Prehistoric Times (10 page)

S
TOP
. Here we are. Don’t get under each other’s feet. Form a circle around me so everyone can see. You are now admiring the sole male sex organ in the cave, represented by a stalagmitic projection of forty centimeters (but it must have increased in size since the time the engraver traced the puny prone figure around it). Thick, opaline – not bad – it looks more like a block of frozen sperm. Who knows, perhaps it has conserved all its seminal virtues, but is it up to us to try our hand at artificial insemination? How far can science go, where do its rights end, who are we to fool around with the very principle of life, etc.? We know, moreover, that women did not do the work of decorating the caves, they were kept away from art just as they were from hunting, they were employed for the seasonal gathering of blackberries, plums, hazelnuts, the harvesting of edible roots, the collecting of eggs, snails, honey – I’m the bear, I go first, any objections? Such harvests in the wild were indispensable because agriculture did not yet exist, and that’s something we must repeat and retain: art preceded agriculture by some twenty thousand years, so that the old collective dream of fleeing civilization to renew our ties with primitive values and with the first passions of human beings does not entail, as one could be led to believe, buying a little ramshackle farmhouse and its fallow land, the practice of painting would be more pertinent – any monochrome painting is more rustic, typical, and authentic than a row of potatoes.

Motherhood was also exclusively left to women, which is no longer the case; quite the opposite in fact: today we may well be witnessing a transfer of responsibilities in this domain for, even if, as in the past, the mother still carries the child in her womb for the first months, afterward it is the father who lugs it around for ten years on his shoulders, where the larva goes through its slow metamorphosis by gaining weight on a daily basis. Kept down for too long by their education and then, until recently, by an unfair division of domestic labor, with access only to the wastewater from watercolors, women will finally be able to exercise their unsuspected talents freely. Imminent upheavals in the arts and sciences are to be expected; as soon as the legacy of this long bondage disappears, women will make their original voices heard and then it will be one surprise after another. One need only think of Pierre and Marie Curie. By mixing their radium with phosphorescent zinc sulfide, a person might perhaps lose some fingers, but one would also obtain a confection of glow-in-the-dark paint, opening whole nights to the possibilities of art. We would be at the dawn of history.

And besides, little does it matter how, the hand that works uses five fingers in the business, whatever the business, and as a result on occasion it loses one or more of the fourteen phalanges that had made up its initial endowment. Goodwill is never lacking, nor is noble ambition, nor fierce determination, the heart is in it, but our numbed extremities betray us. Only my foot slipped as I was walking along the ledge. My hand will not be helpful as long as it cannot grasp running water like a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. I put my finger in the secret gears that tirelessly turn the pages of this catalogue and here I am, trapped, cornered, carried away against my will by the mechanical movement, anyone could take my place, any finger, I don’t count
anymore, and if I were an animal, I would be the waterwheel donkey, if I were an edifice, I would be a mill, as a vegetable I am the artichoke that one pulls the leaves off, I am also a shutter that flaps, a wave covering a wave, a meat cleaver. The pages turn, and now we see a copy of the negative hands disseminated throughout the cave – the artist applied an open palm to the cave wall and projected red or black powder onto this surface by blowing through a hollowed bone, then took his hand away – and these hands have been groping around for fifteen or twenty millennia, and mine gropes with them, I can pull it away, my print will remain. I have touched the back wall and I shall stay stuck to it, I won’t go beyond it either, impossible; it’s already lovely to have got this far, it was not without sufferings, look at all those twisted, mutilated hands, deformed by arthritis, decalcification, eaten away by frostbite or gangrene. All these old man hands groping along until the catalogue’s final pages. Then finally one of them closes it.

