Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  That unconsciousness in the face of danger and that obstinacy in disobedience made the master indignant; they offended him twice over, in his scorned authority and in his knowledge of things, for he had an already-human pretention of thinking himself infallible; his ideas might only last a moment, but for as long as he had them, nothing could make him let go of them; he deemed them to be certainties. Not very numerous, and always suspicious, he fabricated them experimentally from day to day, in accordance with the hazards of life, and those difficult conquests were as precious to him as defensive weapons.

  The belief in interior beasts counted among the most definite dogmas; since one of those enemies had finally showed itself, all the rancor of his flesh rose up against it. By refusing to destroy it, Hock was revealing herself to be dangerous; the repulsions he experienced at the mere sight of the new animal were redirected against the woman who was protecting it and caressing it. She horrified him.

  His hands still extended, the fingers splayed as if for a strangulation, he darted a vengeful gaze at the group, but he did not draw any closer. Like a dog barking at a viper, which prudently keeps its distance, he howled from three paces away:

  “Heûh!”

  Throw it away!

  His cry was brief, and he rapidly closed his mouth and clenched his teeth, for fear that the monster might penetrate into him that way.

  He agitated in vain; the mother paid no attention to his gestures or his vociferations. She had forgotten him.

  When the first-born took her breast and suckled, she no longer saw anything else in the world.

  She did not even notice that Daâh, furious, was climbing the rock and abandoning her.

  XIV. Mother and Father

  In spite of the conviction that Daâh professed of being superior in all things to his companion, because he was superior to her in strength and in courage, one may suppose that certain faculties developed in her with more celerity and vigor than in him. Is it not probable, in particular, that she was the first in whom emotion awoke? Even if one assumes the initial parity of their two nervous organizations, and if one argues that, at first, one was no more impressionable than the other, one must recognize that the woman would receive, from the very start, a culture that was diminished in the man, or even absent; more than the man, she was educated to tremble, and sooner than the man, she learned to love. Two stimulants were working powerfully for the progress of her sensibility: fear, on which she fed more because she was the weaker, and maternity.

  Without any doubt, maternal love constituted the first softening of the beast to endearment. Maternity was the educator of the woman, and the woman, thus educated by instinct, became in her turn the educator of humankind. The mother brought the invention of love to the surface of the globe. Quite naturally, she was able to understand what bonds attached her to the creature issued from her loins; the first manifestations of her love must have resembled an organic function rather than a psychic emotion. What she loved in her child was perhaps not him but an extension of her own flesh; she defended it as one defends one’s arm.

  Animal egotism is perpetuated in maternal attachment; it is, in a sense, an extension of gestation, which childbirth has modified without interrupting it entirely; the offspring, already expelled from the original body, still cleaves to it by suction, like the offspring of a marsupial; common circulation has ended, but the same blood continues to nourish the two beings, and for as long as that function remains necessary, the mother remains devoted to the exercise of her role, which is not yet for her either a duty or an act of love, but a physiological state.

  As for the male, he was unaware and must have remained unaware for a long time that any parental relationship existed between him and the new-born. His animal individualism did not permit him to see, in that creature, anything but a spontaneous production. How could he suppose that a relationship of cause and effect linked his fugitive amusement to the appearance of a being? What connection could he imagine between his own play and the other’s work? He had no more idea than a cock has, while handling hens roughly, that it is cooperating in the birth of chicks. The mystery of generation, which all the research of science has not yet succeeded in penetrating, did not even intrigue him. He simply observed a fact, independent of him, and turned away from it with indifference.

  Daâh had gone. Hock found herself alone again.

  She was not much distressed by that. She scarcely missed the absentee; she only thought about him intermittently. Her entire being was given over to the care of her little one; she had no thought but to watch over him, clean him, turn him over, change his location, feed him at the breast. For the first time in her life, she lingered over the lengthy contemplation of something, and took pleasure in it. A vibrant curiosity immobilized her before that fragile body, and when the gluttonous mouth attached itself to her breast, the eyes of the human female were impregnated with a softness that the world had not yet seen.

  XV. The First Tear

  She became anguished at the slightest sound. The shelter beneath the rock, however, procured her more security than she had known in the forest. In order to render the excavation more hospitable, she began scraping the wall with a stone; the debris constituted, in front, a sort of terrace that permitted her to move at her ease. To complete her work, she piled up heaps of ferns and balls of moss, with which she constituted a nest in the manner of birds. It was there that she laid her first-born; she crouched beside him, in her customary pose, her back to the cliff, and she watched, facing the plain, waiting for bright intervals.

  Of the vast landscape she could not see anything, anxious and blissful by turns, and she listened for passing noises and received the rays that warmed her. Fortunately, the wind from the north-east persisted, and with it an exceptional seasonal splendor. Now, Hock liked the suns for her little one more than for herself. As soon as one of them began to shine, she held out her wriggling creature at arm’s length, as if making and offering toward a god in the hope of a blessing. Vaguely, in the depths of her maternal solicitude, mute supplications rose up, directed at the beneficent star, and without knowing that she was beginning to pray, she invoked it in order that it might stay longer.

