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.
UNLESS, 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 welclass="underline" 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.
THE 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.