Prehistoric Times (8 page)

Boborikine’s drawers were not emptied. His personal effects were moved, linens, books, and those small odds and ends, the hideous ornamental knick-knacks (except for a one-eyed frog made of shells that I threw back into the water), but neither the drawers in the living room highboy nor the one in the bedroom nightstand were cleaned out. I shall therefore have to itemize their contents and the inevitable enumeration presaged here will end as
soon as I have found the yellow thumbtack I need, which could happen very quickly if, for example, I were to find one in the first drawer of the highboy, buried beneath the knot of rubber bands, three green, three blue, one red, one white – and there truly is something poignant about the chance convergence of so many unforeseeable destinies. But no, no thumbtack under there, just a paper clip. Let’s carry on with the inventory. Nothing I remove from the drawer will go back in there; the lot will wind up in the wastebasket so that should my efforts bear no fruit I will at least have gained a speck more space for my own little belongings.

So, this first drawer, in addition to the rubber bands and the paper clip, harbored the following: another paper clip, two postcards (
Mimizan-Plage
, in black and white; and
Breton Gastronomy
, a color print of an oyster platter where purple is the dominant hue), both signed Angèle, who had sunny weather in the Landes, and, the following summer, sunny weather in Brittany too; who swam every day in the Landes and, the following summer, every day in Brittany too; apparently Angèle knew how to preserve her mystery better than Madame de Sévigné and, for lack of additional information, I must sadly leave her – and for once I had a fine specimen of a female character. Additionally: a tiny promotional writing pad (“At home or abroad, always carry your flagon of Lemonbalm Water by Carmes Boyer: Three Centuries of Renown”), a sample-size flask of Lilas perfume (70°), a worm-eaten hazelnut, a few candies in their stained-glass wrappers (the Eucharist as told to children), three spears of chewed fibers that were once either pencils or asparaguses, a red plastic billfold containing an embossed aluminum Saint Christopher crossing a river carrying the Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes at an age when
one doesn’t yet know how to walk on water, and precise instructions in case of a serious accident (“I am a Catholic: please get me a priest if I am dying”), a small box of Solingen razor blades (0.08mm), the missing eye of the frog (I call it a winkle), a Sanex toothpick in its sheath, another hazelnut eaten by a worm (the same worm?), a mouthful of meat that was spit out (the remains of a delicious pink rubber pig given to Boborikine by a gas station attendant), a two-centime coin (once upon a time you could fill your pockets in a candy store in exchange for this peanut sum), a watch that had stopped at 3:31 (and not a single second has since penetrated its impermeable watchcase; not a thing happened after that), and finally a tube of glue, but flat and dry like they all are, you swiftly squander your saliva when you try to find adhesion, cohesion, I know something about all that, I too shall have my place among all these outdated, broken-down objects – in the wastebasket. The archaeologist’s work must always be done again. He dies amid the ruins he has exhumed. All the dust that flew out of the drawer settles on my shoulders: an as-yet-thin layer of sediment, which will grow thicker, under which I shall disappear.

Something sticks in the second drawer, the wood must have warped or else a squirrel hid a walnut between the plywood slats; I keep trying, bracing myself, hands on the handles of the highgirl who wants to be coaxed for form’s sake and is dragging her feet as if I were pulling her against her will out on the dance floor, that’s all she was waiting for, we waltz around clumsily for a moment, and then, with scant ceremony, I waltz her back to where she was and thrust my lumbering dance partner against the wall, she’ll budge no more, I’ve wasted my time with her, my hand gropes around in the drawer that at last has partially opened: empty. Let’s catch our breath a moment.

After a lifetime of experience and daily practice, we instinctively expend the precise amount of energy we need to open a drawer, but the difficulties I just experienced have completely distorted this sense of moderation acquired over the years, assimilated by nerves and muscles, so that the third drawer yanked too brutally goes off the rails and falls on my feet. It’s painful, but I’ve read Epictetus’s
Art of Living
.