  She only absented herself in order to go in search of her subsistence; she took advantage, in that escape, of moments when the nursling was asleep, for fear that he might attract wild beasts with his cries. Before leaving, she covered him carefully with ferns to hide him, and crushed aromatic plants on the ground to mask his odor. She remained in the woods for as short a time as possible: the time to drink from the stream and hastily gather beech-nuts, acorns and snails; she returned to her guard-post rapidly.

  On the third day she had a terrible scare. She was playing with the child, lying in her lap, when she suddenly applied the palm of her hand to the nursling’s mouth; she thought she had heard the sound of rustling foliage and stretching branches overhead. Her back was against the wall; in her chest cavity she distinctly felt the repercussion of a heavy impact resonate through the layer of the rock.

  She picked up a shard of flint and stood up. The steps came closer and heavier, breaking branches. A hoarse voice called: “Hock!”

  Reassured, but irritated by her recent fright, she did not reply. She did not trust the male; rancor was stagnating within her because of the abandonment, and above all, the fists extended the other evening toward her new-born.

  The brambles on the edge of the overhanging rock stirred, and Daâh’s coarse hand appeared, and then his face.

  Hock looked up at him, fixedly, at a distance, not knowing whether the man was returning as a friend or an enemy. That face, seen from below in the midst of the brambles seemed devoid of anger, but curious and almost anxious; his sharp eyes paused on the infant, and nothing moved thereafter.

  Finally, the head overlapping the ledge withdrew into the brambles and seemed to go back into the rock, like that of a tortoise into its shell; it disappeared, and footsteps drew away.

  The f
ollowing day, it came back again, and a lump of meat fell at Hock’s feet.

  Twice, the male believed that he had departed and continued his route, but each time, the same malaise as before had haunted him. Each time, on no longer hearing the accustomed footsteps behind him and the plaints of his companion, on no longer sensing close to his back the presence that assured him against surprise attacks by felines, a more clearly defined impression of solitude had urged him to return to the shelter—to the point that he had resigned himself to it and retraced his steps without having decided to do so.

  He prowled around the vicinity. He hunted.

  On the fifth day, when he leaned over the rock, he perceived the infant hidden under the ferns, but Hock was not there.

  Then a desire took hold of him to examine the strange beast; it seemed less repugnant to him and more intriguing. A curiosity that no animal had ever inspired in him attracted him toward the monster; he wanted to touch it, sniff it and understand it. Slyly, as if creeping up on a prey, he slid between the brambles and descended onto the platform.

  He lifted up the ferns; the awakened child opened his eyes and mouth, and Daâh burst out laughing: the wailing larva was like Hock! It had the same little mobile eyes, the scarcely hairy face and the gestures that beat the air...

  He dared to pick it up in both hands; it was warm and soft; it moved between his fingers. He dropped the beast, which fell onto the bed of ferns, crying. The thing definitely did not frighten him anymore, but did not please him much, and still intrigued him.

  Perplexed, he scaled the rock and went back into the wood.

  A few moments later, the mother came back with her provision of old acorns and rotten walnuts. She had scarcely broken cover, and the foliage disturbed by her passage was still rustling behind her when she thought she observed a displacement of the branches with which she had obstructed her path a little while before. She snuffed; the solitude was suspect; an odor of living presence troubled the air...

  In the shelter of the rock, something moved, and the cry of a child immediately erupted; with the piercing voice a dull flutter was mingled, like the sound of a great Bid flapping its wings in taking off.

  Hock understood immediately; she launched herself forward and arrived at the edge of the cliff just in time to see the pink torso once again, almost within arm’s reach, in the claws of an eagle that was flying away.

  She saw the droplets of blood on the luminous flesh, the little legs hanging down into the void, the head tilted back, and the red mouth wide open, from which a kind of silent howl was emerging.

  Then she saw, drawing away into the distance, the flapping of large brown wings, beneath which the prey was no more than a bright patch.

  Quickly, quickly, quickly the double curved line of the wings became a somber dot moving down below, like dark star in the middle of a gray sky, and which plunged into the mist—and the mother no longer saw anything.

  She remained standing there, motionless, her arms beside her body, her mouth agape. Slowly, two tears ran down her face and fell onto her nipples, and she looked at the incomprehensible droplets in amazement, thinking about the droplets of milk that had moistened the same place the day before and that same morning.

  For the first time in the world, a creature wept.

  XVI. Familial Mourning

  The mother remembered. For three days, she remembered. At intervals, a stabbing regret shuddered in her oblique skull. When she looked at the gulf of the sky, into which the eagle had disappeared, a surge of anger creased the two tufts of russet hair above her eyes. But the interminable procession of clouds, gray after gray, soon made her eyelids blink, and with fatigue and time, her brief thought was lost in the clouds. Then, no longer knowing what she was searching for, but searching nevertheless for something, her gaze descended toward the river and the banks, wandering over the hippopotamuses that were wallowing in the reflections, and rose up again to the clouds that are the Elephants of the sky, and move in files like those of the earth...

