Prehistoric Times (3 page)

There are faces made for drinking and faces made for eating. Professor Glatt’s puffy face is of the eating kind, with his bridgeless nose, fat and flabby, his naturally enlarged and bulging eyes – no need for glasses to see – his sluglike lips, and his chin cleft like a derrière – and it sways like one too, whenever he speaks I get slightly aroused, whenever he laughs, were
he to laugh, and especially whenever he chews. He’s got a great appetite. I’ve cracked all my eggs. It’s an omelet like the full moon. A working lunch. It would seem that my attitude is not appreciated on high, I am not up to scratch, my competence and conscientiousness are being questioned. They are starting to regret having entrusted this position to me, some people – and not the lowest of the low – are even demanding I be dismissed outright, some of the most influential people – apparently there are grounds: incompetence, negligence, sloth, gossiping, lack of discipline, I’m much too laid back, I must realize that my nomination provoked jealousy, it would be easy to replace me, there are always a thousand candidates for a single job. The professor came specifically to call me to order: either I get down to work straightaway or else I clear out and do what I must to find another job, understand? And don’t bother inventing any more excuses. We don’t want to hear any more.

That having been said, Professor Glatt is handsome, he has a handsomeness all his own that offends the eye accustomed to judging beauty in reference and by comparison, but in which you can glimpse almost simultaneously its unique, incomparable perfection. It is even obvious that, should the hideousness that makes Professor Glatt so unique and distinctive and exceptional become the norm, the new accepted human form, or rather, when it does become the norm – because I truly believe he is just one little length ahead of the rest of the species – sculptors and fashion designers will work from his measurements. However, because he is still the only one of his kind, all alone, any and all comparisons accentuate his difference and cause the principle characteristics of this avant-garde body to be taken for defects, deformities even, this avant-garde body that is undeniably beautiful, if we
forget the others, if we only look at him as he stands against the light and, once the effect of surprise or fear has swiftly worn off, we grow fond of this character who resembles no one else, we become accustomed to his oddness, to his too curt ways; already his face seems charming, we fall under the spell of this man to the extent that we cannot suppress a horrified shiver if by chance one of our fellow creatures suddenly enters our visual field – and this time it’s my own reflection in the windowpane: the professor departs, heading down the sandy garden path through the openwork gate, I breathe on the window, he disappears in the mist, my pale reflection along with him. I hear their car starting up.

N
OT ONLY
have I taken over his uniform and his duties, but also Boborikine’s house, or rather, the house placed at his disposal as the person in the job previously held by a certain Crescenzo, who himself lived in this very spot but within four different walls. Let me explain: after Crescenzo’s death, the demolition crew razed the tumbledown house that lacked those modern comforts – water and light – and in the exact same spot, a house was hastily erected into which moved his successor, a certain Boborikine, my predecessor, for here I am today living among his furnishings, or rather, among the furnishings placed at his disposal as the person in the job previously held by a certain Crescenzo, whose dilapidated furnishings were burned with no advance warning to nor measures for evacuating and rehousing the thousands of wood-boring insects who with him enjoyed, well, so to speak, the use of said furnishings, worm-eaten woodwork whose flavorful fibers had been chewed and rechewed and by then had the taste of dust; the tables, chairs, wardrobes, and buffets sought their balance in a ceaseless rolling of high tides, and the bed creaked like a door then squeaked like a staircase so that when sleep finally overcame Crescenzo, it fell upon him like a nocturnal visitor paid to assassinate him, and the dreams that followed ended in bloodshed. All that ancient furniture from an anonymous Antiquity was therefore
obligingly destroyed by fire, which believes itself everywhere to be in Rome, then replaced by new furnishings, but ones whose sharp corners had already been softened and whose edges dulled by the comings and goings of Boborikine: wood’s worst enemy is the big belly of man.

