STOP. Here we are. Don’t get under each other’s feet. Form a circle around me so everyone can see. You are now admiring the sole male sex organ in the cave, represented by a stalagmitic projection of forty centimeters (but it must have increased in size since the time the engraver traced the puny prone figure around it). Thick, opaline — not bad — it looks more like a block of frozen sperm. Who knows, perhaps it has conserved all its seminal virtues, but is it up to us to try our hand at artificial insemination? How far can science go, where do its rights end, who are we to fool around with the very principle of life, etc.? We know, moreover, that women did not do the work of decorating the caves, they were kept away from art just as they were from hunting, they were employed for the seasonal gathering of blackberries, plums, hazelnuts, the harvesting of edible roots, the collecting of eggs, snails, honey — I’m the bear, I go first, any objections? Such harvests in the wild were indispensable because agriculture did not yet exist, and that’s something we must repeat and retain: art preceded agriculture by some twenty thousand years, so that the old collective dream of fleeing civilization to renew our ties with primitive values and with the first passions of human beings does not entail, as one could be led to believe, buying a little ramshackle farmhouse and its fallow land, the practice of painting would be more pertinent — any monochrome painting is more rustic, typical, and authentic than a row of potatoes.
Motherhood was also exclusively left to women, which is no longer the case; quite the opposite in fact: today we may well be witnessing a transfer of responsibilities in this domain for, even if, as in the past, the mother still carries the child in her womb for the first months, afterward it is the father who lugs it around for ten years on his shoulders, where the larva goes through its slow metamorphosis by gaining weight on a daily basis. Kept down for too long by their education and then, until recently, by an unfair division of domestic labor, with access only to the wastewater from watercolors, women will finally be able to exercise their unsuspected talents freely. Imminent upheavals in the arts and sciences are to be expected; as soon as the legacy of this long bondage disappears, women will make their original voices heard and then it will be one surprise after another. One need only think of Pierre and Marie Curie. By mixing their radium with phosphorescent zinc sulfide, a person might perhaps lose some fingers, but one would also obtain a confection of glow-in-the-dark paint, opening whole nights to the possibilities of art. We would be at the dawn of history.
And besides, little does it matter how, the hand that works uses five fingers in the business, whatever the business, and as a result on occasion it loses one or more of the fourteen phalanges that had made up its initial endowment. Goodwill is never lacking, nor is noble ambition, nor fierce determination, the heart is in it, but our numbed extremities betray us. Only my foot slipped as I was walking along the ledge. My hand will not be helpful as long as it cannot grasp running water like a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. I put my finger in the secret gears that tirelessly turn the pages of this catalogue and here I am, trapped, cornered, carried away against my will by the mechanical movement, anyone could take my place, any finger, I don’t count anymore, and if I were an animal, I would be the waterwheel donkey, if I were an edifice, I would be a mill, as a vegetable I am the artichoke that one pulls the leaves off, I am also a shutter that flaps, a wave covering a wave, a meat cleaver. The pages turn, and now we see a copy of the negative hands disseminated throughout the cave — the artist applied an open palm to the cave wall and projected red or black powder onto this surface by blowing through a hollowed bone, then took his hand away — and these hands have been groping around for fifteen or twenty millennia, and mine gropes with them, I can pull it away, my print will remain. I have touched the back wall and I shall stay stuck to it, I won’t go beyond it either, impossible; it’s already lovely to have got this far, it was not without sufferings, look at all those twisted, mutilated hands, deformed by arthritis, decalcification, eaten away by frostbite or gangrene. All these old man hands groping along until the catalogue’s final pages. Then finally one of them closes it.
Sometimes I am a little bit hard to follow — but so-called “born leaders” are mostly shadowed by jealous men armed with knives waiting for the right moment — and it is precisely because my limp causes a deviation in all my trajectories and reroutes me three times over three meters that I was chosen to lead and comment on the guided tour through the Pales cave network. I am no fool. Only a lucid mind can understand the principles of the labyrinths dreamed up by architects and manage to get out of them, but it takes a system of thinking that is sufficiently confused and delirious, or excessively logical, to orient itself in the mazes dug out by rivers. Glatt and his ilk did not appoint me by chance. True, they are beginning to regret their choice. According to them, I’ve done nothing since I’ve been here, the dead Boborikine is more active than I am, more efficient, and at least he has remained faithful to this vocation. He is worried about the future of paleontology. He is exchanging molecules. He is becoming mineral. His remains already contain less carbon 14 than they did before, and this progressive diminution will allow us periodically to take a bearing. And so we shall not let ourselves be fooled by the speeding up or slowing down of History; we need only examine Boborikine’s bones scientifically to know the time and situate ourselves very precisely in it. For — and perhaps you’re hearing it from me first — dread death occurs at least forty thousand years after the official death certificate is written, when our last atoms of carbon 14 are eliminated. Only then do we cease to emit radiation and only then is the fate of our soul sealed for good. May God on that day welcome Boborikine into his holy keeping.
IS IT BECAUSE I am an archaeologist — trained as one and derailed as a result — that I am surprised that so few widowers, widows, and orphans are sufficiently affected by the unbearable absence to break into the dead person’s grave a few days after he or she was buried to see his or her face one last time even in this sorry state, even through their tears, to embrace the body one last time before it will truly be too late, and to verify that it really belongs to the person they thought it did and reassure themselves that he or she has not regained consciousness? This all too rapid resignation smacks of consent. There is something offensive about this instant acceptance. If the greatest grief is so sensible, we can appoint it a judge, it will not lead us astray, we can put ourselves in its hands to let it wisely govern our lives. But I am speaking as an archaeologist oblivious of everything I owe to grave diggers. I am getting carried away by my passion for my job. I want to move too quickly. The minute the dead are inhumed, I want to dig them back up. Patience. It is always too soon to unbury the dead. Never did a paleontologist worthy of his name dig up a dead man. We bring to light fossilized bones, nothing but stone, let’s not get emotional, the dead are no longer there. A skeleton needs living marrow to grow bigger and stronger, but its true adventure, its adventure qua skeleton begins later, slowly, under the right conditions it turns to stone and it’s a crying shame that consciousness cannot participate in the skeleton’s adventure all the way to the end, for it is a wonderful adventure, the kind of adventure consciousness loved, like meditating or remembering, a static adventure regulated by the passing of time with, at the end, peace.