Adam & Eve (39 page)

Embedded in the far wall lay two great flat stones almost together but with an opening between their heavy lips, like stomata on the surfaces of leaves. Botany, the peaceful science. It was a calming thought. Who could have guessed, without a microscope, that a host of lips dotted the surfaces of leaves? Adam had loved to draw in the botany class in college; it legitimized his desire to look and draw.
Lips, lips, labia.
Adam closed the revolving door.
Cellar door.
Hadn’t he read somewhere that scientists had determined that phrase to be the most euphonious in the English language? Adam hurried down the stairs to catch up with the others.

To pass from the basement into the underworld, they each folded themselves in half and entered the mouth of the earth through the stone lips. When he bent himself to enter, Adam impulsively turned and backed through. “Breech,” he said softly. “Ass-backward I am reborn into the realm of darkness.” He would ask Lucy if Shakespeare had written that.
Macbeth?

“Are there witches here?” Lucy joked.

Pierre answered that he thought not, but shamans perhaps.

A weak splash of light followed them through their entrance. Pierre suggested they click on their torches, which Adam knew to mean flashlights. Silently he denied Pierre’s term: a torch must burn.
Flame
was the essence of
torch.
This battery light had no warmth. The light Adam held seemed dim and feeble against the absolute blackness of the earth. He wished he’d come with handfuls of lightning bugs.

“Adam, Adam,” Lucy said with some urgency. “Is it all right for you—being here?”

“Are you claustrophobic?” Pierre asked, but in the pause where Adam might have put words of some sort, Pierre went right on speaking. “My father said, ‘In the old world, he will find connection and kin.’”

Pierre’s flashlight spotlighted a small army of upright rolls of bubble plastic, each tied with a red sash. A platoon of rolled bubble wrap. “I should unroll the plastic to protect the floor,” Pierre remarked. “But my father advised against it. Walk gently.”

“We will, Papa,” Arielle said in the voice of a flute.

I
N A NIMBUS
of light, they moved through a corridor rendered smooth-sided by coursing water eons before humans walked there. Carbuncles of flint protruded unexpectedly from time to time. Occasionally Adam’s hand reached out to touch a rough patch glittering with mica. Far ahead in the dark, he heard the sound of rushing water, and he was afraid of needing to cross it, but the path broadened and ran parallel to the malevolent stream. Adam was grateful the river, terrible in its power and indifference, did not ask him to put even his foot into it. As the water became wider, its violence diminished and finally the flow spread into a broad, still lake. A small red canoe was lodged on the near shore of the pool, but it had room for only one, and Pierre made no indication that they should try to crowd aboard. Overhead, the ceiling arched high.

In this hollow space below the high stone ceiling, their footsteps echoed and mingled as they moved through the emptiness. Against his face, Adam felt a damp chill contradicting the cocoon of warm-seeming glow that surrounded them. While his nostrils constricted to stem the flow of fetid air, his jaw opened, and the air entered the little cave of his mouth and wiped itself on the plushy carpet of his tongue.

Pierre stopped to point down with his flashlight. The beam illumined a bottomless crevasse, a fissure more than a yard wide running in both directions as far as they could see. A great crack. There was nothing to do but step over it. There was no need to jump, but the step would require them all to stretch.

“Lucy,” Pierre said, “you will have to give a little leap. It’s not far, but your body will not want to do it.”

She simply nodded, stepped up to the abyss, looked straight ahead, and, without hesitating, pushed off and over. Modestly, she stood aside, out of the way, and Arielle immediately followed with no to-do at all about the effort. It was almost as though they had blinked collectively and then Arielle had already accomplished the step she needed to take. Pierre nodded at Adam, but Adam was afraid.

“Like a bull,” Pierre said.

Adam stepped back five paces and ran. He would not look down, he would not lower his head, he would look straight ahead like Lucy, unflinching. With every step he was afraid and the soles of his feet tried to recoil as though scorched, but he ran and leaped, landing far beyond on the other side, his entire body shrieking in protest. When his feet hit the stone, he stumbled. His body insisted,
Yes, there was danger.
Like a bad shepherd, Pierre had ordered Adam into danger.

“But you made yourself obedient,” Adam said out loud. They all stared at him as though he had referred to them, so he mumbled truthfully in explanation, “My body, like a herd of disobedient sheep, did not want to take its members across the divide.”

Where was Shakespeare when he needed him? Shakespeare to give him the words for what was never spoken but only thought before?

Pierre picked up a small rock, knelt carefully beside the great crack, and dropped the rock. They listened to it clatter as it fell, colliding with the walls of the split earth. Their flashlights wavered in their hands while they listened. There was no end to the falling, only a diminuendo like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse dying away in a distance.

“I have to
make
myself do it,” Pierre said to no one in particular. “Each
time I have to make myself step over.” Pierre was not ashamed. “The body rebels, instinctively.”

And why had they come to this land of fissures and darkness? To see cave art, but so far there were no pictures. The place itself was a picture, a landscape Adam had never inhabited before. One of the passages opened into a great hall with a huge boulder in its center. So might the earth have fallen from the underside of heaven. Round as a globe, the boulder had dropped from a height beyond the power of their flashlights to illumine, though they all held their torches as high as their arms would reach, and Adam stretched tallest of all. The mass of the boulder was there simply to intimidate, but all they need do was to walk around it. It was inert, helpless.

“‘Potential,’ I call it,” Pierre said.

God’s Weight, Adam thought but did not say.

They placed their hands on the boulder as though to hold it in abeyance or to influence its disposition. Adam liked the gritty feel, even the chill of the rock flank, against his palm and fingers. Some of his smaller, weaker fingers were afraid, but his hand as a whole was confident. The flickering light cast their moving shadows on the stone.

