Touchy Subjects (16 page)

"
La belle mademoiselle
" that was it. That's all it was. "
La belle mademoiselle m'a donne la main. Elle m'a donne la main.
" He wasn't talking to me at all, he was reassuring himself, telling himself the story of the pretty lady who gave him her hand. He had an amazing voice, deep like an actor's. For a moment I was absurdly warmed by the fact that he thought I was
belle,
even if he couldn't have much basis for comparison.

The floor was slick, now, and the passage had narrowed so much I had to walk ahead of Jean-Luc, twisting my arm backwards and waiting for him to catch up with me every couple of steps. I could feel his hand twitch like a rope. He was starting to wheeze, casting anxious glances at the craggy walls closing in on us. The air was dank. I couldn't hear the guide anymore, the group had left us so far behind. Damn her to hell, I thought.

The man's breath was coming faster and harsher in his throat. Had he any idea why he was being dragged down into these prehistoric sewers? I wondered. I supposed I should tell him there was nothing to be afraid of. He had a little wart on the edge of one finger, I could feel it, or maybe it was a callus. I gave his hand a small and tentative squeeze. Jean-Luc squeezed back, harder, and didn't let go. I could feel the fine bones shifting under his skin. Well that was all I needed, for this poor bastard to have a heart attack and die on me, twenty thousand leagues below the earth! The thought almost made me laugh. I wished I knew how old he was. Baldness didn't mean anything; I knew a boy who started losing his hair at twenty-two. I cleared my throat now, trying to think of something comforting to say. Every word of French had deserted me. "
Faut pas ... Faut pas avoir peur
" I stuttered hoarsely at last, praying I had my verb ending right. How would it translate? One should not be afraid. It is a faux pas to have fear.

I thought Jean-Luc might not have heard me or taken it in; he still stared ahead fixedly, as if anticipating a cave bear or mammoth around every corner. His eyes were enormous; the occasional beam of light showed their whites. But as we ducked under an overhang, I heard it like a mantra, under his breath: "
Faut pas avoir peur. Mademoiselle dit, 'Faut pas avoir peur.'
"

I grinned, briefly, in the dark. He was doing all right. Mademoiselle had told him not to be afraid. We'd get out of here in one piece.

When we came to a set of deep steps spiraling down in to the rock, I went first, so that at least if he slipped I could break his fell. But Jean-Luc held on to my hand like a limpet, and I didn't want to scare him by tugging it away, so I held on with the tips of my fingers, our arms knotted awkwardly in the air, as if we were dancing a gavotte. His arm was weaving and shaking; it was like wrestling a snake. My silk hem got under my feet, then, and the pair of us nearly crashed down on one of those stubby little stalagmites. Now that would be funny, if we snapped off ten thousand years' worth of growth and got sued by the French state.

The steps began to twist the other way, and I found my arm bent up behind my back as if I was being led to my death. This was ludicrous; I was going to dislocate something. I stopped for a second and switched hands as fast as I could. Jean-Luc stared at me, but held on to the new hand. "
Pas de problème,
" I said foolishly. No problem. Could you say that in French or did it sound American?

We found our rhythm again, and I could hear Jean-Luc behind me, repeating, "
Pas de problème, pas de problème,
" in a ghost's whisper. Our joined hands were the only spot of heat in this whole desolate mountain.

At last the path leveled out and we found ourselves in a huge cavern where the rest of the group stood watching the guide point out painted animals with her torch. A few faces looked over at us. I relaxed my grip, but Jean-Luc held on tight. For a moment I felt irritated. He wasn't afraid of falling anymore; he was just taking advantage. And then I almost laughed at the thought of this peculiar gentleman taking advantage of me. I stood with his warm cushioned hand in mine, the pair of us gazing forward like a bashful couple at the altar. I was cold right through, now, and my nipples were standing up against the silk of my dress; I angled myself a little away from Jean-Luc so he wouldn't see.

