The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  — But I’m forgetting my manners. This is Dr. Cheynier, who has come to help me, he said to the boys as if uncovering a surprise, and this is Monsieur l’Abbé Bouysonnie, who is an expert in primitive religions. And we’re all anxious to enter the cave, if you are ready.

  The first thing the Abbé’s electric lamp found inside the cave was the rabbit.

  It sat chilled with fear in the cone of light, its sides shivering. Marsal and Ravidat moved beside it just outside the beam, and the one chased it into the other’s arms.

  — We’ve not seen it the whole time we’ve been down here, Ravidat said.

  — He was the first one in! Coencas said.

  — Take him up, the Abbé said, and let him loose, and don’t let the dog get him. He must be famished.

  They heard Agnel shouting above.

  — The rabbit! The bunny!

  Light after light came on. A star trembled on the Abbé’s horn-rimmed glasses. Silent, he looked. His withered right hand was on Marsal’s shoulder, as if he needed to touch the force that brought him here. A battery of lights shifted over their heads. Ravidat held the largest. Queroy aimed a long flashlight.

  With his left hand the Abbé traced in the air the suave curves of a horse’s back and belly.

  — The colors! The tints! The gaiety of their movements! The wit of the drawing, the intelligence!

  — They are old, are they not, Monsieur l’Abbé?

  — Yes, mon cher Laval, no doubt at all of that.

  He pointed higher, the lights climbing with his aim.

  — They are as old as Altamira. Older, far older, than civilization.

  A long cow faced her bull in the heart of the cave, the titan grandmother of Hathor and the cows of Africa upon whom the Nuer people still wait, burnishing their hair with her urine, imagining the female sun between her horns, replenishing the divine within human flesh with her holy blood.

  With them run, as if pacing to the music of the first voice of the world, horses, elk, bears, and a spotted animal whose only portrait occurs here and whose bones have never been found. This first voice, the discourse of waters and rain, of wind in leaves and grass and upon mountain rocks, preceded the laugh of the jackal and the voices of the animals themselves, the rising wind of the cow’s low, the water voice of the horse, the trumpet of the elk, bleat of the deer, growl of the bear.

  In the Abbé’s left eye trembled a jangle of red. He saw the prancing horse the color of rust through a snow of fireflies.

  — Thaon brought me a drawing of this.

  And of a line of reindeer:

  — They are swimming a river. I have seen the motif before, carved on bone.

  He worked the clay of the floor in his fingers.

  — The bears were going when this cave was painted. Man could enter. The Aurignacian snow owl still drifted in at twilight, for the mice. One can imagine the sound of her wings in this stillness. The red rhinoceros was too blind to venture so much dark. The world belonged to the horse, the tarpan, the reindeer. Lion was terrible, but man could smoke him out of the caves, and lion, when the encounter came, was afraid of horse. The old elephants kept to themselves, eating trees.

  They found the horse drawn upside down.

  — Falling, do you suppose? Or weren’t they oriented to the horizon, to the vertical? And these signs, these hieroglyphs! Are we ever going to read them, Bouysonnie?

  They climbed out for lunch, cold chicken and mayonnaise and wine which Abbé Bouysonnie brought in two hampers, with Camembert and bread for dessert.

  — It is a very great thing, is it not? Dr. Cheynier asked Abbé Breuil.

  — So great that I sit here stunned. Absolument bouleversé! If there is a reason for my hanging on to such a disgraceful old age, it was to see this cave. A rabbit, a dog named — do I remember right? — Robot, these boys, a doctor’s ration of petrol — he winked at Cheynier — and I suppose we must even give grudging thanks to the filthy boches for driving me from Paris. A veritable conspiracy of Providence!

  Bouysonnie smiled.

  — You’ve always, my dear Henri, been just around the corner from the discoveries, when, indeed, you weren’t yourself the discoverer.

  — I have, the Abbé said, I have.

  He turned to the boys. Estreguil, who was sucking his fingers, was embarrassed.

