Prehistoric Times (7 page)

I
T’S A FIGURE
engraved on a protrusion from the rock face so as to accentuate the bas-relief effect obtained by the line’s depth. Thus the stomach, drawn with conviction, uses the rock’s convexity to become even rounder above the three incisions of the pubic triangle, suggesting the lopsided walk of the hypertrophied pelvis, but then we hit a wall, the small of the back spreads as it disappears into the rock, the massive thighs are joined all the way down to the knee, then the line becomes less defined, fainter, as if distracted, the feet are barely sketched at all, two crude ovals; likewise the hands look more like stumps, but the arms are magnificent, the right one stretched along the body, the left, raised as if to make some sign, and the shoulder with its perfect outline, clean and sharp, would lodge itself so perfectly beneath its own armpit that our mind almost manages to imagine the voluptuousness of this impossible caress; the breasts, slightly shrunken, strabic, nipples off-center, are only hanging by a thread from the too-frail torso, two breasts disproportionate to the rest of the body, to the rest of the world, to babies’ hunger and man’s desire – what if she really were the victorious rebel woman? Freed from her role as mother and lover, not because of her body’s staunch refusal or her immolation in God, or the way she was purposefully made ugly; not in defense of her childish virginity, nor through the agony of her flesh, the length
of her sharp nails, the coolness of her gaze, the arrogance of her words, the self-conscious concealment of her curves, but through their very excess, their total blossoming, their triumphant expansiveness, refusing all physical limits, overflowing her edges, she seems to defy the little sucking lips of infants, the small, frantic hands of men and their fever that is too short-lived to set her enormous body on fire.

Nonetheless, her head was neglected. Either the artist was saving for last this bit of psychology ever more difficult to define and was interrupted while working, or else he hesitated about which face to choose until the day he died. Or possibly he never intended to finish his character, considering perhaps that it was complete as it was, that any addition would be superfluous or redundant, that the main points were there, that the message had come through, that a head in any event would have paled beside those breasts. Another hypothesis deserves our consideration: several animals in the cave are also incomplete, lacking eyes or paws, some sinuous lines perhaps representing acephalous snakes, the felines’ jaws are in one piece, locked, the upper teeth fused to the lower like those columns that form when a stalactite and a stalagmite meet, an encounter as unpredictable as it is inevitable, in fact, because nothing can stop a stalactite and a stalagmite from meeting once the process is begun; perhaps it was chance that aligned them vertically with one another but its contribution stops there, the rest of the story has nothing to do with its whims. Any coincidence of this kind is in short the result of a series of causes and effects that obey a cold logic whose line of reasoning would allow one, by means of deduction, to foresee the final consequences. The initial involvement of chance is in fact an illusion; chance
has no more reality than the origin of the winds, the flow of this narrative is much better controlled than it seems, its inflexibility drives me to despair. In the end, the obstacles I put in its path turn out to be essential episodes, the story assimilates and integrates everything that could lead it astray, there’s no way out for me, no way to tear myself away from it, no more than it is possible to catch a glimpse of yourself from behind in a mirror by spinning around quickly on your heels; it fails every time. But by a hair. I’ll keep trying.

The bison, hornless, will be less dangerous for the hunter; the horse, hoofless, will not escape him; the jawless wildcat will not rip him to shreds. We can surmise that the woman’s head was omitted for the same reason. The cave artist was already counting on the magical efficacy of representation to establish his supremacy. He reorganized the world according to his needs and desires. He added nothing new to it; his first revolt led him toward destruction – later they would build. He eliminated a lot, there was an urgency to do away with everything that threatened his life, everything that spelled danger and that challenged his power had to be torn out, removed, disposed of. His painting, destined to weaken his prey with its magic, failed in its aims but was in itself the real miracle: through his painting he in effect took over the world. From then on we see him extracting juice from stones. He changed the color of the water. And the light was what he made of it.

