Prehistoric Times (9 page)

P
ROFESSOR
Glatt steps in. This time I’ve gone too far, I’m not getting anywhere. Which one is it? Either I’ve gone too far or I’m not getting anywhere. The professor has to choose. How can I be going too far if I’m not getting anywhere? It’s either one or the other. One cannot, in all sincerity, reproach me for not getting anywhere and going too far at one and the same time – it would be disingenuous. I’m taking too long to open the cave, now that’s a criticism that could be leveled at me, that’s something I would have trouble denying. However, I have my reasons. It seems the way I am carrying out my duties is being judged more and more harshly on high. Even Professor Glatt, who usually takes my side, did not appreciate the thumbtack episode. Couldn’t I simply have pulled the plastic heads off the three yellow thumbtacks to find the requisite harmony? Obviously, yes; and if I didn’t do it, it’s because I had my reasons. What do they know on high about how my work is progressing? How do they measure progress? Still, they cannot be unaware of the fact that a story of this sort never begins abruptly, that it is impossible to know or to locate the beginning of a story of this sort before knowing the ending: it is the end of a story that illuminates in retrospect the phases of its evolution and that allows one to infer its origins. These origins, however, are at times much older than one suspected. In truth, there is but one origin and that is why a
story of this sort can never come to an end; the same origin continually gives rise to new stories without, for all that, cutting itself off from all the other stories going on at the same time: the real interest of the flint tools dug up by Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes (born in Rethel in 1788, died in 1868) at Menchecourt or Moulin Quignon lies not in the fact that they are examples of Paleolithic tools among so many other, identical ones in our possession, but rather in the precise fact that they were discovered by the historical father of prehistoric sciences, and this is what makes them so significant.

So do not talk to me about dates, deadlines, passing time, the approaching tourist season; do not tell me I must get down to it quickly. Besides, I am already down to it. I am in the middle of it. If I weren’t, where would I be? This story began well before me, four billion years ago, about four billion years ago to be exact; it will carry on without me when I’m gone, with periods of respite that in no way will mean it has come to an end, as one could perhaps erroneously think. Some guy loses his precious knife, complains, gets annoyed, retraces his steps in vain, gives up looking for it, and two million years later, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes’s foot stumbles upon it. Ever since, this flint has been in our archaeological collections, another respite before future adventures during which its characteristics as a universal tool will be rediscovered, why not, unless it is swept away with the rubble of the demolished museum where it was exhibited and returned once more to the earth, as if its mineral nature took over at regular intervals: we domesticate animals whose lives are shorter than ours – at thirty, man begins his third dog’s life – but it is not for us to make plans for stones.

(The Pales cave is famous for, among other things, its little black horse from the Steppe that appears at the back of a natural recess in the cave wall and disappears just as suddenly, according to the season and the climatic conditions. It is frightened of the damp that darkens the rock. It is at its best on dry ground. If there is a series of rainy summers in the region, it might not show itself for several years. In contrast, it remains visible as long as harsh winters follow summers without rain. It is in fact unpredictable, like the sky itself. Sometimes it is gone for so long that you believe it has left for good, erased forever. And then suddenly it reappears, and not only is it as distinct as it was before, but it even seems to be in better condition, refreshed, more clearly delineated. You think it has left prehistoric times for good. Wrong. It goes back there, and once again you are thrown.)