I tried to pay attention to the guide. I peered up at the rock walls: orange, greenish grey, and a starding pink. There were scrawl marks that looked as if they'd been done with fingers on a thousand long nights. The paintings were of horses and lions and bears, or so the guide said, and the Specials were laughing and pointing as if they could make them out, but to be honest the rusty overlapping squiggles on the rock all looked alike to me. Whatever the cave dwellers' powers of endurance, it occurred to me, they hadn't been able to draw for shite.

The guide said something I didn't catch, and then let out a surprisingly young laugh and flicked off the light switch. Blackness came down on us like a falling tent. Some of the Specials shrieked with excitement, but Jean-Luc cleaved to my hand as if it were a life belt. I tried to squeeze back, even though he was hurting my fingers. My eyes strained to find any speck of light in the darkness. It suddenly struck me that this was entirely normal behaviour for a trogloditic cavern. When the cold and the dark and the weight of a mountain pressed down on you, what made more sense than to grab the nearest living hand and hold on as tight as you could?

When the lights came back on, I blinked, relieved. A fat boy with a baseball cap on sideways edged back to us, and tried to take hold of Jean-Luc's other hand, but Jean-Luc shook him off, almost viciously. I looked away and bit down on my smile.

What did we think they ate, the cave dwellers? the guide was asking. Most of the Specials grinned back at her as if it were a joke rather than a question. Did they go to a supermarket, she suggested, and buy veal? One or two nodded doubtfully. No, she told us, there were no supermarkets! This claim caused quite a stir among the Specials. Now the guide was shining her torch on a painted animal; I couldn't tell what it was. She announced with grim enthusiasm that the cave dwellers hunted animals with sticks and cooked them in the fire.

"
Non!
"

"
Non!
"

"
Tuer les animaux?
"

A shock wave ran through the group as she nodded to say that yes, they killed the animals. A tiny woman with a squeezed-up face sucked in air. "
Manger les animaux?
" Yes, indeed, they ate the animals. The Specials' reactions were so huge and incredulous that I began to suspect them of irony. Had no one ever told them what sausages were made of?

That's what the cave dwellers did, the guide insisted. And they caught fish, too, she told us, in nets made out of their own hair. And they turned animal skin into leather by soaking it in their own urine, then chewing it till it was soft. At least, I feared that was what she said; the cave was a confusion of voices, now, and all I could think about was how cold I was. I was starting to shake as if I had a palsy. People must always have been cold in those days, it occurred to me. Maybe they knew no different, so they didn't notice it. Or, more likely, maybe they couldn't think about anything else. The minute you woke up, you'd have to start working as if your life depended on it, because it did: build up the fire, eat, keep moving, pile on more clothes, keep eating, never let the fire go out, even in your sleep. They'd all have slept in one big heap, the guide was saying now, putting her head on the shoulder of the girl in the helmet and miming a state of blissful unconscious; if you slept alone, she said, you'd wake up dead. Jean-Luc, by my side, must have heard this, because he let out a single jolt of laughter. I turned my head to smile at him, but he was looking down at his shoes again.

I thought the tour had to be nearly over by now—all I could think of was getting back up into the sunlight—but the guide led us through a little passage so tight we had to go in single file. Jean-Luc and I stayed knotted together like a chain gang. At last the group emerged into a chamber, the smallest so far. The guide mentioned that the man who had discovered these caverns called this one the Sanctuary of Hands.

Then she lifted her torch, and all at once I could see them; they sprang out to meet the light. Handprints in red and black, dozens—no, hundreds of them—daubed on top of each other like graffiti, pressed onto the rock as high as someone on tiptoes could reach. This was how you signed your name, about twenty-seven thousand years ago, said the guide with a casual swing of her torch. The prints glowed in the wide beam as if they were still wet. They were mostly left hands, I saw now, and smallish; perhaps the prints of women or even children. I stepped up to one for a closer look and Jean-Luc crept along behind me.

The handprint nearest us only had three and a half fingers. I recoiled, and the guide must have noticed, because she swung her torch round to where we were standing. I backed out of the blinding light. Yes, she said, many of these hands appeared to be missing a piece or two. This was a great mystery still. Some archaeologists said the cave dwellers must have lost fingers in accidents or because of the cold, but others thought the people must have cut them off themselves. For a gift, she said, almost gaily, did we understand? To give something back to the gods. To say
merci,
thank you.