  — I have been around. Africa, oh yes, and China even. I was in China with a nephew of Voltaire who was quite close to his accomplished granduncle in spirit and brains. The church, in fact, thinks him too very much like his uncle, in a different sort of way. We went to China to look for the deep, the very deep, past of man. At Tcheoukou-tien, a village some thirty-five kilometres below Peking, just under the lovely Fang Mountains — the Fang shan — shan is mountain — we found a very old skull, four hundred thousand, perhaps five hundred thousand years old. Five hundred thousand years old! Cinq cent mille ans!

  He looked at each boy in turn, to make certain that they were following.

  — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that was my friend in China, the nephew of Voltaire. A tall man, all angles like a proper Jesuit. Me, I’m just a parish priest. They called us Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza, our friends in those days. A man name of Pei made the actual discovery. We went to look at the tools. I was most interested in fire, and the ancient men of Peking definitely had that. As a matter of fact they cooked and ate each other.

  — Ate each other!

  It was Estreguil who interrupted, and Agnel looked at him as if he knew more about the subject than the old priest.

  — Most prehistoric people did, Abbé Breuil said, rolling a cigarette.

  — What are these caves? Dr. Cheynier asked.

  — Arks for the spirits of animals, I think. The brain is inward, where one can see without looking, in the imagination. The caves were a kind of inward brain for the earth, the common body, and they put the animals there, so that Lascaux might dream forever of her animals, as man in the lust of their beauty and in need of their blood, venison, marrow, and hides, and in awe of their power and cunning, thought of them sleeping and waking.

  He drank back the last of his wine and held his cup out for more.

  — They were neither gods nor fetishes nor kinfolk nor demons nor mere food, but something of all.

  An airplane buzzed in the distance.

  — The animals themselves have sometimes confronted us, you know! I mean bones, and the mammoths found frozen in Siberia, I mean the beasts themselves in all their ruin, as distinct from paintings, engravings, carvings.

  Coencas was trying to see the airplane.

  — Listen carefully. In the Swiss Alps, up the side of the majestic Drachenberg, five thousand feet above the valley floor, you can find the entrance to a cave. It was in its day a hunters’ cave. Inside it we have found all sorts of bones: wolf, lion, chamois, stag, even hare, who was a hefty alpine fellow in those times, before the last Ice Age locked all that world into a solid glacier and thousands of years of snow.

  — The cave bear, an enormous creature now extinct, was a kind of god, or totem. They broke his bones and sucked out the marrow after they had eaten his flesh and rendered his grease and dressed themselves in his hide. But they placed his skull reverently on ledges in open caves, looking outward, sometimes as many as fifty, all looking outward with their eye sockets, formidable I assure you, especially when they are found, as in the cave of the Drachenberg, covered with ten thousand years of dust.

  — Fine dust, not quite half an inch thick. It looks as if the skulls were sculpted of dust.

  — The snouts of these dread cave bears are all pointed out toward the sunrise, each in its hump of dust, its mask of dust, and each with its pair of empty bear eyes under a brow of dust. The lower jaws have all been removed, so that the long yellow teeth hang more bear-like in the dark while the sun, morning after morning for twenty thousand years, found the skulls on their ledges. It was like a shop with nothing to sell on its shelves but skulls of bears.

&
nbsp; Estreguil and Agnel put their arms around each other.

  — You have, some of you, the Abbé said to the boys, been to Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume, Monsieur Laval has told me. It was I who discovered them, oh years and years ago, when your parents were infants. So you see, you have been in my caves and now I have been in yours. Nous sommes comfrères!

  — You are not, you know, the first boys to have discovered a paleolithic cave, though it seems that you have found the most beautiful of them all.

  — Three strapping fine brothers discovered Le Tuc d’Audoubert and Les Trois Frères. They were in their teens when they found the Tuc, and soldiers home on leave from that other awful war when they found the cave that’s named for them. Max, Louis, and Jacques de Bégouën they were. Their father is the Comte de Bégouën, Henri as he must always be to me, as I am Henri to him. He has retired after a lovely career of politics and owning a newspaper and such terrible things to a house in the Ariège, near St. Giron, though he has never really retired. He is, if I can put it euphemistically, a man who has never lost his taste, bless him, for the good things of this life.

