The Guy Davenport Reader Read online

  Agnel considered these mysteries briefly and held out his frog to a tangle of gnats dancing in the air.

  — Don’t hurt him, Estreguil said. Will he eat the gnats?

  Coencas slid his hand down into his short pants, stuck out his tongue in sweet impudence, and bounced on his toes.

  — Attendez! Marsal said quickly, his voice hushed.

  Robot was crashing through leaves. His tenor bark piped down the slope.

  Ravidat stuffed his cock back into his shorts and the frog leapt from Estreguil’s hands.

  He grabbed his gun, holding it against his chest with his chin while he did up his trousers. Marsal was already away among the trees. Then they all galloped down the hill, elbows out for balance.

  — Up and around! Marsal shouted.

  — Show me the rabbit! Agnel cried from behind them.

  Ravidat and Marsal were out front, stalking to the top of the slope, sighting along their guns. Coencas, his stick at the ready, was at their backs with Estreguil and Queroy.

  — Say if you see my frog, Agnel said.

  — Everybody stop! Ravidat cried. Keep quiet.

  The woods were wonderfully silent.

  — He went down the slope, Marsal said quietly, and then across, down there, and up again, didn’t he?

  — If he catches it, will he eat it? Estreguil asked.

  — Shut up.

  Robot was barking again. They turned together.

  — Show me the rabbit, Agnel said, falling backwards.

  They ran around him.

  — How did the dumb dog get behind us? Ravidat asked.

  They plunged down the hill, looking, jumping for a better look, kneeling for a better look. The familiar oakwood as they ran through it became unfamiliar and directionless, as though it had suddenly lost its ordinariness.

  Agnel tripped and fell, spewing up a dust of leaves. Ravidat and Coencas bounded over fallen trees, their mouths open like heroes in a battle. Marsal was more methodical, sprinting with his gun at port arms.

  — Everybody still! he shouted.

  Only Agnel kept padding on behind them.

  — I hear Robot, Marsal said, but damned if I know where.

  The woods were all at once quiet. The distances were deepening dark.

  Then they heard Robot. His bark was vague and muted, as if down a well. It was beneath them.

  — Holy God, Ravidat said.

  — Quiet!

  Marsal went on all fours and cocked his ear. Robot was howling like a chained puppy. Then he began to whimper.

  — Robot! Ravidat called. Where are you? Eh, mon bon bougre, où es tu, hein?

  Marsal began to move on hands and toes.

  — He’s under the ground, Ravidat. In a fox den or rabbit burrow.

  — He’ll come out, Ravidat said. I’ll bet he has a rabbit.

  — Show me, Agnel said.

  Marsal was walking around the hill, signalling for the others to follow. They could hear Robot’s howls more distinctly as they clambered over an ancient boulder, a great black knee of stone outcropping. They came to the upended roots of a fallen cedar.

  — He’s down there! Marsal said.

  The cedar in falling had torn a ragged shellhole in the hillside, and the weather had melted it down in upon itself. There was a burrow-mouth at the back of the cavity, down which Ravidat, lying on his stomach, shouted.

  — Robot!

  An echo gave back bô! bô! bô!

  — Get out of there! Ravidat coaxed. Come up, old boy! Come up!

  Marsal gave a keen whistle.

  — He’s a hell of a long way down, Coencas said. You can tell. Ravidat took off his canvas jacket, throwing it to Marsal.

  — I’m going in after him.

  — The hole’s too small.

  — Only the hole. You heard that echo. It’s a cave.

  — Sticks, Marsal ordered. Everybody find a good stick.

  Agnel set to, arms over his head. Marsal drew his hunting knife and began to hack at the edges of the hole.

  — It goes in level, he said. It must drop later on.

  Estreguil came dragging a fallen limb as long as a horse. Ravidat brought a leafy length of white oak, stripping branches from it as he dragged it up to the hole.

  — Let’s get this up in there, he said, and walk it back and forth.

  Ravidat and Coencas on one side, Marsal and Queroy on the other, like slaves at the oar of a trireme, they pushed and pulled, grinding the rim of the hole until Ravidat said that he thought he could crawl in.

  — Go in backwards and feel with your feet, Marsal said. You can climb out then if you get stuck.

