The Cave (8 page)

The next three days were a time of intense activity, nervous excitement and a continual making and unmaking of things on paper and in clay. Neither of them wanted to admit that the end result of the idea, and of the work they were having to do in order to give the idea some solidity, would be a blunt refusal, with no explanation other than, The fashion for dolls like that has passed. Shipwrecked, they were rowing toward an island not knowing if it was a real island or only the ghost of an island. Marta was the better of the two at drawing and so she was the one charged with transferring to paper their six chosen types, using the classic grid method to enlarge them to the exact size the dolls would be once they had been fired, a hand span tall, not the span of her hand, which is small, but of her father's. Then came the business of coloring the drawings, this was complicated not because of any excessive care taken in the execution, but because they had to choose and combine colors which they did not know for certain would be right for the figures since the encyclopedia, illustrated in accordance with the printing technology of the time, contained minutely detailed copperplate engravings, but the only chromatic effects were apparent shades of gray achieved by printing black lines on the unvarying white of the paper. The easiest of all was, of course, the nurse. White hat, white blouse, white skirt, white shoes, all white white white, impeccably white, as if she were an angel of charity come down to earth with the mission of relieving suffering and mitigating pain until, eventually, another identically dressed angel had to be summoned urgently in order to mitigate and relieve her own pain and suffering. The Eskimo did not present any great problems either, the skins he wore could be painted half beige half gray, with a few whitish patches to imitate the skin of a bear turned inside out, the main thing was that the Eskimo should have the face of a real Eskimo, which is what he came into the world to be. As for the clown, the problems would be far greater, simply because he was poor. If, instead of being the miserable ragamuffin he is, he were a rich clown, any bright, cheerful color would do, with a random scattering of sequins on his conical hat, his shirt, and his trousers. But he is a poor clown, really poor, and wears a heterogeneous collection of rags showing neither taste nor judgment and patched from head to toe, a waistcoat that comes down to his knees, baggy trousers, a collar large enough to accommodate three necks, a bow tie that looks like a ceiling fan, a lurid shirt, and shoes as big as barges. All of this can be painted in whatever colors one chooses, because, since he is only a poor clown, no one is going to waste their time checking to see if the colors of this clay creation have the decency to respect the colors the poor man would have worn even when he was not working as a clown. The trouble is that this jack-of-all-trades is not actually going to be any easier to model than the hunter or the musketeer, which had seemed so problematic at the start. Moving from the clown to the jester will mean moving from similar to same, from alike to identical, from comparable to analogous. Though applied differently, the colors used on one can be used on another, and a couple of changes of costume will rapidly transform the jester into a clown and the clown into a jester. Strictly speaking, they almost duplicate each other as regards clothes and function, the only difference between them, from the social point of view, is that clowns do not usually visit the palaces of kings. The mandarin in his long gown and the Assyrian in his tunic will require no special attention either, a few touches to the Eskimo's eyes and he can serve as a Chinaman, and
the Assyrian's long, curly beard will make it easier to work on the lower part of the face. Marta made three series of drawings, the first totally faithful to the originals, the second stripped of all accessories, the third free of any superfluous detail. This would facilitate any examination of them by whichever Center official has the last word on the fate of the proposal, and, if the proposal is approved, it will perhaps make less likely, or so they hope, the possibility of any future complaints about a discrepancy between the drawing and the actual clay figure. Until Marta had moved on to the third series of drawings, Cipriano Algor had merely watched what was happening, frustrated because he could not help, all the more because he was aware that any intervention on his part would only slow up the work and make it more difficult. However, as soon as Marta had placed before her the piece of paper on which she would set down the last series of drawings, he rapidly gathered together the initial copies and went out to the pottery. She just had time to say, Don't get annoyed if it doesn't come out right the first time. Hour after hour, during the rest of that day and part of the following day, until it was time for him to go and fetch marçal from the Center, the potter made, unmade and remade dolls in the form of nurses and mandarins, jesters and Assyrians, Eskimos and clowns, almost unrecognizable at the first attempt, but gradually gaining form and meaning as his fingers began to interpret for themselves and in accordance with their own laws the instructions transmitted to them by the brain. Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then
waits to see what will happen. Having sent an order to the hands and fingers, it believes, or pretends to believe, that the task will then be completed, once the extremities of the arms have done their work. The brain has never been curious enough to ask itself why the end result of this manipulative process, which is complex even in its simplest forms, bears so little resemblance to what the brain had imagined before it issued its instructions to the hands. It should be noted that the fingers are not born with brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see. The help of the eyes is important, as important as what is seen through them. That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed. Anything in the brain-in-our-head that appears to have an instinctive, magical, or supernatural quality—whatever that may mean—is taught to it by the small brains in our fingers. In order for the brain-in-the-head to know what a stone is, the fingers first have to touch it, to feel its rough surface, its weight and density, to cut themselves on it. Only long afterward does the brain realize that from a fragment of that rock one could make something which the brain will call a knife or something it will call an idol. The brain-in-the-head has always lagged behind the hands, and even now, when it seems to have overtaken them, the fingers still have to summarize for it the results of their tactile investigations, the shiver that runs across the epidermis when it touches clay, the lacerating sharpness of the graver, the acid biting into the plate, the faint vibration of a piece of paper laid flat, the orography of textures, the crosshatching of fibers, the alphabet of the world in relief. And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from what one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but is immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might
serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' often bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does—a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of a wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or golden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along come the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been named, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experienced in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted. Marta put it another way, Now you're getting the hang of it.