  — His dear wife died early, leaving him three sons to bring up. We may note that they were brought up very well indeed, if just a touch wild, young wolves even in their Sunday best. And the Count Bégouën, never stinting his love of good food, a splendid cellar, and a gracious lady with whom to share them, is now in his eightieth year, and hale as a prime bull.

  — But I’m getting off my subject as if I were eighty myself. On the Bégouën property, Montesquieu-Avantès, the little river Volp runs right through a largish hill, in one side, out the other. What else must a boy do, I need not tell you, but build a raft of oilcans and wooden boxes, and paddle himself into that cave?

  — That’s what Max did, oh most decidedly. A farmer thereabouts, François Camel, had been as far up the Tuc d’Audoubert end of the mountain as where you can’t go any farther unless you are a weasel, but that never stopped a boy, to my knowledge.

  — They all went, of course, Jacques and Louis too. They got to a kind of beach and, what do you know, they came across an inscription scratched there in the eighteenth century. They had to turn back, but not for long. They came back and hacked the weasel hole until they could get into it. They found that it was a gours, a chimney in the rock, and up it they scampered, forty feet.

  — When we turned the rabbit loose that Robot chased into the cave, Estreguil said, he ran as if the Germans were after him!

  — Tais-toi! Ravidat said. D’oú sors-tu?

  The Abbé sighed, and smiled.

  — And what did they find there? Sculpture! The very first prehistoric discoveries were of course sculpture, carved pebbles and bones, but this was modelled in clay, two bison, two bison moreover about to copulate. Close by they found the heelprints of children, such as Cartailhac would find later, also in the heart of a mountain, around the headless statue of a bear, with evidence that a real bear’s head had been staked onto it. Both these sites seem to have been the occasion of a single ceremony. The animals were shaped by the light of a torch, who knows with what sacred dread, and children danced on their heels, and the cave was closed forever.

  — The curious thing about this cave is that if you were to drill through the rock in the right direction you would come to the end of another cave, the Trois Frères, which the Bégouën boys found in 1916. At the uttermost recess of it is that strange sorcerer, or god, a man dancing in a mask with a beard. He wears antlers, a horse’s tail, bear’s paws. His sex is human, but it is placed where a cat’s is, under the tail. He is our oldest portrait of God.

  — The caves are the first draft of the book of Genesis, when man was a minor animal, not suspecting that the divine fire in his heart was unique. He was thousands of years away from the domesticating of these animals. The dog was the first. He is man’s oldest friend.

  Abbé Breuil lit his pipe.

  — Oh, Robot knew they were down there! He is one of them. I’m afraid I’ve already scandalized the archbishop — he winked at Agnel — with the heresy I can’t get out of my head that animals most obviously have souls, but unfallen ones, as they did not participate in the sinful pride of our common parents. Ancient man must have been in some measure envious of the animal, suspecting its superiority.

  — He was right, of course, he added.

  A man in blue overalls had come up behind them.

  — Ramón! Ravidat called out.

  It was Ramón’s grease gun that had first illumined the cave. But he was signalling that he did not wish to be called to. He sat under a tree some metres away and lit his pipe. He winked at Ravidat and made himself comfortable.

  — Abbé, are we going down again today?

  — I think not, Thaon. I should rest my eye. It’s full of lights again. Will the boys keep their guard?

  — You couldn’t drive them away, Monsieur Laval said. They’re well set up in their camp. Pour eux, c’est une aventure.

  — For us all, the Abbé smiled. We shall be at the Hôtel Commerce, he said to the boys, tweaking Agnel’s ear and Estreguil’s nose.

  He shook hands with Ravidat, acknowledging his age and responsibility. His eyes indicated Ramón under the tree.

  — Let no one into the cave, he said.

  — That’s an old friend, Ravidat explained. He is the mechanic in Montignac.

  — Tiens. Jusqu’à demain.