So now we enter the third drawer where other old junk is piled pell-mell: a skein of tangled green wool from an unfinished piece of knitting, abandoned after only four rows, or else mischievously undone and begun anew, then undone again and taken up again (this was no doubt the lifetime bond between Boborikine’s mother and her cat), a holy picture from a first communion illustrating the Annunciation (this episode would be turned into a play. I never saw it, but everyone knows the theater’s old ploys. It’s easy to imagine Joseph coming home unannounced, with a panicked Mary having just enough time to shove Gabriel into a closet), with Angèle’s childish signature on the back and a sweet dedication to her uncle (Angèle’s character is taking on depth in spite of everything; with the passing pages we are getting to know her, and we’ll wind up growing fond of this niece of Boborikine’s), a champagne cork, a yellow, perforated botanic label (missing the wire bracelet that wounds plants’ ankles) bearing an inscription written in pencil:
Ornithogalum
. Some will furtively recognize the furtive
Eleven o’clock lady
(flowers have a nickname reserved for butterflies and a scientific name for lepidopterists), a fat blue die showing six so I’m speeding up; a key chain, a button, a sugar cube, an ant that won’t go far with my thumb on its back (besides, the ant that attempts a raid on its own is a fool); a tiny pair of scissors with its
bird’s beak and appetite, a porcelain egg from the time when doorknobs were still laid and each hatching promised a real surprise – let’s break it. I could surely extract many other belongings from this drawer, dig deep in it to my heart’s content, I’m nowhere near the bottom, but I already know I’ll find all the gold in the world before the yellow thumbtack I need, and what’s more, the wastebasket is full.

T
HE INDEX
fingernail is made for this: by pulling off the pliant top of the thumbtack, I eliminate the problem, that red stain will never again make its impression on my retina, the headless thumbtack, golden, no longer clashes as badly with the other three. At last I shall be able to study the map of the cave seriously. Man’s talons are meant for this kind of small domestic task, but he cannot count on them to dig out his warren. So the karstic network of Pales must not be attributed to the Paleolithic artists who used it, even if they did in fact widen some of the passageways by hand, as you can see from the clods of clay pushed up against the cave walls. In reality, a network of this kind is formed by the combined action of water and air, whose corrosive and solvent properties we sometimes experience on our own bodies. Here comes the explanation. It promises to be rather boring since karstic phenomena are produced too slowly to create what could strictly speaking be called entertainment, even if their representation in fast-forward would unquestionably make us forget the formidable storms at sea, because the rock reinforced with ore that we so casually trample underfoot is powerless against the waters sharpened like daggers that suddenly seep between the joints of the stratifications and rapidly dissolve the calcium carbonate that held it together; then it’s a river’s hydraulic pressure that devours the stone
and carves out corridors into which air – full of carbon dioxide and pernicious organic acids that attack in turn – immediately rushes, and frost dynamites everything in its path, everything explodes, the fractured rock crumbles, easy as pie, the flood clears out the rubble or sends it into the depths before abandoning the network, which has now become practicable, consolidated by the sedimentation of clay and silt, propped up by tall limestone concretions, thin translucent columns or massive pillars; the painters are expected, they can go in now, torches in hand, they enter the labyrinth. As soon as they have found a chamber to their liking, they light the juniper wicks of their
bruloirs
(150 grams of tallow can stoke a sun), the dancing flames and shadows on the walls will evoke living shapes that the artists will capture for all eternity, whereas our cold light from electric bulbs freezes our imaginations; it is implacable, disapproving, the eye of God suspended from the ceiling by a wire – and here comes that thumbtack I had thought I was rid of, turning its dazzling tip on me again and pinning me there, on the upper right-hand corner of the map where I’ve no reason to be.

