Read Online Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters - Free Book Online

lopsided walk of the hypertrophied pelvis, but then we hit a wall, the small of the back spreads as it disappears into the rock, the massive thighs are joined all the way down to the knee, then the line becomes less defined, fainter, as if distracted, the feet are barely sketched at all, two crude ovals; likewise the hands look more like stumps, but the arms are magnificent, the right one stretched along the body, the left, raised as if to make some sign, and the shoulder with its perfect outline, clean and sharp, would lodge itself so perfectly beneath its own armpit that our mind almost manages to imagine the voluptuousness of this impossible caress; the breasts, slightly shrunken, strabic, nipples off-center, are only hanging by a thread from the too-frail torso, two breasts disproportionate to the rest of the body, to the rest of the world, to babies’ hunger and man’s desire – what if she really were the victorious rebel woman? Freed from her role as mother and lover, not because of her body’s staunch refusal or her immolation in God, or the way she was purposefully made ugly; not in defense of her childish virginity, nor through the agony of her flesh, the lengthof her sharp nails, the coolness of her gaze, the arrogance of her words, the self-conscious concealment of her curves, but through their very excess, their total blossoming, their triumphant expansiveness, refusing all physical limits, overflowing her edges, she seems to defy the little sucking lips of infants, the small, frantic hands of men and their fever that is too short-lived to set her enormous body on fire.
    Nonetheless, her head was neglected. Either the artist was saving for last this bit of psychology ever more difficult to define and was interrupted while working, or else he hesitated about which face to choose until the day he died. Or possibly he never intended to finish his character, considering perhaps that it was complete as it was, that any addition would be superfluous or redundant, that the main points were there, that the message had come through, that a head in any event would have paled beside those breasts. Another hypothesis deserves our consideration: several animals in the cave are also incomplete, lacking eyes or paws, some sinuous lines perhaps representing acephalous snakes, the felines’ jaws are in one piece, locked, the upper teeth fused to the lower like those columns that form when a stalactite and a stalagmite meet, an encounter as unpredictable as it is inevitable, in fact, because nothing can stop a stalactite and a stalagmite from meeting once the process is begun; perhaps it was chance that aligned them vertically with one another but its contribution stops there, the rest of the story has nothing to do with its whims. Any coincidence of this kind is in short the result of a series of causes and effects that obey a cold logic whose line of reasoning would allow one, by means of deduction, to foresee the final consequences. The initial involvement of chance is in fact an illusion; chancehas no more reality than the origin of the winds, the flow of this narrative is much better controlled than it seems, its inflexibility drives me to despair. In the end, the obstacles I put in its path turn out to be essential episodes, the story assimilates and integrates everything that could lead it astray, there’s no way out for me, no way to tear myself away from it, no more than it is possible to catch a glimpse of yourself from behind in a mirror by spinning around quickly on your heels; it fails every time. But by a hair. I’ll keep trying.
    The bison, hornless, will be less dangerous for the hunter; the horse, hoofless, will not escape him; the jawless wildcat will not rip him to shreds. We can surmise that the woman’s head was omitted for the same reason. The cave artist was already counting on the magical efficacy of representation to establish his supremacy. He reorganized the world according to his needs and