I'm off to do men's work now, so this time you'll have to stay at home, Cipriano Algor told the dog, who had run after him when he saw him going over to the van. Obviously Found did not need to be told to get in, they just had to leave the van door open long enough for him to know that they would not immediately shoo him out again, but the real cause of his startled scamper toward the van, strange though this may seem, was that, in his doggy anxiety, he was afraid that they were about to leave him on his own. Marta, who had come out into the yard talking to her father and was walking with him to the van, was holding in her hand the envelope containing the drawings and the proposal, and although Found has no very clear idea what envelopes are or what purpose they serve, he knows from experience that people about to get into cars usually carry with them things which, generally speaking, they throw onto the back seat even before they themselves get in. In the light of these experiences, one can see why Found's memory might lead him to assume that Marta was going to accompany her father on this new trip in the van. Although Found has been here only a few days, he has no doubt that his owners' house is his house, but his incipient sense of property does not yet authorize him to look around him and say, All this is mine. Besides, a dog, whatever his size, breed, or character, would never dare to utter such grossly possessive words, he would say at most, All this is ours, and even then, reverting to the particular case of these potters and their property, movables and immovables, the dog Found, even in ten years' time, will be incapable of thinking of himself as the third owner. The most he might possibly achieve when he is a very old dog is a vague, obscure feeling of being part of something dangerously complex and, so to speak, full of slippery meanings, a whole made up of parts in which each individual is, simultaneously, both one of the parts and the whole of which he is a part. These challenging ideas, which the human brain is more or less capable of conceiving but not, without great difficulty, of explaining, are the daily bread of the various canine nations, both from the merely theoretical point of view and as regards their practical consequences. Don't go thinking, however, that the canine spirit is like a serene cloud floating by, a spring dawn full of gentle light, a lake in a garden with white swans swimming, were that the case, Found would not have suddenly started whimpering pitifully, What about me, he was saying, what about me. In response to the heartrending cries of this soul in torment, Cipriano Algor, weighed down as he was by the responsibility of the mission taking him to the Center, could find nothing better to say than, This time you'll have to stay at home, but what consoled the troubled creature was seeing Marta take two steps back once she had handed the envelope to her father, and thus Found realized that they were not, in fact, going to leave him all alone, for even though each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs, as we hope we demonstrated above with a + b, two parts, when put together, make a very different total. Marta waved a weary good-bye to her father and went back into the house. The dog did not follow her at once, but waited until the van, having driven down the hill to the road, had disappeared behind the first house in the village. When, shortly afterward, he went into the kitchen, he saw his mistress sitting in the same chair where she had been working during the last few days. She kept wiping her eyes with her hands as if trying to rid them of some shadow or some pain. Doubtless because he was still green in years, Found had not yet had time to gain clear, definitive, formed opinions on the importance or meaning of tears in the human being, however, considering that these liquid humors are frequently manifest in the strange soup of sentiment, reason and cruelty of which the said human being is made, he thought it might not be such a very grave mistake to go over to his weeping mistress and gently place his head on her knees. An older dog and, always assuming that age carries with it a double load of guilt, a dog of an unnecessarily cynical turn of mind, would take a sardonic view of such an affectionate gesture, but this would only be because the emptiness of old age had caused him to forget that, in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little. Touched, Marta slowly stroked his head and, since he did not move, but remained there staring up at her, she picked up a piece of charcoal and began sketching out on a piece of paper the first lines of a drawing. At first, her tears prevented her from seeing properly, but, gradually, as her hand grew more confident, her eyes grew clearer, and the dog's head, as if emerging from the depths of a murky pool, appeared to her in all its beauty and strength, all its mystery and probing curiosity. From this moment on, Marta will love the dog Found as much as we know Cipriano already loves him.