Prehistoric Times (6 page)

The paintings, often admirably preserved, fossilized by flows of calcareous water, sometimes even protected by a sheet of thin, translucent calcite, are the only irrefutable traces that remain of these rituals and ceremonies, but the deep footprints allow us to imagine there had been dancing as well, and because there was dancing, in all likelihood there was singing; music secured its power, as it does today, through hypnosis and hysteria. I cannot be sure of course, but a certain form of oral literature may have existed, its legendary characters being precisely those reproduced by the painters, an entire animal mythology forged by tales of hunting and combat. This would explain the countless, almost identical depictions in several caves nowhere near each other: those depictions were there only to serve as illustrations for the story that a storyteller, or the painter himself, told aloud for an audience that never tired of hearing it. These paintings, then, really only produced an effect as they were being executed, carried along by the story for as long as it lasted; then they were no longer of interest and the painter had to start on another, the same one, as soon as the storyteller again took up his immutable tale from the beginning. The paintings traveled through the ages, intact, whereas the tales that justified them and gave them meaning have been lost. The paintings live on quite well without them, poignant poetic enigmas, incomplete and perfect, and henceforth they precede every conceivable narrative.

(I know how to show off my erudition when the occasion calls for it, and this is a good opportunity. If I want to slip in my little anecdote, it’s now or never. You may have noticed that nothing is as hard to slip in as an anecdote. Among the forms of commerce that tie men to one another, the exchange of anecdotes is by far the one that works the least well of all. In this business, each person acts exactly as if he had two mouths and one ear. The goal is to prevent the other person from getting to the end of
his
anecdote, either by taking advantage of a moment of silence or by rudely cutting him off in order to slip in one’s own anecdote, despite the meager interest it arouses in the adversary who is concerned, above all, with getting on with his; and we call this savage and pitiless bickering “conversation,” and it seems the two are still good friends when they part. Nonetheless, since I now have the opportunity to slip in my little anecdote without the constant risk of interruption that often forces us to abridge our anecdotes, or to summarize them in order to spare the listener the minor details when he could just as easily have done without the salient points, having himself on the subject a much better story that he’s just dying to tell, I would be wrong to deprive myself of it. First allow me to state – and this preamble should be repeated word for word as my conclusion – that as unbelievable as it may seem, I swear my little anecdote is true: the Spanish Jesuits were for a short time suspected of having painted the Altamira cave paintings themselves in order to prove that all art described as Paleolithic was nothing but fraud and hoax. The scientific dating of the paintings nipped this notion in the bud, but it was nonetheless based on a reasonable assessment of Jesuitic malice and was suggested, indirectly, by the tumultuous religious feeling that overcame the first visitors to the cave.
Will our museums – those great cathedrals of silence, respect, and boredom in which we no longer await anything but God – one day produce the same effect?)

Unless we find humanity’s memory preserved in some cavernous fold of space-time – which cannot be excluded – and if the show we are putting on is being transmitted at this very moment to our distant descendants, well then, my clairvoyance is rooting them to their spot – so unless everything is recorded, the meaning of these ceremonies will remain unknown. We always penetrate these sumptuously painted sanctuaries with the vague discomfort one feels in religious sites devoted to foreign divinities of whose rules and regulations we are ignorant: should we keep on our hat and take off our shoes, or the opposite, or keep on all three, or take them all off, and in what order? We are terrified of committing a sacrilege and have the shameful sense of being there as tourists, with no other motive than to satisfy our curiosity, which is ferreting about everywhere – a rat-chasing dog would be better behaved – and we idiotically lift our heads every time the faithful bow theirs. This is the true reason, the only reason, I am reluctant to take up my duties in the cave: I don’t believe I have the right to violate this sanctuary. What
are
they asking of me! It would be an insult to the faith of our ancestors. Who are we to declare null and void or abstruse the Great Spirit on whom they called as they were perhaps slitting their sons’ throats and banging their heads against the rock? Let’s not forget that they were not as far removed as we are from the origins of the world and that in all likelihood they had available to them reliable, easily verifiable information on the subject that we are lacking today.