The room narrowed to a corridor, and this time its walls were smoothly coated with white calcite. Again Pierre stopped. When he held his lamp close to the wall, its light was reflected in a white glow.

“Look beyond the surface,” Pierre instructed, and Adam thought his words were impossible nonsense. “Don’t look into the light. Pay attention to what the side of your vision can see.”

And then beneath the translucent calcite, Adam began to see the lines of a drawing. Something lived and had its being under the skin of calcite. His eyes traveled those charcoal lines, waiting for them to speak their form.

“I call it ‘The Kindness of Animals,’” Pierre said.

And then Adam saw a pair of giant C’s, the rearing up and reaching and return of curving antlers, of a male reindeer. The animal’s lowered head, even his tongue, was drawn there, and with him was another deer, resting or kneeling, receiving the kindness of that ancient tongue. “It’s like a painting at Font-de-Gaume,” Pierre said, “but larger. And look behind the female.” Then Adam
saw curled and sleeping the small form of a fawn. Colors of reddish brown draped the backs of the animals; the pigment shaded in places to suggest the varying thicknesses and contours of their bodies. The color had its own richness, though it was cloaked by the milkiness of the calcite. Their hooves and the moment defining the reindeer eyes were black.

“He honors her achievement in giving birth,” Lucy said.

“At Font-de-Gaume, there is no little one,” Pierre said. “The tenderness between the two adults is simply there—who knows for what reason.”

In Pierre’s voice, Adam heard a tremor, a fissure, an abysm.

Pierre added, “Perhaps, at Font-de-Gaume, the female was tired, or dying.”

Death? Adam felt the shape of tears traveling his cheeks. He could have swiped the sliding tears away with the back of his hand, but instead he thought of their rounded form bulging on one side, their flatness on the other, of the flexibility of the flat side as it adjusted to the shape of his cheek. He would treasure each tear’s short life as a formed thing before it fell and splattered on the cave floor. He wept for himself, for the dark backward of time, and for this stony man Pierre, who would not allow himself to weep, though his voice might quake. Adam counted six tears like large apple seeds on each side of his cheeks as they traveled down, fell, and lost themselves on the stone floor.

What did this painting want to mean, and to whom? To Adam it said,
You can have this. When you recognize tenderness, it comes to dwell in you. The painting of a tongue is a tongue speaking to you. The painting is a gentle, silent licking of your soul.

When they walked on, Adam felt the broadness of his own back. On that flat place, an image of tenderness could have been painted. The corridor opened again into a stone room. “Look up,” Pierre said.

In the wavering light, a multitude of animals ran across the ceiling. Adam gasped. While the reindeer had seemed beautifully arrested, here the giant creatures moved in unison. Pierre had them turn off their flashlights, but he quickly struck a match to light a thick candle from his pocket. Because of the flickering of the candle, a great ripple of shoulders and backs and bodies poured across the sky, the arch of rock overhead. Adam felt his body sway. Shaggy bison and aurochs tossed their heads and stirred up dust with their trampling. Rounded horses shifted their haunches. Lions sped forward with
faces like wedges among the herds, and elephantine mammoths moved with curtains of hair swaying from their sides.

The contours of the cave, its bulges and declivities, helped to form their bodies, and the shifting shadows of those irregularities in the undulating light made the animals surge and retreat. Billows of calcite mimicked clouds, though sometimes the hooves seemed to spring from earth-rooted, jagged terrain. There was a single, magnificent elklike creature. Adam could have sworn those lordly nostrils flared with breath. The elk’s antlers branched and branched till it seemed he carried an impossible tree on his head, and he himself bifurcated into a kind of outreaching god hand.

Filling the not-sky that was arching rock, the rush and power of the animals overwhelmed Adam, and his heart galloped with their ecstasy.

“Like constellations,” Lucy said. “In the night sky, animals and giants populating the sky.”

A dark hole ascended upward from the ceiling, and Adam thought it might be a chimney through which all of these soaring creatures could funnel outward and into the night and on to the outermost reaches of darkness. Constellations, yes, they could become even that in distant space.

“See the great black cow,” Pierre said, pointing where the ceiling of the cave bent down to become wall. “She’s falling upside down from the sky. You can see her at Lascaux, too. No one knows her story.”

“Black as a piano,” Lucy said sadly. Her pale, fringy hand gestured at the panoply of rushing animals. “But what did it mean to them?”

“These paintings are a text,” Pierre said. “They are as much a text as the pages you saved, the ones inside the French horn case now, waiting. For me.”

Dizziness swept Adam’s mind. Animated by the flickering candle, five lionesses cleaved their way toward the others. Perhaps Lucy or Arielle—her name was fresh and frightening on the tongue of Adam’s mind—must become like a lioness, a power, a sister to those with whom she hunted. He closed his eyes for a moment.

“In their time,” Pierre went on, “these pictures were read, and they were copied many times, over thousands of years. Some painted twelve thousand years ago replicated those made twenty-four thousand years ago, and those
were half inspired by, half copied from, paintings thirty-six thousand years back in time, and these—”

“Is each copy an interpretation?” Lucy asked.

“Who’s to say?”

“There.” Adam pointed. “A horse is running through feathery grass. Or is he in a shower of arrows?”

No one answered.

“Here are rhinoceroses, like ones in Chauvet and elsewhere,” Pierre explained. “Over thousands of years, the artists—shamans, whoever they were—continued to draw in the same style, to copy the drawings created thousands of years before their time. It’s the same with stories. Stories begat stories and were passed through the air from lips into ears until they became the written sacred texts our cultures hold so dear, our holy books, our bibles.”

Pierre’s words rattled and fell, like stones exploring a crevasse. Adam watched Pierre’s eager eyes move from figure to figure.