The cap doesn’t suit me either. It’s a kepi of some kind weighed down by a visor that doesn’t suit me at all. I am not a hat man. When I think of the balaclava I wore as a child, I still have the memory of an extra sock protecting my lips and nose from the nip in the air, just as the two others kept my feet from saying a word, and a pair of mittens and a sweater to complete the set and turn me into a real sheep sheared on a regular basis whose wool grows back thicker with each season and whose mended castoffs wind up with a sickly little brother, always suffering from a cold, my shadow cut out in leatherette, my childhood hanging on my every footstep, who does not want to die. I often think about my brother. One day I turned around: he was no longer behind me. Today he is the head of a flourishing cannery of which I myself refused to take charge, after my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father before me; when my turn came — the first to escape the singular curse that had been striking the eldest sons in our family for a century — there were shouts, tears, and then my father showed me the door.
Well, I overestimated my strength, I was past the age, I slipped. We were moving forward in single file with me out in front, on the cave’s natural ledge between the slightly convex wall on our right and the definitely concave void on our left. I was the expedition leader. The reliefs from a Magdalenian dwelling discovered a few weeks earlier, one made of colored mortar, had led us to assume the existence of some wall ornamentation on the upper levels. We had to go see, and to do so had to scale stone blocks up to the ledge — a very narrow ledge covered in calcite glinting like ice — then dash toward the network entrance while pursing our lips and opening our eyes wide to shout three exclamations or lay three eggs at once. I was amazed beforehand by what I was about to discover — after so many fruitless explorations, to discover something at long last — in a dark cavity that opened out at the end of that ledge, that very narrow ledge covered in calcite as slippery as ice; I could have taken a bigger fall, an overhanging rock stopped my plummet. The cave, incidentally, revealed nothing of interest, neither engraving nor painting. I was in fact most probably the first man to have left a trace there, without being asked, with my knee, a red star; fieldwork is no longer permitted me. I have very obligingly been recycled here; I’m replacing a certain Boborikine, who was recycled somewhere else. It’s a new task for me, another life is beginning, is about to begin, I should already be there, so I’ve been told, they’re getting impatient on high — are you or are you not going to get down to business?
IT SEEMS that Boborikine was already complaining behind their backs about the cap — it was much too tight for him — and that Crescenzo found it to be a bit too wide, or too deep, the happy medium being exactly that which suits no one to a tee. No two skulls are alike, as any peasant growing his turnips on the site of an ancient necropolis can tell you; no two turnips either, even if an exhumed skull is sometimes so similar to a turnip that you can mistake the one for the other. When you think about it, it might even be that our particular casts of mind — each unique — depend solely on the shape of our skull, individual thought testing itself first against the bone of its brainpan, like music molding itself to the geometry of a dome without regard for the musician’s intentions. Just a hypothesis I’m throwing out here. Indeed, I’m going beyond the call of my duties. But since I haven’t yet taken them up… Let’s grant for a moment that this hypothesis is correct, in which case we can legitimately claim that one’s thoughts will develop more freely in a huge-domed skull — but with the risk of getting lost or confused — than in a narrow, pointy skull, unless, on the contrary, they become sharper and burst forth, which is not impossible. My starting hypothesis thus branches out into diverging subhypotheses: this is how webs are woven; truth cannot be caught by the hand.
And so, what exactly is contained in Professor Glatt’s extraordinary skull? His head is crew cut, his forehead invisible but his occiput abnormally enlarged, his temporal bones protuberant; a head wide and flat, whose unevenly distributed weight would inevitably cause it to draw back were it not for his fearsome neck like a truncated cone implanted in his body all the way to the stomach, spreading the two scrawny shoulders like splints, and their floppy arms that would come loose if not for the two vigorous hands supporting them, holding them back at the last minute, hands so red they are blue, heavy with blood, and nails of purple (but not from the salon), and this entire superstructure is set in motion by legs that are too short, but solid, muscular; I’ve looked and looked but Professor Glatt is not yet to be found in the famous illustration where the encyclopedist sketched the life of the earthling in fast motion, from its origins as protozoan painfully heaving itself out of the water, on its elbows, undergoing until the Quaternary a series of bestial metamorphoses that litter the geological ages with molting, sloughing, shedding of flesh and bones, scales, gray hair, to wind up in the end as a human being and stay there more or less the time to catch his breath before doing an abrupt about face, rapidly tossing off behind him his new clothes but getting back his old palms along the way, to dive headfirst into the amniotic antediluvian liquid, the mother sea, ah, vacation at long last.
There are faces made for drinking and faces made for eating. Professor Glatt’s puffy face is of the eating kind, with his bridgeless nose, fat and flabby, his naturally enlarged and bulging eyes — no need for glasses to see — his sluglike lips, and his chin cleft like a derrière — and it sways like one too, whenever he speaks I get slightly aroused, whenever he laughs, were he to laugh, and especially whenever he chews. He’s got a great appetite. I’ve cracked all my eggs. It’s an omelet like the full moon. A working lunch. It would seem that my attitude is not appreciated on high, I am not up to scratch, my competence and conscientiousness are being questioned. They are starting to regret having entrusted this position to me, some people — and not the lowest of the low — are even demanding I be dismissed outright, some of the most influential people — apparently there are grounds: incompetence, negligence, sloth, gossiping, lack of discipline, I’m much too laid back, I must realize that my nomination provoked jealousy, it would be easy to replace me, there are always a thousand candidates for a single job. The professor came specifically to call me to order: either I get down to work straightaway or else I clear out and do what I must to find another job, understand? And don’t bother inventing any more excuses. We don’t want to hear any more.
That having been said, Professor Glatt is handsome, he has a handsomeness all his own that offends the eye accustomed to judging beauty in reference and by comparison, but in which you can glimpse almost simultaneously its unique, incomparable perfection. It is even obvious that, should the hideousness that makes Professor Glatt so unique and distinctive and exceptional become the norm, the new accepted human form, or rather, when it does become the norm — because I truly believe he is just one little length ahead of the rest of the species — sculptors and fashion designers will work from his measurements. However, because he is still the only one of his kind, all alone, any and all comparisons accentuate his difference and cause the principle characteristics of this avant-garde body to be taken for defects, deformities even, this avant-garde body that is undeniably beautiful, if we forget the others, if we only look at him as he stands against the light and, once the effect of surprise or fear has swiftly worn off, we grow fond of this character who resembles no one else, we become accustomed to his oddness, to his too curt ways; already his face seems charming, we fall under the spell of this man to the extent that we cannot suppress a horrified shiver if by chance one of our fellow creatures suddenly enters our visual field — and this time it’s my own reflection in the windowpane: the professor departs, heading down the sandy garden path through the openwork gate, I breathe on the window, he disappears in the mist, my pale reflection along with him. I hear their car starting up.