Prehistoric Times (2 page)

And things will not improve. You could think they might, however, in accordance with the principle of wear and tear that holds true for everything and maintains that what is new ages more rapidly than what is already old, given that ten years completely transforms a child whose father barely fusses about a few wrinkles; you could think that the right shoe – which, in spite of everything, bears traces of Boborikine’s passing this way (burns, scratches, bumps) and is no longer the showcase item it perhaps was to begin with, a lovely object of shiny but sturdy leather, made more for the eye than for the foot – will soften yet, grow deformed, come unstitched, and split open as it treads the soil, to become once again the alter ego of the left shoe, which, for its part, no longer has much to fear from pebbles, because it swallows them whole, or from puddles, having capsized so many times that it is, and will forever remain, like a fish in water. You could think that, but you would be wrong. This could no doubt be verified if my two feet progressed at the same pace, but I limp, must I remind you, the left leg stiff, my knee joint immobilized by a pin, the result of which is, first, that the left shoe lagging behind scrapes the ground from toe to heel or heel to toe depending on the incline, and second, that I am always exceedingly careful about where I place my right foot, my sole toehold, my plinth, my anchor, my hub, my linchpin here below.
All of which is to say that the pair will never be restored. On the contrary. As I proceed with this narrative, the disparity mentioned will continue to grow, resulting in greater difficulties of movement and most likely a painful end of the race, after which there will be a heavy, dramatic fall, one more, over there, but we have yet to get there, so let’s get on with it.

U
NLESS
, of course, I were to work away furiously at the right shoe to accelerate its wear and tear? Since I cannot repair the left, already stitched, glued, nailed, resoled, polished anew a thousand times, and a thousand and one times destroyed anew, now putrid like a dead animal, why not hasten the decline of the right, plunging it one day into a saltwater bath, sheltering a rat in it for a few days, ripping out its steel tips, replacing its black shoelace with some piece of string or other? Finally, the question that occurs to me is the following: is it better to have on your feet two shoes, one of which, more or less acceptable, will partially compensate for the bad impression made by the other, but at the cost of an unfortunate dissymmetry ever irksome to the eye and mind, and which, to boot, runs the great risk of drawing sarcastic remarks my way – always humiliating to my sensibilities – and of tarnishing my reputation? Or is it better to have on your feet two shoes, both in a wretched state, clearly inseparable, as if together they had tackled the most terrible trials and gone through life without losing their stride, side by side in every circumstance, often wounded, helping each other in turn, a fine example of solidarity that in all logic would be attributed to me, and from then on my sorry shoes would bear witness to great moral strength worthy of esteem and respect, and the entire profession would bask in my glory?

Undeniably this second option would be preferable. Yet I must think about my working conditions as well: to do such a thing would be to double the difficulty and discomfort I already endure. If I can no longer support myself on my right foot either, I might as well topple over straightaway. As things stand, these shoes call to mind the not unusual fate of twins separated at birth: one of them will have luck on his side and grow up surrounded by affection and loving care, whereas the other, as if suffering from the aftereffects of those unequally distributed privileges, will remain his entire life within the same four walls, an orphanage quickly morphing into a prison that soon afterward morphs into a hospital. And when chance intervenes and reunites the two brothers, today so different from one another, all they have to recognize and identify each other are the two halves of a photograph on which a grimacing and doubly one-eyed face, pieced together, suddenly lights up with a real mother’s smile, happy, moved, soothed, so much did this simple puzzle – with two disoriented eyes, how do you compose a binocular blue gaze? – seem more improbable and difficult to solve than others of three thousand pieces representing some hazy reflection of sky in water. Whether I want them to or not, these two shoes form a pair.

