Adam & Eve (40 page)

Because the dome of the ceiling was high, the artists would have needed to build scaffolding to create the soaring effect they wanted. They might have lashed poles and crossbars together. Like Michelangelo, Adam thought, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but the power of these animals seemed terrifyingly close, less remote than Michelangelo’s biblical figures. Except for his rendition of Adam, recumbent and limp, waiting for God to touch him, nothing of Michelangelo’s spoke like these beasts conjured with line and color from mute rock.

“Did they already know everything—these artists?” Arielle asked. “Did they know it all then?”

“Picasso said so,” Pierre answered. “He’d seen copies Henri Breuil painted of the bulls in Altamira.”

Adam had never liked Picasso; he thought his forms were cruel to soft bodies. Who was Picasso to pronounce on this? An opportunist. He hoped that Arielle did not worship Picasso. But Picasso had not seen this cave—only Pierre, and them. When a drop of water fell on Adam’s nose, he moved his position slightly and opened his mouth. He waited till a drop fell onto his tongue, and he swallowed.
Shed for thee.

“How old?” Adam asked.

“Breuil’s copies were made in 1902. Picasso saw them when he was twenty-five.”

“How old are these paintings?”

“Older than Chauvet, which is older than Lascaux.”

“And Lascaux is—” Lucy asked.

“Eighteen thousand, six hundred years. And Chauvet is twice as old. And the style in both is much the same. So little evolution of style in all those millennia. Here—” Pierre stopped and gathered his breath. “Here I know we go back even further than Chauvet. I’ve carbon-dated. Back nearly all the way to when we,
Homo sapiens,
evolved. Back forty-seven thousand years.”

Lucy said, “Lascaux is closer to
us,
in time, than it is to these paintings.”

Adam wanted to weep again to think how long humans had labored to bring life from stone.

“There is a reason to paint on walls and ceilings,” Adam said. “It subverts their purpose to enclose. The walls become windows, portals to other realities.” Arielle moved beside him and encircled his waist with her arm, but it was Lucy’s voice that filled his head.

“I believe this,” Lucy said. She spoke loudly, making her voice reverberate in the room. “I believe this,” she repeated, her phrase like a fanfare of trumpets or the prescient roll of tympani; now Lucy’s voice was like elephants braying through their lifted trunks, like zebra hooves drumming the plain: “I believe this: As soon as we were human, it was part of our nature and our necessity to create art. It is as essential—art is as essential to our humanness as food or shelter.”

Adam had never before heard her trumpet her belief in anything. He was pleased. Her credo was of creation, if not of the creator.

Father!
Adam summoned.
Listen to her, Father.
Adam thought of his father’s hands, hard and callused, yellowed like horn, with the work of the ranch. His face carved by wind, hardened by the sun. His icy blue eyes. His intolerance for the soft strokes of graphite on soft paper. His disgust.

Finally Arielle asked her father if the prehistoric artists had represented the human form. “They drew all these animals. Did they draw themselves?”

“I’ll show you,” her father answered. A deepness thickened his voice. Like the tolling of a bell, Adam thought, and he shivered. “In two ways, they represented themselves, male and female,” Pierre said darkly.

Pierre led them from under the clatter of hooves and heads past the great black cow falling from her sky. From the domain of the animals, Pierre took them deeper into the raw earth, into one of three openings that branched away from this rotunda like arteries from a heart. The corridor was smooth again because gushing water had once polished its walls. Then the conduit branched, and nodules of flint began to protrude again from the uniform smoothness. Where a side of the wall was ruptured, they stepped across another crevasse into a parallel hall filled with crystalline stalactites and stalagmites. It seemed like a different universe because of their glitter. Adam felt he was walking among stars.

“They were here, too,” Pierre said, and he pointed to the heads and necks of three mountain goats lined up in profile like choristers, and then a tiny little goat, complete and set apart, more detailed and appealing than anything they had seen, but abandoned, created and left near the bottom of a wall, as though to emphasize his small, incidental nature, all by himself. If a child had crawled here, and the spot had been illumined by an adult carrying a stone lamp, the child might have reached out and patted the drawn goat with the palm of his hand.

“I have a friend,” Arielle said, “who draws just like that.” She pointed at the darling goat, drawn so low on the wall.