It is obvious now that I’ll make no progress as long as the four thumbtacks are not identical. This maniacal need for symmetry and conformity is justified nonetheless: it’s a matter of countering the intricate lines of the map – which herald a delicate journey – with the rigor of a geometry of partitions in order to avoid overflow and contain the drawing in its rectangular (70cm x 95cm) frame. Circumscribed by these conventional boundaries, the terrifying subterranean labyrinth no longer inspires anything but a retrospective anxiety – like the harrowing adventure that fits in a book that fits in a pocket – because everything is at last restored to order. We play somewhat loosely with
scales to bring what exceeds us back to more modest proportions: we believe, for example, that the future can be read in tarot cards. We possess planet Earth, it belongs to us, we are the indisputable masters of it, that is, we reign over a world of miniatures and realities reduced to our size – none of it exists. The whale we know is not a whale, it is nothing like a whale, the real whale is much, much bigger. Our whale is as little like a whale as possible. But all this labeling and miniaturizing must continually be renewed. An illusion that is not maintained cannot survive – the growing plant will never take the flowerpot into consideration. At the first flagging of our vigilance, everything comes undone, suddenly the rosebush is a vile bramble and dogs give birth to wolves, even our marvelous inventions attest only to our weaknesses, the glass had too much sand in its eyes not to wind up blind, cities cave in, the attics are in the cellars, what should beat no longer beats, circulate no longer circulates, one moment of inattention was all it took and the world became itself again, perfectly round and bound just as it was in the Quaternary when we got here, by accident or design, perhaps forced to flee the large celestial cube stuffed with electronics where we used to live comfortably, tapping away at our keyboards. Alas, this wild land on which we washed up was not ready to welcome a civilization as refined as ours and the efforts made ever since to introduce it have been in vain, despite a few recent small successes that nonetheless have nothing definitive about them and are at the mercy of one second of distraction, as has just been proven, the truth being that we did not know how to adapt and we never will, for to do so we would have to regress intellectually in order to carve out a place for ourselves among the brutes in these mountain or desert regions. This is why we prefer pretending to believe in our visions of the world, which are pure hallucinations, or else
they are delirious mental conceptions, it must be said, but which, in the end and despite everything, constitute a universe, our own, whose verisimilitude depends solely on the precision of our encyclopedias and atlases, on our liturgies, our classifications, our maps. The golden thumbtack creates a treacherous disturbance, it is a bolt that fails, a rung that gives way, a hole in the hull, watch out.

I haul myself upstairs, despite my leg; I climb the steps with the strength of my arms – this route henceforth will bear my name. We still have one drawer to rummage through in my bedroom, the night-table drawer now surrenders its precious information about my predecessor Boborikine. The presence of a small box of matches, for example, allows you to establish that he had mastered fire, and that of a needle with an eye, that he dressed in clothes that were sewn. He had a sense of the sacred, his worship of the fertility goddess is evidenced by the queen of spades with hypertrophied breasts from a pornographic deck of cards. He knew the properties of plants, herbs that heal and those that cure insomnia, their dosages and the pharmaceutical methods of packaging in flasks, tubes, or boxes. He cared about the way he looked. His nail file is almost completely smooth, polished by wear, and his comb has caught a few gray strands. He had a strong sense of family; a strip of four standard ID photos shows us four little blond girls each wearing a tiny bandage on her forehead. The first is sticking out her tongue and slanting her eyes with her thumbs; the second is puffing out her cheeks; the third is grimacing horribly; but the last one – smiling, pretty, slightly wounded – can only be the famous Angèle, his favorite niece, less foolish than the other three. But let’s avoid jumping to conclusions. We don’t know what value he
placed on these objects – was this his treasure or the accumulated scraps of a richer life led elsewhere? Some of these vestiges could in fact lead us astray. Sometimes things are deflected from their usual function by a user caught off guard or who’s simply being inventive, when upon examination they don’t turn out to be very different from what you thought based solely on their appearance. Coconuts cannot be ostrich eggs because they contain goat’s milk. I myself learned today, at my age, with the stupefaction that always accompanies this sort of late onset disillusionment, while the beginnings of a smile of commiseration can be seen on the lips of those who always knew – but we are all missing, inexplicably, some piece of information known the world over, or rather something obvious that remains inexplicably unknown to us and to us alone until the day when the scales fall from our eyes and finally there is light – I discovered only today that tiny matchboxes are in reality bursting with thumbtacks, red, blue, green, white, and yellow.