  His legs in to the hips, he walked his elbows backwards, calling out, Courage, Robot! Je viens!

  A half-circle of faces watched him: Marsal’s big gray eyes and tousled brown hair, Queroy’s long Spanish face with its eyes black as hornets, Coencas’s flat-cheeked lean face, all olive and charcoal, Estreguil’s long-nosed, buck-toothed blond face with its wet violet eyes, Agnel’s taffy curls and open mouth full of uneven milk teeth.

  Level light from the setting sun shone on Ravidat’s face.

  — We ought to have a rope, Marsal said.

  — It goes down here, Ravidat’s muffled voice came out. There’s a ledge.

  He lowered his feet, loose rotten stone crumbling as he found footholds. His elbows on the ledge, he struck a heap of scattering objects with his feet. They must lie on something. He dropped.

  — I’m on another ledge! his distant voice rose, as if from behind closed doors several rooms away. I’m standing in a muck of bones. It’s a graveyard down here!

  Earth poured on him in rivulets. An ancient dust, mortuary and feral, lifted from the bones he had disturbed. Coencas was wriggling in head first, loosening pebbles and sliding loam.

  — Matches, he said, reaching down into the dark.

  The he said:

  — I’m coming down!

  Ravidat caught him, shoulders and arms, so that the one, his feet still in daylight, hugged upside down the other standing in dark bones. They could hear Agnel saying:

  — I’m next!

  Coencas pivoted down, crashing onto the bones beside Ravidat.

  — We’re on a ledge, I think. Feel with your foot.

  Coencas struck a match. White clay in striated marl beside them, utter blackness beyond and below, where Robot whined and yelped. Another match: the bones were large, bladed ribs in a heap, a long skull.

  — Bourzat’s ass!

  — Queroy! Jacques! Ravidat shouted upwards. Last year, when old Bourzat’s ass disappeared, you remember? Here it is!

  — It was just about when that storm blew this old tree over, you’re right, Marsal shouted down. You’re right.

  — Does it stink? Agnel hollered.

  Another match showed that the ledge dropped at a fierce angle, but could be descended backwards, if there were footholds.

  — Keep striking matches, Ravidat said. I’m going down.

  Robot had found a rhythm, three yelps and a wail, and kept to it.

  — There’s no more ledge. I’m going to drop.

  A slipping noise, cloth against stone, and then Coencas heard the whomp of feet on clay far below him in the dark.

  — Robot, he heard, ici, ici, vieux bougre.

  — I hear Robot’s tongue and tail, Coencas said upward. Everybody come on down. It’s a long drop after this ledge.

  Coencas lowered himself from the ledge of bones and fell lightly onto soft clay.

  — We’re here, Ravidat said from solid dark.

  Marsal and Queroy were inside, handing down Agnel and Estreguil.

  — Can we get back out? Marsal asked.

  — Qui sait? Coencas said in the voice of Frankenstein’s monster, and his words, full of grunts and squeals, rolled around them.

  — Is the rabbit down here, too? Estreguil said, panting.

  — Can we breathe?

  — Here’s the far wall.
/>
  A match showed it to be calcined and bulbous, a white billow of stone. The floor was uneven, ribbed like river sand, pot-holed, an enormous round-bottomed gully.

  — I’ve never been so dark before, Agnel said.

  — You’re scared! Estreguil said.

  — So are you.

  — It keeps going back, Ravidat’s hollow voice boomed in a strange blur.

  — I’ve got two more matches.

  The hole through which they had entered was a dim wash of light above them.

  — Agnel, Ravidat said beside them, take Robot. Here! Keep steady with one hand. Hold onto Robot with the other. Coencas is going to stand on my shoulders, and push you up to the ledge. D’accord?

  — Good old Robot! Estreguil said.

  Ravidat braced himself against the wall. Coencas climbed onto his shoulders, reached down for Estreguil and Robot, pulled them up with a heave, and lifted them toward the light.

  — Stand on your toes, Ravidat, Coencas said. I think we’re just going to reach.

  Estreguil pushed Robot onto the bone ledge. Then, skinning both knees, he clambered up himself. Agnel went up next, and had to come down again: he couldn’t reach the ledge from Coencas’s shoulders.