A red tide of jealousy engulfed Adam. Outside, up there, far away in Paris, in the sunlight, what café, what striped awning, what blue sky did she live under, with artists for friends? The rapid footfalls of fashionably dressed Parisians drummed in his ears. Of course Arielle must be an artist, who lived among other artists.

Their path bent downward, steeply, and Adam felt bewitched by the change in perspective, how if he were sketching this, Pierre’s shoulders and back would be drawn lower on the page to suggest descent.

Stopping beside a cave within the cave—a grotto—Pierre lifted his light to the prone figures of crudely drawn men, falling, pierced with spears or
sticks. “Here are the wounded. Not unique. Similar figures—but only single figures—have been found several times in different caves.”

“War,” Adam said.

“‘The Killed Man,’ some have said of the single figures they’ve found. Possibly a sacrificial figure. At Cognac, he also looks just like these men, naked, falling forward, the cleavage of his buttocks rendered but the form left unfinished. No head. The lines for shoulders simply stop.”

Adam thought but did not say: Like the artist, we see him from the back, like those who have thrown the spears. The artist, knowing that we, too, are men, has made us complicit. Adam closed one eye the better to aim. Unaware of arms or legs, Adam’s target was the man’s back.

“And so,” Arielle said, “humans have always killed each other.”

Adam met Lucy’s gaze, and together they thought of F. Riley and of the tortured lamb.

Lucy said, “We must not repeat Cain and Abel billions of times. Sin was the joint failure of Adam and Eve to teach their sons the sacredness of life.”

Adam put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder, remembered the willingness of her flesh, and swallowed tears. He followed the movement of dank cave air through his nostrils and down into his lungs, and smelled the unhealthy rottenness of time. Violence against the body, so pitifully vulnerable, was surely the original human sin. And yet he felt strength and readiness in every fiber of his muscles. Readiness to fight or to love.

“Another image,” Pierre said.

They continued downward in a single file. Straight ahead the corridor came to a dead end. A smooth V-shaped rock hung down like a sharp tooth. With bold black lines an icon of womanhood appeared. Without doubt, the black thatch of lines represented the pubic hair of a woman, and at its center the outline of the open vulva.

“And so,” Lucy said in a sad voice, “from the beginning we women were reduced to this.”

“And we men to killers,” Pierre said. “But this is harder than ‘The Killed Man’ to show you, certainly to show my daughter.” Pierre did not turn his gaze away from the large, hairy, open pubes, but Adam watched him reach out and
touch Lucy’s shoulder. Yes, she needed comfort, as much as anyone could give. But she flinched at Pierre’s touch. Adam dared not look at Arielle. Did it come to this? The marks of charcoal gripped in some prehistoric man’s hand were rapid, ugly, ruthless.

Arielle’s voice asked calmly, “Are there other drawings of women, in other caves?”

Her father answered that there were. But they were all like this: five thousand years later, twenty-five thousand years later. What had been drawn to represent women in the days of parietal art was mainly focused on the reproductive female parts.

“I am more than this, Papa,” Arielle said in her pure tones. “We have evolved in our thinking. Some of us, at least.” Her voice, suddenly like her grandfather’s, reminded Adam of a clear stream on a mountainside. “I do not accept this as the image of woman.”

Adam felt depression settle over him. Was his father right to whip the hand that drew a woman reduced to her shaggy crotch? And his own eleven drawings of Lucy? Did he betray the spirit by wanting the body? What was betrayal? After their time in Eden, on the road to Baghdad, in Greece, on the trains, was he betraying Lucy then and now? He thought of Rosalie, the first of his loves, and her apple cheeks. How stirred he had been by the prospect of knowing other girls! And killed men? He winced, remembering the hurt bodies of men he had seen—while he survived.

“This is the wincing place,” Adam said. “The mirror of us—violent and lustful. But the animals they painted were beautiful. To my eye the animals were transcendentally beautiful.” He thought of the majestic elk, a continent of an animal, with its branching rack of antlers.

Pierre picked up a small carved stone, a bulge of hips and breasts, and placed it in his daughter’s hand. “Here she’s a bit more whole, a fuller body and head. Some think they’re fertility symbols perhaps. Not young and lithe, Arielle—but with pendulous breasts and plenty of thickness to her body. A woman after many birthings.”

He put the hard little figure of fecundity back on the cold stone.

