Adam & Eve (41 page)

There by itself someone had drawn the sloping neck and pointed nose of a bear, and close by, the skull of a real bear sat, as though purposely placed, on a hump of dirt. Pierre pointed to claw marks, great gouges torn into the sides of the corridor, and then he pointed to huge shallow basins, dozens of them, and explained that here giant bears had wallowed and slept through prehistoric winters.

Adam longed for snow, for the pristine whiteness, for both the bright terror and the new beauty of Idaho in winter, but he could not imagine Arielle in the snow. He imagined Pierre’s father, the Sufi, handing him a pad of creamy drawing paper; he wanted to take the Sufi’s hand, to kiss his hornlike fingernails.

Suddenly the two couples turned a corner, and there on the stone wall were beautifully painted horses decorated with spots. Yes, a whimsy of spots, like no real horses ever wore. Pretty spots for all the pretty horses. Surrounding them, blessing them, was a halo of human handprints. Adam heard Lucy’s sharp gasp of pleasure at the handprints from the past, friendly and familiar.

A slight smile curled the two corners of Adam’s mouth, and he knew he was smiling at them, the invisible ancient ones. He smiled at the black-spotted horses and the swarm of vermilion handprints. Adam closed his eyes. When he opened them, the flickering light played again on the stone wall, the horses, and the myriad human handprints wreathed around. Here was joy and fulfillment and connection.

“The charcoal I found here,” Pierre said, “carbon-dated back to forty thousand years ago. Painters blew red pigment through a hollow bone onto and around their hands to leave the prints. Look at the fingers. Their fingers and handprints look exactly like ours.”

When he first awoke in Eden, Adam had crawled to the beach, left his own handprint on the shore in the damp sand. Without touching the prehistoric print, Adam placed his hand so that it hovered just above one left by an artist so many thousands of years before. Their work had lasted.

I am justified.

Adam felt no need to put his hand into the wounds of Christ. For a moment Adam’s hand and spread fingers hovered and trembled, then he closed his fingers and rested his hand beside his thigh.

Finally Pierre said, “Look up.” Above them was painted a small figure of a man, not crudely but with the grace of the animals because he was part animal. The man’s head and shoulders were those of a stag.

“At Les Trois-Frères,” Pierre softly explained, “some people call a similar figure ‘The Sorcerer.’” Pierre sounded exhausted, but he continued. “This image, too, combines features of a man, with the antlers of a stag, and that’s the tail of a horse. His legs look human, and so do his arms. His fingers seem stylized, split like goat hooves, to me.”

Although no one mentioned it, the testicles and penis of the figure hung between his legs but seemed turned backward. The penis was a bold, black, curved line, about to lift itself to straightness.

“His body leans forward,” Pierre said, “like ‘The Killed Man,’ but he has a face, and it is turned toward us. Part man, part animal.”

“The Christ was part man, part god,” Adam said.

“Some church dogma says ‘fully man and fully God,’” Lucy corrected quietly.

“In any case,” Pierre went forward with his thought, “the Sorcerer is part man, part animal. Like the Egyptian gods, but so much older. Being partly animal may give him power and help him transcend human limitations.”

“He’s wearing a mask,” Lucy said, “with eyes on the side like a frog.”

“I think he’s hopping, or jumping,” Arielle said. “The other men were crude stick figures, falling. But see how the calf muscles in his legs are defined. They bulge like ours. He may be dancing.
Ekphrastic,
art about art. The artist may be depicting the art of dance.”

“He’s looking at us,” Adam added, peering back.

W
HEN WE EMERGED
from the cave, we stepped out not between the two flat stone lips into Pierre’s basement, but through a hole shrouded by holly in the side of a steep green hill overlooking the river valley. As we reentered the sun-bright world, we shielded our eyes with our hands. After a moment, Pierre pointed west toward two bare juts of gray rock in the distance, where the sides of the valley came closer together but did not adjoin. “The arch broke and fell,” Pierre explained, “millennia ago.”

