Adam & Eve (43 page)

Turning to his father, Pierre replied first in English and then Arabic, “I said that we are all friends who would trust one another with our lives—past, present, or future.”

The old man shrugged his small shoulders and remarked something in Arabic.

Arielle quickly interpreted. “He said, ‘Life? What is that? A small thing to give away in the name of love.’”

We all picked up our eating implements, in unison, before the meat and vegetables.

“I am no longer a vegetarian,” Adam announced.

As he seated himself at the dinner table, the grandfather reported, “With his tongue, he licks to soothe her forehead.” For a moment the cave painting of the male deer licking the head of the female hung in all our memories. The bedouin went on to tell that he had taken the red canoe—he had named her
Lipstick
—and rowed across the still pond to the other side. When he said the word
lipstick,
he gave a sly and mischievous look at Arielle and me, though he continued his account. “On the far shore of the underground lake is the sanctuary where dreams originate.” He had walked into a cavern full of fantastic shapes that could become whatever the viewer wished, “smooth brown ghosts, some knee-high, some towering high as giants. Very smooth, glazed.” In the next chamber, he had been surrounded by the glittering teeth of stalactites and stalagmites encrusted with crystals.

“Because of your words,” I exclaimed, “now we journey there, too. We didn’t cross the lake but you make us see.”

“One should never think of the caves as a
museum.
Some people like to
think of Lascaux as a museum, like the Louvre,” Pierre remarked. “The art is not hung arbitrarily on this wall or that. The wall is the site of their creation, and it has been chosen in a way that signifies.”

“Like an installation,” I said.

“Narrative and image, story and picture,” Pierre went on. “How are they alike and different?”

He began to carve the rack of lamb that formed the centerpiece of our dinner.

“Whether told or written, a story lives in moving time; the abode of a picture is timeless in space, whether real or imagined,” I promptly answered.

“And dance is the art form that dwells in time and place at once,” Arielle said. “Remember the shaman was dancing. Some evening I will dance for you, in the Egyptian fashion.”

Between the carving knife and fork, Pierre held a slice of the tender, dripping meat toward Adam. “Take and eat,” Pierre said.

Embarrassed, perhaps by the bloody meat, perhaps by Arielle’s offer to dance, Adam placed his pointing finger next to the crimson rose on his plate. “What was Nall thinking of when he painted this?”

“A Cardinal de Richelieu rose,” I said, “because the crimson is almost black in the crevices.”

With his mouth full of half-escaping curly greens, the bedouin spoke, and Arielle explained, “He is asking my father which way the writing moves on the pages.” She spoke quickly in Arabic to the grandfather. “I’ve asked him what he means, and he says he wants to know about the direction—left or right—in which you read the writing of the codex.”

“Boustrophedon,” Pierre answered, and we all waited for him to explain.

“It’s a term that derives from Greek, with French trappings. It means ‘as the ox plows.’ That is, the reader reads a line in one direction and then turns, as an ox would turn when plowing, and reads the next line in the opposite direction.”

“Then reading that way is following a path,” Adam said. “Perhaps a labyrinth.”

“But a very simple labyrinth,” Pierre replied, “one in which the visitor cannot be lost. He has only to move his feet to progress.”

“Quite unlike the corridors of your cave,” I said to Pierre, “where anyone could be easily lost.”

“Like good Catholics,” Pierre said, “we in this dining room are at communion. Communion, only a little of communication. Old married couples, especially in France, even when there is no speaking anymore, commune.”

No one replied.

He tried again. “Our spirits flow round the curves in our life paths, back and forth, smoothly, continuously, as the ox plows.”

He rested his curled hand on the tablecloth, and I knew he wished I would cover his hand with my own.

That night Adam lay luxuriantly, I imagined, in his bed as though it were a floating raft. Had he ever been so comfortable? More at peace than Huck Finn enjoying a day on the Mississippi.

He knew he could go through the door to me, and I would give myself to him, as I had so many times, freely, without question or stint. Saint Paul had said it was better to marry than to burn. Or he could go down the hall to Arielle; she, too, would receive him. If he did that, if he did it several times, then for him and for Arielle, both young and still unformed, a new path would flare wide, into a new world.

Tonight he would not choose between us. Instead he would dream. Desire would subside, untouched. Intuitively, he would believe Freud’s idea that masturbation was an impediment to bonding.

In his dream, perhaps Adam is back in the ranch house, in Idaho. Confused, he wanders the familial rooms of the house as though he were in a maze. In each room he pauses before at least one shiny mirror, and the mirror bounces light back into his eyes so that he cannot see his own visage.

In front of the rock fireplace in the living room, he stops to remove from the trophy space above the mantel a boss of longhorns, a dusty relic salvaged from the time when Texas longhorn cattle, half wild, roamed the range. He settles the horns on his own head and snorts like a minotaur. Which way lies his parents’ bedroom? He will show them his own wild power.

Because of the width of the horns, to enter the long hall he needs to turn his head sideways. He is not entirely a monster, for he has the thumping heart of Theseus. When he dares to straighten his head, the walls of the hall become a hollow stone tube, and the corridor twists like a bowel through the earth. The tips of his horns almost scrape the rock sides as he walks forward.

He needs a guide, a Dante: a wizened old man or a capable Pierre. Or, better, a Beatrice, a fresh Ariadne, young and pliable, to guide him out of the labyrinth, risking all for his sake. Or perhaps a woman embodying the complex certainty of middle life, coming to help him, to coax him toward normality. Young or seasoned, he imagines she comes with a stone lamp in her hand.