“I’ve seen photos of such small statuettes,” he said, “from all over Europe.
They’ve been given the names of various kinds of Venuses. The Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue. Some figures are fashioned from rose quartz. They’re composed almost entirely of a lovely abstracting of curves.”

“If those who named her wanted to claim in a respectful way that she represented fertility, they should have named her Demeter, not Venus,” Lucy replied. “She’s a mother, not a calendar girl. Not a representation of idealized, virginal, inaccessible beauty.”

“Young females,” Pierre said, “are depicted almost like straight sticks—no breasts, but curved behind for the buttocks, sometimes a V scratched on the front.” Adam thought of young girls in jeans walking in the schoolyard. “I’ll show you two more sites,” Pierre said. He sounded tired.

Adam heard the cave make a sound as though it were clearing its throat. Or was it the sound of a single footfall? Perhaps God had walked here in the cave with the artists and breathed over their shoulders as they painted the animals. But Pluto, the rapist, had also guided their hands. Adam himself was tired.

Arielle said that in Germany, in a tar pit, an ancestor of humans much older than the fossil Lucy had been found. A lemurlike creature they had named Ida. And others. Then she asked her father if they would go back the way they came. He answered no, that there was another way out, and it led past other paintings, lovely, inspiring ones. And so they began a long, more gradual ascent.

“Is it a mistake to judge them by our values?” Lucy asked.

“Many men,” Pierre replied, “in our time are ready to kill. Many men see women so crudely. Are we so different from people who lived eons ago?”

No one answered. Adam wiped his forehead, as though he were sweating in the cold cave.

“Two great dangers,” Pierre said. “Violence and the way men view women.”

All the way, as they climbed steadily upward, Adam thought of the first animals they had seen under a veil of calcite: the male deer licking the head of the female, their tender connection. He imagined the free movement of the artist’s
whole arm circling to create the sweeping C of antlers, how that movement engendered form and volume on the stone. How the artist’s moving hand had graciously drawn the flick of an animal tongue. But had a woman represented only by her genitals sat nearby posing for the artist, or had he drawn from memory and desire? Adam wished a cave artist had offered a redemptive vision of humanness, an Adam and Eve, rendered fully, with the tenderness of those deer, not the reductive, dark allure of sexuality.

The cave’s corridor fit his shoulders like a cape too heavy to bear. He would walk upward toward openness, remembering the grassy plains spreading around the Garden of Eden, and how the sunshine drenched everything. How he and Lucy had come together in tenderness and respect under the starry sky on the road to Baghdad. He wished they had made love in the sunshine of the open plains of Eden. He thought of the many times he had seen a male wildebeest or graceful gazelle casually mount a female in the daylight. Then walk away.
Dumb animals,
did he hear his father say?

He thought of Pierre’s library, the essence of civilization, and their own cozy group around its table, of a crimson-black rose that someone whom he did not know had designed for his plate.

He walked a maze of branching memory, but there was a wholeness, a continuity, to the narrative. One foot followed another.

Lucy walked ahead beside Pierre as they moved through the uptilted corridor. Adam found his hand reaching for Arielle’s hand—or had she woven her strong, cold fingers between his? Her hand was abnormally strong and confident. What work had she done with this hand?

He considered the vulnerability of Pierre, ahead of him, safely bundled in a warm jacket and wearing a cap, but how easy it would be to pick up any path-side rock (lying just beyond a stooping down and a reaching out of fingertips), and how easy it would be to hurl that rock into the back of Pierre’s head. Adam pictured himself standing on the ledge of the rock shelter in Mesopotamia and looking out on the world, his own neat pile of stones stacked in a pyramid, like antique cannonballs. He had felt himself lord of all he surveyed, and while Lucy slept and healed, he had gathered an arsenal to defend his domain. That he had hidden the French horn case in the rocks embarrassed him, but every
day they had spent together had been essential to their healing happiness.

Pierre flashed his beam on a site where the outlines of animals were drawn, one across another, a great jumble with no attention paid to the relative sizes of the animal; a mammoth was drawn partly inside a bison but also spilling beyond to nudge a lion. Adam saw the outlined shapes of bulls, aurochs, rhinoceroses, and lions piled together like a tangle of wire coat hangers. There was plenty of blank wall space. Why had the artists chosen to pile the outlines together?