Turning to the east as the hillside curved, we saw the Saads’ A-shaped house with a blue roof, like a toy, perhaps a mile away, and the thread of road leading to it. Because the road ended in the cleared space before their home, our taxi from Lyon had turned around to retrace its route.

East and west, in all directions, the sunny openness of the landscape of the south of France made the dark caves seem a product of imagination as much as of memory. Here was the bright reality I loved: topside. I had had the privilege of seeing sacred art; for my own eyes it had emerged from profound darkness—yet I wanted to worship the sun, the days of light and breath it gave me.

Pierre gestured toward a footpath progressing from where we stood across the slope and toward the house. As Pierre began to lead us back, Adam fell in
beside him, with Arielle and me following close behind. For a while she and I shamelessly listened to their conversation.

Pierre said, “My father insisted I show you the underworld.” He added lightly, “I still obey my father.”

“Do you?” Adam seemed amazed. “Throughout my youth, my difficult youth, the chief imperative was to escape the domination of my father.”

“Perhaps,” Pierre asked quietly with the voice of a friend, “it’s time for you to accept him?”

“He’s dead.”

Pierre turned his head and smiled at Adam. “I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

“Suppose I told you—” Adam hesitated, found his wording, and said,”—that I have walked and talked with God.”

Arielle’s head twisted abruptly toward me, but I ignored her surprise.

“Who knows?” her father answered, not at all surprised. “Suppose I told you that I
am
God, and that in walking and talking with me, as we are doing on this hillside, you are talking with God?”

Because the path cut across a slope, Pierre’s and Adam’s eyes were level with one another, though Adam was much the taller man. And younger, and stronger. But there was self-assurance in Pierre’s unmocking brown face. And confidence.

Adam said, “That’s not what I mean.”

“But you could mean it,” Pierre went on comfortably. “Each of us has only his own meanings to offer. But in some sense, I’m sure you can see truth in what I say.”

Silence fell between them, and the four of us simply continued our walking, two by two on the sunny path curving like a low necklace across the bosom of the mountain. With Arielle, I felt warmly companionable. Nearby two birds fluttered into the needles of a pine tree.

“The air smells like ponderosa in Idaho,” Adam remarked. “Why did your father suggest you show us the cave paintings?”

“‘Show your discoveries first to those you love, then share them with the world.’ That was his advice. In France, such treasures belong to everyone by law, that is, to the state.”

“And do you love us?” Adam asked Pierre.

“Certainly, my daughter,” he answered. “But I have hesitated to take my daughter to such a place, to such a deep grave.” I felt that Pierre was purposely ignoring the fact of our presence behind him. He placed that much importance on being direct with Adam.

“You accept that I love my daughter,” Pierre went on. His head was bent, and he appeared to be studying their feet. “But you doubt my love of you and Lucy.”

Adam was silent. I, too, studied our feet moving beside the pathside tufts of grass, beside a fallen pine, past a knuckle of rock emerging from the soil, beside a small gnarled bush with dried orange berries on it. Fellow travelers, we four, at least for the nonce.

“It is a little embarrassing for me to say to you that I love you,” Pierre continued. “And yet it is true of both you and Lucy, though I have known you such a short time. I love you because you have helped me, because you have brought me my heart’s desire, the ancient texts. I know it is a miracle that you have managed to do so.” Pierre was trying hard to read his heart for the truth of the moment. “You have brought a priceless treasure to my house. Who does not love those who give them even the ordinary things they need?”

“The ungrateful,” Adam said, then he tossed his head like a stallion and seemed surprised that he had said the words aloud.

“It is easy for me to feel gratitude,” Pierre said, “and gratitude is the bedfellow of love.”

“Does love have other bedfellows?” Adam asked, but his tone had changed. He sounded like a friend talking to a friend.

“Of course. One of them is desire.”