The headless woman by herself fills a narrow recess of the upper gallery, christened an
alcove
on the map, where the artist clearly must have also been by himself, with just enough space to work; you cannot drive a flint into a limestone wall without a little elbow room. But why did he choose this site
when the neighboring chambers, much vaster and more comfortable, have not been decorated? Was he working unbeknownst to his fellow creatures, flying in the face of some taboo? Did the animal art that prevailed exclude all human representation, considered pointless or anecdotal? Stupid questions, obviously; in fact no one has ever asked a really good question, whatever the subject. Because we cannot escape our own system of explaining the world, all our alleged questions are in reality tentative but peremptory answers transposed in interrogative form to allow for dialogue that, surprise, surprise, will hardly advance knowledge. What remains is the sincere, infinite amazement from before the questions. And I find quite astonishing the contradictory relationship between the almost aggressive sensuality of the headless woman and the way she is shamefully hidden in a hole. She will be the first one I visit as soon as I enter the cave.

Y
ET IT WOULD
be wrong to believe that nothing happened during prehistoric times. Nothing but our faulty memory is to blame. We erroneously fill in its gaps by imagining that humanity slowly disengaged itself from the animal world, perhaps by recruiting and then crossbreeding the most intelligent members of each species, or at least that man made use of all this time to distinguish himself from the others, a primate refined from generation to generation, the son having nothing to learn from his father then outstripped by his own offspring, the mental age of members of the same family being inversely proportional to the real age of each of them, until that last kid, who finally entered History, founder of all traditions who for the first time sired children less resourceful than their father but to whom he gave an excellent education and who became men worthy of this name, and then old soldiers, what a magnificent adventure.

You know your History. We have the documents. The documents confirm one another. Often they repeat each other. Thus we can be sure. Reading these texts is no doubt a bit boring, precisely because they repeat each other, because the truth is unique. Of course you can notice a few variations from one text to another, the story is not always exactly the same, the authors of the
different texts sometimes disagree over details. But it must be said in fairness that we can find our bearings from one to the next, everything we read in one text will be confirmed by another. Thus we can be sure. An episode read in one text had already appeared in another with which we were familiar, and there are other texts in the pipeline that will be certain not to omit it, although they might not always put it back where it belongs, for sometimes authors disagree about the chronology of events. But the events took place, the facts are there, always the same, which is the main thing. What does it matter, after all, where you situate one episode of history, as long as it is there? The authors make it a point of honor not to disappoint us in this matter, the reader’s expectation is rewarded, for the reader would hardly appreciate reading one version of history that differs too much from the ones he has already read and that all agree to such an extent that they form but one, the same good old story every time, the magnificent adventure, and so we can rest assured.

Whereas we are sure of absolutely nothing when it comes to prehistoric times, we know nothing, or almost nothing. We are obliged to invent. There can be, as we’ve seen with the headless woman, contradictory interpretations of what the cave paintings mean, but it can also be tricky just to identify what they are supposed to represent and this gives rise to merciless arguments as well. I caught wind of a scuffle that lasted for years between Glatt and one of his colleagues, Professor Opole, over a partial profile of a quadruped. The former believed it to be a hornless caprine whereas his adversary saw in it an antlerless cervid. Insults were exchanged, the expertise of the one was challenged by the other, and vice versa, as were then the morals of their respective mothers and wives; they came to blows, slaps, fisticuffs, they rolled on the
ground, pulled each other’s hair, bit each other on the ear, split one another’s lips, gave each other black eyes, broke each other’s noses, attempted to strangle one another, smashed each other’s ribs, and finally the antlerless cervid was left for dead. And all that simply to clarify a single point of prehistoric times. Is not this period deserving of our attention?