Above all, they do not belong to me. They will not stop at my graveside. Others after me, my successors, will wear them in turn, big feet or small, they will all have to fit into them, and stay there. I was fantasizing above, it is out of the question for me to harm in the slightest a shoe for which I am the ever replaceable depository and guarantor, responsible, on the contrary, for brushing it as if it were my own foot until it gleams like my own eyeball, for preserving it day in day out so that it will remain in working and walking order
for future generations. We pass away more quickly than our shoes, they go on without us, after us, with other people; they are always good for someone who will finally abandon them in turn, but then they will become the joy of some poorer and more badly shod soul whose forsaken straw espadrilles will find a taker of their own, and so on and so forth down to the very last barefoot beggar. Then, when they are really too tattered to serve as shoes, still they will remain shoes no less; travelers at heart, they will go on by themselves, moved by new energies, new forces, river currents, the whim of a stray dog, the road mender’s shovel, or the ceaselessly seismic or volcanic activity of the landscape in the public dumps, the sudden sinking, settling, folding: they will participate in all their precariousness in these rapid and short-lived orogeneses, allowing themselves from time to time a moment of repose among the vapors, soon to resume their climb, toppling over when they’d barely arrived, while the whole mountain crumbles on their heels, slowly, lazily, and another mountain range gently forms or suddenly looms farther away, yet another challenge to take on, and they’ll take it on, no point in dwelling on the matter. I’ve understood: my steps will be neither the first nor the last for these shoes, neither the most hesitant nor the most resolute – I will belong to these shoes as long as my legs will carry me, I mean in particular my right leg, since the left no longer carries anyone; I belong to them body and sole, my feet will just have to accept it.

T
HE WORK
of the archaeologist requires the agility of the young speleologist and the erudition of the old scientist. Rare are the good archaeologists, the ones whose muscles obey and relieve one another like clockwork while their venerable minds chime the hours and date the remains to the nearest second; most often we have to deal either with inexperienced athletic types who somehow fall or slip into the depths and awkwardly trample upon the minute clayey undulations that bore witness to ten thousand years of civilization and would have provided us with all the information we could ever have hoped for about the customs – dietary habits, religious ceremonies, initiation and funeral rites – of these prehistoric peoples, or else with half-blind old men with encyclopedic knowledge who scratch the surface in quest of some improbable new element likely to shed light on the evolution of human species through the ages, and who, as things stand, can count their lucky stars when they manage to get their hands on their glasses, which they’ve somehow mislaid.

I thought I had reached that time of life when the archaeologist, still more or less master of his body, has at last at his disposal the knowledge and experience necessary to intelligently carry out excavations on sites that have
been pillaged or damaged – and let me add in passing that the term
excavation
always seemed inappropriate to me as applied to what we do; in any event it gives rise to an image of a clawlike hand, feverishly excavating and groping, determined to prove that the peace of the fields is resting on assegai heads, an enraged hand that will turn the earth upside down in order to find spent coins and pitcher spouts, whereas we proceed calmly – there is no urgency – and methodically, I was about to say tactfully, why didn’t I?, and meticulously, so that we often must have recourse to the tool kit of a neurosurgeon that, as we know, contains more teaspoons than shovels and picks. We work on our knees. We know sand as if we were sand, and mud as deeply as possible. We love dirt – death chewed over by life – it forgets nothing and we, precisely, are interested in everything: the humble details, the slightest indication of man’s presence in these places, traces of his footprints. Our ambition is not to reveal a radiant city and its irradiated population every time we raise a clod of earth, so much the better when it happens; from a plowing instrument, the mossy base of a column, or a tomb containing a body, we learn enough to delight us about the little worlds that preceded our own.

The cap doesn’t suit me either. It’s a kepi of some kind weighed down by a visor that doesn’t suit me at all. I am not a hat man. When I think of the balaclava I wore as a child, I still have the memory of an extra sock protecting my lips and nose from the nip in the air, just as the two others kept my feet from saying a word, and a pair of mittens and a sweater to complete the set and turn me into a real sheep sheared on a regular basis whose wool grows back thicker with each season and whose mended castoffs wind up with a sickly
little brother, always suffering from a cold, my shadow cut out in leatherette, my childhood hanging on my every footstep, who does not want to die. I often think about my brother. One day I turned around: he was no longer behind me. Today he is the head of a flourishing cannery of which I myself refused to take charge, after my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father before me; when my turn came – the first to escape the singular curse that had been striking the eldest sons in our family for a century – there were shouts, tears, and then my father showed me the door.