Jean-Luc stared at the print on the wall a few inches from his head. He let go of my hand, then, and laid his own against the rock, delicately fitting his short pale fingers to the blood-red marks. He turned his head and looked at me then, for the first time, and his mouth formed a half smile as if he were about to tell me a great secret. But "
Touchepas!
"called the guide sternly. "
Faut pas toucher,
Jean-Luc!" Touching was forbidden; I should have told him that. His hand contracted like a snail, and I took it into mine again. It was chilled by the rock.

We followed the group up a long widening tunnel that seemed to have been dug out in modern times, and soon I could smell fresh air. After some very steep steps, we were all panting audibly, even the backpackers, and Jean-Luc's hand was hot in my grip again. He and I were the last to emerge, wincing in the sunlight like aged prisoners set free. The hills were a jumble of rocks on every side, and the half-reaped valley slid away below us. The sun warmed my face, and the air tasted sweet as straw.

Every year for a week or two there would be a sort of summer, the guide was explaining; the snow might shrink away just enough to let the cave dwellers come out and sit on the ground.

And what became of them in the end? someone asked her. Well, she said with a little shrug, one year they must have come out and found the snow gone and the sun shining. Then they walked down into the valley and never came back.

On the way down to the car park, I began to wonder when Jean-Luc was going to let go of my hand. I didn't want to have to wriggle it out of his grasp, but I could see the group leader waiting for them by the little bus. I hoped Jean-Luc didn't think I was coming home with the Specials. All of a sudden I felt appallingly sad. I wished I knew what to say to him, in any language.

But at the edge of the car park he disengaged his sticky fingers from mine and turned to face me, very formally. "
Au revoir,
mademoiselle,
" he said, which I supposed could be translated as "Until we meet again," and I smiled and nodded and took up his hand again for a second to shake good-bye. He was puzzled by this, I could tell, but he let me shake it, as if it were a rattle.

"
Au revoir,
Jean-Luc," I repeated, more often than I needed to, and waved until he'd disappeared into the bus. I did look for his profile in the window, but the glass was white in the glare of the sun.

Appalled by his credit-card debts, the writer succumbed to a one-year writer-in-residence job at a small college in the mountains. Until he sold the Great Novel for a hefty enough sum to pay the rent on his apartment for a few years, pragmatism seemed to be called for. In the distant past, the writer had tried every joe-job he could think of; he'd picked grapefruit and filed insurance applications, fried pancakes and sold fitness equipment door-to-door. Since then, he'd supplemented his royalties by other means that he was even less proud of: he'd written inane articles for in-flight magazines and lived two years too long with a doctor because it was just so damn handy not to have to worry about the rent. This year, at least, he would be making his living in a job which was, if not literature itself, then at least not unconnected with it.

As jobs went, the writer thought this would probably turn out to be a rather pleasant one. Interesting, even, at the human level as well as the intellectual one. Packing his possessions into the locker room at the self-storage facility, the day before his departure, he tried to visualize the office that awaited him at the college, perhaps with a view of the bluish mountains. He imagined himself mentoring a few bright young poets and diffident, late-blooming novelists whose brief visits to his office—Mondays and Fridays only—would leave him ample time to work on the Great Novel.

Dear Mr. Writer-in-Residence (I'm afraid I don't know your Name),

I would greatly like to Introduce Myself. My name is Herb Leland and I call myself a WritOr that is not just someone who Happens to write but who am a Storyteller from the very Depths of my Be-ing. The Truth is that I must WRITE OR DIE so to me the word WritOr which came to me during one long Sleepless Night eighteen months ago expresses this fully. I am sure you Understand being a Multi-Talented Wordsmith Yourself

I take great Pleasure in enclosure of the following two Book manuscripts The Long and Lonely Road that is a Memoir that follows Me from Ages one to fifty-three (my present age) and Serendipity a Novel about my character Lee Herbert's Journey from Naivete through Confusion to an (eventually) sense of Atuneness with Everything around him. I have been working on them for Ten Years and they are now done.