  — You go up, Queroy, Ravidat said, and pull Agnel up when you get there.

  Marsal went up next, showered them with dirt and pebbles, and hollered down:

  — How are you going to get up?

  — Get that long limb, Ravidat commanded. Poke it in, and you four bastards hold onto it for all you’re worth.

  Coencas climbed out first, using the limb as a rope, and Ravidat followed. The clarity of the long summer twilight still held. Robot was in Agnel’s arms.

  — We have, Ravidat said in a level voice, discovered a cave.

  — Tell nobody, Marsal said. Estreguil! Agnel! You understand? Nobody. It’s our cave.

  — Find my frog, Agnel said.

  — It’s a damned big cave, Ravidat said. And Marsal and Queroy know what I’m thinking.

  — What? asked Coencas. What is there to think about a cave?

  At the ford Agnel fell into the Vézère. They dressed him in Queroy’s sweater, and Ravidat carried him piggyback to the great spreading beech in Montignac.

  — Regardez les grands chasseurs! the old men at their coffee sang out.

  Agnel had gone to sleep, Robot sat and let his tongue hang down, and Ravidat gave a confidential nod to the Catalan garage mechanic.

  What he wanted, once they were leaning nonchalantly against the castle wall across the road from the beech and the elders, was grease. Old grease. And the use, for a day, of the old grease gun that had been retired since the new one arrived.

  — Grease, my goose?

  Precisely. The use to which it was to be put would be known in time. Meanwhile, could it be a matter among friends?

  — Seguramente.

  And he needed it first thing in the morning.

  Queroy, Marsal, and Estreguil were to come out to the cave as soon as they were out of school. They could bring Agnel. Better to keep him in on it than have him pigeon.

  — Meet me, Ravidat said to Coencas, at the flat rock on the river as soon as you’re up. Va bien?

  Bien. He heard the Heinkels in the night, and the cars of the refugees going through Montignac, headed south. He thought of the armies north and west, of white flares falling through the night sky, and of the long clanking rocking tanks that would most certainly come south. An old man under the great tree had said that the French battle flags had been taken to Marseille and had been paraded through the streets there. They were on their way, these flags, to the colonies in Africa.

  By cockcrow he was up, making his own bowl of coffee, fetching the day’s bread from the baker, as a surprise for his mother. He left a note for her saying that he would be back in the afternoon, and that he would be just south of town, in the Lascaux hills.

  On the flat rock when he got there lay Ravidat’s shoes and socks, trousers, canvas jacket, blue shirt and Kangourou underpants. Ravidat himself was swimming up the river toward him. He stripped and dove in, surfacing with a whoop. Ravidat heaved himself out of the river and sat on the flat rock, streaming. The day was a clear gray, the air sweet and cool. He walked in his lean brown nakedness to a plum bush from which he lifted a haversack that Coencas had not seen. Inside, as he showed the wet, grinning Coencas, was a long rope, the grease gun, and a thermos of coffee.

  — A sip now, he said, the rest for later.

  They dried in the sun. The coffee was laced with a dash of cognac.

  — What do you think we’re going to see? Coencas asked.

  They secured the rope outside the cave, and let themselves down the shelved clay. Ravidat lit a match and fired the grease gun: the kind of torch with which he had gigged frogs at night. The flame was greenish yellow and large as a handkerchief. Ravidat held it high over his head.

  — You’ll see when you see.

  Neither spoke.

  Everywhere they looked there were animals. The vaulted ceiling was painted, the crinkled walls lime white and pale sulphur were painted with horses and cows, with high-antlered elk and animals they did not know. Between the animals were red dots and geometric designs.

  — Did you know they were here?

  — Yes, Ravidat said. They had to be.

  The torch showed in its leaping flare a parade of Shetland ponies bounding like lambs. Above them jumped a disheveled cow like the one in Mère Oie over the moon. Handsome plump horses trotted one after the other, their tails arched like a cat’s. The cave branched into halls, corridors, tunnels.

  They found long-necked reindeer, majestic bulls, lowing cows, great humped bison, mountain goats, plaited signs of quadrate lines, arrows, feathers, lozenges, circles, combs.