It begins, then, with the appearance of man, but this great moment is itself difficult to date: what was, among all these hominids, the first humanly successful humanoid, the fabulous apparition in question, the ancestor worthy of us? There have been so many approaches, so many sketches of the definitive – or presumed definitive – figure, so many projects that seemed to hold water abandoned a hair’s breadth from success, so many two-legged bodies, misshapen, heavyset, hunchbacked, plausible, so many skulls poised atop them – ovoid or rounded, flattened, receding, real heads made for hat-wearing, that were in the end sent packing; in sum, there were so many humanoid creatures before man, creatures that were no longer apes, or not yet apes, that it would be foolhardy to claim to be able to tell man apart from the others with any precision. Besides, these creatures did not disappear from one day to the next the minute exclusive and very selective humankind was picked out of the lot; life went on for them too, their own evolution continued, they long remained contemporaries of
Homo sapiens sapiens
, and – I know this hypothesis will upset those of my fellow creatures who are my superiors – they may even have survived him; my opinion is that we ourselves are today the descendants of a species related to and rival of the human species that was annihilated and whose prestige and privileges we have usurped and whose civilized manners we ape; lice know what they’re doing, so do I,
everywhere I go I see only chimpanzees slogging away, and the more serious they are, the more ridiculous they are, dressed nonetheless as if they were men: religious, sentimental, domestic like men used to be, but awkwardly, brutally, unrelentingly carried away by their ape logic, exceeding all moderation, their smiles swallowed by grimaces, their gestures too brusque, and every word laboriously learned wasted in fits of rage. I am ready to defend this hypothesis as a true theory: we got rid of man, then took his place, and I can prove it: never would man, endowed with the aptitudes both to reason and to laugh, the latter to counteract the former, never would man thus enlightened have entered History.

T
HE RED
thumbtack is preventing me from concentrating. I find it impossible to focus fully on the map, hypnotized like the rabbit trying to find its way through the puzzle-maze that quickly learns by heart the only route leading to its carrot, on the upper right of the page – just try to train it to take another route. Yet I must conscientiously explore every direction on paper before I venture into the cave, I will not wander about at random, if you think I would, you don’t know me, I’d probably get lost and never come out. How could one
not
lose one’s way in the twisting, turning, infinitely branching galleries, so dangerous it’s as if they’re booby-trapped, with sudden slopes in the ground or ceiling and the unanticipated retrenchment of the practicable path between the rough walls that scrape my shoulders and sides and bruise my bones, and the passageways, dark despite the electricity that’s been installed, and the rolling mills, the swallow holes, the ventilation shafts where I slip feetfirst, dead already, ignorant of what lies in wait on the other side, perhaps the void, a hole, a precipitous drop, perhaps the tumbled, crumbled wall of a blind alley, or else a bright, airy room where the sun abseils through a narrow shaft and cools off in a natural lake, miraculously round, that glimmers more appropriately, and tinkles like glass when suddenly a fat, warm drop falls from the dark vault pierced by the violet sparks of the stalactites; you’ll see
that this thunderstorm, petrified for millennia, will awaken today, now: it’s breaking out behind me, I run aimlessly, shoulders hunched, back rounded; count the ridges on my carapace to see how old I am, I think I’m retracing my steps, all I do is step on my own feet, a child slips away from me and climbs up the steep path ahead of him on all fours while the old man for whom I was also responsible slides down into the lower galleries, I form a crowd, the lions are let loose, I spread myself in all of panic’s directions, but the lake in spate catches up to me wherever I am, submerging me, my lungs explode, my rosy cheeks fade, I float with the eyeless, memoryless transparent fish, the last living contemporaries of all the fossils, liquid specters of the Precambrian Era that still haunt the watery depths. I belong among them, from now on their future is mine, and all that because I ventured into the cave without proper preparation: madness. Obviously I shall do no such thing until I know the premises perfectly. I shall devote the time it takes to a preliminary study of the map. I shall learn how to move about the cave on paper, as if I were at home, eyes shut, hands behind my back, with steady steps, a blind homeowner circumventing every obstacle, stepping over crevices thanks to the reflexes I’ll have acquired, all will be second nature. But none of this will be possible unless I manage to get hold of a fourth yellow thumbtack.