Sometimes I am a little bit hard to follow – but so-called “born leaders” are mostly shadowed by jealous men armed with knives waiting for the right moment – and it is precisely because my limp causes a deviation in all my trajectories and reroutes me three times over three meters that I was chosen to lead and comment on the guided tour through the Pales cave network. I am no fool. Only a lucid mind can understand the principles of the labyrinths dreamed up by architects and manage to get out of them, but it takes a system of thinking that is sufficiently confused and delirious, or excessively logical, to orient itself in the mazes dug out by rivers. Glatt and his ilk did not appoint me by chance. True, they are beginning to regret their choice. According to them, I’ve done nothing since I’ve been here, the dead Boborikine is more
active than I am, more efficient, and at least he has remained faithful to this vocation. He is worried about the future of paleontology. He is exchanging molecules. He is becoming mineral. His remains already contain less carbon 14 than they did before, and this progressive diminution will allow us periodically to take a bearing. And so we shall not let ourselves be fooled by the speeding up or slowing down of History; we need only examine Boborikine’s bones scientifically to know the time and situate ourselves very precisely in it. For – and perhaps you’re hearing it from me first – dread death occurs at least forty thousand years after the official death certificate is written, when our last atoms of carbon 14 are eliminated. Only then do we cease to emit radiation and only then is the fate of our soul sealed for good. May God on that day welcome Boborikine into his holy keeping.

I
S IT BECAUSE
I am an archaeologist – trained as one and derailed as a result – that I am surprised that so few widowers, widows, and orphans are sufficiently affected by the unbearable absence to break into the dead person’s grave a few days after he or she was buried to see his or her face one last time even in this sorry state, even through their tears, to embrace the body one last time before it will truly be too late, and to verify that it really belongs to the person they thought it did and reassure themselves that he or she has not regained consciousness? This all too rapid resignation smacks of consent. There is something offensive about this instant acceptance. If the greatest grief is so sensible, we can appoint it a judge, it will not lead us astray, we can put ourselves in its hands to let it wisely govern our lives. But I am speaking as an archaeologist oblivious of everything I owe to grave diggers. I am getting carried away by my passion for my job. I want to move too quickly. The minute the dead are inhumed, I want to dig them back up. Patience. It is always too soon to unbury the dead. Never did a paleontologist worthy of his name dig up a dead man. We bring to light fossilized bones, nothing but stone, let’s not get emotional, the dead are no longer there. A skeleton needs living marrow to grow bigger and stronger, but its true adventure, its adventure
qua
skeleton begins later, slowly, under the right conditions it turns to stone and it’s a crying shame that consciousness cannot participate in the skeleton’s
adventure all the way to the end, for it is a wonderful adventure, the kind of adventure consciousness loved, like meditating or remembering, a static adventure regulated by the passing of time with, at the end, peace.

But we are irremediably, not to say very superficially, creatures of the surface, and it is always difficult for us to admit that history in reality is being determined beneath our feet. For the past (what is putrefied and petrified) and the future (what engenders and endures) are in effect buried: passing time is subterranean. Our senses do not perceive it. Our spirits do not conceive it. All those antennae only give us information about space, or the current moment, that is, today’s weather conditions. We know, however, that the prosperity of a region depends on the resources belowground, and we also know that any history of horology, from the very first ticktock, is meaningless on the scale of time that produces the following riches: quartz, hydrocarbons, diamonds, every ore. I have done a lot of digging in my time, deep digging, I have thrust myself down into the earth like a tree all the while deploring the fact that I cannot travel in every direction at once, unlike the tree that plunges and pushes its roots ever farther, branching them out rather than having to choose between two diverging roads so as to explore them both. I would also have liked to possess the ability to dig in two places simultaneously without having to split myself in two, without separating my blood, with the blind but perfectly controlled perseverance also typical of moles.

I have often had occasion to see them at work, I know them well, or, let me say in passing, I know the ones who usurp their name – for they are never totally moles, fully moles, absolutely moles, they are missing gloves, mole gloves in order to be one hundred percent moles, entirely moles, worthy
of the name “mole” even if, as such, despite their tiny hands that are always clean, they are already almost moles, more mole than any other animal in any case, the shrew for example compared to the mole, the shrew in point of fact is nothing like a mole, the shrew must be redesigned from tail to snout to obtain a mole and that is why, while awaiting the mole with mole fingers, lacking this actual mole, I propose to continue to use the term “mole” for all the pseudomoles, approximate or incomplete, that can give the impression of moleness, they have proved it, and I’ve often had occasion to see them at work, therefore I am very knowledgeable about and I admire and envy their remarkable sense of direction: naturalists are in the habit of slipping a radioactive band onto one of their tiny paws and following their underground movements with a Geiger (Hans, German physicist, born in Neustadt in 1882 and died in Berlin in 1945, for those among you interested in his trajectory) counter. These experiments show that moles navigate very well in their tunnels. They never get lost despite the daily growing complexity of the network; they do not wonder which way to turn at a crossroads and they are so sure of finding their way that they lay in a food supply in several places, on different levels, before bifurcating again, whence this interminable digression that allows me to describe them in their natural surroundings with all the rigor and honesty that one rightly expects from science.