Adam simply let the idea sink like a stone in water.

“And there is longing,” Pierre added.

Adam touched the back of his neck, feeling the warmth of the sun there. Perhaps he was thinking it was a French warmth, not the white, high-altitude burning that touched the Idaho mountains, not the sizzling heat of sunlight on our skin in the unfiltered Middle East. He said, “Your name, Pierre, Peter, in English means ‘rock.’ Jesus told Peter, his disciple, that he would build his church upon a rock, through Peter’s faith.”

“Your greatest longing,” Pierre said, “is for God.”

“‘In God, we trust,’” Adam answered. He grinned. “In America, it’s written on our money.”

He used a friend’s prerogative to lighten the tone of a serious conversation.

Our curiosity about them satisfied, Arielle and I began our own dialogue, but we let a space open between our voices and their ears. We were glad to walk in the sunshine and to draw the aroma of grass and scattered trees into our nostrils, but we wanted to know each other, too. Walking beside Arielle, I remembered my girlhood friend Janet, and how often we had strolled in some park or boulevard while confiding our thoughts.

“Tell me about Thom, your husband who died,” Arielle said. “You loved him?”

Her question struck me as an insult. Beside my elbow, she was a streak of warmth, tall, young, exotic, a presence unlike myself. Because the only bridge to link us seemed to be an arc of language, I began to send words like so many goats across it. Was this how Adam often felt? Cut off from the world with only breath and words, peculiar words, to send to the Other Side? Perhaps what seemed an insult was really an invitation to commune. “I did love my husband—very much—and I do.”

What
should
I say to this younger woman, who was doubtlessly filled with real questions about love? Pierre had tried to read his heart to Adam; as the more experienced person, I must try, too. “I don’t know if the Thom I loved really existed, or if it was my idea of him.” My skepticism blurted out like a protrusion in the path. How blandly abstract my words! Yet I felt I was pulling barbed hooks from the red fish of my heart.

“If he was what I needed—I met him when I was eighteen.” My sentence bridge was breaking up into incoherent phrases. I gathered control and said, “I believed in him because I could imagine him to be what I needed.” When Thom came into my life, my ties with women friends had weakened. Regret flamed through me.

“And have you loved Adam?”

Did the young woman actually mean to ask me if I had had sex with Adam?

“Yes,” I said, but because I feared the falseness of a truth so baldly literal, I added, “And no.”

“These answers cancel out each other.”

“Exactly,” I said, but I felt only silly confusion.

Spontaneously, we both trilled with laughter and liked each other a bit better.

“And are you, Arielle, devoted to sculpting?”

“Yes—and no,” she echoed.

“But you don’t mean it in the same way I do.”

We passed another scrawny bush with puckered orange berries growing close to our path. I thought of the orange blossoming of the parachute in the sky, how Adam and I had stood within the rocky overhang and watched the parachute opening. “You mean,” I interpreted, “that you thought you were passionate about your work, and you were, and you
are.
But now—”

“But now, out of nowhere—there’s Adam.”

“How does he seem to you?”

“Incredibly, fabulously beautiful…. And in some way … wounded.”

“An irresistible combination,” I observed, “for those who need to be needed.” But my scientist husband, established and admired, hadn’t needed me; I chose to be an art therapist partly because I wanted to be needed. When I returned to the States, would I return to my work? I had also chosen the work out of faith in creativity—that which, unfailingly, always, was a positive force.
Ars longa, vita breva.
Even now, for Adam, seeing what the earliest humans created had been wonderfully affirming of his own artistic impulse. Even their depictions of violence and their fundamental absorption with raw sexuality were human realities he needed to embrace. Mostly, I thought, those artists had wanted to celebrate the beauty of the animals, of the Other.

I touched the memory stick hanging around my neck. Thom had said there were Others out there. Would we find them beautiful? Would we find some reason to kill them? Or them us?
Thou shalt not kill
—surely the most important of the commandments.