THE INDEX fingernail is made for this: by pulling off the pliant top of the thumbtack, I eliminate the problem, that red stain will never again make its impression on my retina, the headless thumbtack, golden, no longer clashes as badly with the other three. At last I shall be able to study the map of the cave seriously. Man’s talons are meant for this kind of small domestic task, but he cannot count on them to dig out his warren. So the karstic network of Pales must not be attributed to the Paleolithic artists who used it, even if they did in fact widen some of the passageways by hand, as you can see from the clods of clay pushed up against the cave walls. In reality, a network of this kind is formed by the combined action of water and air, whose corrosive and solvent properties we sometimes experience on our own bodies. Here comes the explanation. It promises to be rather boring since karstic phenomena are produced too slowly to create what could strictly speaking be called entertainment, even if their representation in fast-forward would unquestionably make us forget the formidable storms at sea, because the rock reinforced with ore that we so casually trample underfoot is powerless against the waters sharpened like daggers that suddenly seep between the joints of the stratifications and rapidly dissolve the calcium carbonate that held it together; then it’s a river’s hydraulic pressure that devours the stone and carves out corridors into which air — full of carbon dioxide and pernicious organic acids that attack in turn — immediately rushes, and frost dynamites everything in its path, everything explodes, the fractured rock crumbles, easy as pie, the flood clears out the rubble or sends it into the depths before abandoning the network, which has now become practicable, consolidated by the sedimentation of clay and silt, propped up by tall limestone concretions, thin translucent columns or massive pillars; the painters are expected, they can go in now, torches in hand, they enter the labyrinth. As soon as they have found a chamber to their liking, they light the juniper wicks of their bruloirs (150 grams of tallow can stoke a sun), the dancing flames and shadows on the walls will evoke living shapes that the artists will capture for all eternity, whereas our cold light from electric bulbs freezes our imaginations; it is implacable, disapproving, the eye of God suspended from the ceiling by a wire — and here comes that thumbtack I had thought I was rid of, turning its dazzling tip on me again and pinning me there, on the upper right-hand corner of the map where I’ve no reason to be.
It is obvious now that I’ll make no progress as long as the four thumbtacks are not identical. This maniacal need for symmetry and conformity is justified nonetheless: it’s a matter of countering the intricate lines of the map — which herald a delicate journey — with the rigor of a geometry of partitions in order to avoid overflow and contain the drawing in its rectangular (70cm x 95cm) frame. Circumscribed by these conventional boundaries, the terrifying subterranean labyrinth no longer inspires anything but a retrospective anxiety — like the harrowing adventure that fits in a book that fits in a pocket — because everything is at last restored to order. We play somewhat loosely with scales to bring what exceeds us back to more modest proportions: we believe, for example, that the future can be read in tarot cards. We possess planet Earth, it belongs to us, we are the indisputable masters of it, that is, we reign over a world of miniatures and realities reduced to our size — none of it exists. The whale we know is not a whale, it is nothing like a whale, the real whale is much, much bigger. Our whale is as little like a whale as possible. But all this labeling and miniaturizing must continually be renewed. An illusion that is not maintained cannot survive — the growing plant will never take the flowerpot into consideration. At the first flagging of our vigilance, everything comes undone, suddenly the rosebush is a vile bramble and dogs give birth to wolves, even our marvelous inventions attest only to our weaknesses, the glass had too much sand in its eyes not to wind up blind, cities cave in, the attics are in the cellars, what should beat no longer beats, circulate no longer circulates, one moment of inattention was all it took and the world became itself again, perfectly round and bound just as it was in the Quaternary when we got here, by accident or design, perhaps forced to flee the large celestial cube stuffed with electronics where we used to live comfortably, tapping away at our keyboards. Alas, this wild land on which we washed up was not ready to welcome a civilization as refined as ours and the efforts made ever since to introduce it have been in vain, despite a few recent small successes that nonetheless have nothing definitive about them and are at the mercy of one second of distraction, as has just been proven, the truth being that we did not know how to adapt and we never will, for to do so we would have to regress intellectually in order to carve out a place for ourselves among the brutes in these mountain or desert regions. This is why we prefer pretending to believe in our visions of the world, which are pure hallucinations, or else they are delirious mental conceptions, it must be said, but which, in the end and despite everything, constitute a universe, our own, whose verisimilitude depends solely on the precision of our encyclopedias and atlases, on our liturgies, our classifications, our maps. The golden thumbtack creates a treacherous disturbance, it is a bolt that fails, a rung that gives way, a hole in the hull, watch out.
I haul myself upstairs, despite my leg; I climb the steps with the strength of my arms — this route henceforth will bear my name. We still have one drawer to rummage through in my bedroom, the night-table drawer now surrenders its precious information about my predecessor Boborikine. The presence of a small box of matches, for example, allows you to establish that he had mastered fire, and that of a needle with an eye, that he dressed in clothes that were sewn. He had a sense of the sacred, his worship of the fertility goddess is evidenced by the queen of spades with hypertrophied breasts from a pornographic deck of cards. He knew the properties of plants, herbs that heal and those that cure insomnia, their dosages and the pharmaceutical methods of packaging in flasks, tubes, or boxes. He cared about the way he looked. His nail file is almost completely smooth, polished by wear, and his comb has caught a few gray strands. He had a strong sense of family; a strip of four standard ID photos shows us four little blond girls each wearing a tiny bandage on her forehead. The first is sticking out her tongue and slanting her eyes with her thumbs; the second is puffing out her cheeks; the third is grimacing horribly; but the last one — smiling, pretty, slightly wounded — can only be the famous Angèle, his favorite niece, less foolish than the other three. But let’s avoid jumping to conclusions. We don’t know what value he placed on these objects — was this his treasure or the accumulated scraps of a richer life led elsewhere? Some of these vestiges could in fact lead us astray. Sometimes things are deflected from their usual function by a user caught off guard or who’s simply being inventive, when upon examination they don’t turn out to be very different from what you thought based solely on their appearance. Coconuts cannot be ostrich eggs because they contain goat’s milk. I myself learned today, at my age, with the stupefaction that always accompanies this sort of late onset disillusionment, while the beginnings of a smile of commiseration can be seen on the lips of those who always knew — but we are all missing, inexplicably, some piece of information known the world over, or rather something obvious that remains inexplicably unknown to us and to us alone until the day when the scales fall from our eyes and finally there is light — I discovered only today that tiny matchboxes are in reality bursting with thumbtacks, red, blue, green, white, and yellow.