  As the Citroën bounced down the hill, Monsieur Laval on the runningboard, the Abbé Breuil waving his handkerchief from a window, Ramón walked toward them, his hands in his pockets.

  — Madame Marsal, he said, will be sending up hot soup.

  He approached Ravidat with a look that was both intimate and inquisitive.

  — Is it a big cave?

  — It’s a right good size, yes.

  Ramón looked about him. He indicated with his eyes that he wanted a word apart. Ravidat followed him.

  — Wait, Ramón said. Marsal aussi.

  He put the flat end of his hand out to the others. Then he stared at Coencas, who was looking at them from under his cowlick.

  — You too, Ramón said. Come with us.

  Queroy, Agnel, and Estreguil drew together, left out of a conspiracy.

  — Why can’t they come? Coencas asked.

  Ramón’s face showed that Coencas had jeopardized his own eligibility.

  — What’s it all about? Coencas was persistent.

  Ramón saw his mistake. All or none, however dangerous that seemed. He stood in his indecision, pulling his nose.

  — Igual, he said. Gather around.

  He squatted, taking cigarette paper and a sack of paper from his pockets.

  — This matter is for cojónes, he said in a low voice. The priests will be through looking at the pictures in the caves in a few days. That’s to be seen. I shall talk with him, too. And with the others. They’re all French.

  He sealed the cigarette with the tip of his tongue.

  — The Germans are not here yet.

  He looked at each of them in turn.

  — They will be, in time. There are some of us who will be ready. Do you understand?

  — I think I see, Ravidat said.

  — We call ourselves the Résistance. We are all over France. Have you heard about us, Ravidat? No? Well, you have now. You and Marsal own guns. And you know your way about.

  — You are a refugee, hein? he said to Coencas.

  — From Charleville.

  — And you and you, Ramón said to Estreguil and Agnel.

  — They’re old enough to understand, Ravidat said.

  — I want you to swear, Ramón said. One hand on your balls, one on your heart. Swear!

  — So help us God.

  Ramón looked over his shoulder. It was only Robot jumping at a cricket. They sat quietly, listening to the trill of the nightingales and the wash of wind in the trees.

  — The important thing at the moment, Ramón said, is a place to stash a
mmo. I can get straight off a consignment of Bren guns, if I can find a place to hide them. Is that cave big enough?

  — You can hide anything in it, Ravidat said. It’s as big as a castle down there.

  — If you tell the priest, Coencas said, he won’t let you. He’ll be afraid you’ll hurt the pictures.

  — Foutre les tableaux, Ramón said. We won’t tell him, then. We’ll wait until he clears out.

  — He’s already said, Marsal put in, that he wants to keep the cave secret. That fits in. His secret and our secret will work out the same.

  — Anybody who lets our secret out, Ramón said quietly, will have to answer to the Résistance. And we are many.

  — When do we start? Coencas asked.

  — I’ll tell you when the time comes. The priest will be measuring the cave. Remember his figures. And tell me all his plans. When he’s gone, we can begin to move.

  He stood up.

  — I’m going back down to the village.

  He scooped Agnel up under the arms and held him above his head.

  — You know about the Germans? he said. The war? If you tell anybody about this, we lose the war. If you don’t, we win.

  He set him down.

  — That goes for you too, he said to Estreguil, crooking his finger as if on a trigger.

  — For all of us.

  He set off, as casually as he came.

  — Ravidat, he said, vous avez la verge la plus longue. Soyez le capitaine de ces voyous!

  — Nous sommes soldats! Queroy said.

  — Agents, au moins, Ravidat said.

  — Des espions!

  The moon when it rose was red and perfectly round. Robot gave it a perfunctory trombone howl, joined by Agnel, answered by an owl.

  Queroy hinted that Marsal was afraid to be in the Résistance, that his mother wouldn’t let him if she knew, and got his lip split in a pinwheel of a fight by the fire. Ravidat parted them with slaps and made them shake hands.

  Estreguil fell asleep in his clothes beside Robot, who slept facing the fire.

  Coencas standing in the red light pulled off his shorts and studied his dick.