  All the animals were in files and herds, flowing in long strides down some run of time through the silence of the mountain’s hollow.

  — They are old, Ravidat said.

  — Tout cela est grand, Coencas said, comme Victor Hugo.

  — They are prehistoric, like the painted caves of the Trois Frères and Combarelles. You have not been to them?

  The cave was even larger than Ravidat had thought. It branched off three ways from where he had lit the torch, and two of these passages branched off in turn into narrow galleries where the floor was not clay but cleft rock. Their echoes rounded in remote darkness.

  — It goes on and on.

  They heard shouts outside: Marsal, Queroy, Estreguil, Agnel. They were out of school.

  — Come look! Ravidat called up to them. It is Noah’s Ark down here!

  They told no one of the cave for three days. On the fourth they told their history teacher, Monsieur Laval, who had once taken them to the caves at Combarelles and Les Eyzies. He came out to the cave, trotting the last steep ten metres. When they held the torch for him, he gripped his hands and tears rimmed his eyes.

  — Of all times! Of all times!

  He found a lamp by which the painters had worked, the mortar in which the colors were ground, the palette.

  Coencas found another lamp, a shallow dish in which a wick soaked in deer fat had lit the perpetual night of the cave.

  They began to find, sunk in the clay of the floor, flint blades, though most of them were broken. They found most of these shattered stone knives, thirty-five of them in all, just beneath the buffalo and the herd of horses.

  — Maurice Thaon! Monsieur Laval said. We must get Maurice Thaon. He will know who must be told.

  Breuil, Thaon, who came the next day, bringing a block of drawing paper, told them, is just over at Brive-la-Gaillarde with Bouysonnie, would you believe it?

  Ravidat held the torch while he drew.

  — I had a note from him last week. He will be frantic. He will dance a dance in his soutane. He will hug us all. The war has driven us together here, and we have found the most beautiful of the old caves.

  — Lascaux, he said, as if to the horses tha
t seemed to quiver in the torchlight. Lascaux.

  The postman went to Brive on the nineteenth with Monsieur Laval’s note addressed to L’Abbé Henri Breuil, whom he had the distinguished honor of informing that in a hillside on the estate of the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld a prehistoric cave with extensive paintings had been discovered by some local boys. Knowing the eminent prehistorian would like to inspect this very interesting site, he awaited word from him and begged him to accept his most elevated sentiments.

  Thaon arrived later the same day with drawings.

  — A car! the Abbé shouted. Do we have the petrol? For myself, I can walk.

  They drove up the next day at the Great Tree of Montignac in the Abbé Bouysonnie’s wheezing Citroën. Laval mounted their running-board and directed them to the Lascaux hills.

  Robot barked them to a halt.

  — Here we are! Monsieur Laval said, shifting from foot to foot and waving his arms as if he were conducting a band.

  The six boys, all with uncombed hair, stood in front of the automobile. L’Abbé Breuil herded them before him like so many geese.

  — Brave boys, he cried, wonderful boys.

  He stopped to look at their camp, shaking hands even with Estreguil and Agnel, who had never shaken hands with anybody before.

  — I am decidedly prehistorical myself, is that what you’re thinking, mon gosse?

  Estreguil broke into a wide smile. He instantly liked the wide-backed old priest.

  — Oh, I’m well beyond halfway to a hundred, and then some, he said to Agnel.

  Then he turned to Ravidat, who stood with Robot in his arms.

  — And that’s the pooch to whom we’re indebted, is it?

  He patted the suspicious Robot, and mussed Ravidat’s hair.

  They promptly forgot that this was the man who knew more about prehistoric caves than anybody else in Europe. He was simply an easy old priest with a wounded eye. His face was long, rectangular, big-eared, with strong lines dropping to comfortable pendules and creases under his jaws. A silken wattle hung under his chin. The gray bristles of his thick eyebrows rose and fell as if part of the mechanism of his meticulous articulateness.

  — My eye? Prehistory got it. We’ve been climbing around Les Eyzies all week, Bouysonnie and I, and one of your indestructible bushes, through which, mind you, I was making my way in clear forgetfulness of my age, whacked me in the eye. I see lights in it, rather beautiful.