W
E KNOW
how it happens: some children are playing hide-and-seek in the undergrowth, the most quick-witted one slips behind some fallen rocks; then, as his pursuers draw near, he goes deeper and deeper between the blocks of stone; before long he is forced to bow his head, curl his spine, fall onto all fours, but the route is clearly not designed for mammals. He advances by crawling into this narrow tunnel and suddenly, forgetting the game, he lets out a cry of surprise that echoes for ages, his child’s voice reverberating triumphantly as if he will never run out of breath. His playmates come running and they in turn discover the tunnel’s entrance and are swallowed up by it, heads bowed, backs rounded, on elbows and knees, on bellies, they undergo the same metamorphoses, they crawl up to him and their clamor, filled with wonder, is echoed at a deeper pitch by the invisible choirs of the cave; this is, in fact, how things happen, or else a hunter – a long, shiny rifle carrying a nasty little man over its shoulder – this hunter suddenly sees his dog disappear, suddenly he no longer sees his dog, the ground has opened beneath his dog, the earth has absorbed his damp dog, what has happened to his dog, did he ever really have a dog, did he dream up his dog, his old companion of a dog was ultimately but one more illusion, suddenly annihilated, the lovely dream vanished, how good it would be, how convenient for
hunting to have a dog, yes, he should have a dog, he must get a dog, but then he hears moaning, a plaintive yelp very close by, his dog is lying at the bottom of a pit obscured by ferns, his good, indisputable old canine belonging to a nasty, cynical little man is there, at the bottom of this pit into which the man heavily descends, grabbing at roots, bothered by his rifle now pointing at him and slapping him with its butt since it is not loaded; at last he manages to reach the animal and sees that the shaft continues in a slight incline and leads to a larger cavity. This is, in fact, how things come to pass, unless the day’s hero happens to be an innocent hiker, himself fallen to the bottom of the pit, perhaps even a gamekeeper, or a lumberjack, a sap or mushroom collector, whatever. This is how things happened and the Pales cave was discovered some sixty years ago.

Others will be discovered. History is not made everywhere. There are secret places where prehistoric time accumulates. These underground galleries are spared the hubbub of the surface; they are today as they were fifteen thousand years ago, as if nothing had occurred in the world save some minor or not so minor geological events. The bringing to light of these sanctuaries suddenly overshadows History and its humble chronologies; it then becomes clear that we have exaggerated the importance of dynasties and revolutions: we belong to this same era, of which the future will be the judge, an era in which man more or less simultaneously discovered fire and the atom, when he learned to domesticate animals, overcome gravity, polish stone and vulcanize rubber, to write words and open roads, when he led grand expeditions on land and sea and in space, all the way to the moon, an era that was fleeting but fertile and that witnessed, one after the other, the invention of bronze and
the motion picture camera, where both cave painting and abstract painting had their day, not to mention the steam engine, the universal joint, electricity, the wheel, the brush, the computer, infrared, and the harpoon, all of which contributed at the same moment to increasing the possibilities of man. It is an era whose unity we still have trouble comprehending and whose end we do not yet see; we are smack in the middle of it, but in all likelihood it will be considered as the dawn of humanity by our distant descendants before these descendants some thirty thousand years hence will in turn be put in the same category – primitive populations – by the newcomers, because, as we know, the past recedes, closes in around the origins, and every morning the child speaks of the previous day as the time when he was little.

