Another possible interpretation: they consider on high that I was appointed to this position in recognition of services rendered, or services I might have rendered, that is, out of charity, that I was assigned here the way an old horse that ran well is put in a paddock rather than simply slaughtered, but now it would be out of place if we were to ask for a greener pasture or a higher salary: if we push our luck too far, we might even antagonize our patrons, wear out our welcome, and wind up tossed out on the street or led to the slaughterhouse one morning among the mooing, drooling cows that give off steam like ships about to leave shore; from this perspective, their frantic tails are no longer tails. Instead I see the arms of passengers waving farewell with their hankies, farewell, the cleaver smashes the skulls of all those poor wretches. When one pushes one’s luck too far, it goes overboard, and here I am cruelly ejected from the strict limits of my duties, I land who knows where and to my great surprise find myself debating questions that do not come within my remit: how, for example, are my opinions on the slaughtering of animals and maritime companies worthy of holding our attention for so long? Whence stems this authority? Will my questions in fact be transmitted to the right people and taken into account so that henceforth, on the one hand, cows will be received in more kindly fashion in the slaughterhouses and, on the other, the safety of passengers will at last be guaranteed on transatlantic liners? I should hope my observations will be taken seriously. As for this most recent postponement of my narrative’s development, it will at least have allowed us to focus for a moment on what is happening elsewhere. One would too easily have a tendency to cut oneself off from the world. In fact, this might not be digression’s only charm: perhaps I have made more progress than it seems — perhaps, if you think about it, digression really is the shortest distance between two points, the straight line being so very congested.
TO SWEEP, but also and on a regular basis to gently brush with water the cave engravings that are covered in clayey drippings, to spray the walls with a (10 %) formalin solution every week in order to combat the proliferation of algae, moss and lichen, fungus, mold and mildew, all the destructive thallophytes, and to dissolve as well the bat droppings, the acidity of which corrodes the rock, which then becomes friable and crumbles, even if today there remain only a dozen or so chiropterans in the cave, whereas, when it was first discovered, there lived a colony of one thousand. Where have they gone? And where did they come from, how long had they been there, where do bats come from? I’ve often wondered. I’ve always been very curious about bats, that life after death of theirs intrigues me no end. There is nothing less concrete than a bat, nothing more stealthy or noiseless than a bat, fluttering as if in a cage when it’s in the open air, but uncatchable, never in contact, never on the ground: eschatology could not better describe our immortal soul. Every mystery pales in comparison to this one; it touches on the true nature of the soul and the conditions of its afterlife, a twofold enigma that also concerns bats, you can draw your own conclusions.
Some by the hundreds find refuge in the painted caves, our oldest sanctuaries. I deplore the fact that the builders of churches and cathedrals, following the orders of religious authorities blinded by vanity or prompted by their will to power, propelled these aerospace edifices skyward: the higher and pointier they are, the farther they rise from the ground, the more solemn the homage to the Creator, whereas to truly give thanks to Him, it would seem more appropriate to withdraw into the very heart of His creation, to get as close as possible to the earth’s central core, that flawless original diamond that was gradually covered in sediment, tainted, carbonized, buried beneath the mud and petroleum produced by decomposition, all the strata of lies, of dissembling, granite slabs, leaden weights, funerary marbles, rough barks, old crusts, all the way up to this greensward, these fatuous flowerets. Prehistoric artists worked in this direction, toward the depths, their frescoes extol a dynamic world dominated by the powerful and resolute figures of mammoths and bison, where man, beset by instincts as vague and fickle as his desires, remains in the background, his true place in the territory, that of the most ill-favored creature ever in all his nakedness of a beast flayed alive, his skin as sensitive as the water’s surface and his hunger perpetual. The prehistoric artist revered these splendid, sturdy animals; they had no weaknesses, no uncertainty; their senses warned them about the future, they fled winter before the first chill, whereas man awoke one morning shivering, every season took him by surprise, disoriented even when he stayed in the same place, day in day out. Perhaps the first hunting rites performed in these caves in fact evolved not, as I say rather rashly a little further down, from a belief in their magical powers, but from a more or less conscious need to punctuate that laboriously begun, unsettled existence that had no temporal supports or reference points in comparison to the calm self-confidence of animals that simply had to live their lives in order to fulfill their destiny. Time passed without giving any purchase to men. Rituals had to be created in order to control it to some extent so that man could orient himself, gain a foothold at last in a world that was very poorly organized, governed solely by the laws of nature, and in which intelligence was, in short, the too obvious trait of easy prey.
The paintings, often admirably preserved, fossilized by flows of calcareous water, sometimes even protected by a sheet of thin, translucent calcite, are the only irrefutable traces that remain of these rituals and ceremonies, but the deep footprints allow us to imagine there had been dancing as well, and because there was dancing, in all likelihood there was singing; music secured its power, as it does today, through hypnosis and hysteria. I cannot be sure of course, but a certain form of oral literature may have existed, its legendary characters being precisely those reproduced by the painters, an entire animal mythology forged by tales of hunting and combat. This would explain the countless, almost identical depictions in several caves nowhere near each other: those depictions were there only to serve as illustrations for the story that a storyteller, or the painter himself, told aloud for an audience that never tired of hearing it. These paintings, then, really only produced an effect as they were being executed, carried along by the story for as long as it lasted; then they were no longer of interest and the painter had to start on another, the same one, as soon as the storyteller again took up his immutable tale from the beginning. The paintings traveled through the ages, intact, whereas the tales that justified them and gave them meaning have been lost. The paintings live on quite well without them, poignant poetic enigmas, incomplete and perfect, and henceforth they precede every conceivable narrative.
(I know how to show off my erudition when the occasion calls for it, and this is a good opportunity. If I want to slip in my little anecdote, it’s now or never. You may have noticed that nothing is as hard to slip in as an anecdote. Among the forms of commerce that tie men to one another, the exchange of anecdotes is by far the one that works the least well of all. In this business, each person acts exactly as if he had two mouths and one ear. The goal is to prevent the other person from getting to the end of his anecdote, either by taking advantage of a moment of silence or by rudely cutting him off in order to slip in one’s own anecdote, despite the meager interest it arouses in the adversary who is concerned, above all, with getting on with his; and we call this savage and pitiless bickering “conversation,” and it seems the two are still good friends when they part. Nonetheless, since I now have the opportunity to slip in my little anecdote without the constant risk of interruption that often forces us to abridge our anecdotes, or to summarize them in order to spare the listener the minor details when he could just as easily have done without the salient points, having himself on the subject a much better story that he’s just dying to tell, I would be wrong to deprive myself of it. First allow me to state — and this preamble should be repeated word for word as my conclusion — that as unbelievable as it may seem, I swear my little anecdote is true: the Spanish Jesuits were for a short time suspected of having painted the Altamira cave paintings themselves in order to prove that all art described as Paleolithic was nothing but fraud and hoax. The scientific dating of the paintings nipped this notion in the bud, but it was nonetheless based on a reasonable assessment of Jesuitic malice and was suggested, indirectly, by the tumultuous religious feeling that overcame the first visitors to the cave. Will our museums — those great cathedrals of silence, respect, and boredom in which we no longer await anything but God — one day produce the same effect?)