What’s more, the extreme fragility of certain paintings is yet another reason to protest the premature reopening of the site; Professor Glatt cannot dispute that. As long as effective measures of protection have not been put in place, is it really responsible to expose the cave’s frescoes to anthropic erosion and other human ravages? It would make sense to put in guardrails or dig trenches around the painted cave walls, which, according to the most recent reports, are so friable in spots that a finger can easily bury itself in them up to its second knuckle. Several clay panels were literally reworked in this way, behind Crescenzo’s or Boborikine’s back, by those fanatics who cannot come near a piece of art without touching it, as if they hoped to have some part in its everlastingness or leave a trace of their passage on this earth in a place where all traces are reverently preserved, even at the risk of being called iconoclasts and cursed for all eternity. Why not have a little electric train running
through the galleries? When visitors ride on it they would not be tempted to sign the paintings. Nonetheless, such a measure would scarcely lessen the negative influence these ladies and gentlemen have on the temperature and hygrometry of the cave. By dispersing with their every movement a swarm of organic matter mixed with the dust from their clothing – produced primarily by the incessant decomposition of their live tissues – these same ladies and gentlemen promote the development of bacteria, fungus, and algae; and their whistles of admiration are spears of carbonic acid that pierce the bison’s flanks. (The painter’s breath was already corroding the figures his hand was forming at the very moment of their creation, for breathing man cannot look at the work he is creating and that will outlast him without terror, and his ambition to live on through it comes up against a vague, conflicting desire to destroy it, it is in his power to do so, he is still the stronger of the two. This is why works of art also end up dying, worn out or destroyed: they carried this death wish within from the moment they were conceived – but I only opened this parenthesis so I could wind up here, and here I am, so I’m slamming it shut.)

I would feel terrible chasing you away, Professor, but I have my work cut out for me and your stopping by will do nothing to expedite the reopening of the cave. Of course our conversations are quite interesting. I enjoy them immensely but they disrupt my schedule. The explanations you want from me, your questions I must answer: all this sidetracks me. I’m not getting anywhere. And now, duty calls. Climb up there and tell them that their ideas about me are wrong, that I am very busy despite what it may seem. I have already done a great deal of work. But I do
not
think this is the right time to
reopen the cave. Besides, take a look at the key you gave me. It’s too big, too heavy, one of those keys with the balls of a jailer knocking against his thigh, I don’t believe this key capable of reopening the gate it locked. It doesn’t seem to be at all the kind of key to retrace its steps or change its mind, a key like this can only be used once, to close up, a key like this is one that locks for good, if you ask me, a key like this is a key that bolts the door and throws away the key.

H
E DEFINITELY
must have been seated when he drew his big polychrome mammoth. Then he would have stood up on tiptoe or more likely perched himself on a rock or the back of an assistant, or on a clayey protuberance made expressly for this purpose, or on a rudimentary platform. In any event, he would have constructed all these hypotheses himself before choosing the best one to reach the ledge and paint the heads of those two ibex thereon with a dab of pink ochre, for it is obvious that the three figures were drawn by the same hand. The photographic reproductions in my possession leave no room for doubt. Each artist already had his characteristic style, easily identifiable despite the motifs and techniques shared by all. I would readily attribute the female aurochs and the rearing horse of the last chamber on the third level to this same painter, as well as the line of mammoths filing out of it, taking a sharp turn without losing their stride and straying into a cul-de-sac. The headless woman, on the other hand, truly seems to be the sole work of its creator, unless perhaps the figure of a bear sketched on a stalagmitic pillar was also his, but it is now partially obscured by calcite flowstones and it is difficult to tell. The catalogue of reproductions doesn’t omit a single one of the cave’s paintings. Animal figures predominate – finished or not, at times just rough outlines – because the catalogue lists twenty-eight horses,
twenty-six mammoths, twenty bison, sixteen ibex, sixteen reindeer, seven aurochs, six felines, five fish (salmonid), two elk, two stags, a bear, a woolly rhino, a boar, a wolf, a bird, more than one hundred other mammals that are unfinished, or botched, or clumsy, or damaged, over whose nature prehistorians argue. There is even some question of a human profile that according to some is probably the hindquarters of a bison and, according to others, the only example of a penguin discovered in a cave far from any coast.

