightest extra effort.
I want to close the door, but that means spending the rest of the day listening out for one of the two cats to start meowing so I’ll let them in. Since I’m a little deaf and a little lazy, the idea strikes me as a tragedy. So, knowing full well they’re not going to listen to me, I say “let’s go”. Just like that, with a nod of my head and looking them in the eye. Really, looking at Morty, who is my cat. Lisa, technically, is Morty’s cat.
I grew up with dogs always around, and Morty is my first cat. It didn’t take me long to reach an understanding with him and accept that part of that understanding is making peace with the idea that cats don’t follow instructions. So when I say “let’s go”, it’s my childhood self speaking, used to playing in a house with a large yard, with one of the many female dogs our family had. It’s not my adult self today, steeped in a life of apartments, writing this book sitting on the floor while Morty sleeps in an armchair.
To my surprise, Morty looks at me, listens to me, and stands up. Behind him, Lisa does the same. I move out of the doorway to let them through. And then, they come.
They cross the threshold and pause just inside, expectant, as though they’ve just obeyed a divine command and don’t know what to do next. I close the door and the sound snaps them out of their trance; they do one of those spasmodic leaps cats use to reaffirm their lack of commitment to any kind of logic, and go off to do their own thing, whatever that might be.
That was the whole scene. At the time, I found it a little funny for its sheer cheek, and I know I told my wife about it, perhaps acting it out a little, with the pathos of someone putting too much effort into telling a “you had to be there” kind of anecdote and naively expecting the other person to share their enthusiasm. Perhaps a little like what I’m doing now.
We never spoke about it again.
Part of me began to forget, the way you forget everyday things, even the ones that rise a little above the horizon of monotony. My cats had listened to me, fine. They’d responded to a call, fine. It wasn’t a matter of alerting the Faculty of Natural Sciences and asking them to send me two experts. Pack instinct, autumn, even the coincidence that for an instant my interests had aligned with theirs… And yet, as the days went by, I became obsessed. On some level, the episode disturbed me. It forced me to ask myself questions. And it was starting to affect my relationship with Morty, from whom I now expected things I would never before have thought to demand.
None of my attempts to recreate the scene or extend it to other situations succeeded. Apparently, the invisible wall between us, so often penetrated by physical contact or the rattle of food, even by the sound of his name, wouldn’t let new words through. I did a quick internet search and found serious studies claiming that cats can memorize between 20 and 50 words within a stimulus-response framework. But Morty, at 11 years old, didn’t want to learn new words. Or perhaps he couldn’t. I also considered the possibility that this cognitive limitation couldn’t be attributed to his entire species, but specifically to my cat, who isn’t exactly the brightest candle in the candelabrum, so I tried to improve the quality of my research.
According to an experiment conducted by four Japanese researchers and published in the journal Nature, household cats can recognize their own name when it’s spoken. The researchers refer to “household cats” to distinguish them from “café cats” or what some people call “bodega cats”: semi-public places where felines coexist with too many visitors and names aren’t so clearly assigned. But they also say household cats are good at following directions. For example, when a human points to a place for them to search, they can search there instead of just staring at the finger. (Unfortunately, home experiments to test this ability in Morty were inconclusive). Finally, the study maintains that cats themselves have adapted their vocalizations, and that the meows they use to ask for food have acoustic components we identify as more urgent than others. This last point made me sit up: I’m not sure a meow can be considered a speech act, and yet the specific modulation of the sound reveals an intention to be understood. What’s more, that modulation is socially constructed: it’s the result of listening to us speak and doing their best to imitate us.
My excitement over this new information lasted only a few minutes. My skeptical brain went on alert right away. Every example in the Japanese research involved a reward: the finger pointed to hidden food, responding to a human’s call was rewarded with food, the meow composed for our ears alone had the sole aim of getting food. It all sounded far too Pavlovian. That isn’t talking. It’s a simple behavioral system of stimulus and response. And what I felt on the terrace was something else.
