We would take walks, visit the surrounding area, from Font-de-Gaume to Lascaux, from La Ferrassie to Sous-Grand-Lac. Yes, of course: beneath these places run rivers, cutting holes through the limestone. Above these holes, reindeer made for summer pastures endlessly, climbing from the Atlantic in spring to the green grass of l’Auvergne surrounded by their thundering hooves, an immense dust cloud on the horizon, their antlers above, and the doleful head of one pushing into the rump of the next; and there, in the dissolute gully that cradles and nurses the Vézère, the two Beunes, and the Auvézère, we waited for them with Dabs, Parrot’s Beaks, and cries; and the lichen eaters heard the drums in the distance, saw the fires as if night and day were watching the smoke, but made for the drums without deviation, stretching out in the narrows beside the water, trembling; they plowed straight ahead; because if the reindeer had been able to conceive of a god or a devil, they would have prayed and pondered, then and there, seasonal and unstoppable, each April burgeoning suddenly everywhere like the horns piercing their brows, unleashed without reason like gods, manifesting in a single body endlessly multiplied and animated by a single will that drives them mad, in noisy hordes, men carrying hatchets, graves filled with pikes; and they would have thought that this god was clement, because after all only a part of them was truly present, and remained there all summer enjoying the golden lichens on the basalt, the sun that sets behind the gently sloping round volcanoes when the weather is beautiful and the day is spent ruminating grass. And the men who were the gods of these reindeer, after eight days of charivari, of blood, of live forces in the narrows, skinning, salting, din, these early days of April that allow them to do nothing for the rest of the year, to watch, to talk, filling their bellies, enjoying their wives and loving the little babies that spring forth, these men, and it seems that it’s true since the carbon 14 dated it all conclusively as if decreed by some socialist savant, when they’d had enough of their children and their women, of the interminable discussions in a blood red hut with their great hats rung with antlers and feathers, men descended into the caves and made paintings. Not all the men: only those with more delicate hands, a more ready or tortuous spirit, single hearts that went at night to look for meaning in the puddles of the Beune, and not finding it there gathered at a place of opaque stones that have meaning, words and combinations of stones and words that make sense, and out of these combinations, strength; those who wished to expiate the blood of the deer, but not for the beautiful eyes of the deer, rather, to be free of every care and to kill better the next year and without remorse, with a hand that nothing would still; those who were afraid of the dead spoke to them better than anyone, with a little paper or not, a tricolor scarf or not; those to whom the mayor of some little spot in the Dordogne, perhaps Eyzies, speaks without knowing it, that in his kiss he joins and welcomes beneath the eyes of the citizens whose hats are in their hands, on the eleventh of November, with his crib before a monument to the dead. The mayor of Les Eyzies perhaps thinks of them during the ringing of the bells for the dead. And it once was not uncommon to take these few to be shamans, to be as knowledgeable as socialist savants and as pious as Mohicans, calling forth wild game and rain while drawing them in the dark, then dancing before this imposing display where great cows jump, or one lone wolf runs; and it is now not uncommon to see these men as artists, as art has become fashionable; the times have tossed the socialist savants and their gesticulating primates to the nettles, as if that were so different, as if the arts too didn’t dance in front of the display and shake its doors open to share in its marvels. But upon reflection these were indeed artists, since they made this hole off-limits to others, where they came and entered gingerly and with an air of great mystery, antlers on their heads while they muttered paternosters, and also because they doubtless wrote Oedipus Rex and Theogony on those walls in a writing made of animals that we can’t read. So I distracted myself there from Yvonne, or perhaps went to see her by taking a detour, the long road, as the old bachelors had: we visited these caves behind their hallways, their ticket windows, their uniformed employees, Mado and I; and a hundred times between two submerged lanes between Les Eyzies and Montignac, I repeated this Paleolithic lecture to myself and I repeated it to her.
Once, during Christmas vacation, we were coming back from one of these trips. Between les Martres and Castelnau, coming from les Martres, the road briefly follows the valley before drawing back and taking a detour toward this place I’ve already mentioned, where there are walnuts, and the hallucinogenic fields that carried Yvonne. At the point where the road veers away from the Beune but is still close to it, you see a dirt road marked by a sign from the local administration: Prehistoric Cave of Chez-Quéret. We had already seen this sign, but the airplanes had overlooked it, the cave not appearing in the guidebooks that direct one’s choices. The afternoon had barely begun, the old Renault had already served its amorous office, we had left early in the morning. The road drew us onward. We committed ourselves to it.
It had started to rain again after the eight days of miraculous cold that had delivered Yvonne, whipped. The byroad collapsed into a bog, we bounced around, our wipers beat back and forth. We were above the cliff, the road descended a bit farther; halfway down, there was a house, a barn, a few outbuildings, a field that seemed enormous to me in the black rain. We were at a lower elevation than chez Hélène, but on the same lip of the cliff; the site, the escarpment, the bare limestone were all identical. The high waters of the Beune rose nearly to the road as she widened before the house, flooding the road below; she was muddy, in a hurry, devouring the remains of icicles hanging down all along her banks, like bits of old rags left there through the bitter cold; the bare trees were dripping before us, lamentable like the famous little mammoth of Pech-Merle, which is hairy and dripping, on the thirty-ninth day of the Flood. The scene was sweetly sinister. Mado’s sage duffel coat and jeans leaping animatedly from the car warmed my heart, made me laugh. There was a sort of curate’s garden to cross; we knocked; someone shouted for us to come in. In the big kitchen floated an acrid odor of dust, immemorial and fossilate, of mud so ancient it had become edible, the smell of cooking beets. Jean the Fisherman, a knife in his hand, was making a soup. From his pouch, a shoulder bag open on the table next to the peppers, protruded an open pack of corn Gitanes.