Indeed the trunk of the plane tree in the schoolyard had been quadrangular at first, then the children danced around it; I don’t say this lightly, I was in the ring. The previous generations had done the bulk of it, I don’t deny it, for us it was mostly a matter of protecting and keeping up their work, whereas I must resume in my name and now carry on Boborikine’s, in his stead and on his behalf, dressed in his uniform that is both too big and too small for me, the jacket too wide, the trousers too short, I’m starting to miss my very first shirt, which was nothing more than a lacy tee in which I resembled, what exactly? An angel who wonders, even before anyone else asks the question straight out, if he’s a boy or a girl, a pretty little girl, please let me be a girl, but no, the damp veil is raised on a fait accompli, it’s a boy like his father, full-fledged and irrevocably so, if ever there had been the least little alternative – the embryo’s false wavering between the impossible and the inevitable – a boy who does not hide his vexation, on the contrary, I struggle, scarlet, screaming, fingers folded into the hands, four monkey fists, I cry over the vanished little girl, already a woman whom I miss and mourn and shall never forget; she was perhaps the woman of my life. I was told that time would ease my pain and that other women would come who would have me and share my days. I waited.

One more word about this childhood before I begin, so you know where I come from in order to understand where I’m going, should I decide to go, but I’m already there, here with a past as long as the life behind me. Some people
would be content with this, I could easily stop today, now, as I’m speaking to you, and be silent forever, I could very well have died from my fall without demeaning myself, so don’t go sending Professor Glatt anymore to tell me I’m avoiding or evading, I who should be dead and buried among friends, on the road to decomposing, perhaps crumbling, just when I am about to take on new functions, to fulfill new responsibilities. We were two children fallen from the same bed, so much does the night move, I the oldest, then my brother three years later, a boy as well, it runs in our family, our mother was the only exception, and what an exception, with her dresses and her soft voice; for a long time I believed she really was not one of us, that we had found her in the trash and brought her home, something like that, one of those grisly incidents you read about in the local news.

In reality, she had met my father many years before under less dramatic circumstances. Her father was a friend of my father’s father and my grandfather’s sister’s husband, that is, her father had married my father’s aunt. If ever my duties should leave me the time, I would seriously consider drawing up my family tree to adorn the first two pages of this tale without complicating its reading too much. Simply speaking, my parents’ first connection was one of kissing cousinhood. No matter. Besides, we are all blood relations in the same vein; we lie in the same pool of blood and, because we are all brothers, we are cousins all the more. The wedding was shotgunned when my mother and closest cousin admitted her affair with our cousin my father and confessed that a common cousin would be born in the spring: I came onto the stage through the usual small door – we are all uterine, a genuine bottleneck when you think back on it, without malice, fortunately there are devices at hand to assist – I was pulled out without injury, my closed eyes will open later,
lids sealed by the howl that saves you from idiocy, I gave that first scream everything I’d got, you could have built a cathedral around it and baptized me on the spot. I’ve remained hoarse ever since, alone forever beneath the uni-son, the frog in my throat isolates me from the pack – in French they say a “cat in my throat,” how strange is that?, we’ll wind up calling everything a cat, contrary to common sense and the bitter truth: this lynx takes my larynx for its mate.

My younger brother, who joined me three years later, traveled the same, though somewhat wider route and, once I got started, I kept on like that for some time, opening the road for the two of us in the enchanted world of childhood. We progressed slowly, it’s raining serpents’ heads, the flora has the reflexes and appetites of fauna but the animals all resemble broad green leaves, I’m clearing my path through it all with a machete, my brother tags along behind, there are so many mosquitoes around us that all the seats are taken, the air is saturated with them, I cut into the flesh of fat steaks bleeding with our blood, believe me or don’t, I’m not making anything up, I’m writing fiction; apparently that’s a job, I could see myself doing it, it seems pretty easy, besides all the seats are taken, decidedly, must I also cut into that, I’m a bit reluctant, I’m not used to this, I don’t have the experience. In truth, our childhood was hardly adventurous at all. We learned with difficulty how to speak, with difficulty how to walk, and then, once that was done, we were ordered to shut up and sit still.