Myopia fuels curiosity. It is this myopia above all that the mole’s curiosity would like to break through. And our curiosity is likewise stimulated by the mysteries to which our confused spirit gives birth. In truth, everything is very simple and somewhat disappointing. Archaeology has confirmed that man in his historical fiction has always been what he is, except for a few
details; successive civilizations resemble each other so closely that it would be possible to recount History backward, beginning with today, starting at the end in order to travel back through the ages all the way to the most ancient known remains; and there too we would see a logical progression with effects and causes reversed: the chain of events would seem no less inexorable than the one on which we are dependent. With the same amazement we would measure the path traveled by men from the time of telephone and automobile cities who, little by little having rid themselves of these nuisances, demolished one neighborhood at a time to make room for the peaceful and remote countryside with its farming villages where the rooftops rested on swallows’ nests until some new advances came along, simplifying, simplifying, the walls’ heavy stones that were so difficult to extract from the earth having been cleverly replaced by partitions made of branches or cob, to arrive at long last at the comfort of our modern caves, while the military engineers managed over time to reduce significantly the range of our weapons thanks to a series of technical developments intended to make them less lethal: this escapade, sketched broadly here, would have been no more ridiculous than actual history. If our ancestors had prostrated themselves before a single God, we would have shattered that rudimentary idol in order to worship, forehead to the ground, our gods as numerous as the stars. It is movement that matters, evolution regardless of the slope; there is no design, no necessity, nothing justifies History such as we can reconstitute it. Life is stubborn, it wants to endure, but no one can give it a shape or a goal. It remains a principle without consequence, a pure, unusable energy; no matter how much I dig, what’s the point if my pick only strikes the skulls of these old, old ideas?

A
LL THE SAME
, Professor Glatt had advised me not to let anyone come down and it was not my intention to disobey his orders. The idea of disappearing for a while in order to proceed under the proper conditions with the inventory of the nonindexed objects discovered on the Pales site was rather agreeable to me; as soon as I can escape the gaze of others, I blossom. But I absentmindedly forgot to close the door behind me, and a bunch of busybodies followed me down the steep steps that lead to the cellar where all those objects stored higgledy-piggledy are waiting to be labeled and catalogued. After which they will be distributed to various museums or entrusted to various laboratories for analysis or even exhibited here in the cave; two additional display cases will no doubt be necessary to house the collection. It is always dark in the cellar. The light switch is to your right, if you still believe in this miracle: first there appears a single lightbulb, filled to the neck with a syrupy, cloudy glow that empties slowly into the ceiling lamp’s globe (a fly falls in and drowns, poor thing) so that the darkness withdraws slightly without for all that admitting defeat, without breaking its circle of wolves and dangers; now you can make out more distinctly the many assorted crates lined up against the four walls of hollow cinder block that has been specially treated to prevent leaks with an exterior waterproof coating that is totally ineffective because
the inside plaster has rotted and moisture oozes in long yellowish streaks that swell as they branch out over the entire surface to be irrigated, and blisters form, and sometimes a fat, soft scale (think of that creamy petal that falls off the rose before the others) comes loose and silently strikes the floor, a compressed concrete slab reinforced with a welded wire mesh separated from the load-bearing beams and hourdi blocks by a polystyrene insulating panel that rests and weighs on a peripheral foundation of cinder blocks with a supporting partition wall, and continuous footing measuring 50 cm x 40 cm: nothing to worry about here.