Well, I overestimated my strength, I was past the age, I slipped. We were moving forward in single file with me out in front, on the cave’s natural ledge between the slightly convex wall on our right and the definitely concave void on our left. I was the expedition leader. The reliefs from a Magdalenian dwelling discovered a few weeks earlier, one made of colored mortar, had led us to assume the existence of some wall ornamentation on the upper levels. We had to go see, and to do so had to scale stone blocks up to the ledge – a very narrow ledge covered in calcite glinting like ice – then dash toward the network entrance while pursing our lips and opening our eyes wide to shout three exclamations or lay three eggs at once. I was amazed beforehand by what I was about to discover – after so many fruitless explorations, to discover something at long last – in a dark cavity that opened out at the end of that ledge, that very narrow ledge covered in calcite as slippery as ice; I could have taken a bigger fall, an overhanging rock stopped my plummet. The cave, incidentally, revealed nothing of interest, neither engraving nor painting. I was in fact most probably the first man to have left a trace there, without being
asked, with my knee, a red star; fieldwork is no longer permitted me. I have very obligingly been recycled here; I’m replacing a certain Boborikine, who was recycled somewhere else. It’s a new task for me, another life is beginning, is about to begin, I should already be there, so I’ve been told, they’re getting impatient on high – are you or are you not going to get down to business?

I
T SEEMS
that Boborikine was already complaining behind their backs about the cap – it was much too tight for him – and that Crescenzo found it to be a bit too wide, or too deep, the happy medium being exactly that which suits no one to a tee. No two skulls are alike, as any peasant growing his turnips on the site of an ancient necropolis can tell you; no two turnips either, even if an exhumed skull is sometimes so similar to a turnip that you can mistake the one for the other. When you think about it, it might even be that our particular casts of mind – each unique – depend solely on the shape of our skull, individual thought testing itself first against the bone of its brainpan, like music molding itself to the geometry of a dome without regard for the musician’s intentions. Just a hypothesis I’m throwing out here. Indeed, I’m going beyond the call of my duties. But since I haven’t yet taken them up… Let’s grant for a moment that this hypothesis is correct, in which case we can legitimately claim that one’s thoughts will develop more freely in a huge-domed skull – but with the risk of getting lost or confused – than in a narrow, pointy skull, unless, on the contrary, they become sharper and burst forth, which is not impossible. My starting hypothesis thus branches out into diverging subhypotheses: this is how webs are woven; truth cannot be caught by the hand.

And so, what exactly is contained in Professor Glatt’s extraordinary skull? His head is crew cut, his forehead invisible but his occiput abnormally enlarged, his temporal bones protuberant; a head wide and flat, whose unevenly distributed weight would inevitably cause it to draw back were it not for his fearsome neck like a truncated cone implanted in his body all the way to the stomach, spreading the two scrawny shoulders like splints, and their floppy arms that would come loose if not for the two vigorous hands supporting them, holding them back at the last minute, hands so red they are blue, heavy with blood, and nails of purple (but not from the salon), and this entire superstructure is set in motion by legs that are too short, but solid, muscular; I’ve looked and looked but Professor Glatt is not yet to be found in the famous illustration where the encyclopedist sketched the life of the earthling in fast motion, from its origins as protozoan painfully heaving itself out of the water, on its elbows, undergoing until the Quaternary a series of bestial metamorphoses that litter the geological ages with molting, sloughing, shedding of flesh and bones, scales, gray hair, to wind up in the end as a human being and stay there more or less the time to catch his breath before doing an abrupt about face, rapidly tossing off behind him his new clothes but getting back his old palms along the way, to dive headfirst into the amniotic antediluvian liquid, the mother sea, ah, vacation at long last.