The flickering light illumines all the animals who graze the walls around him.

O
NE DAY
P
IERRE
invited us to reconvene in the library, not in the evening but in the middle of the afternoon, not to sit round the table but in the comfortable wingback chairs and the deeply cushioned green-gold sofa, before the hearth. We would gather not to eat but to listen.

At last he would read a translation of the codex!

After his reading, we would have a bouillabaisse of memorable fishy flavors with seasonings fresh from Zanzibar. I wondered if the danger Pierre’s father had mentioned before our cave expedition was more metaphysical than physical. Would reenvisioning the book of Genesis cause minds to quake? Certainly.

Without hesitation, Adam and Arielle exchanged a single glance and claimed the two seats on the green sofa, facing the fireplace, which hosted a small flame. Left of the sofa were two matching wingback chairs, high and mighty as thrones, upholstered in a feather pattern in French blue, with a small Louis XV table between them. I chose the chair closer to the little fire, while Pierre seated himself at a right angle to the sofa so that his daughter was at his right
elbow. He had entered the room carrying the black French horn case, which he now laid across his lap before snapping up the bright clasps.

“Where is your father?” I asked.

The bedouin’s low, barrellike chair—replete with cushions whose fabric had been heavily embroidered and set with tiny mirrors—was empty. Pierre shrugged. “Perhaps he chooses to remain below, reading the paintings.”

Although Pierre opened the case so we could see the codex, he did not remove it from its safe place. I thought its inscribed signs looked like rivets, as though they were shaped to hold elusive meanings on to the dry, frail sheets. “I place these pages here, for you to see. We will not touch them, though. I read from my draft of the English translation. But I want the codex to be present,” he said, “to represent the person whose own hand so long ago hovered above them, writing.”

Each of us acknowledged the presence of the codex by inclining our heads in the direction of the case.

“I translated first into modern standard Arabic, the language of Cairo, then into French, the language of the country where I have chosen to live, and finally into English because it is the language we come closest to having in common, among the five of us. Of course my English is not so skillfully deployed or idiomatic as one might wish.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry my father is not here, but I will read the Arabic translation to him later.”

He glanced around at all of us and at the little fire. I thought he wanted to remember the moment accurately—the color and size of the flame, how his daughter was dressed—in a cotton shirt and neat khaki pants, the sort with a zipper concealed in a seam encircling each leg just above the knee so the pants might be shortened if they proved too warm. Her cotton shirt was dyed burnt orange. She had not bothered to change from her comfortable lace-up walking shoes into something more fashionable. Adam and I were both stylishly dressed in the neutral linen clothes we had worn when we arrived. My shoes were fashionable but low-heeled, a tasteful compromise between style and comfort.

“It is a jeweled moment,” Adam said. Though he spoke to us all, he turned his head and looked only at Arielle, beside him on the sofa. How lovely it was
to hear Adam’s voice—calm, warm, assured. It was the voice of a man of cultivation, a man of the world. “Like John Keats, I would ask of this moment ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ It seems too lovely to be true: to be
here,
with you all, in the south of France.” Despite his warm words, Adam rubbed his hands together briskly as though they were cold. He nodded at the sprightly flame dancing in the fireplace, and I thought of the comfort we had drawn from our fire on cold damp nights under the rocky overhang.

“‘O for a beaker full of the warm South,’” Adam quoted from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

He hesitated and extended his hand as though he held an imaginary wineglass and were toasting the flames:

I knew that he did not quote for me.

Keats’s words seemed new-minted when Adam pronounced them. Pierre blushed for the young man, this handsome American, so obviously smitten with his daughter. “Well then, from poetic words to sacred ones.” Pierre cleared his throat. “Perhaps they are the same. Let me begin,” he said. But feeling the need for explanation, he hesitated again.

“These notes are thoughts written about two and a half thousand years before the time we now live in, before the beginning of the common era. While these words do not compare, in antiquity, to the paintings that exist in the system of caves below our feet—or they to the age of the star-writ dark studied so devotedly by Lucy’s husband—this writer’s mind, like the minds and needs of artists of parietal paintings and drawings, was like ours. You must not think of him as foreign, or remote. He was like us, a quester.”

Pierre shifted his body to look at me, saw with approval my excitement and interest. “We are full of curiosity?” he said, in a friendly tone.

“Of course,” I murmured. But I also felt a special calm. The moment, the
culmination of all our effort, was too important to be defined only with the froth of excitement. I closed my hand around the titanium case of the flash drive.

“The Neanderthals had bigger brains than ours; those later ones, the cave artists,
Homo sapiens,
and those who lived and wrote in Egypt and Mesopotamia were more like us in brain size and in stature. Dress them as we are dressed, and any of them would pass unnoted on the streets of Paris.

“Even before our codex, a few passages in our own Genesis had been written down by a scribe designated as ‘J’ because he always referred to God as Yahweh, which is spelled with an initial J in German. About the same time, other passages in Genesis were written down, most biblical scholars believe, by an author they designate as ‘E’ because he always referred to God as Elo-him. Two hundred years after J and E walked the earth, the writings of J and E were brought together by a priest—his work is identified by biblical scholars with a ‘P’—who also added his own original cosmic view of creation, the magnificent first two chapters, more or less, of Genesis. The opening of our Genesis was written after the other parts, though it is presented first. We do not know the real names of J or E or even P. The words of J and E were inscribed in the eighth century
BCE
, or ‘before the Common Era,’ as scholars say so as not to be so provincially Christ-centered.”