I’ll try not to make it sound as though I’ve completely lost my mind, but I have to say that that afternoon I had the feeling I’d spoken to my cat in my natural language and that for an instant, for one very brief instant, he understood me. That I hadn’t used a word repeated over and over to establish a conditioned reflex. Nor had I used that particular commanding tone of voice. On the contrary, my tone was neutral and resigned, so I also spoke through what went unsaid. In short, it was more complex than a command and, at the same time, more fluid, as if we were both part of an old but well-oiled mechanism. To say it once and for all: I was certain my cat had shared a little piece of verbal code with me. Like a sort of first real contact, beyond the context, the repertoire of shared experiences, the things nature had taught him and me in equal measure—that winter is coming, that death is coming, that we’d better go inside—and then it occurred to me that perhaps we’d just experienced the tiniest evolutionary spark. A discrete unit in what is generally a continuum stretching over millennia. I visualized evolution as a river flowing in reverse: it begins in a primordial sea where all life is the same life, then branches out, each species finding its own path, its channel, its meanders. A river that flows uphill, because it has to struggle to flow, because it flows against thermodynamics, not because some primordial law propels it, but because of the stubbornness of matter, which insists on reproducing a specific order that sets it apart from the rest. And every so often, by chance, at random, some rivers meet, converge, travel part of the way together, mingle and swirl. More or less fleeting bridges form between different streams. I’ll finally say the word I’ve been avoiding: they communicate.
We’ve been evolving together with cats for more than 9500 years. Of those, I’ve spent the last eleven with Morty. It’s a brief stretch, but a stretch all the same. The only one we’re allowed to take part in. If at some point in that time we manage to talk—if we manage to tear through the darkness and let a ray of light filter through—it will all have been worth it. Because then we’ll be part of a story much bigger than ourselves. Ancient humans dreamed of flying, and in a way their dream was doomed to succeed. In the same way, I suspect this other human project is possible too. That in the future we’ll be able to talk to animals.
Now, even if this is true, I’m sure my cat doesn’t know it. And that if he did, he’d have a lot of questions about it. How can we know whether that was truly an act of communication? How many times have I said “let’s go” to him without even remembering it, perhaps to get him to come eat or go to bed, slowly chiseling out that stimulus-response pattern? Perhaps it wasn’t the Spanish language but other elements of the world (the terrace, the door, the cold) that spoke for me so that his consciousness decided to set itself in motion. His consciousness? What is his consciousness? How is it different from mine? And as for the grandiosity of the goal: don’t we already talk to animals? Don’t we talk to animals all the time? How much more complex can that communication get? Is the point for them to understand us, or for us to decipher their languages, to meddle in their “cultures”? What would the possibility of communicating in complex ways with something nonhuman mean for human history—say, an ape, but also a starling, a dolphin, a whale? What would it mean for other species suddenly to understand or be understood by something other than themselves? Has anything similar ever happened before? Is it happening now, slowly, under our noses and snouts without us noticing? Is this one of those things that’s going to involve artificial intelligence? And if we ever make contact with extraterrestrials… will that contact be like this? Will animals and humans find ourselves on the same side, facing the immense otherness that arrives from beyond? Which species will we talk to first?
I feel that, as the team member with the greatest cognitive complexity, it’s my duty to try to prepare for the possibility that one day Morty will ask me these questions, which fills me with a primal terror and makes me feel like an ape with a stick trying to cobble together a civilization. And my terror is justified: the matter is much more complex than it looks at first glance. At the very least, it calls for an orderly approach that draws on knowledge of linguistics, artificial intelligence and biology.
But not to worry: I have time, and most of those questions must have plausible answers. It’s a matter of going out and finding them. I don’t need to be precise, just to get close enough. In the end, I need to write this book.
If it goes well, I won’t be the first ape to pull it off. And if it goes badly, I won’t be the last ape to fail.