  Eventually, she turned her head, no longer remembering either what it was she had been contemplating, or what it was for which she had been searching.

  But she retained in the depths of her being a racial resentment against the winged animals; when an Eagle passed in front of the cliff, she showed it her fist and howled at it. If, in the course of her incursions, she encountered any kind of nest hidden in a fissure in the rock or wedged in the angle of two branches, she broke the eggs angrily and crushed them under her heel, instead of eating them as before.

  The man had come back and found her alone, near the nest of ferns.

  He observed that solitude without it inducing him to inquire after the disappeared child. The little monster had been there, and was there no longer; Daâh registered the fact, and then, as the fact seemed agreeable to him, he burst out laughing, which was in him an involuntary act. In order better to express his contentment by means of a determined gesture, he danced in front of the woman.

  He was astonished by the slowness with which she responded with similar laughter and agitations. He crouched down beside her, and for a long moment he fixed an immobile gaze upon her. He was visibly making an effort to divine things unknown; his sensed a strange new, ungraspable idea on the part of his companion, and his hunter’s nostrils twitched before the mystery.

  Then, suddenly, he renounced it; like a stone dropped into black water, his thoughts had disappeared. He no longer remembered Hock, who no longer remembered the child. They searched the clouds for the return of the sun.

  But the Suns only passed by rarely now; those that were still perceptible were pale and cool. The wind from the mountains ceased to blow against the nimbus clouds, which began to pile up in flocks. Autumn was approaching. The river and its islets became dull; again the torrents of rain descended upon the bleak landscape.

  In the meantime, a dispossessed Lioness decided to adopt for herself the shelter under the rock where the couple had made a long stay. Hock and Daâh found her installed there one evening, with her cub, and were obliged to seek another refuge. They went back into the forest and resumed their errant existence.

  XVII. The Second Tear

  One day, after a march, she had become drowsy; on waking up she found that he was no longer nearby. For a long time she waited, without daring to leave the spot, and when he did not come back, she lamented as dusk fell.

  Finally, he reappeared, curbed beneath the burden of a russet mass. By dint of patience he had succeeded in surprising a Deer that was suckling a fawn, and killed it. Ordinarily, he butchered kills of that size on the spot, but this time, proud of his capture, Daâh had wanted to show off the entire animal.

  He threw it down on the grass; it fell with a dull sound; the limp feet oscillated momentarily, then became still. But Hock did not admire it; exhausted by excessive anxiety, she was sulking, and turned her back. The hunter grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around.

  He laughed. With his arm extended, he indicated something moving behind him, which gradually emerged from the undergrowth into the open: a slender head with bright fur, a moist shiny nose and candid eyes. The Fawn had followed its mother, and it suddenly launched itself forward.

  With one bound, it was between the hooves. The Deer was lying on her side; beneath her pale belly, her udders were swollen, push out by the weight of the haunch; her neck was stretched out on the moss and her tongue was hanging out, sticky with pink foam.

  The Fawn was already paying no heed to the intimidating human couple. With its forehead, where two bumps announced the location of horns, it bumped the withers of the corpse with weak blows. Then it bent its knees, searching for the teats; and because they were cold, because nothing was animated beneath its caress, because the sleeper persisted in not moving, it began calling out to her in a discontented voice, which initially resembled a reproach but became, by degrees, very soft and very plaintive. Extending its neck and raising its head, it appealed to the empty air, to someone
in the distance who did not respond—and it really was the discouraged supplication of an impotence aware of itself, for, in the end, no voice emerged any longer from the open mouth.

  Hock watched that with a fixed, strangely attentive gaze. When she saw that poor, futile mouth agape, striving to exhale its cry, without being able to do so, she remembered a similar cry, also mute, that her child had uttered toward her as he was carried away by the eagle. She saw her new-born, similar to this one, in the raptor’s clutch, all alone and frightened in the midst of flapping wings, bleating silently into the hole of the empty sky, like this one...

  Vaguely hallucinated, she took a step forward, two steps, doubtless toward her own child; she put out her hand and caressed the spine with its jutting vertebrae; she patted the ribs, gently and maternally, and instinctively turned her head toward that of the other mother, as if to interrogate her or watch over her.

  Without interrupting her mechanical caress, she contemplated by turns the corpse and the orphan, with the result that gradually, haunted as she was by having once again dreamed about her baby, she began to imagine, in that immobile being and those extinct eyes, a vision similar to her own, with an identical pain. She felt that the dead Deer could see her child’s chagrin. She bent down toward the ground, picked up an armful of leaves, and threw them over the Deer’s eyes.

  Of what had happened then, no one knew. The man paid no attention to it, and the woman was barely conscious of it. But that simple gesture was the most august and memorable event that the planet Earth had produced since the advent of life; with it and by virtue of it, an unprecedented phenomenon was revealed, of which there had been no anticipation in the universal battle. For it was at that precise moment that in a parcel of nature, in an imperceptible fragment of innumerable substance, in some cell hidden beneath the cranium of a female, something new was realized: one creature had felt the sadness of another.