Let’s also retrace our steps, let’s take the corridor through which we arrived, but in the opposite direction, and return to the vestibule from which we set off; look down for a moment at the sedimentary rock on which we are treading, composed of quartz grains held together by a solid chalky cement, magnificent enameled sandstone tiles, thirty-three by thirty-three centimeters, laid out on the entire ground floor — so easy to take care of, ladies, that it is a real joy; they say that Cinderella gave up going to the ball in order to mop it and that her sisters were green and yellow with envy. At the rear of the vestibule, to the right of the corridor, let us pause in front of the prepainted flush door that leads to the cellar, where various objects that were collected in the cave are stored and not yet inventoried: another thankless task to which I am duty-bound. In the meantime, the public is not allowed in, step back please, I do not make the rules, let us please observe the proper flow of the tour. The second story is also worth a glance. The spiral staircase awaits us and only us to take flight — with its golden color and the stylishness of Scandinavian pine, it feels more like a schooner that heads to sea, spins around, and drops us safe and sound on the looped carpet of the landing, out of which branches another corridor with its tree-structured logic: to the left, a locked former guest room that now serves the dual purpose of junk room and office library, and is therefore doubly dusty; and the unavoidable small square room at the far end of the passageway with its glazed white porcelain bowl, à la salon de thé, and its double lid that should be closed, quickly please, before you leave, and then about-face! To the left again, but the other left this time, we can admire the separate room that holds the tub whose rosy-tiled nudity, barely veiled by a hanging bathrobe, discreetly echoes the kitchen wall covering — you remember it, the soul of a house is revealed through these subtle relations — the tub is in fact of the same rosy pink, but I have been forever loath to take baths, I have the very unpleasant sensation of drowning in a coffin and I prefer to use the flexible showerhead attached to the big mixing faucet whose red and blue discs are reversed, as is often the case, you just need to know; it is also these tiny, touching details that reveal a house’s soul. Finally, across from the unwelcome guest room but communicating directly, morning and evening, with the tub room, here is my bedroom, cluttered by a double bed, you have to wonder for what and especially for whom, with its five smooth, white walls — in a bedroom there are only ceilings — and its floor overrun with shoddy carpeting, and as sole furnishing, besides this half-useless conjugal bed, a wardrobe with a mirror, bandy-legged in my presence and which I intend to whitewash, brick over — I am one of those people who does not know how to behave in front of a mirror — and a chair sitting at its table near the window: view on the cave. Above the bed, Boborikine hung a reproduction of the headless woman, one of the cave’s most astonishing engravings. Let’s get out of here. We are heading back downstairs. The spiral staircase sinks into the wax polish as if it were butter, do not let go of the banister, you’ll slip.
IT’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.