If I were to believe Professor Glatt, the most authoritarian authority in this field, the figures found in the Pales cave are evidence of an intermittent artistic activity that covers – from the first engraved lines through the final paintings – a period of approximately twenty thousand years. At the end of the Magdalenian era, a rock slide partially obstructed the entrance to the cave, which was then rediscovered only twelve thousand years later, under the circumstances related above. At first it was thought to be a matter of a very simple cavity, a vestibule of twenty-five square meters decorated with three large ochre and black figures and a few smaller animals, mostly merely partially sketched, then an oval section of a passageway that opened to the right onto another chamber with a few paintings and then continued down a gentle slope until it reached a pit filled with fallen blocks of stone: the impasse. An attempt at clearing the way was made without much optimism, but these thorny efforts paid off and the path that was finally cleared gave access to
the entire karstic network of Pales: six kilometers, nine chambers on three levels connected by numerous, sinuous galleries pierced with fireplaces, niches, diverticula, some of which were wide and passable, others which were steep or uneven, strewn with muddy potholes and imposing stalagmitic concretions; fortunately the slightest detail of this labyrinth was depicted on the map tacked in four places on the alveolar-like living room wall, five centimeters thick if you count the two centimeters of wallpaper glue that is generously spread on it and that acts as an insulating compound producing the occasional bas-relief effect where it blisters the off-white wallpaper that is slightly grainy so as to simulate roughcast, or that’s the idea, with which the walls of the adjacent dining room are also covered and at the back of which a glazed door joined with scrap wood opens onto a highly functional kitchen with laminated upper and lower shelves and eight square meters of pink wall tiling around a counter space with a double stainless steel sink and a dish rack, an oven with four electric burners topped by an efficient range hood nourished mainly by spaghetti with tomato sauce, just like me when it leaves me any, whereas the refrigerator stands on the opposite side, revving its engine and sometimes even starting to move, but it stalls immediately, never pushing its desire for adventure very far, and always returning from each of its journeys with fresh butter.

Let’s also retrace our steps, let’s take the corridor through which we arrived, but in the opposite direction, and return to the vestibule from which we set off; look down for a moment at the sedimentary rock on which we are treading, composed of quartz grains held together by a solid chalky cement, magnificent enameled sandstone tiles, thirty-three by thirty-three
centimeters, laid out on the entire ground floor – so easy to take care of, ladies, that it is a real joy; they say that Cinderella gave up going to the ball in order to mop it and that her sisters were green and yellow with envy. At the rear of the vestibule, to the right of the corridor, let us pause in front of the prepainted flush door that leads to the cellar, where various objects that were collected in the cave are stored and not yet inventoried: another thankless task to which I am duty-bound. In the meantime, the public is not allowed in, step back please, I do not make the rules, let us please observe the proper flow of the tour. The second story is also worth a glance. The spiral staircase awaits us and only us to take flight – with its golden color and the stylishness of Scandinavian pine, it feels more like a schooner that heads to sea, spins around, and drops us safe and sound on the looped carpet of the landing, out of which branches another corridor with its tree-structured logic: to the left, a locked former guest room that now serves the dual purpose of junk room and office library, and is therefore doubly dusty; and the unavoidable small square room at the far end of the passageway with its glazed white porcelain bowl, à la
salon de thé
, and its double lid that should be closed, quickly please, before you leave, and then about-face! To the left again, but the other left this time, we can admire the separate room that holds the tub whose rosy-tiled nudity, barely veiled by a hanging bathrobe, discreetly echoes the kitchen wall covering – you remember it, the soul of a house is revealed through these subtle relations – the tub is in fact of the same rosy pink, but I have been forever loath to take baths, I have the very unpleasant sensation of drowning in a coffin and I prefer to use the flexible showerhead attached to the big mixing faucet whose red and blue discs are reversed, as is often the case, you just need to know; it is also these tiny, touching details that reveal a house’s soul.
Finally, across from the unwelcome guest room but communicating directly, morning and evening, with the tub room, here is my bedroom, cluttered by a double bed, you have to wonder for what and especially for whom, with its five smooth, white walls – in a bedroom there are only ceilings – and its floor overrun with shoddy carpeting, and as sole furnishing, besides this half-useless conjugal bed, a wardrobe with a mirror, bandy-legged in my presence and which I intend to whitewash, brick over – I am one of those people who does not know how to behave in front of a mirror – and a chair sitting at its table near the window: view on the cave. Above the bed, Boborikine hung a reproduction of the headless woman, one of the cave’s most astonishing engravings. Let’s get out of here. We are heading back downstairs. The spiral staircase sinks into the wax polish as if it were butter, do not let go of the banister, you’ll slip.