I
TOO HAVE
my doubts: am I even fit to carry out the duties that have been assigned to me? Undeniably, my past as an archaeologist seems to make me perfect for the position; an archaeologist can never break entirely with his past. If there is a past that follows its man, it is unquestionably the past of the archaeologist; no past is richer in memories than an archaeologist’s past. You can never really put it behind you, you cannot easily rid yourself of an archaeologist’s past: no past remains as present or involves the future so much as an archaeologist’s past. Be there a man who lives in his past, it is surely the archaeologist, and who repeats himself, it is surely the archaeologist – without any particular nostalgia, mind you, without sighing over the good old days or lingering more than anyone else over cursing that evil time, but simply because of the very nature of the work that was his for so many long years. Whereas the archaeologist goes back in time, the march of history continues uninterrupted, progress flows smoothly downstream, and the gap between the archaeologist and his true contemporaries grows ever wider. When he comes up for air, he will have to be filled in on everything – for example the enormous upheavals that have occurred in customs and manners. How could he possibly guess that one can no longer drag women by the hair? He must also be informed of the changes everywhere, innovations in every field. He
has fallen so far behind that he will never catch up completely, he will continue to grapple with a present that has passed for everyone else, at least that’s what they think – as if the horse had disappeared with the carriage! For these reasons, the archaeologist is a valuable man, conversant with the origins, and he is perfect, yes perfect, to carry out certain duties, indeed of the type that have been assigned to me.

Ah, but my leg, my voice. It’s work for a good walker, but my leg; and a smooth talker, but my voice. I limp slightly with the left leg, after a fall, I’ll have to tell you about that; and my voice does not come out of its hole voluntarily, it is afraid of the light, I have to moan and groan for a long time to find it, pull it out by hand. My voice is reluctant to leave my mouth, it sticks there like rice pudding, tickles my taste buds, offers to replace a tooth, I part my lips, here it comes at last, I’m speaking, you can hear me if you lean in, it’s a husky voice, very deep, very soft, it couldn’t blow out a candle but it pushes gravel along, a voice to say no, to say shhh, to say a faint farewell like at the end of a long enumeration, its register exhausted, when the words begin to go missing, but that’s not the case, I’d have a thousand things to say, truths to deal out, secrets to divulge if my voice would only come out normally, I have words to amuse, instruct, move, all the words at my disposal, to serve the mind and penetrate the shadows of enigmas, this voice in the brambles of my pharynx brought my answer to the sphinx: more poetry, I know, I heard, I’m not bragging, it just slipped out, poetic verses are naught but the quirks of my conversation. Sometimes my voice cracks on a rare rhyme and my stutter stumbles even more, I don’t really stutter, rather I quaver like a baby goat. Alas my new duties demand, if not the exceptional talents of an orator
with his carafe, at least a particular aptitude for public speaking. I have it not. This leads me to wonder if I am really cut out for this job, and so, because I was wondering about the same thing at the start of this exposition, you can refer back to it, for I do manage despite everything to land on my feet. As far as I can remember, I have never actually fallen flat on my face, except that once, my leg.

On the other hand, I have no choice. If I give up this work, how will I earn my bread, my fresh daily bread, and metonymically, the bread that also connotes the jam and the knife to cut it, the drawer in which to store the knife, and the buffet in which to slide the drawer, and the kitchen in which to place this buffet, and the dwelling place that, in addition to this kitchen, must have at least a bedroom with a bathroom, a wardrobe for my wardrobes, winter and summer? There is as much plaster and cotton as there is flour in the baking of the daily bread, it’s a serious trade, baking is; at this point it could even be termed pastry rather than bread – whence it follows that unchained logic is a superior form of lyricism, a blaze of vertebrae, a wild and deductive madness that organizes everything in its path and never lets up until it has reached the end of its implacable proof: is it not obvious by now that one’s daily bread is a veritable party cake, the sort of mille-feuilles or outrageously expensive
pièce montée
that my disability pension would certainly never allow me to offer myself, and certainly not on a daily basis, my meager disability pension, do I even have the right to the most meager of meager disability pensions? As for my taking up a new career, you’ve got to be joking; it’s out of the question. My only knowledge is of the archaeological sort, my experiences archaeological, my expertise archaeological, and here I am thinking
of the remotest eras: I am not even really up on Antiquity, so when it comes to anything after Jesus Christ, I am truly worthless. After Christ, I no longer exist, why deny it? The only thing that interests me is prehistoric times, I can manage there, deep within prehistoric times I hold my head high, I find my landmarks, my ease, for once I feel buoyed by a time period, I am one with it, I understand it better than anyone else, I mold myself to its battles, I love it, I revel in it. If it weren’t in direct contradiction with its very principle, I would give it my name.