But among all these indefinable figures there is one whose strangeness is due neither to the poor quality nor bad condition of the painting; on the contrary, it is certainly among the most perfect and best preserved in the cave. I have the reproduction in front of me: at first, it looks like an izard head and so you ask yourself: What’s the problem? Only the izard has such curved horns. But then you can make out two thinner lines extending from the horns and branching out to form what are in fact the powerful antlers of a megaceros; so the problem is solved, it was a paltry enigma, and then the eye discerns in the tangle of antlers the very clear shape of a roaring feline and everything becomes arranged differently; one mistook the thick stream of urine with which the wildcat marks its territory for an antler and now that this interpretation has become obvious, you can no longer even find the outlines of the izard or the megaceros; this hypothetical ruminant’s profile in fact calls to mind an eagle’s spread wing, and indeed I can clearly recognize the hooked beak of the raptor; how could we have seen in it the head of a roaring feline? It’s an eagle in flight, no point in looking any further, the curved line of its back no more resembles a stream of urine than it does a mammoth’s trunk, for example. We have to admit it looks too much like a
mammoth’s trunk not to be one, and then the whole pachyderm immediately appears in three-quarters profile – we mistook its frightening right tusk for a bird of prey’s wing – so strange is this figure that when observed more closely it could be taken for a salmon, a crab, or a bison, judging by the woolly fur of its turtleneck. Our indecision is partly due to a whole slew of pentimenti, the traces of which are vaguely visible, often just barely. But, by and large, what do we really know about the aesthetic ideas of troglodyte painters? Why should we deny them the possibility of imagination and reduce their inventive audacity to an ignorance of the laws of perspective obeyed in realist animal art? To reproduce is to admit, and thus it is to submit, to agree to follow the herds of reindeer and their coprophagous flies in all their migrations. But man’s relation to the world changes the moment his imagination comes into play, it changes completely; it’s no longer a relation of constant humiliation and subjection, quite the opposite: it reverses completely, takes a turn for the better, and henceforth quadrupeds will have four equidistant left feet, they won’t go far. And so it was done.

As for the anthropomorphic figures in the cave, other than the headless woman and the penguin, they are few and far between, somewhat sloppy, and reduced to a bare minimum: all it takes are two eyes, two dark rings painted on a natural protuberance of the cave wall. This single portrait is used for every face, the resemblance is there, startling, a mirror could not do better, anyone can recognize himself in it; that dazed look is definitely our own – the malice of the gaze and the irony of the smile cannot change a thing about it, our face is one big nose that expresses, more than anything, a lack of comprehension. Perhaps this is why – and in order to feel as though they
are part of the world in spite of it all, so as to merge with the other creatures and to be accepted by them, to fit in unobtrusively, without scandal, stealthily in other words – the other human characters who appear are all wearing animal masks, beaks and horns or plumage, and this clumsy ruse that communicates their goodwill by and large betrays their helplessness. The calm self-assurance of the animals accentuated the humans’ bewilderment all the more, emphasized their weakness and the erroneousness of their instincts that misled them about the taste of fruit and the chill of nights; so they made an attempt to escape this miserable, inferior, shameful condition by decking themselves out in feathers, skins, furs torn from animals who, once flayed, lose their arrogance, pink as the day they were born, equally tender, totally raw, and vaguely obscene because we replaced their silky fleeces with our own provocative nudity. Moreover, this exchange foretold the slow transubstantiation that would subsequently begin, following the domestication of the wild pig. And this explains why we devour so enthusiastically all the parts of its body, flesh of our flesh, from the snout to the tail, the dream incarnate of the anthropophagous butcher, the self-made man, nothing but obesity, foot shrunk to the nail, brains unraveling, fatty animal of tenderized human meat, without nerves, without soul, without that sickly sweet – but subtle, choice – aftertaste of sludge.

The V of “Vulva,” repeated over and again on the cave walls, already illustrates the dominant obsession of times to come. Two deep gashes made with flints – a crotch – the invisible body fills the surrounding space and is rendered almost palpable thanks to the power of suggestion of both the drawing and desire. More than thirty vulvae were counted on the single wall
here, some large some small, some narrow some wide, spread out like a flight of gulls; but back then two different pictorial signs represented birds and vulvae, and we will have to wait until the advent of watercolors to see this superfluous distinction abolished at last. Another strange thing in the cave – this one unique and consequently less significant – nonetheless deserves a glance. I want to show you. If I can find it. Where was it? Don’t move. Wait here, I’ll be right back. If the catalogue is properly done, conceived from start to finish with the same logical rigor, this strange thing should be on the next page. Indeed it is. Here it is. We can get going. Next page. Stay behind me in a group. We’re turning.