I would feel terrible chasing you away, Professor, but I have my work cut out for me and your stopping by will do nothing to expedite the reopening of the cave. Of course our conversations are quite interesting. I enjoy them immensely but they disrupt my schedule. The explanations you want from me, your questions I must answer: all this sidetracks me. I’m not getting anywhere. And now, duty calls. Climb up there and tell them that their ideas about me are wrong, that I am very busy despite what it may seem. I have already done a great deal of work. But I do not think this is the right time to reopen the cave. Besides, take a look at the key you gave me. It’s too big, too heavy, one of those keys with the balls of a jailer knocking against his thigh, I don’t believe this key capable of reopening the gate it locked. It doesn’t seem to be at all the kind of key to retrace its steps or change its mind, a key like this can only be used once, to close up, a key like this is one that locks for good, if you ask me, a key like this is a key that bolts the door and throws away the key.
HE DEFINITELY must have been seated when he drew his big polychrome mammoth. Then he would have stood up on tiptoe or more likely perched himself on a rock or the back of an assistant, or on a clayey protuberance made expressly for this purpose, or on a rudimentary platform. In any event, he would have constructed all these hypotheses himself before choosing the best one to reach the ledge and paint the heads of those two ibex thereon with a dab of pink ochre, for it is obvious that the three figures were drawn by the same hand. The photographic reproductions in my possession leave no room for doubt. Each artist already had his characteristic style, easily identifiable despite the motifs and techniques shared by all. I would readily attribute the female aurochs and the rearing horse of the last chamber on the third level to this same painter, as well as the line of mammoths filing out of it, taking a sharp turn without losing their stride and straying into a cul-de-sac. The headless woman, on the other hand, truly seems to be the sole work of its creator, unless perhaps the figure of a bear sketched on a stalagmitic pillar was also his, but it is now partially obscured by calcite flowstones and it is difficult to tell. The catalogue of reproductions doesn’t omit a single one of the cave’s paintings. Animal figures predominate — finished or not, at times just rough outlines — because the catalogue lists twenty-eight horses, twenty-six mammoths, twenty bison, sixteen ibex, sixteen reindeer, seven aurochs, six felines, five fish (salmonid), two elk, two stags, a bear, a woolly rhino, a boar, a wolf, a bird, more than one hundred other mammals that are unfinished, or botched, or clumsy, or damaged, over whose nature prehistorians argue. There is even some question of a human profile that according to some is probably the hindquarters of a bison and, according to others, the only example of a penguin discovered in a cave far from any coast.
But among all these indefinable figures there is one whose strangeness is due neither to the poor quality nor bad condition of the painting; on the contrary, it is certainly among the most perfect and best preserved in the cave. I have the reproduction in front of me: at first, it looks like an izard head and so you ask yourself: What’s the problem? Only the izard has such curved horns. But then you can make out two thinner lines extending from the horns and branching out to form what are in fact the powerful antlers of a megaceros; so the problem is solved, it was a paltry enigma, and then the eye discerns in the tangle of antlers the very clear shape of a roaring feline and everything becomes arranged differently; one mistook the thick stream of urine with which the wildcat marks its territory for an antler and now that this interpretation has become obvious, you can no longer even find the outlines of the izard or the megaceros; this hypothetical ruminant’s profile in fact calls to mind an eagle’s spread wing, and indeed I can clearly recognize the hooked beak of the raptor; how could we have seen in it the head of a roaring feline? It’s an eagle in flight, no point in looking any further, the curved line of its back no more resembles a stream of urine than it does a mammoth’s trunk, for example. We have to admit it looks too much like a mammoth’s trunk not to be one, and then the whole pachyderm immediately appears in three-quarters profile — we mistook its frightening right tusk for a bird of prey’s wing — so strange is this figure that when observed more closely it could be taken for a salmon, a crab, or a bison, judging by the woolly fur of its turtleneck. Our indecision is partly due to a whole slew of pentimenti, the traces of which are vaguely visible, often just barely. But, by and large, what do we really know about the aesthetic ideas of troglodyte painters? Why should we deny them the possibility of imagination and reduce their inventive audacity to an ignorance of the laws of perspective obeyed in realist animal art? To reproduce is to admit, and thus it is to submit, to agree to follow the herds of reindeer and their coprophagous flies in all their migrations. But man’s relation to the world changes the moment his imagination comes into play, it changes completely; it’s no longer a relation of constant humiliation and subjection, quite the opposite: it reverses completely, takes a turn for the better, and henceforth quadrupeds will have four equidistant left feet, they won’t go far. And so it was done.
As for the anthropomorphic figures in the cave, other than the headless woman and the penguin, they are few and far between, somewhat sloppy, and reduced to a bare minimum: all it takes are two eyes, two dark rings painted on a natural protuberance of the cave wall. This single portrait is used for every face, the resemblance is there, startling, a mirror could not do better, anyone can recognize himself in it; that dazed look is definitely our own — the malice of the gaze and the irony of the smile cannot change a thing about it, our face is one big nose that expresses, more than anything, a lack of comprehension. Perhaps this is why — and in order to feel as though they are part of the world in spite of it all, so as to merge with the other creatures and to be accepted by them, to fit in unobtrusively, without scandal, stealthily in other words — the other human characters who appear are all wearing animal masks, beaks and horns or plumage, and this clumsy ruse that communicates their goodwill by and large betrays their helplessness. The calm self-assurance of the animals accentuated the humans’ bewilderment all the more, emphasized their weakness and the erroneousness of their instincts that misled them about the taste of fruit and the chill of nights; so they made an attempt to escape this miserable, inferior, shameful condition by decking themselves out in feathers, skins, furs torn from animals who, once flayed, lose their arrogance, pink as the day they were born, equally tender, totally raw, and vaguely obscene because we replaced their silky fleeces with our own provocative nudity. Moreover, this exchange foretold the slow transubstantiation that would subsequently begin, following the domestication of the wild pig. And this explains why we devour so enthusiastically all the parts of its body, flesh of our flesh, from the snout to the tail, the dream incarnate of the anthropophagous butcher, the self-made man, nothing but obesity, foot shrunk to the nail, brains unraveling, fatty animal of tenderized human meat, without nerves, without soul, without that sickly sweet — but subtle, choice — aftertaste of sludge.
The V of “Vulva,” repeated over and again on the cave walls, already illustrates the dominant obsession of times to come. Two deep gashes made with flints — a crotch — the invisible body fills the surrounding space and is rendered almost palpable thanks to the power of suggestion of both the drawing and desire. More than thirty vulvae were counted on the single wall here, some large some small, some narrow some wide, spread out like a flight of gulls; but back then two different pictorial signs represented birds and vulvae, and we will have to wait until the advent of watercolors to see this superfluous distinction abolished at last. Another strange thing in the cave — this one unique and consequently less significant — nonetheless deserves a glance. I want to show you. If I can find it. Where was it? Don’t move. Wait here, I’ll be right back. If the catalogue is properly done, conceived from start to finish with the same logical rigor, this strange thing should be on the next page. Indeed it is. Here it is. We can get going. Next page. Stay behind me in a group. We’re turning.